The Awakening (25 page)

             
Mark put the phone back on the desk and without looking at Abby, he walked over and pushed the shelf back into place.  He heard a faint clicking as the sealing mechanism attached, and then he chanced a look over at his companion.

             
Abby looked tired, frightened still, but otherwise normal.  “What was that about?” she eventually asked.

             
“I’m not entirely sure,” Mark replied.  “The doctor was less forthcoming than I had hoped.  I’m afraid we’re going to have to leave now, and our exit is going to be likely more noticed than our entrance.  I think we can find a door that leads out the back, however, and that works in our favor.”

             
Abby swallowed thickly and looked around the room.  “You sure we can’t keep looking?”

             
The doctor’s warning was weighing heavily on Mark, and he began to feel anxious about Abby being in this room.  “Grab the medical journals and let’s go,” he ordered.

             
Abby snapped into action, grabbing the journals from the desk, and any loose paper in there.  The pair switched out all of the lights, and crept back into the hall.  There was no one around, so they headed into the stairwell, but instead of exiting on the ground floor, Mark pushed the door open on the floor just above it.

             
“We’ve got to find a back exit, and coming out into the lobby is out of the question,” he said.  The halls on the first floor were just as empty as the previous ones, though the sound of beeps alerted them both to patients in these rooms. 

             
With practiced skill, Mark led the way down the maze of halls as quietly as he could until his eyes spotted a fire exit.  They crept through the door, trying to make as little noise as possible.  As predicted, the door led to a stairwell which brought them down to the ground, and in front of a door marked Fire Exit, Alarm Will Sound in big, bold letters.

             
“That’s going to make a lot of noise,” Abby warned.  “What do we do?”

             
Mark took a deep breath, put one hand on the door and grabbed Abby’s wrist with his other.  “We run,” he said, and then he pushed.

             
The alarm buzzed, piercing and fierce as it wailed through the building.  Not considering Abby much at all, Mark dragged her across the field to the opening in the fence that he’d created.  He knew they would be seen this time, and a faint shouting from the building confirmed his suspicions.

             
They were clear, however, before anyone could get to them, and they were out.  Mark dragged Abby into the dark alley, and it wasn’t until they stopped for breath that he saw she was limping.

             
“What happened?” he asked her as he leaned against the cold brick.

             
“Twisted my ankle,” Abby moaned, gingerly putting pressure on her injured foot.  She winced and shook her head.  “Might be broken.  Either way, we’ve gotta go.”

             
“I know,” Mark said.  The car wasn’t far, and he allowed her a little time to hobble along the street until they found the car and got in.

             
Abby sat in the back, putting her foot up on the seat and Mark quickly drove off, trying to keep his steering even and his speed at the limit so he didn’t attract any attention.  He drove in the opposite direction of the hospital, checking his mirrors every so often until they were far enough for him to feel a sense of relief. 

             
They were clear.  They had made it in and out, and for the moment, no one would know it was them.  He found a little motel that looked clean enough on Hotel Circle, a place where tourists came to stay for cheap.

             
Mark purchased a room under his Spanish passport, his name listed there as Marco Moreno, close enough to his real name, but far enough to where he probably wouldn’t be recognized.  He helped Abby to the room and then went into the hall to fetch ice from the machine for her foot.

             
She was half-asleep by the time he got back in with the small plastic bucket, and he did his best not to disturb her as he wrapped a handful of the frozen cubes in a motel washcloth.  She gave a wince as he pulled her shoe off, but she didn’t protest as he applied the makeshift pack to her skin.

             
“Do you think it’s broken?” she asked groggily as she lay back on the bed.

             
Mark peered at the skin.  It was swollen and likely to bruise, but she had wiggled her toes several times which indicated there wasn’t a break.  “I don’t believe so, but I want to keep ice on it for a while.  In the morning we’ll see about getting you some over the counter pain medication.”

             
Abby gave a yawn.  “I’m sure I’ll be fine once I get some sleep.  Honestly I’m so exhausted I could probably sleep through surgery.”

             
Mark gave her a small smile.  “I doubt it’ll come to that.”

             
Her eyes started to close and her breathing slowed.  He thought she might have fallen asleep after a moment, but she took a deep breath and asked, “Do you sleep, Mark?  I guess I never thought to ask.”

             
“I do,” he said quietly.  “I sleep.  My body behaves much like any other human body, except that I don’t age, and I don’t die.”

             
“Have you ever, you know, tried to die?”  Abby cracked an eye open with great difficulty.

             
“Yes,” Mark said, though he didn’t really want to answer this question.  “I’ve gone through many things that would have killed any ordinary human.  If you can think it up, likely it’s happened to me.”

             
“Do you get sick?”

             
Mark chuckled and shook his head.  “Ah, no, I don’t.  I don’t take ill, though that doesn’t mean from time to time I don’t
feel
ill, but as far as the common cold or flu, I’m immune.”

             
“Hmm,” she hummed and her eye closed.

             
After several minutes, Mark realized Abby was finally asleep, and he lay her foot on a few pillows, keeping the injury elevated, and the ice resting on top of it.  He went into the restroom to relieve himself, and after, switched on his cell phone and opened up his text messaging folder.

             
Being that he was usually playing the part of a blind man, Mark wasn’t entirely familiar with the entire texting process, but he managed to tap out a quick message sent to Ben’s phone. 
Your sister is safe, but her ankle is injured.  Please come with the doctor.  Will explain when you get here.  My apologies.

             
With that, Mark set his phone on the table and took the second bed.  He was exhausted himself, though the events of the night made sleep a near impossible idea, and even as he switched off the lights and lay on the bed with his eyes closed, his mind was racing.

             
This doctor clearly knew who he was, and what Yehuda was capable of, and the doctor was hiding something potentially dangerous.  It was dangerous to Abby, at the very least, and that made Mark very nervous.  In his years of traveling the world, though he had kept to himself, out of the spotlight and out of people’s notice, he had never known something as potentially powerful as this doctor was hiding.

             
Mark had to fight off the urge to drive back to the facility, break into the office and inspect that room.  He had not only sensed an otherworldly power about it, but something else was there as well, in the dark.  With a sigh, Mark turned on his side and stretched his consciousness out once more, in hopes of catching just a glimpse of his lost companion.  Darkness greeted him, and with a final sigh, Mark willed himself to sleep.

Chapter
Twenty-Two

              Ben was trembling as Greg hung up the phone.  He had expected to have a word with his sister, but Greg looked concerned, and the fear in his voice when he told Mark to get Abby out of the room was very real. 

             
“Enough waiting around,” Ben snapped when Greg put the phone back into his pocket.  “Who cares about this patient.  Clearly my sister is in danger, and I’m not going to sit here anymore.”

             
“This is important,” Greg said firmly.  He checked his watch and sighed.  “It won’t be long now, Ben, I promise.”

             
Ben crossed his legs, his ankle resting on his crooked knee, his foot jiggling in the air with impatience.  “This had better make sense, doc, or we’re going to have some serious problems.  I’m going to be very frank with you right now, if anything happens to my sister and you kept me here, I’m holding you personally responsible.”

             
“If Mark listens to me and gets her out right now, she’s going to be just fine,” Greg said.  He stood up and went back to the window of the office, pressing the edge of the blinds down and peering out. 

             
Ben stood up, following him and looked over his shoulder out of the small space visible on the window.  “What are you looking at?”

             
Greg pressed his finger through the blinds, against the glass.  “Do you see that room right there?  Room four-oh-six?”

             
“Yes,” Ben said, staring at the closed door. 

             
“That room is where our patient is laying in his bed, completely comatose,” Greg said.  “We’re about to go out there and we’re going to check on his vital signs.”

             
“
We
?” Ben demanded.

             
“Oh yes.  I need you perfectly aware of his state right now.”

             
Ben stepped back and crossed his arms as Greg opened the office door and led the way out.  He went straight to the nurse’s station where a tired woman with frayed, greying black hair sat at a computer.  Her pink scrubs were adorned with cats, which was probably fitting, Ben thought, for a woman working the overnight shift.

             
Greg smiled at her and attached his badge to the front of his shirt.  “Any change in four-oh-six?”

             
“None today, doctor,” she said.  Her voice was hoarse, like a woman who smoked two packs a day, and her teeth, when she smiled, were quite yellow.  “Were you called in?”

             
“No.  This is Detective Stanford, and he’s been assigned to a case that may relate to our patient here,” Greg said smoothly.  “I’m just providing the detective with a status report.”

             
The nurse frowned.  “A related case?”

             
“I’m a homicide detective, and unfortunately I’m not at liberty to discuss any details,” Ben snapped at her, using a forceful, “bad cop” voice.

             
The nurse sneered a little, but said nothing more as Greg led the way into the patient’s room.  There was a low light from a wall panel behind the patient’s bed.  The man on the bed looked like he might have once been attractive, possibly athletic.  His hair was trimmed, his face groomed, and his nails clipped, but that was about all that indicated that he was once a virile young man.

             
He was too thin, now, his body emaciated and muscles atrophied.  His hair was dark, but the color was muddled, and it hung limp and greasy against the pillow.  His skin was rather sallow, clearly from lack of sun, and the skin around his eyes was dark.  His lips were thin and cracked, pulled away at the corners giving him a skeletal look.

             
The entire thing made Ben rather uncomfortable, and he wanted to be out of the room as quickly as possible.  He would take dead, mangled bodies over a man just wasting away attached to machines.

             
“Here’s the chart,” Greg said, passing the bed and approaching a machine attached to the patient with wires.  A little printer kept what looked like a running tally of lines along a grid pattern, piling up in a small tray on the side.  “This monitors his brain activity throughout the day.”

             
“Okay,” Ben said, unable to make neither heads nor tails of the paper other than the little mountains were probably where brain activity spiked.

             
“Now, from what I can discern, it’s when the patient has been completely inactive for at least twenty-four hours that he’s able to be… taken.”

             
Ben frowned.  “Inactive?”

             
“Showing no sign of consciousness,” Greg replied.  “I have the readouts of his monitor attached to my computer, and it alerts me every time his brain activity spikes.  It’s also set to alert me to when his brain activity is unresponsive to any stimuli for over twenty-four hours.  This hasn’t happened until now.”

             
“What do you mean?”