Rob Thurman - All Seeing Eye

“Painless.” I choked out a laugh, stark and humorless. Rolling onto my back, I folded my arms tightly across my chest. It was an instinctive gesture I thought I’d outgrown. Don’t touch. It was from the early Cane Lake days when I’d had less control over my so-called gift. I closed my eyes as Charlie’s last moments squeezed my brain in a fistlike vise. “Wasn’t painless.” In fact, it was as far from painless as you could possibly get. The seizure I’d once suffered at the hospital had been caused by touching the metal railing of the gurney I had been lying on. I’d picked up the death of a man who’d been shot numerous times in the torso with a semiautomatic. Acid had boiled free from a perforated stomach to burn everything in its path. Tattered lungs had filled with suffocating blood. Bones had been shattered, tearing the flesh around them with calcium shrapnel. He’d bled and cried for his mother and screamed and screamed and screamed.

Apparently, so had I. Charlie’s death had been right up there with that. I’d touched that curved piece of plastic and felt it all. Normally, an object has to be with someone a long time to build up their personal signature, to contain a summary of their life. But there are exceptions. A violent death is the one that tops the list. I didn’t know exactly how Charlie had died, because he himself hadn’t known, but I felt it… every god-awful, agonizing second.

“What are you saying?” Hector’s voice was hoarse, but his hand retained firm pressure on my forehead.

Despite his efforts, I still could feel the blood trickling back into my hair. He had known but couldn’t resist one last test. Never mind if he and the others genuinely, if stupidly, had assumed that Charlie had gone easily into that good night. Hector had played his game without thinking that he hadn’t known, couldn’t know what Charlie had actually felt, and I was the one who’d gotten burned.

He also didn’t know the worst. Charlie hadn’t known exactly how it had been done, but he’d known what had been done.

He’d been murdered.

“Nothing. I’m not saying a damn thing.”

And I didn’t. From that moment on, I didn’t say another word. Charlie had known that someone had killed him, but he didn’t know who, and then he didn’t know anything but pain. That meant I didn’t know, either, and I wasn’t about to let a murderer catch on and put me next on his list. I’d say things had gone from sugar to shit in no time, but there hadn’t been any sugar to begin with. From the frying pan into the fire, maybe. Charlie, damn it, what the hell did you get your old roommate into?

Meleah Guerrera showed up with a couple of medical technicians, and I was put into a cervical collar, strapped to a backboard, and lifted to be whisked off to medical. The gurney, liberally covered with fresh sheets that no one had died on, bounced out of the building and over mud that had dried to uncomfortable peaks and gullies. The sky was that unlikely Georgia summer blue, scorched to a pale denim by the blazing sun, and I watched it with unblinking eyes until we entered the comparative cool gloom of the building I’d left only ten minutes before. Allgood and Thackery followed, engaged in a low-voiced, heated exchange. If I’d tried, I might have made out what they were saying. I didn’t try. I had enough to think about.

Charlie was the kind of person who, if given the opportunity, would have changed the world. Unfortunately, his opportunity ran out too soon, but he had been well on his way. He had big plans, great plans, and those plans had killed him. But if they hadn’t, what he would’ve accomplished… Charlie always was a dreamer. Eminently practical, blazingly intelligent, but he’d never been content to keep his eyes fixed on the ground. Charlie wanted to fly-in ways man had yet to accomplish. He’d apparently had a bigger budget than Icarus, though he’d ended up the same damn way… even if someone had helped him out with a big shove.

I’d missed him before. Yeah, I’d deny it to anyone, including myself, but I had. And now… I knew him. Knew every moment of Charlie’s life as if I’d lived it with him, side by side. His twin, his constant shadow. I saw myself through his eyes-sullen, smart-assed, and so transparently vulnerable it made a young, bighearted Charlie ache. I saw Hector as a child-responsible, straitlaced, and with braces so bright they could strike you blind. I celebrated every birthday and holiday. I was there when Charlie proposed to Meleah and she gently, wisely turned him down. When he got drunk with his brother over it, I tasted the beer on my tongue. And when he finally admitted to himself with a rueful laugh that it was for the best, that he was already married to his work, I felt his relief and acceptance. I thought I’d missed Charlie before, now and again. God, I hadn’t had a clue.

I tried to push it aside to focus on the fact that not once did he have an enemy that he knew of. Everyone liked Charlie.

So who had killed him?

“Jackson, I need you to answer my questions. I need to evaluate you.”

I blinked and opened my eyes. I hadn’t realized that I’d closed them, lost in Charlie’s memories. Meleah was leaning over me, concern in her now wholly familiar gray eyes. Around her neck on a chain hung a ring. Silver, it was inscribed with a simple flowing pattern. I lifted a hand to capture it, the metal bright against the black silk. “You told Charlie you lost it.”

Her mouth opened and closed before she took the ring carefully from my hand. “I did. I found it a month after he died. It was in my car under the seat.”

“Smells like lemons.” I closed my eyes again. Her car had smelled like lemons every time Charlie rode in it. And although he hadn’t much liked lemony things-hated lemon meringue pie, found lemonade too tart-he’d liked the smell. Liked it because it was a Meleah smell. I found myself liking it for the same reason, which wasn’t good. I needed a little distance in time and space from all the “Charlie” whirling around in me. His death/murder had been enough to sear the details of his life into me with more force than usual. It had happened before, and there was only one cure for it.

“I need to sleep.” I crossed my arms across my chest and tucked my hands protectively into my armpits. “Now.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Eye, but you’ve had a seizure, struck your head. We need to do X-rays and an EEG at the very least.” She said more, but I missed it. I didn’t need permission to sleep; I was only giving fair warning. I couldn’t have stayed awake if I’d wanted to. The only way to deal with such an abrupt and bruising onslaught of knowledge was to shut down temporarily. I’d learned that the hard way over the years. My body was calling the shots here, not me. I closed my eyes, and less than a second later, I was gone. Gone but not alone.

Charlie was with me.

When I woke up, it was to blue skies, green trees, and mellow sunlight drifting through a window. I blinked blurry eyes, and the warm image resolved itself into a mural painted on the wall. What a ripoff. Of course, classified was classified, but on the other hand, we wouldn’t want bed-bound patients to go stark raving mad, either. So let’s paint a window on the wall with a happy little outdoors scene. That’s as good, right?

Yeah, I was all sorts of cheered. I shifted my gaze from a fat blue butterfly and a positively obese puff-chested robin to look at the room around me. I was still in the infirmary. A curtain pulled around my bed gave me the illusion of privacy without the actual benefits. There was the pull and tug of sticky pads and wires on my bare chest; apparently, I was hooked up to a heart monitor. In case I tried checking out of life early before they’d wrung me dry of whatever made me useful to them, the doc could pop in with a shot of adrenaline to get the old pump going. How’d that old Eagles song go? “ You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave”? Hell, I couldn’t do either.