Читать книгу The Resurrectionist - Sierra Woods - Страница 12

Chapter 4

There are days when the past haunts me entirely too much, and this was one of those days. Being around pregnant women unnerves me. I admit it. I should have no problems dealing with the condition of women who are growing new life inside of them, but I do.

It’s what got me killed.

I hate thinking that I’m weak and vulnerable when I’ve worked very hard to be as tough as I can be. Certain things set me off, and seeing a happily pregnant woman on the arm of her police officer husband is what did it today. This is a joyous time for them, but for me, it does nothing except bring back haunting, hideous memories that still have the power to make me shudder.

After they passed with a happy smile and a wave, I closed the door to my office. Usually, I keep the door open unless I’m consulting, but now, I need some privacy to have my nervous breakdown. In an office that sits in the middle of the police station, there is no such thing as privacy. Or quiet.

One by one, I pulled the horizontal blinds and closed off the windows. Was I hiding? Yes. I’d hide until it’s safe for me to step out again. Until then, the memory of my life in the past overwhelms me in sloshes of emotions that build into pounding waves, and I allow it. Crawling onto the small couch against the wall, I tucked my feet beneath me and clutched a pillow to my middle. Closing my eyes, I let the memory, the horror of it, wash over me. I’ve learned that resisting only puts off the inevitable and gives more power to the pain. If I give it the time it needs now, then life will go on much more quickly.

I had been happily, blissfully, ignorantly, pregnant. My husband hadn’t been as thrilled about it as I had been, but I don’t think men can ever have the same connection to a baby as women do. Just the nature of how we’re put together.

Anyway, my husband, Blake, and I had been headed for divorce when we decided to give it one last go. He’d been carrying on with a woman for several months and had tired of her clingy, demanding ways, so he let her go and went back to his wife, who wasn’t so clingy and demanding. Maybe I should have been and things might have been different, but now, we’ll never know.

So, giving it the old college try at reconciliation, the husband and I had a nice dinner with requisite margaritas, enough that I became a little intoxicated. Okay, a lot intoxicated, but I wasn’t driving, so who cares? And we screwed our brains out all night long. We hadn’t done that since we were dating, so we indulged in an all night bang-a-thon.

And I got pregnant. My family was thrilled because I was finally fulfilling my reproductive obligations inherent to any large family that seemed to want to take over the earth, one generation at a time. The playboy-doctor-husband was not thrilled. Although he said he wanted children someday, to him, someday meant years into the future, when he had a more secure practice, blah, blah, blah. What he really meant was never. He wasn’t the fatherly type who could, or would, be there for his child.

In the old days, T&A’s meant tonsils and adenoids. Now it was tits and asses, making them bigger and smaller in that order. There was serious money to be made in elective plastic surgery, and he was going to make his killing now, then retire to an island in the Caribbean and work on skin cancer late in life. Or something equally brilliant.

As my pregnancy progressed and my belly grew, I was happy. Even though the spousal unit couldn’t be bothered to come to checkups and ultrasounds with me, I was content in knowing that I was growing a new life I could love and cherish. One that would love and cherish me, at least until the teenage years, and then it would be all over for a while.

Although my growing abdomen housed a new life, and that was good, it also threw my center of gravity off, and that was bad. I was in an awkward stage at the end of my third trimester when the doorbell rang and without thinking, I opened it. I’d been shopping for baby things and had taken a load into the house and was ready to return for another, so I was right there by the door. An unfamiliar woman stood there, and the smile fell from my face when I noticed the gun in her hand. She grabbed me by the shirt and dragged me out of the house toward my car with an open back door just a few feet away. I tried to struggle, knowing if I got into my car I was dead. It was the middle of the day and my neighbors all worked, so screaming wasn’t going to help. I had to save myself or die trying.

She clobbered me on the head with something that felt like an anvil, and I collapsed onto the backseat. She shoved my legs in, and away she went with me unconscious in the back. I finally roused, but had no idea where we were or for how long I’d been out. My legs were numb from being folded up in such an awkward position. I had to move, but if I did, she’d know I was awake. I eased my weight up slightly so my legs got some circulation, and they screamed in pain as the blood flow returned.

“Dammit, where is this place?” she grumbled aloud. I heard the shuffling of papers, so maybe she was looking at a map. There was no GPS in my car. If she didn’t know where we were, I wasn’t going to find my way out of there either. Panic as well as my position was making me dizzy.

She turned off the car and got out. As quickly as I could, I shifted to my back. Not a comfortable position when you have a watermelon in your belly, but when your life was on the line, you coped. She opened the back door and reached in. I kicked out with both feet as hard as I could, and she went flying.

I knew I had hurt her, or at least surprised the hell out of her, but I was certain we weren’t done yet. With any luck, she’d left the keys in the ignition, and I could get out of there. I scrambled out of the car as fast as any nine-months-pregnant woman could scramble, which wasn’t too sprightly.

“You’re a dead woman,” she yelled. “Fucking bitch.”

She was on her knees and clutched her front. Hopefully, I’d broken a few ribs. I didn’t know who she was or why she thought kidnapping me was going to improve her life.

“What do you want?” I tried to slide against the car toward the front door.

“You. Dead.”

The words didn’t make sense, but as a nurse, I knew that things many people thought didn’t make sense. She might have been an escaped psych patient who was on a mission from above or listening to the voices in her fillings. Or just off her medications. In any case, keeping her talking and away from me was my first step to survival. “I see, but why? Who are you?”

“You’re the only thing standing between me and Blake.”

Oh, shit. She was his mistress, who was supposed to be a former mistress. And she was freakin’ nuts. Good going, Blake. If I got out of this alive, I was going to put certain of his body parts in the blender.

“Are you out of your mind? What the hell are you doing?” Anger overcame fear for a moment.

“Blake went back to you.” The idea that Blake was married to me seemed to have escaped her. “If you hadn’t gotten pregnant, none of this would be happening.”

Oh, yeah. As if this was my fault. Another sign of pathological nuttiness. Blame everyone else for your personal failures.

“Now, just a damned minute. I have the right to sleep with my own husband. You are the one who doesn’t.” This was pissing me off. Now that I could see what was going on, I was damned mad and some of my fear wore off, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

“We were so good together,” she said with a wistful tone to her voice. “You should have seen us.” She spoke to me as if we were girlfriends sharing secrets. Definite lack of reality attachment.

“I would prefer not to.” I didn’t need anything else to make me nauseated.

“Bitch.” She reached for a large knife on the ground beside her and dove for me. I ducked, but that’s hard to do with a big, fat belly. The knife missed me, but the impact of her body against mine thumped me between her and the car. The air went out of my lungs, and I couldn’t breathe. A pregnant woman has a hard time breathing to begin with. When one is body-slammed by an insane woman, it’s all over.

We collapsed into a heap on the ground, and she clobbered me again. Back then, I didn’t know how to fight. Every woman ought to know how to defend herself, and this was one reason why.

When I woke up there was a knife sticking out of my stomach. I screamed, not certain if it was from pain or from the sight of the butcher knife protruding from my body.

The woman obviously intended to cut my baby out of me.

“Stop!” I reached out to the knife. Adrenaline and the heat of a white anger so deep I felt it in my bones surged through my marrow. I was going to remove that thing and stick it into her. I was not going to die. I was not going to lose my baby to this psychopath.

Unfortunately, I did all of that.

She reached the knife before I did and pulled it toward her, my left. “I’m going to take your baby and watch you bleed to death.” She laughed, as if she was surprised she hadn’t thought of it sooner. “And there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.”

Clenching my teeth against the pain that penetrated every cell of my body, I felt as if I were on fire and there was nothing I could do about it. Pushing up with a hand beneath my hips, I bore the weight of my body on my left hand and reached for the knife with my right. Breathing was next to impossible, and my chest burned with the need for air. I had to win, I had to win. This woman was going to kill me and steal my child. “No.” It’s all I could manage. “No.” She was not going to win. I would not let her win.

Digging deep into a place I didn’t know existed within me, I grabbed her hand on the knife and pushed with everything I had in me. Although I’d never hurt anyone before, I was going to kill this woman.

Somehow I got to my knees with her trying to shove the blade deeper into my side. In the movies there always seems to be a lot of noise in fight scenes, but it was eerily silent. Only the groans of pitting my strength against hers broke the night.

Abruptly, she let go, and stood, her breath coming in and out of her in harsh gasps. “You bitch!” Then, she kicked me in the stomach, and I crashed to the ground, the pain incapacitating me. Stars and bright lights swam in front of my eyes and seemed as though they came from all around us. Then she tackled me and straddled my body, her knees forcing my hands down, trapping them at my sides. My strength was fading. I knew it and so did she.

She grabbed the knife with both hands and pulled, spilling everything inside me out onto the ground. A scream echoed off the canyon walls, and I realized it was mine.

“Come here, little one. You’re so precious,” she said in a sweet voice as she searched for my baby.

“No.” Reaching up with one hand, I tried to save him, but I was too weak. My vision blurred, and I was certain shock was overtaking me. Shock isn’t such a bad thing. It keeps us from remembering the horrors that are happening to us, and at the moment I welcomed it.

She extricated the baby, and held it up. It wasn’t moving and it was purple. “Oh, that’s right. I have to cut the cord before it will breathe.” Talking to herself, she retrieved her knife, slicing through the umbilical cord. Blood spurted, then she looked at me, as if I had the answer to the stupid thing she had done. “It’s bleeding. Why won’t it stop bleeding?”

I looked at my limp baby that she held out. I could see that it was a boy, and tears pricked my eyes. It wouldn’t have mattered to me. I would have loved a girl just as much. She’d cut the cord close to the abdomen and hadn’t tied it off. Now there was nothing left. If the baby could have survived, it would surely now die. It was going to bleed to death, just like me. “Didn’t tie...the cord.” It was all I could manage as tears for him and for me closed off my throat.

She looked down at the baby and tears flooded her eyes. “Dammit! I worked so hard on this. And now, just look at the mess it is.”

My legs went numb, and I knew my end was near. I felt my breathing become labored.

She’d won after all. She laid the baby down beside me, wiped her hands on her jeans, got into my car and drove away, leaving us alone in the darkening desert. I had only moments left.

Pulling the baby toward me, I cuddled him as best I could, tucking the little head under my chin, and I let my tears flow. I sobbed and my baby fell out of my arms.

A light, the brightness of which I’ve never seen, appeared a few feet away. It wasn’t a person, or an angel, though it could have been. I knew I was dying, and who knew what was coming to get me? I wasn’t particularly religious. At least until that moment. For a second, I reconsidered what I knew about religion.

And then I took a breath, and it sighed out of me for the last time.

“Come, child.” The other-sider, for that’s what I have come to know it as, reached out to me. How I knew it was from beyond, I don’t know, but I realized it was trying to communicate with me, even though no words were spoken aloud. All I could hear was a loud ringing in my ears.

“No.” From above my body, I looked down at the baby, who had never begun to live, and touched it with one finger. I wanted to stay with him. He should go with me.

“He is gone to the source now. Your time here is not finished.”

“Yes it is.” It was. I knew it. I’d accepted it. Closing my eyes, I waited to be taken too. Waited for that irresistible pull from beyond I had heard about.

“You will go back. The call for help has gone out, and you will be saved.”

Saved? How could I be? Did it not see the condition of my body? It was too late now. “No.” I looked down at the mess that had been my body. It was almost beyond recognition. I don’t know if I said it out loud, but I thought it and the other-sider heard me. My condition was beyond saving.

The being moved toward me, and the glow of it burned through my eyelids and into my brain. I wanted to let go, to leave this plane of existence, but couldn’t. Something was drawing me back inside. I felt a pop in my physical body. I don’t know how else to explain it, but it was as if someone or something had yanked on me, only I felt it at a visceral level. I had returned.

I began to glow, just like the other-sider. The life force had returned to my body, not floating around as it had been moments ago.

“You will return. You will survive, and you will right the wrongs committed against you, against humanity, and against the universe.”

“Who do you think I am, Wonder Woman?” I managed to ask with my mind. Something was changing, something was reforming inside me. I could feel it. Reaching down, I placed my hand onto my abdomen and realized all was not as it had been. Things were returning to my body that had just been on the ground. I didn’t want to think about infection or how much dirt was coating my internal organs. Should I survive the injuries, I’d die of septicemia for sure. No antibiotic could cure this.

“You are indeed a wonder. Each step of your life has prepared you for this moment. Your life-threatening wounds are repaired, and you will fully heal, be stronger than you ever were. You will return to your life, gifted as no other.” The light that I had thought was bright went nuclear. In that moment, that nanosecond, my life was changed, whether I wanted it to or not.

I screamed from the deepest part of me, and the sound of it echoed off the canyon walls. The smell of wood fires and the murmur of my ancestors crowded my mind. I had been gifted with knowledge from the ancients, and the power of justice. Just as I had come back from the dead, I would assist others to return, to restore the balance of the universe.

Now, I pulled myself out of the musing at the sound of a scuffle outside my door. In a police station, there is always a scuffle of some sort going on.

The clock face slowly came into focus, and I decided my day was over. Though it was early, four o’clock or so, I was whipped. Nothing else was going to get done today.

I grabbed my bag and stood just as the door opened.

“You look like someone beat you with a rock,” Sam said. Charming as ever. Where was that damned petrified wood? I could use it about now.

“Yeah, I feel like it, too.” Shouldering my bag, I avoided looking into his eyes and shoved my shades on. They protected me somewhat, but he was so friggin’ observant that nothing got past him. Damn cops anyway.

“I’m buying,” he said and stepped sideways in the doorway to let me pass.

That meant I had to touch him with my body and slide intimately against him, smell that cologne of his that always made me want to forget my mission and lick my way from one end of his body to the other. Right now, I was too tired, and tried not to sense the way his body felt, the firmness of his chest and abs as I slithered past him. “You coulda moved.” I threw a glare over my shoulder. With the sunglasses on, it was less effective. Sam wasn’t very susceptible to my glares anyway, which pissed me off. I wasn’t in the mood, so he was on his own for chow.

“Coulda.” He fell into step beside me. “Garduno’s?”

It was the one word I couldn’t resist. My mouth began to water in anticipation. Guacamole, margaritas and meat. “You’re such a bastard,” I said and hung my head. I was defeated already. My stomach ruled my life, and he knew it.

“I am, but that’s why you like me.” With his hand on the middle of my back, he gave me a playful shove toward the main doors. “Let’s eat. I’m starved.”

In less than thirty minutes I was surrounded by the things I loved and needed to get through the day: an excellent margarita, a flat-iron steak, rare, and a hot-blooded man across the table. It was a feast for the taste buds and the eyes. Okay, so I didn’t really need the margarita to get through the day, but it was a nice touch at the end of a sucky one. And I really, really didn’t need the hot-blooded man across the table from me, but boy, the eye-candy factor was too hard to resist sometimes. He was buying me dinner, after all. Who could argue with that?

I know Sam was interested in me in a way I couldn’t return. My life was so complicated, it was all I could do to get through it. I didn’t need any more complications. So for the moment, I just sat there and let him ogle my body, enjoying the rush of it. I knew he wanted to, and if this was the only control I had over a man, I had to take it. Gave me a shiver just thinking about what it would be like to have Sam naked and pressed against me. I gulped my frozen-no-salt-on-the-rim drink, trying to cool off my brain and the burn in my crotch. Didn’t work though. Next time I was having salt. I didn’t care what my blood pressure did.

Fortunately, our orders arrived quickly and I grabbed my knife, ready to stab it into anything that didn’t move.

“You’re the only woman I know who likes her steak bloodier than mine.” Sam cut into his meal.

“I feel so feminine and dainty when you say things like that.” Me? Ha. Not even on a good day. After I was resurrected, I burned every feminine thing I owned. Except for that one pair of pretty pink thongs with a matching bra. Someday...

“We never finished our conversation the other day,” Sam said.

Uh, what conversation? We had so many that got interrupted with phone calls and firearms that I couldn’t keep track. Always on the move, always busy doing something for the station or my office, we never seemed to have a moment to allow our brains to catch up. “Which conversation was that?”

“About my grandmother and her job in the underground.”

I had to laugh. That’s certainly one way of putting it. “Yeah.” I looked at Sam. I liked the way his smile sort of slid over his face slowly just then. The man has a face that isn’t pretty or handsome, but it is compelling. His hair is that dark, dark black that Latin men have, and his is cut very short. Not quite a buzz, but a little longer. He is clean shaven, but I’ve seen pictures of him with a ’stache, and it’s nice, too. The most compelling part of his face is his eyes, which sort of pull everything together and make it come alive. His eyes were the shade of espresso, dark and fathomless, eyes you could get lost in. Kinda like now.

“Dani?” He waved his hand in front of my face, bringing me back to the present. Doh!

How embarrassing. “Sorry.” I cleared my throat and speared a piece of grilled jalapeño. Maybe setting my mouth on fire would keep me focused. “Didn’t mean to stare.”

“No problem. You just seemed lost for a second.” The espresso in his eyes percolated a little warmer.

Yeah, I was lost. In his eyes. It’s that damned cologne he wears. I swear there’s some sort of chemical in it that puts me in a trance. Kinda like catnip for women. Ugh. Back to the convo at hand.

“We were talking about your grandmother and Roberto’s case the other day, weren’t we?” Back on track. That’s where I feel best, with a job in front of me, a purpose and a mission to accomplish, not just drifting around like those in the nebula.

“Is there another resurrectionist who can help you?”

Sadly, no. “Not right now. I know a few, but not well enough to step into this kind of job.” Something occurred to me, though. Something I’ve been doing just to get the events of the day out of my brain is something Sam’s grandmother may have done. I have a computer and the internet, but she had access only to books and papers. I frowned and leaned closer to him across the table. Intent. Assistance might come from the other side in a different form. “Did your grandmother keep any records, any sort of journals, papers, anything about her work? I write some things, keep a journal of sorts, so it clears my brain and records some of what I do in the rituals. She might have done the same thing.” That would be a huge bonus, to have information from such a source. I never know if the internet information is legit.

Sam thought a minute, then frowned. “If she did, I don’t know of any, but my sisters might.”

“She could have had a journal she kept hidden, if, as you say, she was at risk of being accused of witchcraft.” If nothing else, I had to have a little hope.

“That’s true. She had so much stuff though, something like that might have been overlooked. She was a Depression-era survivor, so she never threw anything away.” My grandmother had also survived the Great Depression, and she has a garage full of toilet paper and plastic water jugs. The two things she can’t live without. Oh, and soap, too.

“Would you ask your sisters if they found anything like that?” Desperation led me to ask Sam for such a favor. The weight of it got to me sometimes, even with my jovial outlook on life. Even if his abuela was dead, at least I might connect to her through her writings. Burton might be helpful, but he’s unreliable and difficult to contact. Sam, I know I can count on, no matter what it is. He is a man who keeps his word, keeps promises he makes. I just didn’t know why.

“Sure.” He searched my eyes, and I wondered if they had returned to their normal color. After eating, my need for protein and blood is satisfied, and externally, I look normal again. Hesitating, he reached out and placed his hand over mine. He knows that touching is difficult for me. It isn’t something I can easily control, and I can get sucked into the feelings of the person I’m touching. Occupational hazard. But right then, it was simply nice. “I’ll help you any way I can. Sometimes you seem so lonely in what you do, that it takes so much out of you.”

There was no other way to acknowledge that very astute observation. “I am, and it does.”