I was almost certain that the seemingly endless supply of favors owed my friend was in reality a rapidly mounting debt for him. While I knew he had markers he could call in, Felicity and I were never left alone, and it would have taken one man several lifetimes to accumulate such a surplus of obligements. Fortunately, Carl and Constance took it upon themselves to fill whatever shifts they could, and I knew they were doing it out of friendship and not for the trade off.
My daily objections always fell on deaf ears with Ben. It didn’t matter to him that I felt it unfair that I should receive protection when the other potential targets weren’t; or even that I was worried about what he would end up owing to the parade of cops who came in and out of my home. He had told me before that he was going to protect his “corner of the world,” and there was no stopping him from doing just that-whatever it took.
Truth was, I was actually relieved to have them there. Not so much for my own safety as for the peace of mind it gave me knowing I wouldn’t have to worry about Felicity if something happened. The real debt being accumulated was on my end. I owed my friends in a big way.
When the long anticipated other shoe finally did meet the floor, the resulting explosive crash instantly reduced our anxious calm to shimmering crystalline shards that fell abrasively upon the landscape.
It didn’t seem like we had been in bed any time at all when I awoke to heavy handed pounding on our bedroom door blended with the distant sound of my name being urgently called. Strategically placed within the stream of noise a duet of angry barks and growls filled out the cacophonous melody. At first, I thought it was nothing more than the dying remnants of a dream as I strained to listen in the darkness and heard only the rhythmic in and out rush of ocean waves droning from a compact disk set on repeat. I had been using the natural sounds for a meditation aid as I urged myself back toward center-not that I had been overly successful. Apparently, on this night, Felicity and I had fallen asleep with the player still running.
I gave a moment’s consideration to answering the phantom voice and decided I should check the time first. I rolled to the side, and before my eyes were even fully open a square fist of pain rained a double jab down upon my forearm. I winced as I started to move the appendage and sent the agony in a reverberating right hook up through my elbow and into my shoulder. Reflexively I reached for the origin of the torture and was presented with a handful of sticky wetness far beyond anything that had occurred in the past septet of days.
I knew instantly that the voice had not been a dream at all.
“Goddammit, Rowan! Felicity! Wake up!” Ben’s muffled demand joined once more with his frantic hammering against the bedroom door, and again the dogs loudly announced their displeasure in return.
“Hold on,” I managed to croak out through the pain as I sent my hand searching for the switch on the bedside lamp.
By now the commotion had awakened my wife, and she was groggily dragging herself up from her pillow while yawning, “What’s going on?”
“Ben’s at the door,” I groaned as I continued to grope for the light.
“Are you all right?” Felicity questioned as she tossed back the blankets and rolled out of the bed. “You sound like you’re in pain.”
My hand brushed across the switch, and I fumbled with it for a moment before snapping the device to life. The first thing to meet my eyes was the smear of blood on the nightstand where I had been feeling around. The second was the blood soaked patches on the bed sheets. The third was the puckering Monogram of Christ carved deeply into a purplish welt on my forearm. Blood continued to ooze thickly from the symbol as I stared at it with a dejected frown.
“Oh Gods, Rowan!” my wife yelped as her bleary eyes fell across the wound. Till now she had only seen the monogram as fading pink scars on my flesh, and the variety of tortures of the past week had never achieved this level of trauma. This was the first time she had witnessed the stigmata in full gory bloom.
The pain was already starting to subside. My ethereal tormentor had my full attention, and the added push of suffering was no longer needed. “It’s okay. I’ll be all right,” I told her. “Let Ben in. I’m pretty sure I know what he wants.”
I glanced at the clock and saw that my earlier thought had been correct. We hadn’t been in bed long at all. It was only 10:34.
“Jeezus H. Christ…” Ben muttered from behind his hand as he covered the lower half of his face in an attempt to ward off a sweetly vile stench.
My wife and I were following suit as the malodor grew in intensity with each intake of breath.
With February racing toward a close, the ever-changeable pattern of Saint Louis’ weather had executed a backflip, and the jet stream was temporarily exacting kindness on the Midwest. The mercury had been hovering a healthy handful of degrees above the freezing point for a few days now in a practice run for the spring thaw. The combination of patchy leftover snow, evaporation, and temperature created the ideal condition for the misty fog that was now rolling in upon us. In a matter of hours it would be an opaque grey veil obscuring everything it touched, but for now it was a clammy humidity that carried with it the stink of burning flesh.
Through the teaming haze that forewarned of the coming thickness, a discordant flurry of attention-grabbing emergency lights generated blurry star-filtered patterns in the air. Emanating from no less than five Metropolitan Saint Louis City police cruisers, two fire engines, one emergency rescue vehicle, and an undetermined number of cars belonging to detectives with the Major Case Squad, the area was a cluster of strobing illumination. Each pulsing flicker of luminescence was immediately blended, bisected, and bounced in triangular directions by the silvery stainless steel plates that composed the Gateway Arch.
A sharp twinge insinuated itself through my nerve endings, and I absently reached to my wounded forearm as we walked, feeling the soreness swell throughout. I wasn’t sure why the pain had suddenly returned, but I feared perhaps another mark might be appearing soon.
Felicity had hastily bandaged my arm while we both shrugged into clothes in record time-record time at least for someone who was not a firefighter. All the while Ben had impatiently waited in the living room where earlier he had been keeping vigil. His anxious shuffling was marbled throughout with frustrated hurry up’s and come on you two’s. When all was said and done, we were ready to go in less than five minutes. It had only seemed longer. With my friend behind the wheel of his van and the corner of the roof adorned with his own madly flickering red emergency light, traffic signs and speed limits became instantly null and void. In just less than twenty minutes from the time we left the driveway, we sped down the park access road and jerked to a halt on the grounds of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.
Now that we were here, I would just as soon have been almost anyplace else. And the more I dwelled on that desire, the more my arm began to throb.
An ashen-faced rookie clad in the uniform of the city police department was just unfurling a roll of bright yellow barrier tape when we signed in to the crime scene. The vacant look in his glassy eyes was reminiscent of inner redolence brought on by abject horror. His cold emptiness combined with the unmistakable fetor wafting from a point several dozen yards behind him acted as a harbinger of the abomination we were about to witness.
“Who’s runnin’ the scene?” Ben asked the officer while Felicity and I penned our names on the log.
“Detective McLaughlin,” he answered distantly.
I had grounded myself before leaving the van, and thankfully, for the moment at least, I didn’t seem to be having any trouble maintaining the connection. However, compared to my normal level of ethereal protections, the shield I had cast about myself was a fragile eggshell in danger of cracking at any moment. Unwanted visions were angrily demanding ingress through the porous envelope, and the fearful disgust felt by the young man was already seeping through to bathe me with frigid anxiety. What he had witnessed had brought him close to his own personal threshold, and I could feel his need to retreat.
The emotion injected itself into me, gelling in my heart and oozing outward through arteries and veins to poison my body on the whole. I had to beat back an overwhelming desire to turn and flee. My forearm tensed as blackjacks of pain threatened to crush it.
“She with the body?” Ben prodded information from the traumatized officer.
