“Can I get you some coffee?”
Both of them jumped, looking up to see a bored-looking waitress staring down at them. She was overweight and dressed in a frumpy uniform, her hair piled messily on her head, grays breaking through the mahogany color she obviously dyed it.
“Um, yes,” Laura said, scrambling for a thought. She’d forgotten where they were. What people did there. “And a couple of slices of toast, please.”
“I’ll have a stack of pancakes,” Zach said with a smile, as if he was already pleased just imagining his order. “And a coffee too. Laura, are you sure you don’t want pancakes? I’m getting this.”
Laura shook her head no. It wasn’t the cost of the pancakes that bothered her. She didn’t want to stay here too long, and she definitely didn’t want to eat something that would sit heavy in her stomach. She needed to stay alert.
“Alright, then,” the waitress said, pouring them both out a coffee at the table and then wandering off. Laura tried to make a mental note that she was going to return with the food. It would be a good idea not to say anything incriminating or weird when the waitress was bound to drop by.
“I’m explaining,” Zach said, tapping the table as if remembering where they’d left off. “Right. Well, I first saw you solving a case – you were phasing out, having a vision, and then when you came out of it I saw you’d got some kind of idea. You were looking for a man, and you knew who he was. I saw it in your face. That kind of… the spacing out for a split second, the new realization, the figuring out how to conceal it. I know that look. I’ve worn it enough times over my life.”
Laura nodded. So far, it made sense. That must have been during the case she’d just come home from, where a man who heard the voice of his ancestor in his head was killing modern-day descendants of the man who had killed his family. A complicated case – one she would have been a long way from solving if it hadn’t been for the visions giving her a nudge in the right direction.
“Then, I saw another vision of you getting off a plane at the airport here in Washington, D.C.,” Zach continued. “After that, a vision of you entering your home. It was a very immediate vision – my head pounded afterwards. I knew you were there and you’d be ready for me when I knocked on the door.”
Laura nodded. Much of it was similar to what she’d already heard from him when he showed up and she needed proof of his abilities – but to hear it all explained in full made so much more sense. It was the same way that her visions worked.
“The headaches,” she said, leaving it as an open question. She felt almost shy, strangely. Talking about a deeply-held secret she’d only ever spilled to one person in her life, and now finding someone who could identify with what she was saying – it felt truly strange.
“Yes, with every vision,” Zach nodded. “It’s a pain, but I can tell the timing of the vision by the severity of the headache. A light ache means it’s not going to happen too soon, and a migraine means it’s happening right now. Is it the same for you?”
Laura nodded slowly, looking down into her mug of coffee. “Yes, it’s the same. It’s funny how you get used to that constant pain.”
They were interrupted again by the waitress, who placed down two plates in front of them: two slices of dry toast with a pack of butter on the side for Laura, and a pile of pancakes with a jug of maple syrup for Zach. Laura busied herself with scraping a thin quantity of butter onto the bread, even though she wasn’t fully sure she wanted to eat it after all.
“Constant?”
When she looked up, Zach had a strange expression on his face, kind of querying.
“Yes,” she said. “There’s so little time between the visions – multiple a day usually, and then only a short while between the cases when I might drop down to one a day or one every two days. Then I’m back on the road and it starts again.”
Zach frowned, re-steepling his hands thoughtfully. “You seek out the visions?” he asked. “I mean, you try to trigger them on purpose?”
“Yes, of course,” Laura frowned, but a moment later, the reality of the situation became clear to her. A terrible vision of the future, something you couldn’t control or always understand, that brought on pain – why would you want to embrace that, unless you had a very good reason? “I mean, being an FBI agent – the visions help.”
“Right,” Zach nodded. He gave a light shrug. “Unfortunately, I’ve only had a few occasions in my life when it was useful to have these visions of mine. Most of the time, all they have done was to make me aware of a disaster I couldn’t prevent. Although I am still proud of the fact that I convinced my late wife, who passed away a few years ago now, not to book a vacation to New York back in September 2001.”
Laura blinked at him. “You knew about the Twin Towers?”
He nodded sadly. “I did. I saw it before everyone else. It was truly horrific.”
“And you didn’t try to warn anyone else?” Laura demanded. A sense of anger flared in her. The senseless loss of life. Could it have been prevented? She’d never been physically connected to anyone in the attacks, and she hadn’t seen it in advance herself.
“Who would have believed me?” Zach asked softly. “A high school English teacher from some nowhere town – someone with no proof, no details. Just the knowledge that an explosion would happen somehow, sometime. I couldn’t have warned anyone even if I thought I had a chance of being heard.”
Laura tried to swallow down the indignation that wanted to overwhelm her. He was right, of course. And how many times had she been in a similar situation – knowing something would happen but powerless to really do anything about it? Even her own father’s death from cancer had been something she had seen before it happened.
“What were the other times?” she asked, instead of continuing to argue.
“Well, one of them was a little darker,” Zach said. A wry smile passed his lips, perhaps at the knowledge that 9/11 had been dark enough. “As I say, I was a high school teacher. One night I had a terrible vision of one of my female students being attacked on the school premises after hours. I realized she was signed up for a club, so I made sure to pretend I was marking papers at the school the next day and happened to hang around where the club took place as the students were leaving. I was able to step in and prevent it from happening. Of course, no one knew I had prevented it – but the man responsible was a fellow teacher, and with that knowledge, I was able to start watching him more closely. Before the end of the school year he’d been arrested and sentenced to jail time for his interest in violent films featuring young children.”
Laura felt something stir inside her heart. Although the age group was different, she’d also used her visions to protect a young girl from an abuser – little Amy Fallow, whose violent father had been poised to take her life. The fact that Zach had used his visions to undertake similar protective work put her more at ease in his presence.
“What do you think drives all of this?” Laura asked. “I know I use my visions to solve crimes and catch killers, but is that why I have them? Is there some kind of greater purpose to all of this, or is it just random? Why would we have these visions in the first place?”
Zach shook his head. “Your guess is as good as mine,” he said. “I’ve never been able to figure it out. At times it feels like a blessing, at times a curse. But as to a deeper meaning, I’ve no idea.”