Chapter 50
"Ugh."
Bryan chewed the bite of pizza to the side of his mouth and spoke around it. "What?"
"I can't do any more." William slapped his slice onto the cardboard box and swung his feet out over the edge of the rooftop. "After living on furry carrots and mushy apples, I don't think I can do the grease. No more cheese."
Bryan shook his head. "Less than a week ago you had third degree burns, and a thirty ought six bullet shattered your collarbone, and yet tonight you climbed up here like Curious George. But you won't eat cheese? I thought you were weird before." He picked up another slice and wedged in a big bite as he sat down, feet still on the roof. "Okay. Next time I'll get falafel, with the fries inside, if we can just eat someplace a little more normal. Up here is just a little too superhero."
He smiled as he saw William wince.
"Do you have to say that?" William asked.
"You gonna explain to everyone how you've got direct access to a non-physical, overarching consciousness? Good luck. Crazy and comic books, everyone can understand. So, if the tights fit." He looked from William's eyes to his back. "Maybe we should get you a cape."
"Please shut up," William said.
Still smiling, Bryan let the joke rest while he watched William peel congealed cheese off crust.
"Are they still calling me that?"
"The Night Stalker?" Bryan said. "Not so much. Most everyone thinks you're dead or an urban myth. Maybe we can get you a better name. And a cape."
"The voices are telling me to kill you right now. You know that, right?"
Bryan's smile grew. He squinted, pretended to see what William did. "Nah, they like me." He hoped they did, after what he'd seen. He still didn't understand how William had healed so quickly, but it seemed like a new skill. What would he learn next? And how dangerous would his friend be then?
After a moment, William turned to him. "The other police. They think I'm dead too, right?"
"Except Meyers. Hayes says you died, but he's on morphine. Cray and Rios are suspicious, but if you're dead, their case is off the board, so, seems like they're going with it." He waited, but William was silent. "What?"
"Me being alive. It's only trouble for you," William said. "Anytime I do anything, draw attention, it'll get you in trouble with other police."
Bryan thought about it a moment. Yes, if the police found out William was alive it would mean trouble, but he had other problems to worry about before then. Smith had been too efficient in his work over the past six months. There had to be remnants of his organization still in the area, and more importantly, some police had to have been a part of it all along. Not knowing who they were was more trouble than he wanted to think about. William's identity and existence was negligible compared to that. He held up three fingers in a Boy Scout salute. "I saw him in the middle of the building when the whole thing burnt down, Your Honor. I barely survived and I was outside." He saw William smile briefly and begin to pick apart the edge of the pizza crust.
"Still," William said.
"What?" He watched William and began to worry. He hoped it wasn't about Jess. Since the fire, she had been at his place. He had bought a couch and was sleeping on that. Nothing serious had happened between them yet, but Bryan knew it would be soon. She was taking a long time to say goodnight before she went to bed.
It took a moment for William to answer. "I killed him."
"The maintenance man, Harold?"
William nodded. "And the others in that loft."
How could he answer? William had kept the coroner busy in the week leading up to the fire. But the change in William on that night, and since then, had been dramatic. Would he feel guilty about the earlier deaths too?
"It was different," William said.
Bryan looked around William's shoulders, even though he knew he wouldn't see the figures anywhere.
He heard William snort. "I don't need the voices to tell me you were thinking about the ones I fought earlier. It's just...this was different. It wasn't about what the voices wanted. They weren't even there, really. I wanted him dead. So, I pushed him and he burned himself to death."
"I killed the guards and Smith. I shot him in the back. And even though I left him there to burn to death I still think it was self-defense," Bryan said.
"Was any of it? The voices wanted it set up, so I went, started fights, got the attention of the racists, pushed you into getting the maintenance man's attention. I set it all up, created the situation. All so Jess could see." William stopped, picked at the pizza.
She had talked to Bryan about it. Her minor burns, cuts and bruises and the smoke inhalation she had suffered were all healing, but part of Jess was still in shock after William and the voices had made her see that vision. It seemed that after a lifetime of blindness, her brain hadn't been ready for the images she had seen. Bryan still went into the bedroom at night and held her when she woke up, palms pressed against her eyes.
Had William needed to pull Jess into so much danger? She had told Bryan about it, in the visual terms she could express. He had helped her understand the images as much as he could from her inexperienced descriptions. She had seen herself, surrounded by children, and a few adults. From the way she described them, it sounded like all those people were like William.
He knew the voices didn't tell the future, but was this something already in motion, something that William, these others, or even he was creating? Was it a vision of something Jess was supposed to do, the way they showed William how he was supposed to fight? Hanging around William seemed to come with a lot of questions.
"Why Jess?" he asked.
"Why her?" William stared down at the crust in his hands.
Bryan nodded back.
"I'm not sure. Maybe it's like the quote...Only Nixon could go to China."
It took a moment, but Bryan remembered the quote. "Spock?"
"I think it makes you the bigger geek to actually know it's a Vulcan proverb."
"Thanks," Bryan said.
William's grin only lasted a second. "She's always been on the outside of society, with a different perspective, trying so hard to be part of regular society while dealing with different information than everyone else gets. But she fought against anything that seemed abnormal." He paused. "There's more like me coming. They'll need someone like her to teach them, help them grow."
And that brought up the question that had bothered Bryan the most. Since he had realized what had happened at the factory, he knew that she was like William, was again becoming part of his life. She may have said that she wanted Bryan, but she was sharing something with William that he had no part of. Would she go back to him?
Bryan sighed and dove in. "She talks about you. She feels pretty guilty."
He watched William. No answer.
"Listen," Bryan didn't want to go on. This is what he'd been afraid of. That William would want her back. If he was lucky, William would be polite about it. If not, he could push Bryan out of the way any time he wanted to. "If you two want to try again, to be together, I'll..." He let it hang between them.
*
(Author's note: What does William want? Who could he fit with? Read the final section to find out!)