To Light Us, To Guard Us (The Angel War Book 1)

by Sean M O'Connell

  Aaron did remember. There was a deep purplish burn scar on Scott’s upper right leg from a fifth-grade campfire that involved a little too much lighter fluid. And Bluejean of course.

  Bluejean.

  His initial astonishment and relief over Scott’s miraculous recovery gave way to more worry for his handicapped friend. More hope this time too. If Scott could pull through so swimmingly, maybe Bluejean could as well.

  Scott must have read Aaron’s face. The two were often embarrassingly in synch. Like a married couple.

  They turned simultaneously to their fountain of information.

  Allie was no idiot. Anyone with half a sense of intuition could read the inquiry on their two stubbled faces.

  “Both of you might want to sit down for this.”

  Decrypted archival file 0009-658

  KC Brian Hin Bishop- Zion Province, USA

  Entry 1: Indicated Manifestation Events from area hospitals. SK Priority Alert

  Entry 2: Jericho Scenario. Capacity response. Unconfirmed visual contact; Angels and Fallen Angels.

  Entry 3:Emergency Enlistment Order Issue at 18:37- source: SK Adam Ironday Pope. Confirmed.

  Entry 4: U.S. Government declaration 659470- Federal State of Emergency; National Guard-deployed; FEMA-deployed; ERSR-deployed; APB civil service order.

  Salt Lake City, Utah

  Aaron felt the blood drain from his face. Intestines turned a dizzy loop as a thousand scenarios of bad news ran haphazardly through his already exhausted mind. He slumped into a chair and looked up at Scott. The huge, pale lump of granite remained standing, blinking once slowly and murmuring to himself. A prayer probably.

  Aaron’s wife folded her arms and leaned against the wall, gaze ticking back and forth between them in professional appraisal as she determined whether or not they were ready for what she was about to tell them.

  Her patience aggravated Aaron.

  “What is it Al?” It came out a groan, sounding rougher than he intended.

  Scott hadn’t seen their small companion go under, hadn’t carried him into the emergency room and bargained for his life. But his connection to the boyish man ran as deep as Aaron’s. Maybe deeper. He too stared beseechingly at Allie, asking for the words that he didn’t really want to hear.

  “Is he gone?” he sighed tentatively.

  “No! Well…Yes. …. He is not dead.. But he is gone.”

  Comatose. Brain Dead. Vegetable. Lost cause. Invalid.

  The labels ran through Aaron’s brain in a despairing parade. He couldn’t speak.

  Scott did.

  “What do you mean he’s gone but not dead? Is he in a coma?”

  “No. I mean he was alive -in a similar state to yours, only less severe- when we saw him last. He’s just… Gone.”

  “Gone? Gone how? As in missing!?”

  Allie nodded tersely.

  “A technician went to check on him about two hours ago and found his bed empty. Electrodes stuck to the blanket, IV hanging free. He wasn’t in restraints. It looks like he must have woken up and just walked out.”

  Now Aaron spoke.

  “I thought you said he was in bad shape, like Fitz. How could he have disappeared? And why was he alone?”

  He regretted the implication in his question even as he spoke it. The hospital was overwhelmed. Allie herself had probably stopped in to check on him a hundred times, but she had work to do. Bluejean was not the only patient in this hospital. Especially not today.

  “I’m sorry Aaron, but we monitored him as much as we could. And I think we should be encouraged. His condition was similar to Scott’s when you brought him in and they received similar treatment. Scott is just fine. I’m hopeful that Bluejean is too.”

  “Allie is right Aaron. We just need to find him so we can be sure.”

  Like a rock. Like a big, white, rock.

  Aaron’s initial alarm faded slightly. Bluejean had always surprised them with his resiliency, and he could not have gone far with the hospital under quarantine. Nobody in. Nobody out.

  For the most part anyway. Aaron had found a way.

  Blue was probably in the cafeteria sucking down orange Jell-O and raisins.

  A buzz-saw of thoughts and search patterns ran through Aaron’s head.

  Quick search.

  Allie would have swept this floor and any others she was working on already.

  Bluejean hates beings alone, but is scared of large groups.

  Emergency room is out.

  Surgical floors are out.

  He loves nurses.

  Allie would have checked.

  He loves food.

  And babies.

  “Alright tubby, we will find him.” Both Allie and Scott were relieved to hear the jab. It told them Aaron was thinking clearly, that he was himself.

  “I’m going to check the cafeteria. Scott, you need to check the waiting rooms and any other place with a vending machine. Allie, do you have time to run to the Women’s Center and check the nursery and birthing wings?”

  “I can manage the time. But why there?”

  Scott answered with a shiny, but tense smile.

  “Come on Allie, you know ‘Jeans. He loves women and babies. Chances are you will find him flirting with a couple of delivery room nurses.”

  Even in the tense moment, they all shared a laugh at the endearing quirks of their simple friend. Aaron wrapped Allie in another crushing hug as the three prepared to split up and search, agreeing to meet back at the same spot in thirty minutes.

  Each hoped to have the chubby Mr. Durham in tow….

  ….

  An ungodly howl ripped through the hallway, destroying their hope and their plans.

  Allie jumped. Aaron cursed. Scott Fitzpatrick turned his broad shoulders directly to the source of the commotion.

  At the far end of the hallway, a heavy defibrillation cart came skittering into view and flipped onto its side. Crash pads bounced off the floor and walls, sparking where they touched metal. The trio of friends all frowned at the destruction. Aaron instinctively pulled Allie behind himself as four men rolled into view, clutching and swinging at one another in desperate combat.

  Give it a rest already.

  Aaron wondered momentarily where the security presence was inside the hospital.

  Then he realized that one of the men in the fracas wore military fatigues.

  That Guardsman was the security presence. And he needed backup.

  Disorganized shouts brushed at the edges of his hearing. More bodies poured into view and joined the fray. It was an all-out brawl, backlit against the windows of a trauma suite. Aaron considered opening the nearest exit door to alert the soldiers posted there, but was distracted by something completely unexpected.

  Scott, wearing perhaps the most intense frown Aaron had ever seen, turned to him and to Allie. He ordered brusquely.

  “Stay here.”

  With that, three hundred pounds of former professional athlete took off toward the melee at a dead sprint.

  Aaron’s mouth dropped open in shock.

  Scott Fitzpatrick was a huge and powerful man. Formidable to the point of frightening, but he was also the least confrontational and most rational man that Aaron knew.

  The big guy hated conflict. Avoided it like the plague.

  Yet there was his rapidly-receding back, trucking headlong toward an already loaded situation.

  A gunshot rang out from the end of the hall as the National Guardsman unloaded point-blank on one of his attackers.

  Now it was Aaron’s turn to frown. He repeated Scott’s orders to Allie as she clutched ineffectually at his wrists, trying to prevent him from giving chase.

  “Honey, stay here!”

  Then he too took off. What could only be the last bits of adrenaline allotted for one day squeezed into his bloodstream and he darted after his friend.

  Ahead, Scott was only steps from the confrontation.

  As Aaron watched, he lowered a shoulder and hit o
ne man in a clutching pair at full speed. The impact lifted all three of them off of the ground and a sickening crunch echoed back toward Aaron just before another gunshot sent more blood and chaos into the air.

  Scott’s momentum carried him through the man he had somehow chosen to destroy and together they crashed into the window of the trauma room.

  The doctors inside looked up with marked alarm as the reinforcing mesh held spider webs of glass in place. They were working to restrain a boy of seventeen or eighteen who thrashed so violently that his body folded almost in half each time he bucked upward off the table.

  Aaron reached the fray just as three men piled onto Scott, one swinging a fire extinguisher over his head like a club.

  His blood was up now.

  The bright lights of the hospital hallway dimmed to a rosy overcast color. These random white men fighting in blue jeans and hospital scrubs began to look just a little more like South American soldiers in gray fatigues.

  Aaron struggled to control his flashback, instead letting his exhausted mind pick apart the sloppy movements of their combat just as he added himself to the mix.

  A sharp punch to the liver of the man wielding the fire extinguisher caused the heavy red cylinder to slip harmlessly from his grip and bounce off the floor. Aaron followed that with a short uppercut to the man’s chin and completed the job by sweeping his legs out with a sharp kick to one ankle. Bone cracked satisfyingly against the hard floor.

  Move, next one.

  Aaron noted that the soldier in fatigues was unconscious on the ground, pistol-whipped by his own empty sidearm.

  Duck.

  A wide left brushed his bristly hair as he dipped under the punch of a tall stringy man. Aaron grabbed the fire extinguisher as he rose from the crouch and punched it into his attacker’s throat.

  The man went down hard.

  He flipped the cylinder smoothly between his hands and brought a hard edge down on the man’s collarbone. The man howled like a wounded animal and cursed at Aaron in a voice loaded with pain, anger, and fear. Despite the vehement language, he didn’t rise again.

  For some reason, most of the attention, in fact, all of the attention, seemed to be on Scott.

  Five or six had him hemmed up near where the crash cart lay on its side. The smartest of them hung back, muttering what could only be a plan of attack to one another.

  For the second time in twenty-four hours, Scott’s shirt had been ripped away and Aaron could see the veins spread like a net over his broad, bulging chest. His pale skin was flushed as he glowered in alert fury, waiting for one of the group spread out in front of him to come forward.

  From his left, a chubby man darted in, moving faster than Aaron would have given him credit for given his build. He leapt at Scott’s face and was met with a backhanded slap that broke his forward motion and buckled him to the floor.

  Others took advantage of the situation and rushed Fitzpatrick as he pummeled their brave but foolish counterpart.

  A man in denim and biker boots much like Aaron’s own kicked Scott viciously in his exposed side. His effort was rewarded with a pained grunt.

  Unfortunately for him, the attack also earned Scott’s undivided attention. A pale hand reached, grabbed the man by one arm and jerked him forward, bringing him in for a devastating head butt. The assailant folded like a lawn chair.

  Help out.

  Two more men came running into the melee from the same direction Aaron had come.

  He decided Scott had enough work to do and turned to face them.

  To Aaron’s despair, Allie followed hot on their heels.

  “Allie NO!”

  He reared back and chucked the fire extinguisher into the face of one of the newcomers. It glanced off of the man’s head, cutting him, slowing him down, but not stopping him.

  Tough guy.

  For the first time, Aaron noted the bloodshot and manic look in the eyes of these men. They stared at Scott with murderous focus, as if his size and power were an affront to their very existence.

  For whatever reason, Aaron was just a speed bump on the way to a bigger prize. It made no sense, and yet he was certain of it.

  They wanted to kill Scott.

  It reminded Aaron of one of the old zombie movies, where mobs of bloodthirsty undead would chase after the flesh of the living.

  Except these zombies were smart, and they were pissed off.

  He met the first of them headlong, twisting with the impact to throw the man face-first into the already-shattered window behind him. Bits of glass stuck in his attacker’s hair as he struggled to recover from the impact and get up, but Aaron hammered his fists into the back of the man’s head, measuring the impacts so they wouldn’t be lethal. Hoping only to knock him out.

  It took two more punches than he expected it would. Three total.

  Aaron counted two more bodies piled on top of Scott.

  One of them, the other man that had come running down the hall, was struggling to get a smaller form off of his own back.

  Allie.

  She had a slender arm twined around the man’s neck and was trying in vain to pull him away from the fracas.

  Seeing his diminutive wife embroiled in the violence turned the whole world red. Aaron Dayne’s self-control threatened to slip away as he sprang up and grabbed her waist, shouting into her ear.

  “Allie let go! LET GO!! You have to get out of here!”

  Confusion reigned, but she released her grip and allowed Aaron to toss her bodily back the way she had come. Immediately the man she had been clinging to whirled, ready to dispatch the menace that had been on his back. Surprise registered in his bloodshot eyes for a fraction of a second before the point of Aaron’s elbow smashed into his mouth and pulverized teeth into grit. A mist of blood blew into Dayne’s face as the man struggled to breathe through a rain of knuckles. He flailed weakly against the onslaught.

  Far away, Aaron could hear the screaming of familiar voices. Faint echoes, ghosts of his past or his future.

  In the here and now there was only the smell of sweat, old cigarettes and coppery blood. Eventually there was no more resistance to be found from the bones in the other man’s face, and the grasping hands slumped uselessly to the floor to bounce in fits of nervous nonsense.

  Aaron struggled to tread water, to keep his head above the sea of blood and anger that tried to drown him.

  He let his mind cling to a tiny voice in the background. It was small, feminine, and it was trying to tell him something.

  A hand gripped him and began pulling him away from the bloody mess beneath him. Her fingernails were painted pink, but they slipped on the gore clinging to his arms. He tried harder.

  Come back. See the moment.

  This wasn’t Argentina, he was somewhere else. But there was blood, more blood.

  Dead. I killed him.

  In slow motion, the moment returned. Allie was tugging at him, trying to get him away from the violence. There was a deep cut on his arm, he didn’t know from where. To his right, a pile of men bubbled roughly. Scott was there, rising and falling in a rhythm of chaos. The air stank of exertion and burning cotton.

  Too many. Get him out of there.

  Aaron shrugged Allie off and told her to go for help, knowing that she wouldn’t leave them, even though she should. He leapt into the fray once more, pulling and wrenching at the limbs and necks of crazed men trying to hurt his best friend. It distracted them momentarily, so that Scott was able to clear a space for himself, which he used to level an athletically-built redneck with a devastating roundhouse. Two men turned on Aaron, bowling into him and riding him to the ground. They were fast, driven by adrenaline no doubt, and their combined weight and frantic pace were getting the best of him despite his training and efficiency. He used knees and elbows to protect against their clawing hands, trying to roll to an advantageous position. Another flushed face appeared above him and added its wicked grimace to the attack.

  Three on one. Get up.


  One of his attackers disappeared suddenly, yanked away by a familiar pair of broad hands. A second later, half of the remaining pair slumped in a shattered heap. Aaron wrapped the last man in a shoulder choke, stopping the blood flow to his brain as he kicked and thrashed in a futile attempt to break the hold. When the shaking stopped, Aaron loosened his grip and rolled over, standing up to take quick stock of the situation.

  Scott was busy banging someone’s head into a metal trash canister.

  To Aaron’s surprise another man was there, calmly clamping one hand over the windpipe of one of the crazed attackers.

  And then there were three.

  The stranger held his opponent at arm’s length, looking straight into the other man’s purpling face and waiting for the hands clawing at his hospital gown to drop. The thin greenish garment hung by a single tie, exposing much of the man’s muscular body. Veins and striations stood out in stark relief against his baby-pink skin. Aaron wondered absently if their newfound ally was some sort of tri-athlete, or maybe a professional boxer, as his build might indicate. The way he stared into the face of the man he was choking disturbed Aaron. There was no hate or malice or even grinding of teeth. Only focus.

  Aaron spun around to take in their progress. Only two men still stood, and both were locked in grim combat with Scott. All around lay the groaning or unconscious bodies of men who had already failed in their attempts to down his enormous friend. Dayne felt limbs leaden as the adrenaline ran out.

  His body was cashed-out and weak, but his mind remained sharp.

  In the spare seconds Aaron wasted deciding how to help Scott, the Stranger strode past him and unleashed a single, lightning fast right cross to one assailant. He dropped like a stone.

  Must be a boxer.

  Scott, huffing like a freight-train, reached out to envelope his last attacker in a bear hug. But Stranger got him first. A knee to the tailbone, and two vicious blows later, and the assailants lay side by side in induced slumber.