Out of the Black - Lee Doty [95]
He moved to the desk. "Clint?" He reached out, but jerked back as darkness surrounded him for the second time tonight. The lights flickered on-off-on again, chasing the darkness and the echoes of his startled cry away. About forty minutes back, the lights in the security room had failed for perhap a second, but then everything had returned to normal. He'd never seen a power interruption in the hospital, and now two in one night. He had the odd intuition of being stalked and very alone. He wanted to head back to the security office and see if perhaps that red-head Fed was feeling nervous and maybe even a little snuggly.
Clint hadn't moved.
He put a hand on Clint's shoulder, gave him a gentle shake. That was all it took to upset Clint's precarious balance. Clint's right arm slipped off the desk, his head lolled left and knocked against the top of the desk. He slid to the floor in a heap.
Chase jumped, barely avoided a scream, got it together... exhaled. He bent down, put a hand on Clint's clammy neck... Pulse, that's good. Breathing, too... cool, no mouth-to-mouth necessary.
He sighed with relief and went into action. He stood and hit the alarm on the security desk... nothing. Sure, it was a silent alarm, so he knew not to expect klaxons or whistles, but something was missing. It took him a second to realize what... his tablet hadn't alarmed him. He should have received a level one security page instructing him to go to the lobby.
He checked his tablet's power indicator- fine. He opened the screen enough to check the diagnostics: active, connected to the hospital's access points, but nothing else. Diagnostic pings sent across the net failed to return from points farther than the tier-one routers.
"What the..." this was just wrong. Once when he was a child, an earthquake took down eighty percent of the networks in the L.A. basin, but none of the hospitals had lost their networks entirely. Hospital, police, and some governmental networks were so hard, so massively redundant, that he'd never heard of a complete outage.
This outage was intentional, and whoever had done it was resourceful and probably crazy. You drop a hospital's net and a lot of sick people could die.
Great. Well, at least the building was filled with cops and Feds... and security guards. Glancing down at Clint's unconscious form, he didn't feel much comforted.
Then he noticed the security monitors on the desk before him and felt even less comfortable. Of the three monitors, only the one that gave him a view directly outside the doors was active. He guessed it was probably an older generation that was hardwired, and therefore not susceptible to a network outage. On the small screen, he could see a crowd of perhaps ten people had gathered by the ambulance parking perhaps ten meters outside the door. He leaned in, trying to make out what they were doing, but they just seemed to be standing perfectly still, looking at the outside of the hospital door. He glanced up at the inside of the door, but the dim and flickering lights outside in the ambulance run worked together with the gray-tinted glass to keep the door reflecting the inside of the lobby, with only the vaguest hint of anything behind it.
Chase used the control pad to zoom the cheap camera in as far as possible. The camera reached its maximum zoom with perhaps three of the people on the screen. The shadows weren't being kind to them, their faces looked too angular, and there seemed to be blood spattered on their clothes, but then Chase understood: they were wearing masks; cheap circus clown masks. There was no other explanation for the identical toothy grin that dominated each face. Perhaps they were terrorists waiting for some cue to storm the building, now that the net was down.
The camera began to flicker. Chase thought it was just interference- whatever was affecting the lights- but then he saw all three of the people on the monitor turn in perfect unison