Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
A/N: As the protagonist in Stephen King's Lisey's Story says: Bool! The end.
Mac Taylor couldn't shake the certainty that he had sand in his shoes. He knew he didn't because he had checked them as he sat in the back of the ambulance at the bombing site, and again in the hospital bathroom just before he'd gone out to talk to Flack's attending physician. No sand, just sock lint and the warm-fabric piquancy of sweaty feet. He'd even rubbed his palm over the soles of his feet to be sure, and it had come away clean.
Just like your Army days, grunted a wry voice inside his head. All that's missing was the white glove, and the way you're going, you might be wearing those again soon, too.
He was a scientist, and he had spent his career following the evidence. His eyes told him there was no sand in his shoes, and so did his sensitive fingertips, and yet, he was still sitting in his chair outside Flack's room, surreptitiously scraping his feet against the scuffed linoleum floor and gritting his teeth against the furtive slither of sand in his shoes.
He'd never liked sand, even as a child growing up in Chicago. The city was, much like New York, a world of concrete and asphalt, and the only grass he could ever remember seeing had been on the field at Wrigley. But every few years, his mother's sister, Imogen, would swoop down and carry him and his mother off for a week at the Jersey shore. He couldn't remember much about Aunt Imogen now, who had died his senior year of high school. Just fleeting glimpses of pink fingernails and even pinker lips and a rubber swim cap festooned with fake flowers. She'd smelled vaguely of lilac and nicotine, and her voice had been husky with the promise of the emphysema that would eventually kill her. What he did remember was the sand.
It wasn't the rasping texture of it that bothered him, or the way it burned in his hand when he scooped it up to build sandcastles on the shoreline. It was the sheer, sneaking prevalence of it. It got everywhere-his eyes, his mouth, between his toes-and no matter how long his mother or Aunt Imogen held him under the freezing shower at the end of the rickety boardwalk or scrubbed him in the hard, scalding water of Aunt Imogen's shower, there would be grains of sand on his bedsheets and pillow when he awoke. It probably came from his eyelashes, his mother said dismissively, or from between his toes, and even before the reassuring, grown-up refrains of hypothesis and scientific theory, he'd thought she was right, but he couldn't be sure, you see, because he had washed his toes the night before with scrupulous care, and the sight of those tiny grains where there should have been none filled him with an inexplicable, dry-mouthed unease.
It was dishonest. That was what bothered you, made the spittle go sour in your mouth. All your life, you'd been taught that honesty was the best policy, to be a straight shooter as your grandfather called it. But sand wasn't honest. It was sneaky and crept into places uninvited. It'd hide in the crack of your ass if you weren't careful. There was something malicious in the seething, shifting latency of it, a malicious sentience that made your skin crawl.
You went to the beach because you liked the smell of sea salt and brine and the reflection of the sunlight on the water. You liked to let the water lap at your toes and wade out deeper to feel the caress of kelp on your ankles and calves. You liked the suntans and the souvenirs and the stories brought back for the neighborhood boys of pretty girls in flimsy bikinis, but you never liked the sand, and you avoided it whenever you could. Sandcastles could be built just as well with dirt, and in the end, it didn't matter what they were built with because they all succumbed to the gentle, enticing tongue of the sea.
You never told anyone how you felt about sand, especially not the sergeant at the Army recruiting station you walked into one afternoon after a fight with your father that had gone on three words too long. You knew it wasn't rational, that it was the talk of cracked and fragile minds. Minds like David Lessing, who thought to serve his country by reducing a building to rubble with you inside it. So you kept your mouth shut and your shoulders squared and prayed that Uncle Sam needed one more corn-fed, Midwestern boy for his ranks because it was the only way out of a town that was no longer home.
Uncle Sam sent you and a herd of other newly-adopted sons to Parris Island, where you spent the next six weeks tasting dirt in your mouth from all the push-ups and peeling skin from pus-filled blisters on your hands and feet. You learned to eat the gruel that the Army called food. Your campmates laughed at it, called it leather and dogshit, and it was true. It was all of those things, but you were secretly glad that it never tasted like sand. When the others bitched and moaned about the dirt, you resisted the urge to tell them that at least it wasn't sand, that at least it would swirl down the shower drain like it was supposed to and not be waiting for them on their cots and in the bristles of their toothbrushes.
Then your orders came down, and you were shipped to Beirut, a city birthed from the sand that surrounded it. Hell, the entire Middle East was a goddamned empire of sand. The thought inspired a green-gilled revulsion, but there was no question of not going. A Marine followed orders, and besides, you didn't want the other guys thinking you were a spineless chickenshit. So, you packed your duffel and shined your shoes and turned up at the hangar with your collar starched and stiff.
Beirut was a beautiful city, or at least it had been before the bombs flew and left smoking craters in their wake. But you learned how soulless and nasty sand could be over there, more than you ever wanted to. You had entered its dominion, and its powers were limitless. There was no crevice it could not fill, no niche it could not claim with its formless, golden fingers. It covered everything in a fine, ever-shifting scrim, and after a week, reaching out to brush it from tables and chairs was as much an autonomic response as breathing or blinking. It even found its way into the MREs that were supposedly vacuum-sealed against it.
Most of your fellow soldiers regarded it as nothing more than a literal pain in the ass. They laughed it off when they tasted grit in their toothpaste or had to wipe its grains from the damp heads of their cocks after a trip to the latrine. Your bunkmate in the barracks was a skinny, Norwegian kid from Bumfuck, Minnesota, and he played in the sand the way kids play in the snow when they see it for the first time. He was constantly picking it up and letting it drizzle through his fingers, and he told you more than once that he was going to send a baggie of it home to his girlfriend.
'S Pretty, you know? he told you earnestly one night, sitting cross-legged on his bunk with a cigarette dangling loosely between his lips. He fumbled inside a wadded-up sock for his Zippo and flipped it open with a practiced flick of his wrist. Like gold. He exhaled smoke with lazy grace, and for some reason, it reminded you of Aunt Imogen, who was already dead.
You suppressed a shudder and shook your head. Fool's gold, you thought, but your mouth said, It itches like hell, Whitney, and what's she going to do with a bag of sand, anyway? That's no kinda gift. Why don't you send her some nice perfume or a swatch of pretty fabric, maybe some dried dates? Bet those'd go over better than sand. Be more thoughtful, too.
He shook his head. Nah. Too expensive, and besides, I like to take a piece of wherever I've been with me.
Still, you persisted, Something better than sand. Sand's a pain in the ass. It'll get everywhere if you let it.
Whitney laughed and took a drag off his cigarette. If you let it? Fuck, Taylor, if I didn't know any better, I'd say you were spooked.
He laughed again, and you laughed with him because you didn't want anyone to know that he was right. You were spooked by it, and you had no childhood terror to blame it on. You dropped the subject and played cards over a milkcrate table, betting cigarettes instead of chips. He cleaned you out, but you didn't mind because you only smoked to pass the time and distract your mouth from the dry, Communion wafer taste of sand. You played all night in the hopes that Whitney would forget all about his pouch of sand.
But the very next afternoon, you saw him squatting in the sand by the mess hall, and you knew what he was doing. He was gathering it for his girlfriend back home. You wanted to tell him to leave the sand alone, to put it back before something terrible happened, but when he looked up at you and grinned, you could only smile weakly back at him because you knew he'd never believe you. He might even report you to the CO and punch your ticket home courtesy of a Section 08 discharge, and back then, the Army was all you had. So, you shouldered your carbine, shuffled past him into the chow tent, and ate eggs that tasted like sand.
But you were right. Something terrible did happen to Whitney. The sand took him in the end, swallowed up his bleeding, screaming mouth.
Beirut was where you learned that sand had a voice. It was usually sly and sussurating and sibilant, but it could scream, too, howl with a thousand untold furies. It held thirty centuries of secrets beneath its lashing tongue and behind its teeth, and it wasn't always quiet. It was a shrieking dervish on that morning in 1983, when the barracks exploded with a thunderclap and sent bunks and body parts flying. There was a sandstorm that morning, and the sand decided to sing.
You could hear it as you blundered your way through the rubble of the barracks with your carbine clutched in gritty, blood-streaked hands. It was the only thing you could hear in the immediate aftermath of the explosion. The pressure from the blast had concussed your eardrums, and everything else was muffled and indistinct, words spoken underwater in a dream. But that scream was unmistakable, shrill and triumphant as the sand scoured exposed faces and open wounds. It was the sound of victory.
You found Whitney twenty yards from his bunk, and even with sand and smoke in your eyes, you knew he was bad. In fact, the pragmatist in you knew he was lost, but the idealist in you who believed in Semper Fi refused to give up. You dropped to you knees in the sand and tried to fix the unfixable. His guts were exposed to the sky, wet and glistening, and every time he breathed, they shifted and quivered. His hands were waving spasmodically over the hole, fluttering ineffectually at the ragged, stringy edges of the wound, and you suspected he was trying to brush the sand away. You couldn't blame him, but it was no use. There was too much, and it was filling him like sawdust.
You grabbed his hands, and they were cold to the touch. Don't. Whitney, can you hear me? It's me, Mac.
His head never moved, but his eyes rolled in their sockets. His mouth worked, but if he was trying to say your name, all that emerged was blood, dark and sticky on his lips and chin. Not that it mattered; you couldn't hear him anyway. Recognition flickered in his eyes, and he tried to say something else, cold, maybe.
Don't talk, Whitney. It's going to be okay. You just hang in there for me. Medic! you screamed. Medic! But the other men were just as deaf as you, and the wind was the Devil's chorus, and no one came.
So you knelt in sand that shifted beneath your knees and belied the stability of the world, and watched it soak up the blood that gushed out of Whitney with every heartbeat. The ground was so parched and desperate for moisture that the blood never puddled. It was simply sucked into the earth in vampiric tribute, and you wondered if it was taken in exchange for the sand he had stolen for his girlfriend back in Minnesota. It was a superstitious idea born of combat hysteria, but it made your flesh crawl in the ninety-degree heat.
The worst part about watching Whitney die wasn't the pulsing wound, and it wasn't the helpless tears he cried as he stared at a sun blotted out by curtains of sand. It was the relentless, inevitable way the sand buried him. It filled his wound like packing gauze and swept into his open, gasping mouth. It scoured his eyes and nose, and as he choked and sputtered and grew a goatee of sand and blood on his chin, you thought about your Aunt Imogen and all those trips to the beach.
Maybe it wasn't the cigarettes that killed her, turned her lungs black and leathery and tumorous. Maybe it was the sand, creeping, sneaking sand that found its way past her lips with every drag. Maybe the sand had gotten into her and strangled her from the inside. It was dark and horrible and altogether plausible, and it prompted you to brush the sand from Whitney's face and mouth and tell him over and over again that it was going to be okay even when it wasn't.
It was twenty minutes before a medic lumbered over to inspect the damage, and by then, Whitney was long gone. His heart had shuddered to a stop, and he was cold and pale and waxy in your grip. The medic peered at him from behind goggles, grunted, and painted his forehead with an F. Fatality.
There's nothin' more you can do for this one, soldier, he told you matter-of-factly, and scuttled off in search of survivors, back bent against the buffeting wind.
You knew you should go after him, help look for other soldiers trapped in the rubble, but you didn't want to leave Whitney behind, not when your motto was, Leave no man behind, and not when you knew what would happen if you did. It would bury him completely, leave no trace for the medic to find when he came back with a bodybag and a litter. Whitney would be lost to the sand and sleep forever with his mouth full of shifting grains of gold.
So you stayed with your lost cause and brushed the sand from his face and open eyes, dusted it from his pants and boots. It was unending, and you only had ten fingers, fingers scrubbed raw by the storm. Scoop, scoop, scoop, and still the sand blanketed his legs and drifted over his stomach, its uniformity marred only by the splotch of red over his gut that was rapidly drying to maroon. You were still sweeping when a pair of soldiers shambled up with a litter between them, gas masks over their faces to protect against the storm's clawing fury.
They put him on the litter and spirited him away, and the last image you ever saw of Pfc. Stan Whitney was hours later, long after the storm had broken. You saw his socked feet hanging off the edge of a cot while an exhausted medic dumped the sand from his boots and slipped his dog tags inside to ship them home. You stared at his feet until the medic closed the tent flap, and then you stumbled into the showers and watched grains of sand and flecks of Whitney mingle in perverse fraternity as they swirled down the drain.
You've never trusted sand since, and you absolutely refuse to walk on it in bare feet. You wore loafers to the beach on your honeymoon in Acapulco. Claire thought it was funny as she pranced and pirouetted in the sand and luxuriated in the feel of damp sand between her toes, and you laughed with her because laughter shared was not madness. You laughed with her so you wouldn't scream when you woke to the rasp and scratch of sand on the hotel sheets. Claire was smart and lovely and priceless, and she didn't deserve to be tainted by your private darkness before the weight of her wedding band had settled onto her finger.
Claire was also a paradox because she was a child of the sand, raised in the California sunshine and transplanted to the cold, concrete gardens of Chicago by the demands of adulthood. She was golden as the sun, even in the bleak, bone-whiteness of winter, and you could hear echoes of the sand in her laughter. Not the harsh, grating caw of desert sand baked hard by millennia of unblinking sun, but the warm, cool wetness of surf-kissed, California sand. She tasted like salt when you kissed her, the tangy rime of a margarita glass, and when you touched her, she poured through your fingers in a seductive, slithering dance.
Claire was a windstorm, but she did not cut. She enfolded you, protected you, filled your empty spaces and moved with you through the world. She was the Sphinx and the serpent, and she was all that good and safe. You let your guard down with her, and that was a mistake, one that Stan Whitney could have warned you about if he weren't almost seventeen years dead by then. You thought she was safe, and she gave you the deepest cut of all.
They told you it was ash that rained down on you that morning as you wandered around the city under the pretense of official police business, and you were too shocked to dispute them as you picked your way over mounds of rubble that belonged seventeen years behind you. It was Beirut all over again, only bigger and louder, and as you watched dazed survivors lurch from the blast zone with soot and blood on their blank, slack faces, you kept expecting to see Whitney lying on the ground with his guts unzipped and quivering.
But there was no Whitney, not that day. There was just Claire, raining down on you in a fine mist that coated your upturned face and hands. She covered you in small, golden grains, crept into your socks and beneath your nails and into your open mouth. You swallowed her whole and breathed her in, and you kept looking for her because you couldn't believe that's all that was left, that was all she would leave behind. You looked until your eyes throbbed and burned with the effort of blinking her away. Parts of her were in a thousand uncomprehending faces, but never the whole, never the part of her that made her quintessentially Claire. That had spiraled forever beyond your reach on the plumes of smoke that rose from the crater that used to be her office building.
You went on looking until a voice in a blue uniform ordered you to go home, and then Stella drove you home, thin-lipped and silent in her chariot of bone. For a moment, you thought you'd found Claire in the tears on her dusty, hollowed cheeks, but it was just Stella, fierce, independent, bowed but unbroken Stella. You were the broken one that day, and you left pieces of yourself on the passenger seat of her car like sloughed skin. She offered to come inside with you, sweeping up the shed pieces as she came, but you couldn't. You shook your head and shut her out, and then you locked the door and sat on the couch with the TV turned off and ash and Claire all over you.
Eventually-you don't know exactly when because until this morning, the details of that day had been excised from your life with surgical precision-you wandered to the hall closet on wooden, matchstick legs and brought down Claire's beachball, the one she'd bought in Acapulco, the one she'd joked about being your first joint purchase. You carried it back to the couch and sat with it on your lap, the child you'd never discussed and would never have,
It was vinyl and red and white and orange and green, and it was filled with her breath. You rested your cheek against its smooth surface and told yourself that it still smelled like her perfume and the coconut oil sunblock she smeared on her skin to prevent sunburns. You pretended not to hear the sly, chuckling slither of desert sand as it slid from one side to the other.
What you told Ivanov's last victim was true enough; you kept that ball because it was all that remained of Claire, but you've never told anybody the whole truth, not even a woman who's only breathing because her brain doesn't realize she's dead. You can't. It's too monstrous, a child's fairy tale run amok. It's a truth a man of science would never abide, and yet, you cannot let it go.
You still have that beach ball because you're afraid to open the valve. Claire's ghost might rush past your face, warm and stale and smelling of vinyl and mothballs and old despair. The last of her would slip from your life on a puff of air, and you wouldn't even see her go. Or maybe there would be nothing in it but sand, soft, California sand that would explode from the ball like a genie unleashed, never to be captured again. It would infest every inch of your life, every clean, safe place you had carved for yourself in the wake of Beirut and the crumbling of the Towers.
But that dreadful possibility hadn't occurred to you then, and it was a comfort to have something of hers so close to your dirty, gritty face. You stroked the smooth, glassy surface of the ball and told yourself that any minute now, the door would open, and she would lurch inside with dirt on her face and blood in her hair and one broken, high-heeled shoe in her hand. But she never did. The door remained resolutely closed, and the ash and Claire stayed in your hair.
You didn't want to wash her off. You wanted to keep her with you as long as you could, but when you tried to sleep in your clothes, the California sand became desert sand against your raw, unprotected skin, and you wound up dancing a jig in the darkness beside the bed as you tore off your clothes and scrubbed blindly at the darning needles underneath your skin. You barked your shin against the bathroom door and almost took a header into the shower, and then you stood there in the dark and shivered like a drunk, arms wrapped around yourself for comfort.
When your trembling hands finally found the tap, you turned it on full bore and adjusted it until the water scalded your back and shoulders, and then you stood beneath the stream with your eyes screwed shut so you wouldn't have to see Claire washing down the drain with an undignified gurgle. But you saw it anyway. The Marine in you wouldn't let you shirk your duty, and it made you look, made you acknowledge what you were doing.
You didn't want to let her go, even if she was in pieces, so you tried to scoop her up, gather her in your hands, but she slipped through your wet, grasping fingers. You could only sit slumped on the shower and let the water drip into eyes that had forgotten how to blink. That was the first and only time you fell apart, and then you pulled the plug and built the walls to keep the sand out.
Except the sand had found another way in, through his friends and colleagues. One by one, it had worn them away. They were all jagged now, whittled to the bone, and in Aiden's case, it hadn't even left that. Just white teeth against blackened bone and a pile of ash for the casket that had been so discreetly closed at her service. He wondered now and again if her father visited the grave with flowers, stoop-shouldered and grey and fading quietly into death without a whimper. Maybe he carried the sand home on his shoes and in the cuffs of his pants, where it cut grooves into his face and thinned him to tired eyes and old bones.
Danny had certainly carried it home, though he wasn't sure where and when it had found him. Maybe it had been Aiden's parting gift to an old friend, or maybe it had been castoff from the bat used to fracture Louie Messer's skull in two places. Danny had always been harder than the others, tempered by hard knocks and the looming shadow of police surveillance, but now there was no softness at all, no light on his face or in his eyes. He was hard, brutal angles inside ragged, ill-fitting clothes that needed washing, and his eyes were wary and shuttered.
And then there was Stella. If he wanted, he could turn her head and see her beside Flack, holding his limp hand in her warm, scarred one. He knew how the sand had gotten into her: It had embedded itself underneath the skin of her nails when she'd sliced her fingertips to ribbons in her bathtub. It was inside her now, and it had hardened her from the inside out, made her bitter and irritable, a queen of ice and glass.
Now it had come for Flack. There had been no subtlety this time, no finesse. It had simply ripped him open and settled into the open, pulsating wound. Just like Whitney.
You thought it was Whitney at first. The explosion bent time, turned it backward into the past in a terrible, warbling loop, and when you stepped over the smoking rubble and saw him lying there, he was wearing Whitney's face. Suddenly, it was 1983 again, and you were dumb and green and scared shitless in some shithole called Beirut. You dropped to your knees and watched his eyes roll to white, turning inward to the next life while he unmoored from this one with every beat of his heart.
You told him he would be all right, and your mouth burned with the lie because it was the same thing you told Whitney before simple biology made you a liar. You made a promise history showed you couldn't keep, and you bet it all on bottled water and a borrowed shoelace. You told the lie over and over again in the hope that repetition would make it real, Peter Pan wishing life into a dying fairy whose light was guttering, smothered beneath a curtain of dust.
You know what the worst part is, Mac, the part that twists in your gut like fresh shrapnel? You weren't trying to save Flack in the building. The truth is, you never saw him. You saw Stan Whitney, and you were trying to unthread the past. That's why you stuffed a piece of Flack's torn coat into the wound. To keep the sand out.
He looked into Flack's room, and the angle of light distorted the image. Flack's face doubled and trebled, and then it was Whitney's, pale and dead and covered in sand. He closed his eyes and opened them again, and the illusion was gone, but only for a moment. Another blink, and Whitney was there again.
He gritted his teeth and scrubbed his face with his hands. The skin was raw and chapped, and he winced. Flack, he thought fiercely. Flack, Flack, Flack. That's Flack in there, not Whitney. Whitney is dead and has been since 1983, and nothing will ever change that.
He stood with a creak of tendon and popping vertebrae and went into Flack's room. His shoes were loud on the scuffed linoleum. Flack, they reprimanded him sharply. Flack.
Stella started at his approach. "Mac," she greeted him wearily. Her voice was hoarse and grating. She stifled a yawn with the back of her hand.
Her voice is full of sand, he thought nonsensically. "Take a break, Stella. I'll watch him for a while."
Watch who? countered a cynical voice inside his head.
Flack, he told himself. I'll watch Flack.
Stella shook her head. "No, Mac, I'm good," she insisted stubbornly, and promptly yawned again.
He rested his hand on her shoulder and flinched at the hard spar of bone beneath his palm. Too thin. Too thin. She's scored and whittled just like Aiden's father and Danny. "Stella," he began more firmly.
She cut him off with a ruthless slice of her palm. "Dammit, Mac, I said no," she snapped, and cast a guilty, sidelong glance at Flack, who did not stir. "I'm not leaving him," she finished quietly.
"Nobody said anything about leaving," he answered reasonably. "I just thought you might like a chance to freshen up and grab some more coffee."
Her pinched face softened at the mention of coffee, and she offered him a bleary smile. "I could go for that," she conceded, and ran her fingers through her hair. She got up with a grimace. "I'll be back in a few. You'll call me if-,"
"You have my word."
"You're a good one, Mac," she said softly, and reached out to rub his shoulder.
Good ones don't obscure the faces of the living with the faces of the dead, don't draw on fresh wounds to heal old ones that have already scabbed over and toughened to leathery, knurled scar tissue.
Flack, chided Stella's shoes as she walked away. Flack, Flack, Flack.
The closing of the door blocked it out, but only momentarily. Then it was taken up by the rhythmic beep of the cardiac monitor. Flack, Flack, Flack into infinity.
He sat in the chair, and it was still warm with lingering body heat. Like radiant heat off the desert hardpan, he thought, and the sand in his shoes washed over his toes in gleeful, silky-fingered agreement.
He sat with his elbows propped on his thighs and studied Flack. His face was cool and pale, wax fashioned into human form.
It wasn't like that this morning, said the voice of self-recrimination inside his head. It was bright and animated and full of cocksure vitality. Sure, he bitched about being called in on a Sunday morning, but he ate his bear claw with gusto in the car on the way to the scene, and he turned his face to the sun through the passenger window. Now that you think about it, there's probably some frosting smeared on your center console. Flack's enthusiasm gets a little messy when it comes to food. Hey, maybe you can bag it and take it back to the lab with the rest of the evidence.
He's too young to be lying here with a tube up his nose. He should be out eyeing pretty girls and reveling in his youth, not teetering scant inches from the end and reliving your nightmares. Because that's exactly what he's doing. He went down because the sand needed another way in, a path under the walls of stoicism you've built around yourself. So it put on Stan Whitney's face, and Flack's still wearing it. It may never come off.
He blinked, and Stan Whitney was in the bed again.
Flack, he told himself. It's Flack.
Flack! Flack! Flack! the cardiac monitor agreed with manic enthusiasm, but the face of the man in the bed did not change.
He stood up in the hopes that a change of perspective would dispel the illusion, exorcise the ghost that lived beneath Don Flack's skin. But Whitney refused to leave. Mac gripped Flack's hand in his own.
"Flack," he said, and wondered why the name suddenly felt so foreign inside his mouth. "Flack, if you can hear me, squeeze my hand." The sand inside his shoes shifted in greedy anticipation.
Mac Taylor closed his eyes and waited.