But after the Penitentiary, they stayed in Jefferson City for a few more days to investigate nearby Binder Lake, where local legend declared fishermen were often dragged under the water never to be seen again. They had a terrific time, even though they got little in the way of results. This was the first episode in some time that they’d had to embellish the story, because while it might have been true that several fisherman had vanished there, if there was supernatural cause, the Othernaturals didn’t find it.
“It’s more likely that they got drunk and fell in,” said Andrew.
“Wouldn’t you still sense their deaths?” pressed a hopeful Rosemary.
“Drunks drowning in a murky lake feels about the same as drunks swimming in a murky lake. You’ll need a better psychic than me.”
The only real magic they encountered at Binder Lake was Judge’s ability to coax squirrels and raccoons out of the forest to eat out of his hand – and almost a fox, too, though the tiny fox had been too skittish to play, and Judge didn’t want to “hassle the poor little booger.”
Luckily the lake was eerie as hell at night, covered with warm spring mist and echoing with the burping of frogs. They’d rented a small fishing boat that was barely big enough to hold the team, and all seven of them floated on the water at midnight, each of them catching the shivers until they all began to giggle together in sheer terror, all of them half-convinced that hands would soon rise from the water and grab for them. Greg’s bright camera light actually made the night seem darker, reflecting off the lake’s faint mist and shining back at them, rendering all beyond their small circle invisible.
Being on that fishing boat at night was a completely unexpected pleasure for Kaye; huddled next to Stefan under a blanket. How delicious it was to be in the dark, scared more by their own imaginations than by anything in reality.
Rosemary asked skeptically, “Is anyone having psychic experiences out here?”
Greg whispered, “I sense my need to row ashore and find the bathroom.”
Judge said, “Just aim over the side, my friend, or you’ll sink us.” It wasn’t very funny so was thus hilarious, setting them all sniggering.
Rosemary pulled a box of crackers from her backpack. She crushed handfuls and dropped them in the water and then said, “Now we’ll get some water noise. Everybody be ready to act startled.” But they were all startled when surprisingly large fish started breaking the water to gobble the crackers down – Kaye had no idea that fish got so big in ordinary lakes and she’d shrieked when one shining, slimy-grey monster actually rolled over in the water showing its white bloated belly, splashing her when it dunked under again. Her shriek made Sally shriek and Stefan jump and all of them smothered their laughter while the water blipped and burbled with the swarming ugly fish.
Judge dared Sally, “Put your fingers in the water and noodle a fish.” Sally thought it was something sexual, said she wasn’t going to be noodling any fishes, thanks very much, and soon they were all snorting again with giggles and jokes about the sexual harassment of fish until Andrew explained that “noodling” a fish only meant to catch it barehanded by tickling it, which explanation only made the sex jokes worse, and then for the rest of their float it was all noodling jokes, more crackers being tossed into the water and the fish, mistaking Greg’s light for sunshine, hurtling to the surface to feed.
Kaye thought the episode came out simply beautifully. Greg edited the boat trip to cut out most (but not all) of the laughter, kept the strange blooping fish noises and the glowing mist, and of course included all the shrieks and jumps. It didn’t matter that they hadn’t actually found anything: Andrew saved face for them by reminding the audience that water was always a buffer. It was very hard to pick up psychic readings through water, which made the whole venture feel perfectly legitimate. Greg and Sally edited the episode to resemble a campfire story, like something Scouts might whisper to each other at a Jamboree. The Lake of Lost Fishermen.
That made two episodes in a row during which no one went to the hospital. Kaye was glad she had stayed. Next, Kaye would be accompanying Stefan to Necronomi-Con in Dallas, and she doubted very much that anything could go wrong at a horror convention. Surely all the blood and gore there would be fake.
Chapter One
Creve Coeur, Missouri; June 2015
It was the day after the swarm.
At the Creve Coeur Medical Center, nursing shifts ended and new ones began at 7:00 a.m. The time between 5:00 and 6:00 a.m. was perhaps the least active hour of the morning, even for experienced nurses, when yawns were the deepest and attention spans the shortest. Hospitals do not have weekends as such – sick people need care regardless of the day – but the attitude of weekends sometimes seeped through from the real world and on this Sunday morning, a heavy glaze of sleepiness hung over the ward.
A male and female nursing team were behind the desk keeping an ear out for the phones, writing in charts and trying to snap open their droopy eyelids. They barely looked up as Sally Friend passed by them. Sally wore a white polo shirt, white trousers, a white sweater, and white sneakers. Her blonde curls were pinned back. She had a badge pinned to a lanyard around her neck, but closer inspection would reveal it to be Greg’s gym membership card.
She expected at any moment to be stopped and questioned, so had a story worked out. She’d put on her ditz face and say, “I came to visit my friend,” which was completely true. If anybody snapped at her about visiting hours, she’d amp up the ditz face and act like she’d never heard the term in her life. “Visit-ink how-ers?” she would repeat, agog with amazement.
But so far, the hospital staff had ignored her. She was a young pretty woman dressed head-to-toe in white, and no sensible humans would be out at this hour, so she must be staff. They kept scribbling in their charts and said nothing to her. Sally strolled to Judge’s room and walked right through the open door. Behind his half-pulled curtain, Judge waited, fully dressed, with his pack under the bed and ready to grab. The mild squeak of Sally’s shoes told him she was coming, but he still looked worried until he could clearly see it was her.
Judge’s appearance was somewhat improved from last night, when Sally, Stefan and Kaye had forced their way in to see him. The welts on his face, neck and arms were almost unnoticeable now, looking no worse than mosquito bites. His eyes were clearer, the shocky shadows gone from beneath them. The hours between then and now had obviously done him some good. People who got a visit from Kaye Whittington always recovered pretty quickly, as Sally could personally attest. Last year Sally had pierced her foot clean through on a petrified corn stalk, and Kaye had healed that serious injury in less than ten minutes.
“I can’t do much about toxins, but I can fix these,” Kaye had informed Judge, when she’d put her hands to his lumpy face, to work her Kaye-magic on the swollen bee stings.
Now look at him, almost back to his old self!
Sally whispered, “Wow, you look like a hundred times better. Now I’m not so worried about busting you out.”
“Shh,” Judge said, finger to his lips. Sally rolled her eyes at him. She’d spoken so quietly she could barely hear herself. From the pocket of her sweater she produced a small digital camera, not quite as nice as the ones Greg used for the show, but perfectly adequate. She’d been filming bits and pieces of this adventure since she’d gotten up earlier than everybody else and swiped the Othernaturals van from the hotel parking lot. This was her insurance policy.
Judge looked at her with consternation as she took footage of his room, panning quickly over to the wheelchair that waited nearby. So, Judge had done his part of the job, procuring “transportation” for himself. He fished his backpack from under the bed and tossed it in the wheelchair, then climbed in beside it. He used the top sheet from his bed to spread over himself, hiding his street clothes.
Sally handed him the camera. “Be discreet,” she whispered.
“You be discreet,” he snapped back, but they were grinning at each other. This was eno
rmously fun. The fact of the matter was, Judge was an adult who could walk out of the hospital anytime he damn well pleased, but when he’d suggested last night that he wanted Sally to “break him out,” she’d been unable to resist. Judge had tried to explain, “It’s just that I don’t want to be lectured by ten different doctors about—”
Sally brushed off the problem. With the power of her ditz-face, she was never required to explain anything. “Whatever! Let’s do it!”
She gave the wheelchair a push, found it resistant, bent down her head beside Judge’s so they could see how to release the brakes on the silly thing, and a moment later they were moving. The chair gave a faint unoiled whine as she briskly pushed it down the hall. They passed the nurses’ station and the male nurse glanced up with vague curiosity.
“Going for a visit,” said Judge with a disarming smile. The male nurse was checking Sally out, so she tried a disarming grin of her own and said, “We’ll be back in just a minute.”
On they went to the elevator bank. By the time Sally dodged disembarking passengers and backed the wheelchair into an elevator, she saw that the two nurses were out of their chairs and peering down the hall after the wheelchair. It might be occurring to them that something troublesome, or at least something silly, was going on.
The elevator doors banged shut. They were in the elevator with three figures in scrubs. A moment later, the doors opened again they were on the eighth floor, absolutely the wrong direction. In her haste to get Judge off the second floor, Sally had wheeled them into the first elevator that had opened without paying attention to its direction. The surgeons stepped off, one of them yawning expressively.
“Sorry. Down we go.” Sally pushed the lobby button. As they descended toward “2” again, she held her breath, half-fearing that the doors would swing open there, revealing two annoyed nurses who would demand to know what she and Judge were playing at. As the floors ticked away, Judge squirmed and discarded the white sheet, balling it up and tossing it into the elevator corner.
All was fine. They went clear to the lobby without interruption, and Sally pushed Judge onward toward the front doors. The all-nighters at the information desk were speaking quietly to each other but paused to say, “Good morning!”
Sally shrugged. “So far so good!” She found she was playing a character: a nurse who must take this patient outside before the sun had even risen. What an ordeal! Sally gave them no time for any further questions.
Out the doors they went. The difference between the near-frigid temperature of the hospital and the sultry June air was shocking. It was still quite dark outside, but on the eastern horizon the sky was taking on the faintly purple hue of approaching dawn.
“Where’s the van?” asked Judge.
“Physical therapy parking lot,” said Sally.
“Sally!” Judge surprised her by looking scornful; presumably he thought she was parked diagonally across three handicapped-parking spots and laughing ruefully as hospital patients shed tears of frustration.
She rolled her eyes at him. “What? It’s the closest! Nobody is even there yet. Ditch the chair and come on.”
Judge jumped to his feet, grabbed his pack and followed her. They left the wheelchair by a bench in front of the hospital, brakes on, and giggling like children they jogged toward the nearly empty parking garage until Judge had to slow down saying, “Okay, maybe walking is a better idea.”
“Are you dizzy? Omigod, don’t fall over. Great. Kaye is going to kill us both.”
*****
In the van, Sally followed Judge’s directions to the animal hospital. Judge was so eager to get back to Vladimir that he was jiggling in his seat, feet tapping, skinny knees banging up and down.
“Judge, he’s fine. Rosemary would have called you if anything was wrong.”
“I know, but he needs his me,” Judge said. “He had a very bad day yesterday.”
From what Sally had heard, Judge’s day had been pretty bad too, including a dislocated shoulder, poisoning, dangerous shock, and a high fever brought on by his reaction to numerous bee stings. You couldn’t tell Judge that, though. It was all about his kitty. He was out the van door before Sally had even parked, saying a quick, “See you inside,” and then dashing up to the emergency clinic’s entrance to bang on the locked door. Sally followed a few moments later, carrying her sunhat and scarf in her hand. The sun would rise any minute now.
Through the glass door, Sally saw a rather pathetic tableau. In the waiting room, Rosemary and Drew were rousing themselves from what had obviously been an extremely uncomfortable night, spent dozing on hard plastic chairs. They both looked a little hellish, bleary-eyed and disoriented, hair spiky and mussed, their clothes badly rumpled, groaning with the cramps in their necks and backs.
Drew stumbled over and unlocked the door. He was the first to speak, though it wasn’t precisely English and certainly wasn’t Rated PG. The sentence ended with, “hell is going on?”
“Judge!” Rosemary cried, coming awake all at once, her voice full of accusations that needed no detail.
“I had to see my Vlad,” Judge replied, pushing past, looking eagerly around. “I’m fine, don’t fuss. Kaye fixed me up last night when she brought Sally and the Old Man in to visit me. Is he in the same room as yesterday?” He meant his cat, but he didn’t wait for anyone to answer him, just rushed past the front desk toward the kennels room.
“Is anyone else here?” asked Sally.
“Vet attendant in the back room,” said Drew as he scrubbed at his face with his hands. “She tried to throw us out last night; Rosemary wouldn’t let her.”
“Omigod, you guys spent the night here?”
Rosemary stretched, wincing at her aches. Sally heard a few joints popping. Rosemary asked, “How many games of Scrabble do you think we played?”
“I lost count after I’d won the seventh.”
“Figures – after the seventh, I started winning.” She cocked her thumb at Drew and whispered, as if sharing a secret, “When he’s tired, he forgets how to spell.”
Sally examined Rosemary more carefully. Even rumpled, bruised up and grimy, her best friend was still the prettiest woman Sally had ever met, and Sally would have been envious if Rosemary weren’t also super-nice. This early morning, though, there was something on Rosemary that was positively glowing, a fierce, flushed pink emotion with a taste like tart candy being sucked by a bitten tongue, a little mix of blood and pain with the sweetness. Sally followed the line of the emotion and saw where it led: where Rosemary’s emotions always led, right to Drew. This glowing river had never before been so obviously unstifled and so obviously mutual, though. Sally suddenly wondered what these two had been up to all week, with the group split in half, in their fancy St. Louis hotel without Stefan around to scowl protectively.
Rosemary caught Sally’s perceptive perusal. “See something interesting?”
Sally shook her head, far too innocently to be convincing.
“Um, well, I’ll be back in a second, I’m going to the restroom.”
“Great, good,” said Drew, looking utterly wiped out, waving Rosemary away. “I’m going to stay here, and probably die.”
“It was so sweet of you to spend the night,” Sally insisted. “Both of you.”
Drew groaned and rubbed his forehead. “Romy wasn’t going to leave Vladimir, and I wasn’t going to leave Romy. What are friends for?”
Sally and Drew both heard Judge in the treatment room, crooning over his cat, and at that sound, Drew suddenly looked more like himself, saying, “Vladimir’s part of the team, right?”
“He is. He really is.” Sally decided firmly that she wasn’t going to start sniffling. “I’m going to go see Vlad too.”
She went to find Judge and his cat. Vladimir had spent the night in far greater comfort than either Rosemary or Drew. His majesty was curled on a soft cat bed in a spacious kennel. A chart hung from the kennel door, titled “Vladimir Duncan,” which made Sally want to laugh until sh
e caught sight of the recovering cat. Obviously sedated, the cat glared at them with his eyes blinking dizzily and out-of-synch. Was it an optical illusion or – Sally whimpered in dismay as she realized that Vladimir’s cat-face was actually swollen. “Oh poor baby!” she cried, joining Judge at the kennel.
“Him all swollen up from the bad bees, but him is a beautiful boy anyway,” Judge said in full-on, shameless baby-talk. He tugged the kennel open. Vladimir yipped and lurched out of the cat bed, staggering unsteadily toward his beloved Judge. “Oh you come here, my big fat beast, you don’t have to walk on those ouchie paws. Is Vladimir drunk? Oh I think he is, I think his vet gave him a big ol’ kitty cocktail. Let Judge’ems hold you. There’s my fluffy buddy.”
Vladimir bonked Judge appreciatively in the chin twice, purring so loudly that Sally felt the rumble through the air. The great cat settled onto Judge’s shoulder and, for all appearances, went back to sleep, and Judge stood there cradling him like a baby.
Sally swiped at her eyes, sniffling regardless of her determination not to. “I’m so glad he’s going to be okay. I can’t believe anyone would be so mean to a cat.”
“I would have killed them, Sal,” Judge confessed. He looked uncharacteristically ferocious and frightened, which was unusual enough to give Sally chills. “If Rosemary hadn’t talked me down, I was ready to murder them both.”
“You were hurt, though, and not in your right mind.”
Witches Page 3