Mark had to fight off the urge to drive back to the facility, break into the office and inspect that room. He had not only sensed an otherworldly power about it, but something else was there as well, in the dark. With a sigh, Mark turned on his side and stretched his consciousness out once more, in hopes of catching just a glimpse of his lost companion. Darkness greeted him, and with a final sigh, Mark willed himself to sleep.
Twenty-Four
Ben was trembling as Greg hung up the phone. He had expected to have a word with his sister, but Greg looked concerned, and the fear in his voice when he told Mark to get Abby out of the room was very real.
“Enough waiting around,” Ben snapped when Greg put the phone back into his pocket. “Who cares about this patient. Clearly my sister is in danger, and I’m not going to sit here anymore.”
“This is important,” Greg said firmly. He checked his watch and sighed. “It won’t be long now, Ben, I promise.”
Ben crossed his legs, his ankle resting on his crooked knee, his foot jiggling in the air with impatience. “This had better make sense, doc, or we’re going to have some serious problems. I’m going to be very frank with you right now, if anything happens to my sister and you kept me here, I’m holding you personally responsible.”
“If Mark listens to me and gets her out right now, she’s going to be just fine,” Greg said. He stood up and went back to the window of the office, pressing the edge of the blinds down and peering out.
Ben stood up, following him and looked over his shoulder out of the small space visible on the window. “What are you looking at?”
Greg pressed his finger through the blinds, against the glass. “Do you see that room right there? Room four-oh-six?”
“Yes,” Ben said, staring at the closed door.
“That room is where our patient is laying in his bed, completely comatose,” Greg said. “We’re about to go out there and we’re going to check on his vital signs.”
“We?” Ben demanded.
“Oh yes. I need you perfectly aware of his state right now.”
Ben stepped back and crossed his arms as Greg opened the office door and led the way out. He went straight to the nurse’s station where a tired woman with frayed, greying black hair sat at a computer. Her pink scrubs were adorned with cats, which was probably fitting, Ben thought, for a woman working the overnight shift.
Greg smiled at her and attached his badge to the front of his shirt. “Any change in four-oh-six?”
“None today, doctor,” she said. Her voice was hoarse, like a woman who smoked two packs a day, and her teeth, when she smiled, were quite yellow. “Were you called in?”
“No. This is Detective Stanford, and he’s been assigned to a case that may relate to our patient here,” Greg said smoothly. “I’m just providing the detective with a status report.”
The nurse frowned. “A related case?”
“I’m a homicide detective, and unfortunately I’m not at liberty to discuss any details,” Ben snapped at her, using a forceful, “bad cop” voice.
The nurse sneered a little, but said nothing more as Greg led the way into the patient’s room. There was a low light from a wall panel behind the patient’s bed. The man on the bed looked like he might have once been attractive, possibly athletic. His hair was trimmed, his face groomed, and his nails clipped, but that was about all that indicated that he was once a virile young man.
He was too thin, now, his body emaciated and muscles atrophied. His hair was dark, but the color was muddled, and it hung limp and greasy against the pillow. His skin was rather sallow, clearly from lack of sun, and the skin around his eyes was dark. His lips were thin and cracked, pulled away at the corners giving him a skeletal look.
The entire thing made Ben rather uncomfortable, and he wanted to be out of the room as quickly as possible. He would take dead, mangled bodies over a man just wasting away attached to machines.
“Here’s the chart,” Greg said, passing the bed and approaching a machine attached to the patient with wires. A little printer kept what looked like a running tally of lines along a grid pattern, piling up in a small tray on the side. “This monitors his brain activity throughout the day.”
“Okay,” Ben said, unable to make neither heads nor tails of the paper other than the little mountains were probably where brain activity spiked. “So he’s been what?”
“Showing no sign of consciousness,” Greg replied. “I have the readouts of his monitor attached to my computer, and it alerts me every time his brain activity spikes. It’s also set to alert me to when his brain activity is unresponsive to any stimuli for over twenty-four hours. This hasn’t happened until now.”
“What do you mean?”
Greg shrugged and set the paper back down in the tray. “Since Charles was brought in here, his brain has been, for lack of a better word, trying to regain consciousness. At least seven or eight times a day we’d see a spike in his activity. Much like the other patients that went missing, Charles showed signs of impossible healing as well as a sudden drop in brain activity, instead of an increase which one might expect if the patient was just going to suddenly recover and walk out.”
Ben let out a tired sigh. “Is this all you wanted to show me?”
“No, but it’s all we need to be in the room for,” Greg said and led the way back to the office. Once securely inside, the doctor cracked open the blinds, just a little, and gestured for Ben to sit on the chair. “I’m going to ask you not to interfere with what’s about to happen, Ben. Do I have your word?”
“No,” Ben said with a disbelieving laugh. “Of course you don’t have my word. I’m a cop, Greg, and if something is going wrong, I’m not about to stand aside.”
Greg looked troubled, crossing his arms, his face pleading with Ben. “You’re special, Ben. You have something in you, something in your genes that was passed down to you, that makes you vulnerable, except you’ve beat it. Your absolute refusal to believe in any of this keeps you shielded from them.”
“Them,” Ben repeated.
“Yes, them. It’ll all make sense soon. I promise.”
“I see,” Ben replied, his voice heavy.
“No one is going to get hurt,” Greg pressed. He took a step toward Ben, but the warning look the detective shot him made him stay where he was. “All that’s going to happen is that the nurse is going to get called away from her station. The lights are going to go out, though there will be a few on generators in the hall. You’ll see Charles open the door and walk out of the hospital. That’s all that’s going to happen. I beg you not to stop him.”
“And if he goes, he dies?” Ben asked.
Greg gave a helpless shrug. “I don’t know. I can’t promise whether he’ll live or die.”
“Letting him walk out knowing he will die is accessory to murder,” Ben said.
“I can’t argue with you, I can only ask that you trust me, and understand that this man is going to die anyway. Whether it’s in this bed, or on the street. He was chosen for a reason,” Greg begged.
Ben acquiesced to the doctor’s request, but could not bring himself to promise that he wouldn’t step in if he actually saw this man get up from his bed and walk out. This was no joke, as far as he could tell. Greg Asclepius was an actual doctor, with an actual degree. The medical records were in the database; Ben had used it before when researching evidence on a warrant. The man in the bed was clearly comatose, and there was no way the man had been out of his bed anytime in the recent past.
He couldn’t really believe, however, that everything the doctor said was actually going to happen. The idea that the nurse was going to leave, and the lights would go out, and then this Charles person would just stand up and stroll out was absolutely insane.
However, even as Ben sat there in disbelief, the nurse answered a call, and suddenly got up from her post and ran down the hall. Ben heard Greg take a deep breath and whisper, “Here we go.”
Ben opened his mouth to reply, but
the lights went out, just as Greg promised. Ben was instantly on his feet, his gun drawn, his face pressed against the blinds. As the doctor had described, a few floor lights remained, attached to the building’s generator, but Ben could see in the corners of the hall, the security cameras were all out.
“They didn’t think to put those cameras on damn generators, too?” Ben whispered.
“They are on generators,” Greg whispered back. “Those were taken out separately. Please, just watch.”
The heavy flow of adrenaline was causing Ben’s hands to tremble, but his finger near the trigger of his gun was trained and still. He watched as the door across the room slowly opened, and a man appeared in the door.
There was no mistaking him for the emaciated Charles Wighbon, though Ben’s brain desperately tried to come up with some other explanation. The man stumbled, his muscles clearly unused and weak. He was wearing the hospital gown, the back flowing openly, as the man shuffled across the carpet.
“I’m sorry,” Ben said and he shoved Greg aside, throwing the door open and holding the gun at point-blank range. “Stop right there, Mr. Wighbon.”
Charles stopped, but so did Ben. It was the oddest thing Ben had ever experienced aside from what happened to him in the church. His feet, suddenly, felt glued to the floor, and though he held the gun, he couldn’t move to pull the trigger.
Charles, for all his emaciated glory, looked at Ben with sunken eyes, and grinned. The eyes flashed, just for the barest second, as though someone had shone a light through them from the inside of Charles’ head, much like the video’s Ben had seen earlier. The man cocked his head to the side, as if studying Ben, and then, ever so slowly, picking up speed as he went, shuffled down the hall and disappeared through the emergency exit door.
It was when the door slammed shut that Ben could move again, but before he could go after the man, Greg hauled him into the office and slammed the door. “Don’t, you fool! He’s already seen you!”
“So what?” Ben said, pushing Greg off his arm. “Look at him, look at the state of him! He’s practically a corpse.”
“Tell me you didn’t feel that power,” the doctor stressed.
“Are you saying he could kill me? That I couldn’t overpower him, or effing shoot him if I needed to?” Ben demanded.
“No,” Greg said with a shrug. “If it came down to it, you probably could kill him. However, there’s always strength in numbers, and don’t for a second think he’s alone. There are many of them in this world, Ben, and together they could do some damage if they chose to.”
Ben had had enough, and he threw up his hands, his gun still clenched in his fist. “What the hell just happened? I want answers and I want them now. Who was that man? What was he? How the hell was he able to just stroll out of here after being in a coma for this long?”
Greg bowed his head as he pulled Ben back away from the door. His face was drawn, tired, but he was going to talk. Ben didn’t care if he had to tie the doctor down, he’d get some answers.
After a moment, Greg went to a small cabinet in the corner of the room and pulled out a cheap bottle of scotch and two glasses. He filled them and handed one to Ben, who took it greedily. Taking a seat, his back to the wall instead of the front door, he narrowed his eyes at the doctor, waiting for answers.
“The thing inside that man, manipulating his body, was a god.”
Ben’s eyebrows rose. “A god?”
“A Greek god, to be exact,” Greg said, nodding a little. “Not sure which one, it’s more difficult to tell these days. But yes.” When Ben snorted in disbelief, Greg leaned across his desk, imploring Ben with wide eyes to listen, to understand. “They’re not the Greek gods you know from myth. They’re old, they’re incorporeal, angry and nearly powerless. They use humans as vessels to touch our world, and they’re planning something. I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t good. I know that much.”
Taking a drink, Ben gathered his thoughts, not sure if he should laugh, cry, or shoot this doctor and put him out of his obvious misery. Instead he humored him. “So… what? So they’re taking this coma guy out for a quick romp?”
“Normally they have chosen vessels. Some of them don’t even bother with humans any more but,” he hesitated, going silent for a moment. “They’re growing in numbers. They can’t sustain a body for long. Their core has a pretty profound effect on the human body. They accelerate the aging process to the point where a human dies of old age in a matter of weeks. Gods who have a more symbiotic relationship with their humans allow frequent breaks, but this is different. They’re… ramping up, and I know for a fact it has something to do with your John Doe.”
Ben had officially heard enough. Whatever the doctor was saying, he couldn’t accept it. There was no way. It was a stretch to ask him to believe in the healing powers of Mark’s little friend, but Greek gods? Absolutely not. “This is a bunch of bullshit,” Ben snarled. However, something in him was shaken. He knew he should have pushed Greg away and gone after the man, but for some reason he couldn’t. It took Ben a minute to realize he was actually scared.
Ben was startled, suddenly, by a buzzing in his pocket, and he pulled out his phone to reveal a text from Mark. It was asking him to come with the doctor back to San Diego the next day. There was no question about that, of course, and he replied with two words, Expect me.
Ben turned to look at the doctor, who was watching him apprehensively, and he let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. It was time to get a move on, and with the bizarre knowledge the doctor had, Ben wasn’t about to let him out of his sights. Whatever he’d seen tonight sure as hell wasn’t normal, and this doctor was obviously involved. He holstered his gun again, securing it back against his side, and then said, “We should probably get a few hours of sleep before we head back to your office.”
Twenty-Five
With the dawn, Mark woke to the sound of the shower running. He rolled over and saw Abby’s bed vacant and the discarded washcloth on the floor. He sat up, stretching slightly, his back a little tense from the stiff motel bed, and he rose.
The clock on the nightstand read four-fifteen, so he assumed it was off and went to his phone. It was blinking with a message, and when he opened it, it read simply, Expect me. It was from Ben, and Mark had a feeling the good detective was in a rage. It wasn’t anything he could help, however, and he could only hope that whatever Ben had discussed with the doctor the night before had helped him to understand the gravity of what was going on.
Mark went to the car to grab his bag, and when he returned, Abby was sitting on the edge of the bed, using the stiff-bristled, motel-issued brush on her hair. She was wrapped in a towel, her clothes piled on the floor next to her.
“We might need to go shopping if I’m going to be cavorting around with you for a while,” she said with a small smile. “Sorry about the towel, they seem fresh out of hotel robes.”
“It’s fine,” Mark replied with a shrug and a half-smile. “We have some time before your brother and the doctor arrive, we can pick up whatever necessities you may need for this trip.”
“Any idea how long we’re going to be away?” Abby asked. “I mean, I should call the school and give them some sort of time frame.”
“I believe they know already,” Mark said, “or if they don’t, they will shortly. The break-in at the hospital won’t go unreported, and it’s likely those two detectives will be on the case. They’ll be searching for us, so wherever we go, we have to lay low. Our best hope is that whoever took Yehuda took him out of the city.”
Abby sighed and bowed her head. “I’m going to get arrested, aren’t I?”
“Should we ever be captured by law enforcement, I’m going to claim you are my hostage, and not a thing will be done to you. Believe me, Abigail, nothing bad will happen to your personal life.”
“I don’t want to see you in trouble, either,” Abby fretted.
Mark gave a little chuckle. “Believe me, nothing will happen t
o me that I can’t handle. Now, go ahead and get dressed, and we’ll find a quiet place to eat and then get you the things you need.”
Abby stared at Mark for a long time before finally grabbing her clothes and going back into the bathroom to change. She was still limping a little when she came out, but she was able to put more pressure on the foot, which meant that it wasn’t broken.
As terrible as it was, if the foot had been broken, Mark would have had to leave her behind. He couldn’t have afforded to drag along an injured person, nor could he afford being seen at a hospital where authorities could be alerted.
The pair got into the car and Mark found a little café for breakfast on the still, quiet streets of La Jolla. The café was nice, older styled, and the patrons there were all aging locals. They took a booth in the very back and ordered from the tall, lanky waitress who looked like she’d been working in the café for far too long.
Mark ordered coffee and took down the entire cup before the waitress had even walked away. He accepted the refill with an apologetic grin, and for the second cup added a couple of sugars. “I need all the energy I can get, today,” he said to Abby, who was watching him with a wry grin.
“I see that. Is today going to be a lot like last night?”
Mark shrugged. “I don’t know. I can only assume we’ll be on the run, and definitely should not be in this city long.”
“Why are we here, exactly? I mean, are we going to try and break back into that doctor’s office and see what’s in that room?”
Mark shook his head. “No we’re not. Well, at least you’re not. Whatever is in there is dangerous to you, and I’m not going to put you at risk.”
The Awakening (The Judas Curse Book 1) Page 17