Chapter Seven
Jared leaned in close enough for Dani to smell an antiseptic odor clinging to him. He brushed the tip of his nose against hers.
Goo hope towel, Dan-ni. Stoop death.
He grabbed her wrist, and before she could pull away, the fog spun into a gray vortex with her at the center. The mist swept down onto her head and washed out her sight of the kid or anything else. Jared’s hold vanished, leaving her stumbling in the void.
She held her breath to avoid breathing in the murk. Then the light plunged into darkness. Her feet tangled on a stretch of coiled rubber and she slammed against a wall. Rebounding a step only smacked her back into another hard surface. Clattering noises, like metal and plastic objects colliding, echoed about, revealing that she stood within a confined space.
A swipe of one hand hit a row of metal shelves. The other hand thumped against a wooden panel she hoped was a door. She finally forced herself still, tired of feeling stuck inside a life-sized pinball machine.
Where had Jared sent her?
She sniffed and caught a mix of citrus, pine, and soap. She tried another step, tripped over the rubber coils again, and caught herself against several hard wooden rods. Lovely. Had she racked up a high score yet?
She fumbled around until her hand landed on a doorknob. A twist and push let light into the tiny room, revealing … a janitor’s closet. Of course.
A peek outside revealed a sterile-looking hallway, complete with beige wall tiles and linoleum floors. For a moment, Dani thought she might be back in some section of HQ. Then her eyes lighted on a sign on the wall: X-Ray. An arrow pointed to the left, alongside others which indicated the directions to restrooms, a lab, and the fire exit.
Dani recognized St. Joseph Hospital from a couple visits when she’d been interviewing for a possible internship. The medical center served much of the downtown Denver area, and must be the hospital Jared had been speaking of. Unfortunately, during one of her visits, she’d crossed paths with a patient who’d vomited what looked like chunky blood all over her shoes—but which turned out to be raspberry Jell-O. Dani had been left with a nurse until she got her hyperventilating under control. Not the best impression to make in front of people she wanted to work with someday.
Fortunately, no one stood nearby to see a young woman suddenly appear within a janitor’s closet. After flipping the closet light on, Dani shut the door briefly and searched for the tools she could use.
She took a spray bottle filled with green all-purpose cleaning fluid and put it in one of the buckets, which she hefted along with a sponge-mop. A faded baseball cap hung off a corner of one of the shelves. She hesitated, thinking of all the scalp conditions the previous wearer could’ve suffered. However, after she slathered the inside of the cap with sani-gel, she jammed it onto her head to hide her red frizz of hair. A long shower would be needed once she got back to HQ, for sure, complete with delousing shampoo.
She already wore yellow plastic gloves and had more gel in a pocket. Hardly the chanted equipment the Cleaners provided, but it would all do in a pinch.
So armed, she slipped out into the hall.
Right as she did, a blast of noise made her jump to the side. Heart pounding, she leaned against the wall as if taking a break. The overhead intercom system squealed, and a voice babbled out codes and what sounded like a call for Doctor Snorkles to report to surgery. Footsteps pounded from the far end of the hall. Dani kept her head bowed as several orderlies ran past. Once they’d turned the corner, she let out a breath.
Jared’s warnings about death had set her more on edge than she’d realized. Admittedly, death wasn’t uncommon in a hospital, but Jared had seemed worried about a specific person—another maid, by the sound of it. How did he know these things? More to the point, what did he think she could do about it?
She tapped the radio on her hip and contemplated calling in before going any further. Then she reconsidered. If she found something valuable on her own, it might prove to Francis she didn’t need to be babied any longer.
Where to, then?
Well, those orderlies had sure been going somewhere in a near panic. How far could she get before a hospital employee noticed her skulking about and had her escorted out by security?
Ben had once told her that no one pays attention to janitors. Time to put that to the test.
She tugged the zipper of her jumpsuit as high as it could go and pulled the brim of her stolen hat down a bit further. Holding the mop over one shoulder, she headed after the orderlies. She woke her power to its smallest degree and let tendrils of energy snake out of her and into the elements.
I’m just a janitor. She reinforced the thought over and over, trying to channel her belief into an insulating aura. Nobody special. Nobody worth taking notice of. Just let me by so I can do my job.
She took the same corner as the orderlies and found herself in a hall with a stretch of windows on one side. A glance outside showed a garden and walkways populated by nurses and wheelchair-bound patients basking in the fading sunlight. She eyed the lot of them as she hurried past, looking for anything amiss.
Unnoticed, she entered a waiting room where visitors slouched in padded seats, their expressions a mix of worry, exhaustion, and feeble hope. Just beyond this, she paused on seeing two men standing by a corner, their expressions strained, body language tense. The nearer one wore a black jacket with Public Health stitched in bright yellow on the back. The other had a lab coat over a button-down shirt and slacks.
As Dani eased closer, one of the orderlies who’d run by earlier appeared by the doctor’s shoulder and offered him a clipboard and pen. After a quick signature, the doctor sent the orderly off and then returned to his conversation with Public Health Man. Dani set her bucket down and pretended to swab out a stubborn grain of dirt as she eavesdropped.
‘This makes no sense,” PH-guy said in a hoarse whisper. “Suicides don’t occur in these numbers unless there’s some environmental toxin or, I hate to say it, some religious nutjob convincing folks it’s time to catch a comet to heaven. But so far as I can tell, none of these people have any link and nobody from my team has detected any triggers at the grocery store. There’s no common denominator.”
“What do you expect me to do?” the doctor asked. “I’m just trying to keep the rest alive. It’s a miracle anyone made it here before bleeding out.” He checked his wristwatch and sighed. “Got another surgery in ten. Think you can try interviewing some of the others? See if you missed something before?”
The officer frowned. “I’ll give it another shot, but I haven’t been able to get a single coherent statement out of anyone so far.”
The men shook hands and headed in opposite directions. Bucket in hand, Dani trailed the Public Health officer. He opened a set of swinging doors by scanning an ID badge on a wall sensor. Above the doors, big block letters read EMERGENCY CARE, with a smaller band of red letters beneath stating: Authorized Personnel Only. She shadowed him inside.
Right within the unit, Dani stopped so suddenly the doors nearly slapped her butt as they shut.
Beds lined the U-shaped room, with a nurse’s station against the near wall. Patients filled every bed, and each one looked like a mummy’s stunt double from a horror flick.
Stained bandages swathed them all, especially around the arms, head, and neck. Red and black blotches seeped through the gauze. If Dani hadn’t heard the men talking earlier, she might’ve thought these the victims of an explosion.
The faces she glimpsed looked like they’d been put through meat grinders, lips shredded, hands little more than stumps stuck in bloody mittens. A number of patients had been strapped in place, and most appeared unconscious or sedated.
The Public Health officer went to another doctor who stood near the nurse’s station. They exchanged murmured words, and the doctor—almost skeletally thin in his coat—nodded to the bed on the far right. The officer went and began whispering to the patient there.
The doctor wrote on a notepad as he looked around the room, gazing at each patient in turn while scribbling furiously. Dani tensed as he slowly turned her way. He frowned for a second, as if sensing something amiss. His gaze swept past her, however, and she moved further into the unit.
As she shifted along, she caught snatches of conversations as nurses checked vitals and replaced empty saline bags.
“At least twice this many dead before the first ambulance got to the store …”
“Five in surgery right now. Dr. Lewis doesn’t think many will survive the night …”
“This is insane. What makes so many people try and kill themselves all at once? Cashier said it was like some switch got flipped in their brains. One minute, all’s normal. Next, everyone’s grabbing any sharp object they can find …”
Dani moved to a structural column halfway down one side of the room and stood in its shadow.
Suicides? All of these and more at once? In the same place? This couldn’t be natural. It must be what Jared sent her to discover.
She shut her eyes and extended her power throughout the room, seeking a clue to—
A palpable aura of decay suffused the Emergency Unit, making her gag and choke. The stink of rotted flesh clawed at her nose, and her eyes watered from the mix of urine, vomit, and antiseptic.
She nearly retracted her energies as the disruptive power assaulted her, but forced herself to push against the virulent energies. The longer she studied it, the less it felt like a focused attack on her and more a Corrupted presence brought in with the patients. Whatever the source, it didn’t react to her probing. It must’ve caused such a negative reaction because of the natural opposition to her Pure energies.
Yet among it all, she sensed a faint glimmer of Pure energies outside of hers, like a candle guttering in a sleet storm. Letting this guide her, she slid out from her hiding place, alert for danger.
She started in one corner and tiptoed to each bed, giving each patient a once-over before moving on. The fifth stop held what she’d feared to find.
A woman had been laid out here, as shredded as the rest of them. Part of her outfit had been cut away to give doctors access to her slashed ribs and arms, but Dani recognized enough of the tattered remains to identify the make. A purple stain nearly obscured the stitched name on the left breast pocket.
Another Cleaner. A maid, if Jared had been right.
Dani chewed the inside of her upper lip. What was going on? First one taken by murderous rage, and now another having signed onto the suicide squad? Had something the maid done affected all these other people? Could it affect Dani, even now?
After checking the area to make sure she remained unnoticed, Dani leaned over the maid’s bed. The woman looked pale and birdlike in her thinness.
Dani bent over and whispered. “Can you hear me? Hello?”
Whimpering, the maid tried to rise. Before the motion could draw attention, Dani set her mop against the side of the bed and gently pressed down on the maid’s shoulders to restrain her.
“Hey, hey … no moving. Settle down.” She smiled gently as the maid’s eyes opened a sliver. “It’s okay. I’m with the Cleaners too. Can you tell me what happened? Did something attack you? Blot-hounds, maybe? Dust devils?”
The maid murmured incoherently. Her eyes gleamed with tears and her shredded cheeks twitched.
Dani looked around. The nurses remained busy and the thin doctor continued his note taking without having moved an inch. Too public. She’d need a scrub-team brought out, otherwise there’d be no chance of trying to retrieve the maid without causing a commotion. She turned back to the woman.
“I need to report this to HQ. We’ll get someone to take you back, maybe find a handyman …”
As her hand went to the radio on her belt, the maid’s eyes snapped wide. Dani stepped back as she recognized the look on the woman’s face—identical to Sherri’s before she’d stabbed her training partner.
“Wait—”
With a cry of rage, the maid launched off the bed and grabbed Dani’s throat.