CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

 

 

Bobbi and Damien signed the papers, shot the shit with the two doctors on ER duty that evening, and headed to the break room. No calls yet, but that was only a matter of time. Best to grab a cup of coffee and a stale sandwich while they had the chance.

The rain was coming down harder. From their vantage point in the second-floor break room, Bobbi could usually see the whole of Rustwood laid out below. A miniature map of city lights reflecting on wet asphalt.

Not today. The mists were rolling in thick, swallowing the town entirely.

Good. Drown them. Wash the whole mess away. Oceans rising up, battering against windows and walls. Houses crumbling, dust on the surface of a great wave, and then nothing, not even driftwood. Just water receding to reveal pristine forests, the silence of the glades...

In Bobbi's palm, the needle pricked against skin.

"Hey."

Damien rapped on the table, and for a moment Bobbi couldn't remember where she was, what she'd been thinking about. A thick fog had settled around her mind as easily as it had the city below.

Then she blinked, and it cleared. Hospital. The patient. Two hours left in her shift. "What?"

"I said, you're losing it. Barely here. When was the last time you called in sick?"

Bobbi lowered her eyes. "We don't get to call in sick. You know that."

"That's the attitude that puts people like us in beds upstairs. Doesn't that girl of yours miss you?"

"Sometimes," she said, quietly. Little Jacinta always lit up when Bobbi got home, exploding from her cocoon of blankets to dive-tackle Bobbi around the waist. More affection than she ever showed her biological mother, that was for sure. But every thirty-hour shift was thirty hours that Jacinta had to live with Bobbi's sister, and each time Jacinta returned from her mother's home Bobbi saw the dullness, the disconnect, growing in her eyes.

Damien was right. Too long away from family led to burnout, for parents and children both. Better paramedics than her had been destroyed by the job. Bobbi knew all too well how the long shifts sunk claws into you, tight around your heart. How it was all you could think about, all you could breathe, to the point where you were suffocating every minute you weren't on the clock and drowning every minute you were.

But this wasn't burnout. This was something different.

Something calling to her.

"Have you ever had a holiday?" Damien asked. "Since you started here, have you taken a single goddamn day off?"

Her pulse was drumming in her temples. "I don't remember."

"I know that feeling. I don't even remember when I started. You have to push back against HR sometime, or you'll end up like Blaxland."

"I heard he's doing better now. Took six months off to write the great American novel. Made a mint."

"If that's true, why doesn't he ever come back to say hi?" Damien shook his head. "Take a weekend off. Take the girl with you."

"Yeah, maybe. Haven't been fishing in a while." But when Bobbi tried to think about fishing, the delicate knotting of the line, the shimmer of a lure...

All she could see were the hooks. Those fine points, curving, pressing against her fingertip. The moment of pain as they pressed, pressed, and finally pierced the skin.

Her pulse hammered louder. Not just drums. A roar of blood that pressed down around the margins of her skull. Almost like a caffeine migraine, the steady roar of pain that came with one too many cups of cafeteria coffee. But she hadn't had coffee that afternoon. Hadn't had a cup all day.

It was almost like...

Like the hammering was coming from outside. From above her.

Upstairs.

"Speaking of fishing," Damien said, "I've got this spot that-"

Bobbi clenched her hand around the needle. "I got something to do."

If Damien called for her as she left the cafeteria, she didn't hear it. All her attention was on the hammering in her head. Yes, it was coming from somewhere overhead. Inside her skull but outside at the same time. Like the warbeat of a distant army.

It should've scared her. Should've sent her running.

Somehow, it soothed her. It felt right. A gentle thudding, like Jacinta's child-size heartbeat when she lay against Bobbi's chest. Not just right. Proper. Where she was meant to be.

Like how the needle was meant to be in her hand.

Like how those bright points of pain made all the world come clear around her, made the colours sharper, made everything fall into neat lines.

The drums wanted her to do something. The drums needed her.

They needed her to...

Bobbi blinked. She was standing outside a door on the third floor of St Jeremiah's, a door marked with four black circles that spelled biohazard. One circle in the centre. Three more around a central axis, not complete but curling into sharp fishhook points. Needle points. Claws.

Of course, she whispered. Of course. The white crow. That childhood memory was an omen. Crows were always omens. Was this what it'd been warning her about? Or maybe leading her towards something important, something greater than herself.

Claws tightening on her bare arm. The curl of biohazard talons.

This was where she was meant to be.

She slid through the biohazard doors, into the darkness beyond, where rows of beds waited behind plastic curtains. Only a glimmer of light through the windows. The air was thick with the stink of decay.

Fifty bodies, maybe more. They turned over and moaned beneath their bedsheets, clutched themselves, cried out in thin, reedy voices. Bobbi couldn't understand what they were saying. It was all one word, a single cry rising and falling in chorus.

The other sounds of the hospital - the muttering of patients in the halls, the echoes of hurried footfalls reverberating off linoleum floors, the gentle finger-tap of rain against the windows - had bled away. All that remained was that low song. A half-hundred people keening together, mourning in tune.

She already knew what they were crying for. Their freedom. Reduced to names on charts and left to grow skeletal. She crept to the nearest bed and peeled back the sheet. The man beneath was a bag of bones and tendons, his knees and spine swollen into golf-ball lumps, inflamed, ready to burst.

Not blisters at all. To Bobbi, each looked like a pregnant belly - stretch-lines marking where they pushed from the skin, a thin red seam dividing each down the middle.

The drumming only grew stronger as she ran her hands across the sick man's skin. He was sweaty, clammy, almost stuck to the mattress. "Poor thing," she whispered, although she knew he couldn't hear, that he'd been beyond hearing for a long time now. Nothing but a vessel for...

For what?

Something vital.

They'd known all along, Bobbi realised. The doctors, the surgeons, the admins who'd ignored the blister sickness for weeks, waiting for out-of-town experts to arrive before finally giving up and designating the whole upper floor as a biohazard zone. They'd known exactly what the sickness was. The power inside it. Maybe keeping it concealed so they could exploit it themselves, put it to use just like how they put Bobbi and Damien to use. Everything was just a tool to them. Even people.

Especially people.

How many weeks had they kept it contained? How many months? All that time, aching to break free. To grow and spread and remake the world.

Let it loose, the voice in the back of her head whispered. Except it wasn't her voice at all. She recognised that now. It was the whisper of something greater. A force outside herself, sliding into place so easily, as if there'd been a space inside her all along, waiting to be filled.

I am the new queen, that voice commanded. I will own this town. Together, we will make it shine before we bring it to an end. After all, shouldn't all things burn at their moment of greatest glory?

All I ask is that you share my gift. Let it grow. Set it free.

She understood now. The needle and the sickness. The way the little point glittered. The purity in that sliver of steel.

It'd never been a sickness. It was a transformation in waiting. A gift that would free them all. Even Jacinta, finally loosed from her deadbeat mother.

No more long shifts. No more exhaustion. Only Bobbi and Jacinta, clutching one another, waiting for the end.

It will be beautiful, the voice said, and it seemed madness to disagree.

She unfurled her fist, stared at the glittering needle. A crow-talon in another form. Easy to get the fluids out, of course. A simple prick, a twist. Then what? She hadn't brought tubing, bags, sample tubes. Nothing but herself.

You are the vessel. The first to deliver my gift.

"I understand," she whispered, even though she didn't, not truly. Even though a part of her was shrieking in panic as she leaned over the man in the bed and pressed the needle to the largest lump, the one growing at the base of his spine, between the arched knobs of his hips. "I understand."

One quick stab.

The gush of pus was immediate, a hot spray across her hands that coated her to the elbows. She quickly moved to the next blister, this one on the dying man's wrist. A prick. A jerk. A spatter of blood. It misted high across her cheeks and lips.

Contents under pressure, she thought, and giggled. So long waiting to be free. Now, like a tulip throwing off the morning dew and opening to greet the sunlight, the sickness could finally unfurl and stretch and spread its petals across the valley of Rustwood.

She was the vessel. The deliverance.

Bobbi moved to the next patient. Drew back the covers gently, reverently. Pushed the needle in deep. Twisted it left, then right.

She let the fluids coat her. Fill her cupped hands, slick her chest, pour across her cheeks.

And all the while, the needle-point glistened. It sang.

You're doing good work, Bobbi. Good work is rewarded. I reward all my children.

Even Jacinta? she asked.

Even her.

The only sane part left of Bobbi gibbered and begged as hands that were no longer her own lifted the needle high and stared at that perfect, glittering point.

She stared for a long time.