“Thank you,” Lauryn gasped.
“Don’t thank me yet,” the man replied, his deep voice unnaturally calm as he turned back toward Lenny, who’d already rolled back to his feet, snorting like a bull as he turned to stare them down with his blood-filled eyes.
It was at this point that the absurdity of the situation finally began to beat its way through Lauryn’s panic. She was in an alley under the elevated train track less than a hundred feet from a busy train station during the evening rush, facing off against her patient, who’d apparently turned into a monster—a legit monster with red eyes, incredible strength, clawed hands, the works—with an unknown savior who didn’t look like he found any of this out of the ordinary.
Quite the opposite. The man who’d just pulled Lauryn to her feet looked so calm, he might as well have been waiting for the train. Lauryn was still trying to work her brain around that when Lenny’s bloody eyes locked onto the two of them, and his ashen face contorted into a mask of pure, insane rage.
“Um,” she said, voice cracking as she took a step back. “I don’t know who you are, but I think we should run. I already called EMS. They’ll be here in just—”
“I know,” the man said, his voice calm and still as a deep winter night. “That’s why we can’t run. Look around.” He nodded at the sheltered square at the end of the alley, formed by the retaining wall, the support beams, and the chain fence that separated this alley from the rest of the underpass. “Right now, he’s in here with us. If we leave, he’ll follow, and then the whole street will be in danger.” He reached into his bulky coat, keeping his eyes locked on Lenny, who was now stomping the dirty pavement like a rhinoceros about to charge. “We have to fight him here.”
“Are you crazy?” Lauryn hissed. “We can’t fight him! He’s sick. He needs medical attention, not to be hurt more.”
Even as she said it, though, Lauryn wasn’t sure. She liked to think she had a high threshold for weird situations—a necessity in her profession—but nothing about this made any kind of sense. She could probably come up with some kind of explanation for the red eyes, discolored skin, and obvious violent psychosis, but that didn’t change the fact that this thing in front of her was over nine feet tall. On his best day, Lenny just barely topped six feet. He was so tall now, his head was actually scraping the bottom of the train bridge overhead, and that simply wasn’t possible. Just thinking about it made Lauryn feel like the whole world was sliding sideways. A feeling that only got worse when the man in front of her reached into his coat to pull out—not a stun gun or a pepper-spray canister or anything that might actually be useful—but a sword. A huge two-handed, cross-hilted sword with a wide blade so finely polished it glowed like molten silver in the dark alley.
“Unclean spirit!” he said, his deep voice ringing as he raised the sword in front of him. “I command you to leave this servant of the Lord and torment him no longer.”
The loud words bounced through the dark like shots, and the thing that had been Lenny recoiled with a hiss. Lauryn hissed, too, but for completely different reasons. “What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m attempting an exorcism,” the man replied, never taking his eyes off Lenny.
That’s what Lauryn had been afraid of—this guy was clearly mad, too. She looked down at her hand, wondering if whatever she had touched had psychotropic properties. At the same time, she still found herself saying, “An exorcism? Like, for demonic possession?”
The man answered her blatant skepticism with a patient look and a nod toward Lenny. “Do you know of anything else that could do that?”
Lauryn did not, but just because she didn’t have a rational explanation didn’t mean she had to buy a crazy one. Unfortunately, she was literally not in a position to argue. The lunatic with the sword was the only thing standing between her and Lenny. But while she wasn’t sure how she was going to handle two crazy men, Lauryn was still a doctor and Lenny was still her patient. It was her duty to help him survive… whatever was going on. Before she could think of how to actually do that, though, Lenny’s discolored lips peeled back in a snarl.
“Your words mean nothing, soldier,” he said, his voice grinding in a way that should never come from a human throat. “He is already ours, as you all will be.”
“Nothing is yours but death,” the man with the sword said, his booming voice making Lauryn jump. “I command you to be silent and come out of him!”
Again, the force of his words bounded through the narrow alley like gunshots, and again the thing that had been Lenny snarled like a beast, running its hand possessively over the veteran’s discolored face. For a moment, Lauryn worried it was going to try to speak again in that awful voice, but thankfully it didn’t. It did something even worse. It jumped.
The thing that had been Lenny flew at them like a tiger, its clawlike hands going straight for the stranger’s throat. Fast as it was, though, the man with the sword was even quicker, spinning away like a leaf on the wind. He dragged Lauryn with him, snatching her out of the way a fraction of a second before Lenny slammed into the cement support beam they’d been standing against. The moment the monster’s back was to them, the stranger brought his silver sword down, slamming the flat of the wide, heavy blade across Lenny’s shoulders.
The blow landed like a hammer, propelling the transformed veteran to the ground. His scream of pain as he landed was the most human sound he’d made since this whole thing started, and it stabbed Lauryn like a knife.
“Stop!”
She didn’t even realize she’d yelled until the word left her throat. The sudden sound made the man with the sword jerk in surprise, and then he jerked again when Lauryn’s hand shot out to grab the cross hilt of his sword. “Don’t,” she ordered. “He’s my patient. I won’t let you hurt him.”
“I don’t want to hurt him,” the man said, his patience, which until this moment had been flawless, slipping slightly. “But he is a threat to everything. If the demon won’t listen—”
“There is no demon!” she cried. “Look, I don’t know what’s happening to him, but he needs help. Not this.” She pushed down on the sword and let go, turning back to the transformed man, who was already pushing himself up from the pavement. “Lenny!” she yelled. “Snap out of it! This guy’s going to hurt you!”
“I’ll hurt him,” Lenny snarled. “I’ll—”
“No one’s hurting anyone,” Lauryn said in her doctor’s voice, the one she used when patients needed to be shocked back to their senses. “Help is on the way. We’re going to get through this, Lenny, I promise, but you need to stop this right now. Come back to us.”
The command echoed through the alley, making Lenny shake. Lauryn stepped back, ready to run, but this time, Lenny didn’t attack. He just shook his head, blinking his bloody eyes in confusion, and then he whispered, “Doc?”
The word was tiny and broken, but it was the sweetest thing Lauryn had heard all night, because it was Lenny’s real voice. “Yes,” she said with a gasp of relief. “It’s me. It’s Dr. Jefferson. Hang in there, Lenny. Help is on the—”
She cut off as Lenny grabbed his head. “You gotta make it stop! The voices, the voices—”