“That’s why I brought them.” The man bent to fish a small envelope from the stems and thorns. He lifted it, his blood smearing on the white paper. “It says: Congrat- ulations, Fuck-Head, on your latest kill. Burlington Police. ”
Azra stared at the bloodstained card. “What does that mean?”
“Didn’t you hear? The woman you knocked up ran her car into a tree a half-hour ago. No other cars, no alcohol, no nothing. I guess she didn’t want to live, knowing you’d been inside her. Congratulations, FuckHead.”
Azra’s eyes did not meet the man’s. He watched the roses as though they were yet another body. He backed away until the bunk folded his knees, and he sat, eyes unmoving. His heart pounded.
How can it be? How can she be…? The thought was inconceivable. It was as though someone had told him the sun would no longer rise, that the world would slowly cool over the next three weeks to absolute zero, that they would all die. How could she leave?
“Oh, Donna, no.” He felt sudden terror for her, for whatever pain she had felt, for those last regretful moments spent alone. “Oh, Donna, no.”
The cell closed in around him. There would be no more place of bliss. There would be no more refuge. Around him closed the very fist of God. That’s who had done this. God had wanted Donna dead. He had wanted her dead four months ago. He had tried to kill her at the bedroom window, but Azra had stopped him. But at last, God had found a way to kill her. He had compelled another tree to yank its roots from the sucking earth and fall on her and crush her and crush the child within her.
“No matter what happens to me, as long as I have you, you and my child, I can be human and mad and in prison and still be in Heaven.”
That was the main reason God had wanted her dead. She had dared to make Azra human, had dared, in defiance of divinity and mortality, to reach across the shredding fissure between the two worlds and touch him. She had become Azra’s heaven, and God suffered no heaven but his own.
The roses were within easy reach. Azra retrieved them. He lay down on the bunk and sniffed the flowers. He saw Donna Leland, his guardian angel and his lover, floating in the dead heavy cement ceiling above him. Some of the thorns were very strong, as big as a dog’s claw but as sharp as a cat’s. There was one thorn that was very strong and very sharp, indeed. It felt right slicing into the veins of his arm. It felt right slicing into the veins of his neck. He lay there, blanketed in white blooms and warmed by his own blood seeping silently out onto cold steel and pooling in the indentation atop the bunk. A very human end. Perhaps not the right end for a serial killer, dying quietly, bedded in flowers and warm blood and safety. But perhaps there was no such thing as dying well. Perhaps humans just died.
He would know soon enough.
“I have been human for only weeks now. How can they stand it for year after Goddamned year?”
He was both cold and hot. There was a thrilling darkness hovering just above his consciousness, an unraveling net beyond which lay endless nothing. He disowned his limbs, one by one. They became mannequin parts, sliding loosely away from him – feet, calves, thighs, pelvis, arms, trunk. At last, all that was left was the head, the damnable violent ceaseless head.
It, and the scent of white roses.
Wailing women and a blood-painted world that jagged and jarred around him, with white linens and restraints on hands and feet, the conveyance listing like a ship but too fast for water, with the swing and jolt of steel waves, and hands not of steel but of flesh and stinging needles on plastic tubes and held down with tape. There was. There was.
Sirens. That’s what. Not women, but sirens. One was very close and muffled. On the roof. The back of the ambulance was crowded. Two police and an EMT and him and lots of drawers and compartments. There was lots of metal. Lots of hard, hard plastic. The cops watched his eyes, but he didn’t more than flutter them. The EMT watched plasma dripping from a bag and checked forearms made of cotton gauze and red juice. His neck was that way, too. The machines beeped, and so did the EMT, but the police were barking like watchdogs. They snarled through their teeth. The ambulance sheared a corner, and all swayed to the side and up a moment before the torquing springs fought the ambulance back between the lanes. The long high wail of sirens stretched out, too. Cop squads behind. The pink that flashed through the cabin was cops ahead.
There was a clamp that held the stretcher to the wall – an old ambulance. The clamp was near his hand. It was easy to touch, but stiff.
Why, though? Why do it, Azra? A moment ago you wanted to die. Why now try to live? And another voice answered in his head. There is no longer an Azra. Only a Samael. And why die? There is no need to die. Only to descend. He waited for the next wide corner, and then pulled hard. The stretcher slued sideways, ramming into the EMT’s knees and dumping him onto the gauzy arms. Stainless steel handles struck the cops, likewise, and one of them collapsed across Azra’s feet. The other had fumbled his gun out and pulled back the EMT and watched the patient’s eyes, but nothing.
“Damn thing got me in the groin. Fuck!” said the cop on his knees.
The one with the gun kicked the stretcher back against the wall, where it bounced and came back at him. The EMT caught the edge of it this time and heaved hard to get it against the wall. He lifted the lever and, with the help of the leaning gunman, got the cart in place. The lever snapped to, and they both backed up.
“Where’s my gun?”
A bullet went through his throat and shot out the top of the ambulance.
The man gurgled in red bubbles as he fell back, and then there were three holes in the head of the other officer. The EMT pushed himself up but slipped on the bloody floor and fell beside the cot. It swung into him again, bringing with it a hot gun muzzle and a madman.
“Release me, or you’re dead.”
The EMT sat for a moment, stunned. The madman lurched on the cot and shot the EMT’s right ear off. Next moment, buckles came from the patient’s wrists and hands, and he undid the straps. The killer sat up and shot the EMT through the left eye. The ambulance’s brakes shrieked. The driver shouted into the radio handset. The gurney rolled up toward the cabin door and smashed into it. Samael shoved the gurney back, flung himself through the door, and shot the last round through the driver’s ear. Then he rolled him from the seat and scrambled spiderlike behind the wheel. Stomping on the accelerator, he pulled back out onto the road.
Sergeants Davis and Carls couldn’t make out what the ambulance driver was saying except for “Pull over, pull over.” That’s what the other squads were doing, so Davis did the same, only to have the ambulance lurch out ahead of them all.
“Jesus Christ, what’s he doing?” bellowed Carls, his eyes squinting beneath pudgy gray brows. Davis, a middle-aged black man, only shrugged. The squad roared out behind the ambulance. Other cars followed. The calls began crowing over the radio. “…driver said he was loose… shots fired… behind the wheel now, I’d say…”
The last supposition was proven as the ambulance pulled away from them all, fifty, seventy, ninety miles an hour.
“Kick it in, Davis. For God’s sake. This ain’t OJ.”
The squad leaped in response, tires squealing at fortyfive miles an hour. Cars Seven and Eleven muscled up on either side of them, with Twenty-Two screaming up behind. Ahead, the ambulance mounted the long belly of an on-ramp.
The captain’s voice came over the radio, “…yes, call ahead. He’s south-bound on Ninety-four… yeah, toward Kenosha. Current pace, he’ll be there in a few minutes. Roadblock, hell yes… and helicopters. Better call down to Chicago. If we let him slip, he’ll be in Evanston and Oak Park in twenty minutes. Got a fucking ambulance going a hundred twenty – easy enough to spot…”
Without slowing, Davis sent the car hurtling up the ramp. The undercarriage struck ground. Eleven and Seven also bottomed out. Three bursts of orange sparks flashed beneath the thrumming machines and spun away crazily behind them. The squads bounced, still fender on fender, and speared their way into the sparse and sluggish stream of Wednesday evening traffic. Far ahead, past jittering cars and brake lights, the ambulance darted away. It shrank. Already its sides were scored from sideswipes. Even now, it rammed the back corner of a sedan, spinning it as though it were a child’s toy. The ambulance topped a rise and disappeared. Davis clenched his jaw and wove past an old man who apparently hadn’t heard the sirens or noticed the Broadway light show going on behind him. The lanes ahead were clearing to either side like the Red Sea before Moses. Into the breach the squads plunged.