The Participants (2 page)

Elza's face flushed hot. “Nothing.”

“Only one points at me.” Hess scrutinized
her.

“Perhaps the other objects to your
looks.”

Hess stepped close and pitched his voice low
for her ears only. “Watch yourself in this tribe. You speak too
boldly and watch too openly. The men here like to break stubborn
women.”

Downy chest hair peeked free of Hess's furs,
different from the smooth chests of the other men of the tribe.
Combined with his uncommonly pale eyes, it suggested he was an
outsider by blood as well as temperament. “Why do you care what
happens to us?”

“Wrong question, woman.”

“And what is the right question?”

“The right question is why no one else
cares.” Hess stepped away, then hesitated. “If you aren't noticed,
the men may forget you and tire themselves out on the others. You
are smart. Do whatever it takes.”

Elza watched Hess cross the camp, collect an
attractive woman, and disappear into a tent. In spite of her
situation, she found herself intrigued. Hess was, without a doubt,
the most fascinating man she had ever met.

The sirens were the first thing to reach him.
Their strident wails pierced the haze of his mind, drawing him back
towards full awareness. Zack opened his eyes to find himself in
darkness. Immediately, he began to thrash his arms, striking at the
space above him, wordlessly snarling in a kaleidoscope of emotions.
Rage, fear, and weariness swirled within him in a corrosive
solution, burning away the veneer of sanity.

“Oh my God, he's moving!”

Zack's movements dislodged a jacket from his
face and the return of light banished the shadows within him. “He's
moving, Kelly! Do something!”

He sat up. And then Zack remembered the
robbers, the gun, and the thunder that pronounced the end of his
life. But death had rejected him. Or, more accurately, his nature
had rejected death just as it rejected every other harm inflicted
upon his body.

Maggie was trying to climb Kelly like a
pole, staring and pointing at him in horror. Zack momentarily
pondered the psychology of her response. He decided the sense of
revulsion had its origin in the proof that an essential assumption
was false. Horror was the panicked realization of ignorance.
Realizing a stick was in fact a snake forced an individual to
recognize that they were not able to identify the threats in their
environment. Seeing a dead body revive introduced a much greater
uncertainty and therefore a correspondingly greater revulsion.

The intense curiosity which had seized him
upon witnessing Maggie's reaction released him when he realized the
spectacle he had made of himself. He was interfering with the
events he was supposed to watch; violating the sanctity of his
observations. The repercussions of his actions could ripple out to
taint every aspect of his interactions in this world.

Kelly backed towards the door. “Shit, he's
alive.”

Zack said the only thing that came to mind.
“I can't believe that guy missed me at that range. He must have
been smoking something.”

“No way he missed. Your brains are all over
the cigarette display,” Kelly said.

Zack glanced over his shoulder. As expected,
no bodily fluids stained the merchandise. They had returned to
where the Creator intended them to be, just as they did when he got
a paper-cut or nicked himself shaving. “It's not there, Kelly.
Maybe you girls just had a little too much excitement today and
imagined things.”

Maggie shook her head. “I swear to God I saw
you dead. I threw the jacket from the lost and found on top of you
it was so nasty.”

“Then why are my brains inside my head right
now?”

Paramedics loped into the store with medical
kits, shouting questions about who was in charge and where the body
was. Kelly glanced back and forth between the medics and Zack, then
threw her hands in the air. “I need some fresh air.”

One of the men approached him. “You hurt,
kid?”

“No, sir,” Zack said.

“Is anyone here hurt?”

Zack shrugged. “The women went crazy for a
bit. Does that count?”

Not long after the ambulance departed, a
state trooper arrived to gather evidence. Zack re-enacted the scene
for the female officer, claiming to slip and fall whenever the
gunman cocked his gun. The officer took each of their reports, then
asked to see the surveillance video.

Zack's stomach dropped. There were three
cameras inside the store. One pointed directly down at the register
to prevent employee theft, another sat where it caught the face of
every customer walking through the door, and the third was pointed
at the deli counter. Zack turned to look at the third camera. He
was almost certain that the background of the shot would show a
perfect side profile of the person at the register.

They crowded into the manager's office while
Kelly brought the camera feed up on the computer screen. At the
officer's direction, Kelly showed the door camera from earlier. The
rusty Fiat backed into the spot directly before the door and two
men got out. There was no license plate. The two men had their
masks on before they came into view to enter the store, then
retreated to their car empty-handed a minute later. The officer
made notes of everything, then asked to see the other cameras.

Kelly brought up the register camera and
they watched events unfold. The front of Zack's face bobbed in and
out of the picture from one side of the screen throughout the
conversation. The officer muttered something about stupid macho
men. When the gun came out, Zack wasn't in frame. They saw the gun
fire without learning anything.

Zack held his breath as the feed from the
third camera came onto the screen. In perfect clarity, it showed
Zack abandon customers at the deli counter to kick Maggie off the
register, taunt a gunman, and take a bullet to the head. The stream
from the exit wound sprayed matter onto the cigarettes and the body
collapsed.

At the same moment, Kelly, Maggie, and the
police officer turned to look at him. Zack presented his best
scowl. “Is this some kind of hoax?” He pointed a finger at his
coworkers. “Are the two of you trying to mess with me?”

They stared at him until the officer cleared
her throat. “I can't write this up as a homicide when the victim is
still walking around. My report will say Mr. Vernon fell to the
ground before the gun went off. I'll let the three of you decide
for yourselves if this was a miracle or what not.”

Zack returned to register duty once things
were settled. There was a line of customers waiting to pay for gas
and hear some gossip about events in the store. Zack downplayed his
involvement and took cash as quickly as possible. Ideally he would
leave after making himself so conspicuous. Unfortunately, he had
made commitments which would keep him in western Pennsylvania for a
while.

When a customer mentioned he heard from the
radio that some guy died in a shooting, Zack pulled out his cell
phone. There were no missed calls, but it would only be a matter of
time before one of Lacey's coworkers told her the news. If he
didn't contact her soon, she would call him in a panic. No matter
what he did or said at that point, there would be a fight
tonight.

Getting involved had been a mistake. He
should have remained at the deli counter and observed. Zack's
glanced to the corner of the store where Maggie was texting her
friends. He knew her well enough to be certain she would have
complied with any request of the gunman, but he couldn't be sure
how a sociopath jonesing for his drug would react. The ambulance
might have been necessary if Zack hadn't interfered.

Zack felt a flash of guilt at the thought.
The divine command, a wordless understanding instilled within him
by the Creator, demanded observation. It was open to some level of
interpretation, but any dictionary ever compiled would list
participation as the antonym of observation. Sometimes Zack found
himself sympathizing with these creatures too much. They were
nothing more than figments of the Creator's imagination,
temporarily granted existence for a purpose Zack did not know.

When he finished with the last customer,
Zack walked over to Maggie. “I have to make a phone call. You're on
register.”

Maggie kept a safe distance from him.
“Lacey's gonna flip when she hears what you did. I went to school
with her, remember, and Lacey's one mean bitch.”

“It would be nice if Lacey heard my version
of the story first.”

Maggie smirked at him. “Too late. I texted
her a pic before I tossed the jacket on your head.”

I didn't think she had the
guts to do that,
Zack thought. “Let me see
your phone,” he said.

“No way. You just want to delete the
evidence. You're too late, anyway. I sent it to like a hundred
people. My friend Jess knows people. She's going to get it on the
news for me.”

She must really hate Lacey.
And my spooky revival did nothing to endear me to her. How did I
miss the fact that she was so cold-blooded?
Zack resisted the curiosity that rose up within him. He
needed to perform damage control right now. There was no time to
study Maggie's psychology. Maybe he could remind her of the reason
she was still alive. “Did Kelly have anything to say to you this
morning?”

“I don't know what that was about. When I
got to her office, I told her that if she tried getting me fired
she would be sorry, then she got up in my face asking what I did.
After that, you went and got your brains blown out.”

No good deed goes
unpunished,
Zack thought. That kind of
perverse incentive seemed a flaw in any sane world, but who was he
to judge the Creator?

“Did you ever think that you were supposed
to be on that register?”

Maggie nodded towards the door. “Your wifey
just showed up.”

Lacey stood there, mascara running down her
face, frizzy straw-colored hair a ragged mess from raking her
fingers through it as she did when nervous, one hand cradling a
protruding abdomen wrapped in stretchy maternity clothes, staring
at him in shock. Then she had the worst reaction Zack thought
possible. Lacey ran forward and seized him with both arms, burying
her face in his chest.

“I thought you were dead!”

Zack looked down at the mess of Lacey's hair
and pondered the impulse that made this woman love him. They barely
spoke except to argue. Physical chemistry was nonexistent. There
wasn't even respect between them. Lacey's previous boyfriend
knocked her up right before a judge sent him to jail for burning
down a co-worker’s house. Lacey hooked up with Zack at a bar and
claimed to be pregnant with his child two days later. All these
months later, Lacey still continued the charade. After every
checkup, she dropped hints that her baby was growing fast and might
come early. Lacey believed him to be an idiot, which he thought
only fair as he had the same opinion of her. The only reason he
could imagine for her devotion to him was desperation.

Zack patted Lacey's back and cleared his
throat. “Let's talk outside.” Where Maggie couldn't contradict his
story.

“There's video of it all,” Maggie
volunteered. “Want to see it?”

“Stop this,” Zack said.

“Zack got his brains blown out, then ten
minutes later they grew back. When he started moving, I freaked
out. I think Kelly might have shit in her Depends.”

Lacey released him. “I want to see it.”

“You don't want to watch the video.” A flash
of inspiration struck Zack. “Too much excitement isn't good for the
baby. We should get you home to rest.”

Lacey's eyes narrowed in suspicion. “I need
to know what happened.”

“I thought the guy was bluffing and he shot
at me, but he missed.”

While less than intelligent, Lacey's limited
powers of deduction were bolstered by intimate familiarity. “You
were asking for it. You wanted to die.”

“Come on, Lacey, you don't believe
that.”

Her skin began to flush bright red until
Zack could imagine steam shooting from her ears like a cartoon
character. “I am pregnant with your baby! How dare you do something
like this? You're an asshole, Zack, a fucking asshole! What would I
do if you died? Move back into my mom's place? You know I can't
stand her.”

“You could move into section eight housing.
There are programs to help people in your situation. It wouldn't be
the end of the world.”

Lacey threw up her hands. “I ain't living in
some welfare apartment so my neighbors can give my kid drugs.”

“Actually, they drug screen applicants for
the housing assistance program, so your neighbors would be clean.
But go ahead and assume people you never met are going to slip
crack into your baby's bottle.”

“Oh, I forgot how damn smart you are. Well
guess what. You just admitted you were trying to get yourself
killed!”

Zack glared at her. “I never said that. I
just want you to stop the drama.”

“Drama? You don't know shit about drama,
honey. I lived with drama for eighteen years so don't talk to me
about drama.”

“So screaming at me in public doesn't count
as drama?”

Lacey folded her arms. “We'll talk about it
later. I need to go back to work now because we can't live on your
paycheck. Just do me a favor and don't kill yourself when I'm eight
months pregnant.”

“I thought you were only at seven months.”
Zack regretted the words the moment he said them. Lacey's face went
white. “Seven months and change. I'm just rounding up,” she said.
As she waddled past the door, Lacey raised both hands to her
face.

Proposing to her had been a mistake. Not
because of the frustration it caused him – Zack suspected he
somehow deserved that. It had been a mistake because Lacey expected
things from a husband he couldn't provide. She wanted love and Zack
wasn't even sure such a thing existed. The best he could offer was
pity.