Paul Jones - Towards Yesterday

Before he could finish, the door exploded outward, and with a banshee scream, Adrianna Drake launched herself from her hiding place. Leaping around Portia’s guard, she clung to the killer’s face like a deranged chimpanzee. Portia let out a scream of pain as the diminutive professor of Physics sank her teeth deep into his nose, tearing away a chunk the size of her thumb. Blood splattered her face as she spat the lump of flesh over his shoulder, where it landed with a wet plop beside a stunned Simone.

Portia’s hand instinctively flashed toward his ruptured nose, forming a fist that smashed into the little girl’s face and sent her sprawling onto her back on the lab floor.

“You little—”he began, but stopped mid-sentence as his peripheral vision caught the movement of Rebecca’s now free hand flashing upwards, palm up, toward his knife hand. Her upturned hand caught the butt of the knife and forced it, point first, into Portia’s exposed throat.

The blade sank deep into the fleshy tissue, just above his Adam’s apple. He immediately fell sideways, his hands clasping at the hilt of the dagger and the remaining two inches of blade protruding from his neck, a look of stunned amazement in his eyes. Blood began to pour from the wound. Portia’s eyes widened with shock, his mouth worked spastically and a sound that could have been an expletive but instead turned into a wet Ughmpph rasped from between his lips as blood filled his mouth, spilling out in a thick red ribbon over his chin.

Rebecca rose uneasily to her feet.

“ Bish ,” her killer rasped, “ You lishle Bish .” His voice was now nothing more than a weak blood-soaked gurgle.

Rebecca stood over the prostrate form of Byron Portia for a moment. Then without a word she raised her knee to chest height and stomped her foot down on the protruding butt of the knife, driving the remaining few inches of blade deeper into his throat until it could go no further.

With a look of utter astonishment in his eyes, Byron Portia, until that moment the world’s most successful and luckiest serial killer, choked to death on his own blood in under a minute.

Rebecca continued to stare at the body of Byron Portia long after Simone had taken her hand in her own and led the shocked woman over to a chair. Adrenaline was still coursing through her body and Rebecca’s palms were wet and sticky in the older woman’s hands as Simone knelt in front of her, blocking the grisly image of Portia’s body from her sight.

Adrianna picked herself up from where she had fallen when the killer hit her. She fingered her face gingerly, feeling around for damage. Her upper lip was swollen and bloody and she spat a glob of blood onto the floor as she made her way over to the other two women.

“Bastard,” Adrianna whispered, staring at the corpse. “Hope you rot in Hell.” As she passed the body of Portia, she gave him a vicious kick to the head.

Rebecca knew Simone was talking to her. Jim’s ex-wife was kneeling in front of her and she could see the woman’s lips moving. There was a look of abject concern on her face, an odd counterpoint to the fear that still flitted across her eyes every few seconds as the woman glanced suspiciously over her shoulder at the dead man laying behind her. Simone’s voice seemed to fade into Rebecca’s frame of reference much as someone waking slowly from sleep becomes aware of the sounds in their bedroom: the ticking of a clock or the whir of an overhead fan, the rush of a car passing by on the street outside their window.

Her voice faded in and filled the silent void of terror that the death of this man had left. She could feel the softness of Simone’s hand as she gently stroked her hair, the woman’s voice calming as she reassured her. “—okay. It’s all okay now. He’s gone. He’s gone. He can’t hurt anyone now.”

Over Simone’s shoulder, Rebecca could see the clock up on the opposite wall. As she stared dumbly at it the display turned from -00.15 to -00.16.

Without another word, Rebecca began to weep.

On a cold and windy morning, they gathered between the gray headstones on the side of the hill, silently waiting for Mitchell Lorentz’s coffin to descend into the ground.

There were few tears from the small group of mourners collected around the open grave. They had already been shed in the two weeks since the attack on the laboratory. And, of course, it was hard to wonder about the fate of someone’s immortal soul when it was already proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the dead did not always necessarily remain dead.

Jim’s free hand absently wandered to the stitches lacing his scalp. A burr of fresh hair now roughened the cool flesh where the surgeons had shaved the site clean to get to his wound He had come-to in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. The first thing he had seen was Rebecca’s concerned face staring at him from the bench on the opposite side of the ambulance as paramedic’s worked on his injuries. She was holding his hand lightly in hers and he felt her tenderly squeeze it when she saw his eyes flutter open. A smile of relief crossed her lips as she said something to him, but he heard nothing over the wailing wah-woo of the ambulance’s two-tone siren and the rattling of the gurney to which he was strapped. He managed a weak smile in return and was halfway through asking if she was all right when consciousness slipped away from him once more.

His next memory was of a pounding in his head that was ameliorated only by the strange distant feeling of separation he had from his own body. He was lying in a bed, soft cotton sheets cool against his skin; a medical drip next to his bed held a bag suspended from a hook. The clear plastic bag contained a bluish fluid that ran down a tube to a catheter imbedded in his hand. The only sound in the room was the electronic beep of a heart monitor, like a metronome synchronized to the rise and fall of his chest. Rebecca was gone, and in her place was a little girl whose feet barely reached halfway to the ground from the lip of the chair she was perched on. Her blond hair stretched down to her shoulders and she wore blue leather buckle-down shoes on feet that swung back and forth to some personal tune only she could hear. She was watching him and as his eyes had cleared enough that he could finally focused on her the beat of the heart monitor suddenly leapt to a bossa—nova rhythm.

Seeing he was awake, the child scooted off the chair in three swift shimmies and ran to the door, reaching up to the handle, then disappearing into the hospital corridor beyond. Jim was too weak to do anything more than croak a plaintive don’t go. But it was too late; she was out the door before the words left him. His heart sank, sure she was just an illusion, a wish fulfilled by the blue liquid being fed into his arm by the doctors, and he sank back in the bed and allowed the darkness to claim him once again.

When he next awoke, the little girl was back.

His daughter.

Lark , he croaked.

Her name drifted on the air like a ghost.

Slowly, the fog began to lift and the room swam into full view. Lark was not alone. Her mother was with her, their daughter perched comfortably on Simone’s lap.

Simone looked tired. Her eyes were red and puffy and her hair had lost some of its luster, as though it had not been washed in a couple of days. Her skin was pale and there was no hint of any kind of makeup.

“There you go,” said an unfamiliar voice from the other side of the bed. “That should make things more comfortable for you.”