by Rob Horner
I didn’t want to tell them about my dreams. Not yet. Even though I was pretty sure they had some power, I wasn’t ready to call them prophetic.
“Just see if you can arrange it,” I said. “Doesn’t it make sense to check out everyone who works here?”
“What’s going on, Johnny?” Ricardo asked.
“Besides,” Angie added. “There’s no way to get up there.”
I shook my head, and when the pain didn’t return, I got to my feet. “I think there’s a stairway that connects our area to theirs.”
“Did Iz say something about that?” she asked.
I shook my head. “It’s a hunch. Maybe more than that. If it turns out to be true, then we can talk about it.”
“But you’re not sure, are you?” Ricardo asked.
I wasn’t, but if there was a way to verify even one part of that fragmented set of dreams, maybe the rest would make sense. Was it cause and effect? Did the change in location during the attack have to do with my actions, or with someone else’s? The only thing I took as a certainty was that an attack would happen.
Now what could I do to stop it? Or, if stopping it wasn’t possible, how could I mitigate the damage?
“Johnny?” the doctor prodded gently.
“No, I’m not sure,” I said softly. Then, “What time is it, anyway?”
“It’s about oh-three-hundred,” Ricardo answered.
“That’s three a.m.,” Angie translated.
My jaw cracked in a yawn. I’d been going non-stop for almost twenty-four hours. No wonder I couldn’t get my mind to work right.
“You must be exhausted, and you’re going to have a lot to do in just a few hours,” Ricardo said. “Military schedule and all that.”
“And there are a bunch of people who want to talk to you,” Angie added. “What you did down there, even though we tried to prepare them…well…it’s an amazing thing. We can really help people now.” She rose from her perch on the bed as she spoke, already moving toward the door.
“You should lay back down,” Ricardo said as another yawn threatened to split my face in half. “We can worry about your room assignment after breakfast.”
I nodded, already sliding my feet back onto the bed.
“There’s a shower to the left, and there’s a rack with towels, sweatpants, and T-shirts in the basic sizes in there, just something you can change into.”
Before I could get too relaxed, I swung myself out of bed again. His dark eyebrows raised, but I said, “I’m going to shower and change first, then. I feel gross.”
“Okay, but don’t stay up too long,” he advised. “If our friend over there wakes up, or you need anything else, just push the call light over the head of the bed.”
He pointed at a small panel with several buttons. One was blue, and though I wasn’t a medical person, my mind immediately translated that to mean “Code Blue.” There was a red button with a crude outline of a nurse’s hat on it, and a third button with “Cancel” written on it.
“Got it,” I said.
“All right, then. If you didn’t hear it before, welcome to Mandatum.”
“Thanks.”
Before he could open the door, I asked one more question. “Why haven’t either of you fixed her cut?”
He looked down for a moment, then said, “That’s her business, you know? Sometimes we have wounds inside that we feel should have a reflection on the outside. And sometimes we just want to let those things heal naturally.”
He let himself out of the infirmary, and I went to clean up.
Chapter 8
Meet Officer Brian King
“Hey! You in the other bed! Hey you!”
The deep voice, speaking in a forced whisper, roused me from a dreamless and much too brief sleep.
I opened my eyes to dimness, rather than darkness. The lights in the infirmary were turned down, but not completely off. The second bed remained empty, but the curtain was parted around the third.
“You awake?” the same voice called.
Pushing back the covers, I forced myself to sit up, drawing a hand across my face to wipe the sleep away. A hand reached out to open the curtain farther, and I could make out the form of a large man lying on the bed. He raised his head, almost furtive, like he was worried someone would find out he was awake.
Or like he feared what would happen if they did.
Shaking my head, I tried to put myself in his position. There was no way to know how long he’d been possessed, or what he’d been doing before it happened. How would it feel, to wake up in a strange bed, in what looked like a hospital, and not remember how you got there?
“I’m awake,” I said, rising to my feet. A flash of white light shone from behind his curtain, like he’d turned a flashlight on and back off. “My name’s John. What’s yours?”
“John, huh?” he said. He still hadn’t opened his curtain any further or tried to get up. Was there some kind of residual weakness after being possessed? Mrs. Fields hadn’t seemed to have any problems. But then, who knew how long this guy had a Dra’Gal riding in his head?
I moved closer, passing the second bed.
There was an explosion of movement as the man burst out of his bed, rushing through the curtains and straight for me. He was wearing a set of light-blue hospital scrubs, the disposable paper kind. He couldn’t possibly know what I could do, so at first there was no fear.
Then I saw the gun in his hand.
Where’d he get a gun?
He stopped a foot away, the gun held in a shooter’s grip, right hand resting in the left. He didn’t point it at my head. No, it was aimed at the center of my chest. No way he could miss.
“My name is Officer Brian King of the Virginia Beach Police Department. My badge number is 9645.”
I kept my shoulders loose while he talked. His teeth were clenched and, though he tried to sound like a man in control, the widening of his eyes and the way they kept flicking left and right told me he was anything but. I’m not sure how he managed to sneak a pistol into the infirmary, or why they allowed him to keep it. Someone had to undress him to get him into the paper scrubs; why hadn’t it been found?
“Where am I?” he demanded.
Still as loose as I could make myself, which isn’t easy with a gun pointed at you, I said, “You’re in a hospital, Officer. Just like me.”
“What happened to me?”
“What’s the last thing you can remember?”
His eyes tightened, his gaze losing focus, trying to remember.
“Look, Officer. I’m going to sit on this bed, okay?” I tilted my head to the right, indicating the middle bed. “I don’t know where you got the gun, but you can see I’m unarmed.”
“I…yes, all right. You sit. John, was it?”
“Yes sir.” I stepped slowly to my right, then backed up until my legs hit the side of the bed. Slowly, more conscious of the speed of my movements than I’d ever been before, I lowered myself to the mattress.
“John what?”
“John Wilson, sir.”
There was no recognition on his face, as I’d half-feared there might be. Was it possible he’d been converted before my name became synonymous with high school terrorist in Virginia Beach?
“How old are you, John?”
“I’m sixteen, sir. Could you point the gun at the floor, or something, please?”
He looked down at his hands like they belonged to someone else, then at the rest of his body, eyes widening further as he took stock of his clothes. I don’t know if he was seeing it for the first time, or if his initial shock was wearing off and he was starting to process information rather than react to circumstances. My eyes wandered away, giving him a moment to collect himself. There was a clock on the wall behind the head of the middle bed, showing 5:30. Directly under the clock was another of those small panels with the three buttons on it. Blue or red didn’t matter right now. I just needed to press one of them to get help.
The police office
r lowered his gun, his hands dropping to either side. He took a step back, preparing to sit on the side of his bed. As his hands went to press against the mattress, either for leverage or balance, a white flash outlined his right hand. Like the first time, it was there and gone, no longer than it would take me to flick a light switch on and off. When the light faded, the pistol was gone.
He didn’t seem aware that anything had happened.
“What was I doing?” he asked absently.
A chill swept through me. What if his time as a Dra’Gal had some lingering effect on his mental abilities? What if the only thing he remembered about being a cop was his name and badge number? Maybe all the good things that drove him to a career in law enforcement were gone, burned out by his time under the influence of something hateful and evil.
“Me and my partner were called to the scene of an apparent homicide last night,” he began. “At least, I think it was last night.”
“What day of the week was that?” I asked gently.
The look he gave me spoke of a desperation to remain the one asking the questions, rather than being forced to give answers that might be more frightening than just remaining ignorant.
“Sunday, the fourteenth.”
Five days. He’d been a Dra’Gal for five days. I decided not to correct him on the date yet. Let him find the holes in the story and ask for them to be filled. That might be better than just flooding him with things he could deny simply because they didn’t jive with what he thought.
“The report was called in by an employee of the King George’s Seafood Restaurant, off Virginia Beach Boulevard.”
“I know the place,” I said quietly. The restaurant lay just outside of Pembroke Mall, on the corner of Constitution Drive and the boulevard.
“The body was a mess,” he continued. “It looked like an animal, a large one, had gotten to her. There were claw marks all over her body, just these great, long, bloody tears. We searched the area for clues, of course. There was a lot of blood pooled around the victim, some spray marks on the wall. She was attacked and killed right there, not somewhere else and dumped. We found footprints all through the blood smears, but they were weird.”
His voice quieted as he spoke, his vision turned inward, scanning his memory.
“One of them looked like a normal tennis shoe tread, something with a bunch of lateral grooves, like a cheap running shoe. The other was this strange circle, but broken down the middle, like one of those Chinese Yin and Yang things, only the break wasn’t a sinuous line, but more like a groove that just went straight through.”
“Like a hoof?” I offered.
His eyes snapped up, staring, blue steel boring a hole through me. He still wasn’t seeing me, not really. “That thought occurred to me, to us, but it didn’t make any sense. The photographers shot the scene, and the body was carried off to the examiner’s office. We hoped there might be tissue samples, maybe under the girl’s nails, something we could work with.”
“By three in the morning, the scene was wrapped up. There’s just me and Tony, my partner, and we’re about to get in our car when we hear this weird noise, like a growl and a rattle, coming from around the side of the restaurant. It was a dumpster, but not attached to the seafood place. It’s in this open space, kind of a feeder lane that goes between the food joint and a gas station next door.”
I remained silent, certain I could guess what was about to happen but riveted by his voice as he recounted the experience.
“It wasn’t far from where we found the woman, so I’m not sure how we didn’t check it before. Tony motioned for me to stay by the wall as backup while he went to investigate the dumpster. I thought it was probably a dog that got stuck inside, you know? We don’t really worry about feral animals in that part of the city. No skunks or raccoons, not like they get out in Pungo. Before Tony even gets his hands on the dumpster lid, out jumps this…thing.”
“It came out hissing and spitting, long arms slashing through the air, just like a damned cat, only it was so much bigger. It all happened so fast, and then Tony was down on the ground, his throat torn out. He didn’t even have time to scream. But I did, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I screamed even as I pulled my gun, this same gun—” He lifted his right hand, only then realizing it was empty.
If the disappearance of the firearm alarmed him, he didn’t show it. A part of him was so engaged with the story, reliving the fear, that everything else, myself included, was just a momentary distraction.
“It finished climbing out of the dumpster, then it turned and looked at me. I couldn’t really see it, you know, it was dark out there. But I had no trouble seeing its eyes. They were like little red spotlights, only they gave me the most horrible feelings deep inside. I’ve heard of being pinned by someone’s eyes before, but I’d never felt it. The thing had me, could have walked right up and torn me apart just like Tony, but then a car pulled onto the boulevard from Independence, headlights filling up this little back alley for just a second.”
“That’s all I needed. I pulled the trigger on my gun, once, twice, even though I could tell that my first shot hit it dead on. The thing fell back, collapsed on the ground and—God help me—I ran up to it, stood over it, and pulled the trigger again, this time shooting it in the face. I just stood there, pulling the trigger, until the slide racked back and stayed there.”
“I’m not sure how long I stood over the thing. Maybe I blacked out for a few seconds, or my brain shut down, or something. I finally realized that all I could hear was a hoarse voice calling for Tony, over and over. It was me, of course it was me, just yelling, making a fool of myself.”
He ran a shaking hand over his brush cut hair.
“I couldn’t believe what just happened. I didn’t want to believe it. Monsters aren’t real, right? I knew that if I just went to my car and sat down for a minute, everything would be all right. Maybe I’d dozed off during the long wait for forensics, and Tony was just letting me grab a few winks before waking me up. He was a good partner—”
The officer trailed off again. “I drove back to the station like that, just zoned out. Maybe that’s why everyone seemed weird when I got there, looking at me funny. The chief called me into his office before I even got the chance to sit down at my computer and start working up the case. What would I have said anyway? At that point, it still wasn’t registering my partner was gone, that I’d emptied out an entire clip shooting at something from my worst nightmare.”
“There was a statue sitting on the chief’s desk, plain as day and first thing I saw when I went into his office. I swear it looked exactly like the thing I’d shot, just smaller. It was so similar, in fact, that I raised my gun and aimed at the thing. Before I could pull the trigger, it dawned on me that I hadn’t drawn my gun. Heck, I’d put it in my desk drawer as soon as I came in. But there it was, right when I wanted it.
“The chief was staring at my gun too, but he didn’t say anything, just told me to stand down. He said I needed to check out the statue. I didn’t want to, of course, and not just because it reminded me of that…thing near the dumpster. It was ugly. I said something about that, and he said it was an order. Everyone else had already looked at it. His voice was changing, like he needed to clear his throat. I turned around to leave, and there were all the other officers, everyone currently in the building, just standing behind me, watching me.”
He stopped for a minute. His hands moved in front of him, side by side, palms up and fingers curled slightly, like an Old Testament supplicant. Light, bright and pure, welled up between his fingers, taking the shape of a glowing ball. It only lasted a moment, then it receded. In its place was a police badge in a small leather billfold, the numbers 9645 clear on the card behind the laminate on one side, with a stylized metal shield on the other.
“Well, at least that wasn’t just a part of the dream,” he said softly. “Sucks, though. If that part is true, maybe more of it is.”
The light flashed again, and his hands
were empty, like a sleight of hand magician making things appear and disappear.
“It happened so fast. I can remember thinking I didn’t want to hurt my friends, even though some of them were starting to…change, I guess.”
“Like there was something under their skin, pushing its way out?” I said, finally getting him to focus on me. “Like every horror movie you’ve ever seen come to life, werewolves and demons?”
“Yeah. So that wasn’t just a nightmare, either? You’ve seen them too?”
I nodded, not wanting to tell him, yet, that he’d been one of those things until a few hours before.
“They came at me, and I didn’t want to hurt anyone, so my gun disappeared. But then my baton was there, and I swung and screamed, trying to break through them. Two of them grabbed me, managed to get handcuffs on me, but they disappeared as soon as I decided I didn’t want them on me. It didn’t matter. There were too many of them. They got me turned around and there was the chief, holding up that statue.
“And then…I woke up here.” He spread his hands to indicate…everything. He was calmer, more in control. Funny how a little thing like not having everyone turn into a demon and try to grab you tends to slow the adrenaline just a bit.
“That thing you can do,” I asked. “Are you making things invisible?”
“Not invisible, no,” he said. Light bloomed in his hands, fading to reveal a Wilson basketball. “I just picture something I want, and it appears.” The basketball vanished. “Now, what’s your story?”
It took about ten minutes to fill him in. My story began the same night as his and in roughly the same location. He nodded during the first part, hearing another person describe a first encounter with the Dra’Gal. My story took us from the carnival to the high school, then to the park and back to my house, finally ending up at Tanya’s home in Hampton. I was extra careful during the rescue of Mrs. Fields, wanting him to understand that people could be saved after being converted.
“Is that what happened to me?” he asked, and his voice was a lot calmer than I expected, like a part of him anticipated the answer and worked through the reactions, bringing himself to a state of readiness. Was that a measure of the kind of man he was? Or was it something that went with being a police officer?