Raul maintained a running commentary the entire time they were being transported. <...and there goes another IFV,> he informed her with a mild curse.
Sarah scrolled through an itemized bill for what she suspected was a car crash. Between his voice and the clack of the keys she felt like she was listening to a podcast.
A moment passed as Raul consulted his notes.
He said it like it was a question. Like he hadn’t been sitting there trying to read every unit patch off the guards’ collective sleeves. Sarah shook her head. She would have told him to get his shit together if he hadn’t choked back a muffled oath.
Sarah grunted. Truth be told, her own position wasn’t doing much better. It wasn’t at the point where she had nurses beating down her door; however, it was only a matter of time considering how much traffic was headed towards the morgue. Eventually, someone was going to need to strip the dead and store their stuff where it wouldn’t be underfoot. The room intentionally built for that purpose struck her as the most likely candidate.
‘I’ll have to be ready,’ she thought with a dark, pessimistic grimace. ‘I can either drop the morticians fast or attempt to play the whole thing off.’
Her eyes shifted from the screen to the pallets of cached supplies. Of the two, the latter seemed like it would buy more time for her to find her missing host. Could she squeeze into any of the unopened scrubs? Sarah snagged a pack while her search results compiled. The ‘Mediums’ looked like they’d fit.
“Fuck it,” she spat before pulling up her top by the hem. “Where are those damn shoes?”
To be fair, they were more like cloth booties that you sealed with a tight rubber band. The only difference was you wore these over your normal footwear, instead of as a replacement. Largely for hygienic reasons; no one wanted you to track dirt or blood across the floor when you moved through the winding corridors.
‘Not that it helps much,’ Sarah acknowledged with a deeply nettled frown. ‘The hospital could wipe the whole building down in Lysol, and they’d still suffer a rash of infections. The massive fields of ‘Poison’ mana have certainly seen to that.’
Sarah stared at a pair of dull green sweatpants while her tendrils shivered in disgust. From the vault in the pharmacy all the way to the anesthesiology department, there was a haze of toxic motes clinging to the filtered air. They tasted like bitter powder and thickly cloying gas. Born from the various treatments, rather than the intentions behind their use, the clouds served as a stark reminder that medicine was defined by the dose.
And right now, the calibrations were badly off.
Pallsburg issued an inquisitive hum at Sarah’s frozen form. The warspawn dismissed her concern. She didn’t have time to give a TED talk on magic and its place in the health care industry. If her host wanted an explanation, she could get it from Amanda after they’d completed their self-appointed task. In the meantime, she simply wrapped a lanyard around her neck and fished through a box of blank IDs.
The words ‘Not for Official Use’ were carefully printed across the top. Beneath those was space for a portrait and a line that read ‘Your Name Here.’ The owner’s job title and badge number were supposed to follow in the prompt below. Sarah didn’t see a need for either; instead, she casually flicked her wrist ensuring their absence was concealed by her chest. Now, anyone walking by would see the unadorned rear and assume the card had merely gotten twisted.
She turned back to the computer. Sarah got through two more false positives before her disguise was put to the test. It was a patient ironically enough. The dark-haired man had taken one look at the enormous storeroom and then quickly stumbled back out. He muttered something about needing to piss as he headed in the opposite direction. Sarah didn’t pay him much mind.
The nurse who broke in a minute later was a slightly different story.
“Hey,” said attendant called out, her uniform a match for Sarah’s own. “Have you seen a gentleman in a blue shirt pass by?”
Sarah glanced up before lifting her eyebrows into an elegantly puzzled arch. “Five ten? Maybe a hundred and sixty pounds?” When her ‘co-worker’ nodded, the parasite jerked her thumb to the left. “You just missed him. Why don’t you try the private wing or maybe near the gift shop?”
The woman swore and motioned for Sarah to join her. “Alright. Damn. In that case, follow me. I’ll probably need your help to wrestle him back inside his room.”
Sarah sighed. Her nails began to bounce against the plastic hump crowning the center of her mouse. “You can’t just get an orderly to assist you?”
Little Miss Ratched shook her head. “They’re all too busy manhandling the injured from that shootout downtown. It’s not worth the trouble to drag them away from their duties when you and I can do it ourselves.”
It was worth it to Sarah, but she understood the sentiment. What’s more, she wasn’t eager to invite the extra scrutiny that a denial could potentially elicit. She clicked on the latest file. Sarah skimmed through the details before recalling that she was mid conversation. “...Fine,” she ground out, her tone slipping into a petulant drawl. “Let me just close this, and I’ll be right…”
She trailed off. Like a child with a Gameboy, there was a temptation to steal ‘one more minute’ until it ballooned into five or ten. Even recognizing the issue didn’t inoculate her against the symptoms. It simply made Sarah feel embarrassed the longer she forced the woman to wait.
Finally, after grinding her teeth into proverbial chalk, she staggered away from the terminal. In the half dozen steps it took her to stride to the door, Sarah saw a flash of exasperation erupt and then fade into impatient silence.
“I know - I know,” Sarah grumbled as her associate stomped across the tile. “Haven’t you ever heard the saying that ‘slow is smooth and smooth is fast?’”
“Yes," the nurse huffed. "It was coined by an organization whose members tend to eat crayons. I try not to pay it any mind.”
Sarah clicked her tongue at the lightning-fast rebuttal. She was spared from having to comment, though, by a crash team rounding the corner. The two of them stepped aside while the bloodstained gurney barreled past. After it had vanished into the depths of the beige complex, Sarah found her irritation had been swept along with it leaving only terse professionalism in its place.
A pregnant hush settled over their impromptu search party. Sarah writhed beneath its weight the longer it took to find their missing quarry. ‘This is not who I should be tracking,’ she silently bitched between rooms. ‘Seriously, this jackoff had better have OD’d on the can or I’m going to be fucking pissed.’
At least, that’s what she told herself. In reality, there were enough cops around to make her dread being tied to such a crime. She could already picture it; it’d be like that scene in Reservoir Dogs with the pot and the German Shepherd. What had Lawrence Tierney advised? ‘Shit your pants, dive in and swim?’ It was a good line, but Sarah was getting real tired of doing laps with a load in her drawers.
A pair of sharp grey eyes darted towards the oblivious nurse. Sarah thought about bodying her in the aforementioned bathroom before secreting her corpse in a stall. Since that would result in a manhunt, she decided to act like she’d gotten an alert on her cell phone, instead. “Ah," she announced after glancing at the locked device. "It seems I’m needed in Pediatrics. Do you want me to let them know about your issues with your wandering patient?”
The woman gave her such a filthy look that Sarah knew her excuse hadn’t passed muster. She still let the parasite leave without making a direct accusation. “By all means,” the old battleaxe muttered. “I’m sure whatever they have you doing is positively critical compared to my request.”
Her voice was so acidic it could have been used to etch glass. Sarah was a little too calloused, though, to buckle from an angry glare. “Good. Great talk. Let me know how it all works out.”
The nurse wasn’t prepared for that much sheer indifference. It bought Sarah the time she needed to retreat with her cover intact. Sadly, when she returned to the storeroom, she realized she had taken too long, and the terminal had signed itself out.
“Fuck,” Sarah cursed as she slammed her thumb against the spacebar. “Come on, don’t you dare do this to me. Power on… guest log-in… boot to desktop…”
A splash of black pixels engulfed the aging monitor. When the loading screen finally vanished, and took the pulsing throbber with it, Sarah scanned through the programs In the start menu but failed to find the half-remembered app. She refused to give up. Her fingers summoned forth a command prompt that begrudgingly accepted her code. It proceeded to ask her for a password. Sarah may have broken the keyboard during the course of her response.
‘Feel better?’ Pallsburg asked once the peripheral was done bouncing off the floor.
Sarah scoffed, her gaze locked on the shattered device. ‘No, but we’ve reached the limit of what petty vandalism is likely to accomplish. All that’s left is actually fixing the freaking problem.’
For that, she was going to need the IT department. It was the only way to be sure that Sarah could access the relevant files. Screw swiping random credentials or pissing about the system, she’d just go straight to the source and finagle everything from there.
Of course, actually locating said office turned out to be a huge pain in the ass. You see, unlike the physicians or other external services, tech support wasn’t publicly listed, forcing Sarah to get creative. She honestly didn’t expect to have much luck until she recalled the computers gathering dust in the corner. Then, in the dim gloom of the increasingly oppressive storeroom, Sarah realized they must have come with paperwork and thought to check for an order form.
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She found it wedged beneath a desktop at the bottom of the stack. ‘Service Request: 00175693,’ read the cover letter. ‘Issued by: Doctor Steven M. Gilford on July 1st, 2022.’ The nature of the problem and where it had occurred was described at the bottom of the page. So was the equipment’s destination and the technician who’d signed off on the transfer.
‘Room 305,’ Sarah noted rapidly. ‘I can get there via the west stairway so long as it’s not crawling with guards.’
The caveat had become increasingly necessary over the course of the morning. In fact, ever since she’d run around on that frigid bitch’s orders, she’d been spotting a lot more cops congregating within the halls. Most of them were near the VIP quarters and areas like imaging and surgery. It wouldn’t take long, though, before they began to range farther afield.
Sarah hoped to be gone by the time they all got settled in. To that end, she chose to trade stealth for speed and practically dashed out of the grungy depot.
The fluorescent lights threw multicolored streaks across her vision as she transitioned to the glistening corridors. From there, it was a quick jog to the nearest stairwell with only a brief change of pace so she wouldn’t look guilty on camera. The steps wore at her soles whenever she hit the ‘no slick’ strip near the edge. By the time she reached the second floor, she could already feel a hole forming in the light-weight cloth of her shoe covers.
Sarah maintained her pace, regardless. She had a feeling her footwear wasn’t a stranger to the occasional rip or tear. She certainly didn’t get any odd looks the first time she slipped by an orderly. If anything, it was her destination that drew his attention since she wasn’t exactly dressed like she’d been hired to update his browser.
A muscle in Sarah's throat twitched before her tendrils could reign it in. She smiled through her rising panic until the two of them had cleared the intersection. Then, the warspawn swallowed her gorge and started reading the various plaques. The one marked ‘305’ was thirty meters away on her right. It was also propped open and had a security guard stationed outside. Not professionally - he hadn’t been assigned to defend the place - however, that didn’t make him less of a problem as he shot the shit with its occupant.
“No - no - no,” the cop was muttering gruffly. “Don’t give me that horse crap. This is the Celtic’s year. They’ve got Kristaps, Tatum and Jayleen Brown. Even with just the three of them they’re going to be scoring ninety points a game. Do you really think the Lakers are going to bring it home while Davis has a busted leg? Where’s your local pride?”
His counterpart rolled around in his chair. “With my wife," he said, "buying groceries for our kids. How much did you even spend on this spread? Ten? Twenty dollars a square?” When the officer didn’t reply, Sarah heard the hidden speaker slap his hand against his face. “You’ve got a fucking problem, man. This shit is supposed to be for fun.”
“Yeah, well…”
Sarah tuned the rest out. She didn’t need to hear the guy’s faults to know that firepower wasn’t one of them. Especially, since the smooth black leather of a holstered Glock was casually dangling from his belt. It looked like one of the newer models. Twenty-two - twenty-three? Truthfully, there weren’t enough changes in the design for her to be able to identify the weapon at a glance.
It also wasn’t a requirement: not when she could get its wielder to piss off with a subtle application of her core.
‘You hear that?’ Sarah hissed as she impressed the motes with her intent. ‘We’re aiming for the shitter. Let’s see if we can get him to run for it, lest the dam break in the hallway.’
The mana shifted accordingly and then drifted across the intervening space. If she’d been doing this to a Tellim, it would have taken about eleven motes for the spell to properly sink in. Since humans were built much tougher, it cost her close to fifteen.
The mana still seeped through his skin without alerting the cop to its presence. By the time the residue had cleared from the corridor, he was beginning to look a little uncomfortable. Thirty seconds later, he needed to make his excuses. Sarah resolved to give him the full minute before she dared to approach her objective.
A shard of ice took shape between her fingers during the long wait to proceed. When Sarah felt the handle start to stick to her sweaty palm, she knew the hour had come for her to focus on its point. Her footsteps approached the office without a single scuff or squeak. Sarah drifted through the frame blade first while its owner remained comfortably oblivious. ‘Nothing personal,’ the parasite thought as she prepared herself to put him to the question. ‘Maybe if you cooperate, we’ll get to skip the messy example.'
The technician didn’t comment on his assailant’s selfish prayer. Instead, he simply fiddled with his cell phone in between checking his workstation’s screen. The latter displayed a series of videos being taken throughout the hospital. First of the car park, then of the fifth floor. It took until she saw the receptionist’s desk before Sarah realized she was accosting the system administrator responsible for monitoring the camera network.
‘Well, at least he deserves it,’ the infiltrator chuckled darkly. ‘You can’t exactly claim the dude’s innocent when he’s literally asleep at the wheel.’
The terminal cycled through perspectives like an attention-fried twelve-year-old. In the cold, brutal silence before she ruined someone’s day, Sarah took a moment to stare at the feed and wondered if this felt voyeuristic to anyone but her. She reached forward to grab her victim by the shoulder. She got about three inches from his shirt when she saw Rogers appear in the footage.
‘Wait, is that…’
The system switched units before she could say for sure. Sarah kept her hand hovering in the air while she waited for the feed to cycle back. A couple of seconds later, she noticed a similar figure closing in on the hospital’s front entrance. It was definitely the same warspawn who’d sided with Mannly and the others.
‘Motherfucker. Does Raul see this?’
Sarah went to ask him and then immediately killed the broadcast. There was no way Rogers would miss it if she attempted to contact her partner. Better to address the prick directly and trust Raul to read between the lines.
Rogers peered around the sidewalk without visibly moving his head.
Sarah shrugged.
The grainy image showed a crack in Rogers’ stoicism before his expression smoothed itself out.
Rogers visibly took a breath.
A faint tremor wracked the mutilated warspawn’s frame. It read as rage to Sarah, or maybe terror, until a spreading stain crept into the camera’s view. Another gathered beneath Rogers' foot from the blood trickling past his beltline.
Sarah’s teeth nibbled at her bottom lip. She tried to get a better view of the damage but was hesitant to alert the guard.
Rogers’ image disappeared, only to be replaced by a hallway on the third floor. His voice still came through covered in ice and iron.
Well, he wasn’t wrong about that. Bouchard’s death would've been an auspicious prize if it could buy her what she sought. Alas, Sarah was a sentimental bitch and unmoved by material gain. There also wasn’t much reason to swipe the points when Pallsburg could heal with a touch. Rogers wouldn’t buy that, though. What’s more, Sarah sensed his patience was wearing thin even if he might not have moved quite yet. Should she go for the files? Possibly use her colleague as a convenient distraction?
Sarah ran the numbers in her head before concluding it was too much of a risk. Nothing about this assault would be quiet, and her host remained somewhere in the complex. Therefore, it’d be best to shut his operation down entirely, lest Rogers ruin her life by accident. How, though? It’d be tricky to herd him into a…
The parasite paused as she recalled her sweep of the perimeter. There were only two reasonable entrances into this section of the complex. If she could cut Rogers off from one of them, she should be able to intercept him at the other. The best way to do that would be…
<...Sure,> her partner acquiesced, even though he was unlikely to have a shot.
Sarah stared at the map on her phone and started sprinting towards the rear entrance. She could practically hear her cabalmate cursing through the static on the open channel.
‘That’s not an option,’ Sarah thought with a scowl. ‘There’s only one person here I want.’
The hospital blurred before her eyes as Sarah retraced her steps. Every corridor or two, someone would poke their head out to investigate the commotion; however, Sarah never gave them the time of day until she almost tripped over a man in a wheelchair. Even then, she merely offered her excuses before attempting to hurry past.
His response nearly stopped her in her tracks. “No problem,” the stranger replied. “I'm sure it was just bad luck.”
A weight settled in Sarah’s stomach at the sound of his awkward laugh. In the thirty years she had spent on Earth, it'd become second nature for her to differentiate between the various flavors of social anxiety. Meeting people for the first time; speaking up in class; having to excuse another’s rudeness. The details may have varied, depending on the setting; however, none of them resembled the signals the patient was currently displaying. A closer match would have been someone who knew her nature and the threat her species could pose.
‘Did we miss someone from Pennant’s listening post,’ Sarah wondered softly to herself. ‘I’m not too familiar with Pallsburg’s history, but…’ The words caught in her throat. Even though she’d turned away and had begun to walk towards the exit, Sarah kept picturing the manner in which her easygoing victim had moved. He reminded her of Raul’s younger brother; specifically, when the latter had been tending to the field. It was the inelegance, she decided. They shared the same jerky gracelessness that all callow warspawn possessed.
‘Okay,’ Sarah growled while the wheelchair rolled away. ‘Calm down. Let’s not jump at shadows. This guy could just have a neurological condition or simply be fucking disabled. There’s no reason to think he’s the only infiltrator who’s recently changed his face.’
‘But what if he is,’ a part of her argued back. ‘If that’s him… if that’s Townsend’s new host…’
Sarah’s ‘Water’ core spun itself up. The parasite kept her senses peeled for any kind of obvious reaction. When one didn’t manifest itself, she realized she'd have to roll the dice. There were about four seconds until the prick crawled away. …Three. …Two.
Sarah took a deep breath and made her choice before the clock could do it for her.