Out of the Black - Lee Doty [53]
It was nice to see someone else shocked for a change. "How...?" Alex asked.
"It's from Blade Runner."
They both stared at Ping, confused.
"The video... really old movie. I found a well-watched copy of it when I decrypted Sieberg... Roy's tablet. Now I think I get his nickname too. The guy who said that line in the movie was named Roy..."
"Huh?" Rae said.
"I don't have time to explain everything to you people."
"Yeah," Alex said, lost in thought, "He'd been badgering me since forever to watch it with him... I'd always intended to, but..."
Another chirp came from Alex's tablet. They looked down in unison. The stairwell door had opened again and another man and woman in dark clothes entered. They were holding hands.
Ping, Rae and Alex suppressed laughter with varying degrees of success.
The hand-holders were both looking around the room in an awful approximation of casual. Their hands were clutched, but both were clearly uncomfortable with it. They never looked at each other, and when they moved they were both so decisiey were yanking one another about. It was comically bad cover.
"Lets just hope they're this bad at searching." Ping whispered.
They all had a grand, if quiet, laugh. They were all going to die.
On the screen, one of the casually dressed agents approached Good Cop. Alex turned up the volume on his tablet so they could hear.
"Sweep's complete. No sign of them. You sure they came to eight?"
"Quite." Good Cop said, giving a theatrical sigh, "We're going to have to get a little less subtle then... bring them in."
***
Anne pulled over a stool and sat at the Harm's left elbow. The listless Harm's head lolled away from Anne, drooling fiercely, no doubt. Anne breathed a sigh of relief. Sometimes the sedatives didn't work at all. Maybe she'd be extremely lucky and the Harm would wake up when Anne was long gone. The needle went in without a flinch. Anne popped the vac tube into the barrel and watched it fill. When it was full, she popped it out and attached the second one. Almost there.
Whispered as if in her ear, she heard dry laughter, "Look for us, find you won't."
Anne jumped. She looked around, searching for the speaker. The ward was full of other patients, but none were close enough, or creepy enough, to be the whisperer. She leaned across the Harm's slack body and looked down at her drooling face... nope.
Great, now she was hearing things too. Nearby, the screaming continued... the current subject was elves, for which the other Harm obviously had some ill feelings. The clamor intensified as the other Harm worked one hand out of his restraints. There were now two EMTs and two orderlies trying to get him subdued enough for Wyler's needle.
"So anxious!" The dry voice croaked from nowhere, full of menace. "Does it so long for our embrace? Can its fragile heart feel the coming?"
"Who's there?" Anne whispered, looking around, not wanting to attract attention.
"As if it hears, what does it feel?" Amusement crackled like dead leaves through the words, but the most disturbing part was the guttural sound that followed... like a deep growl, but with a touch of machinery. It was not the kind of sound any mouth could make.
Anne's every hair rose away from her skin, straining outward with fear. Ok, now she was really wishing she hadn't said anything... well, it's never too late to start. She set her unseeing eyes on her work.
The vial was full of inky blood. She removed the needle from the Harm's lifeless arm and began to fumble the full vac tube out of the barrel. 'Time to go, time to go, time to go' spun through her fear-fogged mind- a mantra, a syntactic snake eating its own tail. It was one thing to try to stop worshiping the God of Fear, but quite another to ignore him when he puts in a personal appearance.
Anne stopped with the vial of blood between her fingers, staring at it intently. It felt like she was holding a bag of bugs... though she could still feel the smooth texture of the vial's glass between her fingers, there was another feeling too... like small, ephemeral ants were crawling