Free Captain Quad by Sean Costello Page B

remembered commands were instantly assembled. In a sweeping assault they descended the neural pathways of his brain stem, their urgent purpose to recruit the wasted muscles of his body, to draft them into service this one last time, to endow them with the needed machinery to raise an arm and fling that wreath off his chest. . . but the futile directives toppled to their death in the chasm of Peter's shattered spine.
    The wreath lay there under its immovable weight.
    "Stop it, Mom, please. Get this thing off me. I'm not dead. I am not dead!"
    Now she had a Bible open and she was reading from it, kneeling at his bedside, consigning him solemnly from this world to the next. Peter cried out to her, begging her to stop. The weight of the wreath was crushing him, stifling his breath—and suddenly it seemed that he really would die, right here at his own grotesque mock funeral. The mossy-sweet stench of the wreath swamped his nostrils like bilge water, and he was drowning in it.
    "Please," he beseeched her, sobbing, swallowing his gorge, trying to stop the thick lump of his supper from geysering up into his throat. "Please, Mom—"
    "'And as they were afraid,'" Leona murmured, eyes half shut, "'and bowed their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead?'"
    "Stop! Get it off me. . . please!"
    "'He is not here, but is risen.'"
    "Stop it! "
    Still unmindful of her son's shouted pleas, Leona got to her feet, leaned over the bed, and placed a gentle kiss on his forehead.
    "Rest peacefully, my dear sweet boy," she said.
    "Stop this!" Peter bellowed, his anguish insane. "Stop it, stop it, stop it!"
    In the hallway someone tried the knob, then hammered briskly on the bolted door. Distantly Peter heard a shouted voice. "Open up in there. Open up now!"
    Leona backed away, sparing Peter a final glance filled with sweet memory and tearful sorrow before showing him her back. Then she reached for the door latch, twisted it, and vanished from the room.
    Someone else was there with him now, the owner of that muffled voice, but Peter was far away, deep in the lime-pit blackness of his soul, a cry of perfect agony building within him. The supper the nurse had so patiently spooned into him boiled sickly in a stomach he could no longer feel.
    And as that smothering wreath was finally borne away, it all gushed out of him—the tormented cry, his half-digested supper, the last remaining shred of his capacity for pain. . .
    And his hope.
    It all came up together, soiling the sheets of his bed.

TEN

    In September of 1984, fifteen months following the accident, Kelly Wheeler became a full-time resident of Kingston, Ontario. Her reapplication into the phys ed program at Queen's University had been accepted, and by the middle of that month she'd immersed herself totally in the course load. Marti Stone, who had already been there a year, had arranged shared lodgings for them in Chown Hall, a sedate limestone residence building located just a block from Lake Ontario. Their top-floor room overlooked the cobalt waters of the lake, and Kelly fell in love with it immediately. In the twelve months Marti had been there she'd learned her way around both the campus and the city itself, and she did her level best to make Kelly feel at home. As always, Marti offset the melancholy Kelly carried with her like a yoke. There was just no moping when Marti was around. Her energy bordered on the manic, and she maneuvered from party mode to sports to academia with a juggler's ease.
    Kingston itself was a wonder to Kelly. Though essentially a working-class town, it housed a major university, a military college, a leading medical complex, and, just for good measure, a maximum-security penitentiary. Kingston Pen, the most infamous of the prison sectors located in the area, was just a stone's throw from the campus itself. In fact, from the roof of the teachers college—as Marti was quick to point out—you could see straight into the yard of the