The Meridians(12)

A dead body.

Scott did not recognize the dead man; had never seen him before in his life and had certainly not seen him in the last few minutes. Where the man had come from was a mystery, but there was no doubt that the man was very old, and very dead. A perfect hole - the mirror to the one that Scott himself should have been wearing but somehow was not - perforated the old man's forehead, and blood pooled behind his head in a thickening puddle that slowly reached out to cover more and more of the floor with its dead embrace.

The old man's eyes were open, wide and staring into the spaces of eternity. Even clouded by death, Scott could see that the twin orbs were blue, bluer than any eyes he had ever seen before.

Where did you come from, Mister? he thought.

There was a rushing sound, and pressure built up in Scott's ears, as though he were in the circle of a hurricane, the air pressure so high it almost made him gasp. An electrical snap sounded, lightning fast. Then there was an audible sucking noise as air rushed around him with gale force.

Just as suddenly as it had come, though, it stopped.

Scott looked around.

The old man was still beside him. Still dead, eyes unmoving though his hair - which was still thick and full in spite of his apparent age - was mussed and ruffled by the passing of the strange storm which had assaulted the inside of the shop.

The gray-suited killer, however, was nowhere to be seen. Whether he had gone up the stairs or taken some other route during the strange atmospheric effects, Scott did not know. But the man was gone, of that there could be no doubt.

Then loss of blood and internal trauma finally caught up to Scott and he closed his eyes and lapsed into a fitful sleep.

Not a long one, though. The next moment, it seemed like, he was looking into the face of Officer Terry Ramsay, one of the uniforms that worked out of Scott's precinct.

"Detective Cowley!" shouted Ramsay. "Stay with me, man!"

"The old man -" began Scott.

"Dead," said Ramsay. "Don't you worry about him, you just worry about you. Stay awake, bro. Stay with me."

"What's going on?" asked Scott, his speech oddly slurred and muffled, like he was talking underwater.

"Don't talk, Cowley," said Ramsay.

Scott wanted to say more, to ask where the old man had come from and what had happened to the gray-suited man, but he again lost the battle he'd been fighting since the first shot hit him in the gut. He blacked out.

He was visited in the darkness. An old man, not the same old man with the electric blue eyes that had died impossibly beside him in the shop, but a different old man, one wearing a suit of subtly patterned gray, one with gray eyes half-lidded and teeming with internal madness.

The old man had scars on his face, and Scott remembered in that instant the shot that had ricocheted off the wall near the gray-suited killer, spraying him with chips of concrete and brick. He looked to the old man's right shoulder, and saw that the suit was hanging in tatters on that side.

As though the wearer had been shot there, a long time ago.

Gray Man, thought Scott. The killer is the Gray Man. But he's old now. Mr. Gray is old. How can he be so old?

Mr. Gray leaned over Scott, and whispered to him. "I will come back. I will kill you."

A moment later Mr. Gray shimmered, as though walking away through the mirage lines of a desert sun. He leaned down, and picked something up.

It was a baby. But so tiny, much tinier than Chad -

(Chad, oh God, my Chad, please give me back my son!)

- had ever been. A premature baby, it had to be.

Mr. Gray picked up the preemie, and held it close as though in an embrace. But instead of love, hatred shone from the old man's insane eyes. And, slowly, he crushed the baby. Thin, mewling cries came from the place in the man's bosom where he was holding the child.

"At last," breathed Mr. Gray. "After all these years."

Then he looked over Scott's shoulder, as though seeing something in the dark void of this strange dream. "No," he said. "Not now. You can't stop me now!"

Then the old man screamed and threw up an arm.

The baby was no longer in his grasp. Instead, it was standing in front of the old man, growing impossibly, turning in an instant into a young boy, then an older boy, then a young man, then hurtling into middle age.

The man was familiar somehow, though Scott could not tell where he had ever seen him before.

Then, an instant before the man erupted into old age, the world twisted around him as it had in the alley....

And Scott woke up in the hospital, wondering what kind of drugs were coursing through his body that could induce such a powerful and strange dream. He could hear the beep, beep, beep of the machines that told him he was alive, and he was glad for that, because the way he felt he was having serious doubts about whether or not that was the case.

He looked down at himself and saw that he was covered in bandages. But the view was blurry, as though he were looking at everything through cotton. Tubes were running in and out of him, and a machine was making hissing noises that told him he was being aided in his breathing.

Someone was next to him. Amy! he thought. But then he realized: no, Amy was dead, and so was Chad. So it wasn't them.

It was Fariborz, his partner. The man, a swarthy Persian with thick arms and back that were currently covered by a shirt that was so tightly stretched over the man's muscles that it looked like it had been painted onto him, was looking at him from below thick eyebrows drawn close together with concern.