“I’ll pass,” she said. “I don’t want to get drunk. I want to stay sober so I can look at you with clear eyes.”
Kevin laughed. “To each his own. But I think Virginia is being a little overdramatic. It’s not like I was that close to death. I just chose an inopportune time to take a little nap, that’s all.”
“Yeah, right,” Cait shot back. “I’ve heard this story a hundred times and I’ve talked to the doctors. They said if the rescue had taken five minutes longer, you would have died right there in the chair, so don’t give me that macho male crap!” She smiled as she said it, still amazed at their incredible good fortune.
Cait knew she had lost a lot on that couch—shooting her brother less than twenty-four hours after learning of his existence had opened a hole in her heart that would never completely heal—but she knew also she had had no choice in the matter, that Milo Cain had been irreparably broken and would not have stopped until everyone inside the house was dead, and that made all the difference in the world.
She felt sadness for what she had done but no guilt.
And while the sadness of losing her brother might never disappear, Cait understood she had gained something as welclass="underline" a mother who would now be in her life forever. Virginia had already made plans to sell the house in Everett and move to Tampa permanently, and was on her way to becoming friends not just with Kevin, but with Cait’s adoptive mother as well.
Milo had miraculously survived the shooting despite the delay in receiving medical attention, but was presently hospitalized and in a coma, and would require months of convalescence, maybe years. In any event, according to the Suffolk County district attorney, he would never see the outside of a prison again. The full extent of Mr. Midnight’s crimes, of his horrific brutality, was only beginning to be uncovered, and the D.A. assured Virginia and Cait that there was already more than enough evidence to keep Milo under lock and key for the rest of his life.
Cait blinked and smiled at Kevin. She squeezed her mother’s hand. “You know what? I’ve changed my mind. Maybe I’ll have that drink after all.”
EPILOGUE
Footsteps echoed as the nurse moved away, waddling down the shadowy corridor of the prison infirmary like an overweight duck. Still in a coma two months after being shot in the face, Milo was unable to move a muscle, not even to open his one remaining eye. What the others didn’t realize, however, what they failed to understand, was that he could still hear and comprehend. In fact, although it had changed, he still possessed an acute awareness of his surroundings.
Milo paid particular attention to the doctors, who proclaimed, with their stuffy country-club Ivy-League medical school wisdom, that he would likely never regain consciousness, and even if he did, would remain forever in a vegetative state, paralyzed from the neck down, the result of a broken vertebra suffered from falling to the floor after being shot. It seemed a dismal future, and in those first agonizing days and weeks after the ill-fated confrontation in Everett, Milo had wallowed in utter solitary despair. He was unable to talk or to communicate in any way, a situation that left him desperate to bring an end to his misery, through death if necessary.
Not that he had any way of making that happen.
And then something strange and wonderful had occurred, almost mystical in its revelatory significance.
About three weeks after the Everett fiasco, a nurse had been bustling around his lonely hospital room, changing his bed linens. She was ignoring him completely, of course, not that Milo minded. What would she possibly be expected to say to an unresponsive lump of human tissue huddled under threadbare prison hospital blankets, especially when that lump of tissue had been “Mr. Midnight,” one of Boston’s most notorious serial killers?
Milo knew he would remember the following moment with the fondness and clarity other people reserved for their weddings, or the birth of their children. The coma and brain damage the gunshot wound had caused hadn’t eliminated the mental movies he’d been subjected to his entire life; if anything, their frequency and severity had grown steadily stronger and more vivid, and as the nurse worked, he felt one blast into his head.
The nurse was daydreaming about her boyfriend, recalling their previous night’s sexual encounter with what Milo considered admirable enthusiasm. He joined her in recalling the intensity of her climax, and then, without so much as a single conscious thought on his part, pushed a suggestion into her unsuspecting brain.
The nurse dropped immediately to the floor, panting and moaning and thrashing in a thirty-second orgasm. Afterward, she lay still for a moment. Then she rose, embarrassed and confused, but thankful no one besides the inanimate lump of tissue had been present to witness her carnal display. The nurse had hurriedly finished changing the sheets and then departed.
Just like that, Milo realized he had not lost everything. He had not come close to losing everything. In fact, it seemed he had gained something of extreme significance. He immediately stopped yearning for death and began testing his newfound ability.
And the more Milo tested the limits of his power, the more he discovered there weren’t many. Maybe there weren’t any.
What had once seemed like the ultimate prison sentence—the solitary confinement of his coma—now struck Milo Cain as nothing more than an opportunity to expand his consciousness…and his gift. Because he was free—truly free—in all the ways that mattered.
And now he was unstoppable.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Allan Leverone is the author of six novels in the horror and thriller genres, including the Amazon Top 25 overall paid bestselling thriller, The Lonely Mile. He has also authored three horror novellas, two of which have been released through the DarkFuse limited edition collectible novella series.
Allan is a 2012 Derringer Award winner whose short fiction has been featured in Needle: A Magazine of Noir, Shotgun Honey, A Twist of Noir, Morpheus Tales and many other print and online magazines, as well as numerous anthologies.
He lives and works in Londonderry, New Hampshire, with his wife of thirty years, three children and one beautiful granddaughter. He loves hearing from readers. Connect at www.allanleverone.com, on Facebook/AllanLeveroneauthor, and on Twitter, @AllanLeverone.
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Copyright
First Edition
Mr. Midnight © 2013 by Allan Leverone
All Rights Reserved.
A DarkFuse Release
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