Out of the Black (27 page)

Ping swerved right, attempting to dislodge the wolf-man or whatever had so wronged his windshield. However, the claw-studded knobby black things at the end of its oily arms had found purchase in the crack between the hood and the windshield. Its eyes burned with what Ping sincerely hoped was reflected light. It howled, showing curving teeth and a gray worm-like tongue.

He briefly considered braking, but didn't think he'd get enough traction out of the soft soil to dislodge the beast. It released the hood with its left hand, cocked the fist back and swung it forward, shattering the cracked windshield.

Twin explosions tripped over each other, blowing more glass out of the car as Rae added her opinion to the discussion. The two shots blew out most of the windshield and showered the hood with its rough diamonds. The departing fletchettes made a much less pretty impression on the oily man-thing. It's ink-black skin parted, arm deconstructing near the shoulder, face yielding... don't want to look at that!

Then it was gone, head over claws into the rushing night air.

Ping squinted into the wind rushing through the shattered windshield. "What was that?" he shouted, glancing toward Rae.

"Don't ask me!" Rae shook her head, trying to hold the fletcher at the ready through the shuddering violence of the car's journey across Roy's yard. "Just 'cause I did more shootin' than screaming don't mean I know what's goin' on!"

Ping laughed, "Hang on!"

The car slammed into the antique cedar plank fence at the side of the yard, halfway between two posts. The fence must have indeed been antique because it disintegrated on impact. The night air filled with flying wood. Ping and Rae pulled their heads down, but no flying planks entered the car. The impact jolted through the car, rattling teeth and dislodging chips of safety glass from their clothes.

The car leaped onto the pavement. It fishtailed as it turned right, away from the street that fronted Roy's property. A contrail of fallen leaves, splinters, and dirt settled behind the accelerating car.

Behind them, at the corner of the block, a woman with a sniper rifle burst from the back of a gray microvan where she had been in position to kill anything exiting through the front gate. Turning to the side-street, she leveled the weapon at the retreating car, but her hastily fired shots missed their mark and the fleeing car made a sliding turn left onto another side street.

Swearing, she lowered the weapon and pitched it into the rear of the microvan. She slammed the hatch and sprinted to the driver's door. Inside, she pulled the microvan away from the curb and down the side street after her prey. She activated the commlink in her ear, and informed the other hunters of their target's unexpected escape.

Seconds later, the others joined the pursuit.

***

Talia hated her job. She made her way carefully through the beds, checking for trouble. As she moved, she made extra sure not to give any of the patients a chance to grab at her. Her job was monotonous, but boredom wasn't even really boredom if it was surrounded by the constant threat of messy death.

Until this year, the security ward at the hospital had been a sweet assignment. There was time for reading while nominally watching over injured drunks and people hurt running from the police for misdemeanors. The clientele back then was mostly unconscious or disabled. Occasionally, they'd even get a high profile criminal that her kids would love to hear about.

Now though, it was Harms, Harms, and more Harms. It had gotten so bad that the hospital now had a medium security ward for criminals not currently under the influence of Harmony. Of course, Talia didn't have the seniority to get on that duty regularly. Others got to read novels and sip coffee while keeping one eye on the bad and broken. Talia got the terror and the body armor.

Yep, body armor... and not the cool kind, either. Not the kind that stops bullets and looks snappy so your kids brag about it at school. No, the armor she wore was a plastic low-friction slicker and gloves to help her stay ungrabbed and unbitten by her charges.

She was almost done with this job. She was starting to take the tension home to her kids. This was
not
okay. If it were a choice between putting food on the table and snapping at the kids for every little thing, then they'd go hungry. She'd been trying for months now to transfer to more bearable work, but it was getting to the point where she was going to have to quit. Yep, tonight after work she would dig through the classifieds... but she was always so tired at night after she got the girls down for bed. Ever since Jack died, she was the only source of income for herself and the girls. She needed a job, but perhaps she didn't need this particular one.

Silence.

No mumbling, gurgling, screaming, moaning or thrashing... it was one of those times. "Hey Jeff! Mothership's hovering again!"

"What's the time?" He called back from the desk.

"Four thirty-eight in the wee hours!" She said, checking her watch. For weeks now, she and Jeff had been trying to find a pattern or any other cause for these strange syncopated pauses. So far, they hadn't figured anything out. The pauses seemed to occur randomly, not governed by a fixed period or any environmental factors. They came several times a day now, and could last from ten seconds to ten minutes. The doctors didn't have any helpful input either.

She made her way carefully but quickly back to the desk, where Jeff was waiting with a tired but amused grin. "Don't let it get to you. You should be thankful for the break."

"It's creepy, that's what it is."

"Yeah, it is that." He shook his head. "Hey, I pulled low security tomorrow... care if I gloat a bit?"

She fixed him with a murderous look.

Then the lights went out and the world went black. Though the darkness couldn't have lasted more than two seconds, it took only half of that time for Talia's mind to fill with thoughts of the supernatural. The lights flickered back to life and she was left looking into Jeff's surprised face.

"What was that?" he asked, looking around.

She shrugged. She really hated her job.

***

Chase exited the security office. At thirty, he ouldn't say he'd exactly lived his dreams. His dream of being an astronaut died at twelve when he'd first encountered calculus. He'd been nimble then, and had shifted focus quickly to policeman. Of course, he had never really pursued that much past his first failed academy entrance exam. The part-time security job he'd taken in the interim had settled into his routine and he'd just breezed through nearly a decade without ever fully waking.

When he thought about it, it distressed him- so he didn't think about it. He still had time to do what he really wanted... whatever that was. For now, his days were filled with sleep and his nights were full of the sparkling excitement that was hospital security on the graveyard shift.

Tonight had been especially weird... though come to think of it, he couldn't remember why- some kind of weird fight in the ER maybe. Though the details were hazy now, the memory of the mega-hot Fed he'd just left in the security office was not. His mind returned again to the way her red hair caught the light, the perfect way she filled out her suit. Maybe his long-term goals should involve the FBI.

He was still dreaming of the glamorous world of the Bureau when he felt it... something was wrong. The lobby was silent. He stood, hand still on the door, keeping it from swinging closed behind him. Something...

On the surface, everything seemed normal: Clint was dozing at the security desk like he'd seen from the security office. The light was bright and hospital-harsh, no creepy shadows or menacing rotwielers were visible, but something was, well... off.

Did the light seem too harsh? Subtle shifts or flickers seemed to affect the light at the edges of his vision, though he wasn't entirely sure this wasn't the lingering effects of last night's festivities. Was it the blackness outside the door? Maybe it was that this place was empty... the Feds had closed the hospital down because of the trouble earlier- not the hot feds, but the... um... harder-to-remember Feds from... before. Had there been a first set of agents tonight? Now that he thought more about it, he wasn't sure

Hand on the stunner holstered at his hip, Chase reluctantly let the door close behind him, feeling somehow committed to the new, ambiguously scary scene. He moved toward Clint's sleeping form. This would be the second time he'd found Clint dozing this month, but there was something in his posture that bothered Chase. Clint's head was on the desk, resting on his right arm. Beside him on the desk was a medium-sized plant from the gift shop. His face was turned away from Chase, but his left arm had slipped off the desk and hung limp toward the floor like a divining rod over a buried reservoir- right there, buddy. Clint's feet were too far back, like he'd been dragged here and placed in the chair.

Near Clint's feet, dark potting soil had been spilled. Chase's eyes returned to the potted plant. He hadn't noticed before, but the plant was bent slightly with several of its stems broken as if it had been knocked to the floor, then righted and placed back on the desk.

It occurred to him that he hadn't seen the plant knocked off the desk since the policewoman had left it earlier. It then occurred to him that he probably should have been doing less reading and more monitoring in the security office.

He moved to the desk. "Clint?" He reached out, but jerked back as darkness surrounded him for the second time tonight. The lights flickered on-off-on again, chasing the darkness and the echoes of his startled cry away. About forty minutes back, the lights in the security room had failed for perhap a second, but then everything had returned to normal. He'd never seen a power interruption in the hospital, and now two in one night. He had the odd intuition of being stalked and very alone. He wanted to head back to the security office and see if perhaps that red-head Fed was feeling nervous and maybe even a little snuggly.

Clint hadn't moved.

He put a hand on Clint's shoulder, gave him a gentle shake. That was all it took to upset Clint's precarious balance. Clint's right arm slipped off the desk, his head lolled left and knocked against the top of the desk. He slid to the floor in a heap.

Chase jumped, barely avoided a scream, got it together... exhaled. He bent down, put a hand on Clint's clammy neck... Pulse, that's good. Breathing, too... cool, no mouth-to-mouth necessary.

He sighed with relief and went into action. He stood and hit the alarm on the security desk... nothing. Sure, it was a silent alarm, so he knew not to expect klaxons or whistles, but something was missing. It took him a second to realize what... his tablet hadn't alarmed him. He should have received a level one security page instructing him to go to the lobby.

He checked his tablet's power indicator- fine. He opened the screen enough to check the diagnostics: active, connected to the hospital's access points, but nothing else. Diagnostic pings sent across the net failed to return from points farther than the tier-one routers.

"What the..." this was just wrong. Once when he was a child, an earthquake took down eighty percent of the networks in the L.A. basin, but none of the hospitals had lost their networks entirely. Hospital, police, and some governmental networks were so hard, so massively redundant, that he'd never heard of a complete outage.

This outage was intentional, and whoever had done it was resourceful and probably crazy. You drop a hospital's net and a lot of sick people could die.

Great. Well, at least the building was filled with cops and Feds... and security guards. Glancing down at Clint's unconscious form, he didn't feel much comforted.

Then he noticed the security monitors on the desk before him and felt even less comfortable. Of the three monitors, only the one that gave him a view directly outside the doors was active. He guessed it was probably an older generation that was hardwired, and therefore not susceptible to a network outage. On the small screen, he could see a crowd of perhaps ten people had gathered by the ambulance parking perhaps ten meters outside the door. He leaned in, trying to make out what they were doing, but they just seemed to be standing perfectly still, looking at the outside of the hospital door. He glanced up at the inside of the door, but the dim and flickering lights outside in the ambulance run worked together with the gray-tinted glass to keep the door reflecting the inside of the lobby, with only the vaguest hint of anything behind it.

Chase used the control pad to zoom the cheap camera in as far as possible. The camera reached its maximum zoom with perhaps three of the people on the screen. The shadows weren't being kind to them, their faces looked too angular, and there seemed to be blood spattered on their clothes, but then Chase understood: they were wearing masks; cheap circus clown masks. There was no other explanation for the identical toothy grin that dominated each face. Perhaps they were terrorists waiting for some cue to storm the building, now that the net was down.

The camera began to flicker. Chase thought it was just interference- whatever was affecting the lights- but then he saw all three of the people on the monitor turn in perfect unison toward the entry ramp. An emergency vehicle of some kind was coming down the ramp... Chase hoped it was more cops. He looked up again at the reflective door that was now flickering with the lights from the ambulance that had just pulled up.

He looked back to the monitor, but the clown-masked terrorists were gone. He started to zoom the camera back, but before it showed him anything, startled shouts, then ragged screams came through the door from the ambulance run.

"Holy..." Chase looked up at the entrance again, trying to make out shapes in the bursts of alternating red and white light. Then he looked down at the very,
very
small stunner clenched in his hand... this didn't look like it would be a good night for him. The screams cut off, leaving behind a silence that somehow seemed worse. A small buzz sounded from the security console. His finger was still on the zoom out key and the console was informing him that the camera had reached its widest angle. He glanced back down at the monitor, which now held an image of most of the area outside the door.