2,733 words. I'm making up for yesterday by writing extra both today and tomorrow. (I'd better at least!)At six o'clock Alicia was waiting by the church door, her hands in her jacket pockets and a blank expression on her face. She was looking at the park across the street, not really watching anything in particular by taking it all in at once.
Martin walked up with concern on his face. "Are you okay?" he asked Alicia just before he reached the door.
She turned her head slowly, and looked at him. "Oh, I'm fine," she informed him without audible.
He gave her a reassuring smile. "Come on."
She followed him into the church. They passed through the narthex and took stairs down to a hallway that lead underneath the sanctuary. A glance into the reception hall revealed the class that was meeting was some sort of exercise training. At least that was the assumption both made due to everyone being on their own small mat, performing the same stretching motion.
Martin and Alicia decided to use the meeting room. It was carpeted wall to wall, with one of it's walls being lined with bookshelves full of religious texts. The opposite wall had a school desk sized altar with a bible resting on it. A third wall had a row of simple windows. In the center of the room sat a hefty wood table which took up about three-fourths the length of the room. Around it where thirteen comfortable looking chairs.
Martin closed the door behind them, then gestured for Alicia to take a seat. After she chose a chair, he picked the one on the opposite side of the table from her. Once they were both seated, he clasped his hands and rested them in front of him on the table. "Tell me what happened."
Alicia exhaled audibly, looking down at the floor. "I had a set of bad dreams last night, about a fire. And D. All morning I couldn't stop thinking about what you had said, and about the times I've seen D, both outside of the hospital and the time I found out that's where she worked. Oh," both her hand and her head turned towards Martin. "I remembered the first time we met, D and I that is, if you're still interested."
Martin nodded. "Quite."
"I was on a field trip with my girl scout troop. That was back before it had been disbanded so I was about, twelve years old? Maybe thirteen? Ironically we had just completed a first aid course taught by the Red Cross a few days before." She shrugged, then realized it wasn't an ironic statement to Martin yet as he didn't know the rest of the story. "Anyway. We had gone to an amusement park, it was a reward for all the fund rasing and volunteer work we'd done that year. Sometime not long after lunch my buddy group had decided we were still hungry, so we were out searching for a cart with something that we could afford. We heard screams from one of the rides nearby. Not normal amusement park screams, these were screams of shock and pain. Of course we ran to see what was going on. It turned out- you know that ride where you get in the circular room that has no ceiling and stand right up against the wall, and then the room starts spinning and when it's going fast enough the floor drops and you're stuck against the wall 'cause of the centrifugal force?"
Martin nodded.
"You know how it has the suspended walkways all around it so the line winds up to the top where you watch those already on the ride, and then the line goes down to the platform where you enter the ride?"
Martin nodded again.
"Well what had happened was the one around the top of the ride gave way, and part of it fell on the platform next to the door, which then also gave way. There were a lot injured people, but the line hadn't been so long that there was already a crowd of people around yet. So we, the four of us in the buddy group, ran up to start helping people because we thought since we'd just finished first aid training we were qualified." She shook her head with a small smile. "Thankfully there was also someone there who had an authoritative sounding voice, who managed to keep things under control, and had those who had been in line and not injured help those who could were but move on their own away from the ride. My friends and I looked around for those who needed serious help getting up and out of the debris, such as support for walking or getting part of the walkways off of them. We did our best, and kept track of those who were unconscious or speaking gibberish so we could tell the emergency crew where to go first, as we didn't dare move anyone who couldn't tell us what was wrong with them."
Alicia pursed her lips for a moment, her eyes slightly glazing over as she visualized the events happening again. She nodded slowly to herself. "We got into the newspaper for that. 'Girls Scouts Save Lives at Amusement Park'." She looked to Martin. "I was always proud of that. Even after I grew up and realized we hadn't saved anyone's life, it was just a good twist on a bad story for the newspaper. Really we had only helped get the real help where it needed to be faster. But I figured maybe that had counted for something, made some difference." She feel silent for a moment.
Martin reached across the table to her, to pull her out of the past. "But you did save a life, didn't you," he said.
Alicia looked back to him. "At first just the park doctor arrived. And some park patrons who said they were doctors also showed up. But soon three ambulances where there too. We had lots of EMTs and doctors then. My friends and I directed as many as would listen to us to the places we knew they were needed most. I led one back around to a bunch of bushes I had found a few people lying in, who couldn't be seen unless you were right up at the bushes. When I turned to the EMT next to me to point the people out, I saw a doctor had followed us and was already making her way into the bushes."
"D?" Martin asked.
Alicia nodded. "The EMT checked the closest person, then the next, then the third which is the one the doctor had gone to first. I stayed next to the first one, so I didn't have to climb through all the bushes. I watched the EMT double check the third person, then shake his head and look up at the sky. He came back to the second person and started doing something for that one. The doctor... D... she stood up from the third person and looked around. I motioned for her to come over to the one I was by." Alicia paused, her face darkening a bit. Her head shook very slightly from side to side as she said, "She just looked at me. I couldn't believe it at first. She wasn't doing anything. I called out to her. 'Come help him!' She came only close enough so I could hear her without her having to yell. She said.... 'I can't.' And turned and walked away."
Alicia looked off out the windows. "I hated her for that. She didn't even try. She didn't even check him to see how he was. It was because of that moment," she tapped the table for punctuation, "that I stopped trusting doctors." She looked back at Martin. "So I stayed with him until the EMT had the second person taken away and came back over to check on us. Actually I stayed with him until they put him in the ambulance because after they had woken him up he didn't want me to leave him." She blushed slightly. "He called me an Angel."
Martin smiled. "I bet. You did save his life."
"But how would he have known?"
"Perhaps he felt himself slipping away, and then felt you bring him back?" Martin suggested
"Yeah, maybe." Alicia shrugged. "But it does make more sense now. The EMT had been really surprised when he came back and checked the guy. He had something about some rate for guy's being the same. He called for another EMT, and they put a bunch of needles in him that led to bags they held up above him, and put one of those breathing masks on him. A few minutes later the guy woke up, as I said. Only for a minute or two, but it was enough to get the EMTs to have a stretcher brought over for him."
Alicia leaned back. "So that's when I first actually met D. As in spoke with her."
Martin nodded. "Wow." He leaned back as well. "And... what happened today?"
"At lunch I decided to go to the hospital to get D to settle for me that you were insane, so that hopefully I'd stop dwelling on everything and could get back to work. Well, instead, she said you were right." She bit her lower lip for a moment, not quite able to bring herself to meet his eyes. "And once I realized she was being serious, I flipped out."
"It's okay, Alicia. I do understand how far fetched I must have sounded," he assured her, smiling again. "It's just, well, I was psyched it was true! After having actually met death, that was what convinced me."
Alicia cocked her head in curiosity. "What was true?"
"You!" he proclaimed as he gestured at her with his arms. His smile got wider. "Someone who can stop death!"
Alicia continued to look at him, narrowing her eyes somewhat. "How did you know?" she asked with a bit of reservation.
Martin nodded at her. "Believe it or not, you're not the first to have this gift."
That was a surprise. "I'm not?"
"Nope." He shrugged. "Honestly, I don't know very much about this either. All I know is what I was told in an unsigned letter I got. And what was happening around you."
Alicia's face changed to one of suspicious concern and she sat up straighter in her chair. "What was happening around me?" she questioned him. "Have you been following me? Is that why you started coming to this church?"
"No no, nothing of the sort," he said quickly with a wave of his hand. "My firm was hired to audit the hospitals records, financial and medical. That's what we do. Statistics on various different subjects: success rates of operations; turn around times in the Emergency Room; response times for each doctor; something was termed worker effectiveness for each employee; the percentage of patients that survive due to treatment; the success rates of various treatments; etcetera, etcetera."
Alicia relaxed slightly, but reserved judgement until having heard him out.
"We found an interesting anomaly in the hospital's death counts as compared to other hospitals. Actually, we almost missed it, but for the desire to know how shifts did in comparison to each other. Usually administrations only want to know how individual doctors or nurses are doing, or individual treatments or types of surgeries. But apparently this one had put together a specialist team last year that work a given shift, and they want a report on how that shift was doing compared to the other shifts during which standard sets of employees worked. You know, to see if the method that had been used to put that team together should be adopted in other areas."
"Okay, sure," Alicia commented.
"Right," Martin continued. "So my group decided we had to do the death statistics on an hourly basis if we wanted to get the most accurate numbers since that team worked a variable shift instead of a nine to five type shift. Well, we found that a few hours consistently had statistically lower rates than the rest of the hours of the day. When we plotted them weekly, we noticed those rates for those hours were consistently even lower on specific days. Care to guess which days and which hours?" Martin asked her.
"The ones I volunteer," Alicia realized. "That's why D was upset with me when I showed up randomly today off my normal schedule."
"That would make sense," Martin agreed. Then he went on. "It took a lot more work to figure out it was you, specifically. My company didn't go that far. We just reported the numbers and correlations. But I was super curious as to what was causing those numbers. They were clearly not random, something had to be causing them. I used my own time, an extra couple hours at the office every week, to compare our findings with those in other departments who were doing the numbers on individual employees."
"That's how you found me?" Alicia asked.
"Actually, I came up with nothing," Martin replied. "Except I had ruled out all the employees. So that left either some sort of environmental difference, which we weren't accounting for in any of our numbers, or, I soon realized, the volunteers, whom we also weren't doing numbers on." He shrugged. "I gave up the search for a while, until I got that note."
"What note?" Alicia asked.
"The one I mentioned a few minutes ago," he explained and waited for her to respond. After a few moments he held open his hands to indicate why hadn't she remembered yet, and added, "The same one I gave you this morning?"
"Oh!" Alicia felt like she got caught by her parents with her hand in the cookie jar right before dinner. "I, uh, I haven't read it yet," she confessed.
"Oh," Martin repeated, but sounding like that's not at all what he had expected. "I just assumed that you had gone to confront D because of the letter."
"No, sorry," Alicia said with an apologetic shrug. "I went because of all the memories that were taking on new meanings."
"Well, there wasn't all that much in it," Martin told her. "It said that the cause I had been looking for was a person. Someone special, with a special power. Who needed to know about the power, very soon. And it give a few specifics of what signs I should look for when I went to the hospital."
"And it said I wasn't the first?" Alicia added.
"No, actually, I figured that part out on my own. You know, it's had to just believe something without doing research into it first." He gestured with his hand, and added, "At least, it is for me. There's a lot of fiction out there, a lot of hearsay, and a lot of ghost stories and alien seers. But when I came across bits and pieces of recountings that matched the signs in the letter, my curiosity grew. Especially when I turned up several diary entries by a priest back in the eighteen hundreds. He had kept tabs on a member of his congregation that he thought was a little off, until he learned about the secret. He even had a few details of the gift's abilities. Which is why I wanted you to introduce me to D."
"Ahhh," Alicia said with an understanding nod. "Hey, can you show me those?"
"Sure," Martin replied. "I don't have them on me. But if you want I can give them to you tomorrow."
"That'd be great. You want to meet for lunch?" she suggested. Adding a mental note to herself to do some research of her own. If there was documentation of others like her, then perhaps she could get some guidance from them.
"That's sounds good," Martin agreed.
They both nodded, then fell silent.
After a minute, Alicia spoke up. "There's one thing that still bothers me."
"Only one?" Martin asked.
"Well, only one I wish to think about right now," Alicia admitted.
"What's that?"
"Whomever sent you that note. If they knew about me, why involve you instead of telling me themselves? Why the anonymous tip off? And who was it? And why?"
Martin nodded. "I've asked myself those questions too."
"And?" Alicia prompted, hopeful for an answers.
"I have no idea."
Labels: BoD, NaNoWriMo 2005, Story
