Brian Freeman - The Night Bird

The officer glanced at Jess, who nodded. He holstered his weapon and retreated from the room.

Frost took a step toward Lucy, but Frankie lifted a hand to stop him. She shook her head, but she kept her eyes on Lucy. “Don’t do it, Frost,” she called. “Anything could set her off.”

“Lucy,” Frost called, trying to cast his voice above the pounding music. “Lucy, it’s Frost.”

“She can’t hear you,” Frankie said.

He didn’t care. He needed to reach her. The guns were still trained on her heart. “Lucy, come on, let’s get out of here. Shack wants to see you. You can stay at my place tonight. We can watch the city lights through the window. We can just sit there. You and me. Talking. What do you think?”

Somewhere inside her head, he knew that she had to hear him, but nothing he said reached her.

“Lucy,” he pleaded again.

He thought he saw a glimmer of hesitation in her face, but then the Night Bird’s voice interrupted from the speakers. The awful, singsong cadence rose over the music. It was too late. He watched Lucy’s mind breaking into glass pieces.

“Can you fly? Can you fly? Will you die? Will you die?”

“Stop it,” Frost hissed under his breath. “Stop it, stop it, stop it.”

“It’s up to you, you know what to do.”

High on the imaginary bridge, Lucy shook her head back and forth, over and over. “No, don’t make me. Please don’t make me.”

“It’s up to you, you know what to do.”

“Oh no. Oh no, no, no, no, no, no.”

“You know what to do. You know what to do.”

“I can’t. I can’t. No, please... please...”

“The knife is the key... set yourself free. The knife is the key...”

“Put it down,” Jess called again, her low voice a warning. She knew they were running out of time. “Put the knife down right now, Ms. Hagen. Nobody wants to hurt you.”

“Luuuucy... the knife is the key, set yourself free.”

Then everything happened at once.

Lucy screamed like a war cry. She pushed off her feet and charged at Frankie. Lucy was on her before the police could take action, and with the two women locked in a knot, no one could shoot. Lucy stabbed with the knife; Frankie held her arm back. They twisted, circled, and stumbled, battling hand to hand. Frankie was taller and stronger, but Lucy had a fever of adrenaline.

Frost ran. He needed to get to them now, while there was no clean shot. It wasn’t far, not far at all; he could cross the distance in five seconds, but he didn’t have time.

Five seconds was too long.

Lucy charged into Frankie’s body, and Frankie lost her balance and tumbled backward. Frankie had nothing to break her fall, and her head cracked against the stone floor. Lucy leaped.

Three seconds, two seconds, it was still too long.

Frankie couldn’t fight back, couldn’t lift her splayed arms. All she could do was stare helplessly at the girl kneeling over her. Lucy clasped both hands around the black handle and hoisted the knife high over her head. Frankie’s chest was below her, skin and bone and heart. Defenseless.

One second was all Lucy needed to swing the knife downward and bury it in Frankie’s body, but one second was too long. One second was all Frost needed to reach Lucy and pull her away, but one second was too long.

Lucy was still there in that frozen moment, knife over her head, poised to strike.

In that second, the music went off. The screens went blank. The room fell silent. The mountains, the glacier, and the bridge disappeared. Lucy blinked, as if waking up from a dream.

Jess fired.

The first bullet struck Lucy in the muscles of her right shoulder. Her hand froze; the knife slipped out of her fingers and clattered to the floor. A second officer fired in the same instant. His bullet hit Lucy in the side, under her rib cage, penetrating kidney and bowel and exiting out her back and slamming into the wall.

The third officer fired and missed her head by less than an inch, but the damage was done.

She was on her knees when Frost reached her. Her eyes blinked in confusion. He eased her onto her back, and he took off his jacket and propped it under her head. He found the wound in her side and kept pressure on it to stanch the bleeding.

Lucy stared at him. “Frost?”

“I’m right here, Lucy.”

“Did you get me off the bridge?”

“Yeah,” he told her, giving her a smile he didn’t feel. “Yeah, you’re safe now. Nothing to worry about. No bridges.”

“I can’t move,” she murmured. “It happens like that sometimes. The fear overwhelms me, and I get paralyzed. Don’t worry, though, it always goes away. I’ll be fine.”

“You’ll be fine,” Frost said.

She closed her eyes. Time passed slowly as he waited for the paramedics, and all he could do was stare at her face and watch her steady breathing. Warm blood pushed between his fingers. He didn’t know how many minutes had gone by when he felt a hand graze his shoulder. It was Frankie.

“Let me take over, Frost,” she told him. “I’m a doctor, remember?”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I want to help.”

He let her trade places with him. He got up from the floor, but he didn’t go far. He stood with his arms folded tightly across his chest. The pain at the base of his neck had become needles pressing everywhere into his skull. As he waited, Jess came up next to him, close enough that her shoulder brushed his arm. They stood silently for a few seconds.

“You know I didn’t have a choice,” she said.

Frost didn’t answer. She was right, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it. Not yet. He didn’t blame her. If anything, he blamed himself. History was full of bad moments that should have gone differently.

“None of this is your fault, either,” Jess told him.

He still said nothing. He didn’t want her to think he was being deliberately cold, but he had nothing to give. Jess got the message, and she left him alone. He watched Frankie, who looked up from Lucy and gave him a reassuring smile. It was a smile without the distance he usually felt from her.

“She’ll make it,” Frankie told him. “These wounds aren’t fatal.”

Not the bullet wounds, Frost thought. He didn’t know about the wounds inside. It was cruel enough to torture a person’s body, but it was even worse to torture someone’s mind. There was no surgery for that. No gauze pads to press against the blood, no stitches. He began to understand the temptation of manipulating someone’s memory to make the past go away. He wondered if, given the choice, Lucy would want to forget everything. Erase the last week of her life that began on the bridge with Brynn. Forget the Night Bird.

Forget Frost, too.

Then he stared at the stark white walls and thought, This is what a blank slate looks like. This is the emptiness that’s left when your memory is gone. It didn’t seem any better than the alternative.

Finally, finally, he heard sirens drawing closer.

The police officer who drove Frankie home loved to chat. She wasn’t in a mood to talk, but that didn’t bother him.

His name was Harmon Krug. He was one of the largest human beings that Frankie had ever met, with a chest so deep that he had trouble turning the steering wheel. He was bald, with no neck and hands that resembled baseball gloves. He slouched in his seat to avoid grazing the roof of the car with his head.

“So you’re a shrink, huh?” Harmon asked, in a voice that had its own amplifier. “Messing around in people’s heads, that’s gotta be weird. Most of the people I meet, I don’t think you’d want to take a good look under the hood, know what I mean?”