A spark of amusement crept into his dark eyes. “Oh, clever. And you continued the food metaphor. I’m impressed. But a minute ago you were suggesting the big sissies were afraid of a little rain.”
Before I could offer a tart comeback, he added, “There’s something in that woods, and I think it’s important we know what it is.”
“Goldman, I’ll tell you what’s in that woods-weird, creepy, bloodthirsty critters that were once-upon-a-time human beings, just like you and me. They didn’t get called off. They just got scared because one of them bought the farm.”
“And you were forced to kill him… or her. I’m sorry, Colleen.” He gave me a liquid brown look of utter sorrow that bit through me like a north wind, then got up and headed across the room.
I was stunned. “What-sorry? Do I look like I need your sympathy?”
Part of me wanted to chase him down and make him take back his pity. Another part was just plain embarrassed, because people were staring at me. My dignity circuit kicked in. I grinned and shook my head, as if I hadn’t just let him get to me. I was still sitting there about twenty minutes later when Cal came in and sat down across the table.
“Where’s Goldie?” were the first words out of his mouth. They pissed me off.
“Just missed him.”
Cal’s eyes tried to catch mine and read them. “Did he say anything more to you about what he heard out there?”
“Nothing that made any sense.” I changed the subject. “You talk to the admin guy-Nelson?”
He nodded, looking down at his hands clasped on the tabletop. Something about the expression on his face… “What?”
He raised his eyes to the sheet of glass and looked out into the rain. Flames from the cook stoves were bright blossoms in the dark. Our reflections watched us watching them.
“They have some very real needs here, Colleen. They’re short doctors, nurses… mechanics.” He shot a glance at me. “You name it, they need it.”
“He asked us to stay.”
A nod.
“You’re not seriously thinking about it?”
“I don’t want to think about it, but…” He closed his eyes. “Just after you left, they brought in a kid with severe slash wounds. Deep slash wounds. I didn’t think they’d be able to stop the bleeding. Dr. Nelson didn’t think they’d be able to stop the bleeding. Doc did. And between the two of them, they pulled it off. The kid’s unconscious, but Doc thinks he’ll recover.” His eyes opened and pinned me to the back of my chair. “When I first walked into his office a while ago, Darryl Nelson struck me as a man who was worn-out-almost used up. No light in his eyes, no hope. He said it was the end of a long day, but it was more than that. When he shook my hand just now …” He turned his right hand over on the table, palm up, and I realized the cuffs of his shirt were stained with blood. “…he was a different man.”
I touched the stained sleeve. “That the kid’s?”
He pulled a wry grimace. “I’m a paramedic now.”
“And they need paramedics.”
“They need everything.” He sat back in his chair. After a moment of silence he looked at me, his eyes sharp and cool. “You know as well as I do that there’s not a lot we can do in just a few days. This place has problems that would take an ongoing battle just to keep under control. But…” He gazed around the cafeteria at the little knots of people scattered around the room-families, children. “We can make a little bit of a difference here, and the rest could only help us.”
I had to admit, the thought of setting up camp here, even for a couple of days, was awfully appealing. We were all exhausted. Even Cal, for all that he seemed to have an endless supply of high-voltage batteries. This wasn’t an easy decision for him. Fear for Tina, fear that we’d be too late for her, for everyone, just hovered in the back of his head. You could see it in his eyes if you looked real close, as I often did.
“If you want to move on…”
He shook his head. “We’re going to be here at least for the night. Let’s just… be here now, or whatever Yoda said.”
I snorted. The thought of Cal being here now was a bit of a stretch. “Yeah, right.”
He almost smiled. “Look, why don’t you go get some sleep? I’m going back down to the E.R. and make sure Doc doesn’t pull an all-nighter.”
He got up then, automatically reaching down to adjust the position of the sword that hung against his thigh. The sword he’d pulled, like Excalibur, from a pile of trash in the Manhattan underground. Sometimes I thought the thing was more than a weapon. A familiar, maybe-like a witch’s black cat. Okay, that’s creepy, but these days you found yourself thinking stuff like that all the time.
I gestured at it. “You’re gonna forget to take that thing off one of these nights, and wake up with it fused to your leg.”
This time he did smile, and the smile got all the way up into his eyes. It was a smile that made you feel, irrationally, that he saw the end of all this, and it was a good end. He laid a hand on the sword hilt. “Darryl said if you go to the admissions desk, they’d find a room for you. With a real bed.”
“A real bed? I don’t know if I remember how to use one of those.”
He left, and I got a bite to eat-bread, jerky, dried fruit. Just about everything is dried or jerked these days. Then I fetched my pack out of the wagon and went up to Admissions and got myself a room on the ward. The guy there actually had me sign a guest register.
“Hey, when this is all over,” he said, “these kinds of records might be the only way of tracking people down.”
Either that made sense or I was groggier than I thought. I signed in and the guy handed me a towel and told me how to get to the showers. The showers, for godsake! I was so dazzled by the thought of showers that I didn’t take offense at the suggestion that I needed one.
The admissions guy warned me that at this time of night the fires under the hot water reservoir had been banked down for hours and wouldn’t be stoked until just before dawn. “Water might be a little cool,” he said.
It was merely lukewarm. Felt great anyway. After, I dragged myself to my room, lay down on the bed and tried to sleep. I couldn’t. I don’t know how long I lay there trying, but I finally gave up, rolled out of bed, and wandered out into the hall.
From the ward I could look down toward the core of the building and the lobby, a two-story atrium with a lot of plate-glass windows and a skylight-almost like being in the open woods at night. I made my way down the hall past the gift shop (now a small supply store that took barter rather than money, according to Admissions Guy) and into the atrium. I curled up on a sofa in the lounge, my head resting on the arm so I could look up and see the sky.
The rain had stopped and the moon was still there, wearing a veil of clouds. She wasn’t full; it looked like something had taken a bite out of her. No matter. As days passed, she’d wax and wane and wax again. And there were stars, twinkling like a promise.
Something in the darkness of the west wing caught my eye. A shadow shifted, oozed. Static electricity arced across every nerve junction in my body.
I rolled my head a little to one side so I could see the mouth of the corridor from the E.R., which opened right next to the door of the pharmacy. After a moment of watching, there was more movement. Someone or something had just slithered around the corner into the darkened store.
I put the thought of shadows or lurkers aside and rolled off the sofa to slink across the moonlit floor, keeping low and using the groupings of furniture as cover. I passed soundlessly through the glass doors and paused to let my eyes adjust to the deeper darkness in the cluttered room.
My ears found the movement first; a secret scuffling, as of really big mice, came from the storage area behind the pharmacist’s counter. I crab-crawled across the front of the room, then slipped up and around the counter.