Read Online Taji's Syndrome by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro - Free Book Online

are stuck in this, too,” Harper said, in order to say something.
    “They were going to the Ellinghams for a drink,” Susan corrected him. “But who knows? it might go on long enough for them to sit here the way we’re doing.”
    “They’ll have it on the news. The cops will keep the traffic diverted,” said Harper with more faith than certainty.
    The air in the car was getting cooler, but no one wanted to mention it yet. Only Grant, locked away in his relentless mind, accommodated it to the extent that he stopped unzipping his jacket and instead ran his thumbnail down the interlocking bits of metal.
    One of the ambulances hurried back the way it had come, all lights on and the siren on screech. A few of the other cars honked their horns at it, whether in derision or support was a matter of conjecture.
    “When we get home, I’m going to call Jarvis and tell him I’d like to help if they’ll let me, if there’s anything I can do.” Harper’s voice was distant, the words coming slowly. “I don’t want to worry you or upset you, Susan, but I have to do it.”
    “You do what you have to do,” said Susan in a constricted tone of voice. “I don’t want to know about it.”
    Harper sighed, and let himself be distracted by the sudden return of the second ambulance, this time with a police escort. “I can’t believe that Christmas was day before yesterday.”
    “Some Christmases aren’t real Christmasy,” said Mason, hoping he would not cry. He had wept for a week before Kevin died, so wasted and pale, with machines and tubes turning him into something as alien as a being from another planet. He had wept the night it had finally ended. Now he did not want to cry anymore.
    “Next year we’ll do something better,” said Harper, pain and determination in his words. “Let’s go to Hawaii, or to Florida, somewhere it’s warm and Christmas looks like a midsummer fair.”
    “That’s next year,” said Susan, but with less criticism than before.
    “We’ll do something that won’t remind us. That will be a start. Lots of people have holidays that have bad things associated with them,” Harper said with deliberate simplicity. “That doesn’t mean that the holidays were bad, or have to stay bad, but that something bad happened on one.” He hesitated. “Remember that Phil’s brother was killed in that plane crash the day before Thanksgiving five years ago. Phil still has Thanksgiving and . . .”
    When no one said anything more, Susan regarded Grant with curiosity and worry. “Can you leave the zipper alone?” she asked, though she got no response and expected none.

—Sylvia Kostermeyer—

    ONCE IN a while San Diego was visited by a major storm, a grey, vicious beating from wind and water that drove everyone indoors and made the streets unsafe, that drove the camp-dwelling Latin American detainees into the crowded Immigration Service Holding Station where frustration and despair often led to violence.
    “How many of them are sick?” asked Sylvia, making sure that her California Board of Public Health and Environmental Services badge was clearly visible on her lapel.
    “Old sick or new sick?” asked Clifford Gross, who had been working for the Immigration Service for thirty years, his medical oath long since abrogated in favor of bureaucratic survival.
    “I mean sick, period. Public health sick,” Sylvia declared, her patience already running thin.
    “Well, you can figure that eighty percent of them are undernourished in some way, that seventy percent have some kind of parasites on them, that another seventy percent have some other chronic health problem, such as low-level allergies. Not long ago we ended up with a genuine, full-blown case of rabies. Tell me what you’re looking for and we’ll see if we’ve got any.”
    “I’ve been looking over your reports,” Sylvia said, deliberately taking an indirect approach. “I’ve noticed that you have had an increase in toxic waste syndrome,