Star Harbor Nights

Sullivan's had originally been a blue collar bar in a blue collar neighborhood. The neighborhood had gentrified a bit, and the remainder of its original clientele had gone from blue to gray, but it had managed to keep most of its flavor.

Val's father had been a regular at Sully's, back in his day. The older patrons all knew and liked her. So did the younger ones, in fact. There was just something likeable about the tall, blonde woman with the distinctly Nordic good looks and her blue eyes that sparkled like sunlight on the water.

She could be found at Sully's nearly every day. That wasn't too surprising, as her apartment was directly above it, but she'd picked the apartment because of the bar, rather than the other way around. She liked the place as much as she did the people. It had the feel of history about it.

Also, her job gave her a lot of down time between unpredictable busy periods. She'd learned early on in her chosen vocation that having a place to unwind and relax instead of just sitting around waiting to be called was crucial.

When that call came, she jumped and looked down at the pager on her belt. It hadn't actually done anything. It wasn't even activated. Like an exquisite work of art, its sole function in the world was to be looked at.

"Okay, guys, I've got to take off," she announced. "Got a pick-up to do."

"Hey, when you going to get a real job?" Earl asked.

"I have a real job, Earl," she said. She didn't take offense at the question. For one thing, she'd heard it too many times to be bothered by it that much, anyway. For another, she knew Earl was, in his own way, trying to look out for her. "What I do is very important."

"What do you do?" Sam, another one of the bar's regulars, asked.

"She's a bike messenger," Earl said.

"I'm a motorcycle courier," she said, at the same time.

"Ain't nothing wrong with that," Sam said, lifting his bottle in recognition. "The world needs couriers. Computers can't change that. You can't get a heart from the hospital to the airport in a, what have you, an e-mail attachment."

"The world needs ditch-diggers, too, but that don't mean we should all drop what we're doing and grab a shovel," Earl said. "Our Val here, she could have been the one at the hospital putting the heart into some guy. She could have been whatever she wanted. She had a full-ride scholarship to KSU, and she majors in... what did you major in, Val, the first time around?"

"Social work," she said.

"Right, right. She's majoring in social work, and then she does a semester abroad in Sweden or some place."

"Norway," she corrected.

"Right, right, and what that has to do with social work, I'll never know," Earl went on. "And when she gets back, she drops out, and starts going to Everett Community College to study Mortuary Sciences. Mortuary Sciences!"

"Nothing wrong with that, neither," Sam said.

"Nothing wrong with that?" Earl echoed. "You mean to tell me, your Jenny-the big-shot-lawyer comes home for Christmas and tells you that she don't want to be a lawyer no more, she wants to work in a funeral parlor with dead stiffs who've been killed, and you'd be okay with it?"

"Yeah, I would," Sam said. "It's a legitimate undertaking."

"I'm not joking," Earl said. "How would you handle it in conversation? 'Oh, my kid's a doctor.'... 'Oh, my kid's a banker.'... and then there's, 'Oh, my kid runs a funeral parlor.'"

"Beats telling them she's a lawyer," Sam said. "Hey, maybe I'll start telling people that, anyway."

"Oh, this guy... what am I going to do with him?" Earl moaned, rolling his eyes. "But anyway, she's not even an undertaker. She puts in all the time at community college, gets her degree or certificate or whatever, gets like an internship at a big funeral parlor, and decides after like a week that it's not for her."

"It was a little more involved than that," Val said.

"So what happened?"

"I just felt that there were better uses for my education."

"Running all over the place on a motorcycle is a better use for a mortician's license and half a social work degree?" Earl asked.

"I'd explain it to you if I could, Uncle Earl," Val said.

"Don't you Uncle Earl me, I'm not such a soft touch as all that. I promised your dad I'd look out for you, and by God that's..."

"Hey, ease off," Sam said. "Kid's doing what she likes, she's doing all right for herself. That's just the way this generation is. Grown men wearing their hair long, playing video games, and eating sugar cereal and watching cartoons... there's worse things than that. If I thought I could have got away with it, that's how I would have spent my thirties."

"And what does that have to do with anything?" Earl asked, slapping his hand on the bar in frustration.

"I'm just sayin'," Sam said. "So where you off to, kid?"

"As it happens, a hospital," Val said.

"See? Kid's doin' good," Sam said.

Val's bike was a red and gold custom monster with the image of a snarling wolf's head frozen between the handle bars. If you saw it by itself, or alongside Val but without any other frame of reference, it looked fairly sleek. It was only when you realized it was proportioned for someone of Val's size that you saw what a beast it truly was, though that didn't detract from its beauty. People who knew such things would have recognized the customized bike as the work of one of the famous west coast masters of that trade. They would have been wrong, but that was its level of quality.

The mid-afternoon traffic wasn't too heavy. She came to a stop at a lighted intersection. There was no sense of urgency about the call, otherwise, she would simply have ignored the red lights. She became aware that another motorcycle had pulled up to a stop alongside her. She glanced over, and did a double take. It was a familiar figure in faded white racing gear, atop a slim Italian-style racing bike of the same washed-out color.

"Hey, Dwight," she said wryly. The pale figure ignored her. "Hey, you wanna race?" she goaded him cheekily.

The light turned green and she went blazing down the street with a whoop and a holler, leaving the trimmer but more sedately driven cycle in her wake. She kept the speed on all the way to her destination.

The pale figure that she called Dwight was already waiting for her when she get to the hospital, leaning against the brick work by the lobby entrance and smoking a coffin nail. His bike was parked on the sidewalk, the visored helmet hanging over the handlebar. People walked around it almost reflexively.

"Good race," he said simply when he saw her.

"Two words," Val said. "That's almost a record."

"Almost," he agreed.

She left him smoking by the doorway and headed inside. Susan was sitting behind the intake desk. She smiled and waved as she went past.

"Hello, Valerie!" Susan said, momentarily interrupting her conversation with an incoming patient.

"Hey, Susan!" Val called back. She had no idea what Susan saw when she looked at her, but she'd never questioned her presence in all the times she'd been called to the hospital.

Val headed straight for the burn ward. The first time she'd been there, she'd been following a trail based on instinct, and had got herself badly lost in the maze of hallways and stairwells. Lutheran General was housed in the oldest hospital building in Nebula City. It had been renovated many times, but never all at once. The result was that without a detailed map and a native guide, one tended to run into the problem of "you can't get there from here."

Now, she was an old pro. Quite often she was called to an O.R. or the emergency room, but her purview sent her to the burn ward more often than not. She knew the way quite well. She passed Dwight again on her way; he was just leaving a room crowded with green-scrubbed figures huddled around a patient they hadn't quite given up. She wanted to tell them not to bother, but she also knew that at a certain level, their extreme exertions were for their own benefit.

At the ward entrance, she said a quiet prayer for those who would be left behind, and then she went inside. She went over to the bed she was being called to and read the patient's chart. It wasn't, strictly speaking, necessary, but most of her pick ups were people she might never see again. She liked to know a little something about them.

Joseph Bannerman, Caucasian male, age 38, had third degree burns over ninety percent of his body, as well as internal injuries sustained in a car crash. He hadn't regained consciousness since being brought in.

She touched the patient gently on his bandaged shoulder... gently, not out of fear that she'd hurt him, but rather out of respect for the dead. After a moment, he stirred and sat up, leaving the bandages and the burned skin they'd concealed behind on the bed.

"Come on Joe, time to go," she said. Somewhere in the room, but also... in some way... far behind them, a machine let out a steady piercing tone.

"But... don't I need to check out?" he asked her.

"You kind of just did," she said with a faint smile. She lead him out of the room and back down through the maze of hallways and stairs. By the time she got to her bike, he was little more than a memory, and even to her own eyes, she appeared to be alone.

But a memory is still something, and she felt the weight of him as she rode on.

She'd barely got back on the bike when she once more felt the insistent tug at her core. It guided her to a weed-choked parking lot by an abandoned gas station, where a boy lay on his back. His hand was a mangled, bleeding mess. The scattered firecrackers around the fallen child told the story. Several erstwhile companions were still in sight, though running fast in every direction.

Val sighed, and started to reach for the boy's trembling body, but then his eyes locked with hers and she saw that he was afraid of her. Most of the people she dealt with weren't. It made her hesitate. She assayed the situation. He was bleeding badly and in shock. He was dying, but he wasn't dead.

She closed her eyes and found the spark of life within herself, mentally fanning it into a flame. She placed her hands over the boy's chest, not quite touching it.

"What exactly are you doing?" Dwight asked from behind her, in his soft, gravelly voice.

"I'm a chooser of the slain," Val said. "I choose to put this one back. He's not too far gone."

"Your prerogative," Dwight said. "He's gonna go through life with half a hand now, you know. That's not a picnic for anybody. That, and he'll still die... and who knows what he'll amount to in the meantime."

"I'm not going to sit here and play the 'What if he cures cancer?'/'What if he's the next Hitler?' game with you," Val said. "Mainly because I know you don't care about either of those things, but also because I know odds are he won't do anything more significant with his life than live it. But you know what? That's enough. Like you said... my prerogative."

"You didn't use to be this sentimental," Dwight said, and then he was gone... or at least, he was no longer specifically there.

She let out an exasperated breath. The boy had passed out completely, but she no longer felt drawn to him. She got back on her bike and rode away.

Immediately, she felt another, stronger pull.

"I knew I'd have to pay for that," she said aloud. She guided her motorcycle through the streets until she came to a grocery store. She heard the unmistakable sound of gunfire from within, and then a panicking throng came rushing out its front doors. She waded through them, and they parted around her as the pedestrian traffic coming and going outside the hospital had gone around Dwight's bike.

The front of the supermarket had cleared out, as everybody had either ran for the doors or retreated to the back. There was a uniformed police officer down on the floor, a scarlet rose blossoming on the front of his NCPD uniform. Another man in faded khakis lay slumped against the front of the counter for the in-store Bank of Everett branch.

The pull was coming from the downed officer, but there was a second and more insistent pull coming from somewhere on his chest. Val stooped low, undid the top button on his shirt, and fished out a thin silver chain with a stylized symbol that looked something like an inverted "T" hanging from it.

The officer opened his eyes and sat up, leaving his damaged body behind.

"Aren't you supposed to say, 'Well done, thou good and faithful servant?'" he asked her.

"Nah, that's what the other guy's people say," Val said. "I think we're a little late for a deathbed conversion, but if you really want to, I could ask around a little..."

"I... uh... I think I'm good," he said, laughing a bit. "So, wow... I'm... chosen?"

"You've been tapped, yeah," Val said.

"I wore the hammer, the mjolnir, but I was I never was really one hundred percent sure I believed... doesn't that matter?"

"Not to me," Val said. "I think that's the other guy's thing, too."

"I'm Glen, by the way... Glen Hansen," he said.

"Call me Val."

"That's, uh, cute," Glen Hansen said.

"It's my name," she said with a shrug. "Come on, I'll take you... onward."

Officer Glen Hansen did not fade to a memory as they approached the bike.

The deliveries took a little longer than the pick-ups had. Joe ended up somewhere fairly nondescript but pleasant. Val guessed he hadn't had any particularly strong religious affinity in life. She got tasked with a lot of those deaths when they happened to involve fire, her special affinity.

Hansen, of course, went straight to the Hall. She promised to come back and share a drink with him when she could, but in the meantime, she had people waiting for her in a more earthly sort of mead hall.

"Well, you made it back," Earl said as she came into Sully's.

"You sound surprised," she said.

"The way you zip around on that speed demon of yours? I'm surprised you don't wipe out and take out a whole sidewalk full of pedestrians. I just want you to realize that you take more than your own life into your hands every time you get on that thing," Earl said.

"I know that, Uncle Earl," Val said. "Believe me, I know that."