“Stand aside,” I blurted. “Emergency!” As if my bloody gloves and surgical gown weren’t warning enough.
But he blocked my path, one hand on either stair rail, his long arms spanning the length of the stairwell. “That man is dangerous,” he growled softly.
“That man is under my care,” I announced, lifting my chin. I walked into the man, figuring that he would give way to my outstretched bloody gloves. Like a normal person would.
. But he didn’t. My sticky gloves nearly mashed into the velvet of his jacket, and he didn’t flinch. This close, he smelled like old books and moss.
“You can’t go down there,” he said. His voice was soft, but insistent.
My eyes narrowed. “You don’t get to tell me where to go,” I chirped petulantly. I ducked under his arm, darting out of his reach, and barreled down the steps the remaining way to ground level.
I rushed out into the parking lot and stopped short.
“What the actual hell—”
The patient peeled himself off the ground and crawled to his feet. He reminded me of a half-dead insect when he did so, shaking and rickety and dripping blood.
That’s impossible, I thought. There was no way that a human being could do that. I took two steps toward him...
...and a dozen people flitted out of the darkness, from the shadows beneath cars and behind shrubs. The overhead parking lot lights, haloed by moths, illuminated their long shadows on the pavement.
I breathed a sigh of relief. The squad was here and would get him stable, get him back to my OR.
But...my brow wrinkled. That wasn’t the squad. Nobody was in uniform. They converged on him as he turned, screaming.
“Stop!” I shouted.
Heads turned toward me. Their faces were moon-pale and glistening in the lamplight.
The man in the velvet jacket grabbed my arm, dragging me back. “You want no part of this.”
“Don’t tell me what I want,” I growled. I stomped on his instep and twisted my arm to break his grip at the weakest part, the thumb. I whirled and ran toward the fracas.
The shadowy people had plucked my patient off the pavement, clotting around him.
I yelled at them, the way I might yell at pigeons in the park who were eating my dropped French fries.
Overhead, the parking lot lights shattered, one by one, in a series of pops. Someone had a gun. I flinched back, shielding my face from flying shards of plastic with my hands, as I was suddenly plunged into darkness. I heard fighting, yelling, as if a gang war had broken out in front of me, roiling in the dark where no one could see.
Or at least, as dark as things could get in Riverpointe. Riverpointe was a decently sized city, and ambient light filtered back quickly from the freeway, headlights on the access road to the hospital, and the hospital’s helipad above.
As my vision adjusted, I realized I was alone. The people who were trying to abduct my patient, my patient...even that fascinating-smelling velvet guy...all were gone.
Ambulance lights flashed at the end of the parking lot, approaching me. Behind me, I heard the hammering of footsteps on the stairwell. Security spilled out behind me, along with a few cops who’d been hanging out in the nurse’s lounge. The EMTs pulled up to the curb, and there were all of a sudden a couple dozen people churning in a uniformed cloud around me.
“Where’d the guy go?” a security guard asked me.
A moth that had once orbited the parking lot lights flitted down and smacked my face. I batted at it, grimacing.
“I don’t know,” I whispered, stunned. “He was just...taken.”
The moth landed on the ground on its back, wiggling.
With bloody fingers, I picked it up and placed it gently in a nearby shrub. Lights, voices, and radios crackled around me. Questions rose and fell, directed at me in a tide of inquiries I couldn’t answer. But I stared at the bloody moth, stained by my touch, as it sought a safe place among the churning shadows and light.
CHAPTER 2: BLAZE
“Trust me. After the day I’ve had, I need to blow off a bit of steam.”
I cradled the phone between my cheek and shoulder as I pinned up tendrils of my hair that had fallen loose from the knot on the top of my head. I never bothered to do much with my hair; it spent most of its life stuffed under a surgical cap at work or jammed into a bun in my off time. Even now, discussing plans to go out with my friend Kara, I couldn’t be bothered to put forth more than the minimum effort required.
“I heard all about it from Curt. Seriously, if you need to decompress—” Kara began. Kara understood. Kara was a radiologist at the hospital, and she knew how to roll with canceled plans more than most people did. But I’d been blowing my friends off in favor of work the last three weeks in a row, and I didn’t want to disappoint yet again. Even fellow friends in the medical field had limits for how much they’d indulge my batshit schedule.
I was rattled by the events earlier this evening, though I would never admit it. I’d never had a guy get up off my table before. I’d never had a patient try to kill himself. And get abducted, disappear...I shook my head. I’d only been an independently-working attending surgeon out of fellowship for two years. Weird things happened at hospitals, but this was beyond my frame of reference. I worried that I’d screwed up, did something wrong. I’d been turning the scene over and over in my mind, and I knew I was now suffering a good case of analysis paralysis.
“Really, I want to go,” I told her, deciding that getting out of my head was a good idea for now. “After all that, I don’t think I want to sit at home and stew in front of the television. Besides, I’ve put sooooo much effort into getting ready. It would be a shame to waste all this glam on reruns.” I winced when I said it. I had spent exactly three minutes getting ready to go out. Ten, if I included the time it took to get a shower.
“Only if you’re sure.”
“I’m sure,” I said. “But no shop talk, okay?” That was a big ask, I knew; our lives revolved around the hospital like tiny planetoids around a ferociously burning sun.
Kara gave a heavy sigh. “You mean I can’t regale you with stories of the foreign objects I’ve found in bodies this week? I mean, there was a plastic lizard, even.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “No, dude. You do not want to get a knife monkey thinking about how the hell that happened. Because I won’t be able to stop thinking about how to get it out of wherever it crawled into.”
“Okay.” I heard Kara’s grin through the phone. “I bet you’ll ask me after two drinks, though. That lizard and the pinecone...”
“Wait for me to ask.”
“Okay. See you at ten at...that new place? Silla’s?”
“Yep. See you then.”
I hung up and stared at my phone. I had an hour. It would take a half-hour to get there if I called for a rideshare to pick me up. I lived within walking distance of the hospital, which was important to me, as I was often on call at odd hours and used the walk back to my apartment to decompress. I was the lowest surgeon on the totem pole, which meant I drew all the worst hours on the schedule. Usually, I didn’t mind the walk home, but this evening the security team had insisted on driving me in the security van. Since I was still jumping at shadows, I was grateful for that favor and made a mental note to drop a pizza off to security next time I went in.