Black Ice - The Twisted Thread - Part 3
Nov. 7th, 2011 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittydesadeOne day passed. Then two, and as her shift wound down and she started to wonder if maybe her mother wasn't at least half right she caught a glimpse of a large, loud bike out the front window of the ER. Randi bit her lip and resolved not to look out any more windows till she could clock out, but she kept looking, and the bike kept leaning on its stand.
By the time she made it out the doors it was almost forty five minutes after her shift was supposed to end, her hands still reeked of sanitizer, and the bike was still there, its rider waiting for her astride. She didn't know what to say. A smile kept creeping up despite her best efforts to be tired and cranky and not want to go anywhere, really, except maybe back home. Home and to bed, and not for that kind of thing. She still looked both ways before she ran across the street and then all she saw was the thin sliver of the world above the black leather shoulder, and all she could smell was the bike, the jacket, and Ray.
Randi closed her eyes, sighing, and let herself relax against him.
"Long day, sounds like," his voice whispered around her, not as significant in her senses as his broad body or his arms tight around her, or the warmth of his body or the creak of his jacket. The bike swayed a little as they both shifted to perch better.
She sighed, rubbing her burning eyes against his shoulder. "Long day. Long night. Need more sleep." But it didn't look like she was going to get any, between studying and working. She felt his fingers curl into her hair, felt the strands catch on his rings a bit as he combed her hair out from its ponytail down her back.
"You wanna go home?"
If he had any other plans, he didn't say them, not even after she gave him a few minutes to bring up alternatives, suggest something else he might want to do or had arranged. So she nodded. "I'm not going to be much fun, I think."
"'s okay. It's okay." He sounded puzzled. She couldn't see why. "Come on, let's go home."
She left her car at the clinic and clung to him the whole way back, wind on her arms and legs chilling her down to her fingertips. It was still better than driving alone, somehow. Leaning into his bulk shielded her from the wind a little bit, and there was something reassuring about a warm body so solidly there that you couldn't refute the fact that you weren't alone.
They got off the bike, made it up to the apartment, and she leaned on the door of her fridge and stared into it as though a hand would reach out and tell her what she wanted for dinner. Breakfast. Whatever meal of the day it was. He closed the door after the chill started to numb her cheeks and steered her towards the bedroom with an arm around her shoulders. "You can nap first. Figure out what to eat after."
"Doesn't sound like a half bad idea," she managed, sleepwalking through shedding her clothes and stretching out on the bed next to him.
Only now she couldn't sleep. He was warm and made a nice pillow, and the lights were off, the curtains drawn. They'd managed to work their way under the covers and as tired as she was she should have fallen asleep, but she couldn't. She traced the wrinkles and folds on his blue-gray shirt. Blue, she thought. Grayed out by the lack of light.
"What are we doing, anyway?" she asked, her voice slurred even to her.
He looked down. She looked up and caught the reflection of the outside light against his eyes, making them blue on white circles. The effect was eerie. "Mm?"
"What are we doing? Where..."
Randi stopped after that, tucking her head back down and closing her eyes. She'd sworn she wouldn't be that girl, not with him, not with where he came from and what he did, hell, what she did. No thinking about the future, just enjoying the present. If they ended up here, still, a year from now maybe she would ask where this was going. Not this soon. This soon it was still just dating, fun and kind of thrilling, but just dating.
Except for where it wasn't. And her mind churned over what all this meant, where it had come from out of the blue. She couldn't hold onto a thought or a reason why, but she knew something about this was unlike her. And unlike him, even though she had only known him a short while. There were impulses and then there were impulses. And now there was this.
Ray didn't say anything to her aborted question. And he didn't ask what she was talking about, which could have been thoughtful consideration or it could have been him not wanting to know the answers any more than she did.
She closed her eyes and listened to his breathing and the utter lack of conversation echoing in the reflection of the street sounds outside and finally, finally she did fall asleep.
The hospital stretched out in front of her, endless and waiting. And dark. Night hours were darker than day hours because of all the patients trying to get their sleep, the halls were awkwardly lit, but that didn't explain the shadows reaching out and lapping at her toes. She just needed to drop off this paperwork, at least, and then she could go. If she could find the right office.
There wasn't anyone to ask. The desks were empty, reception, intake, everything. Ghost hospital.
"This is ridiculous," she muttered. There was no way everyone would be on a break at once, and she would have noticed if there had been some kind of evacuation order. "This is absolutely fu--"
Something clanged down the hall, behind her. Maybe someone dropping a bedpan or jostling a gurney or something, but that meant that someone was here, too. Randi looked down the hall, didn't see anyone, so she started checking rooms.
The whole setup was odd. Odder still that no one was in the rooms, no nurses, no patients, nothing. Every door she yanked open, every place she looked the hospital was devoid of bodies, and her skin was crawling off her bones by the time she came around to reception again. Outside, the wind had whipped up, slamming branches against windows. Howling like a dog gone rabid. Like something was circling the building, trying to get in.
No fool, she knew what to do in the case of a windstorm or a hurricane. She went to the interior of the building, the labs. Closed the doors after a moment's thought, because if the wind did break the windows and start rushing around the building, the last thing she needed was flying breakables. Or needles out of the hazmat bin. As an afterthought, she ripped the needle bin off the wall and stuffed it in a lower cabinet, barring it with a piece of pole from the IV stand. Everything breakable went into another cabinet. Now she was safe. Wasn't she?
Then why this feeling of fear, this gripping cold hand around her lungs, causing her to hyperventilate and her skin to go cold and clammy? Tears welled up behind her eyes, and she scrubbed them away with the back of her hand and jumped, sliding down against the cabinets as something banged against the door outside. She curled up, made herself as small as she could as the banging went on and on. Whatever it was, it would shake this hospital down to get at her, and the best she could do was to arm herself with the biggest syringe needle she could find and hope to hit a weak spot. If it had weak spots. It didn't sound as though it did.
The door banged open as she twitched awake, heart pounding in her chest, feeling as though she'd sat bolt upright but realizing as sensation returned to her that she was still sprawled on her bed, the big warm presence of her biker by her side.
Somehow, that was only minimal comfort.
"You okay?" Zenya shoulder-bumped her as they scrubbed up after lunch the next day, throwing Randi off balance for a second.
She shook her head, pushing unwashed stringy hair back and bundling it up in a ponytail again. It had taken her way too long to fall asleep again, even with Ray petting her hair and her curling up against him, talking it out. "Couldn't sleep last night."
"Uh-huh..." Her friend grinned, white teeth flashing against beautiful dark skin. "Your new boyfriend keeping you up nights?"
Randi thunked her palm against her forehead between the eyes, grimacing. Not what she'd meant, not what she'd wanted Zenya to take from this, and when had he turned into her boyfriend, anyway? Apart from the sex. And the cuddling. And he'd picked her up from work, shit, they knew about that. No, yeah, they probably had every reason to call him her boyfriend, didn't they.
"He's not my boyfriend," she muttered anyway. "I barely know him."
Never mind that she was sleeping with him. Not just the sex, literally, sleeping with him. Never mind that she barely knew him, and she felt comfortable enough with him to lie on a bed and listen to his quicker-than-usual heartbeat and fall asleep with him droning on about anything above her head. She barely knew him.
She knew he was a biker. That he worked at a road shop.
"Quit daydreaming about your new boyfriend and come on," Zenya laughed, and Randi realized she'd been standing in the same place for at least the last couple of minutes.
"Shit..." she followed her friend out, shaking her head. "He's not my boyfriend!"
"You sure about that?"
They climbed into the truck, did their equipment check. Always, at the start of the shift and at the end of lunch, making sure there wasn't anything spilled, anything that needed topping up. Randi counted everything on her side, then counted it again just to make sure. Distracted as she was, she didn't want to miss anything.
Zenya's question still stuck in her mind. "He's not my type. He's a biker, a convict... can you seriously see me with a convict?" She looked at her over her shoulder, waited until Zenya turned around.
"I don't know about convicts, but I did catch the way he looked at you the other night." And her friend wasn't smiling when she said it, either. "You haven't shut up about him since he started following you, either. What's so bad about having a biker boyfriend?"
Randi turned and flopped down on the mat. Zenya was right, and it bugged her that she was right. It bugged her that her friend had noticed. Scottie, too, probably. And the rest of them. "It's not..." She took a breath. "It's not the boyfriend part. It's the fact that we barely know each other and he's... he's in my head. He's in my dreams, I can't stop thinking about him... I feel..." Her words tangled around themselves, and she didn't want to admit to half of this crap but she couldn't seem to stop herself. Maybe she just wanted someone to share it with. "I feel safe around him. Like, this is where it's supposed to, to come to, or something. Like I know he'll never hurt me, and that makes everything okay. Like..."
She didn't say it. Made herself not say it, but now that she'd come this far she knew that there was a part of her that wanted to do whatever he asked. If he asked her to run away with him, she would. Leave everything.
"Give it up, sweetie. You're in love. It happens to all of us."
Randi scrunched up her face at the other woman and shook her head. Didn't argue in words, but she shook her head. If she was in love, why was she fighting it so hard? Didn't you just want to drown in it when you were in love?
"Not to me, this doesn't happen to me," she muttered. "This craziness does not get to happen to me." She did want to fight it, she wanted to fight this losing herself every step of the way. And it was a losing battle. In the worst way, it was comfortable, what she was sinking into, but she knew she could lose herself in it, and the more she thought about that the less she wanted to. And the more she wanted to know about what was happening, and who he was.
Randi leaned her forearms against the edge of the counter, well away from reception in case someone needed to check in. Right now, most of the nurses and receptionists were busy, but if she hung around here long enough the tide would ebb and she would be able to get a hold of someone who might be able to answer her question.
"Hey, could you…" The nurse held up her finger, and Randi fell silent again.
It was another twenty minutes before she got hold of someone who could, she thought, answer questions. "Sorry about that," the young man said, stripping off his gloves and dumping them in the hazmat bin by the door. "What did you need?"
"Nothing official, but I was wondering…" She had come up with this excuse over the last few hours, trying to figure out a way she could ask about the biker gang without making it sound too paranoid or two lovesick. "I was wondering, there's this guy I've been seeing. Not like that, he's been hanging around a lot, ever since I saw him in the library. I think he's a member of the gang," briefly, she outlined what she knew of the organization.
The nurse listened, nodded. He folded his arms, shook his head slightly when he was done. "Yeah, you know the old joke about bikers and organs?"
"Bikers, organ donors, yeah, I know. I figured that was the case, but that's not what I was asking about…" He was shaking his head again.
"No, that's what I'm talking about. These guys, they come in less chewed up than usual. They come in with scrapes and bruises, but mostly they come in with people who are actually members of the gang. Their girlfriends, some of them have kids, but them? It's like they don't have accidents."
There were only two types of bikers in her experience, those who had accidents and those who were yet to have accidents. And maybe this guy was only talking from a short-term point of view, but he had to have heard something around the ER. Probably from someone who had been there a lot longer than he had. This worried her. She had been all set to say that these guys were human, just, a little weird, and now there was this. Hellhounds didn't get injured like normal people. Some kinds of psychics could actually heal their physical wounds, although that was pretty rare. Hoodoo folk could make luck charms. This didn't sound like any of that.
"Any specialists take a look at them?" She figured he'd know what she meant by specialists, without getting into it in an open reception area. People still had their prejudices.
He had to think about that one. "I don't think so," he shook his head. "I could check if you want? Now it just, and I could be wrong about this, but it just seems like they have this incredible luck. They just don't get hurt."
"Divine intervention?" Randi snorted.
He laughed. "Yeah, maybe." And then someone stuck their head out of the lab and called him over, and he waved and apologized and went back to work.
No, now that she thought about it, divine intervention didn't seem likely. Even with all the weird shit that was out there in the world these days, no one had ever proven the existence of God. Any God. The flipside to that, though, demonic intervention, there were rumors of that all-around. Maybe because there were other things that people called demons; for centuries people had called the fairies creatures of the devil. Or maybe just because there was no God, but there was evil, and it wandered rampant through the world. Now that was just depressing to think about.
Part of her wanted to ask Ray what was going on with the gang, wanted to lay out all the evidence in front of him and make him give her some kind of an answer. Part of her didn't want to know simply because if there was something evil or malicious or magical going on, she didn't want to know about it. Especially if it involved finding out what that leader of his was, she knew she didn't want to know about that. Knowing would mean she would have to deal with it, and she didn't know if she could handle it. And part of her, that small part that was still whining against the onslaught of realism, wanted it to be the fairytale that it had been for the last week or so. The street rat prince, the diamond in the rough, and her some kind of fairytale princess.
"This sucks," she groaned, keeping to one side of the hall as she hunched over and worked her way out through the crowd. Some kind of MVA, she didn't know what, but all of a sudden intake was full of people running and shouting and trying to work. She could join them, she thought. She looked over her shoulder and wondered if she should. Five guys in black leather accompanied a sixth on the gurney, working around the ER staff. So much for lucky and never getting into accidents. She stomped all over the momentary panic that it might be Ray with her best mental stompy boots.
No. In this state of mind she would only get in the way, and she knew how important it was for people to stay out of triage and out of the way if they weren't going to be useful. Sometimes even if they were going to be useful. Too many bodies in too small of a space, and now the tension was rising to dangerous levels. Throwing punches levels. She stopped in the entryway and turned, frowning, trying to make sense of the people and the patterns of the bodies that moved around what should have been her space. At its best, ER was a quiet shift. At its worst, it was a boiling kettle of emotion and human chaos. Or not so human chaos. Two more gurneys, each accompanied by their own swarm of people. Something really big had gone down.
Randi knew it was going bad when she saw the movement under the skinny guy's hands. Not human movement, she knew what it looked like when muscles detached themselves, when bone shards shifted around under the skin. Come to think of it, that's what it looked like. Only there was no reason she could see for bone shards to be shifting under the man's fingers.
"All right," said the security guy, whose name she couldn't remember off the top of her head. "All right, there's no need for all this, okay? We've got people here to take care of, so why don't you guys take it outside."
Neither the gang members nor the scruffy, white-trash looking bastards paid attention to him. She frowned, wondering if she should go talk to them even though she was only supposed to be a vague acquaintance of Ray's and then she saw his hand move up from his belt. Not to his gun, but away from his panic button, which had to be pushed and held for a certain length of time so as to minimize the false alarms.
"Yeah..." one of the bikers, the shorter, rounder one said. "Why don't we take it outside."
Somehow she had the feeling it wouldn't stay there, not when people started dropping. "Guys..." No one was listening to her. It might help if she spoke above a hoarse, low tone, but she didn't know that she wanted them to listen to her.
"All right," the Hellhound said after a minute or two to think it over. "Let's go."
"Lead the way." The biker smiled, showing plenty of teeth. No one was turning their back on anyone if they could help it, but the doorways weren't wide enough to accommodate everyone, so there had to be some backs facing some enemies. Randi followed the crowd, hoping to see Ray or at least find some way to stop it or get it off her field.
Not only could she not find a way to stop it, she didn't even see how it started. One minute they were all filing outside to the parking lot and the next minute there were growls, snarls, and blood in the air. Smelling blood wasn't just the purview of the other-than-human, she'd been around enough of it that she knew it in the air, and so did most of the emergency staff she could name. Someone was bleeding. A second or two later, a lot of people were bleeding.
Security came trickling out of the door. There was screaming, people punching each other, not the Foley sound of celery snapping on a steel panel but real quiet thuds as people hit the pavement, louder echoing thuds as they hit the cars. Each other. Randi backed off until she could tell where the blood smell was coming from, and then one of the ER doctors rushed past and she didn't have time to grab him.
"Wait, don't get involved, don't g--"
She'd learned it, she didn't remember where, some conversation about security. You don't get involved in a fight, you let the combatants sort it out themselves and then when they're exhausted, because fights are quick and dirty and people exhaust quickly except in certain cases, you wade in. That went double for Hellhounds and similar, and the bikers shouldn't have stood a chance against them, but they did. It went on twice as long as she expected, and somewhere in there the writhing mass of bodies spat out the doctor again, into Randi's arms.
He looked normal from the back. She put her arms around him when she caught him and her fingertips brushed over something slick and wet.
"Easy..." she lowered him to the ground. Dr. Grant, she thought. Dr. Gant? Dr. something that started with a G. She dragged him closer to the doors. "Easy... don't try to talk, don't even breathe hard can I get some help over here?"
Security was busy trying to break up the fight. Someone else was on the ground and not moving, she didn't see any details except that they were blond and scrawny and wearing battered brown leather. Right now she had a doctor laying supine on the pavement, breathing wet and rapid and shallow. Airway unblocked, for a miracle, she half expected his windpipe to be dangling down his chest. But from the collar up he was whole, if wide-eyed with panic.
From the collar down or so, he was a bloody mess of raw meat. Someone had laid him open with at least three jagged-edged instruments, maybe four. He was bubbling up froth from his lungs, bleeding too fast and she couldn't stop all the severed blood vessels.
He died while two more paramedics came running out to assist. One moment he was there, meeting her eyes with the same terrified pleading look that his patients had probably given him before they were wheeled into surgery, the next minute, nothing. Randi sat back on her heels and couldn't hear the fighting around her, couldn't hear anything but the crunch of sneakers on gravel as the others took over for all of the ninety seconds or so while they declared him and went to see if there were any still in need of help.
It was cold, that night. Absurdly cold, and she rolled back onto her heels, flat feet, and then pushed herself up to standing as she thought about her warm bed and her warm biker boyfriend who was thankfully nowhere in this mess, and how much she wanted to be there again. Her fingers left blood trails on her sleeves as she rubbed her arms, up and down. There was nothing she could do as the fighting slowed, stopped. Not when all she could think about was the biker lieutenant who wasn't there, was probably off on some other gang business, and wonder how long it would take him to get to her place if she called.
It wasn't until hours after she'd scrubbed the blood off her hands and been poked and prodded for all kinds of tests, after she was on the bus and headed for her apartment that she realized why this time was different. Not like she didn't get blood all over her on a pretty regular basis at work, all kinds of fluids. But this was the first time the violence had touched her that much. It was the first time she had been there when it started, while it was going on, and for a little while after it faded.
It was different, being there for it all. Why was it different, how? She went back and forth on the question, head against the window while rain poured down outside. Completely missing her stop and then once she straightened and realized they were past it she shook her head at herself and went on to the garage instead.
Ray was there. Along with two other people, closing up and running around getting things under tarps. Why was no one else there?
Because they were all at the hospital getting arrested, that was why. Of course.
Randi came out of the bus at a rapid trot, almost slipping on the last step; her back foot skidded out from under her and she landed with a jolt on the pavement. The splash caught their attention, all three men looking around at her.
"We're closed," one of them called. Or at least she thought he did, she could only half-hear him and half-see the words he mouthed.
But Ray was already starting towards her, waving the other guy off. "It's fine, it's cool." That, she did hear. And in another few seconds he had his jacket over her head and shoulders, not that it made much of a difference when she was already soaked, and was escorting her into the office. "What happened? You okay?"
She looked up and him and all she could think of was that he wouldn't be this calm, this concerned about her, if he knew.
"The way you look at me like that, makes me think I'm not gonna like this."
He talked different when he was around his crew, just a little bit. She fell into the chair he rolled out for her, and he leaned on the desk. "The ER was attacked today," she said, after a second in which everything dripped on the floor and the rain provided white noise from outside. "A doctor died. A couple of people died. I think... I think they were Hellhounds."
"Hellh--" he shook his head, pushed up off the desk and paced a slow circle, pushing his hands through his hair. "Fuck."
"Sums it up." Now she was shivering, couldn't stop shivering, and she didn't know if it was because of the cold or the bloody fight or the way he acted. For the first time since that one night they'd met he was pushing out with his personality, filling the room with some kind of aura that, yes, now she thought was supernatural, parahuman. Before she had thought it was just him being larger than life.
Would she have noticed it straight off if she hadn't been knocked head over heels in love with him? Was she thinking clearly now?
She questioned every last bit of her judgment even as she couldn't stop looking at him, following him as he paced around the room.
"What happened? I mean from the beginning."
Randi clenched her jaw down on the urge to tell him everything and lifted her chin, staring back at his improbable pale blue eyes. "If I tell you, you have to promise you will try to steer this club away from revenge."
He took a breath as he stared at her, and took a step towards her. She leaned back even though it wasn't a menacing step. "Are you..." And then it struck her that he was fighting against the same impulse she was. To make up, to make love not war. "Are you trying to tell me..."
"I'm telling you that I don't want another bloodbath in my ER," she snapped. "I don't want to ... to stand in the middle of that riot again. I won't."
And they stared at each other for a minute, two minutes more.
He looked away first, pushing his hair back and back to pacing. "Jesus fucking..." They all had to stop and take a breath. Rain pouring down outside, how long could it last? It didn't sound as though it had let up hardly at all. No one came in to interrupt them, but for all she knew they could have been in a different office or a different part of the garage, or just left. Which she should do, just leave. She'd done what she'd come to do, told him what she'd come to tell him.
She still didn't know if she could leave. The thought of doing so terrified her in some nebulous way, like the fear of ripping off a sticky bandage or ripping IV needles out of her arm. Fear of an unknown pain, illogical though it might be. And underneath that, the sensation that it was something outside of her about to cause her pain.
"Son of a bitch."
He looked over at her. She shook her head, unwilling and in some ways unable to explain how she felt as though this wasn't her, this was outside herself, some other person or thing's influence. The sharper the needing him feeling got, the more convinced she was that it was outside her. She never needed anyone this quickly in her life. And yet it hurt, physically, chest tight and clenching and eyes watering, to think of this fight they had almost had. She felt like bellying down, crawling on the floor, doing anything to avoid another fight.
That wasn't her. She would throw things, hit people, and stomp out, but she did not belly down for anyone.
The tension snapped with a near-audible pop like the pressure in her ears equalizing. “I can't... I don't know if I can make that happen, babe. I don't have the kind of pull over the gang that you think I have.”
“You need to try,” she told him, standing firm, folding her arms. And then unfolding them again, trying not to be confrontational. More than she felt she had to be. “I don't know what you've got going on here, but you need to try. This is the kind of thing that won't make good publicity for your guys...”
“Don't I know it,” he snorted, shaking his head, but it had the sound of an old argument between him and someone else, and one he wasn't happy to rehash. He mustered a smile from somewhere; they both had to be exhausted.
“... and it's the kind of thing that gets State Troopers in. SWAT, here, to the garage.” No, he did know it, better than she did. This was his life, not hers, she didn't need to belabor the point or threaten him with the law.
“Please, Ray.”
He nodded. “I know. I'll try.”
By the time she made it out the doors it was almost forty five minutes after her shift was supposed to end, her hands still reeked of sanitizer, and the bike was still there, its rider waiting for her astride. She didn't know what to say. A smile kept creeping up despite her best efforts to be tired and cranky and not want to go anywhere, really, except maybe back home. Home and to bed, and not for that kind of thing. She still looked both ways before she ran across the street and then all she saw was the thin sliver of the world above the black leather shoulder, and all she could smell was the bike, the jacket, and Ray.
Randi closed her eyes, sighing, and let herself relax against him.
"Long day, sounds like," his voice whispered around her, not as significant in her senses as his broad body or his arms tight around her, or the warmth of his body or the creak of his jacket. The bike swayed a little as they both shifted to perch better.
She sighed, rubbing her burning eyes against his shoulder. "Long day. Long night. Need more sleep." But it didn't look like she was going to get any, between studying and working. She felt his fingers curl into her hair, felt the strands catch on his rings a bit as he combed her hair out from its ponytail down her back.
"You wanna go home?"
If he had any other plans, he didn't say them, not even after she gave him a few minutes to bring up alternatives, suggest something else he might want to do or had arranged. So she nodded. "I'm not going to be much fun, I think."
"'s okay. It's okay." He sounded puzzled. She couldn't see why. "Come on, let's go home."
She left her car at the clinic and clung to him the whole way back, wind on her arms and legs chilling her down to her fingertips. It was still better than driving alone, somehow. Leaning into his bulk shielded her from the wind a little bit, and there was something reassuring about a warm body so solidly there that you couldn't refute the fact that you weren't alone.
They got off the bike, made it up to the apartment, and she leaned on the door of her fridge and stared into it as though a hand would reach out and tell her what she wanted for dinner. Breakfast. Whatever meal of the day it was. He closed the door after the chill started to numb her cheeks and steered her towards the bedroom with an arm around her shoulders. "You can nap first. Figure out what to eat after."
"Doesn't sound like a half bad idea," she managed, sleepwalking through shedding her clothes and stretching out on the bed next to him.
Only now she couldn't sleep. He was warm and made a nice pillow, and the lights were off, the curtains drawn. They'd managed to work their way under the covers and as tired as she was she should have fallen asleep, but she couldn't. She traced the wrinkles and folds on his blue-gray shirt. Blue, she thought. Grayed out by the lack of light.
"What are we doing, anyway?" she asked, her voice slurred even to her.
He looked down. She looked up and caught the reflection of the outside light against his eyes, making them blue on white circles. The effect was eerie. "Mm?"
"What are we doing? Where..."
Randi stopped after that, tucking her head back down and closing her eyes. She'd sworn she wouldn't be that girl, not with him, not with where he came from and what he did, hell, what she did. No thinking about the future, just enjoying the present. If they ended up here, still, a year from now maybe she would ask where this was going. Not this soon. This soon it was still just dating, fun and kind of thrilling, but just dating.
Except for where it wasn't. And her mind churned over what all this meant, where it had come from out of the blue. She couldn't hold onto a thought or a reason why, but she knew something about this was unlike her. And unlike him, even though she had only known him a short while. There were impulses and then there were impulses. And now there was this.
Ray didn't say anything to her aborted question. And he didn't ask what she was talking about, which could have been thoughtful consideration or it could have been him not wanting to know the answers any more than she did.
She closed her eyes and listened to his breathing and the utter lack of conversation echoing in the reflection of the street sounds outside and finally, finally she did fall asleep.
The hospital stretched out in front of her, endless and waiting. And dark. Night hours were darker than day hours because of all the patients trying to get their sleep, the halls were awkwardly lit, but that didn't explain the shadows reaching out and lapping at her toes. She just needed to drop off this paperwork, at least, and then she could go. If she could find the right office.
There wasn't anyone to ask. The desks were empty, reception, intake, everything. Ghost hospital.
"This is ridiculous," she muttered. There was no way everyone would be on a break at once, and she would have noticed if there had been some kind of evacuation order. "This is absolutely fu--"
Something clanged down the hall, behind her. Maybe someone dropping a bedpan or jostling a gurney or something, but that meant that someone was here, too. Randi looked down the hall, didn't see anyone, so she started checking rooms.
The whole setup was odd. Odder still that no one was in the rooms, no nurses, no patients, nothing. Every door she yanked open, every place she looked the hospital was devoid of bodies, and her skin was crawling off her bones by the time she came around to reception again. Outside, the wind had whipped up, slamming branches against windows. Howling like a dog gone rabid. Like something was circling the building, trying to get in.
No fool, she knew what to do in the case of a windstorm or a hurricane. She went to the interior of the building, the labs. Closed the doors after a moment's thought, because if the wind did break the windows and start rushing around the building, the last thing she needed was flying breakables. Or needles out of the hazmat bin. As an afterthought, she ripped the needle bin off the wall and stuffed it in a lower cabinet, barring it with a piece of pole from the IV stand. Everything breakable went into another cabinet. Now she was safe. Wasn't she?
Then why this feeling of fear, this gripping cold hand around her lungs, causing her to hyperventilate and her skin to go cold and clammy? Tears welled up behind her eyes, and she scrubbed them away with the back of her hand and jumped, sliding down against the cabinets as something banged against the door outside. She curled up, made herself as small as she could as the banging went on and on. Whatever it was, it would shake this hospital down to get at her, and the best she could do was to arm herself with the biggest syringe needle she could find and hope to hit a weak spot. If it had weak spots. It didn't sound as though it did.
The door banged open as she twitched awake, heart pounding in her chest, feeling as though she'd sat bolt upright but realizing as sensation returned to her that she was still sprawled on her bed, the big warm presence of her biker by her side.
Somehow, that was only minimal comfort.
"You okay?" Zenya shoulder-bumped her as they scrubbed up after lunch the next day, throwing Randi off balance for a second.
She shook her head, pushing unwashed stringy hair back and bundling it up in a ponytail again. It had taken her way too long to fall asleep again, even with Ray petting her hair and her curling up against him, talking it out. "Couldn't sleep last night."
"Uh-huh..." Her friend grinned, white teeth flashing against beautiful dark skin. "Your new boyfriend keeping you up nights?"
Randi thunked her palm against her forehead between the eyes, grimacing. Not what she'd meant, not what she'd wanted Zenya to take from this, and when had he turned into her boyfriend, anyway? Apart from the sex. And the cuddling. And he'd picked her up from work, shit, they knew about that. No, yeah, they probably had every reason to call him her boyfriend, didn't they.
"He's not my boyfriend," she muttered anyway. "I barely know him."
Never mind that she was sleeping with him. Not just the sex, literally, sleeping with him. Never mind that she barely knew him, and she felt comfortable enough with him to lie on a bed and listen to his quicker-than-usual heartbeat and fall asleep with him droning on about anything above her head. She barely knew him.
She knew he was a biker. That he worked at a road shop.
"Quit daydreaming about your new boyfriend and come on," Zenya laughed, and Randi realized she'd been standing in the same place for at least the last couple of minutes.
"Shit..." she followed her friend out, shaking her head. "He's not my boyfriend!"
"You sure about that?"
They climbed into the truck, did their equipment check. Always, at the start of the shift and at the end of lunch, making sure there wasn't anything spilled, anything that needed topping up. Randi counted everything on her side, then counted it again just to make sure. Distracted as she was, she didn't want to miss anything.
Zenya's question still stuck in her mind. "He's not my type. He's a biker, a convict... can you seriously see me with a convict?" She looked at her over her shoulder, waited until Zenya turned around.
"I don't know about convicts, but I did catch the way he looked at you the other night." And her friend wasn't smiling when she said it, either. "You haven't shut up about him since he started following you, either. What's so bad about having a biker boyfriend?"
Randi turned and flopped down on the mat. Zenya was right, and it bugged her that she was right. It bugged her that her friend had noticed. Scottie, too, probably. And the rest of them. "It's not..." She took a breath. "It's not the boyfriend part. It's the fact that we barely know each other and he's... he's in my head. He's in my dreams, I can't stop thinking about him... I feel..." Her words tangled around themselves, and she didn't want to admit to half of this crap but she couldn't seem to stop herself. Maybe she just wanted someone to share it with. "I feel safe around him. Like, this is where it's supposed to, to come to, or something. Like I know he'll never hurt me, and that makes everything okay. Like..."
She didn't say it. Made herself not say it, but now that she'd come this far she knew that there was a part of her that wanted to do whatever he asked. If he asked her to run away with him, she would. Leave everything.
"Give it up, sweetie. You're in love. It happens to all of us."
Randi scrunched up her face at the other woman and shook her head. Didn't argue in words, but she shook her head. If she was in love, why was she fighting it so hard? Didn't you just want to drown in it when you were in love?
"Not to me, this doesn't happen to me," she muttered. "This craziness does not get to happen to me." She did want to fight it, she wanted to fight this losing herself every step of the way. And it was a losing battle. In the worst way, it was comfortable, what she was sinking into, but she knew she could lose herself in it, and the more she thought about that the less she wanted to. And the more she wanted to know about what was happening, and who he was.
Randi leaned her forearms against the edge of the counter, well away from reception in case someone needed to check in. Right now, most of the nurses and receptionists were busy, but if she hung around here long enough the tide would ebb and she would be able to get a hold of someone who might be able to answer her question.
"Hey, could you…" The nurse held up her finger, and Randi fell silent again.
It was another twenty minutes before she got hold of someone who could, she thought, answer questions. "Sorry about that," the young man said, stripping off his gloves and dumping them in the hazmat bin by the door. "What did you need?"
"Nothing official, but I was wondering…" She had come up with this excuse over the last few hours, trying to figure out a way she could ask about the biker gang without making it sound too paranoid or two lovesick. "I was wondering, there's this guy I've been seeing. Not like that, he's been hanging around a lot, ever since I saw him in the library. I think he's a member of the gang," briefly, she outlined what she knew of the organization.
The nurse listened, nodded. He folded his arms, shook his head slightly when he was done. "Yeah, you know the old joke about bikers and organs?"
"Bikers, organ donors, yeah, I know. I figured that was the case, but that's not what I was asking about…" He was shaking his head again.
"No, that's what I'm talking about. These guys, they come in less chewed up than usual. They come in with scrapes and bruises, but mostly they come in with people who are actually members of the gang. Their girlfriends, some of them have kids, but them? It's like they don't have accidents."
There were only two types of bikers in her experience, those who had accidents and those who were yet to have accidents. And maybe this guy was only talking from a short-term point of view, but he had to have heard something around the ER. Probably from someone who had been there a lot longer than he had. This worried her. She had been all set to say that these guys were human, just, a little weird, and now there was this. Hellhounds didn't get injured like normal people. Some kinds of psychics could actually heal their physical wounds, although that was pretty rare. Hoodoo folk could make luck charms. This didn't sound like any of that.
"Any specialists take a look at them?" She figured he'd know what she meant by specialists, without getting into it in an open reception area. People still had their prejudices.
He had to think about that one. "I don't think so," he shook his head. "I could check if you want? Now it just, and I could be wrong about this, but it just seems like they have this incredible luck. They just don't get hurt."
"Divine intervention?" Randi snorted.
He laughed. "Yeah, maybe." And then someone stuck their head out of the lab and called him over, and he waved and apologized and went back to work.
No, now that she thought about it, divine intervention didn't seem likely. Even with all the weird shit that was out there in the world these days, no one had ever proven the existence of God. Any God. The flipside to that, though, demonic intervention, there were rumors of that all-around. Maybe because there were other things that people called demons; for centuries people had called the fairies creatures of the devil. Or maybe just because there was no God, but there was evil, and it wandered rampant through the world. Now that was just depressing to think about.
Part of her wanted to ask Ray what was going on with the gang, wanted to lay out all the evidence in front of him and make him give her some kind of an answer. Part of her didn't want to know simply because if there was something evil or malicious or magical going on, she didn't want to know about it. Especially if it involved finding out what that leader of his was, she knew she didn't want to know about that. Knowing would mean she would have to deal with it, and she didn't know if she could handle it. And part of her, that small part that was still whining against the onslaught of realism, wanted it to be the fairytale that it had been for the last week or so. The street rat prince, the diamond in the rough, and her some kind of fairytale princess.
"This sucks," she groaned, keeping to one side of the hall as she hunched over and worked her way out through the crowd. Some kind of MVA, she didn't know what, but all of a sudden intake was full of people running and shouting and trying to work. She could join them, she thought. She looked over her shoulder and wondered if she should. Five guys in black leather accompanied a sixth on the gurney, working around the ER staff. So much for lucky and never getting into accidents. She stomped all over the momentary panic that it might be Ray with her best mental stompy boots.
No. In this state of mind she would only get in the way, and she knew how important it was for people to stay out of triage and out of the way if they weren't going to be useful. Sometimes even if they were going to be useful. Too many bodies in too small of a space, and now the tension was rising to dangerous levels. Throwing punches levels. She stopped in the entryway and turned, frowning, trying to make sense of the people and the patterns of the bodies that moved around what should have been her space. At its best, ER was a quiet shift. At its worst, it was a boiling kettle of emotion and human chaos. Or not so human chaos. Two more gurneys, each accompanied by their own swarm of people. Something really big had gone down.
Randi knew it was going bad when she saw the movement under the skinny guy's hands. Not human movement, she knew what it looked like when muscles detached themselves, when bone shards shifted around under the skin. Come to think of it, that's what it looked like. Only there was no reason she could see for bone shards to be shifting under the man's fingers.
"All right," said the security guy, whose name she couldn't remember off the top of her head. "All right, there's no need for all this, okay? We've got people here to take care of, so why don't you guys take it outside."
Neither the gang members nor the scruffy, white-trash looking bastards paid attention to him. She frowned, wondering if she should go talk to them even though she was only supposed to be a vague acquaintance of Ray's and then she saw his hand move up from his belt. Not to his gun, but away from his panic button, which had to be pushed and held for a certain length of time so as to minimize the false alarms.
"Yeah..." one of the bikers, the shorter, rounder one said. "Why don't we take it outside."
Somehow she had the feeling it wouldn't stay there, not when people started dropping. "Guys..." No one was listening to her. It might help if she spoke above a hoarse, low tone, but she didn't know that she wanted them to listen to her.
"All right," the Hellhound said after a minute or two to think it over. "Let's go."
"Lead the way." The biker smiled, showing plenty of teeth. No one was turning their back on anyone if they could help it, but the doorways weren't wide enough to accommodate everyone, so there had to be some backs facing some enemies. Randi followed the crowd, hoping to see Ray or at least find some way to stop it or get it off her field.
Not only could she not find a way to stop it, she didn't even see how it started. One minute they were all filing outside to the parking lot and the next minute there were growls, snarls, and blood in the air. Smelling blood wasn't just the purview of the other-than-human, she'd been around enough of it that she knew it in the air, and so did most of the emergency staff she could name. Someone was bleeding. A second or two later, a lot of people were bleeding.
Security came trickling out of the door. There was screaming, people punching each other, not the Foley sound of celery snapping on a steel panel but real quiet thuds as people hit the pavement, louder echoing thuds as they hit the cars. Each other. Randi backed off until she could tell where the blood smell was coming from, and then one of the ER doctors rushed past and she didn't have time to grab him.
"Wait, don't get involved, don't g--"
She'd learned it, she didn't remember where, some conversation about security. You don't get involved in a fight, you let the combatants sort it out themselves and then when they're exhausted, because fights are quick and dirty and people exhaust quickly except in certain cases, you wade in. That went double for Hellhounds and similar, and the bikers shouldn't have stood a chance against them, but they did. It went on twice as long as she expected, and somewhere in there the writhing mass of bodies spat out the doctor again, into Randi's arms.
He looked normal from the back. She put her arms around him when she caught him and her fingertips brushed over something slick and wet.
"Easy..." she lowered him to the ground. Dr. Grant, she thought. Dr. Gant? Dr. something that started with a G. She dragged him closer to the doors. "Easy... don't try to talk, don't even breathe hard can I get some help over here?"
Security was busy trying to break up the fight. Someone else was on the ground and not moving, she didn't see any details except that they were blond and scrawny and wearing battered brown leather. Right now she had a doctor laying supine on the pavement, breathing wet and rapid and shallow. Airway unblocked, for a miracle, she half expected his windpipe to be dangling down his chest. But from the collar up he was whole, if wide-eyed with panic.
From the collar down or so, he was a bloody mess of raw meat. Someone had laid him open with at least three jagged-edged instruments, maybe four. He was bubbling up froth from his lungs, bleeding too fast and she couldn't stop all the severed blood vessels.
He died while two more paramedics came running out to assist. One moment he was there, meeting her eyes with the same terrified pleading look that his patients had probably given him before they were wheeled into surgery, the next minute, nothing. Randi sat back on her heels and couldn't hear the fighting around her, couldn't hear anything but the crunch of sneakers on gravel as the others took over for all of the ninety seconds or so while they declared him and went to see if there were any still in need of help.
It was cold, that night. Absurdly cold, and she rolled back onto her heels, flat feet, and then pushed herself up to standing as she thought about her warm bed and her warm biker boyfriend who was thankfully nowhere in this mess, and how much she wanted to be there again. Her fingers left blood trails on her sleeves as she rubbed her arms, up and down. There was nothing she could do as the fighting slowed, stopped. Not when all she could think about was the biker lieutenant who wasn't there, was probably off on some other gang business, and wonder how long it would take him to get to her place if she called.
It wasn't until hours after she'd scrubbed the blood off her hands and been poked and prodded for all kinds of tests, after she was on the bus and headed for her apartment that she realized why this time was different. Not like she didn't get blood all over her on a pretty regular basis at work, all kinds of fluids. But this was the first time the violence had touched her that much. It was the first time she had been there when it started, while it was going on, and for a little while after it faded.
It was different, being there for it all. Why was it different, how? She went back and forth on the question, head against the window while rain poured down outside. Completely missing her stop and then once she straightened and realized they were past it she shook her head at herself and went on to the garage instead.
Ray was there. Along with two other people, closing up and running around getting things under tarps. Why was no one else there?
Because they were all at the hospital getting arrested, that was why. Of course.
Randi came out of the bus at a rapid trot, almost slipping on the last step; her back foot skidded out from under her and she landed with a jolt on the pavement. The splash caught their attention, all three men looking around at her.
"We're closed," one of them called. Or at least she thought he did, she could only half-hear him and half-see the words he mouthed.
But Ray was already starting towards her, waving the other guy off. "It's fine, it's cool." That, she did hear. And in another few seconds he had his jacket over her head and shoulders, not that it made much of a difference when she was already soaked, and was escorting her into the office. "What happened? You okay?"
She looked up and him and all she could think of was that he wouldn't be this calm, this concerned about her, if he knew.
"The way you look at me like that, makes me think I'm not gonna like this."
He talked different when he was around his crew, just a little bit. She fell into the chair he rolled out for her, and he leaned on the desk. "The ER was attacked today," she said, after a second in which everything dripped on the floor and the rain provided white noise from outside. "A doctor died. A couple of people died. I think... I think they were Hellhounds."
"Hellh--" he shook his head, pushed up off the desk and paced a slow circle, pushing his hands through his hair. "Fuck."
"Sums it up." Now she was shivering, couldn't stop shivering, and she didn't know if it was because of the cold or the bloody fight or the way he acted. For the first time since that one night they'd met he was pushing out with his personality, filling the room with some kind of aura that, yes, now she thought was supernatural, parahuman. Before she had thought it was just him being larger than life.
Would she have noticed it straight off if she hadn't been knocked head over heels in love with him? Was she thinking clearly now?
She questioned every last bit of her judgment even as she couldn't stop looking at him, following him as he paced around the room.
"What happened? I mean from the beginning."
Randi clenched her jaw down on the urge to tell him everything and lifted her chin, staring back at his improbable pale blue eyes. "If I tell you, you have to promise you will try to steer this club away from revenge."
He took a breath as he stared at her, and took a step towards her. She leaned back even though it wasn't a menacing step. "Are you..." And then it struck her that he was fighting against the same impulse she was. To make up, to make love not war. "Are you trying to tell me..."
"I'm telling you that I don't want another bloodbath in my ER," she snapped. "I don't want to ... to stand in the middle of that riot again. I won't."
And they stared at each other for a minute, two minutes more.
He looked away first, pushing his hair back and back to pacing. "Jesus fucking..." They all had to stop and take a breath. Rain pouring down outside, how long could it last? It didn't sound as though it had let up hardly at all. No one came in to interrupt them, but for all she knew they could have been in a different office or a different part of the garage, or just left. Which she should do, just leave. She'd done what she'd come to do, told him what she'd come to tell him.
She still didn't know if she could leave. The thought of doing so terrified her in some nebulous way, like the fear of ripping off a sticky bandage or ripping IV needles out of her arm. Fear of an unknown pain, illogical though it might be. And underneath that, the sensation that it was something outside of her about to cause her pain.
"Son of a bitch."
He looked over at her. She shook her head, unwilling and in some ways unable to explain how she felt as though this wasn't her, this was outside herself, some other person or thing's influence. The sharper the needing him feeling got, the more convinced she was that it was outside her. She never needed anyone this quickly in her life. And yet it hurt, physically, chest tight and clenching and eyes watering, to think of this fight they had almost had. She felt like bellying down, crawling on the floor, doing anything to avoid another fight.
That wasn't her. She would throw things, hit people, and stomp out, but she did not belly down for anyone.
The tension snapped with a near-audible pop like the pressure in her ears equalizing. “I can't... I don't know if I can make that happen, babe. I don't have the kind of pull over the gang that you think I have.”
“You need to try,” she told him, standing firm, folding her arms. And then unfolding them again, trying not to be confrontational. More than she felt she had to be. “I don't know what you've got going on here, but you need to try. This is the kind of thing that won't make good publicity for your guys...”
“Don't I know it,” he snorted, shaking his head, but it had the sound of an old argument between him and someone else, and one he wasn't happy to rehash. He mustered a smile from somewhere; they both had to be exhausted.
“... and it's the kind of thing that gets State Troopers in. SWAT, here, to the garage.” No, he did know it, better than she did. This was his life, not hers, she didn't need to belabor the point or threaten him with the law.
“Please, Ray.”
He nodded. “I know. I'll try.”