Ghost of the Gods - 02 (12 page)

“It’s not my fault. The other item wasn’t there,” said Paul. “Why are you following me? What do you want from me?”

Mark captured stray thoughts of blackmail from Paul. A medical assist showed his heart and respiration were highly elevated in what had to be a stress reaction like fear or anger. Mark knew he had deeply hooked Paul, and it was time to reel in his fish.

“We know it was there,” said Mark. “Convince me it wasn’t.”

“Convince you,” said Paul. “Sure, I’ll convince you.”

Mark heard a
snick
like sound and felt a sting on the side of his neck, then warm liquid running down into his collar. Paul quickly retreated out of reach. What? An assist was screaming in Mark’s head about an injury to his neck. There was an undecipherable smirk on Paul’s face. Something thin and shiny with smears of red was in Paul’s fist.

“Real
Antinostrum
soldiers would not wear thin body armor,” sneered Paul. “Real
Antinostrum
soldiers
would be heavily armed.”

Mark was confused and light headed. What was going on? He was barely able to stand. He touched his soaking wet neck and came away with a hand covered in red paint. It took his addled mind precious seconds to correct—not paint, blood! The station and Paul’s face were spinning. Mark stumbled to his knees and ended up on his back. His vision tunneled into nothing more than a corner of the overhang and snowflakes falling toward him through sodium yellow light. The wind suddenly felt very cold. His vision faded as his self-awareness evaporated into the night.

Sarah Mayfair – Chicago Protectorate – February 3, 0002 A.P.

It was almost midnight and Sarah was panic stricken. She had again walked out to the edge of the singularity’s vortex trying to see if she could reach Mark. She’d lost her empathic link to his emotions days ago. Prior to that, he had been a constant in her life. She could always feel him: his warmth, his sharp edges, his clarity. The only exception was when either of them were inside the disruptive vortex of that singularity. She didn’t know what to do. Was he being held captive somewhere inside the vortex? Something inside her, some intuition possibly from the god-machine itself, had been telling her he wasn’t within the vortex. If that was true, then where was he?

This nightmare had started days ago when she was standing in front of that church and felt an intense confusion from Mark, then nothing. He’d winked out as if a light switch had been thrown. It was too late to get a sense of his location. She only knew how to do that with an ongoing stream of data. Sarah refused to accept the obvious answer that he was dead. He couldn’t leave her alone in this world. That was not the plan. She had to find him. She sent out another memory capsule calling to him. After a few fruitless minutes of silence she walked into the singularity’s vortex to search again in that horrible darkness.

Sarah walked into the surveillance nest. She was out of breath from jogging up most of the stairs before tiring to a slower and slower pace. Ralph padded over to her. Just as before, no one was in the room. Every time she had returned to the nest she’d had a strange feeling that he would be there when she opened the door.

She had the presence of mind to close the door and lock it before crumpling to the floor, sobbing. She was nearing the point where rational thought demanded she give up. Sarah felt exposed and naked before an uncaring God. In that moment of extreme loss and hopelessness she realized she was in love with Mark. With the prefect, unforgiving recall of a nanotech brain, she relived the past six weeks since they had become lovers. She hated God for doing this to her again. She was too late. She had been too late with her lover, Kenny, who had died in the New Jersey kill-zones and now too late with Mark. No, that was not going to happen again. She would not allow it.

Sarah Mayfair – Chicago Protectorate – February 4, 0002 A.P.

The sun was grimly rising outside. Sarah was exhausted and unslept. Ralph was curled up with his huge head in her lap. She was thinking about ending her life. The loneliness was already too much. She remembered that other darkest moment of her life. She had been on the Morristown police force. It was just after the New Jersey kill-zones when she was waiting in their apartment for Kenny to come home. New Jersey had been the first and only outbreak of the plague at that early time. She had come so close to using her Berretta on herself that night.

Ralph whined at her. Sarah wearily pulled herself up, wiped the tears from her face, put Ralph on his leash, and headed out the door once more. She’d had a lucid dream in which she’d found Mark by taking extreme steps. It was all she had left to try. She knew what she had to do and if it drew the attention of Enforcers, so be it. She would pay a visit to that priest and find out where Paul lived. She would break into homes. She would hurt people. She would do whatever was necessary to find Mark.

The heavy church door opened, letting in a cold gust of wind. Sarah had been inside, sitting on a pew for hours. This place of worship was both gray and ornate at the same time. It was a very old building dating back to the turn of the last century. Ralph was on the floor next to her. Some parishioners had looked at her with undisguised contempt for bringing an animal inside their house of God. She absorbed all their negative emotions—saving them in her heart to burn as fuel for when the priest returned to his flock. She would gladly hurt him to get the information she needed. She would know the moment he was nearing the church by his emotional patterns radiating out onto the n-web. Every person had a unique emotional fingerprint. Right now there were only two that Sarah was focused on: Mark and this priest. Ralph looked up at her with expectant eyes. When Sarah did not respond, he sighed and went back to resting.

She dozed from exhaustion, and when she awoke she sensed something had changed inside her. The church was darker. The stained glass windows were muted with twilight. She had slept hard. A ceremony of some kind was in progress. People were kneeling to accept wafers. As her nanotech brain reached full operating clarity, she recognized what had changed. Mark’s emotions were back. He was experiencing pain and confusion. She jumped to her feet, trying to grasp where the emotions were radiating from. Geo-tagging information was displayed through an assist, which gave her Mark’s approximate location. Ralph grew excited as her emotions leaked into him. He began barking. There was a commotion of voices that she ignored. Someone gripped her arm and asked her to leave. She instinctively threw the hand off her, dimly realizing she had spilled a man to the floor. She would not move an inch until she had the clearest possible location for Mark’s signal. What if it disappeared?

Mark Freedman – Chicago Protectorate – February 4, 0002 A.P.

Mark was heavily drugged. His brain and body had just passed a tipping point where enough of the damage had been repaired that higher brain functions were returning. He knew he was in a hospital room and that he’d lost several days. He tried to reach Sarah with a memory capsule and failed. Something was not right. He sat up and immediately wished he hadn’t. The room spun, making him nauseous. His brain struggled to sync up the images flooding in from his eyes, then succeeded and began rendering a stable view of reality. The nausea faded. A medical assist showed his body was working hard to repair the damage. The assist also showed serum levels for various drugs that were in his system and how his body was trying to eliminate them. He had no recall of who had found him and brought him here. Out of the most likely scenarios competing in his nanotech brain, all but one had protectorate surveillance as a decisive factor—which was not a good thing. There would be flagged records in USAG logs showing a medical doctor, a high priority asset, had been found with near fatal wounds in a surveillance blind spot. In all likelihood Enforcers would investigate if they were not already doing so. They would want to interview him. The fact that he was not in a prison hospital was a testament to Ike’s handiwork combined with Enforcer laziness.

The room was not private, and the curtain separating the two beds was pulled back so Mark could see his roommate. The man appeared to be asleep. A whiteboard in the room listed Mark’s cover name that went with his bracelet and the name of his roommate, Frank Baxter. Also on the board were the names of his nurse, nurse’s aide, and goals for the day with a smiley face.

An assist projected a medical schematic over Frank. The man was in his late forties and had suffered a serious head and spinal injury. There were enough sedatives in Frank to make sure he slept through the night and it looked like Frank was on track to doing just that. He was snoring loudly in stage N4 sleep, making the transition to REM. Warning beeps from an IV pump in distress had been coming through the partially open door since Mark awoke. The fact that the beeping went unaddressed meant the nurses were probably overworked. Stray mental prattle from both patients and nurses were pinging Mark from every direction. He tried capturing usable thoughts from the nurses but got very little. His mind felt fuzzy. He could tell the nurses were preoccupied with their patients, which was good for the patients, but bad for his plans of early checkout from this fine hotel. He was hoping to snare a login that would get him into the med-computer located in his room. He wanted to check his chart to see when to expect the next nurse’s visit.

Mark caught a stray thought that caused him to forget about the computer. A nurse was worried about a newly diagnosed cancer patient losing hope and decided she had just enough time to visit with him before the shift change and staff meeting in an hour. That meant right now might just be the perfect time to slip out unnoticed.

Mark swung his legs off the bed. He felt like he was rising from the dead. Every inch of his body ached with a deep, dull pain that seemed to come from within his bones. He looked around the room, trying to formulate a plan. A patient monitor was displaying his vital signs. His blood pressure, oxygen, and heart rate were all good. A medical assist showed his left jugular vein had been partially severed. Implanted memories containing medical status filled in some of the blanks about what had happened to him. After the stabbing his body had gone into an automatic self-preservation mode. All unnecessary functions, including higher thought processes, had been shut down to drastically lower his metabolic rate. COBIC had quickly stanched the blood loss. The knifing had caused no major organ damage. He was left in a catatonic state in which he could have survived indefinitely as COBIC slowly rebuilt fluid and blood levels through nano-assembly, using available raw materials such as body fat, muscle, and skin tissues. His bones ached because COBIC bacterium had moved into the marrow to overstimulate production of blood cells.

Mark saw he was hooked up to an IV, which was pushing clear liquids and drugs. He got up out of bed on shaky legs and unplugged the IV pump from its power outlet. The pump was now running on batteries. Step one was to disconnect himself from the patient monitor but he knew a loss of signal might bring nurses running. He looked over at his buddy Frank and smiled. He had an idea that just might work and gently pushed the room door shut until he heard a soft click.

A short time later, Mark walked into the bathroom rolling the IV stand and pump with him. Frank was now wearing two full sets of patient monitor sensors. Mark wondered how long it would take for the staff to notice that two patients had very similar vital signs. The two datasets did not match exactly because Mark had purposely attached the sensors to different spots on Frank’s body to produce dissimilar blood pressure and oxygen levels. There was nothing he could do about pulse.

In the bathroom mirror he inspected the damage to his body. A large bandage on his neck covered where he had been stabbed. Smaller bandages were on his forehead and one elbow. Mild heat from the neck wound told him COBIC was still working to repair the injury.

Mark washed his hands, then began to peel back the bandage on his neck. The wound was fully closed and light pink in color. All but two of the stitches fell out as he removed the gauze. The wound looked like he’d been healing for weeks. He picked off the two remaining stitches, which were held in place by a thin layer of skin and would have fallen off shortly on their own. Mark was both relieved and worried by what he saw. A doc or nurse might have already looked at what was under that bandage or rather, what was not under it. The miracle would be labeled some kind of impossible freak healing. For all he knew, the docs might already have begun studying his abnormal metabolism. It was possible the hospital had fingerprinted him on admission. How long would it take for USAG intelligence services to connect the dots and figure out they had Mark Freedman, wanted fugitive, in this hospital? He had to get out of here and he had no good options. His cover would unquestionably be blown if he stayed. If he walked out now there would be a report and Enforcers might investigate, but probably not tonight and not as a high priority unless they had his prints. He had to find Sarah. They had to switch identities to their second set of bracelets as fast as possible. They couldn’t risk going back to their surveillance nest. Enforcers could show up without warning. The smart thing to do would be to get out of Chicago tonight, but he was not going anywhere until he arranged a close encounter with that singularity and gotten answers to his questions.

Mark began removing the tape holding the IV line in his arm. He stopped and looked at the IV pump. The thing would start squawking the minute he pulled the line. He tried to switch it off, but there was some kind of security lock on the keypad. It required a pass code. He looked around for something he could use as a screwdriver to open the battery compartment. He found his street clothes in the closet, including his body armor, all in dry cleaner’s bags. It was odd to see the care the hospital staff had taken to clean his military vest and clothing. He checked his cell phone and found the battery was dead. He looked at the hospital phone on the bed stand and decided for the second time since he’d awoken that it was too risky to use it to call Sarah. It would be a far too obvious and easy lead for Enforcers to follow. He found nothing usable as a Philips head screwdriver except his keys. It took long minutes, but the IV pump finally sputtered out with a few short, sad beeps as he yanked the battery from the pump. He pulled the IV line from his arm and was free.

Mark checked the clock on the wall. How long did he have before the next nursing visit? He picked up the pace, taking his sweatshirt from the closet and tugging it on. He looked at the faded blood stains and realized why the hospital had dry cleaned everything. There must be rules against leaving bloody clothing to ferment in a patient’s room. He might attract attention walking out of the hospital in dirty looking clothing. While there was no surveillance camera in his room, there were almost certainly cameras in the halls. The cameras would also make it impossible to steal some scrubs. Mark knew patients would be encouraged to walk the halls. So the least suspicious disguise was the one he was already wearing. Unfortunately, once he got outside in the Chicago winter, a hospital gown would make him look very cold and very strange.