The chaos and confusion of the last few moments had yet to resolve themselves into anything resembling clarity for Ellen. The taxi had come to a stop, her driver had been … killed? Surely not...? At some point, Mr. Trout had pulled her from the cab as men had run about, in and out of, the now ruined front entrance to St Alban's. The front windows and larger glass doors had just shattered. The noise of them letting go their internal cohesion would chase through her dreams for years to come. She was uncertain as to the absolute order of some of these things. And, to Ellen's greater concern, her mind was trying desperately to skitter and slide away from a few of these events; the mind is great at covering up those unpleasant events when it knows that dwelling upon those things will hinder the body carrying that mind in surviving the next few moments.
When Trout and she had left the safety of the cab, she had come close to stumbling over a body. A tall, lanky, man, dressed in a well tailored suit, in all white, lies on the cobbles. She had quickly checked his vitals, and immediately had known he was passed any help she might render, as his sightless eyes looked to the nighttime stars, but, Ellen was certain, his navel was pressed to the street.
She had stood quickly, to follow after Trout, who had approached a petite man who she had witnessed mere moments ago run from the broken building entrance, and ricochet quickly from one much taller man to the next. His baggy clothing had waved and flapped about his person as his body had spun and whirled between the men in white. He had been more graceful in his movements than many of the dancers she had envied in her teens as her ever increasing height made ballet less and less feasible.
Ellen couldn't quite put her finger on how he had taken each larger man down, he didn't seem to be as well armed as they had been. But, he had been moving so gracefully...and he had used a pair of long, white batons... to do... something...
This triage of memories is common, and if it causes confusion at a lovely, mythical time, called "Later," well, then, that can all be dealt with later, which the body won't have if it fails to deal with "The Now." Creatively editing the Now to ensure a Later is the brain's primary function, her father used to say before he retired. Odd what I choose to remember at the weirdest of times.
Ellen was now kneeling over the second body of a formerly tall, dark skinned man in white, trying not to retch. Mister Trout spoke with the short serious looking man in the baggy clothing, and billowing coat. She understood not a single word, and the language was like listening to the slow slide of an avalanche; it was deep and rumbled, but smooth at the same time, sliding as it did from the edge of one word to the next, with occasional staccato pops. She assumed at first it was Welsh, but as she listened it became obvious that it had nothing to do with any Gaelic tongue she had ever heard. Ellen continued to listen, completely baffled. The taller of the two small men spoke whatever language it was they were speaking in a much slower cadence. And he punctuated his deep thrumming words with mad waving and pointed hand gestures. He seemed familiar to her, but she just couldn’t place from where; Ellen didn’t know anyone who gesticulated so wildly while never raising his voice. She turned away, and looked down at the dead man’s ruin of a face, which now chased all such worries about remembering other faces away.
It looked to her trained eye like an infection of gangrene. But the wounds on his face and neck were little more than a pair of fine slices; so neat and even were the edges of the wound, she wondered if a scalpel had been used. How would a fully grown, healthy man get gangrenous from a pair of scratches? And how long had he walked around with it eating away at his face without going to hospital? What kind of idiot does it take to wander about with that level of an infection at all? ”Gosh, John, is your face about to fall off? It looks awfully green around the edges.” She thought, and suppressed a giggle. “No, it’s not ripe enough yet, just a few more days!” …Stress. It must be the stress.
The moment broke her resolve. The weird thoughts of a man walking about with putrefying flesh, getting greener, and sloughing away, made her giggle, despite her situation.
“I must need more sleep…” she mumbled to herself. The conversation was brief a few feet from Ellen as the petit man, though he towered over Mister Trout, glared at the dwarf before turning to slink off towards a white lump at the edge of the alley half a block away. She almost found the way he walked alluring. It was catlike, with a sway to his hips that men didn’t generally have. Even under what looked like five layers of clothes, all much too big, his stride was making it difficult for the young nurse to NOT watch. Ellen had a hard time turning her attention back to Mister Trout as the stranger, familiar as he might seem, stalked towards what she now supposed might be yet another body.
This new man sulking off to the alley at the end of the block had dusky dark skin that reminded Ellen of a polished wood, subtle light brown, tan, and gold colors that shone in the moonlight, and the quick glimpse she had of his eyes made her think of some exotic cat, maybe an Abyssinian, from their delicate canting and slightly almond shape. There was a flashing hint of yellow in the hazel green of those eyes. His clothes, while of a middling to nice quality, bagged and billowed about his small frame as he moved through the night. It reminded Ellen, unkindly, of a child wearing their father's clothes, and pretending at adulthood. Maybe it's just the style he prefers, she thought, I can't keep up with the fashion world. The collar of his dark gray, tweed long-coat was turned up against the cold, yet, bizarrely, he wore no shoes. She couldn’t imagine wandering about in the dead of winter without shoes; just the thought of her bare feet on the cold, wet, gritty macadam made her shiver down to her very soul.
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“Alvin.” The word came up at Ellen from somewhere near her thigh. Glancing down she saw Mister Trout at her side. “You can call me Alvin, if you like. He cleans up well, doesn’t he?”
“What? Oh. Umm, certainly, thank you. Who?” The mists of the last few minutes cleared, and she remembered the questions she had been asking the little man in the cab before the driver had... ceased.
“Oh, that’s your Christian name?”
Though back in the here and now, Nurse Lindsey had the feeling she was still dazed. The fact that it was now the wee hours of the morning, and she had just ended a cab ride with no less than four (?) dead bodies in the street by her place of employment was surreal, at best.
Why? She wondered. There are dead bodies in the morgue, I see at least one dead body every one to three days. What are four more? Would I feel the same if those four were in the morgue? Is this a bias I have about where a body can and cannot acceptably be... she let the thought trail off, as it was unproductive in the here and now.
Though her father disapproved, her mother capped each evening with a stiff drink. She said it kept the floor beneath her feet on the harder days; that sounds like a nice idea right about now... Ellen could see how that might be pleasant knowing exactly where the floor might, in fact, be.
“No,” he said, “But it’s the closest you might ever come to my first name, Christian, or no.” His deep voice purred, a smug cat with a secret ball of yarn you would never find. "Right, and who’s cleaning up how, now?”
“That, right there," Trout pointed at the petite man where he knelt over the forth body. "That’s your special patient, Mister John Doe, himself. All cleaned up, unbandaged, and running about the hospital grounds, eh? Killed two men right here, might be more, but I doubt it was him did our driver or this fellow; his kind don’t do guns.” he said, pointing at the security guard, “I’d say he has now been properly and completely healed, wouldn’t you?” The broad grin on his small face was almost as preposterous as his assertion, as it pulled his beard into new and disturbing shapes around the borders of his face.
Before she could respond, Ellen was grabbed by someone very strong from behind, and the very audible clicking, ratcheting of a large and mechanical object could be heard as something cold and hard was put to the side of her head. It made her gasp in shock. Harsh words in a strong foreign accent followed the threat of the gun at her head.
“You, you great SOW that plays at being a woman, and YOU," the new voice almost yelled, "the abomination under the Glorious Sun’s light will not move. Please. I will shoot you. Do not doubt me.”
Three more men dressed in white stepped from behind the tallest one, who now held Ellen. As he wrenched her arm back, one of his fellows reached over with a pair of handcuffs, beginning to secure her wrists. When it was done, the one holding her at gunpoint nodded to Mister Trout, and a bald member of their party picked the dwarf from the ground without apparent effort.
He must take hours shaving and polishing that head of his, it's sooo smooth! Maybe he’s one of those Retrometrosexuals the newsfeeds are always on about? His nails gleam like they’ve had a posh polish…looks like they’re all wearing eyeliner, though…THAT’S what my night has been missing, tall, male models working as muggers!...I’ve got to calm down, where’s my head? Ah, that’s right! It's here. Next to the gun…
Her thoughts on their assailants were quickly cut off. The man now holding “Alvin” looked thoroughly disgusted at handling the dwarf. You could see him sneer and scowl down at the wretched little man, and when Trout began to complain, the much taller man gave him a tooth-jarring shake. Calling out in his exotic voice to where the assassin was crouched over his last kill, “We have come from the Seat our most Holy Dawn, at His behest to give you His blessed word.” This man might speak nonsense, but at least he’s well spoken; Ellen came close to giggling at the silly thought. He speaks well, looks like he has money, he’s tall, dad will be so thrilled he "caught" me…now if I can only survive…
In a clear voice their lead assailant continued to yell to the deadly little man who might, or might not have been, her favorite patient, “And He is not pleased you mongrels, you Followers of the Bastard, have chosen to come back, to further pollute His world!”
At this, two other men in white stepped from the alley across the street from the broken hospital edifice, and they also pulled large, awkward guns of their own, to point them back toward where the man in baggy clothing and no shoes knelt over the last dead man.
But, Ellen noticed, he wasn't there now. The shadows where he had crouched had deepened. But, she could no longer see him over the white wool wrapped corpse.
The speaker went on regardless. “And if you, unworthy as you are, come out to meet the Glory of His Divine Word, we will spare your friend the many deaths she deserves for aiding you. We will even spare this stony little thing, this Child of Bes, that even now pretends at life!” She saw a shifting in the darkness where the little man had stood, a twist of the light from a nearby streetlamp, played across something not quite well defined enough to make out. What could have, possibly been the man in baggy clothes straightened from whatever task it was he had gone to do.
There was a slight clearing of the shadows, and a silhouette of a baggily dressed little man turned, tucking something long, and slender into its sleeve, away into the fold of its dark clothing. The shade cocked what might have been its head, and put what may have been its hands on its rumpled and lumpy hips as the tall man with the gun continued on about “Glorious” this, and “His Holy Words” that.
With a shifting of its dark head from Mister Trout and Ellen to the slowly approaching strange men, a stilted, and halting deep voice said simply, “Don’t really know them. Ta!”
Ellen didn’t know whether to laugh at the absurdity of the statement, or sob at the graceful flutter of motion, as she saw his compact body turn and spring gazelle-like back into the darkened mouth of the alleyway that lead from that far corner, back around the North side of the hospital.