“No, I’ll be fine. I’m gonna… just sit here a bit and catch my breath. Then I’m gonna go hook up with the guys again. We’ll be home either late today or tomorrow, okay?”
“You call. You call every time you guys stop for something, all right? I want to know that you’re coming home.”
“I always come home, baby.” Oops. There’s that lie again. “Hey, I hear you got Zane all patched up.”
“Oh, yeah. Cameron seems to have some basic magical ability. Enough that it worked. You’re going to have to explain all that to me when you get home.” She didn’t want to talk about Cam and Zane, I could tell that much. “Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked one more time. “Jess, if you need help…”
“Baby, I’m fine. And you should get some sleep. Anna’s gonna drag you out of bed in a couple hours whether you want to or not. I’ll see you both soon.”
She heaved a heavy sigh. “I… Be careful, please. Come home.”
“I will. Love you, baby.”
“I love you too, Jess.”
I hung up the phone and tried to muster the energy to get to my feet. The sun rose while I sat on the ground leaning on Marty’s dented fender. It lit the world in shades of fire. It was beautiful.
20
There was a variety of interesting headlines in several news-type publications in the days and weeks following my pseudovacation.
The first one made national news, all the way from Fort Collins, Colorado. Apparently, an oxygen tank exploded in a storage room at the local hospital, damaging a hallway and causing the evacuation of the entire facility. Everyone was so thankful that it wasn’t a tank in a patient’s room, and that the injuries were minimal. No one could figure out just why the tank exploded, or what it was doing in the storage room where it didn’t belong. Investigations were ongoing.
It took Cole a week (and most of a six-pack) to tell me what really happened.
“You’re going to think I’m insane, big brother,” he mentioned quietly one night. “Absolutely out of my ever- loving mind.”
The Yeti had walked right into the ER in his human guise, like he owned the place. At his heels were two of his minions, scuttling along like the good little pets they were.
“It was like nobody saw them. Like they couldn’t see them.” Cole shook his head. “Why could we see them, and no one else?”
“People see what they want to see. You guys kinda had it crammed down your throat.” Really, I had no idea what I was talking about. Philosophy I could explain. Mystic shit, not so much. Despite my eerily accurate dream, I was not a magic user. I knew this. I believed this. So what the hell had happened to me up there?
“Anyway… I saw him come in, before they saw me, and I yanked the curtains shut around Zane’s bed.”
They’d retreated out the backside of the ER, into the maintenance hallways of the hospital, wheeling Zane’s bed between them. Duke padded along silently, like he understood the risk they were taking.
Why no one stopped them, I don’t think any of us will ever know. At Will’s direction, they turned away from the patient room elevators and toward the operating rooms. There was only one way in or out down there, to keep it sterile, and Will figured there’d be fewer innocents present so late at night.
They might have gotten away clean, if the bed’s wheel hadn’t gotten caught on a sharp corner, jostling it. In his pained delirium, Zane moaned.
Demons track by sound, or so Axel said. I think he must have been telling the truth, because all it took was that moan, several hallways distant, to alert the Yeti and his zombie pets.
“We tried to stay ahead of them, but the kid was half awake by that point, and kept hollering. They came right to us. We could hear their claws, scrabbling on the floor tiles.”
They weren’t going to reach the operating suites in time, so the guys crammed the bed into the nearest storage room they could find and barricaded the door with whatever they could get their hands on. They combined what little weaponry they had left-Cole’s gun with two bullets, and one hopper full of blessed paintballs-and prepared to make their stand.
“He knocked on the door. Just tap tap tap, all polite like.” Cole shook his head. “Cameron kept insisting that he couldn’t hurt us, wasn’t allowed to, and all I could do was look at Zane in that bed and think that Cameron was either crazy or stupid.”
There were things Cole didn’t say. Things that I maybe made up in my own head, but I could picture how it went so clearly. Oscar’s hand, pressed so tightly over his son’s mouth, trying to stifle the boy’s cries. Will, pawing through the shelves of supplies to see if there was something, any thing there they could use. Marty with the loaded paintball gun, just waiting for the door to come flying open.
“He said, ‘I’ll give you two minutes to decide what to do with the boy, and then I’ll send my pets in to retrieve him.’” My brother blinked a bit. “He really thought we’d give the kid up to save our own skins. What kind of person does that?”
“He’s not a person, little brother. He’s about the furthest thing from it.”
The Yeti didn’t give them two minutes. Almost immediately, they heard the ceiling tiles in the hallway go crashing down, and the minions were in the drop ceiling above them. The brackets that held the fiberboard tiles dipped and swayed dangerously, even the zombies’ slight weight too much for the light support system.
“If they came through the ceiling, we were gonna be trapped in close quarters with them. But if we opened the door, the demon was gonna get Zane.” Cole drained what was left of his beer and reached for another. “I took aim at the ceiling, thinking maybe I could shoot through the tiles and at least cripple them. We could let Duke finish them on the ground or something.”
This was the part of the story where, unbeknownst to anyone at the hospital, I came in. There was a sudden silence above them, and out in the hallway, the Yeti chuckled. “I have been called away on unexpected business, gentlemen. I’ll leave my pets here for your amusement.” And just like that, poof, he was gone.
Of course, the guys had no way of knowing he’d really disappeared. They didn’t know I’d just shouted out a name I’d sworn never to say, that I was about to fight for my life on a mountain far to the south. They did know, however, that the creatures in the ceiling paused for long moments, then exited the way they’d come in, tiles crashing to the floor out in the hallway. They heard the claws clacking on the floor, hurrying away.
I suppose it’s possible the creatures remembered the guys. Maybe what little intelligence they had left recalled that tangling with my buddies meant excruciating, horrific pain. More likely, they just smelled the blood down in the OR and decided it was Zombie-Starbucks. Either way, once the Yeti wasn’t there to boss them around, the two minions went scampering off into the hospital.
My brother knew they couldn’t let those things go running off willy-nilly into the general populace. At the very least, having half-rotting animated corpses in the OR was so not sterile. I mean, there isn’t enough hand sanitizer in the world to cover that mess.
So Cole left Marty and Duke to stand guard over everyone else, and went chasing off into the hallways alone, armed with two bullets. Yeah, I know. He’s growing up to be just like me. Ain’t I proud?
“I chased them almost all the way to the surgery suites, but I didn’t realize until we were almost there that there was actually an operation taking place. I could hear the beeping machines, and people’s voices.” He paused there for a long time. “I knew I was gonna die, y’know. Knew I couldn’t take them out with two shots, and it didn’t matter. I had to stop them no matter what. Had to keep them from hurting anyone else.”
He fired after those fleeing abominations, one bullet sending one of them cartwheeling into the wall. It didn’t kill it, though, and they both turned on my brother, hissing as they bounded down the hallway toward him. With one bullet, he faced them both down and silently said his good-byes.
“I don’t know what happened next, Jess. I mean, I can tell you what I think I saw, but…”
From behind him, a searing white light lit up the hallway, bright enough to blind him even with his back to it. He dropped to his knees, hands slapped over his eyes in agony, and the Yeti’s pets shrieked in their death throes. The light eclipsed everything, its brilliance so great that Cole couldn’t make out the pattern of the floor tiles, even with his nose pressed against them. When he was finally able to raise his head, there were only ashes in the
