Out of the Black (38 page)

"Bio-terror." He pronounced as she entered the security room, trying to get his flirt on.

"Sorry?" She said, pocketing her badge.

"Aliens then?" he raised his eyebrows.

"What?"

"You are going to tell me what's going on, right?"

"Oh!" She laughed. "Sorry... no. I'm here to relieve you."

"Aw... come on. I can't leave my post."

"Sorry." She said. The firmness didn't drive the friendliness out of her voice, but it threatened to if he didn't cooperate. "This is a federal matter now. Have you been debriefed?"

"Uh..." he hesitated, suddenly feeling uncomfortable. "Maybe?"

"You're going to cooperate, right? I'm assuming you're not wanting to toy with obstruction."

"I'm not obstructin'. There was this Fed, came in right after the commotion... but I don't remember much else. Nice guy though. Looked like he'd been skiing lately."

"He had a bad tan?"

"Nope... stat cast had him immobilized between neck and wrist," Chase grabbed his own wrist, "I didn't say he looked like a
good
skier."

"What did you see of this 'commotion'?" She pulled out her tablet.

"I saw the whole..." He paused, like a man realizing he was lost and perhaps naked. "There was this... It was in the ER. A fight maybe?"

"You don't know?"

He shook his head. "Weird."

"Indeed." She made a few scratches on her tablet. "I'll need you to wait in the reception room and help the other guard keep people out."

His chances of a date were fading fast. "You got secret Fed business here, eh?" he leaned toward her as if she might impart more knowledge if she could speak it quietly.

"Something like that." She smiled and gestured to the monitor bank. "Besides it looks like your pal could use the help."

"Jeez Clint!" On the monitor, Clint was apparently sleeping, slumped over the small security desk.

***

Less than a minute after the addled security officer left, Miranda Todd buzzed her companions into the security room. Derry entered first, looking like a tourist in Kauai. "Ow. Derry, turn down that shirt, okay?"

"Now that just hurts. Here I come a' running when you call me in the middle of the night and all you do is give me the fashion debrief." He threw an assault gun toward her. She caught it without conscious thought and re-stowed it under her jacket.

"Look Derry, this isn't my show..."

"Get me a look inside OR-3." Elena Mendez said as the door closed behind her.

"Comin' up boss." Miranda's fingers flew across the security console. An overhead view of the operating theatre opened in the center of the display. Two surgeons and a tech surrounded the coffin-like operating bed.

"That your man?" Derry asked, his eyes shifting to Elena.

Miranda nodded. "Operating theatre's supposed to go available in thirty minutes, so they should be finishing any minute now... triage records look positive." Miranda looked up from the console with an encouraging smile.

Elena's brown eyes remained fixed on the display. A shadow passed through them. Her face softened, but the focus didn't leave her eyes. "How long to link into the security net?"

"Done." Miranda said as her fingers stopped moving again.

Elena opened her tablet, configured an alpha encrypter, and called Hawthorne. She got a failure buzz. She checked the crypto, then the tablet, then the connection. "Net's down."

"In a hospital?" Derry looked surprised.

She configured the tablet for a point-to-point connection, got another buzz. "I can't get RF through either."

"Nonsense!" Miranda's fingers flew over the console. "There she is right there... four floors up, in the observation room above the OR... you shouldn't have any trouble getting microband through to her. Hey! Who's that with her?"

They all leaned in for a better look just as the monitor filed with electric snow. The lights flickered- flickered again. Static filled the security screens.

"Wha?" Miranda began diagnostics, or tried to. The computer console accepted none of her commands. It was completely dead.

"That felt targeted." Elena said, "Lets get out of here. Derry, you've got point."

Three assault guns came up in unison. They moved to the doorway, hard and ready for anything- or so they thought.

***

The lights flickered, flickered again and the lights from the city outside blazed briefly through Ping's dark reflection. It was his turn to stare into the window's black glass and wait. Behind him in the semitransparent vista of reflection, Alex lay on the hospital bed, healing himself presumably. Rae paced around the far end of the room. From time to time, he could see her stealing glances at him.

His head was no longer bandaged. Alex had finished what work had been left undone by the medkit and surgeons. He felt strong, steady. Fortunately Rae had been wrong, and the only evidence of his head wound now was a terrible case of bed-head. He wore clothes packed before their flight from Roy's house on Lake Geneva. Apparently the same clothes that Rae had dressed him in for their trip to the hospital. This was definitely his week for being stripped and dressed by strangers. Of course, it was also the week of being beaten senseless and then healed miraculously. Was his glass half empty or half full?

Roy's sword was in his pocket, Roy's twin pistols slung beneath a hard composite jacket most people would probably use for riding motorcycles. He couldn't imagine what Roy had used it for... air skiing behind suborbital transports, perhaps.

He looked up from his borrowed and aliased tablet, his gaze shifted to Rae's nervous pacing, then back to his own reflection. He wore a dead man's clothes, carried a dead man's weapons. His face was expressionless, his eyes soft and dark. Through his reflection swam the shifting lights of the night city. He couldn't meet Rae's gaze, couldn't speak. He didn't deserve to be alive. Sure his little gambit had worked, but what kind of person would try something like that? Certainly a desperate one, but he didn't feel like letting himself off so easy.

Rae stopped pacing and took a deep breath. She walked toward Ping's window, her reflection growing behind him as she approached. She came to a halt behind him. Though he wanted to look down, wanted to just go away, he returned her reflected stare. Man of ashes poured into another's urn.

"How did you know?" She said.

"I didn't."

"Not good enough."

"No, it wasn't... I was playing God again."

"You know, I could just surf to guiltypleasure.org if all I wanted was self recrimination."

"Net's down, so you're lucky I'm here."

"Look..." she paused, "The net's down? Here?"

He gave her a grim nod, "Anyone having a library flashback?" he held the collapsed tablet over his shoulder for her to see. "It went down when the lights flickered off just now. They're getting close."

"I'm getting tired of being almost dead." she shrugged.

"Tell me 'bout it." Ping's smile was aurprise to him.

"How'd you know how to free Alex?"

He took a moment to consider. "I thought it was the most likely thing that he'd been... whatevered... spellified. He checked out in the middle of our escape with no wounds. Then the kit and the doctors couldn't find anything wrong with him. I couldn't see any other way we could free him, he obviously wasn't going to come around again on his own... at least not before we were discovered here."

"How'd you know the blade would break the spell?"

"I didn't for sure, but I'd seen Dek use one like it to shred Garvey's spell in the library. He cut clean through it... knocked Garvey off his feet with whatever backlash it caused. Afterward, the blade was traced with some kind of glowing pattern. Later, Dek told me my sword would cut through anything the Loom could weave."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

He couldn't read her expression. Concern? Hurt? Anger. "What if it didn't work? I've already killed good people with my poor judgment..." He broke off; tried again. "I'm as damned as I'm gonna get."

The silence lengthened between them.

"You know Detective, before a couple days ago, I hadn't killed anyone. The library, that really hurt, you know?"

He nodded. He knew.

"But you know what? Over the last two days of lying low, I've had a lot of time to think."

He made no indications he'd heard, so she continued, "I didn't kill to make my life easier, not even to make it longer... I killed to save Alex, to save you." She paused again, "I didn't do the work of death. I did the work of life, Detective. So did you."

His smile was bitter. "Nice speech, Rae."

"Did it work?"

"What was it trying to do?"

"Get you to stop missing the point."

"And what point is that?"

"The one on top of your head."

"Wha?" he turned to look at her over his shoulder.

She smiled that beautiful smile that Alex had helped him see. "Only suckers waste time hating themselves for doin' what's right." Her hand snapped out quickly, smacking him painfully in the shoulder. "Even when bad stuff happens."

"Man, that was beautiful." Alex groaned from the bed.

They both turned to face him. "Now what, chief?" Ping asked, looking sideways at Rae and rubbing his bruised shoulder.

"Check this out!" Alex said, holding out his arms. After a few seconds, he raised perhaps ten centimeters off the floor. He smiled like a kid with a new toy, floating around the room. Like a slow-motion superman, he made his favorite man-of-steel poses.

Watching the spectacle, Rae turned to Ping, "Geeks should
not
have superpowers."

"Evildoers beware." Ping muttered.

Finished for the time being, Alex touched down on the floor and gave a small bow. If he was expecting applause- and he was- he ended up disappointed. After a pause to allow them to change their minds about the adulation,he moved on. "We don't have long. They'll be in the building any minute. Once they get here, they'll probably knock down the hospital's net and head straight for us."

Ping and Rae exchanged glances. "What?" Alex said.

"Babe... the net went down maybe five minutes ago now."

The blood drained out of Alex's face. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"You were too busy showin' off!"

"How did you know they were coming? That they'd kill the net?" Ping asked, subconsciously checking the positioning of his holsters.

"Elfin magic... didn't think it would be so soon."

"So you did your little flying demo before you warned us?"

Alex looked guilty. He smiled sheepishly, "It was pretty cool... no?"

They were not impressed.

"Time to go." Alex moved toward the door.

"Wait!" Rae said. "Why did you bring us to this hospital? Why not the three others closer to where we were hiding out?"

"Dek's here. The tracker stopped moving earlier tonight, so I used a little power from your cameo to hack Ping's medkit." He turned and ran for the door with Ping and Rae close behind.

"You're saying you've been aware all this time?" Rae said as they sprinted down the hall toward the elevator banks.

"Sensible underwear." Alex said, hitting the call button.

Rae winced. Alex smiled.

***

Hawthorne gripped Mendez's empty operating bed with one hand while the other wavered in the general direction of the broken observation window above. In that hand she held her pistol, covering the window above.

Behind her, Anne stood facing the gaggle of... well, she didn't have a description better than 'party demons'. Her vision was still skipping from the arduous trip from window to floor, her hands still shook, her teeth still clenched. She was still uncertain about being very, very sick. The demons' deranged chuckling seemed to dance around the jitters in her overtaxed mind.

"How many bullets you got in that gun, Hawthorne?" Anne asked quietly.

"Call me Sarah... and there'll be plenty left when we're dead."

"Ok, Sarah. Can I ask you a favor?"

"No."

"Fair enough."

"There it is!" The monstrous visitors all hissed at once. "Hiding in briars, but here it will be."

"That make any sense to you?" Anne whispered sideways.

"Nope."

Anne nodded. "Right. Thought not." Then raising her voice to be heard, she said, "You are on the road to destruction! All your base are belong to us!"

Hawthorne glanced over her shoulder, "Wha?"

Anne sniggered. The demons seemed unsure of what they should do now. Not so much thinking as just awaiting instructions. The surgeons had joined the OR tech behind Anne. Jeremy ws still frozen four meters before her, perhaps two meters from the closest demons.

"Jeremy!" Anne hissed.

In the slow motion of the shell-shocked, Jeremy's head turned slowly to point his sheet-white face and bulging eyes in her direction. "Onh?" He may have said.

Anne jerked her head and motioned with her eyes for him to skeedaddle behind her with the rest of the non-monsters. He gave a tick with his head that Anne read as a nod, but then his head turned back to the demons and he didn't move another muscle. Well, that wasn't entirely true- at least one sphincter muscle moved, and it was not to Jeremy's great advantage. "Oops." Anne whispered as Jeremy's pants darkened.

As if they were attuned to the scent of urine like sharks are to blood, the demons exploded forward. A demon wearing the color-traced black of a neo-goth grabbed Jeremy around the throat, or would have about three hundred milliseconds later if he had not instead received a face full of Anne Kelley's fist.

With her left hand, she yanks Jeremy back toward the others, perhaps a little too hard she thinks, since she sees his feet exiting her peripheral vision about a meter off the ground. At the same time, her right hand streaks forward, tearing through the toothy grin of the goth-demon. Teeth and blood disengage themselves from his face, but her fist is already gone. Her left leg lashes out low and the demon leaves the ground, smashing into one of the demons behind him.

Anne bores forward, whirling-jumping around another assailant, using the demon's head as a lever to throw it into another demon. Around her, two others turn in perfect sync to press attacks from both sides- one aims a kick to her side, the other levels a punch at her head. Neither connects as Anne dodges the punch while sweeping up the kicking leg. She wraps her arm around the knee and pulls up hard with the leg locked in her elbow. The hip joint dislocates under the pressure just before her kick destroys the knee of the supporting leg.