Chapter Forty

T HERE'S A SPECIAL designation for the odd time of night when things seem to go bump more often. The witching hour. The weirding hour. That stretch of time when the light is close, when morning is almost upon humanity, but darkness still holds sway. When all humans want to be asleep, out of danger, and safely ensconced somewhere. Even those who work night shifts often find this time the most difficult to deal with.

As the witching hour approached, Brittany had fallen asleep in the waiting room down the hall from Joseph's room.

Dulce lay in an ICU bed, a bevy of monitoring devices attached to her. Her breathing was both shallow and irregular.

Joseph slept fitfully in his room, waking up every time he breathed the wrong way, then trying to get another pump of morphine into his system.

The nurses at the station would close their eyes every once in a while, just to get the stinging to stop a little. But it was just a moment, not long enough for anything to actually happen, right? Of course, time is a fluid element, and those briefest of moments when in the nurses' eyes were closed sometimes extended significantly longer than they would like to admit. During one of those moments, a slight man walked down the hallway in very soft shoes, making just the tiniest of squeaks against the linoleum. A phone to his ear, he looked inside each room as he passed, careful to let each door shut as quietly as he could.

Britt woke with a start, falling out of the chair she'd precariously balanced in, thumping solidly as she hit the floor. She shook her head and tried to get her brain working, freeing it from the fog of sleep surrounding herself.

Still in the hospital , she thought. But what woke me?

The place was quiet, moreso than earlier, the beeps and thrums of the machinery muted by a plethora of closed doors.

"Huh," Brittany said out loud, just to hear something. She got to her feet, and walked out of the waiting area, looking up and down the hallway.

At the end was a man in a long coat with a phone to his ear. He was moving quickly, speaking softly, and looking in each and every room.

He interested Brittany. Unusual behavior had that effect on her.

She pulled the gun from her NYPD windbreaker pocket, but held it down at her side. She had no reason to aim on the man. Yet. Just seemed like it might be prudent to be prepared.

On the one hand, it could be a concerned parent or a relative looking for a patient. On the other, it could be one of the assailants looking to finish the job…

Of course, the man stopped at Joseph's room.

Of course, the man went inside Joseph's room.

Of course , Britt thought.

She brought up the gun and darted down the hall, all sleep fog gone, back to being on high alert.

Closer to Joseph's room, she could hear that the man was arguing with whomever was on the other end of the line.

Brittany put her back to the wall, edging her face around until she could just have one blue eye looking into the room.

The man on the phone was near the window, looking out, seeming perhaps, to direct someone, telling them to move left or right. Brittany slid around the corner, planted her feet in a proper shooter's stance, and aimed her gun straight at the man on the phone. Sure, she might be firing over Joseph, but she figured having a bit of an obstacle in between herself and her perp was worth the possibility of hot brass landing on her boss's slumbering form.

"Hey!" Brittany shouted.

The man spun around, eyes wide. He had a nice face, pleasant. White guy, dark hair, enough stubble to be a fashion statement and not just skipping a shave session. The coat was a nice piece, like something he'd picked up at Barney's, as were his shoes. Leather loafers. He seemed woefully out of place.

"Hands up," Brittany said.

"You got it?" the man asked into the phone.

"I will shoot you," Brittany replied.

"Yeah, just a second," the man snapped at Brittany.

Britt had had a long day. She didn't have patience for assholes being smart with her.

She fired.

The gun report was hideously loud, and Brittany immediately regretted her decision. Her aim was true, however, and the bullet impacted the man's elbow, spinning his arm out and away from his body. The phone clattered to the floor, blood sprayed out over the window, and the man stared at his arm for a moment, jaw wide.

He brought his ruined joint up close to his eyes, or at least as close as he could get what was left of his elbow to his face.

"What the fuck?" He shouted.

"Hands up," Brittany replied, ears ringing.

"Wharg?" Joseph said through a morphine haze, fumbling in his bed but tangled up in his blankets.

"You stupid bitch!" the man shouted.

"You do realize I've got the gun," she said.

"You don't know who you're messing with."

"I'd really like to know—" Brittany started, willing to let the guy talk if it might offer her some information on the group she was going up against.

"You will be consumed, destroyed, and your remains will be forgotten along with the rest of the diseased parasitic fools you are."

"Fair enough. Just, is there a name for you guys bringing about all the consuming and destroying?"

The man didn't say anything. He just looked over his shoulder, out the window. Whatever he saw seemed to make him happy, because he smiled a gross terrible smile that stayed in place when he turned back to Brittany.

"It is too late," he said, and spread his arms out akimbo.

Behind the man, across the darkness out the window, there was a slightly shimmering line. Though a line probably wasn't the proper shape to describe what was happening. Outside in the middle of the air was something like a sine wave, vibrating at a very high rate. It didn't make sense in the physical world, and even though Brittany had plenty of experience dealing with things outside the boundaries of human experience, even her brain was having difficulty trying to parse exactly what she was seeing. The dark night sky provided a perfect contrast for the shimmering colors, colors Brittany wasn't sure she'd seen before. The combinations didn't make sense, but that wasn't necessarily surprising.

The real downside, though, was the hypnotic effect the undulating lights and shapes had on Brittany. She spent but a moment staring out the window trying to understand the site before her eyes, but it was enough time for the man to make a move, sprinting for the door.

"Hey!" Brittany shouted.

She froze in place, torn between chasing the mystery man and watching the events unfolding outside the window. Even though it only been a second or two, the shimmering line/sine wave/call-it-what-you-will was growing and changing in a way that told Brittany something big was about to happen.

But then again, the shimmering thing was outside and the man was inside. Decision made, she turned and burned after the man, racing out the door in time to see the mystery man slamming into the emergency exit stairwell.

Brittany hoped the emergency exit door would cause lights to turn on or flash, maybe an alarm or a siren, anything to alert the hospital to what was going on. But nothing happened. Well almost nothing happened; the nurses finally woke up at their station. Most of the patients around were also awake, those who had the capacity to wake that is. Gunshots have a way of making sleep a little difficult.

The nurses shouted something at Brittany as she sprinted by, but she didn't have the time to stop and show them her badge. She just hoped they realized she was the federal agent who'd been sleeping in the waiting room all night, and had a reason to be sprinting down the hallway with her gun out.

She slammed into the door, and the door slammed into the wall. For a heartbeat she worried she wouldn't be able to figure out if the man she pursued had gone up or down, but luckily he was still bleeding profusely from the destroyed elbow she'd given him. The blood trail made it obvious: downstairs.

Britt jumped from landing to landing, light on her toes, her lifelong gymnastics training coming to bear one more time. She had one hand on the rail, and one hand holding the gun up, ready to aim at a moment's notice. She chanced a peek over the railing, and saw her target starting to flail in his attempted escape. Whatever adrenaline powered his ignorance of the immense pain his wound must be causing had clearly started to run out. It wasn't long for he would pass out from loss of blood. But oddly, he didn't seem to mind his bleeding, nor did he make any attempt to stanch the flow of crimson from his gunshot wound.

Brittany managed to catch up to the man, not too hard considering he had slumped down and was currently laying in a pool of blood, shuddering ever so slightly as he drew in ragged breaths. Brittany stood above the man, trying to determine what she should do. She knew helping him would be both a humanitarian and intelligent thing to do, and she was in a hospital, but she also worried what was happening outside the window upstairs. What the shimmering sine wave might be transforming into.

"Goddammit," she said to herself, "you're such a fucking softy."

She grabbed the back of his collar and pulled, tugging his heavy body behind her. She kicked the door and and pulled him into the main hospital area. They were on the fourth floor, a specialty floor which was, judging by the signs on the wall, devoted to X-rays and other types of internal viewing. Except for the MRI machines, which were in the basement. Hospitals have plenty of signage.

The nurse at the station was shocked to see someone walking down the hall. Moreso, that someone was coming down the hall dragging a bleeding body behind them.

"What the hell are you doing?" The nurse asked.

"Federal emergency," Brittany replied. "I need you to see if you can get this man stabilized. He's a suspect."

"Suspect in what?" The nurse asked, hand on her hip, throwing out plenty of attitude.

"I don't need your sass," Brittany said, "what I need is someone to help me, dammit. This man could potentially be very important. He could be a member of a potential terrorist organization. I'm not sure. But I need him to be alive so I can question him and figure out what the fuck is actually going on. So you want to do your damn job and maybe save this guy, so I can do my job, and maybe save you?"

The nurse stared at Brittany for a moment. It was clear that she was having a few thoughts, a few choice thoughts, about what to say or do. But in the end, when the man groaned, the nurse sighed and realized there was a serious event taking place in front of her.

"I'll take him," the nurse said. "You just make sure the terrorists don't win."

"Thanks," Brittany said, slapping her hand on the counter. She pivoted on her foot and sprinted towards the main elevators. She had to get outside, and fast.