3point8

By Michael Melilli

I’ve heard that when you’ve lost everything, you finally see who you really are. If that’s true, then I’m not sure I like the thing at the core of myself.

It scares me.

I’ve lost my wife. She’s not dead, but she might as well be—locked in a coma that she’ll never be free from. My daughter is gone too—taken from me before I even had the chance to hold her.

They told me she’s dead, but I’m not so sure anymore.

I’ve started seeing things, dark creatures, I feel their taint in the air and the way they make the world feel off . . . wrong. Everyone says it’s all in my mind, that it’s just grief. They say I’m overwhelmed by the sorrow and the loss and that someday it’ll all be better again.

Maybe they’re right, or maybe I’m just losing my mind. These things I’m seeing can’t be real; monsters aren’t supposed to exist.

But if they do, then they have my little girl.

If there’s even a chance that my daughter is still alive, then I need to find her. No matter what anyone says. No matter what it takes.

No matter what kind of man it turns me into.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inkshares
• Release date: Sep 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781942645184

Michael Melilli

Michael attended Chapman University in Orange, California, where he earned a BFA in Film/TV Writing and Directing. He went on to work for various film and television production companies—including the Jim Henson Company—before landing at PlainJoe Studios in Corona, California. He serves as the Director of Environmental Design and helps to tell stories within physical spaces from restaurants to dynamic office spaces to themed children’s facilities and even high profile immersive attractions. In addition to having circumnavigated the globe and having an almost unhealthy obsession with Batman, Michael is an avid gamer and consumer of story in any form. He currently lives in Corona, California, with his wife Jaimee.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Three point eight ounces, that’s all that’s left of my daughter.

All my hopes and dreams, the sum potential of a human life, reduced to a minuscule container of ash. But even that’s not true. We call them ashes, but they’re not, not really.

When a body is cremated, after it’s passed through a two-thousand-degree fire, all that’s left behind are bone fragments, which are then crushed into a fine sand. We don’t have ashes sitting in the urns on our mantels. We don’t scatter ashes into the wind or sprinkle them over the deep blue sea. The returned remains of our loved ones aren’t ash; they’re dust. Pulverized bone ground down into near nothingness. An entire life reduced to nothing but a fine powder.

Of all the lies I’ve uncovered these past ten weeks, this is the one that I can’t seem to get out of my mind.

There’s no reason to fixate on this. It doesn’t matter what’s sitting in the urn. Ash or sand can’t become bone, and bone can’t become flesh, and my daughter can’t be brought back from this tiny pile of grit. Even if there were a way, a magic potion or some miraculously advanced technology, she’d still be lost to me. Because this isn’t my daughter. These aren’t her earthly remains.

These three point eight ounces of sand are a lie.

I don’t know who they came from, if they even came from anyone at all, but I refuse to let go of them. They may not be my daughter, but I still need them. I need them to remind myself of the lies and the deceit. I need them to remind me of what was taken from me and what’s still out there somewhere. I need them to remind me of the family that they destroyed.

I need them to remind me that it’s worth risking anything to get my daughter back. No matter what it takes.

Am I losing myself? Surely. A little more of the person I was seems to crumble away every day. I’ve never been a violent man. Never been in a fight. Never came leaping from my car to scream at someone who’d cut me off at a red light. My wife once said I was a strong but gentle man with a kind heart. It’s better she can’t see this, can’t see who I’ve been forced to become.

A gentle man wouldn’t dream of smashing another man’s head into a concrete sidewalk until his skull cracked. Continuing long after the cries of pain and pleading have stopped. Long after he’s told me where my little girl has been taken. Not stopping till there’s nothing recognizable left.

A gentle man wouldn’t do the things I’ve done.

They’re the ones who did this to me. Who wiped out my family and destroyed my life. Who pushed me to this place. They’re out there somewhere. I know that now. Swirling in the darkness between places, bloated by their feelings of superiority to the human race while they watch us. While they witness us struggle and fight to survive, to build something in this life.

They watch and they mock and they jeer because they know, deep in the charred fissures of their broken souls, that everything we do is for them. All our building, creating, inventing. All of it is for them. The more comfortable we are, the easier it is for them to take us, to consume us, to break us.

We’re building the ramp that will lead us into the slaughterhouse.

Well, let them gloat. Let them scoff and mock and jeer. Because I’m coming for them, and when I get there, I won’t be the gentle man with a kind heart that my wife knew. No, I’ll be a broken man with nothing left to lose, the man they forged. A man who wants nothing more than to catch them so he can beat them till their flesh splits to the bone. A man who will crush and pulverize every piece of their skeletons to dust while they still live. A man who dreams of hearing their desperate screams of pain and takes pleasure in knowing that they may feel half of the pain he carries with him daily.

I’ll destroy them one by one till I have my daughter back. I’ll see how much dust they can be reduced to . . . and I won’t stop till I get her back.

No matter what it takes . . .

10 WEEKS TILL DUE DATE

MONDAY

When you live in a hospital, alarms are what you dread most.

What’s unbelievably cruel is that alarms go off constantly: all day, all night, at all hours. The harsh beeps, the shrill rings, the piercing sirens that sound from nowhere.

Almost as bad are the announcements over the PA system. Alarms spoken in indecipherable languages and codes known only to the nurses and doctors. You listen desperately for a room number or a floor, praying it’s not one you know. When it is, you hold your breath while you wait for the door to fly open.

It doesn’t matter how often I go through this; my heart still stops every time.

I’ve lived in this hospital for the last five weeks, ever since they transferred my wife here. It’s become a second home, a place that I’m actually comfortable in—aside from the alarms. Sometimes I even forget that the two of us used to live somewhere else. The timeless passing of the days in this place seems to be all I’ve ever known.

We always knew we’d end up here, but not this soon and not like this.

Five weeks ago, my wife got a headache. Nothing unusual in and of itself—she suffered from them on a regular basis—so she went to lie down. When I came to check on her, she had a difficult time speaking, her words slow and thick, like she was having trouble pushing them out of her mouth.

I rushed her to the ER, where they put us in a room and told us they were going to run some tests as soon as possible. The hours passed as we stared at bland institutional walls and listened to the whir of machinery. Every now and then, a nurse would pop her head in to let us know that it wouldn’t be much longer.

My wife eventually drifted off to sleep. While she slept, I perched on a barely padded chair in the corner. I squirmed and writhed, shifting my weight constantly in a vain attempt to find comfort on something that was just a step up from a folding chair.

Eventually they came, reconfigured my wife’s bed, then rolled her out the door and asked me to wait. They reassured me that she wouldn’t be gone long, and I had to bite back the urge to scream. To remind them that even five minutes was too long in a place where time seemed to slow to a crawl while worry threatened to spill over into panic. Five minutes was an eternity in a white room with an uncomfortable chair and no answers.

I tried to sleep but couldn’t. I even abandoned the chair and tried lying on the floor. I stared up at the ceiling tiles, finding figures and shapes within their uneven surfaces while the chill from the cheap vinyl flooring crept into my bones.

Less than an hour later, the door opened again, but I felt like I’d been on the floor for days. As if I’d taken root and fused with the taupe tiles, becoming one with the monolithic building itself. Cold and dispassionate, a silent witness to unending organic rot and decay.

The doctor explained what they’d found in the voice that all medical professionals seemed trained to employ. Slow, deliberate, and clear, but most of all calm. Nerve-rackingly calm in a way that didn’t fit with the words themselves. Someone pronouncing judgment on your future should never be so calm.

The doctor may have been unemotional, but every word filled me with terror. Bleeding in the brain. Likely an aneurysm. Not huge, but large enough to warrant surgery. They were working on scheduling it now.

Then more waiting.

They decided they needed to move her to another facility, somewhere that would be better able to handle her surgery. The nurse suggested I go home and get some personal items because we’d be in the hospital at least a few days. Before I left, I kissed my wife gently on the forehead and told her I loved her. She whispered the same words back to me.

It was the last time I’d hear her voice.

Over the days that followed, I found myself overwhelmed by anger and guilt. Anger for not being there with her when it happened. Guilt for taking extra time at home to grab a snack, take a shower, and send a few work e-mails, all while her last conscious moments were slowly ticking away.

I should have been with her at the end.

My haul from home consisted of a backpack and duffel stuffed with personal items. A few changes of clothes, toiletries, my laptop, both of our e-readers, and my wife’s stuffed monkey she’d had since childhood. The polka dots were faded and the stitching loose, but Monkey went wherever my wife went, and it was the one thing I knew she’d want.

I hauled the bags into the hospital and gave the nurse on duty my name. She started her search, going through the motions like she did hundreds of times every shift, but this time something different happened. I could see it in her eyes, that slight twitch as she reread a line. The blank expression she suddenly locked over her features. I knew. I knew, I knew, I knew, but I pushed it down, away, out of my mind. I refused it.

A doctor appeared and led me to his office. He explained that the aneurysm had burst as they were prepping her for surgery. He told me that while my wife wasn’t dead, she was in a coma with almost no chance of recovery. He offered his condolences calmly, again in the emotionless voice I was coming to know so well. I could tell he’d had conversations like this many times before.

Now we have to think about the baby, he continued.

The baby. Our baby. My daughter. My first thought was that I’d most likely be raising her on my own, that my wife had left me alone to do a job meant for two, and life as I knew it was over. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t work and raise a child without my wife’s help. Why couldn’t this happen before she got pregnant?

I’ll never forgive myself for thinking that first.

The doctor explained that the baby could survive. They’d have to try to hold off on delivery for as long as possible. My wife’s pregnancy was only at week twenty-five. For every week we delayed, the baby would develop more, making it more viable. We just had to hold on, wait, and pray.

That’s how I came to live in a hospital. That’s how the expanse of my world shrank down to one building where time stalled.

That’s where I was when the alarms began blaring.

***

When I found out I was going to be a father, I immediately began to imagine all the big moments to come over the next year.

I’d pictured the doctor’s visits, seeing our baby on the ultrasound and listening in wonder to the heartbeat. I imagined the nursery, what it would take to tear out my old office and turn it into a place where our child would grow. I imagined my wife waddling into the living room and telling me it was time. Then the sitcom-like scramble for bags and wallets and keys and phones before the drive to the hospital. Watching for cop cars and pushing through lights I should have stopped at while my wife took deep, quick breaths in the seat next to me.

A nice, tidy family-comedy pregnancy . . . but that’s not what happened.

The alarm went off, and a nurse burst into the room. She checked some readouts, consulted some numbers, then yelled something out into the hall. A second later, a doctor appeared, trailed by more nurses.

Your daughter is showing signs of fetal distress, the doctor explained to me, calm as always. We need to get her out now.

Will she be OK? I asked.

We’ll do everything we can.

In an instant, the bed was lowered, equipment either unhooked or relocated, and they began wheeling my wife out the door. I stood to follow, but a nurse stopped me.

You need to stay here, she instructed before closing the door. Once more leaving me in an empty room to wait.

***

What are you supposed to do when your wife is being cut open and your baby brought into this world?

The human mind is an incredible thing. The pure potential contained in this lump of matter is astounding. Three pounds of water and nerve cells hold the potential to change the world. Everything ever invented, every piece of art, every word written, and every war fought have all sprung from this inexplicable organ.

There are times, though, when the situation is even more than this mighty collection of gray matter can process. For me, that was now, and my brain responded the only way it could . . . it shut down.

I didn’t pass out or faint or anything dramatic like that. I simply stopped functioning on any level beyond the basic systems needed to keep me alive. I just stood there, lost, while my brain attempted to come to terms with what had just happened.

Eventually I rebooted. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been standing, but I did know that my feet were beginning to ache. I took a seat on the plastic upholstered bench nearby while I thought about what I should do next.

What could I do? Was there anything? There had to be something, some way to help. I couldn’t just sit here while my wife and child were in danger. How would I live with myself if I didn’t do anything?

I felt my brain seizing up again, a fog filling it and making it impossible to form or connect thoughts. I lost track of time, of where I was and what was happening.

The door opened a moment later, and a new doctor stepped into the room. She caught sight of me, then checked the digital tablet she was carrying.

Judd Mara? she asked.

The sound of my name snapped me out of the fog as it thumped into the room. I hated my name, always had. The sound of it is awkward and harsh and bulky. It drops onto the tongue and sits there, a heavy mass that’s all but impossible to expel. Judd. Thud. Crud. My classmates had a field day with my name back in elementary school.

Um, yeah, that’s me.

And your wife is Madelyn Mara?

Yeah, that’s her.

Madelyn. There was a name that danced off the tongue. Plus, it wasn’t fair how well it went with my last name, Madelyn Mara. It sounded like the secret identity of a noble superhero.

I called her Mads for short, just to bring her down to my level. She thought it was cute.

Do you mind if I scan your bracelet? she asked as she stepped forward and extended the tablet.

The hospital bracelet had been the key to my wife the last few weeks, the only way to access her, her room, and her information. It was the only way I had to show who I was and prove that Mads and I were actually married. In the hospital, it defined me. It made me . . . me.

A red target traced my skin, and the tablet beeped as it found the barcode. A second beep followed, and my identity was returned to me once more.

Thank you, the doctor said as she took a seat on a nearby stool. I know it’s annoying, but we like to make sure we protect our patients’ information.

Yeah, sure, of course.

I’m Dr. Allison, she continued, extending her hand. I shook it limply. I’m sure you’re pretty worried right now.

No shit, I answered with a staccato exhale I’d meant to be a laugh.

Totally understandable, which is why I’m here. I’m going to explain to you what’s happening, talk about what’s next, and answer any questions you may have. Sound good?

Yeah, that’d be nice.

I warmed up to Dr. Allison the more she talked. She wasn’t using the practiced voice I’d become so accustomed to. She was frank and straightforward, and she checked to make sure I was