Slashback

10

Niko

Twelve Years Ago

“Give me the matches, Cal. I am not playing here.”

He handed them over, muttering under his breath, but I knew enough to know when he was playing at teasing the big brother. He wasn’t a budding pyromaniac. One fire didn’t an arsonist make. And that one had been an emergency. I couldn’t hold that one against him.

I was sure enough that he wouldn’t burn down Junior’s house, but while I more than still had doubts about Junior’s basement of dead bodies, it was true that people were going missing. It would be safer if Cal weren’t home alone after school while I worked, whether it was light outside or not.

“Why don’t you stay after school today and play a few games of baseball, football—whatever your gym teacher has planned? Then I can come by after work and we can go home together.” The students at Cal’s school had many parents with odd schedules who weren’t home in time for the bus to drop off their children. The principal had decided an after-school sports session was a good idea for those parents who needed two or three hours to come by and get the kids who couldn’t take the bus to be home alone. I’d met Coach VanBuren. He wasn’t especially bright and I didn’t think he’d volunteered for the job, but he did it. He might not be a patient man or a man who loved his job, but being there until the parents could be—that made him a good man.

“I don’t like sports anymore and they won’t let me play,” Cal finished without showing much concern. He hadn’t been a fan of team sports since he knew there were team sports. Except football. He liked football. He loved tackling. I was hoping when his growth spurt came it would be enough that he could play on the team of whichever school we were in at the time. Or I had hoped, but now . . . what was this?

“Since when don’t you like sports, and what do you mean they won’t let you play?” I frowned. Cal was small but he could outrun anyone his age. “Why not?”

“Since this year.” He started to scoop all his papers off the kitchen table and wad them into one big mass. “I got tired of faking it. I like to win. When you play games you’re supposed to win. That’s the whole point. If you’re not trying your hardest to win, then you’re not playing it right.” He began shoving books and wads of what I hoped was doodles but knew, knew was his homework in his backpack. “If you’re following ‘rules’”—he pulled a face at the word—“then you’re not trying your hardest. Games shouldn’t have rules, not if you want to win. They’re . . . um . . .”

“Mutually exclusive?” I provided.

He zipped up the backpack. “Exactly. If I’m going to play a game where I’m supposed to win, then I’m going to win. Coach VanBuren doesn’t understand. He says I have ‘poor impulse control issues,’ ‘the attention span of a frigging gnat,’ and I’m a ‘little psycho asshole.’” The three quotes, I could hear them as if that potbellied, balding, worthless excuse for a human being was standing beside me. I felt a flush of anger, but Cal was indifferent. He was snorting at the man’s idiocy. “For a coach he doesn’t know anything about winning.”

I supposed he didn’t. He’d also been demoted from good man to jackass in my book. “No, he doesn’t. You know what my teachers tell me in the dojos?” I hadn’t thought it was time for that yet, but I’d been wrong.

Stuffing a candy bar in the zippered pocket of his backpack, he slung it on, finally ready for the morning in his worn Batman T-shirt, faded jeans, and scuffed sneakers. “What?” he asked curiously.

“That in there are rules and honor, but outside in the real world, rules and honor only get you . . . mugged or worse.” I’d been about to say killed, but we had enough of that word for the past few days. “You don’t have poor impulse control and you’re not a psycho. You know how to protect yourself, to come out on top, and that’s something your coach doesn’t know himself.” I gave him a nudge for the front door. I could hear his bus wheezing down the street outside. “Come home straight from school, lock the doors, and don’t let anyone in. All right?”

“And jack-off Junior next door?”

“Language.” I’d told myself that battle was lost, but the reaction was knee jerk. I gave him a carefully light swat to the back of his head. “Behave.” As for Junior, that sad miserable lump of a neighbor was making my life a living nightmare and he had genuine monsters to compete with in that area. “I’ll think of something at school today. Now go. Catch your bus.”

He was gone and climbing onto the creaking yellow whale. Looking through the windows he gave me a half wave. When you had one person in the world, just one, who gave you affection, you were slow to outgrow that. I waved back. I hoped he didn’t for a long time, because it was true of us both. We each only had one person.

Inside the bus a kid nearly half a foot taller than Cal stood up and said something insulting from the sneer on his face. Behind the smoky glass I saw Cal look up at him and bare his teeth. It wasn’t a smile or a grin. What had he said the other day? “I like lions. They’re cool.” Cal showed the would-be bully the teeth of a lion and the kid sat back down hurriedly, letting Cal walk on to find his seat. By now the bus was halfway down the street and I was thinking that hateful idiot VanBuren could be right this one time.

Cal probably shouldn’t play sports anymore.

Lions didn’t play to win. Lions didn’t play at all.

Lions survived.

There was nothing in the newspaper or on the Internet in the high school library about a missing prostitute. But it had been only last night. That sort of information would take days, maybe weeks to pop up considering her occupation. Considering if she went with Junior at all. She could have the worst drug habit in the world, but one look at the sweaty, watery-eyed, generally leaky blob that was Junior could change anyone’s mind and put them on the straight and narrow. It could be that Junior had been asking for directions or decided that a prostitute the hepatitis yellow of old chicken fat was one disease risk too many. He did work in a hospital, cafeteria or not. He had to know some people were deathly ill by looking at them no matter how dim he was.

The hospital. Lawrence Memorial, had to be, it was basically the only hospital to speak of in New London. I could tell Cal we were checking to see if Junior did work there or if he’d lied. If he was behind plastic, slowly scooping up burned squares of lasagna with a blank expression, wearing a hairnet and plastic gloves, looking as harmless as he had in his bathrobe only more so, Cal could be persuaded no one like that could be a serial killer so clever that the police wasn’t aware he existed. I could convince myself as well. After last night, I was not having doubts, but . . . questions. Junior wasn’t a killer, but you didn’t have to be a killer to be a predator. It was best to cover all the bases.

“Hey, Leandros.” There was a hot and heavy breath hitting the skin of my neck not covered by my ponytail. “My uncle lives on your block. He says your mom’s a whore.” There was the laugh of an excited monkey, screeching and aggressive. “’S’at true?”

I turned off the library computer and swiveled in my chair to see buzzed brown hair and gunmetal eyes. Rex. That wasn’t his real name. That wasn’t a dog’s real name these days, but it was all I could be bothered to remember. Rex. Bully. Brothers who were already in prison and waiting for him to join them. Completely not worth my time. “She is,” I said agreeably, standing a little too close in his personal space. He automatically stepped back and my lip curled. Bullies, so predictable. “But she charges extra for pathetic fumbling virgins like you. You might want to save up.” I walked around him and went out the door.

Cal was a lion, but he wasn’t the only one.

Cal shifted from foot to foot in the autumn brown grass. He was nervous. Cal didn’t get nervous or he hadn’t much past the age of seven. “It’s a good plan,” I repeated. “We go in, find the cafeteria, check that Junior actually works there. We might even be able to talk to some people there.” Or I would. Cal was not especially adept at being casual if there was nothing physical to be gained. “Ask what kind of place it is to work. Are the people nice. Are there any weirdos because I’ve worked with them before and I don’t want to again. It’s simple and it’ll work.” I wouldn’t use the word weirdos if it weren’t a con, if only a little one. When I went to college, I’d fit in. My vocabulary would be correct, my behavior perfect, my grades exemplary, and that would save Cal and me.

Being perfect.

Ducking his head, Cal stared at the strip of grass we stood on along with its one spindly tree that would explode with cherry blossoms in the spring. For now it was bare and vulnerable and Cal was doing a flawless imitation of the same. “It’s a good plan,” he echoed me with an uneasy mutter. He looked up at the ER entrance, the place that had the most people coming and going. Blending in would be easier there than the front. I’d taken a look there first. The moment you stepped in you were facing an information desk with sharp-eyed elderly volunteers who wanted to know where, why, who, when . . . trying to be helpful. They would’ve been more helpful without the security office six feet away.

“Then what’s the problem?” I said impatiently. I shouldn’t be that way, but this was mostly for him. It was getting old, all of this and I was losing my patience. I had more important things to do than to keep trying to drag the ridiculous and stubborn delusion of a killer out of my brother’s head.

He wrapped his arms around himself. Normally he would’ve snagged a hand on my sleeve if something was bothering him, but I was annoyed and I had let him hear it. “It smells.” He swallowed. “Even from here. It smells like blood and death and cancer. Cancer smells like blood frying in a burned skillet, did you know? It does. But it smells like that mouse that died in the wall that one time and rotted until we found it. It smells like that too. And pus—it’s sweet but sick at the same time. How can it smell like both? They put alcohol over it all but that only makes it worse because it’s all still there. It’s like a graveyard but no one knows they’re dead yet. No one knows. . . .”

I squatted down and pulled his face into my chest. His arms went from wrapping around himself to me and he held on tight, shaking—but minutely, because this was Cal. He was proud and he wasn’t afraid of anything. He couldn’t let himself be. “I’m sorry,” I said quietly, trying not to sound guilty, trying not to make it worse to him, that his difference stopped him from doing something that anyone else could do without thinking about it. I rested my chin on top of his head. Sorry, sorry—I was sorry, more than. Worse I was an idiot. The sheets from the Salvation Army that made him sick to be near and I wanted to drag him into a hospital? I didn’t ask myself what I was thinking. It was clear I wasn’t thinking at all. “It’s my fault, Cal. I was stupid and I’m sorry.”

“I don’t think I can go in, Nik.” He straightened and turned his back on the hospital. He had to smell it, but he didn’t have to see it. “You shouldn’t go either. If he’s killing people, you shouldn’t be by yourself.”

“It’s an entire building full of people.” I stood. “If Junior was Jack the Ripper himself he couldn’t do anything there.” I pointed at a bench across the entrance for the ambulances. It was close to fifty feet away but security was patrolling hospital grounds. It was safe enough. “Think it’ll be better over there? The smell? You could wait until I come back. I won’t be longer than a half hour.” This was it. I was done with Junior. I was done with his messing with Cal’s head and turning me into an ass to my little brother by sabotaging my self-control. Today I proved he was nothing, no worse than that jack-in-the-box that had scared Cal when he was five. That had been a toy. Junior was less than that.

He took in the bench with a quick glance and nodded. “It’ll be okay.” This time his hand did snag my shirt. “Be careful.”

I smiled and thumped him gently on the top of his head. “Isn’t that what I always tell you?”

“Yeah, but I never . . . um . . . just be careful.” He was dashing for the bench before I could take a swipe at his shirt. Never listened—this time I had a real reason to be annoyed and I couldn’t do it. I waited until he was on the bench and headed with grim determination toward the ER entrance.

Junior, each word resounded darkly in my thoughts with every step, you have truly become an unbelievable pain in my neck.

Junior did work in the cafeteria, which was in the basement. He was exactly as I imagined: slow, mumbling shyly to the employees and visitors, and a hairnet far larger than what little hair he had required. After getting a glimpse of him, I moved back to a corner of the cafeteria behind a pillar out of his sight. I took the last empty table and waited for an impatient short man in scrubs to give me the look. It was a universal look for hardworking people with short lunch breaks: why are you taking up a table if you’re not eating? I waved a hand at him and started to stand up. “Oh, sorry, I’m leaving.”

He swooped in as fast as a hawk on a field mouse. I waited until he had a mouth of mashed potatoes while eyeing me suspiciously in case I tried to snatch the table back. “My dad’s upstairs,” I offered. “Getting some sort of stomach scan. I’m just waiting until it’s done.” I could’ve added that he was all I had and did this guy know where the chapel was so I could pray and maybe I should think about getting a job in case my dad couldn’t go back to work right away. It’s what Sophia would’ve said, which is why I wouldn’t. I went straight for the “get a job” lie as it tasted the least like chalk and tin in my mouth. “What are the people like who work here now? Are they nice?”

It turned out he was a cardiopulmonary surgeon and he certainly did not know the personalities and/or characteristics of the common cafeteria worker. In other words, in this hospital he was a god and the rest ants beneath his sanctified feet.

The next person was a proctologist. She had no problem talking about the cafeteria workers, their probable bowel habits considering the food they served and told me stories about the odder things she’d removed from people’s anuses including a set of Russian nesting dolls. They kept coming out and coming out and coming out. I couldn’t help but laugh while simultaneously wondering if I was going to have to give the red-faced doctor choking on her own hilarity the Heimlich maneuver and promising myself to never repeat the stories to Cal. I might leave them to him in my will, but he wouldn’t hear them while I was still alive. The moral of the story being if I decided to go into medicine and I wanted good-humored colleagues, proctology was the field to aim for . . . so to speak.

As for Junior, my new friend Dr. Linda Wilner said he was a nice enough guy, gave big portions and rarely sneezed on the food, was religious as he’d seen him praying over his own lunch, and with what he ate could use some roughage to help out with regularity. I decided I likely didn’t want to be a proctologist after all.

I thanked her and was leaving the cafeteria when I saw Junior not concentrating on the stewed cabbage as I’d planned, but gone and a security guard at the entrance to the cafeteria staring at me. It was a toss-up whether Junior had spotted me and called security or the first doctor I’d talked to had. I was betting the doctor. If Junior saw me, he’d assume I was here looking for a job as I’d told him I’d planned to. The doctor—he could not like unescorted minors taking up tables that Heaven itself had set aside for him or not believed I had a parent here at all. Hospitals are great places for thieves. Everyone’s worried about their sick or dying family member, no one’s watching their purse or wallet. It was a pickpocket’s dream. Our second week in New London, Sophia had gone to Lawrence Memorial with the intention of being a one-woman crime spree. Unfortunately for her, it had already been picked clean several times over in the past months by thieves who had the same idea as Sophia. After that kind of pattern, it made sense they’d be on alert. I should’ve thought about that.

I thought about it when the security guard started walking, then running, my way. I thought about it more than once as I ran through halls, up and down stairs, went up to the roof and memorably all the way down to the morgue. In a cold metal drawer lying on my side next to a gray and blue man with a missing leg below the knee and a stench I didn’t have to be Cal to smell, I wondered irritably what made this security guard this dogged? He was in his forties. How much were they paying him to be this devoted to his job? Where did he get all that energy?

Not getting laid by his wife, Cal whispered in my mind. But at least that’ll keep him safe from the serial killer.

If he were here, that was what he’d say—how could an eleven-year-old get a foul mouth so quickly without my noticing it was on the horizon? But he and his smart mouth weren’t here. He was waiting for me outside and I was now an hour overdue. If he stayed on the bench, it would be all right. He would know better than to come to try to find me. I was the oldest. This was my job. I would get out of here and he would stay where I’d told him. He’d listen, he’d obey, he wouldn’t come in this place. I’d get out of this damn morgue and I’d see for myself. Cal knew better than to try to save me, not here.

Of course “here” was where I found him.

He’d made it as far as the automatic sliding glass doors of the ER before collapsing. I could see the people running toward him as he convulsed and vomited on the cheap tile floor. The cavalry had come to rescue me and I meant that without an ounce of sarcasm. He’d risked his life over this and he knew it. Cal, who looked all human on the outside, but we had no idea what he looked like on the inside and I couldn’t take a chance.

I’d lost the security guard, but I didn’t make any new friends when I hit a doctor with one shoulder knocking him flat, and then did the same to a nurse on the other side. Scooping Cal up, I kept running through the still open doors. It was dark outside now and none of the ER staff were the runners the security guard had been. Even carrying Cal, I lost them after several blocks of twists and turns.

I had him up with his head over my shoulder. I didn’t enjoy the warmth of his vomit spilling down my back, but that was much better than him choking on it. The convulsing turned to squirming, and then he was gasping in my ear, “Nik, get away from me. Nik, get away!” That might not have halted my running, but his fists pounding as hard as they could against my back did. I stopped in an alley between a long out-of-business store and a church and gently put him on his feet. He fell instantly, scrambling backward on all fours, horrified eyes on me.

“Cal?” Confusion and a flash of panic wrapped dual hands around my lungs and gripped tightly. I took a step toward him.

“No.” He moved farther away, then lunged to his feet and toward the nearest garbage can, digging through it until he found a can of Coke that was not quite empty. He poured what was left over his hand, then covered up his nose and mouth.

That’s when I got it. For an hour and a half I’d been in the hospital soaking up the stench of illness and dying that had had Cal on the floor flailing in his own sick. Worse, I’d been in a drawer with a corpse, who from the whiff I’d gotten, had died of gangrene. I was making Cal as sick as the hospital could. I backed away. “Tell me when I’m far enough,” I asked as if it were an ordinary question. Right now we both needed to believe things were ordinary if we had to lie to ourselves to do it.

After several more steps he nodded, still keeping his mouth and nose covered. I’d have to write a thank-you note to the Coca-Cola company, I thought with only a slight edge of relieved hysteria.

“Where’d you go?” he asked, accusing words muffled by his hand. “You said a half hour. You were gone an hour and a half. You were gone forever. I thought he got you.”

“I know. I’m sorry, Cal. I am. A security guard chased me through the entire place. I had to hide. . . .” He didn’t need to know where I had to hide. “We forgot Sophia said that place had been picked clean. They’re still watching for anyone who looks suspicious.” A wandering teenager alone in a place that had been repeatedly robbed would look suspicious.

He was only half listening to my answer. The rest of his attention was taken with jerking his gaze from my feet up to my face, back down, and then over again. “You don’t smell like you. You smell like that mouse in the wall. You smell like you’re rotting. I can’t smell you at all. You’re not you.” He took a sliding step back, the unsteadiness better but not gone.

Cal was the same as any ordinary person in having only five senses, but he was different in that one of them was incredibly heightened. With my normal nose I could detect the nauseating taint of gangrene that clung to me. For Cal it covered everything else, including the way that I had always smelled to him. I hadn’t known until this moment the extent it factored into how he perceived people. For him to not be able to smell the usual me at all would be the same as if I’d suddenly gone blind and couldn’t see him. I’d be able to hear him and touch him, but a huge part of what made him Cal to me would be gone.

“But it is me,” I assured. “Same hair.” I tugged at the short ponytail. “Same voice, same willingness to not yell at you although I’m half covered in your vomit. It’s me, Cal, and as soon as we get home and I wash, I’ll smell the same as always.” The clothes, I’d have to throw away. No, burn.

“It’s you?” His other foot was hovering in the air about to take him yet another step away. He looked at me searchingly up and down one last time and let his shoulders slump and his foot drop. “I’m stupid. I know it’s you. You’re just not . . .” He shook his head.

“Just not all of me. Not that you can smell. I know. Let’s go home and I’ll fix it, all right?”

He nodded, hand firmly in place between me and my new smell. “Okay. But could you walk ahead of me? Really far ahead of me?”

“Behind you,” I amended, to watch for the same type that had tried to rob us the night before. “But far behind. I’ll wash out back with the hose and soap.” That would keep the smell out of the house. “You can go tell Mrs. Spoonmaker since you already lied about me being seventeen. She might get a thrill.”

That made him smile. I could see the dimple beside his covering hand. “It’s cold. The water’s going to be colder.” He held up his free hand, the index finger and thumb about half an inch apart. “That’s not going to impress anybody. She goes to mass though. She might pray for you.”

“You know more than you should for your age and way too much than is good for me at any age.” I shook my head in mock despair. “Home. Move it. Even I don’t like the way I smell right now. Your puke isn’t like rose petals and baking apple pie either.”

We started walking. Home would be good. I could get clean and not think about how if I hadn’t had to hide in the morgue, the plan would’ve worked in a different way than I’d thought. If I’d walked out of the hospital smelling like death after only being in the cafeteria that would let Junior off the hook. It took only one goal-oriented security guard and one dead man who’d liked sugar more than his leg and life to throw that all out the window.

“Walk slower,” Cal said from in front of me as he plodded, steps tired and occasionally wobbly. “I can still smell you.”

By the time we were home, Cal had recovered and took a quick shower before coming out back. I kept as far away as our tiny backyard would allow as he threw me the soap. He uncurled the hose while I stripped and dumped my clothes in the garbage can for later burning. For once I was thankful we couldn’t afford to live in a neighborhood that had streetlights. If any of our neighbors saw me as anything other than a smear paler than the night, then they were trying too much. Cal would be happy to go paint a giant P for pervert on their doors if they did.

“Ready?” he asked. But he didn’t wait for my answer. How would that be fun for him? A stream of ice-cold water hit me in the face. I grimaced but began soaping up as Cal hosed me down like an elephant on a hot day at the zoo.

I scrubbed every inch thoroughly before waving my arms. “Cal, all right, stop. I think I’m fine now.” Except that I expected my skin had turned blue and I was freezing. Cal was right. Mrs. Spoonmaker would have to pray for me.

Cal took an experimental sniff, then shook his head. Part of the decision, I thought, was driven by how much he was enjoying himself. Little brothers and water hoses are deadly combinations. “One more time. To make sure it doesn’t get in the house. You really, really stank.”

I couldn’t disagree with that.