Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

“N,” Amy said.

“O,” Amy said.

“T.”

. .

“A,” Amy said.

“M”

“Y,” barely audible.

“What?” Jolene blurted. “WHAT?”

Static.

“Shhh, new word,” Broker said.

“F,” Amy said.

“A,” Amy said.

“U,” Amy said.

“L,” Amy said.

“T,” Amy said.

Each letter drove a stake into Allen’s chest.

More static. Garbled sounds.

“New word,” Broker said.

Hyperventilating now, Allen listened to the next word, fully expecting to hear his name. Instead he heard: “Nurse,” which didn’t make sense. Nor did the conversation that followed. But then it did make a kind of sense. They seemed to have reached an impasse. Hank was spent, asleep.

This was more information than Allen could process.

His chest churned from the tug-of-war, from the stomp of fear that shouted run away . But something else, too, a bright spur of anger.

Fight them and survive.

Think. They’re not that smart.

Run.

He did run, but just to move his car up to the road, where he tucked it out of sight on the shoulder. Heart pounding, he dashed into the pines, then came to a halt. He was making too much noise. He looked around, amazed at how ordinary things-trees and leaves and pine needles-had acquired hard, glowing edges; danger did that, etched this new world in sharp relief.

So be stealthy.

Quietly he stalked around the garage. It was suicidal, but he was compelled to face the thing that was coming to destroy him. All he had to do was get up on the deck, peek in the window.

The reflection of clouds in the patio door jiggled. The door opened. Allen ducked beneath the edge of the deck as he heard footsteps walk out onto the deck. A second later he smelled igniting tobacco and saw a nervous cloud of smoke jet above him. He snooped up and saw Jolene smoking a cigarette. Her face was etched, almost metal with resolve. She held a cell phone to her ear. She was pacing, agitated.

And then he heard the phone ring and the urgency in her. “Earl,” she asked firmly. “Can you drive?”

Allen carefully listened to the entire phone conversation. By the time Jolene finished he knew his life had changed and that his entire education and training had prepared him for this particular crisis. To know how to read the signs and act decisively.

He mounted the stairs and watched Jolene leave the studio. Broker and Amy were in the house. He didn’t know where. But, for the moment, Hank was unattended. It was time to take another chance.

He found himself in a totally new place that was also very familiar. Sometimes surgeons were called upon to make fast decisions about who lived and who died.

Triage.

Hank fluttered awake as Jolene walked past his bed and disappeared into her bedroom. He smelled an after-scent of tobacco and that made his throat ache. Then he felt a gust of cold air on his face. His lurching eyes caught motion in the windows. Leaves. Branches heaving. He tried to focus his eyes. Wasn’t going to happen, he was too tired.

Then, wait, a person; slipping in through the door.

Broker?

No, not Broker.

Hank recognized the blue wind shell the man was wearing.

Christ, it was Allen.

Silent and grim, Allen moved swiftly to the bed, pulled a pillow from under Hank’s head. No parting thoughts, hardly even eye contact. All business, Allen lowered the pillow, blocked out light and plugged Hank’s mouth and nose with clean cotton.

Death smelled like Tide.

. .

Then the pillow pressure released and Allen stuffed it back under Hank’s head, bounded to the patio door, and was gone. Hank panted, regaining his breath.

Footsteps.

Chased Allen away.

Amy and Broker.

Amy smiled, seeing Hank’s eyes flutter once and then close tight. “Okay, Hank, we’re going for a ride; we’ve got a real comfortable bed made up for you.”

Allen! Look out for Allen! He knows!

* * *

“He’s beat, look at his eyes,” Broker said.

“You just take a nap, Hank; you’re going to be fine,” Amy said.

As Hank sank deeper into a stupor of fatigue they eased him up, bent him in the proper places, and lowered him into the wheelchair he’d come home from the hospital in.

Allen was here! He tried to kill me!

Listen!

But he was too damn tired to even open his eyes.

Earl had just lost an argument with a nurse about trading his Percocet prescription up to morphine when his cell phone rang on the stand next to the bed. He just stared at it with fogged eyes because it could only be one person. So he let it ring. Fuck her.

Five hours out of the recovery room, his left cheek, chin, eye, and ear had turned deep black and blue. His neck was stiff. They said they were concerned about concussion. In the meantime, the staff kept popping in to view him: Earl Garf, the ostrich-kick novelty.

His left upper arm was now held together by a thirty-four-millimeter titanium rod. The surgeon had accessed the ball of the left humerus through an incision in the shoulder. Then he’d inserted the rod down the bone channel and, working under an X-ray machine to get his alignment, had joined the rod and broken bone in place with two screws. Then he sutured the gashes in Earl’s biceps, lightly casted the whole business, and folded it into a hanging traction sling.

The pain was nonspecific at this point, more like just everywhere. The fingers of his left hand peeked from the sling and were starting to resemble Oscar Meyer wieners, plump and brown-gray. But he could move them.

Because his neck was stiff, he had to rotate his whole upper body to turn his head. Percocet was not doing it. He needed morphine. He began to marshal his case to present to a doctor.

But then, after the phone stopped ringing his pager buzzed on the table. With difficulty, he swung his right arm across his chest and pressed the call button.

6666666.

The devil, the end of the world; the code he and Jolene used for a major emergency. Now what?

Again, with difficulty, he reached over to the table and manipulated his cell phone in his good hand. He punched Jolene’s wireless number.

She answered immediately except it wasn’t an answer, it was, “Earl, can you drive?”

“Hey, fuck you. I’m off the island, remember? I got a broken arm because of you. I may never bench-press again.”

“Listen, Earl, things just got serious,” Jolene said.

“Which part of ‘fuck you’ don’t you understand?”

“I mean serious, Earl; NoDak serious.”

More personal code. NoDak meant the convenience store in North Dakota. It meant life and death. “Okay. I’m listening,” he said.

“Good, because Hank’s talking.”

That brought him up sharp; the Percocet haze wavered and dimmed as a cold streak of sweat shot down the inside of his stitched broken arm. He tried to focus on the voice in the phone. “Hank is talking ?” he repeated, incredulous.

“He’s not word -talking with his mouth, he’s blink -talking with his eyes. The point is-he’s communicating. You may remember certain conversations we had in front of him about you taking Stovall into the woods and leaving him to die nailed to a fucking tree?”

Kicked by an ostrich and now this. Unbelievable. “So what’s he saying?”

“What happened was, this afternoon he tickled my hand with his finger. I didn’t call Allen or you because you guys laughed at me the other night. So I called Broker.”

“Sure, fine; makes perfect sense .” Earl was having trouble controlling his voice.