“Jake…” Jaina said.
Jake wiped sweat and gore from his face and tried to settled his vision. Jaina reached up toward him from the floor. Her eyes stared straight through him and her other hand was clutched at a growing spread of blood from her stomach.
Jake’s wild hatred faded as he slid down to her side and pressed a hand over a fresh bullet wound. Her blood was warm as it seeped through his fingers.
“Jake…” she said again.
Jake took his hand away from her just long enough to tear off his shirt. He balled the fabric up and thrust it against the wound.
“It’s okay, Jae. You’re going to be all right,” Jake said.
Jaina smiled. “You know… You know, it doesn’t hurt as… As much as I thought it would… To get shot…”
Jake laughed. He hadn’t meant to. It wasn’t a time to laugh, but he did. “I actually thought the same thing when I first got hit,” Jake said, pointing to a faded scar on his left shoulder. “But I survived. Just like you will.”
“Good thing… Thing we’re in a hospital, yeah?” Jaina asked.
Jake straightened. It was. “Can you keep pressure here? Hard as you can.” Jake moved Jaina’s hands to replace his, holding his crumpled shirt.
“Oh sure… I have to do… Do all the work…”
With a flutter, Jaina’s eyes closed. Jake leaned forward, holding his cheek next to her mouth and nose. Still breathing.
Jake stood. “Hang tight, Jae. I’m going to get help.”
Jake ran past the slain guard, careful not to lose his footing on the man’s blood.
Like a beast, Jake darted from door to door along every corridor, searching for supplies or another living person. Anything that would help him save Jaina. So that he could save Dani. So that he could kill Aza. And end this thing, he thought.
Drip, drip, drip.
Jake stumbled and caught himself on the wall. He looked back, not knowing how far he’d run. A trail of sparse blood drops marked his passage. His own version of bread crumbs that would lead from his bleeding arm to a crime scene. Connecting them.
“For all the blood to drip, drip, drip is to die, die, die…” Aza’s voice said.
Jake pulled the pistol from the back of his waistband and spun in a tight circle. When he saw nothing, he clutched at his head. “Fucking bitch,” he said. “Get out of my head.”
“…and be free, free, free.”
“Shut…up!” Jake shouted.
Something moved at the end of the hallway, going from one corridor to the other and passing through Jake’s field of view for a split second. He froze, staring at the spot, and tensed, senses so alert that his own breathing sounded like a hurricane and the beat of his heart like a roll of thunder.
From the place he watched came a voice. “Daddy!” it shouted.
“Dani?” Jake asked, already running, leading with his pistol. Looking for a target.
Jake rounded the corner to find another corridor lined with closed doors. It looked just like the last. The lights flickered erratically, buzzing as they did. It added to the cacophony of sounds in Jake’s head. Real or imagined, he couldn’t dismiss any of them, for the sake of missing something vital. At the far end was another security door, shut. Pounding on it was the figure of a twelve-year-old girl too tall for her age.
He ran for her.
Halfway down the hallway, Dani turned from pounding on the door. The boldness in her eyes and the sneer of her lip forced Jake into a skidding halt.
“Dani?” he asked.
Dani tilted her head to the side. “To see is to believe the lies of perception.” Her lips were coated in red lipstick. Too-red. Garish and bright.
Jake raised his pistol and centered the sights on her chest. His hands were shaking and slick with sweat, but he squeezed the grip tight and held his ground.
“Aza!” he shouted. “Where’s my daughter?” He knew enough not to trust his eyes.
Dani took a step toward Jake. She was barefoot and left bloody prints behind her, though Jake could see no wound. “A man points a gun at his own daughter, praying for a reason to pull the trigger. What is madness to one is sanity to another. A twist of perception and an entire world can crumble.”
“You’re not my daughter,” Jake said. “You’re making me see things. Hear things. Do things.”
“Free will is an illusion. A construct of both the weak and powerful. Used by one for control and the other for hope, false as they both might be.”
“Who are you?” Jake asked.
“When one hears the truth, it—”
“Enough!” Jake shouted. “Enough bullshit. None of these words mean anything. And delusion or not, you’re more than just some twisted girl. More than Aza. I should have seen that before. Maybe I didn’t want to. Who are you?”
Dani knelt on one knee, then both. She looked up at Jake and smiled. “A confident man would pull the trigger. A foolish man would not. And a cowardly man would run.”
Something black seeped under the security door behind the thing that looked like Dani. It wasn’t solid, nor was it like fog or vapor. Jake couldn’t even be sure it was black. It was something deeper than that, making a chasm where there had once been substance. It was more than his mind could make sense of.
Jake backed up a step and swept his pistol from side to side as the blackness slowly grew, creeping along the floor. It pooled around the thing that wasn’t Dani, gathering at her thighs, wicking up her chest. It was too dark to look at. Even a glimpse caused Jake’s senses to spin and leave him disoriented.
“This isn’t real,” Jake said. He thought back to Aza’s therapy journal. Her story of the House of Sand killings. Aza had made her father see things, smell things, hear things. “Maybe you got to me. Maybe I’m infected with whatever madness killed Aza’s family, but I know this isn’t real. That’s an edge her father didn’t have.”
Dani’s wicked smile melted into a grimace as the darkness crept up her body. “Da—Daddy?”
Jake backed up, but kept his gun raised. He knew what he was witnessing was a fabrication brought on by whatever foul evil controlled Aza, but he still had the urge to run toward the thing he knew wasn’t his daughter. It was a battle between his heart and mind with no clear favorite.
“Daddy, please,” Dani said as the darkness looped around her neck.
Tears ran from Jake’s eyes, but he didn’t move. He couldn’t falter now. Even as the wretched thing of black pulled Dani toward the ceiling and let her dangle from tendrils of inky nothingness.
“This isn’t real,” Jake said. “This isn’t real.”
Dani let out a final gasp and the thing vanished, letting her body fall to the floor with the sickening crack of bone and slap of dead flesh. Blood began to slowly pool around the body.
Jake whirled around. The thing without shape or color was gone. He turned back to the broken body on the tile floor. He couldn’t see her face. Gun still held out in front of him, searching for a target, Jake approached. He had to know for certain.
He circled toward the wall to keep from stepping in her blood. He held his breath as her face came into view.
“Shit,” Jake said when he saw a face he didn’t recognize.
The girl that lay crumpled in front of him wasn’t Dani, but a young girl of similar age and build. A girl with a family that would wonder what had happened to their daughter. A girl that didn’t deserve to die. A girl he couldn’t help but feel like he had killed. If his mind wasn’t so muddied, he could have saved her. If he’d seen what was real.
He tore his gaze from the girl and tried the set of security doors. Locked. He pounded them and cursed.
From behind him, Jake heard a door open and quickly shut again.
He spun, bringing his pistol up. Tears and sweat and blood were in his eyes, blurring his view of the hallway, but it was still empty. Save for the corpse at his feet.
He stalked toward where he’d heard the noise. His intuition took him to a sing
le door, labeled, Storage C1.
He pressed his ear to the door and tried to block out everything else around him. He strained to sense something of what was on the other side, but all he could hear was the pounding of his own heartbeat and the incessant dripping of unseen blood. No one could bleed forever.
Jake tried the handle. It wasn’t locked, but as he pushed down on it, something slammed into the opposite of the door and tried to engage the lock. Jake shouldered into it before he could be barred entry.
A woman fell away from the door and crashed into a shelf piled high with a variety of boxes, bottles, and bags. A large amount fell on top of her as she fought to bring her knees to her chest.
“P-Please, I have a family. I don’t want to die,” she said, turning her body into a ball.
Jake stood in the doorway, shirtless, covered in blood, aiming a pistol at the defenseless woman. Then he saw the madness of his appearance and hastily stowed his weapon in his waistband. He crouched, and the woman renewed her efforts to burrow into the shelving at her back.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Jake said, extending open, albeit bloody, hands. “Please, I know I look like a madman, but I’m not going to hurt you.”
The woman peered at him over her knees, but then quickly ducked her head again and began sobbing.
Jake surveyed the small closet. He was certain to find more than enough supplies to help Jaina, but he couldn’t leave knowing he struck such fear into another person. He wasn’t a monster.
“I know how I appear,” Jake said. “But it’s because my friend was hurt. Bad. I’m just trying to help her. And my daughter.”
The woman looked up, teary-eyed and puffy-faced. She stared at him in silence.
Jake tried to smile. He couldn’t be sure if he succeeded. “My name is Jake. I’m…I used to be a detective. Retired now. What’s your name?”
The woman eyed him a while longer before finally saying, “Pam.”
“Pam, as shitty as the circumstances are, it’s nice to meet you. Do you work here?” Jake asked, nodding at the obvious hospital scrubs Pam was dressed in.
Pam nodded. “I’m…I’m a nurse. On the pediatric unit. You’re really a cop?”
“Used to be, yeah.”
“Is it true?” Pam asked. “That that hospital is under quarantine?”
Jake recoiled a bit. “Quarantine? I… Pam, can you tell me what you know?”
“Well, I don’t know for sure. There was some sort of outbreak in one of the wings. Triggered a full hospital shutdown. But then people were saying it was some sort of attack. There was a…a fire in the south storage room. Where we keep the oxygen tanks. Felt like an earthquake. I hid in here when that happened. Been…Been too scared to leave.”
Jake stood and rubbed his temples. He had heard nothing about an outbreak. From the limited chatter on DS Grimly’s radio, he’d heard a number of other explanations, but nothing that spoke to a medical outbreak. Just what the fuck was going on?
“Maybe that’s why the response teams won’t breach…” Jake said.
“The what?” Pam asked.
“Oh, nothing,” Jake said quickly. “Listen, Pam, I can’t offer a whole lot in the way of answers, but I could really use your help patching up my friend.”
“Out…there?” Pam asked, pointing at the open door.
Jake held out a hand. “You help me, I’ll help you. I can protect you.”
Pam studied his hand for a moment, but ultimately took it. Jake pulled her upright and led her out into the hallway after grabbing an armload of assorted supplies.
“Oh my God,” Pam said, covering her mouth and falling away from Jake, into the far wall.
Jake followed her wide-eyed stare to the bloody body of the unknown girl. “Shit,” he said. “Don’t look, Pam. Come on, this way.”
Jake wrapped an arm around Pam and forced her away from the corpse.
“What happened to her?” Pam asked. “Did you…?”
“No,” Jake said. “It was… I don’t know. Doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter!?” Pam exclaimed. “She looked like a little girl. I—”
“Pam!” Jake shouted, quickening their pace, hoping it would distract the woman. “I need you focused. There’s more going on here than—hey, where did you say the outbreak started?”
“Uh, the burn ward, I think.”
Jake almost lost his legs. No cop worth his salt believed in coincidences. He pulled to a stop and forced Pam to face him. “You work on the pediatric unit, you said.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you remember a patient that was here recently…young girl, small…black hair, stupidly blue eyes…name’s Aza. And there might have been another girl with her, messy brown hair, big for her age. Danielle, but prefers being called Dani.”
Pam frowned, but then nodded. “Sure, but that’s not her name.”
“Not her name? Dani’s my daughter. I—” Jake stopped and looked Pam in the eyes, seeing a darkness shade them that hadn’t been there before.
Pam shook her head slowly as a smile spread across her face. “I have a confession to make, DS Anderson. Pam isn’t my name, either.”
Jake pushed her away and fumbled for his pistol. He pointed it at her as he took a full step backward.
“Aza,” he said. “How are you doing this?”
Pam cocked her head to the side. “Names are a curious thing, are they not? Silly words that hold such power. Little else can change something so resolutely as a simple name. A few letters, uttered by the tongue, can change a man completely.”
Jake squeezed the grip of his pistol so hard that the tremble in his hand stopped. He fought to keep from pulling the trigger. “You didn’t just see through your father’s eyes, did you? You controlled him. Like a puppet. How?”
“Not now, DS Anderson.” Aza’s words from Pam’s body. He couldn’t trust anyone anymore.
Jake leveled the pistol at Pam’s heart, not really believing it would faze Aza, but not knowing what else to do. It was easier to return to what he knew. “Where’s Dani?”
Pam held up a finger. “Just a moment,” she said.
“Dani!” Jake shouted, punctuating with waves of his pistol. “Where’s my daughter?”
“Patience,” Pam said, “truly is a virtue, DS Anderson.”
Jake almost pulled the trigger, but a distant screamed halted any violence. It took a beat before Jake recognized it. Jaina’s voice, full of pain and desperation. She was shouting his name as if it meant the world.
“Ah, there it is,” Pam said. “Your siren’s song.”
Jake didn’t bother any further with Pam or Aza or whoever she was. He ran toward Jaina, desperate to protect her. Desperate to protect someone.
Jake rounded the last corner to find Jaina in the place he’d left her. The corpse of the security guard propped open one of the security doors, giving full view to Jake’s fallen partner. When he’d left her, she had been unconscious and alone. Now, she was neither.
“Get away from her!” Jake yelled at the fragment of nothingness that hovered over Jaina, swallowing the nearby light, obscuring his view of anything beyond. Making the hallway feel like the size of a thimble.
“Jake!” Jaina screamed. She pushed feebly at the floor, pressing her body into the wall, eyes locked on the thing.
It had no body, no face or eyes. It had no shape or discernible size. It moved, but Jake couldn’t see it. Only a vague sense alerted him to the change. He aimed at the void of impenetrable darkness and fired. With the crack and muzzle flash of the shot, the thing vanished.
Jake fell at Jaina’s side and vigorously checked her over.
“Oh, Jake,” Jaina said, flinging her arms around his neck.
He pushed against the embrace. And grabbed the sides of her face. “Are you okay?”
“Jake…what…what was that thing?”
Jake shook his head and moved to inspect her torso, already preparing a pad of gauze. He pulled up her shirt and
wiped at the smeared blood. It was everywhere. They were swimming in it. Then he stopped his torrid task.
“Jae?” he asked, prodding at the spot where the bullet had pierced her stomach.
“What?” she asked, curling forward to look.
There was no bullet hole. At least not as Jake had left it. Jaina was still sitting in a pool of her own blood, but was no longer actively bleeding. And while Jake had found the wound, he hardly believed what he was looking at.
“Is this my blood?” Jaina asked, holding up her hands and looking around herself.
Jake nodded, stupefied. “You were shot. But…”
“Shot? Holy shit.”
“Yeah,” Jake said. He used the gauze to wipe clean her stomach. “I don’t understand.”
“What? Jake, what?” Jaina pulled up her shirt further and brought a hand tentatively to her stomach. “What…”
The wound was sealed. Instead of a neat, open hole, it was a mound of puckered flesh, red and black. Jake could smell it then, the scent of burned flesh. And somewhere deeper than that, the pungent scent of pine.
Somehow, Jaina’s wound had been cauterized.
“No one bleeds forever,” whispered Aza’s voice.
Chapter Thirty
Monday 3:00 a.m.
“Can you stand?” Jake asked as he pulled Jaina to her feet.
Jaina pushed his hands away and swayed in place. “Yeah, I think so. Jake?”
“Yeah?”
Jaina looked straight at him, looking far more alert than the blood at Jake’s feet said she should be. “What the fuck is going on?”
He hazarded a quick glance at her side, expecting to see spewing blood. “I don’t know.”
“Reassuring,” Jaina said.
“What do you remember?” Jake asked. To still his nerves, Jake ejected the magazine from his pistol and counted the rounds. Three short of a full clip.
“Not sure,” Jaina said. “I mean, I remember the guard, hearing a gun go off, thinking you’d been shot, but then…nothing. Until you jolted me awake.”
“I didn’t wake you. I—never mind. Doesn’t matter. Dani is still the priority.” If he let his mind wander over the various inconsistencies and strange happenings that surrounded him, his head would spin off. And that wouldn’t get Dani back.
Dear Tragedy: A Dark Supernatural Thriller (House of Sand Book 2) Page 22