White Walker (6 page)

It was a sound that made him think of desolate
landscapes beneath low gray clouds. A forlorn place where all
dropped calls waited to be picked up again. He’d never considered
himself an artist, but three days earlier he’d broken down and
picked up the supplies needed to try his hand at painting. His
sister had always been after him to do something more with his life
than work and watch television. There was no wife or children to
occupy his free time. He’d dated a few times but had always found
the prospect of dealing with someone else’s emotions less than
desirable.

Slipping his headphones from his head, he glanced
over at Leslie in the next cubicle.

“I think the phones just went dead,” he said.

Leslie, who had just finished her call and was
entering the last of her contact notes before the next call came
in, stopped what she was doing and tried to connect to an outside
line. She looked back at Kevin and shrugged.

“We’ll have to get Teddy to look at it. Maybe it’s
just a computer glitch,” he said as he pulled up his Internet
browser and discovered that he could still get online. He pushed
himself up from his seat and looked out across the sea of empty
cubicles.

Cody looked up as Kevin got up from his seat.

“I think the phones just died,” Cody said.

“I just lost my connection,” Norman said as he got
to his feet as well.

“Has anybody seen Teddy?” Kevin said.

“Last I seen him, he was in the break room with
Judy,” Cody said.

Kevin nodded. He understood what Teddy was going
through right now, another compelling reason to remain unattached.
The old timers, those who had been doing this for a couple of
years, all knew Teddy from when they first started working for the
company. At the time they had been contracted to handle the public
sector for a major cellular account and each of them had horror
stories of dealing with irate customers who had sworn to hunt them
down because they couldn’t fix a problem that was the customer’s
own fault to begin with. From billing errors, which were numerous,
to subscriptions that customers claimed they never signed up for,
even though their records indicated they had, to overages in data
and text that every customer assumed the company would gladly
absorb the cost for.

They had become friends in much the same way a
battle-hardened platoon would become brothers under fire. So Kevin
felt for what Teddy had to do. Judy was a part of that group as
well and the idea that one of them would have to leave just didn’t
sit too well with the old timers. If it wasn’t done, then newcomers
like Cody and David would believe they could do the same thing and
get away with it.

Sometimes you did what you had to instead of what
you wanted to.

Kevin moved from the main room into the short
hallway that led to the break room. Judy and Liz emerged from the
ladies’ room. It was obvious Judy had been crying.

“Is she all right?”

Liz nodded in response before leading Judy towards
the main room.

“Is Teddy still in the break room?” Kevin said.

“I guess.” Judy shrugged as she vanished into the
main room.

Kevin watched her go then stepped across to the
doorway that led to the break room. He found it empty.

“Might as well grab a smoke while we’re back here.
Come on, Norman,” Cody said as he pulled a pack of cigarettes from
his pocket and leaned against the rear door.

“I ain’t going back out there. I don’t need a smoke
that bad.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Cody said.

Norman simply shook his head and backed away from
the door leading to the rear dock.

“Suit yourself then,” Cody said with a shrug as he
turned and pushed open the door. The wind grabbed it, slamming it
against the wall with a crash that made Norman jump as a startled
cry escaped his lips. Kevin crossed from the break room as a fierce
wind barreled down the short hallway, driving the snow before it,
causing the papers pinned to the bulletin board to flutter as if
they were insects that had suddenly come to life and were trying to
escape their captivity.

Kevin spotted Teddy on the dock. “What the hell,” he
shouted as he brought the door back around to close it.

“Teddy,” Cody said as he approached him. He was
reaching out with one hand when Teddy suddenly jerked backwards and
stumbled into his arms. The wind howled around them like a living
thing, screaming in a banshee’s voice as it nipped at their
legs.

As the falling blankets of snow parted, Kevin saw
the stranger standing on the opposite bank watching them. “There’s
somebody over there,” Kevin said, shouting to be heard over the
roaring voice of the wind. Cody looked in the direction he was
pointing but by then the stranger had vanished. His presence
disturbed Kevin on a primitive level. There was something odd about
his appearance, yet at the same time it was like he belonged
there.

Cody hit him on the shoulder, getting his attention,
and Kevin followed them back towards the building. Ice crystals had
started to form in Teddy’s hair, framing his face in a wreath of
white. His eyes were vacant, distant, fixed on some unseen object.
The sight of them sent a chill down the length of Kevin’s
spine.

Reaching the door, he swiped his card and Cody
pulled the door open. After moving Teddy into the building, Kevin
turned and walked back across the small dock to the opposite side.
He searched the falling snow for the person he’d seen earlier.

“Are you looking for me?” A gravelly voice whispered
on his right and Kevin nearly jumped off the dock. He spun around
to confront the stranger, who stood a mere ten feet away.

Too close
, Kevin thought as he took several
quick steps back to open the space between them.

“Who are you? What do you want?” Kevin said. He
sensed that the stranger was smiling beneath the filthy scarf that
covered the lower portion of his face, a smile that never quite
reached eyes that glittered with a harsh light in the shadows that
shrouded his features in darkness.

“You know who I am.”

Kevin shook his head even though he knew, on an
instinctive level, that what stood before him couldn’t really
exist.

“I have to get back inside,” Kevin said.

“May I come in?” the stranger asked and for one
terrifying moment Kevin imagined himself allowing the stranger
inside the building. Something his grandmother had told him when he
was younger suddenly blossomed in his mind. She was nearing ninety
when he was a boy of ten, a small woman, yet far from frail, who
had buried most of her small family already. Two sons and a
daughter, along with her husband, had passed before her and it left
her bitter to the point many people no longer came to visit, adding
to her bitterness.

“If they gotta ask to come in,” she’d said, “don’t
let them. They’re only there to cause trouble.”

Kevin shook his head as he backed across the dock.
When his shoulders came against the door he said, “I’m sorry, but
this is a restricted area.”

“Of course it is,” the stranger said, tilting his
head to the side much like a dog cocked its head when its owner
spoke to it. “But it’s so cold out here.” The comment was so out of
character with the stranger’s actions.

“I’m sorry,” Kevin said as he continued to shake his
head, “company policy, and all that.” He finished with a helpless
shrug.

“Of course, I understand.”

But he didn’t really, did he?
Kevin didn’t
understand any of it. The storm that had come up out of nowhere on
a sunny day, even surprising the national weather service, whose
last report had been spring-like weather with temperatures in the
mid-forties.

The stranger reached out and dropped his hand on
Kevin’s shoulder. His grip was strong, his fingers like ice, and
Kevin felt a numbing cold burrowing into his chest. He yanked open
the door, ripped his shoulder from beneath the stranger’s hand, and
stumbled into the short hallway as his eyesight started to dim.

The cold spread across his chest like a raging fire
feeding on a ready supply of fuel. Kevin coughed, the frozen flesh
of half of his lung tearing away under the sudden movement, sending
daggers of pain racing across his chest ahead of the icy line that
slowly marched across his body.

He fell to his knees as the door slammed shut behind
him, drawing the attention of the others who were huddled around
Teddy’s prone figure.

“What’s wrong?” Leslie said as she left Teddy’s side
and ran down the short hall to drop to her knees in front of
Kevin.

The line of cold enveloped his heart, stopping it in
mid-beat, and his eyesight slowly dimmed as the blood pressure in
his body, no longer driven by a beating heart, dropped. As the
darkness claimed him he saw them, the children, standing around
him, watching him die.

He saw a stocky young boy with blonde hair, holding
his own shoulder as he nodded at Kevin with a knowing look. There
was a pair of twin girls no more than seven with matching pigtails.
An older black-haired girl and a redheaded boy with a spray of
freckles dotted across his nose. Behind them stood a young woman,
no more than a child herself, charged with the care of these
children. Her face set in a mask of determination. She wasn’t
watching him, though; her eyes were fixed on the back door and for
some reason he understood that she was hiding from the stranger who
had done this to him. Then he saw no more as his lifeless body fell
forward.

Leslie caught him and eased him to the floor.
Kevin’s skin had taken on a gray color, his lips turning
purple.

“He’s not breathing,” Leslie shouted.

“Does anybody know CPR?” Andrea said.

“I think Jasmine does,” Judy said, still on her
knees next to Teddy’s prone figure.

“Where is she?” Leslie said.

“I don’t know, she was at the meeting earlier, but I
haven’t seen her since,” Liz said.

When it was obvious the phones were down and the
others had gone off in search of Teddy, Jasmine and David slipped
away from the main room and made their way to the training room.
They had just started seeing one another again, so when the phones
went down, David had pulled her away from the main floor for a
little one on one. She always wore those tight, short dresses that
made him horny as hell and this morning he was feeling especially
needy.

“Are you sure it’s going to be all right?” she
said.

“No problem, babe, everything will be fine.”

“But what if they miss us.”

“I doubt it, they’re too busy looking for
Teddy.”

David led her to the training desk and wrapped his
arms around her waist, pulling her up so he could give her a deep
kiss. She moaned as his hands made their way down her back, pulling
down the zipper of her dress in the process.

“They might come looking for us,” she said as she
struggled to get her breathing under control while David undid the
clasp of her bra.

“Nobody’s gonna be worried about us,” he said as he
brought his hands forward and slid her dress off her shoulders. She
pulled her arms through the sleeves of her dress and wrapped them
around David’s neck.

“Do you love me?” she said.

“Of course I do,” he said as he slipped off his
shirt and stood bare-chested before her. She ran her fingers
through the sparse hair on his chest as he fondled her breast,
rolling an erect nipple between his fingers.

She didn’t like the flippant way he answered. She
knew his emotions were only focused on one thing, and it was not
love. They rolled over her in a wave of excited anticipation, of
passion, and a yearning need to be fulfilled.

All of her life she had been overwhelmed by the
emotions of others around her, feeling their passion for life, or
lack thereof, on a level she didn’t quite understand. Her parents
had divorced when she was seven and she had lived with her mother’s
sorrow for over a year before her grandmother had taken her in.
During that time she had come close, on several occasions, to
taking her own life to put an end to that relentless grief.

It was her grandmother who had discovered her
special talent. After the funeral of her grandmother’s sister, they
had been sitting on the back porch listening to the sorrowful cry
of the loons in the lake below them.

“I don’t know how Harry’s going to make it now,” her
grandmother had said. Harry being the husband of her sister.

“He was happy,” Jasmine had told her.

“How do you know that, child?”

“I could feel it,” she’d said. “When he stood next
to me I could feel his happiness. He was only faking being sad. He
was glad she was gone.”

Her grandmother had regarded her with a critical
eye. “You felt his emotion?”

Jasmine nodded as the loons cried in their sorrowful
voice, and the stars twinkled into existence in the darkening sky
above them. “When someone gets close to me I can feel what they’re
feeling.”

“Can you feel what I feel right now?”

Jasmine nodded. “You’re sad, surprised, and just a
little afraid.”

“Afraid of what, child?”

“Me,” Jasmine answered as her grandmother pushed
herself to her feet and vanished inside. For the remainder of her
visit, her grandmother made it a point to keep her distance. After
six months her mother came for her and she returned home, where she
was introduced to her mother’s new boyfriend. Jasmine kept her
distance from Carl, sensing on their first meeting his lust not
only for Jasmine’s mother, but for Jasmine herself, who had
blossomed into a beautiful young girl.

It wasn’t until she was in high school that she
discovered she exhibited the traits of an empath. No longer
restricted to the kiddies’ section of the library, she had searched
for an explanation for her ability, finding it in an old hardback
book with blank covers wrapped in clear cellophane plastic. Hidden
within the barren landscape of scientific speak, she had discovered
a small section at the end of the chapter on telekinesis, detailing
the traits of an empath. Armed with this knowledge, she searched
the Internet in her quest to uncover the secrets to a gift that was
more a curse.