Tempest (A Short Story)

            Time was on her side though.  Tempest began running.  She could beat him to the subway; beat his finger to the trigger mechanism.  She would sit next to someone; the man wouldn’t find a clear shot.  He wouldn’t get a chance to complete his grim mission.  She would win over Ducante.  She would win this battle between her purity and his evilness.  Tempest began to laugh.  She ran faster and laughed harder.  Insanity had taken command.  Fear had taken its toll, ripping what little logic was left in Tempest’s way of thinking.  By god, she would martyr herself if necessary. 

            She didn’t look back.  She couldn’t.  Not necessary, she knew he was behind her exhaling his death stench with every quickened step.  Tempest could hear his laughter, hyena-like and just as deadly.  His smell of rotting flesh filtered through her nostrils making her gag with each of her hysteric giggles.  She didn’t think about the incongruence.  She had no time.  Her car was pulling up and emptying its contents.  She flashed her pass and clumsily crossed the turnstile.  Refusing to look back, Tempest bumped and dodged her way onto the car, number eight westbound. 

            She found one empty seat.  An older man occupied the space next to her, newspaper pressed against his face like a blanket.  The smell of alcohol and stale tobacco oozed from his ragged clothing.  A raspy, “Hi, sweet one,” fell from the man’s jagged teeth, more of a snake’s hiss than a voice.  “Been around here long?”  A strange question asked by a strange old drunk.  She wouldn’t look at him, too worried about Ducante’s bullet.  “Can’t you talk little one?”  He pressed.  Tempest would have no part of it.

            Tempest worked up the courage to look out the graying car window.  He wasn’t there.  Ducante had not caught up with her.  She smiled and relaxed enough to look at the old man, who wasn’t the old man at all.  Ducante sat next to her with a crooked smile pasted on his lips.  “Been here long?”  He asked cynically.  “What took you so long?”  His laughter echoed off the subway car’s roof.  Tempest jumped when he pulled his pistol out of his coat pocket.  “I know you’ve been wanting this.”  The voice sounded far away, like the sound of a television playing in someone’s room across the hall, her hall, her room.

            Tempest stood up, Ducante only smiled.  He made no move towards her.  His pistol’s stare steadied upon her.  She ran as fast as she could through the car’s corridor, shoving faces and bodies aside, until she reached the metal double doors separating cars.  She attempted to open the doors.  They wouldn’t budge.  Tempest began screaming, “Ducante, you bastard!”  She slammed her body against the doors and they begrudgingly opened to a black night filled with all the smells of depravity found in a tunnel of paranoia, of insanity.  Her head hit the hardened steel rails.  At that moment, Tempest Garner’s nightmares ceased.

            “Doctor Ducante,” asked Janet Landis casually, “will five milligrams be enough to hold her?”  Four exhausted attendants watched curiously as the floor nurse pulled a needle out of Tempest’s hip.  “Don’t just stand there guys.  Let’s get her into isolation.”

            Roy Ducante smiled with his eyes glued on the nurse’s ass.  “I think five will do just fine.”

            The train rumbled by the state hospital on its way to Chicago.  It was the Broadway Limited, a train carrying no celebrities or businessmen, just old men with black umbrellas and old ladies with holes in their dreams.  No one on the train heard the woman screaming in her rubber room across the field.  After all, they had their own nightmares waiting for them at the next stop.

            “Mommy?”  The Down Syndrome boy leaned across his seat and whispered into his mother’s ear.  He startled her.  Liz’s eyes stuttered open.  The dream had been disconcerting, not to mention dreary.  She had no sister, but the dream said otherwise.  Tempest, a word describing the frightful things in life and the turmoil all around her, was the girl’s name.

            “What is it my dear?”

            “What’th big beelding oter are?”

            Liz looked at the building as it quickly disappeared into the graying evening light behind her.  A morose looking shadow of her stared through the glare of a passenger car window, an eerie sight making her shivers shortly.  “I don’t know Jacob.  Looked like some kind of hospital.  What’s it look like to you?”

            “Don know.”  He answered flatly.  “Maabe a keel place.”  A kill place to the boy meant a funeral home.  Since leaving the 5^th Ward, a “keel place” took on an entirely new meaning for the child.  Jake was only a child in his mind.  His body was twenty-three.

            “Otay, I tie.”  The boy said.

            “Good, you try.”  Liz watched as the boy leaned his head against the pillow given to him by one of the conductors or whatever they were called nowadays.  She watched as the lightening flared in the distance fields.  “Tempest, it surely is.”  She whispered to no one in particular.  The rolling and soft pitching of the train lolled her into sleep.  This time the nightmare didn’t return.  It left her at the “keel place.”

The End