Ten Plagues

Keren had a gift for sensing the difference between simple, human evil and a demonic hand. Her father had told her it was a gift given to her by God, to discern spirits, both good and evil. It had been her cross to bear all her life. In this tumult she felt an overpowering sense of the devil at work.

A boy, not older than six, hung limp in her arms. Keren hugged his dead body close, unwilling to flinch from his blood and crushed bones. Tears flowed until they streaked the coating of gray ash that encrusted the boy. She did her best to avoid numbing her feelings. This little boy deserved the respect of Keren’s horror. She let his face burn into her mind, even though she knew it would haunt her for the rest of her life.

She lay the boy gently down on a spread-out body bag and left him. Let someone else zip the bag closed; she’d give him his last minutes in the air. As she straightened, she heard the sad whine of the cadaver dogs as they began to resist hunting through the wreckage of the apartment buildings. Their handlers urged them on with coaxing voices that sounded as depressed as the hounds. She knew how the dogs felt. She was about ten minutes away from curling up on a pile of jagged bricks and going to sleep.

O’Shea grabbed her empty arms. He gave her a long look. From behind his dust mask he said, “Cap wants us at the hospital. It sounds crazy, but this explosion may have something to do with the Lopez case.”

“We can’t leave.” Keren’s voice broke.

“Orders, Keren.” O’Shea took her arm and started dragging her over the jumble of bricks.

It was a testimony to how exhausted she was that she let herself be manhandled. “How could this have anything to do with Juanita Lopez’s disappearing act?”

“They’ve got someone there, just now waking up, who claims he knows what happened and the two are related.” O’Shea kept dragging her and she kept letting him.

“Could he be responsible for this?”

“The guy in the hospital?” O’Shea asked.

“No,” Keren said sarcastically, “the captain. Of course the guy in the hospital.”

“I don’t know. I barely caught his name. I don’t even know if what I’ve told you is right. I probably made part of it up, ‘cuz Cap was yelling his head off and shouting orders at everybody. I got the basics and ran like a scared rabbit.”

“Smart man.” Keren let O’Shea into her five-year-old Impala then went around to her side. Her car was blue somewhere under its coating of gray grit.

She caught sight of herself in the rearview mirror and was appalled. She pulled the dust mask off and it was worse. Her eyes, which she called light blue, looked gray to match the car and her clothes and the whole rest of the world. Her hair sprung out in a hundred directions. She looked like a science experiment gone horribly awry.

“We should clean up first. We’ll probably get kicked out of the hospital.”

O’Shea snorted, which was as close as her partner came to a laugh most of the time. “Everyone there’s gonna look the same. We’d get kicked out if we were clean.”

“Still, I’d hate to drip brick fragments into some guy’s newly sewn-up head.”

“We’ll risk it. Drive.”

Keren obeyed him. Amazing what a little trauma will do to a person. “What’s the name of the guy Cap said to question?”

Keren eased her car into the street.

O’Shea checked his notebook. “Paul Morris.”

Paul Morris! Keren’s stomach took a dive. No, it wasn’t that uncommon of a name. It couldn’t be the same guy.

“Where is Paul Morris?” Keren yelled over the din in the emergency room.

A harassed nurse actually balled her fist. Keren got ready to duck.

“Find him yourself! I’m busy!” The nurse walked away before Keren could threaten the poor woman into cooperating.

There were bleeding people everywhere. Some injured. Others, obviously worried family, crying and dragging on the arm of anyone who looked official. Every cubicle was jammed with cots.

“How, in all this chaos, are we supposed to find anyone?” Keren shook her head at the chaos.

O’Shea shook his head, then he shook it again as if he were trying to shake out the vision of bleeding, weeping, grieving people. “You start in the cubicles. I’ll start asking around out here.”

“Okay, that should only take ten or twenty hours,” Keren said.

“I’m open to suggestions.” O’Shea glared at her.

“If that means I have to use my brain, forget it. I’m sucking fumes. Just start. Even if we could get a nurse to talk to us, she probably wouldn’t know where he is in this mess.”

O’Shea waded into the crowd. Keren heard him asking, “Do you know a Paul Morris? Is one of you Paul Morris?”

Keren sighed and went into the first cubicle.

It was over an hour later when she found him. She peeked between two poorly closed curtains and saw a man sleeping on a gurney, amid five other occupied beds.

It was him. The man who’d run up to the tenement building with that wooden sign and been shoved inside. The man who’d risked his life to save those kids.