Out of the Black - Lee Doty [116]
When she gave him the whole story he had sent his wife and kids out of harm's way to visit his wife's aunt. He'd stayed behind to 'keep up appearances' at work, and because he said he hoped to be helpful. She had a sneaking suspicion he just wanted to see some action, just so that he could write it in his journal or something. She'd tried to explain to him that it's just a bit harder to share exciting stories when dead, but he wouldn't hear any of it.
What to do next? This was the question that had dogged her for two days of lying low. Her early plan called for Ping and Alex to wake up on their own, but now she was being forced to consider plan B... whatever that was.
"Hey Rae, seek medical attention."
Motionless before, now she lay frozen. The voice had sounded as synthetic as ever. After a few disbelieving seconds, she rolled over, leaned her head over the side of the bed and looked down at Ping. Comatose as ever, the medkit still attached to his head.
She considered pinching herself to make sure she hadn't dozed off. Nope... this was awake. She could smell Alex's rank two-days-without-eating breath, she could feel the bed, the covers.
She waited through the remaining seconds of the one-minute interval.
"Seek medical attention." The voice droned. Time to investigate.
She disentangled herself from Alex and the blanket. As she did so, she had a comfortable sense of precognition: together in their small, cozy home. They were old and gray, waking up late on Sunday morning, maybe expecting a visit from the grandkids. They would unravel themselves from their own blanket and smile like idiots.
She spared a moment to look at his sleeping face. She wondered how he would look old. She hoped she was going to find out.
One quick movement later, she crouched on the floor before Ping's bunk, a vision in silver-black cameo and sensible underwear.
Ping lay before her, swaddled in a Pachinko Molasses blanket. He just looked so cute. The child's bunk bed was probably the only kind of bed that would look too small for him. Like Alex, she and Rygar had stripped him and suited him up with the iron diaper and armband. She smiled again, remembering the unsavory scene of hooking them up with the bedpans and the IV feeders. Rygar had borne the brunt of the iron diaper part, thank the merciful heavens.
Ping's head was mostly hidden by the medkit. She'd retrieved it from the trunk of his destroyed car before they left the crash site. After she'd strapped it to his wounded head, it had stopped the bleeding and fused his cracked skull. Ever since then, it nagged her every sixty seconds to get more serious treatment for him. Being a police medkit, it was impossible to disable the urgent care warning, so she had endured it for two days. It wasn't that she didn't believe its advice... she just cn't see a way to get into a hospital without ending up dead.
Though she could see how the hunters had found them at Roy's, she still wondered how they'd been found at the library. Magic? Tech? Alex would have an opinion if he were around to ask. Which brought up another question that had been wracking her brain for these last days: what was wrong with Alex?
Ping's wounds were serious, but at least the medkit could tell something was wrong. That knowledge was somehow comforting. At least comforting compared to Alex's wounds, whatever they were. There wasn't a mark on him, but he just wouldn't wake up. Jerry had purchased