Out of the Black - Lee Doty [152]
The door closed.
***
Two gurneys with two Feds on them, two cops pushing them, with Alex and Anne in the lead, they moved from the OR into the hallway. The surgeons and techs had partially revived Jeremy and were long gone, heading for the street.
"You still feel that disturbance in the Force?" Ping asked.
"Eh?" Alex said.
"You know, that feeling you've not felt since..." Ping said, laying on the irony, but Alex still didn't understand. "Is Kaspari still here?"
Alex nodded, "Oh, right. Nice joke, by the way... I'm just a bit distracted. Can't tell where Kaspari might be, but he's definitely here. Quite frankly, I'm surprised we're still alive if what she said is true." He looked sideways at Anne. "I'm putting most of my energy into hiding us, but I can't believe it's gonna work with Kaspari."
"Well, lets not stick around to test that theory." Rae said as they arrived at the elevator bank. Anne pushed the down call-button.
Seconds later, the first elevator arrived, but the signal light indicated that it was going up. The doors slid slowly aside.
***
As they passed the landing for the fourth floor, four people in scrubs came barreling down the stairs. Two were still wearing white surgical smocks that were stained with blood.
The blood registered as odd to Elena, though it took her a second to understand why. Only triage nurses and doctors would be treating patients outside of hermetically sealed operating beds, but these folks definitely weren't coming from the first-floor ER.
To say the medical types were concerned with personal safety was a bit of an understatement. Every face was deformed by fear, every eye locked on the two women's weapons. By the taint in the air, Elena surmised that one of them had a bladder control problem.
As the two groups rounded the spirals of the stairs to face one another, they both stopped. One out of fear, the other out of curiosity. The hospital staff tried to flatten themselves against the wall, hoping that the heavily armed women would just pass by.
They were in a hurry, but Elena decided to invest a few seconds in information gathering. "What's the trouble?"
"You tell me!" One of the sme barreli men said with a tinge of desperation in his voice. He seemed to be relieved to be talking... probably a surgeon.
"What's with the blood?" Miranda gestured with her weapon.
There was a moment of indecision, filled with tension and exchanged glances. Finally, the only woman moaned. "We don't even know them... don't care what's going on! Please, just let us go!"
Elena lowered the barrel of her weapon and presented her FBI badge. "Don't worry, we're the good guys. Where's the trouble?"
"OR-3." The surgeon said, "But you do not want to go there!"
Miranda and Elena exchanged a glance. They both knew that was Kyle's operating room. "We can take care of ourselves." Elena gave her weapon an unconscious shake.
The woman shook her head, seemingly ready to laugh and cry. "No. You can't."
"What's up there?" Miranda asked.
"Corpses. Lots of corpses." One of the men said.
"Cops, monsters, witches..." the surgeon said.
"And one really scary phlebotomist," the woman added with a confused shake of her head, "I didn't see that coming at all."
The hospital workers seemed to all guess that it was time to bolt. They moved quickly past the armed women.
"Witches?" Miranda was skeptical.
"Corpses." Elena said, face darkening.
After a quick exchange of uncertain glances, Elena and Miranda resumed their ascent. Halfway up the final flight of stairs, Miranda asked, "What's a flebotomist?"
"Down!" someone shouted from behind the door to the fifth floor. An explosion cut off the shout; then it deepened into an earthquake.
Elena's vision blurred as an ephemeral cloud seemed to flit through the stairwell. The floor shuddered. The building creaked. Dust fell from cracking sheet rock.
Miranda almost lost her footing as the building seemed to swim around her. She grabbed the handrail with both