Chapter 2
“Here’s
to not having to do our jobs.”
Dave raised his glass, sealing Edwin’s
toast. As a college town in the middle of nowhere, Pullman had no shortage of
bars. Rico’s was one of the few in the city where graduate students and faculty
outnumbered undergrad patrons. Craft beer filled the air with the scent of
hops, malts, and roasts. Off in a corner, the four burly paramedics sipped
whiskey sours and tried their best to fight their natural urge to party like
athletes. The ambulance driver watched them, sipping a ginger ale, having a
vicarious good time.
“So, how are things at Eastern?”
“Not much in either direction since
you left, Dave. We still have little fits of apathy in some of the staff, but
luckily they’re enough of a minority that we can make them take vacations to
recharge. It’s nothing like back in the seventies.”
Dave nodded his approval and shot
his beer to drown the memory of the time his friend referenced.
The doctors had gone to college
together, done medical rounds together, and finally wound up at Eastern one
ward apart. In their graduation pictures they looked like the same person with
a few details tweaked. Once Dave left Eastern, the details sharpened. He’d
avoided Edwin’s growing bald spot. Beneath a button up shirt Dave kept a trim
figure while Edwin had the type of gut that earned adult-onset diabetes. Every
morning, Edwin took a chemical cocktail to fight heart disease while Dave had
orange juice. Dave kept the same glasses prescription while Edwin’s grew into
telescopes. It was the price Dr. Harrison paid to add ‘Chief of Staff’ to his
credentials.
“So,” Harrison ran a finger around
the rim of his glass, “are you going to make me ask?”
Dave took another drink. “Ask what?”
“There’s my answer. Who was that
young woman that got Buddy to take his medication?”
“She works at the clubhouse.”
“That’s what she does. Now who is
she? I’ve never seen anyone talk a delusional client out of their own head when
things are going to hell like that. Is she some messianic grad student? Freud
reborn? Sherlock Holmes with a psych PhD? What?”
Dave drained his glass and clinked
it onto the bar. “She’s Rebecca Collins.”
A three-inch thick file folder
opened in Harrison’s head. “Collins?”
“Yes. That Collins.”
“Jesus. I never would have
recognized her.”
“I know.”
Harrison sat back and finished his own
drink. The rest of his questions went unasked. Most of them disappeared, but
one remained. It itched as he shook hands and farewelled Dave. He continued to
wonder as the ambulance crew loaded up and started the drive home.
The question was, how long would it
be before Collins, Rebecca, appeared in his caseload at Eastern?
They left Pullman full of beer and
glad that it was the only thing they were bringing with them. The highway led
them away from the Snake River Canyon, where Rebecca twitched in her dreams. At
a fork, the driver (sober as a bird and bitter as if he were caged) noticed the
sign marked “Colton”, urging them to take a right. He kept to the left. The
name was familiar to him, but only as another eastern Washington small city
that he knew nothing about.
The first thing he didn’t know was
that Colton was a city of numbers. It was a line item to the state budget
committees. Population, less than two thousand. Percentile for revenue profit,
eleventh. Poverty level, seventy-five percent. Budget priority, bottom ten
percent.
Most people knew of Colton as a
landmark. “Keep going twenty miles past Colton… You’ll see Colton on the left…
The big building over there? That’s part of Colton…” Very few people knew what
the city produced. They assumed it was another farm community, even though the
land had fallowed decades earlier. Even fewer knew how the city was formed, as
the entire story fit in a single volume crammed in the basement of the city
library, which had burned down. No one bothered to spare it a thought. Just
another tiny eastern Washington city.
City was a generous term. Huge
expanses of rocky, sun-punished ground stretched between the clusters of
buildings where people lived. An old factory, a coal power plant, and a shipping
warehouse gave the only hint of work within the city, and they were all
shuttered with plywood and chained up doors. The only business was the Colton
General Store, selling off-brand products at welfare prices.
In the fifties, a few Coltonites who understood
that their home was dying reached out for life support. They pooled money,
polled and campaigned, then built piers, shipping, and fuel supplies for
traffic on the Snake River. For one glorious quarter, money flowed into the
city. New jobs appeared, working with sailors who had plenty of stories,
servicing ships the size of buildings. Rumors spread, saying there was work in
some place called Colton.
Then the dams came. The river dropped,
and the shining new port rose high away from the water’s edge, perched on bone-dry
pylons. The city begged for more money to rebuild, but by then the rumors had
died and they were a number again, droning in monotone about their budget priority.
People left. Education grew costly, drink
grew cheap. The good people, the ones who wanted to keep their home and see it
thrive, found themselves outnumbered ten to one by people on government money
who believed in ‘good enough.’ Colton kept existing as a landmark past a
mysterious road sign.
Twelve grain siloes marked the eastern
edge of the city. They rose from the ground in a straight line, a picket fence.
Ten of them held dust. One held grain. New power lines piped electricity into
the last silo. Inside, spotlights lit the cement and metal interior. It was
spotless, but the stink of grain dust lingered, infused into the interior. A
mattress and a few blankets sprawled near the door. Cords trailing from the
wall led to a microwave near a pallet of bottled water and a freezer filled
with boxed meals. A toilet and sink jutted from the corrugated steel nearby,
fed by bare copper pipes.
Green and red lights blinked in the
darkness past the living area. Two-dozen computer towers dotted the floor, arranged
in clusters connected by a labyrinth of wires. The coils joined into arteries
that led to a monitor, casting a white glow against the far wall.
Jimmy Collins proofread lines of
code on the screen. The information bits sketched pathways made of glowing
light in his mind. They twined together into a net, then twisted into a
pattern. He checked and double-checked, then looked out to his computer towers.
The pattern knit between them, strung in beams of light. The image in his head
matched the image on screen. Time to see if it worked.
Doctors called his condition
synesthesia, the blending of one sense with another. For some people with it,
the taste of bacon sounded like a pleasant hum while liver screeched like a
scratched chalkboard. Others smelled blue and yellow and red, and when they
were unlucky, gray. Tchaikovsky, the famous composer, saw patterns in music as
lines of color on the staff, which danced across the page and through the air
as they were played. Jimmy also saw color that played, expanded and created,
but his instrument was the computer. His colors were code.
He pressed enter and the code began.
The first tower glowed, light filling it from bottom to top like water filling
a glass. Before it overflowed, a beam shot to the next tower. It filled and
spread to two more. The light doubled again and again, until the net he’d seen
in his mind glowed in front of him. When the last tower shone, the net doubled
back on itself, twisting, and the pattern appeared.
Tendrils of light writhed upwards.
They met into the air and spliced like a rope. It contorted into one knot, then
two, then four. The light divided and knotted in an endless pattern, growing
more intricate as seconds ticked by, but there was no originality. Nothing more
than what he programmed appeared.
He hung his head as the code ran its
course and the light dimmed. It had been beautiful, it had been intricate, but
it led nowhere. The experiment was a failure.
Something landed on the metal roof
above him. Skittering taps echoed through the silo. It was the sound of talons.
He glanced at the clock in the corner of his screen, and realized it had to be
dark outside.
The Witch had come.
He hit a kill switch with practiced
speed. The towers went dead. The monitor flashed white and blinked out. He
barreled underneath the computer desk into a rat’s nest of wires.
Above, the steel whined as a claw
scored a line in the roof. She was hungry.
Deep crimson glowed in the blackness
of the silo. A beam of light, red that darkened into black spots, dangled from
the ceiling. It’s end twitched like a cat’s tail, then swung through the air.
It animated into a tentacle, prehensile, that swept against the corrugated
walls of the silo. It probed between the computer towers. Jimmy saw himself in
its glow as it tapped the ground inches away from him. He pulled his legs in
and wrapped his body tight. It crept closer. He could almost hear her licking
her lips, breathing rapid as she sniffed him out.
She was cruel, but not smart. He had
to play along, let her think she was winning until he could get away.
His left hand dug into the computer
cords on the floor. He found a tight one and looped his arm into it. When it
was a twisted skein and his veins ballooned blue out of pale gray skin, he waited.
White-hot tingles moved up and down the suffocating flesh, sounding the alarm
that it was dying.
A whimper crawled up his throat and
escaped into the air. She smelled it. Drool ran down the corners of her fanged
mouth, falling tat tat tat onto the
roof. The red and black light below thrashed in excitement.
Aching, throbbing, stabbing hurt
coursed out of his arm and bled into his lungs. He choked it out as red mist
that floated up to her. She breathed deep.
His mind retreated to sanctuary as
his body screamed. He saw whitish blue light, uncurling in spirals that drifted
through the air. A whisper crept out of the light and settled over him, warm.
And
here you are.
Needles of pain proved too much for
Jimmy Collins. His screams echoed against the steel walls, filling it to the
brim. Outside, she sucked at the mist in his screams. Sated, she grinned with
pointed teeth and melted back into the inky night.
And
here you are.
The whisper sounded in time with his
heartbeat as he freed his arm and soothed the hurt. He shut his eyes and saw
the whitish blue light, listening over and over until the pain had left enough
for him to think.
And
here you are.
Soft thoughts turned hard. The
whitish blue light darkened into cobalt. It uncurled, rail straight and needle
thin, pointed at the end like a stiletto. Code that made light like blue
daggers traced in front of his eyes. When the time was right, he’d use it, but
that time hadn’t come. Fighting was a risk he couldn’t take until his work was
done.
The night’s code was a failure but
his formulas were solid. All he needed was new input, enough to give the push
that would bring the light to life. One person stuck out in his mind as smart
enough to give that input.
His left hand pulsed with stinging blood.
His right took a smartphone from his pocket. The message he needed to send
hovered in front of him. He blinked, and the message turned to ones and zeroes
that shimmered, green and red. He transcribed them, one at a time onto his
phone and pressed send. The string of red and green light trailed up through
the ceiling and out into the night.
The Witch loomed in the sky, framed
by the moonlight. There were more meals for her in Colton. She flapped her
wings, scanning the city below, searching where to send her light next.
Twinkling greens and reds traced by her
in a line, heading away from the city. She growled, talons flexing at the
sight. Someone was taunting her, but she couldn’t read the light and she’d
never know who it was. She was cruel, but not smart.
In his silo, Jimmy made a bed in the
tangled wires, clutching his throbbing arm close. He drifted off to shallow
sleep, thinking soft thoughts again.
