Escape (48 page)

Testing the doorknob, the creature found that he had successfully frozen both the knob and the lock by resoldering it to the door. No one would be getting in there for a while.

With that, the creature began walking down the hallway again, back toward the patient waiting areas, encountering a few more nurses along the way, one of which asked him if he needed help. He assured her that he did not. When the pristine white hallway was clear again, the creature who wore Lystra Deswin's face dissapeared in a sudden explosion of gray dust. The hazy cloud coalesced a second later in the form of the matronly nurse, complete with blue nurse's uniform. Curious whose form it had taken now, the creature checked the nametag over its right breast: Rasha Tiuk.

Plastering a grin on her pudgy face, the creature, now Rasha Tiuk, began walking down the hallway again, this time in the opposite direction, back toward the so-called restricted areas of the medical center. Rasha's form would do for now, at least until the creature could find a more useful one.

* * *

“I'm afraid there's really nothing wrong with the two of you,” the doctor said with an exasperated sigh. “All of your vitals are good
—
better than good actually. Neither of you are experiencing symptoms of a known disease or
sickness
. Yet we can't deny that
something
must be wrong with you, if only by looking at your eyes.”

Jilly frowned. “So that's it? You give up? As a doctor myself I can tell you there's still a lot you haven't
—
”

The doctor held up a hand to stop her. “I didn't say I'd given up. I'd like to run some more blood tests, but at this point, I have to say I'm leaning toward some form of dye. Perhaps you consumed or otherwise came into contact with a potent red dye, and
 
.
 
.
 
.
” He shook his head. “I'm inclined to say that your eyes will probably return to their normal color in a few days, and that unless you're experiencing some form of pain or diminished function in your eyes, you shouldn't worry about it. As for your other symptoms, they could be unrelated, or subjective distortions caused by stress or anxiety. If you think there's something wrong with you, you're bound to find a variety of
—
”

“Doctor.” Jilly's voice was suddenly weary. “ We're not being hypochondriacs. I was hoping we could get somewhere without having to scare you, but
—
” Jilly turned to Ferrel who was sitting beside her on the examination table. “Would you punch the wall please.”

Ferrel smiled. “My pleasure.” His arm blurred, and connected with the wall in an explosion of formaplast and castcrete. He coughed lightly on the resultant cloud of dust, and turned back to the doctor with a smile, his red eyes glowing visibly through the  dust cloud.

The doctor took a hasty step back and stumbled over his stool. He fell heavily to the floor, his data pad clattering to the floor beside him. “How did you
 
.
 
.
 
.
”

Jilly began nodding slowly. “Exactly.”

* * *

Nurse Rasha Tiuk rounded the corner, following signs to guide her way. When the signs grew ambiguous, she stopped to ask a passing doctor.

“Hello, I'm looking for the manager of this facility. Can you tell me where I might find him
 
.
 
.
 
.
or her?”

The doctor slowed to a stop and regarded her with a wrinkled brow. “You mean Doctor Lesteran? Your cousin,
Fesha
Lesteran? She's on the top floor. Are you feeling all right?”

Rasha merely smiled and shrugged and continued on her way. What was a cousin? Rasha had to search her memory for a microsecond to dredge up the definition
.
 
.
 
.
 
.
The child of one's aunt or uncle
—
in other words, a tangential familial relation. Well, that would make her job easier.

Rasha followed the signs to the nearest lift tube and punched the call button. She spent a moment waiting before the tube opened and disgorged a pair of doctors. She brushed by them with a smile, and punched the highest number, 185, on the control panel. As she rode up, Rasha wondered what sort of authority the manager would have, and if she shouldn't rather be looking for the most senior doctor in the ER.

Well, surely, as the manager of the entire building she would be allowed to poke her nose into the ER? And perhaps more importantly, she would be able to manage future scares as the changing masses flooded into the med center looking for answers. Why are my eyes red? Why was my son able to kill his schoolmate with a single punch?

She would develop an official med center policy to deal with such cases. Sooner or later it would become impossible to cover up, but she would make sure it was later than sooner.

When the lift finally arrived on level 185, having shot up more than 50 floors in less than 10 seconds, Rasha Tiuk continued on her way. The entire level was devoted to Doctor Lesteran's quarters and office, which made finding her disappointingly easy.

Stopping in front of Fesha's secretary, Rasha pasted a broad grin on her pudgy face, and spent a moment waiting to be noticed.

The secretary looked up from her desk with eyebrows raised. “May I help you?”

“Yes, I'm here to see Doctor Lesteran.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No, I don't think so.”

The secretary frowned and shook her head. “Without an appointment
 
.
 
.
 
.
”

“Tell her it's her cousin, Rasha.”

The secretary looked uncertain, and her eyes dipped momentarily to check Rasha's nametag, as if she might be an imposter. Of course, the name tag said Rasha Tiuk, but that likely didn't meant anything to the secretary, so she pressed a forefinger to the comm panel on her desk and spoke into it.

“Miss Lesteran, I'm sorry to disturb you, but there's a Rasha Tiuk here to see you
.
 
.
 
.
 
.
She says she's your cousin.”

“Rasha? Well, what are you waiting for? Let her in for Deus' sake!”

“Yes, Miss Lesteran.”

The secretary turned chagrined eyes up from the comm panel and nodded to Rasha, who smiled all the more broadly and walked past the secretary's desk to the broad, double tesk wood doors of Doctor Lesteran's office.

Chapter 28

W
hen the doctor returned, he was followed into the room by a much taller, older man, also wearing a doctor's white uniform. He shut the door of the examination room behind him and turned to them with a look of strained patience.

“Good evening, Miss Claassen and Mr. Catrel. I'm Doctor Handell, the senior physician of the ER. Perhaps you'd like to
 
.
 
.
 
.
show
me what Doctor Coragail means by incredible feats of strength and
daimonic
eyes?” The elder doctor raised one bushy silver eyebrow at them, shrugged, and said, “Well, never mind the eyes. Let's see you do something incredible.” He sent the younger doctor, who was cowering in the furthest corner of the room, a quick sidelong look.

Jilly met Dr. Handell's skepticism with a shrug and nodded to the hole in the wall.

“Yes, I can see something happened to the wall. How do I know that wasn't chiseled out as part of a practical joke?” Dr. Handell sent the younger doctor another look, this one full of warning.

“Before we show you anything, I need some guarantees,” Jilly said. “We came here for a diagnosis, and hopefully, treatment
—
not to become science experiments in the lab. I need your word that that won't happen.”

Doctor Handell's mouth twisted wryly. “I assure you, Miss Claassen
—
”

“In writing,” she added. The hard edge in her voice gave Doctor Handell pause.

He hesitated briefly, holding Jilly's level gaze, waiting for her to give up the obvious charade. When she didn't even blink, his eyes narrowed, and without looking away he snapped his fingers at the younger doctor. Doctor Coragail didn't even move. He was staring fixedly at the hole in the wall, his eyes wide, his pale face frozen in a gape.

“Doctor Coragail? Paper? Pen?”

No answer.

“Doctor!”

The young man actually jumped with fright. “Yes
 
.
 
.
 
.
of course, one-one moment
 
.
 
.
 
.
” He rifled through a stack of papers atop an L-shaped counter in the corner where he was hiding. He withdrew one sheet from the stack, and without daring to move his feet, held the paper out at arms length, but still out of reach of Doctor Handell.

The elder doctor covered the distance between them with a frown and snatched the paper noisily from Doctor Coragail's shaking hand. He went to the counter, found a pen there for himself, and spent a moment hunched over and scribbling. When he was done, Handell walked up to Jilly and thrust the paper in front of her nose.

“This good enough for you?”

Jilly scanned the page quickly, then nodded and took the sheet from him. “Better than nothing,” she said as she folded it and stuffed it into her tunic.

“Your turn.”

“Okay.” With that, Jilly seemed to blur before the doctor's eyes. He blinked, blaming old age and fatigue for the phenomenon. And in that split-second he both saw and heard Jilly deliver a quick one-two punch, with a roundhouse kick for good measure, to the hole in the wall next to Ferrel. When his ears stopped ringing from the thunderous explosions, and the dust had settled enough to see, he saw Jilly turn to him with a grim smile, her eyes glowing fiercely red in the sudden gloom. There was a pile of crumbled castcrete at her feet, and a ragged hole in the wall clear through to the adjacent room.

“Was that
incredible
enough for you, Doc?” Ferrel asked.

“Deus save us,” Handell whispered. “What are you? Automatons?”

Jilly shook her head. “We were hoping you could tell
us
.”

* * *

“Well, we
 
.
 
.
 
.
” Doctor Handell trailed off uncertainly, as if he'd begun his sentence and forgotten how to finish it. “We should
 
.
 
.
 
.
”

Jilly sighed. She took a seat beside Ferrel on the examination table, rolled up the sleeve of her tunic, held out her arm and made a fist. “How about we start with blood samples?”

“Yes
 
.
 
.
 
.
” The elder doctor's eyes had glazed over, but the younger one, who had had more time to absorb the surreal situation, began collecting the necessary implements from the drawers in the desk beside him. A moment later he approached her with a pair of needles, a stretchy blue tourniquet, and a bottle of alcohol to disinfect the implements and her skin.

Setting the implements on the examination table beside her, he drew the rolling stool in front of her and set to work. At some point while he was drawing blood, a doctor from the adjacent room poked his head through the hole in the wall with a disbelieving exclamation of, “What in the Infernal happened to the wall?”

To which Ferrel turned and replied: “Mind your own keficking business.”

The Doctor's head retreated from the hole with a mutter about the impertinence of youth.

Doctor Coragail finished taking Jilly's blood, then, almost as an afterthought, rolled his stool up in front of Ferrel and took another sample from him. He set the samples carefully on the counter and wrote on the labels to distinguish them. When he was done, he spent a moment staring at the samples, half expecting the vials of red blood to leap up and do a little dance
—
or at the very least turn green. It would be in keeping with everything else that had happened so far.

Jilly interrupted his contemplation with another suggestion. “You should probably check the samples yourself. Better not to involve anyone else just yet. At least until you know what you're dealing with.”

Doctor Handell, who had been standing quietly in his corner of the room throughout the sample-taking process cleared his throat and walked over to the counter where the samples lay. He snatched them both in one shaky hand, and sheepishly met Jilly's eyes. His gaze slid away almost instantly, but in that instant Jilly read in his thoughts that he'd come to a decision about his patients. They weren't going to be leaving the med center anytime soon. Until everything was understood about their condition
—
what was causing it, how to treat it, whether or not it actually needed treating or in fact represented some form of useful mutation
—
they would eat, sleep, and breathe the carefully filtered air of an isolation ward.