All Seeing Eye

19

I felt the tickle of grass on my skin. I hadn’t lost the ring, but the bare skin of my hand was resting on the ground. I jerked it up, holding my breath. No. Jesus, no. No screaming, no feeling of blood rising to gush out of your throat, no water sucking you down to endless suffocation.

I exhaled when none of that appeared. That day must be trapped in the house… and the well. I pulled my other glove out of my pocket, put it on, and shoved the ring in its place. I didn’t need it any longer. I already knew Charlie was here. Worse, with Fujiwara’s sabotage, I knew what that meant.

As I pushed myself up on my elbows, my entire body ached. Despite that, nothing else seemed to be broken. I was lucky. I hadn’t been close to the reintegrator. The soldiers had been, though. Like all the goons on the project, their job was to protect the geeks. They had been bringing up the rear, holding back enough to guard Hector and Thackery’s flank. Now they were down and unmoving in the brown grass. One was breathing; the other two weren’t. Neither was Fujiwara, who had a foot-wide piece of metal protruding from his chest, that crimson grin now carved permanently on his face.

I didn’t see Hector. He’d heard my warning. He would’ve gone after Meleah to try to get her out of the house through the back. They hadn’t made it. I knew even before the screaming I’d been relieved not to have filling my head suddenly ripped through the air. It was a woman’s scream but not one of fear. It was pure rage-“My baby! You drowned my baby!”-it was the words of my mother. This was what she had screamed at Boyd as she went after him with the butcher knife. Her words but not her voice. It was Meleah.

The show had started, I thought numbly. I didn’t move. There were no weapons, I repeated to myself. No gun and knife, and the soldiers weren’t armed-protocol for any reenactment mission. Nothing that bad could happen. I thought it again and one more time before I swore. I heaved myself to my feet and went step by slow step toward the last place I wanted to be.

“Boyd, you motherfucker, don’t! Don’t! No, Mom! No!” Hector’s shout and a cry of anguish from the past that I didn’t remember. Had that been me? I recalled every detail-why didn’t I remember that?

I ran. The past was horrific and littered with bodies, but this was the present. There were people I knew here and now, living people. And maybe this time I could do something to keep them that way. I hit the porch and was through the door as the line of scarlet on Meleah’s brown skin begin to spill blood. Thackery had slashed her, but he hadn’t put the knife through her throat as Boyd had done to my mother. Meleah was strong and athletic, not the beaten-down, worn wisp of a woman my mom had been. Meleah had moved quickly enough to escape the knife… almost.

Knife. What was a knife doing here in an abandoned shell of a home? There was nothing. No furniture, no appliances, not a single discarded flea-market fake painting on the wall. How could there be a knife like the bright and shiny new one in Thackery’s hand? Now Hector was turning and running down the narrow hall toward the back bedroom… where the shotgun had been. If the knife had been replaced, I had every expectation that the shotgun had been, too. Fujiwara’s manipulation from beyond the grave.

Sometimes things are so wrong and so bad that your brain refuses to deal with them in the here and now. You can almost feel the pop-and-sizzle of the short-circuiting brain cells before numbness covers your mind in an insulating blanket. That blanket let you step away and see things clearly-see what has to be done. This had happened before. It had let me react, not freeze up in the face of death. Had allowed me to see that someone had to die, and unless I wanted it to be me, then I’d better find a way to stop it.

There was no pop-and-sizzle this time. There was only reality, hypermagnified. The universe only gave you one psychotic split per slaughter. This second time around, I was on my own. I dealt with it. I didn’t have much choice, and I already had one run-through. What was an encore performance? A piece of cake, right?

Right.

As Thackery followed Hector at a run down the hall, I gripped Meleah’s arms as she staggered back against the stained plasterboard and helped her slide down to a sitting position. Peeling back her hand, blood under her immaculately short polished nails and in every crease of her knuckles, I faced the slash that ran across the front of her throat. It was bleeding, but it wasn’t the waterfall spill I’d unconsciously expected. It wasn’t deep enough for arteries to have been cut. It wasn’t precisely superficial, but she wouldn’t bleed to death.

I didn’t think.

She wouldn’t die.

I hoped.

I ripped the pristine white sleeve of her lab coat-professional always, even on field trips to hell. She was a good match for Hector. Would that they both lived long enough to find that out. I wrapped the sleeve around her throat and tied it snugly enough to help with the bleeding but not enough to cut off her air. “Put your hand back up.” I pulled it up for her and pressed it to the quickly staining cloth. “It’ll help.”

Her eyes met mine as her hand automatically stayed where I’d placed it. “He drowned my baby,” she whispered. “Jack.” My mom had been the only one to call me Jack, like the girls had been the only ones to call me Jackie. “He killed our Tess.”

“I know… Mom.” I swallowed. A recording, only a recording with more depth and scope than any duplication should have. “I know. Stay here. I’ll get Boyd. I promise.”

I ran a soothing hand along her hair and then stood from my crouch to run down the hall after Thackery and Hector. Thackery had kept hold of the knife, something Boyd hadn’t done, since he’d left it buried in my mother’s throat. He had something else that my stepfather had lacked. Boyd had just been a fat, lazy bastard who had no hope of outrunning a fourteen-year-old. Thackery was a whippet of a man. Lithe and fast.

But Hector was no skinny teenager, either. His body was honed and hardened by military service. He could outrun the runt that I’d been. Thackery was quicker than Boyd. Hector was quicker than me.

He’d already fired the shotgun. I’d already been throwing myself onto Thackery, knocking him and the knife down, where they could do no more damage. Unfortunately, in Hector’s eyes- my eyes from sixteen years ago-the damage had already been done. His hands had already found the shotgun in the closet, and his finger had already pulled the trigger. I wished I’d been slower. Thackery didn’t need saving. I was another matter. The buckshot mainly hit my chest and was stopped by the Kevlar. Some of it hit a few inches under my left arm, an area unprotected by the vest. Only part of the load but enough to blow me off Thackery and land me on my back. People say it feels as if you were kicked by a mule. People, they always goddamn lie.

The pain spiked sharp and hot, and blood coated my gloved hand when I touched the multiple punctures through cloth and flesh. I looked up from my hand to Hector. He didn’t see me. One shot. It had taken two to put Boyd down. As Thackery growled and propelled himself up from the floor, blade in hand arcing straight for Hector’s chest, Hector fired the second shot, right into Thackery’s face-Boyd’s face-the same as I had done.

And if there was balance in the world, any at all, that’s where it would’ve stopped, the killing. Hector would go to Meleah’s side and tell his mom that everything was fine. Everything would be all right.

The world laughed at that one.

Whoever had left the shotgun hadn’t only loaded it, they’d also left extra ammunition. Thackery was gone, a faceless corpse lying across my legs in a hallway I used to slide down in socked feet. But I was still alive-in serious, nerve-shredding pain but alive. That made me another Boyd to take care of. Hector disappeared into the back bedroom and returned to load the shotgun with two more shells by the time I managed to use a handful of Thackery’s lab coat to pull myself up into a sitting position. I ignored the gray haze that blurred my vision. “Hector,” I said hoarsely, but he wasn’t Hector now. “ Jackson, it’s over. You killed him. You killed Boyd. He’s dead.”

The shotgun stayed trained on me, and Hector’s pale eyes didn’t blink. They were empty. That didn’t mean he hadn’t heard me. If I could’ve seen into my own eyes when I’d put Boyd down, I wouldn’t have seen much of anyone home then, either.

“Jackson,” I emphasized again. The guy at the mill had heard me, or at least I’d pushed the recording into a minor detour. “Jackson, your mom is hurt. She needs you.”

This time, Hector did blink, and his lips peeled back from his teeth. “You stabbed her. You murdering bastard. She’s dying. You’ve killed her. You killed Tess. No more killing. Not by you.”

I saw them simultaneously: his finger tightening on the trigger…

And the shoe.

It was at his feet, halfway between him and Thackery’s shattered skull. It gleamed bright and pink as the day Mom had bought it and as the day I’d found it in the grass. One small pink shoe. Tess’s shoe… although she’d been buried in them both. Her pride and joy, her favorite possessions. How could she be buried in anything else?

This was dying, I guessed. Not your whole life running like an overly long James Cameron movie. No, just small moments. Small shots of the things that had derailed your life altogether. It made sense. It made you glad to go. You could finally see the whole screwed-up mess put to rest, because there’d never been any real hope of turning it around with one selfless act. That was movie shit, and movie shit was just that. Pure, unadulterated, get-your-hopes-up and pull-the-rug-out-from-under-you-every-time shit.

“Go on then, Jackson,” I said quietly, my eyes still on the impossible shoe. “Boyd has to go, and you know it. Pull the trigger. Hector, if you remember this, it’s not your fault. Some things have to play out. You can’t stop a recording in the middle. It has to play out until the end. Things just work that way.”

I didn’t look up to watch him pull the trigger. If he did remember this, I didn’t want that to be one of his memories. Nightmares cut at you a shade less in the dark of the night if you don’t have to see them looking back at you.

But instead of the shotgun blast that I couldn’t possibly hear until after it tore off my head, I heard something else. Something as impossible as the shoe.

“Boys are so stupid.”

I lifted my gaze-not by too much, I didn’t have to-and saw her standing behind Hector. She had small fingers hooked into his pocket as she peeked around his hip. The strawberry blond hair was in a bow. Green, to clash completely with the shoe. Tess had always had her own unique style.

“Jack Sprat, I’m awfully busy now.” There was the same overly dramatic sigh I remembered. Her face brightened. “You found my shoe!”

“I did.” My lips were completely numb. I didn’t feel them move. “I wish I could’ve kept it before, but I thought you’d want it more.” Hector hadn’t pulled the trigger, or he had and here was the afterlife I’d always denied. I didn’t like being wrong. I hated worse to admit it. But now, if this was what happened when you died, I didn’t mind being a blind idiot. “Where were you all those years? Why didn’t you come see me?”

She cocked her head and smiled, happy as she’d ever been… always been. Every minute of every day. “I came all the time. Except not so much since, um, December? Other than that, I visited you tons and tons. But you couldn’t see me or hear me. You never pay attention.” She stomped her socked foot playfully, and suddenly, the pink shoe was back on her foot as she stepped out to stand beside a frozen Hector. He was breathing, I could see that, and maybe that meant I wasn’t dead after all. Why would I stick around to watch the man breathe?

“I knew you’d need help. And if you wouldn’t listen, then I’d have to smack you one and make you listen.” I felt good and solidly smacked, that was true. She reached up and pinched Hector’s side. “Wake up, Hector. Put the bad gun down and wake up.”

Hector jumped, as if he’d received a small electric shock. “What

…?” He looked at the shotgun in his hand and hurriedly eased back on the trigger before placing the weapon on the floor. “Jackson.” He was pale under his darker skin. “I shot you. God, I shot you.” Thackery he paid no attention to. After all, in his mind, Thackery had been a done deal, anyway.

Tess shook her head, hair swinging and fierce with exasperation. “Boys. Boys can’t do anything right.”

Hector’s head jerked around and then angled down. I was certain my file had pictures. He knew who he was seeing, what he was seeing, even if I was having trouble wrapping a mind suddenly made of mush around it all. “Tess?”

“You hurt Jackie, but I guess it’s not your fault. I thought doctors were supposed to be smart and have suckers. Grape suckers are the best.” She turned an expectant gaze on him, only to sigh again, this time in disappointment, when his mouth opened without sound and no suckers came out of his pocket. “I think you need to go back to doctor school, but I have a present for you, anyway.”

She held her hand up imperiously for such a small thing, a small thing who hadn’t even been made of flesh and blood for a long time. I could see that now. A stray beam of sun had struggled through the bedroom window to find its way to and then through her. She wasn’t transparent. She was luminous and delicate, made of the wings of butterflies.

“Charlie.” She wriggled her fingers impatiently. “Chaaaarlie, I have to go. I’m late. It’s my birthday party. Hurry up.”

Her hand disappeared in a ripple of air and returned holding on to a much larger one. The rest of the body stepped through a larger ripple, and I saw the messy hair and big nose I hadn’t forgotten. They were as homely as ever, and Charlie’s smile was as wide and pleased. “You found me.”

“Everything that’s lost is found sooner or later,” she said solemnly. I saw her hand tighten around his to squeeze reassuringly. “It’s time to go home, Charlie. You’ll love it. It’s everything and everything and everything.”

He nodded. “I can’t wait to see.” He was so close to Hector that their shoulders rested against each other’s, and Charlie bumped his harder, judging by the sudden tilt to Hector’s stance. An older brother’s affection. Pale blue eyes to pale blue eyes, he added warmly, “You did good, little brother.”

“Charlie.” Hector said it with the purest of belief and relief.

“You found the one guy who could help you save me. I owe you big.” Then Charlie turned his gaze to me. “I knew you’d answer my call. Just like you promised at Cane Lake.”

“One helluva long-distance charge,” I managed, my tongue as numb as my face and lips. I wasn’t Hector. I had nothing this trusting or this deserving in me. No faith. This couldn’t be real. As much as I wanted it to be, it was the denial of what I’d believed for almost my entire life. How could I believe it? All of it?

A kiss brushed across my cheek, and I turned with what had to be half-crazed eyes to look into those of my sister, still five years old, still beautiful.

“You won’t forget this, Jackie. You’ll try, because you’re a boy, and boys are stubborn. But I won’t let you. No way you’ll be able to ignore me now.” She smiled again, a little sadder, the kind of sad that broke me with her next words. “It wasn’t your fault you didn’t save me. We all take turns. It wasn’t yours. But it’s my turn to save you now. And I will.”

They were gone, the two of them, as if they hadn’t been there to begin with. Couldn’t have been there, and my thoughts clamped onto that firmly, because that made sense. Impossible shoes, impossible sisters, they don’t happen. Hallucinations from blood loss, that happened. Some damned ether disruption went screwy and messed with your mind, that happened, too. But the long lost? They don’t come back, and they don’t speak to you. They don’t absolve you of things that can’t be absolved.

“You’re already doing it, aren’t you, you stubborn bastard?” No matter what he said, Hector sounded unnerved. Amazed, too, but he’d definitely had his world tilted on its axis. “Going straight into denial of a full-blown miracle.”

“You shot me. That means you don’t get any say into what I do or don’t do. And there are no miracles. It’s not like the Vatican is behind funding your project.” I lifted an arm, swallowed bile that scorched my throat at the pain the movement caused, and demanded, “Help me up. We need to check on Meleah.”

He was already as pale as he could get, but I saw the apprehension etch its way into his face.

“She’s going to be all right.” I thought she was, and right now, that was the best to be hoped for. “She was quicker.” I didn’t want to finish the rest of that sentence, and I didn’t. “I think it looks worse than it is.”

I was on my feet, thanks mainly to Hector hoisting me up with one hand while the other held the shotgun. I hadn’t seen him bend over to pick it back up. I knew I hadn’t, but there it was. I could’ve missed it.

I knew I hadn’t. But I could have. It didn’t have to be Tess who put it in his hand. And why would she? Why would he need it now? He wouldn’t. I held tight to the last thought, because denial needed help now and again. Back where I’d left her, Meleah remained sitting on the floor. She managed a smile at our appearance. “Hector. Jackson.” The cloth around her throat and under her hand was only half scarlet. The bleeding had slowed. I’d been right. She would be all right. Hector, her, me-we were going to walk away from this, unlikely as that would’ve seemed minutes ago.

Which proved once and for all that I was limited to reading objects, places, and people. While bullshit illusions were wide open, the future was closed to me. I’d always been grateful for that.

Until now.

Stepping through the open front doorway, as cheerful and smiling as always in the face of adversity and carefully designed plans gone wrong, Eden glowed with the same inner joy she’d never failed to show. She stopped when she saw the two of us, standing upright.

“This is inconvenient,” she noted, not dressed in nursing scrubs anymore, frowning a little. “All good boys and girls should be dead now. I did expect maybe Thackery would’ve survived, being the obnoxious ass that he is. I was rather looking forward to finishing him off as a loose end.”

Eden. My nurse advocate. On my side against all others who would use me without regard, when really, all along, her own regard had been as predatory as a silent fin slicing through the water. And considerate enough to wear latex gloves always around me, to save me from an unwanted reading. Too bad I hadn’t seen that a reading was more unwanted by her than by me. Eden, who came bearing the gift of an injection of painkiller and sedative in the middle of the night.

“What was in the shot you brought me last night like a good little Florence Nightingale?” I asked, propping myself against the nearest wall, the easier to ride out the waves of pain radiating from the buried shotgun pellets.

She smiled, the dimple flashing beside her mouth like the morning star. “An overdose of Flecainide. A therapeutic dose is just the trick for an arrhythmia. Too much stops the heart altogether. It’s what I gave Dr. Allgood, along with the sedative he normally received in his preexperiment physical. Fifteen minutes later, he’s in the transplanar, and in fifteen more minutes, he’s dead. It’s a good drug for falling through the cracks of a toxicology report.” She flashed the same smile at Hector. “You wondered why you couldn’t find what was wrong with your little toy. That’s because nothing was. Charlie was a dead man before he climbed into it.”

Her gun, the same nine-millimeter Hector carried on base, was trained on him. He was the only one of us armed. And wasn’t that lucky? The shotgun in his hand, the one I hadn’t seen him pick up, the one that if he’d thought about it, he wouldn’t want to pick up again after turning Thackery’s face to hamburger with one barrel and taking me down with the other one.

“But you didn’t want the shot, Jackson, and as you were so certain you were leaving today and no more readings were in the works, I backed down. No one likes a pushy nurse. And I’d had my three other shots at you. It seemed only fair.” In keeping with her bouncy Eden persona, she was wearing whimsical fairy earrings. I didn’t want to die period, but I really didn’t want to die at the hands of someone wearing fairy anything. “It was fine with me if you escaped with your life. I only kill people who are in the way. I get paid for my work. I’m not into extra credit. I don’t even mind all that much about Fujiwara. He was a good partner, but with this job, I have enough to retire, and with his share, I might get two villas instead of one.”

“You killed Charlie.” Hector sorted through it all to home in on what had started it all. The project breakdown, giving Fujiwara enough time to gather all of the data about it. She couldn’t have foreseen what would happen with Charlie, who wasn’t quite as dead as she’d hoped, but what a lucky break for her. Charlie had caused more confusion and crippled the project even further. Until I came along, everything was as sweet as those blackberry pancakes she’d made me. And even then, I hadn’t been a threat to her or Fujiwara, who deserved an Oscar for his acting skills. But Eden was as competent a killer as she was a nurse. No sense in taking chances. It was only after three failed attempts outside the infirmary that she was willing to risk taking a run at me inside it. I imagined that if she’d gone through with it, she’d already be in another country by now with the information Fujiwara had gathered. This plan-my house equipped with the weapons of the past-was nice for cleaning up a few loose ends like Hector and Thackery, who might eventually have figured things out about Fujiwara, but it hadn’t been strictly necessary.

But some killers embraced the better-safe-than-sorry standard.

And so did some scientists.

Hector wasn’t waiting for more talking-if there was going to be more, which I highly doubted. Eden was happily polite in her murdering ways, but she was one for getting things done. The shotgun in Hector’s hand, put there by Tess I now knew, wasn’t pointed at Eden, not specifically. The muzzle was tipping halfway between waist high and the floor as he faced her. It wasn’t a chest shot, but right then, any shot would do, and he took it.

The roar of the gun firing came at the same time as she disappeared, lunging to one side. Standing as she had been in the doorway, that put her outside and out of view, either with shattered legs or unhurt but not nearly as cheerful as before. Hector started for the door, pumping the shotgun as he went. I was right behind him, a little slower, as he’d already used it on me, and the pain of that didn’t fade like a scraped knee. It only grew more white-hot with every passing minute.

That didn’t stop me from grabbing a handful of his shirt and yanking him off his feet as I dove toward the floor. The faint shadow of the gun I’d seen through a window filmed in red dirt turned into an explosion of glass and three bullets that passed over our bodies to embed themselves in the wall. Hector growled and this time was at the door long before me, out into the sun and gone. I did follow, but I couldn’t catch up. Shot once today, shot once the day before with a broken rib to show for it, it took the marathon out of my running. But I kept moving doggedly through the grass growing taller into fields I still recognized from sixteen years ago, following a path I’d once run as the colors of the day all faded to black and white behind the horrible truth I’d known.

It was in that tall grass that I found Hector, down and swearing, with a bullet hole through his upper leg. “Go after her,” he gritted between his teeth. “She missed the femoral artery, but she hit the damn bone. It’s broken. Don’t let her get away, Jackson. Not after all she’s done.” He held the shotgun up to me.

She’d killed Charlie. She’d arranged for Meleah to have her throat sliced, me to relive something no one should relive, and my friend to be shot. No, she wasn’t fucking getting away from any of that.

I started after her, and Hector snapped, “No, you son of a bitch. You take the damn gun. Take it, or she will kill you, do you understand that?”

I shook my head. Everything in my life had changed or was trying to change since Hector had shown up, but this never would. “I don’t need a gun.” And for some reason, I believed it. Hector yelled that I was a “Suicidal bastard!” but I honestly believed it. I didn’t need a gun for Eden. It was crazy, completely insane, I knew that, but it wasn’t suicidal, because I knew. I just knew. Eden would be taken care of, no gun needed.

I was still running, my hand covering the slow bleeding where the Kevlar had failed me, when I saw her far ahead. Her hair was the brilliant shine of chestnut streaked with red and gold under the sun, and she ran like a gazelle. I didn’t say anything, but she must have heard me stumbling through the grass. Her head turned to take me in. I couldn’t see the green of her eyes, she was too far off, but I could see her smile. All triumph. Still running, she brought her gun up and over her shoulder to aim dead on me. I could feel the weight of it as heavily as the sun’s heat that pressed down. Eden’s smile widened.

And then she was gone.

I slowed down to a walk then. I hurt, and with every breath, my broken rib stabbed at the surrounding flesh. There was no hurry, anyway. I knew where Eden was, and she wasn’t going anywhere.

When I finally reached the well, it was quiet. Not a bird flew in the sky. The incessant hum of insects had turned to the quiet of a church. I looked down into the dark water that was a bare glitter and gleam thirty feet below and saw nothing else. No pale smear of a hand raised up. No body floating on the surface. Eden had gone to the depths… of a well that had been plugged with concrete by the county sixteen years ago after a young girl named Tess had drowned there. There was no concrete now and no sign that there had ever been.

Wasn’t that a mystery?

Her nine-millimeter was balanced on the edge of the stone, deadly as a water moccasin. I nudged it with my foot and dumped it into the well. With the distant splash, I murmured, “You forgot something.” Then I walked away and back to Hector. When he asked about Eden, I shrugged and answered.

“She wasn’t much of a swimmer.”