Uncollected Blood (11 page)

“Okay, so do they come around and believe you?”

“Most. I would be lying if I did not admit that most signed the paperwork just to get me to leave.”

“In which case we’re no longer your problem. Some one else will come take care of us?”

“If necessary.” The man replied. He cleared his throat and stared at Jamie intently.

“Got a pen.”

The man nodded towards the table, and sure enough there was a pen Jamie had not noticed before. He wondered when the man had placed it there. He picked it up. A rather pleasant feeling of static emanated from the pen.

“Is this magic?”

“An ordinary pen, Mr. Darren.” The man assured him.

Jamie was paralyzed as the debate returned to him.
  Just to make him go away
, he thought as he brought the pen to the line. He pressed the pen against the paper but not so much that a drop of ink worked its way on to the paper. Then he pulled it away and looked at the man.

The man raised both his eyebrows impatiently waiting for Jamie to speak.

“I…” he started, “What if I wanted to know more?”

“More.” The man repeated and bobbed his head as if he were willing but wanted Jamie to continue to define the word.

“I can’t unmake what happened today, correct?”

“It is not allowed.”

“So essentially I’m without a job. I peed my pants in front of the head of the company. I know I’m the butt of every joke in the office right now. I can’t go back.” Jamie shook his head, “What if, since I can ‘slip’ as you say, I come work for you guys? I mean are there jobs for people like me?”

“You would certainly have to submit a resume and interview, Mr. Darren.”

At first Jamie heard annoyance in the man’s voice, and then he sensed it was false. The man’s eyes gave away a particular gleam of pride or accomplishment.

“Well let’s do it. Give me the information.” Jamie slapped both his hands down on his knees.

Slowly, the man pulled his briefcase back on his lap. The locks snapped open and he lifted the lid. He spent a moment inside the briefcase, arranging various things before he closed the lid again and had a single sheet of paper.

“I will need to amend the contract.” He said holding his hand out. Jamie picked up the Residuals Contract and stretched across the coffee table.  The man took it and unbound the packet.  After a moment of rearranging the papers he handed the contract back.

“By signing this you agree to the Residuals Contract and also request application for employment.”

Jamie slashed his signature across the dotted line.

“That’s it?”

“No, but it will start the process, Mr. Darren.” This time the irritability was real. The man stood up, took the contract and returned it to his brief case so quick that the only thing Jamie noticed was the clicking of the latches. The man turned his back on Jamie and said, “My time does fly. Let it fly on its own.” He twitched towards the window causing Jamie to look at what had been the sunset. It looked like midday. The man was gone.

Jamie looked at the clock and instantly told himself he had just dozed off for a minute. But he knew too much happened in that minute long dream,
was it really possible to pass back and forth through time?
And if Jamie was doing it, how could he control it?

If he couldn’t just do it himself he had to find a way to prove it to himself.

The loud boom.

It happened around four o’clock. Not an ideal time to wait for, but it could ease Jamie’s mind back to sanity if there was no sound at all and once and for all he could consider this a strange nightmare. It wasn’t like he could simply go back to work. One of two things occurred this morning, he overslept and tossed and turned in a strange realistic nightmare and missed his meeting and would lose his job, or he really did piss his pants.

He laughed. He could check that right then and there. He went into his bathroom and flipped open the hamper but before he looked he knew. He would’ve taken them and put them straight in the washing machine. He didn’t remember doing it, but the whole morning had been a bit of a blur.

The pants smelled.  He closed the lid of the washing machine and started it up. His options were changed, if he peed his pants then he could only think he hallucinated the other parts, which given the circumstances of his stress seemed very likely.

The day felt longer than any workday he’d ever had.  Before too long Jamie went outside hoping to see what actually made the boom.

“You’re insane.” He said. His voice and his mind cracked a little. The traffic outside his townhouse did seem busy for the time of day, but nothing else struck him out of the ordinary and he couldn’t remember the last time he was home this early in the day.

He looked at his wristwatch; almost 4 P.M., it wouldn’t be much longer.

“I’m glad you came outside.” A woman said.  Jamie turned to see a rather plump woman somewhere in her thirties or forties who’d had a career smoking. She was standing just a few feet from his patch of grass. She could’ve been his neighbor for all he knew, he’d never paid much attention.

“If you would follow me, Mr. Darren.” Her voice had the same tone, the same pronunciations that he’s heard from the man who forced him to sign some kind of a contract.  He’d either gone off the deep end for the last time or this was for real. He decided he’d rather be insane than let people at work think he just simply pissed himself. He stood up and joined her.

“A little quicker, we have to be out of view.”

“Out of view of what?”

“This is where people think you died,” she said. “You have been approved for hiring.”

They were down another block when he heard the loud boom.

It was four o’clock. His wristwatch told him so.

The boom had come from an explosion. He could feel the force of it this time and his teeth remembered how they’d been shook before. Jamie twisted around and looked down the street. He could hear the roaring flames and watched as a few of his neighbors burst out of their homes.

“It’s not the most pleasant mark to leave on the world, but you kind of set yourself up for the crazy out by pissing your pants and losing your job and all,” she produced a smoker’s smile, the one that normal people use when they’re wincing.

Jamie was in awe; everything he had ever owned was suddenly gone. He started to search his mind for the things he would miss the most.

“I was always going to join, wasn’t I? This is my destiny?”

She gave a snort. It threw Jamie off guard. He just stared at her until she turned and stopped walking.

“Once you slip far enough into the future and then comeback it all seems like destiny. But what if I told you if you hadn’t joined that would’ve still happened?” She pointed forward and started to walk again towards a black sedan, best in its class. “It’s time for you to help make a difference in the world. In her hand was a set of keys. She held them out until Jamie realized he should take them. “You drive,” she said with much disdain.

Jamie snatched the keys and looked them over in his hand. “Where are we going?”

“To the future where the Earth is still spinning, Mr. Darren, and where there are no red lights.”

THE END.

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July 16, 2002

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When the air is this thick, this early in the morning, it is going to be another hot and humid day—the kind that takes hold and doesn’t let go. Where iced tea and air conditioning serve only as a brief knife through then uncomfortable.  Joggers flock to the streets and then cross the footbridge to Belle Isle, a haven in the middle of the James River right in Downtown Richmond. There is the nice cool air that splashed off the rapids overlooked by Hollywood Cemetery on the opposite side of the river.  It was the kind of scene you would want to gaze upon, if eternity meant haunting the grounds where your body was buried.

But this early morning scene was not one that welcomed serenity. Police, dogs and volunteers fanned out searching. The commotion was enough to have drawn the local news channels that were excited to be reporting something other than traffic jams.  More police were required to keep the reporters out of the scene than were heading up the search.

One jogger hadn’t noticed anything yet. His head bobbed to some heart-matching beat on his mp3 player, oblivious that the world housed people other than himself. That was until he reached Belle Isle and found his footing was going to lead him straight into the back of a news reporter trying to catch the cemetery in the background of her shot.

The jogger veered right and was confronted by two out stretched hands belonging to the navy clad Richmond police officer who didn’t want him going any further.

“What’s going on?” the jogger asked as he bounced in place, checking his pulse as he looked over a police officer’s shoulder.

The police officer gave him a strong look before answering, “Some children went missing.”

The jogger gasped. “Kidnapped?”

The police officer examined the jogger. He didn’t seem to appreciate the fluorescent and tight clothing, or the continued jogging in place.

“I’d hope not, wouldn’t you?” The officer said, “You might want to find another route this morning.”

The jogger nodded, and the officer turned his back and made way towards the reporter before the jogger could spit out his false intentions of making every effort to help.

A pack of dogs rushed passed him.

“They’ve got it,” The handler barked into a walkie-talkie.  Like a tornado sweeping up everything around it, the scene took off down the path encircling the Isle. The jogger sprinted to keep up, passing the rapids and the flooded quarry, all the way to a small picnic shelter on the western end.

The dogs had found the scent and everyone watched as they dipped off the path onto the rocks at the top of where the rapids began.  There along the river sat a boy staring into the river, taking no notice of the swarm that surrounded him.

“Son? Son!”  A father yelled almost tripping as he pushed through the crowd. He was so eager he let go his wife’s hand and sprinted down to the rocks. All the horror he had imagined could be forgotten—his son was alive. The boy heard his father and turned. He looked back, his face white, eyes bloodshot with exhaustion and fear.

The jogger stopped jogging.

He watched the horror of the father’s imagination begin again. Something terrible had happened.

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July 12, 2002

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“You can’t be further off from the truth, Dave,” Eric said. He grabbed Dave’s shoulder as he tried to walk away.

Dave threw his friend’s hand off his shoulder like a sailor curses, “Oh I can’t be?”

“No, really you can’t and you want to know why?”             

“Enlighten me,” Dave said with all of an eleven-year-old’s pride             

“Ok, I say we go on the island, and I say you’re a chicken. A girl chicken.”

“All right, first of all I’m not a chicken—”

“Girl chicken.” Eric reminded him.

Dave paid him no attention; “—I just know where not to stick my head at night. You know how many bodies show up here?” His voice popped,  “And they don’t even make too big of a deal about it because it’s so regular. Cops wake up, grab doughnuts, load their guns, swing by Belle Isle and pick up a dead body.”

“Exactly, and you know why they find bodies here?” Eric asked.             

Dave shrugged only to hear Eric’s reasoning.             

“Because they’re not killed here. This is where you dump bodies.”

“Well I’m not a chicken, so stop calling me one,” Dave said.

Eric shook his head. “This is Belle Isle, it’s where people take their families and people come to make out and stuff. You’re being a chicken. Nothing scary about it at all.”

Eric sauntered down the bridge and then surprisingly spun around.             

“Aren’t you coming?” he demanded with expanded wings and upturned palms.

Eric was a year younger and head shorter than Dave. Which in eleven-year-old logic meant Dave was supposed to be tougher and braver. Dave would’ve produced a sigh before he tagged along if he had learned that a sigh was an auditory acceptance of things he cannot change.  After all he’d already snuck out of his bedroom, trespassed on railroad tracks for a long mile and ended up hopping the gate closing off the footbridge to Belle Isle. The sign has said something about only being open from dawn to dusk, which Dave confused enough on a regular basis that he wasn’t really sure it said not to go.

He just knew the stories.

Belle Isle was a place his parents had already forbade him from visiting without them. Last summer, he and Eric had made a daytime visit to try and catch fish barehanded. They had, a large stinking dead catfish had washed up on the rocks. They brought it home like proud fishermen, but soon learned you should never eat any of the fish that come out of the James River, not in Richmond. And to make matters worse his parents declared Belle Isle and the river off limits, like Dave was dumb enough to get drowned or something. He couldn’t stand it, when would they learn he wasn’t a baby anymore?

Dave sprinted to catch up to Eric, his father’s binoculars bounced against his chest. He wasn’t supposed to have those either. He had been told countless times. They were kept in the top drawer of his father’s dresser.

“I’d load my gun before I got doughnuts.” Eric said.

“Why, you’re just getting doughnuts?”

“Exactly, so that’s when the bad dudes would think, let’s jump him, idiot hasn’t loaded his gun yet.”

“No one is that dumb,” was what Dave had started to say but Eric shushed him. They had reached the Isle. Above them cars still whizzed by on the bridge, up above them an orange glow still existed, but below and in front of them it was only the darkness. Blackness formed like a wall at the start of the paths that disappeared into the woods and looped around Belle Isle.

Dave and Eric dangled off the walk bridge rather than take it the rest of the way down. The drop was a good one and Dave felt it in his stomach as they hit. It took him a minute to recover. As he regained his breathe he thought that it would’ve been quicker to walk down. But that wouldn’t have been cool.

They ran towards the absolute darkness. The trail went left and right around the big hill at the center of Belle Isle. To the right it was a black hole. To the left it would become a black hole in a hundred yards or so. Tonight, though, they were headed straight up the hill.

To the top.

Eric kicked dust back at Dave as they both scrambled up the hill. It the hill had been muddy they never would’ve been able to crawl up. It was so steep most of the way they were in a vertical crawl.

At the top they looked out on to the tops of buildings, the bridge still noisy with traffic shooting north and south in and out of the city. Easily recognizable in the skyline was the Federal Reserve Building overlooking the river. It was why they were there.

They were going to fight crime.

Eric practically broke the strap off Dave’s neck as he yanked at the binoculars.

“Let me see ‘em.” He hissed at a whisper. The branches in the woods around them laughed. “It’s nothing, wuss.” Eric said, still trying to get a hold of the binoculars. Dave thought otherwise. He removed the strap and stared into the woods around them. It was the same feeling he had when he would open the door after school, his parents still at work, the strange air like the breath of someone hiding in the house, traveling all the way down the stairs to greet him at the front door. He would have to search each room until he was satisfied he was home alone. There was never anyone there. He tried to convince himself of the same thing here on Belle Isle. There is no one here. But the darkness surrounding him was vast. There could be anyone or anything in the woods behind them.

“From here we can see everything. Like Batman, I’ll check out the Federal Reserve Building first, if any terrorists are going to strike, they’re going to take out the Federal Building or our school, but I don’t care if they take out our school, it doesn’t even have a pool. No, if they go after the money they’re planning something bigger.”

“Like what?” Dave asked.

“Like another 9/11, probably bigger this time.” Eric was dead serious, and it scared Dave. Planes scared him now. Every time he looked up and saw them. A few blinking lights in the night sky headed east to the Richmond airport.  He couldn’t trust them to land there. Anyone of them could turn around and dive straight for him or his house. He watched as one passed overhead.

Anyone of them he thought again.

“No movement.” Eric reported. “ But it only just got dark, we might have to wait all night.”

Dave knew better, he had to be home by 10 P.M. His parents checked on him every night before they went to sleep.  Said things like sleep tight.  They didn’t know he was practically a grown up. He wasn’t scared of monsters under the bed or in the closet. He wasn’t going to scared of anything anymore, except of course getting caught out when his parents thought he was at home sleeping.

“You know they used to keep the prisoners here during the Civil War. Buried them everywhere, heard that’s why more bodies end up here, they are supposed to be dumped here, all those we’re better without. Should turn it back into a prison, like Alcatraz.” Eric said. He looked at his friend, “Might even be a couple of ghosts out, you chicken.”

“Don’t call me that!” Dave looked at him like it was the last straw.

Eric shrugged it off turned back towards the city lights.

“In the blackest moment of night they strike. But they won’t expect us to be waiting for them this time. They think they have it all figured out.” He pulled the binoculars away and looked at Dave. “You can’t be scared of the dark. I’ll leave you out here if you get all girlie on me, I swear to God.”

“I’m not scared. Besides, you shouldn’t swear to God.”

“You know I hate to break it to you, Davie, but their ain’t no God, no Santa Claus, and No Batman.”

“Of course there’s no Batman. I knew that.”

“Superman?”

“Yeah I know he’s fake too.”

“Just making sure, some times you’re such a kid. Like I’m babysitting you.” Eric said before diving back into the binoculars. Then his mouth gaped, “Oh wow.”

“What? What do you see?”

“I think it’s a fire. Lots of smoke.”

“Let me see.”

“It’s rising up, over that way, just over the city I think it’s in Church Hill. Must be a meth lab going up in smoke. Nice, another criminal finds their own end, those idiots might put us out of a job.” He sounded disappointed as if all he ever wanted to do was arrest some one.

Again Dave reached for the binoculars, “Let me see!”

“This is crazy it looks like a giant bat.”

“Very funny, Eric, they’re my Dad’s so let me see. I brought them.”

Eric slung them into Dave’s chest. It hurt. “ Don’t break them, then.”

Dave drew the binoculars up to his eyes. They shook in his hands, they were so much heavier than he expected. He searched the night sky, passed the blurring lights.

“Where? I don’t see anything. You were just messing. I’m not out here to pretend, Eric.”

Eric yanked him in the right direction. “See it now, moron?”

There it was.

Dave couldn’t take his eyes of it.

It was a dark shadow, creeping up over the city. It was like the arched back of a black cat ready to pounce, as if it clutched its prey beneath it’s paw and stood there wondering when it was going to stop twisting, fighting, trying not to be eaten.  But Dave could tell it wasn’t smoke from a fire, it was blacker than the darkness around them. It seemed to have its own place in the night sky, same as the Federal building it looked formed and sturdy, only it moved ever so noticeably. Like it was breathing. And in the darkness was that feeling again, that feeling realized, the stranger in the house, the person lurking in the woods, he could feel that person in the black form he looked out at.  His mouth fell wide. “It’s looking at me.”

“What?” Eric asked. “You’ve been doing drugs or something?”

Dave flung the binoculars to the ground like they burned him. He was on the verge of tears when he glared at Eric with anger. “You’re messing with me! Trying to scare me!”