The Fourth Whore, page 11
The orthopedic doctor was also a man of few words. He seemed pleased to find her awake but only because she could begin rehabilitation, which he assured her would only take a few months. The pins in her left leg, however, would come out soon. He approved a wheelchair ride to see Gloria if her primary doctor agreed.
“Can you call Dr. Patel and ask him?” she begged the middle-aged, heavy-set nurse when it was just the two of them left in her room.
“Dr. Patel is not in charge of your case. In fact, I’m not sure you’ll be seeing him again, honey,” she said, adjusting Kenzi’s blankets. “We’ve been told to page Dr. Childs directly.”
“Why?” Kenzi whined. “I don’t even know that other guy. Dr. Patel was the only one who was nice to me.”
This was no good. All these doctors were announcing what she could and couldn’t do, and what she had to do. None asked her what she wanted or how she felt. Only Dr. Patel seemed to care. She wished she knew his first name. Right now, he was her only friend in the world.
“He’s just a resident. They come and go. Best not to get too attached. I’ll give the doctor a call but honey, I gotta tell you—there are a couple of detectives breathing down our necks to get at you. If Dr. Childs approves a visit to your friend’s room, you better believe they’ll be in here asking you all sorts of questions.” She leaned over to Kenzi conspiratorially. “You know the answers yet?”
Kenzi shook her head. How was she going to get out of this? She wanted Dr. Patel. He could help her.
“Then just rest for now. I’ll wake you up when your clear tray comes. We’ll try some broth and Jell-O. It’ll be lime if you’re lucky.” She winked and laid the large remote beside her. The thing was the size of a bicycle seat and had buttons to control the bed, call the nurse and turn on the TV.
Kenzi lay in the twilight listening to the cacophony of monitors from the rooms surrounding her own. She wondered which one Gloria’s was. Her mind filled with all the possible stories she could tell the cops. It wasn’t like she could sleep. She’d slept so much lately, she wasn’t tired. What she needed to do was come up with a plan. Gloria would have to stay strong and hang in there until Kenzi could see her. She wanted to, of course, but not until she was also ready to answer some tough questions. What about Patel? Would she see him again? She hadn’t had a friend like that since she was a kid. The Scribble Man had made her feel safe just like Dr. Patel did now. She needed to tell him she was sorry that he got in trouble for giving her ice chips. She’d tell him that Dr. Altrey agreed with him so he’d know he was not “just” a resident. He was a good doctor.
She hit the on button for the TV and let the noise fill the background space between the monitors and the telephone calls to the desk.
“…bombing that killed twenty-seven people, seven of which were young children. All were members of the Carmen Heights Baptist Church of Carmen Heights, Massachusetts. The victims were protesting across the street from the Women’s Health Clinic. The protests were progressing peacefully when the coolers brought by the church members themselves blew up in succession. Police are still investigating when and how the explosive devices were placed.
“Violence is nothing new to the Women’s Health Clinic. They’ve been the victims of shootings and arsons in their short five years of business. Protestors are required to remain fifty feet from the business as a result. A spokesperson from WHC stated she believes the bombing may have been perpetrated by another pro-life group in order to cast suspicion upon the clinic themselves. This, of course, is raising a lot of chatter among both pro-life and pro-choice groups.
“This bombing comes on the cusp of the pro-life movement’s biggest annual event: The Right to Life Rally on Washington D.C. When asked how the movement plans to handle this tragedy, Kelly Ray Tarleton, chair of the rally, said they plan to use the tragedy as an example of the pro-choice movement’s disregard for life.”
The picture shifted from the pretty blonde with sparkling white teeth to a sour-looking, dowdy woman with a brown bob. She wore a big button that stated ALL LIVES MATTER with a curled-up fetus crushed beneath the weight of the statement. “It will be a good reminder of what we’re fighting for. I think we’ll have record numbers this year. This kind of disrespect for the sanctity of human life must be stopped…no matter the cost,” she stated.
Kenzi wrinkled her nose in disgust. “She ought to come hang out in my neighborhood so she can see how all those babies they want to save have to live.”
The station seemed to agree with Kenzi, as there was no further discussion about the bombing. The ever-optimistic blonde returned to the screen. “In local news, a family is found mysteriously murdered in their home. While the coroner determined the time of death to be similar, one body was strangely dried and mummified.” The picture cut to paramedics wheeling tarp covered stretchers out of a lovely two-story home. The reporter held a microphone up to Clark Rennet, county coroner.
“It appears that the female body had just given birth quite traumatically. The newborn’s umbilical cord was still attached to the placenta. The adult male, though, appears to have been sort of wrung out or squeezed to death in some odd way. I’ve never seen anything like it in my twenty-five years as coroner.”
Kenzi’s mind presented her with a slideshow: the image of a snake wrapped around a body, squeezing. A woman, dark, naked sucking the life away. Another body out there just like that. No wonder the cops were itching to talk to her. This was bad. Very bad.
“What is this world coming to?” a voice asked and chuckled.
Kenzi jumped.
The Mediterranean beauty no one acknowledged as her nurse was back for another night shift. How had Kenzi not noticed before that the she was pregnant?
“What? I’m sorry, I wasn’t paying attention.”
“Oh nothing,” the nurse breezed.
The room darkened when she entered, as if her presence required all the energy in the small space—like a black hole, she’d pulled it into her.
“Sorry, I forgot your name,” Kenzi said, sure that the woman had never offered it.
“Lily is fine for now.”
The nurse wandered the room, inspecting it, picking items up, and dropping them again. She stopped in front of the monitor with the green blips indicating Kenzi’s heart-beat and watched it dreamily.
Lily. Kenzi committed it to memory. She planned to confront the other night nurse who insisted Lily didn’t even exist. Because if Jane was to be believed, this woman didn’t belong here at all. And she might be right. After all, Lily certainly didn’t act much like a nurse. But if not, what was she doing here? Goosebumps prickled her arms as she considered Jane’s words about the cops outside. Maybe the woman was working undercover.
Kenzi wasn’t about to let on that she was suspicious.
“Are you my nurse tonight?”
The woman approached the bed, leaned over, and tucked the blankets around Kenzi in a maternal gesture. Her ample breasts threatened to spill over the dam of her collared, old fashioned nurse’s uniform. Sandwiched between her breasts and struggling to free itself was the tip of a familiar, hairless good luck charm. It hung from a black leather thong. Kenzi reached out for it without thinking, then snatched her hand back. What the hell was Lily doing with Kenzi’s rabbit’s foot? Her skin itched for the first time since awakening; she needed to cut.
“What makes you ask such a silly question?” Lily stood back up, her belly pushing tightly against the bleached white cotton top. “I’m taking care of you, aren’t I?”
Kenzi’s nails bit into her palms, scratching at the psychosomatic itch. She didn’t care about the cops anymore, her addiction to cut took over and she wanted, no, she needed the claws of her proverbial safety blanket.
“The other nurse, Jane, said you weren’t. She said you shouldn’t even be here.”
“Perhaps, she is jealous because I can offer you things she cannot. I can make you better.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I can fix all this,” she swept her arm over Kenzi’s body. Heat surged through her veins rolling from her ruined belly to her broken leg. “But I don’t do anything for free, Kenzi Brooks. I expect you to help me too.”
Pain meds. It had to be all the pain meds. She was hallucinating or dreaming. Yes, dreaming again. Likely. All she needed to do was quiet her mind and let the metronomic sounds of her own heartbeat lull her back to sleep.
“I just want to see my friend Gloria, I want to make sure she’s OK without having to deal with the fucking cops,” she murmured.
“Why is this woman so important to you?” the nurse who probably wasn’t a nurse demanded.
Lily’s jade eyes bore into Kenzi’s bicolored ones. It was as if the woman already knew the answers, but Kenzi found her mouth opening and giving Lily whatever she wanted.
“My mom, she always had some issues with depression. I mean, even when I was little, she would spend days locked in her room. My brother took care of me, made us cereal and cheese sandwiches. We called them her bad days. My dad, he was—I guess he still is probably—a trucker, so he was gone a lot. I mean he would be home on weekends and stuff, but he liked to watch TV, so we had to stay out of his hair.”
Lily was back to canvasing the room, as if she had heard all this before. Kenzi continued but kept the woman in her peripheral vision.
“When I was seven, my brother and I were on our way to a store, and he got hit by a car and killed.”
“And you? You were not injured?” Lily interrupted.
“Oh, well, no. I, I thought I saw something and I stopped on the curb.”
“What did you see? What stopped you?” Lily rushed back to her side—intensity to her stare, hands resting on Kenzi’s scarred arm.
“I had this, oh, I guess he was an imaginary friend, it was the first time I saw him, it was like an hallucination or something, and it made me stop. He was so different…I don’t know, it was fate I guess.”
“Fate,” Lily echoed. “I need you to tell me exactly what he looked like. What happened after your brother got hit.”
Kenzi sighed. They had taken a tangent in the conversation. Lily was no longer interested in Kenzi’s love for her friend Gloria or how the woman had become a surrogate mother. The Scribble Man was an even more uncomfortable topic than her devotion to her stand-in mom. It had been a long time since she’d tried to discuss him with anyone. Lily was the first person to take it seriously. Compelled by perhaps that alone, Kenzi described the scars and the black hooded vest. The crisscrossed belt thing that held the hour-glass where he’d put Robbie’s silvery ghost. Lily sat down on the bed beside her as Kenzi tried to recall all the details of the childhood friend she’d left behind years ago.
“After all that, my dad sort of faded out of our lives and it was just me and Marilyn—my mom. She did her best—well, there were times where she did—before she got mixed up in drugs. I used to act up at school, got in trouble all the time or whenever I tried to talk about The Scribble Man, I’d end up in the principal’s office waiting for my mom to come pick me up because no one wanted to deal with me. But see, that’s where Gloria came in. She was always there when Mom wasn’t. She would come get me when Mom didn’t care...or couldn’t.” Kenzi shrugged. It was that simple and that complicated.
Lily sat, listening. Kenzi’s tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. Where was that damn tray filled with all sorts of liquids the other nurse had promised? She reached for the cup of ice chips on the bed-side stand.
“Here, let me. You must be thirsty,” Lily said. She reached over Kenzi to grab it. The necklace popped free of her cleavage and the hairless foot with its bloodstained claws swung like a pendulum over Kenzi’s middle. It was her foot—no doubt about it—and this strange woman had it.
The ice chips sat on the spoon waiting for her to bite. She swallowed. Their angled edges softened as they slid into her stomach. The icy trail warmed and then faded entirely to became one with her body’s own temperature. The process slowed her pounding heart and tamped down the adrenaline surge that came with the realization that this woman wore Kenzi’s keychain around her neck. Instead of asking about it directly, Kenzi returned to her tale, adding details, and watching the woman intently.
“I know it seems like a petty thing to remember but I had this keychain that was super important to me. I found it the day Robbie died. I used to think that the Scribble Man gave it to me, but now that I know he was just imaginary, I suppose I picked it up from the wreckage. It was old and nasty.” No facial change in the woman on the bed.
“It was a rabbit’s foot. You know, like a lucky rabbit’s foot? Only most of the hair was gone, so it looked like just a scary mummified monster claw instead. I loved it for that, you know? It was freaky like me and it made me feel invincible. I carried it with me all the time, and it felt as if I could use it whenever I wanted to bring the Scribble Man to visit me—I suppose I could in my mind. Until I couldn’t, and then I started to use it to hurt myself.”
“Hurt yourself?” Lily asked as if she hadn’t seen the cuts on Kenzi’s arms.
“Yeah.” She held her arm out with the scar in a child’s scrawl of KENZI starting near her elbow and working down to her wrist. “I remember seeing Robbie’s name on the Scribble Man’s arm that day, so I guess I thought if I did the same with my own name, it would make him come to me. That started a life-long bad habit.”
“Well, finally, your tray came!” The other nurse, Jane, breezed in the room carrying a tray covered in a variety of fluid-filled vessels and interrupting Kenzi’s memories.
Lily didn’t move, never turned her head to acknowledge the woman and the nurse didn’t seem to notice her either. She sat the clear fluids on the bedside tray and moved the ice chips beside the other Styrofoam cups.
“See how you do with these. If you keep it down, we’ll try some soft foods for breakfast.”
“OK,” Kenzi said.
There was nothing else to say. The odd exchange that occurred as if Lily, who was smiling like the Mona Lisa, didn’t exist, had robbed her of any words she might say.
Before she could organize her confusion into a question, a siren-type wail rolled out of the space around them. Blue lights in the hallway began flashing and a voice called out over the speaker system.
CODE BLUE, ICU ROOM 402. CODE BLUE, ICU ROOM 402.
The nurse ran out of the room. Lily stood up, still smirking. “I’ll be going as well, but I will see you again soon.”
She walked out the door and disappeared into the mass chaos ensuing near the nurse’s station.
Chapter 19: Book of Kenzi 7
The burn of a branding iron woke Sariel from his slumber in the corner of Gloria’s room. Enoch and he had been careful to spend Kenzi’s waking hours here watching over the woman until he decided the best way to re-enter Kenzi’s life. An alarm rang wildly for only a short time before the room began to fill.
So many mortals, like ants whose pheromone trails had been disturbed, scuttled about haphazardly trying to alter the inevitable. Interested in the battle waging against him, Sariel wove between the chaotic dancers in blue scrubs as they worked their medicine on the fleshy shell of Gloria Paulson. The room was packed and yet more congregated outside the door near the desk that sat in the center of a semi-circular ward. He counted them—a way to occupy a mind filled with indecision and angst. One, two, three, f…Lilith. Lilith, he was absolutely sure, slipped out of the room a few doors down and floated unnoticed like a wolf among sheep.
Sariel stepped into the corridor but she was gone—vanished within a mass of flesh and bone. She’d been in with Kenzi, two doors down, there was no doubt. He stepped to Kenzi’s room in one movement, unencumbered by the physics of the mortal dimension.
A waif, thin and pale, stood wavering by her bed. She had the same frightened little bunny look in her eyes he’d seen the first day he met her. The electronic blip of her heartbeat kept an up-tempo rhythm.
“Kenzi,” he said softly.
If he’d had a heartbeat, he was certain in that moment its pace would have rivaled hers.
She looked him in the eyes, seeing him clearly as if he were as mortal as she.
“Kenzi, I—”
Kenzi screamed and stepped out with her braced leg as if to try to run, He rushed to her, put his arms around her and they tumbled.
z
“Where am I?” Kenzi asked the darkness.
For the moment, it was pure black—a complete absence of light. With it, Kenzi realized, came a complete absence of pain. Her other senses heightened. Damp chills nibbled at her. She hugged herself. The tube was gone, and she was standing, unencumbered by any medical equipment. If she weren’t so damn cold, she could think. Vegetal rot mingled with wet earth in her nostrils. Kenzi had never been in the graveyard during a rain storm but she imagined it would smell like this.
“This is my home, my prison. A punishment for disobedience,” a voice to her right echoed. It was deep and ethereal like the autotune all the rappers used. The echo gave a sense of vastness to the space they both occupied. The opposite of a shadow formed in her vision. A large male shape gradually focused like a polaroid picture. His pale skin almost glowed.
She opened her mouth to ask his name but screamed instead. Cold, clammy appendages tickled at her body—some gaining purchase on her loose hospital gown.
“Step toward me,” her companion said. “They can’t reach far.”
She inched toward the voice, careful to keep some distance between them as well.
