Adventures of Matt Parkman, Chapter 5: A little girl
A/N: When I first wrote this, I was thinking Matty was about 14 months old. I've since figured out from the Heroes wiki that he was more likely born in April of 2007 and since this is set in March of 2010, he's nearly three years old.
Matt woke up to the sound of Matty crying. It jarred on his senses and gave him a headache. At some time during sleep, he'd loosed his normal mental inhibitions and dropped his barriers. The racket hurt. The crying of small children was one of the most disturbing sounds he'd ever heard. It was no wonder just the sound of it caused the blood pressure and heart rates of non-sensitives to go up. Janice told him she'd read they used recordings of babies crying as a form of torture in some prison camps. He was sure it was worse for someone like him. He blocked it out resolutely and went in to see his son. Janice was in the shower. Matty had just graced his diaper with new, semi-solid contents. "Oh joy," the man muttered and set about to taking care of him.
While changing his son, he thought about things. I wonder if I could use my telepathy to potty train him? He's big enough. A lot of kids his age have figured it out. Or maybe I could get him to use complete sentences already? I don't believe that bunk the pediatrician says about boys being slower on verbal stuff and potty training. I can see he's thinking things, things he doesn't have words for. What if I pushed the words in there? Would that work? He considered that as he finished and lifted Matty into his arms.
He walked over and fished a red block out of Matty's toys. He held it up where the boy could see it. The boy reached for it. Matt held it a little further away. "Uh-uh. Matty, this is red. A red block. Red. Can you say red?"
Matty looked at it intently and his father could feel his unformed mind trying to find the right label and apply it verbally. Finally he said, "Rrray." He meant red. Matt could see that. He smiled. "Right! Right. Red. ReD. ReDuh. With a D, Matty. Dee. Now can you say, 'I want the red block'?" He waved it a little, just out of the toddler's reach. Matty looked between his face and the block, then became disinterested and looked off around the room.
Matt frowned. Short attention span. Fine. He focused on his son, forced the boy's attention back to the block, and told him with clear and forceful articulation, Red. The child wailed, a piercing shriek, and Matt lost his ability entirely.
Janice got out of the shower immediately and rushed over, dripping and only half-rinsed. She tried to clear her eyes. "What's going on? What's wrong?"
"I… I don't know." Matt tried to give his boy the block. The child batted it away and reached for his mother, disconsolate. Matt tried to give him to her.
She shook her head. "No, Matt! I'm sopping wet! Just… calm him down. What happened?" She looked around, trying to figure out what was upsetting her son. He was still shrieking like someone was stabbing him with a pin.
"I… I… I'm sorry. I'm sorry." Matt jostled him, getting agitated. He couldn't hear anything mentally, couldn't sense anything. There was a void where his ability used to be. He'd been accustomed for years now to having a sixth sense, an awareness of consciousness around him. Even when he blocked, he was at least aware of his blocks and barriers. Now there was nothing. He began to panic. "I'm so sorry. Matty, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
Matt was so focused on his son he didn't see the expression on his wife's face as she realized Matt had done something to her son, something that was making him cry and shriek, something that had left no mark on him. The fuzzy awareness of her own befuddled emotions of late sprang into sharper focus. There was one glaring explanation for it.
"Matt? Matt?" she asked him, trying to demand and be tentative at the same time. "Give him to me, Matt. I'll do it. You go on. Go on! Leave!"
"No, no. It's… I've got to, I'm sorry. Matty? Little Matty?" He tried desperately presenting the child with other toys but he still wailed and reached for his mother, wanting nothing to do with his father.
Janice took the child's arms and upper body. For a moment they nearly fought over him. Matt let go first, backing away, seeing the expression on her face. He backed out of the room. He stood outside, out of sight, listening. His chest was tight and ached. His breath caught several times. He didn't know why. He wasn't paying attention to himself, but to his wife calming his little boy, who was crying less and less, soothed by the presence of someone who hadn't hurt him.
He began to pack his things.
An hour later, he sat numbly in his efficiency apartment. He'd need to get a bed. He'd never intended to sleep here, to live here. He'd rented it so he'd have a place to paint. Now he wondered if he'd ever paint again. He was out of canvas. There was no need to get anymore. Depression threatened to close around him.
He looked over at the painting at the front of the stack, of the little girl being menaced by a man with a gun. Somewhere out there, it was going to happen soon. He didn't know where or when and now he didn't know how to find out. He needed to find out.
He looked at the other paintings. Maybe there was a clue there. He flipped through them, growing increasingly frustrated. His power was gone. His ability - gone! And his family along with it. He couldn't help people now. He couldn't even think of how to help himself. He flung a couple of the paintings out of the way. He kicked over a can of blue paint. He grabbed the picture of the yellow dog and tore it in half. He snatched up another of a man reading a newspaper. He hesitated. He could just barely make out the date… today. What was in today's paper that was so important he made a painting of someone reading it?
He grabbed his jacket and stormed out. He bought the daily rag outside a coffee shop and stalked in, finding a place to sit and page through it. He made sure he had the right section and flipped through it quickly. He wasn't in the mood to read through it carefully, but as it turned out, he didn't need to. Three pages in was a human-interest story of kindergarten children with a blown up picture of Kassidy Singer, a little black girl who looked eerily familiar. She would be threatened by a gunman, sometime soon.
I know… I know who! He read the story quickly, but it wasn't useful. Kassidy had won a class award for spelling and she attended a special magnet school for gifted but under-privileged children. He went to the local library. He had to find out where she lived, and quickly!
That afternoon he was driving very slowly around Kassidy's neighborhood with a sheet of paper in one hand, steering wheel grasped in the other. On the paper was a screen shot of a map of the area with a little red tear-drop showing the Singer house. He wasn't sure what he was going to do other than find out where it was and take a look around, but a physical, in-person inspection seemed like a good idea. It was a start.
There it is! He stopped outside and double-checked the house number. He was in another bad neighborhood, which didn't surprise him given the "under-privileged" part mentioned in the newspaper article. The Singer house had an absurdly high fence around the yard constructed of sectional chain link poorly attached to T-posts driven into the ground. Within the enclosure were a number of kid's toys and a large, floppy-eared yellow dog, which was currently standing at the front door, head cocked, as if wanting inside.
Matt put the car in park. A yellow dog. Huh. His thoughts didn't get much past that when he heard gunshots ring out from inside the house. Oh no! The dog began barking in agitation. Matt jumped from his car and rushed to the gate, where he hesitated. It was a really big dog. It looked like some kind of mutt, maybe a cross between a St. Bernard and a yellow lab. It must have weighed over a hundred pounds. It ran back and forth under the windows at the front of the house, barking madly.
While Matt paused to consider the safety of entering the yard, a second batch of shots were fired. He yanked open the gate and ran in, hoping like hell the dog wasn't as vicious as the high fence and angry barking indicated. He dodged around it as the animal leaped at him, but it wasn't trying to bite. It just jumped around him and almost tripped him. He grabbed the front door and opened it, going inside and shutting the dog out.
He was in a living room, but his attention was instantly riveted to the form of a man standing in the hallway, almost directly in front of him. The man was facing away and past him, Matt could see a little black girl scooting away along the floor, looking terrified. The man raised a gun. Matt surged forward, yelling, "NO!"
If I had my ability I could stop him! The man stopped anyway, wheeling to bring the gun to bear on Matt, who skidded to a stop a few feet into the hall. He held up both hands. He didn't have a weapon on him, having not expected things to happen this soon. Always before he'd known something of what he was getting into, when a problem was going to occur. He'd been able to pick his equipment and prepare. Without precognition, he was surprised.
He was surprised on another front as well. The man was familiar. Both men peered at one another, recognition flickering on their faces. "You!" Matt said. "You're the guy I took to the hospital!"
"W- What are you doing here?" the other man said.
Matt opened his mouth, unable to think of a good response to that. In the background, the little girl got up and ran away. The noise caused the gunman to spin back to her and Matt saw his opportunity. He charged at him, slamming into him. Matt's entire focus was on getting hold of the gun. He fell heavily on the other man and there was a snap. The man grunted in pain and although he tried to hang onto the gun, his fingers seemed nerveless for a moment. Matt twisted it away from him. A single bullet went off as he pried it away, but it buried itself harmlessly in the wall.
Matt backed up, turning the weapon on the other man, who now reached under his jacket. Matt yelled, "Hands out! Hands out! Stop moving! Stop!" If I had my ability he'd have stopped already!
The man paused and looked towards Matt, seeing nothing but the barrel of his own gun. It loomed abnormally large from the business end. He stopped moving.
"Roll over! On your stomach, hands behind your head! Lace your fingers!" Matt shook the gun a little at him when the man didn't instantly comply. Then he rolled over as if in great pain and did as Matt directed.
Parkman inched forward, looking around and listening. He couldn't hear anything else, anyone else, though his ears were ringing slightly from the gunshot. If he'd been using telepathy, then his head would have been killing him about now. Everything that happened he saw through the lens of his ability and how it all would have played out if he still had it. He'd know already if the man had a weapon in his jacket, instead of having to awkwardly, one-handedly pat him down as he was now doing.
There was no gun where the man had been reaching, but Matt found something sharp and wet. He flipped aside the jacket to see a broken rib had punctured his side. The little girl came out of hiding and looked at the bad man on the floor. Matt wiped his blood-smeared fingers off on the man's shirt, getting a twitch from him, but otherwise he was being a cooperative prisoner. He finished searching him, turning up a knife and an extra clip, both of which Matt pocketed, but nothing else.
He stepped back and raised the gun again. "What are you doing here? Why did you come here?"
The man turned his head slightly to make it easier to speak and said, "Marcus, Marcus killed my boys. Cut their throats right in front of me. They's the ones who was gonna shoot me the other night. Came in my house and killed my boys, beat me up and took me out to shoot me. Said they were leaving a message for anyone else who didn't pay back they loans. They woulda killed my woman too but she was at work. I said, I said I was gonna kill Marcus and all his family for him killing my boys."
Matt backed up slowly, remembering the other gunshots. He looked out in the living room, the room he'd dashed through without a glance earlier. To one side was a man on the floor. A few feet from him was a woman, still heaving and panting on the couch. Matt jerked his head from her to the man in the hall several times, trying to guess if it was safe to go to her.
Damn it! If I had my ability, I could make him stay there! He lowered the gun and went to her side. She was bleeding out rapidly. Even as he went to her, her chest moved less and less. He put the gun on the coffee table and grabbed a glossy-covered magazine. He pressed it to cover two holes in her chest, but she stopped breathing as he did it. Her lips moved soundlessly as she stared at him, then her eyes stopped seeing entirely.
After a long beat, he picked the gun up and moved from her to check the man, who was already dead. Matt went back to the hall, where he saw the perp was still laying where he'd been before. Kassidy stood a little past him, unaware of what had happened in the living room. She'd heard the shots, but she'd been in her room. Matt thumbed the safety on the gun.
He walked over and picked up the phone from the wall, intending to call the police. And tell them what? I know that guy. They have me from the police report I gave at the hospital. We'll look like partners who were together on killing the adults and fought over whether to kill the girl. I can't make them believe me. I can't make him tell the right story. I can't explain why I was here.
He put the phone back, then picked it up again and wiped his prints off it and replaced it carefully. He walked out and wiped off the magazine he'd touched and the front door handle. He returned to the hall and looked at the little girl. "Kassidy? Do you have someone near here you can go to? A- A friend, a relative maybe? A neighbor who can look after you?"
She shook her head and said, "Grana."
"You can go to Grana? Is that your grandmother?"
She nodded soberly. Matt said, "Okay, go to Grana."
"We have to drive there."
"Oh. Too far to walk?" She nodded again. He pursed his lips and said, "Do you know Grana's name?" She shook her head. "Do you know her address? Can you tell me where she lives?"
She smiled a little and said, "She lives on Chesapeake Drive. C-H-E-S-A-P-E-A-K-E. Chesapeake!" She smiled bigger, showing him an adorable, gap-toothed grin.
He smiled a little in response. She was cute, but what kindergartner knew how to spell that? He shook it off. "Chesapeake. Okay. Do you remember her house number?" The girl shook her head. "Do you know what other streets are near where she lives?"
"Delaware… and Edmonton…" She pronounced them carefully.
Matt nodded. He saw the pattern of alphabetical street names. "What about streets with numbers? Where there some streets with numbers?
She furrowed her brow, thinking. "A three… and a two…"
"Good! Good! That's really good." Especially for a kindergartner - gifted no doubt. "Thirty-two?" She shrugged. Apparently numbers had not been her focus. "Okay, that's good enough."
Parkman walked over to the man still lying on the floor and poked him in the spine with the gun, finger out of the trigger well. "Hey," he told him. The man jumped. "Um… You still feel like you need to kill her?" It occurred to Matt the man now knew where the girl was going to be. Without his ability, he couldn't cloud his mind or tell him to leave her alone.
"No, no." The man shook his head energetically.
If I had my ability, I'd know if he was lying. Matt said, "Okay. Here's the deal then. I'm going to leave and take her to her Grana's. I'm going to leave you here. You do whatever you think you need to do. Leave her out of it. It's all over. Don't tell the cops I was here. Don't tell them about me."
"They after you?"
"Ye… Yeah. They're after me." Matt looked at the man's back for a long moment, thinking of the cycle of violence he'd found himself in the middle of here. "I'm… I'm just going to let you go. Understand?"
"Sure, sure. That's good, sure." The man nodded again. "Wait until I'm out of here though," Matt added. "Don't get up until then." Parkman looked at the little girl. "Kassidy, we're going to go out the back door and I'm going to take you to Grana's. There's been an accident and your parents can't come. I'll explain everything to your grandmother, okay?"
She nodded and said, "Then we have to take Mazy. I'm not supposed to go anywhere with strangers without taking Mazy."
"Okay, okay, fine." Matt nodded agreeably and waited for her to get her dolly or whatever Mazy was. Instead the girl started off through another door, into the kitchen. He followed, giving the man on the floor one last glance. The man looked up at him and their eyes met for a moment. Even without his power, Matt had an odd feeling the matter was settled and Kassidy would be safe. He hoped like hell it was true.