Elizabeth Hand - 12 Monkeys

“Oh, my God, James. Did you kill him?”

He shook his head. “Just — just in case,” he said thickly. Blood oozed from his mouth as he spoke. “In case I’m not crazy…”

He held up two bloody prongs half as long as his thumb. It was a moment before Kathryn realized she was staring at two of his molars.

“That’s how they find us,” he explained. Blood spotted the floor beneath him. “By our teeth.”

He lifted his face and stared at her. And in spite of the blood and grime, his bloodshot eyes, the knife, and all the other madness, she saw him as if for the first time. Not a psychotic ex-con who had pursued her for six years, but another man entirely, a man who could weep at the rising moon and not seem pathetic, someone who still believed the old songs he heard on the radio, someone whose depths of feeling was not bound by time or space or even the subtle convolutions of the mind itself…

Someone who loved her.

For a long moment they stood there. And somehow Kathryn knew that this was it, the closest she would ever come to something she had long ago given up any hope of having: a thirty-five-dollar-an-hour room in a skid row flophouse, a pimp moaning in pain in the next room, and a bloodstained man gazing at her as though she were the Pieta. And somehow, somehow it was enough.

Abruptly the room shook. From the corridor cam the thunder of booted feet thudding up the stairs.

“POLICE! THROW YOUR WEAPONS OUT AND COME OUTTA THERE!”

Silently Cole reached for her. She took his hand and followed him to the window, waited as he shoved it open and slid outside, pulling her gently after him onto the fire escape.

“Hey! That the police? I’m an innocent victim in here!” the biker shrieked from the bathroom. A uniformed cop charged into the room in a crouch, pistol extended in both hands. He panned the gun around an empty room. “Get me the fuck outta here! I was attacked by a coked-up whore and a crazy dentist!”

More policemen rushed in, kicking aside furniture as they raced for the open window and stared down into an alley where blood glowed like petals on the drifting piles of newsprint.

Holiday shoppers hurried toward the curb as a city bus pulled up, angling for the door with armfuls of bright shopping bags. The doors whooshed open, disgorging a late-afternoon crush on the avenue. Overhead streamers of gold and green arced from one streetlight to the next, gleaming in the faint sunlight. White lights glittered from bare tree limbs in the first shadows of twilight. Along the avenue, canopies flapped in the wind and holiday crowds surged past expensive storefronts: Wanamaker’s, Bloomingdale’s, Neiman Marcus. There was music, the heady brazen burst of a Salvation Army band vying with the genteel tinkle of handbells playing The Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies .

The bus pulled away, leaving a haze of bluish exhaust. As the shoppers dispersed, Kathryn Railly moved furtively to the relative shelter of the crowded sidewalk. Sunglasses hid her bruised eye. Behind her Cole moved more slowly, a bloody handkerchief pressed to his mouth. He gazed at the hundreds of people, the shining store windows and laughing children with the stunned expression of a man waking from a troubled dream.

“Keep your head down and try to blend in,” Kathryn whispered. She grabbed his hand and pulled him close to her. “We’ll stick with the crowd. There’s got to be a phone around here— There!” she said excitedly, pointing to a corner booth. “In there.”

She hurried him past a chorus of blue-uniformed Salvation Army volunteers circling a shining scarlet kettle. Cole stopped and stared at them, shaking his head slowly.

Kathryn tugged at Cole’s hand, but he refused to budge. The cold breeze brought with it the smell of fir trees and wood smoke, mingling with the music to prod at him with some faint memory almost within reach. He lifted his head, the music washing over him like rain, and gazed upward. His mouth fell open and his eyes widened, trapped somewhere between wonder and terror.

It was the building from his dream: the ornate and crumbling structure he had reached after emerging from the sewer, the building where he had seen snow and hear the distant baying of wolves. As he stared he saw silhouetted against its rococo roof a regal figure, gold-maned, its head thrown back so that the sun set its corona of hair aflame.

“James! Listen—”

He started, turned to see Kathryn dropping her hand from his, “I’m going to try that phone number you had. Let’s hope it’s nothing—”

Disoriented, he watched her hurry off, her dark hair disappearing and then popping into view again as the flow of Christmas shoppers streamed past. Some of them were close enough now that he could see their faces, their smiles and cheerfully generic holiday greetings suddenly frozen as they took in the dazed man standing there like the survivor of a car wreck. Cole pressed the handkerchief more tightly to his mouth and backed away. Someone jostled him and he fell against a shop window. Turning he recoiled in terror: inches from his face a bear reared on its hind legs, jaws bared in a snarl.

“James! James—”

Kathryn’s voice filtered to him through the music and laughter. He shook his head, saw that the bear was only part of an elaborate display involving toy train trestles laden with fake snow, a mountainside where Lilliputian skiers slalomed through glittering powder.

“It’s okay, James! We’re insane! We’re crazy!”

Laughing, Kathryn ran up to him, grabbed his hand, and hugged him clumsily. A passerby gave them an odd look, then shrugged and hurried on. “It’s a carpet cleaning company.”

Cole let her lead him back into the crowded sidewalk. “A carpet cleaning company?”

“No superiors! No scientists!” Kathryn threw her head back joyously. “No people from the future. It’s just a carpet cleaning company. They have voice mail — you leave a message telling them when you want your carpet cleaned.”

Cole shook his head slowly. “You… you left them a message?”

Kathryn grinned impishly. Her cheeks glowed bright red; she looked like a schoolgirl on the first day of winter vacation.

“I couldn’t resist!” she went on breathlessly. “I was so relieved. Wait’ll they hear this nutty woman telling them — they better watch out for the Army of the Twelve Monkeys — I told them Freedom for Animals Association—”

Cole gazed in horror at her rosy face. In a voice taut with dread he began reciting along with her.

“ The Freedom for Animals Association on Second Avenue is the secret headquarters of the Army of the Twelve Monkeys. They’re the ones who are going to do it. I can’t do anything more. I have to go now. Have a Merry Christmas .”

Kathryn broke off and stared at Cole in confused disbelief. She looked over her shoulder at the phone booth twenty yards away. “You — you couldn’t have heard me.”

Cole gazed at her numbly. “They got your message, Kathryn,” he said. He no longer saw her, only a circle of scowling faces, the tail-end of an audio tape flapping off its reel. “They played it for me. It was a bad recording… distorted. I didn’t recognize your voice.”

Kathryn’s expression grew terrified as she suddenly grasped his meaning. “My God,” she whispered.

From the street behind them a horn blared. Shaken, Kathryn turned to see a uniformed cop staring from the window of a police cruiser as it inched along in the bumper-to-bumper traffic. The policeman squinted at something, his brow furrowing, then reached for his radio.