Disciple: DreamWalkers, Book 2 (11 page)

Zeke sniffed deep. No fresh wraith odor. The vamps wouldn’t be able to jettison out of doorways, fly out of rafters. The coma station was all long, straight corridors, sealed vaults, and monitored gates. And then, on level six, the blast doors. Wherever the bastards manifested in this facility, they wouldn’t have much room to run.

Zeke and the soldier secured the corridor. Three vamps skidded around a corner. He and soldier boy made short work of the bodies with their swords. The soldier was quick, Zeke noted, and scored two to Zeke’s one.

Wraiths dispatched, Zeke halted at Karen’s room on the next round. “Get me in there.”

The soldier shook his head. “No can do.”

“Get me the fuck in there. That’s an order.” In his area, he didn’t have to pull rank like some braggoty schmuck. Didn’t have to tell his staff twice what to do during a combat situation. Maybe the informality of the North American division had some downsides.

The soldier grinned. “Don’t have the code. Sir.”

Zeke slammed the butt of a gun against the tiny square of glass until a startled, but human, face appeared in it. Blond soldier. Scar. That Blake guy. Zeke pointed the gun’s muzzle toward the touchpad.

Blake disappeared and the door swung slowly open. Zeke stepped back. Two soldiers slid into the corridor from the room, triple checking for unwelcome intruders. Zeke entered. When everyone settled, the door locked them in except for Zeke’s original guard.

Adi, beside Karen’s bed, smiled when she saw him. A bulky ECT unit stood unpacked and ready on one of the folding chairs, and the air smelled faintly of ozone. “When I beat you out of the sphere, Zeke, I worried about you, but I gave you a few minutes to recover.”

“I’m recovered,” he said. Since the shit had hit the fan, surely whatever Adi had been hiding from the rest of the Somnium couldn’t be concealed. Zeke, however, declined to offer particulars until he and Adi could privately discuss their encounter. Adi’s concern that someone at the facility might be sneaking around—someone besides Adi—swayed him.

“Maggie’s all right,” Adi told him, answering his next question. She returned her attention to Karen’s medical display. It had blips. Blips a comatose patient shouldn’t have. “She got out of the trance sphere on her own. We aren’t sure how many vamps were hers, but—”

“Five followed her out. The rest are someone else’s.” When Zeke had entered this room a couple of hours ago, he hadn’t wanted to step any closer to the bed. This time, he marched right up to it—to Karen’s prone body, still covered in tubes and surrounded by machines. “Clearly Karen isn’t as trapped as you assumed. She has to be put down.”

“No.” Adi hustled around the foot of the bed. “I employed the ECT. I believe she’s about to—”

Karen inhaled, a raspy, deep wheeze. Her body arched like a plastic ruler. Seizures wracked her and she started gagging.

Adi shoved Zeke out of the way. He was so shocked that he let her. Adi’s hands flew to Karen’s face, removing the tubes in her throat. She adjusted a drip and grabbed Karen’s shoulders. Karen convulsed several more times.

Zeke motioned sharply. The soldiers in the room drew their guns and pointed them at the struggling body in the bed.

He did too.

“Roberts, fetch Dr. Leifer,” Adi barked. “Blake, ready the defib paddles. She may crash. The rest of you, stand down.”

The soldiers obeyed. Zeke didn’t. This was Karen Kingsbury coming awake during a code one. Karen the murderer. Karen who had knowledge about healing that Adi wanted.

The fact that the fallout wouldn’t be all his fault this time didn’t make him feel any better.

Karen fell limply against the pillows. Her eyelids fluttered open. Bright blue eyes were the only color in her pallid face.

“Can you speak?” Adi asked.

“Thank you, Adishakti Sharma.” Karen’s hoarse voice was nothing recognizable. Her vocal chords had been damaged by her year in a coma, supported by tubes and medical science. “I’m never entering the dreamsphere again. You have my word.”

“You can sense the barricade I placed for you?” Such a wall was fleeting, and the dreamer had to comply with it. “Our link was enough to allow me to do that before I left the sphere.”

“Oh, yes. It feels like safety.” Karen’s fingers twitched as if she wanted to take something into her hand. “You won’t regret this. You have saved so many lives.”

A sleep barricade wasn’t a permanent solution. High-level alucinators deteriorated if separated from the sphere. Much longer than a couple days’ absence, and the bedridden Karen wouldn’t survive it.

Zeke found himself hoping that would be the case.

“We’ll see about that,” Adi murmured to Karen, cocking an eyebrow. Zeke appreciated that she seemed dubious about the psycho. “We seem to have an active manifestation.”

“I warned you they’d taken the girl.” Karen coughed and sighed. “Tell Zeke I’m sorry for his loss.”

He cocked his gun. “I haven’t lost anything but my patience.”

Karen spotted him—with his weapon aimed at her head—and recoiled into the pillows.

“Your poor student.” Her voice was so croaky, he could barely tell what she was saying. “Trapped. Coma. Don’t make her suffer like I did. She’ll have to be neutralized if you don’t want—”

Adi adjusted another drip. “Maggie’s conscious, Karen. And cooperative. Yet we’re to believe she’s the one manifesting?”

“Oh God, she’s awake and there are manifestations?” Karen couldn’t grow any paler. She matched the white pillows already. And yet, she did. She went from emaciated coma patient to bleached-out skeleton as fear gripped her expression. “That’s worse. What if he turned her into a waking portal? He kept threatening to do that to me.”

“Bullshit. There’s no such thing as a waking portal.” In the corner of Zeke’s vision, a few soldiers shifted their weight to their other feet—unprofessionally, if you asked him. His hand and body were steady.

“Who is this he—the leader you mentioned?” Adi tapped the IV tube leading to Karen’s elbow. The vigil, Zeke noticed, stayed out of Karen’s reach now that the patient was awake—not that Karen seemed able to jump out of bed and attack anyone.

“He…” Before Karen could answer, her lids fluttered shut. Her head rolled to the side and she lay silent. The only movement was a single tear tracking down her hollow cheek like a raindrop.

Adi calmly checked Karen’s pulse. The door hissed open, and a man in scrubs hastened through, escorted by several soldiers.

“We have a recovery? How remarkable.” The doctor joined Adi at Karen’s bedside and checked all Karen’s vitals. The patient didn’t stir. “She doesn’t seem conscious.”

“She’s in a natural sleep, barricaded out of the sphere,” Adi said. “Per standard protocol.”

Zeke felt a little foolish extending his gun when Adi and the doctor blocked him from his target. He lowered it but didn’t reholster.

“You shouldn’t have zapped her out,” he said to Adi.

He wanted to ask what Karen had offered besides the secret of quick healing but held silent. It seemed likely Adi intended to keep some facts private for now. In a situation that was already blowing up in their faces, caution wasn’t a poor choice.

“But she did emerge?” Dr. Leifer asked. “This is a recovery?”

“She was conscious for approximately four minutes,” Adi told the doctor. “I performed two routine ECTs, and it worked.”

Zeke glanced between the purple lights flashing outside the hospital room and the patient in the bed. “ECTs are never routine.”

The specially-tuned electroconvulsive therapy machines were a last resort for trapped dreamers—dreamers who manifested without waking. It meant their shields had eroded and they were helpless—the portals Karen had mentioned, except in comas. If the ECT didn’t jolt them loose, the effect of the voltage tended to send dreamers into a medical coma instead, cut off from the sphere. Or kill them outright. All field teams, by law, carried an ECT, but everyone dreaded their use.

“Actually, ECTs became somewhat standard in this facility as we’ve attempted to source the reason behind the patients’ decline,” Dr. Leifer corrected Zeke. “Particularly some of our more valuable patients. We’ve unfortunately lost several L5 sufferers in the past month despite our best efforts to sustain or revive them.”

“How is one patient more valuable than another? It’s not like they’re hostages,” Zeke said.

The doctor glanced at him briefly. He was an older man, wrinkled and white haired. Alucinators stationed at bases tended to be young and fit, able to leap tall wraiths in a single bound. “Valuable to the Somnium, of course. This L5…” He flipped through the chart. “Kingsbury. She’s our first revival in three years. I’m so glad we didn’t have to resort to the experimental lobotomy on an L5. This is good news, good news indeed.”

“Did you happen to notice Karen Kingsbury is a mass murderer?” Zeke asked with a harsh laugh. They should have—and still could—lobotomize her. That must be the undesirable experiment Adi mentioned. If they had patients flickering into dream comas and subsequent manifestations, he could see why they’d resorted to such primitive medicine. “It’s not good news that she’s back in the land of the living.”

Dr. Leifer shrugged. “Humans have made a number of breakthroughs in medical science using volunteer prison populations. I don’t see why that’s a concern.”

Was the guy clueless? “Because she’s creating these manifestations and would like to kill us all.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t think she’s manifesting, if protocol was followed.” Dr. Leifer started sorting through a medicine cabinet. Clearly his attention wasn’t on Zeke.

“So who’s causing the manifestations if not Karen?” Zeke asked, taken aback by the doctor’s detachment. Four facility members had already died during the attack, and the code red showed no signs of ending.

The doctor approached Karen with some vials. “I believe they were traced to an L5 disciple of some sort? That’s not my area of expertise. I’m sure she’ll be ECT’d soon enough. These things happen.”

Did he mean Maggie? “Adi, what’s he talking about?”

“We’ll speak later.” She spared him a warning glance.

He wasn’t going to be able to accomplish his original mission—euthanize Karen somehow—with all these people in the room. He couldn’t talk to Adi either. But he could make sure nobody tried to ECT his student. “I’m going to trauma one to find Maggie. What’s the best way to get past the blast doors?”

“Non-facility Somnium members aren’t authorized to circumvent the blast doors during lockdown,” a bald soldier said. He was big and tough-looking and had a tilt to his chin that screamed “I think I’m in charge.”

“This non-facility Somnium member outranks you. I’m a sentry. How about you get on your radio and buzz me through before Adi has to do it?”

Adi’s radio crackled. It wasn’t someone telling Zeke how to bypass the blast doors. “Units ten and fifteen, report to the morgue. Scanner indicates code one.”

Shit, that was outside the current manifestation zone—and closer to Maggie in trauma one. It was damned suspicious too, that it had cropped up right after he’d announced his destination—where Maggie was.

Five of the eleven soldiers in the room, including the officious bald one, wheeled toward the exit. Blake touch-padded it open.

“Second thought, I’m going to the morgue,” Zeke amended. Code one meant an active manifestation, a horde of substantial size. These guys were well-equipped, but they could use someone with his field experience. “Might wanna ask yourself why the manifestations are still happening, Adi.”

She frowned at the sleeping woman. “I placed a barricade, Zeke. I’m sure it’s a malingerer. It will be over soon.”

“Yeah, like a sleep barricade’s gonna stop her. Better wake the psycho up or we’ll keep having code ones,” he advised over his shoulder before following the soldiers out the door.

The morgue was one floor above the blast doors and two floors down from trauma one. Dead bodies didn’t need as much protection, and trauma one was close to the surface for emergency use. The five soldiers and Zeke met up with six soldiers from elsewhere in maximum security. They trotted through several levels without seeing any wraiths and clanked up a ladder in an access tube to detour the blast doors.

The others, like the first soldier, didn’t automatically fall in step under Zeke’s leadership. He could insist or he could let them do their thing. Mostly. Facilities like this, which employed division military, were run by HQ. To them he was practically a civilian, despite the fact area bases were the ones on the front lines.

Within minutes, their group reached the chilly, unpleasantly scented morgue level. Chemicals and wraith pong. The monsters were here, all right. And alive. No wraith dust on the floor that he could see or feel. The lights and sirens blared, same as below, but there was no other sign of manifestations.

Zeke let the soldiers secure the initial corridor. The coma station wasn’t a straight up and down structure—more like a rabbit warren. He’d been shown the map briefly during the check-in process. The soldier in charge remained beside him while the other ten searched.

“Where are the wraiths?” the bald guy, a sergeant by his insignia, asked the others when they returned.

“No signs of them, sir.”

“Sure as hell can’t listen for them with all this racket.” The wail was starting to get on Zeke’s last nerve, and he was itching to dust some vamps. “Whedons hiss a lot. You can hear ’em coming. It’s the Nosferatus that go quiet.”

The sergeant, walkie in hand, glared at Zeke. “Unit ten, this is unit fifteen command.” He practically had to yell to be heard over the screeching alarms. “No sign of bogeys level five, section A. Over.”

Other confirmations crackled through the walkie. No signs of bogeys in other sections. Or no signs these guys knew how to interpret. While the coma station handled manifestations, it wasn’t like being a field agent and collaring neos.

The air was heavy with sound and fury. Zeke’s neck prickled. The monsters were close. This corridor didn’t have anywhere near the number of doors as the maximum security level. There were only a couple, and he hadn’t seen soldiers clear the rooms.

Not to mention these crap-ass alarms. Surely everyone knew there was a code one by now? Zeke contemplated the locations of various loudspeakers and decided against shooting them. They probably had backups.