THE TOWER ━ stranger things

09.

chapter nine — marvin gaye and the overflowing cup

"Let me go! Let me go!" The old woman yelled, the whites of her knuckles showing as she gripped onto the sides of the gurney she was strapped too. Sofia swallowed thickly, taking a step back as she watched the woman thrash and holler at the EMT's; her dirt caked face made her avert her gaze.

"Doris, we need you to stay calm for us, okay?" One of them spoke kindly to her. "Stay calm," They stressed while she was doing the exact opposite.

She just inhaled an entire bag of fertilizer, how the hell is she suddenly supposed to calm down? Sofia questioned. She knew the underlying sentiment was to help ease the situation, but truthfully she couldn't understand why they were speaking into the void if nothing was going to respond back in compliance.

"I have to go back! I have to go back!" Doris screamed again and Sofia grimaced at the entire interaction. Her eyes turned down to her partner Callahan's hands as they shook with fear. Have they never experienced something like this?

Working as an officer in several different states, Sofia had seen just about as much as she could. Sometimes it wasn't pretty. Sometimes images of corpses strewn across back alleyways or dead streets plagued her dreams. Sometimes grief stricken faces of mothers or fathers or children shook her awake in the middle of the night. She hated it; death, war, violence.

These hatreds were the driving force behind her obtaining citizenship and diving head first into the Police Academy when she was just twenty-five. Mateo was five and Irene had just turned three – her husband begged her not to join.

It was hard; not only because she was a woman, but also because many saw her solely as a foreigner that didn't belong. She was ridiculed by those in her cadre, and in the outside world, but she persisted. She told herself if there was one person that was going to help fix the world's problems, it'd be her. Her ancestors had their fair share of repairing a tainted community and she believed she could do the same. She had hope.

Now, fifteen years later, hope was a dying ember in the furnace of her heart. Too much of the world had been corrupted – too much for her hands to grab onto and patch over.

The EMT's carried the older women up the stairs and the two kids who made the call followed suit along with Sofia's partner. She stood back, getting one last good look at the scene. The torn open fertilizer bags made her stomach churn with a familiar feeling. She sighed, gripping the stair rail and took her first step. It hit her then – something that hadn't moved through her body in a long time. Her eyes glossed over as she froze, to others it probably would have seemed as if she was just in a daze but she had fallen into the abyss of her gift.

She heard muffled wails and then the booming symphony of sirens; fire, police, and ambulance. There was a soft whirring that washed over the sounds – like a defibrillator charging up – but it faded quickly into the sound of a steady heartbeat being monitored.

"Vasquez!" Callahan's voice pulled her out and she closed her eyes, trying to catch the rest of the vision before it left completely. To her dismay it slipped away into her subconscious and she clenched her fist in frustration before trudging up the stairs.

"Sorry, I was just looking for anything else that we might have missed." She responded once she stepped outside, meeting her partner's weary gaze. The two kids looked at her as well and she placed a hand on the girl's shoulder, "It's a good thing you called, however we can't just brush under the rug how you two found Mrs. Driscoll." She responded, dropping her arm and placing her hands on her belt.

"What in the name of Jesus just happened?" Callahan asked beside her and she sighed. In the time she'd become acquainted with her partner, she found out he had a knack for freaking out over minuscule things. Of course, their current situation hadn't been miniscule but still, it didn't even elicit that kind of response from the two young-adults standing beside them.