bedeviled & beyond 03 - bedeviled & beleaguered

by Sam Cheever

  I shrugged. “My fault. I should have told you he was coming.”

  Emo appeared beside us. His dark eyes swept over Darma and me. “Are you okay?”

  We nodded.

  He looked at Bob. “Thanks for getting them out of there. The building’s on fire.”

  That woke me up. “What? They’re burning down our office? Shit!”

  Bob swore and jammed the pistol back under his coat.

  “There’s been some kind of change in this thing that’s blanketing the city and the humans have gone crazy. They’re murdering anyone who tries to stop them, crashing air vehicles into everything and setting things on fire. The ones who can’t bring themselves to do violence are jumping off bridges and buildings. It’s a frunkin’ mess.”

  He skimmed Bob a look. “The planned and unplanned care units are overrun with casualties and they’ve had to deal with their own violence. They brought in rogue magic protection because the police are overwhelmed. The Paranormal Cops have had to take over because many of the human cops have joined with the mobs.”

  I gave a brief thought to PC Cheets and wondered how she was doing. “We need to help.”

  Emo nodded. “Let’s start with unplanned care, we can get Ralph out.”

  Bob smiled gratefully. “Thank you. He and I can help once we get him.”

  Emo nodded and looked at me. “If you and I join power I think I can shift all four of us there.”

  I grabbed his hand. “Let’s do it.”

  ~SC~

  The unplanned care unit was, as expected, in total chaos. We shifted into a full waiting room filled with people in all stages of injury and illness. People were sitting in chairs, lying on cots on the floor and even draped along the filthy floor. Medi-care personnel hustled around them, triaging the mess and performing whatever care they could on the spot.

  I assumed all the beds were taken.

  Before we could move we were surrounded by several large men in ugly brown uniforms. The men stood over seven feet tall, had pale, triangular eyes and were covered nearly from head to toe with knives of all sizes on criss-crossing straps.

  Venusians. Apparently Doctor Lee had called some friends.

  “What’s your business here?” One of them asked us. His strange, yellow gaze fixed on Emo as being the most dangerous of the four of us.

  Big mistake on his part.

  I reached out and poked him and four knives were suddenly pressing against my body. I rolled my eyes. “We’re here to help. Have your men stand down.”

  The Venetian cocked his head, which was covered with thick, white hair. “You look like trouble.”

  I grinned. “Smart man. Ask Doctor Lee about Astra Q Phelps. She’ll tell you I’m okay.”

  He stared at me for a few beats and then his wide lips slid into a smile. “She told me to watch for you. Somehow I pictured you bigger.”

  I snorted. “Join the club. I’m surprised every time I look in the mirror.”

  He jerked his head at his men and they slid back to their assigned posts. Watching people move out of their way, I wished we had a few thousand more just like them. Nobody beats a Venusian soldier for pure steel-headed meanness on the battle field. And they’re smart too. A combination that guaranteed success.

  “What can we do to help?” I asked the apparent leader.

  He jerked his head toward the back hallway. “Follow me, Doctor Lee is expecting you.”

  I frowned. And how exactly did she know I was coming when I hadn’t even known it myself until a few moments earlier?

  She was bending over a gurney with a wild eyed human male strapped to it. The man’s face was cut and bleeding from several places and his clothing looked like it had been shredded by a gargoyle.

  Doctor Lee looked up when we approached and her face registered relief when she saw us. “Mx. Phelps. I’m so glad you’re here. I really need your help.” Her triangular yellow eyes slid to Darma. She grinned. “You’re a sight for sore eyes.” She motioned toward the hallway behind her, which was filled with gurneys and cots and in some cases, blankets and pillows on the floor. Each of which was filled with a bleeding and/or broken body. “Start to work on those. Use your healing magics, I don’t care. Just see how many of them you can shove back out the door over the next couple of hours.”

  Darma didn’t hesitate, she gave a brisk nod and headed for the battered multitude behind Doctor Lee. She had a smile on her face as she passed me.

  I’d lost her to medi-care again.

  Sighing, I turned back to Doctor Lee. “What can we do?”

  She worked as she talked to us, moving efficiently down the line of sick and injured, calling out orders to the medi-care assistants standing around her.

  “I need my people here to keep the patients from killing each other.” She smiled at the tall man beside me. “But I also need someone out there who can find the injured and bring them in.”

  I nodded. “We can do that.”

  She nodded toward the Venusian standing beside me. Captain Lee will accompany you.”

  Captain Lee? Brother? Husband?

  “Soul mate.” Doctor Lee favored the tall man with a smile. She’d pulled the question right out of my mind. Damn I hated that.

  “Sorry.” She didn’t even look at me. “I’m afraid I have no time for niceties.”

  I nodded. “I’d tell you that I forgive you but you’d already know that too wouldn’t you?”

  She grinned. “Be careful out there, Astra. You basically have no friends other than those you go with. It’s a world of enemies now. For everybody.”

  I sighed and muttered, “I’m pretty much used to that.”

  Bob reached to touch my arm. “Ralph?”

  “Oh yeah, Doctor Lee, would you happen to know where Ralph Peters is? We need to spring him to help us.”

  She frowned for a moment. “The werewolf?” She shook her head. Sorry, I’ve lost track of him. “Have Captain Lee take you to records, someone there will help you find him. Although...” she glanced around meaningfully, “—it will be a miracle if he’s where he’s supposed to be. Things, as you can see, are in chaos.” She nodded to Captain Lee and turned away. As she made her way down the hallway she ducked the flailing arms of irate patients and called out orders to overworked medi-care personnel.

  I arched an eyebrow at Bob and he grinned, shrugging. “We would have told you if we thought it mattered. As it is we’re kind of stuck in this form. There’s apparently something in the mist that’s interfering with our ability to shift.”

  I shook my head, marveling that I’d had two werewolves working just down the hall from me for months and I hadn’t known. “That explains why your business is called ‘Werever...Whatever’. I always just figured you couldn’t spell. So what do you guys do?”

  Captain Lee reached a huge hand toward the much smaller man, “Hired muscle, shapeshifter justice.” He shook Bob’s hand, “I admire your work.”

  Bob looked taken back for a moment, probably wondering how Captain Lee knew about them. But I said, “Venusian. They read minds.”

  Bob frowned and nodded. “We work for the Were Council. When a Were commits one of the capital offenses they send us after him...or her.”

  “Hey!” I said. “You and I kind of do the same thing.”

  Bob nodded. “Ralph and I have discussed that. We’ve even considered trying to work with you. Occasionally we could use some backup.”

  Which of course reminded us all why we were there.

  I looked at Captain Lee and he jerked his head back down the hallway in the direction we’d just come. “Records is this way.”

  Glancing around, I shouted, “Darma!”

  Her voice came back to me in my head. There’s no need to shout, Astra! It was her most superior and cranky voice. I grinned. She’d figured out how to communicate telepathically with me. Frunkin’ cool! She glanced up at me from the patient she was tending and I gave her a thumbs up.

  She smiled. Be careful ou
t there, Astra. I don’t want to be tending you in here later.

  I figured that answered my unspoken question. She was where she wanted to be. And I was about to be where I would much rather be. Fighting the bad guys.

  I’d leave the business of managing death and dismemberment to her. She was built for that.

  My specialty was causing death and dismemberment.

  ~SC~

  Records was a mess and nobody there wanted to listen to us. Until Captain Lee lifted one of the harried records clerks up by the back of the neck and slammed him against the wall.

  Then we learned that Ralph was on the second floor.

  Captain Lee led the way, shoving non-injured walking and talking obstacles out of the way if they didn’t make room for him in the halls fast enough. At one point I saw him twitch, glancing around to Doctor Lee, who fixed him with a hostile yellow gaze.

  He gave her a nod and continued on, clearing our path a little less brutally.

  I grinned at Emo and he grinned back. Busted! he thought at me.

  “We’ll be around the corner in a minute and out of her sight.” Captain Lee told my partner in a hostile growl.

  I laughed as Emo jerked in surprise. He quickly made a zipping motion over his head.

  “It won’t work. I’ll still be able to get in there,” Captain Lee informed Emo.

  I laughed again as Emo’s dark eyes widened in mock horror.

  Ralph wasn’t in the room records had given us. Captain Lee threatened to go back down and pound on the harried clerk a little more.

  I was really starting to like the guy.

  I put a hand on his tree trunk of an arm to stop him. “However much fun that might be, I don’t think it’ll do much good. Being a werewolf with a supersized appetite, I’m guessing Ralph’s probably wondering around looking for something to eat. There are no meal drones. The usual routine is out the door right now.”

  I was close. Ralph was wondering around with food. But he was dispensing it rather than consuming it. We found him after about twenty minutes of searching the thickly inhabited halls, dodging grasping hands and, in a few cases, well-aimed globs of spit from patients with severe anger issues.

  He was pushing a cart down the middle of the hall and handing out small tubes of water and food whenever a patient was interested. Many of the people on the floor around our feet were unconscious. And most of them looked like they’d been through a war.

  Ralph’s head shot up when Bob called out to him. He waved when he saw us but kept dispensing. We walked up to him. He started handing us tubes. “Help me distribute the rest of this batch and I’ll go get more.”

  I shook my head. “We have something we need to do outside, Ralph. We came to get you to help us.”

  He frowned, obviously unsure what to do.

  Bob, knowing his partner well enough to gauge the problem, said, “They want us to bring in injured. The police are swamped and they’re having trouble getting everybody off the streets.”

  Ralph nodded. “Help me get the rest of this passed out first. Then I’ll go with you.”

  ~SC~

  A half hour later we shifted out of there. After much discussion we’d decided to start downtown, near the office. Because that was the area where the population was most densely situated and we figured it would be the optimum place for trouble.

  As soon as light, sound and motion returned I knew we’d guessed right.

  We stood in a cluster in the middle of a street that looked like it had recently survived a great war. The concrete was broken and sported huge craters filled with smoking air vehicles.

  The buildings on either side of the street hadn’t fared much better. Every one of them showed some level of destruction. Smoke billowed from windows in almost every structure and some buildings were all but crumpled to the ground. It looked like someone had detonated a laser bomb beneath the city.

  The mist hovered below the tops of the buildings, seemingly holding the smoke and fire beneath it. The situation was compacting its poison and magnifying the discomfort of being on the streets. Our eyes and noses started to burn and run almost immediately and I wondered if the acrid air was going to get us before the rabid human population got a chance at us.

  Almost as I had the thought an inhuman howl pierced the smog at our backs and several apparitions covered in what looked like gray and red paint flew at us with long, sharp looking pieces of metal.

  They looked like something from a forest tribe on one of the more backward planets.

  Emo and I shot stunning levels of power at them and they jerked to a halt, their strangely painted faces clearly showing their surprise.

  We started toward them, thinking they’d been adequately subdued.

  “How are we gonna get them to the unplanned care unit?” I asked Emo as we approached the humans.

  “I can see if my air vehicle survived the fire.”

  I nodded and then ducked as the human nearest me swung a deadly looking scythe. I remembered seeing one of those in a museum once. As I ducked the first swing I presented a power induced uppercut to the human’s midsection, just below his ribs and he gasped once but quickly regained his momentum. The scythe whizzed by my left ear and hit the concrete with a jarring crunch.

  I was pretty sure by the look on the human’s face that the concussion from the swing must have done some ligament damage to his arms but he was zombie-like in his determination to pulverize me and he lifted the scythe over his head again.

  I glanced at Emo. “Wasn’t there a museum near here? Something tells me it’s been broken into. Some of these weapons are ancient.”

  Emo nodded and kicked out at a human who was trying to hit him with a long, thick piece of wood that had sharp pieces of metal sticking out of the bashin’ end. The man flew backward and skidded several feet along the concrete. He hopped back up almost immediately and came at Emo with the weapon again, swinging it with deadly accuracy toward my partner’s head.

  “Up the street a few blocks...that way.” He pointed with his right hand and lifted his left hand to shoot a jolt of power into the piece of wood, blasting it into tiny little pieces that flew toward my face.

  “Shit!”

  Emo grimaced. “Sorry. I’m trying not to hurt him.”

  Emo and I both turned to look at the human. He had a six inch long chunk of wood sticking out of his forehead. His eyes crossed in an effort to look at the wood stuck between them and then rolled up in his head as he slid bonelessly to the ground.

  “I think you hurt him.”

  Emo frowned, “Damn fragile things, humans.”

  Nodding, I returned my attention to the one who was trying to kill me.

  He still seemed determined to dissect me with the scythe.

  It was starting to piss me off.

  I took a running leap and planted a foot in the middle of his chest. I hit with enough power to crack a few ribs and sprang off, landing just behind him and springing back onto my hands as the scythe completed another arc toward me.

  Apparently, like the gargoyle in the park, the humans had become impervious to pain and fear as a result of the mist’s affects. It had given them an edge they’d never had before. They couldn’t be stopped without massive physical harm.

  That presented a hefty problem for me.

  I’d been sent out there to help the injured.

  Not make more of them.

  Finally I pulled my power forward and made a constraining bubble with it, encompassing the incensed human inside my magic. He swung at the bubble angrily with the scythe but couldn’t penetrate it.

  How I was gonna get him out of that bubble and into custody I didn’t know.

  Turning around I took note of how everyone else was doing.

  Emo had left his nearly dead guy on the ground and was helping Bob and Ralph subdue a very large woman. Between the three of them they were like bidgie bugs fighting off a hawk.

  The woman weighed three hundred pounds or my middle name wasn�
�t Q.

  And she was extremely scary.

  Despite her size she was dressed from head to toe in skintight red leather. Half of her very round face was covered in a black dragon tattoo and she had small knives piercing her ear lobes instead of earrings.

  As she danced around, very gracefully for her size, trying to dissect the three men, her tongue slithered across her fleshy lips, showing a stud as big as my thumbprint in the center.

  She had two very long, very businesslike knives in her hands and was swinging them in precise arcs around her thick body like she’d been trained to kill with them. I noticed that both Ralph and Bob were covered in small wounds, some of which were bleeding profusely.

  They weren’t going to be able to stop her unless they hurt her.

  The three men didn’t want to hurt her. I had no problem with it.

  Lifting a hand, I zapped her until she fell to the ground. She hit hard, nearly shaking the street under our feet, and lay there quivering.

  The three men looked at me and I shrugged. “What? She was pissing me off.”

  I glanced at Captain Lee. He’d made lots of nice injured people for us to transport.

  Our mission was not going well.

  At the current rate we’d need an air bus just to transport the people we’d injured trying to save the injured people we were supposed to be rescuing.

  My mental drawers shuffled as we were discussing what to do with our new injured people. Dialle’s voice warmed my happy places.

  Astra, where are you?

  Right now I’m in the middle of the street outside my office. We’ve been asked to help transport the injured to unplanned care. We could use your help if you’re bored.

  A throaty chuckle throbbed nicely between my thighs. Unfortunately, it is all we can do to keep the humans from our door. We have guards everywhere trying to...dissuade them from entering the Court with weapons and extremely bad attitudes. On the plus side, I have lots of injured people here for you.

  Shit! We’ll get there as soon as we can. I think we’re gonna be busy here for a while.

  If you need to rest, I believe my quarters are human-free at the moment. I’d be happy to assist your needs there.

  I smirked. I’ll just bet you would, bud.