The Isis Collar (29 page)

She was breathing hard and a sheen of sweat made her bangs droop and stick together. I caught a glimpse of the display as they circled around the mat.
F*ck you, b*tch.
I wondered what that sounded like because I knew the department dummies weren’t programmed to say actual swear words. The dummy moved fast and Alex was put on the defensive again. This time, she missed her mark and wound up spin-kicking through open air. The dummy used that moment to swing backward and catch her supporting leg. She went down with an
oof
and Dawna and I winced when the dummy came down again and hit her in the stomach with the side of its head, hard enough to force a pained sound from her throat. The dummy’s head always turned at the last second to protect the computer screen. The display now showed fangs and the words:
You’re afraid. You’ll taste sweet. Die, human!

Alex had struggled to a half-sitting position by the time the dummy came down again. Ooh, that was going to
hurt.

But I was wrong. As the dummy approached, Alex pulled a stake from her sash and used the dummy’s own momentum to drive the sharpened wood into its heart. There was a beep and red fluid spilled over her in a wash that made Dawna gasp. The scent of mint filled the air, which was just as well. The spray of red had made me twitch uncomfortably for an instant, but mint held no appeal to my vampire nose.

Alex said, “Pause. Hold position. Teaching mode.” She and the dummy froze as if they were on a movie screen, locked in a final death battle. Alex moved only her head, turning toward us with her hand still locked on the stake. “Do you see what I’m doing here? The reason you were struggling with the stake was your hand position. See how I’ve got the bottom of the stake against the heel of my palm? If you grip the stake like a golf club, you can’t get enough force behind a strike. You have to use your body weight to
push
the stake in. Think of it like an extension of your arm. You have more strength when you punch straight forward than when your wrist is bent. Down is always best if you can get on top of the vampire. But when all else fails, sometimes you have to allow the bat to attack toward you. Drop and roll. Make it come to you and then push it in.”

The screen was displaying
Ahhhh! [hisses. screams].
But Dawna’s eyes were fixed on Alex. She was using every muscle, every nerve of her being, to take it all in. There was clarity and understanding in her eyes. Whew, this was actually working. I’d just have to figure out some way to get her past the sounds of death. Maybe I needed to talk to her psychologist about that.

“Resume program.” The dummy returned to an upright position and the screen read
Congratulations, Heather. You have killed the vampire. Please replace cartridge.
We needed to put a new heart package into the center of the ballistic gel.

I rose and helped Alex to her feet. Dawna excused herself to the bathroom, pausing to ask Alex, “Unless you need to clean up before you start again?”

She shook her head, accidentally showering me with tiny droplets of minty red. “Naw. I don’t get that luxury when I’m actually in the field. They seldom come at me in singles, so I need to be able to work when I’m messy.” As Dawna left the room with an odd look on her face, Alex leaned closer to me and whispered, “Will it bother her if I stay bloody? Be honest. How’s she doing?”

I shrugged lightly and kept my voice down. “Fine. As far as I can tell, there are no problems without the sound. Don’t know what to do about that issue, though.”

“We’ll talk later. I have some ideas.” She wiped away the trickles of sweat dripping down toward her eyes and we replaced the heart cartridge just as Dawna came back into the room.

*   *   *

An hour later, we were
all
sweating. I’d had a turn at level six on civilian mode, which didn’t require me to talk to the dummy or wait to pull out my stake. It was easy. So easy it frightened me a little because I started to get really aggressive. I found out later that as I was fighting, Alex began to raise the levels with voice commands I didn’t even hear. She upped the six to an eight and then to police mode. Then to ten.

I was moving and dodging, kicking and stabbing without even realizing it. When I finally shoved the stake into the gel chest, it went all the way through to stick out the dummy’s back. I heard my own battle scream as I drove in the wood, and it was a freaky sound.

Panting with sweat and minty blood running down my face, I finally turned to my friends. They stared at me with an odd mix of awe and wariness. Neither said a word. They just stood up from the couch, replaced the cartridge in the dummy, and, while I wiped down my face, began their own practice again.

Dawna had used Alex’s tips to good effect and had killed the vampire twice. Of course, Dawna had also died twice, but that was the nice thing about training. You got to get up again when you died and you didn’t wind up with fangs.

I sat down while Alex did another session. I was still breathing hard, which said I hadn’t been working out as often as I should. Dawna had barely raised a sweat and seemed a little disappointed that it wasn’t her turn again. She was really getting into this and was flexible enough that once she’d mastered the whole “stake” thing, she would be pretty good at it. Except for those annoying sounds. If only we could push the mute button on real monsters.

My cell phone rang across the room. I skirted around the action on the mat and picked it up, walking into the kitchen so I wouldn’t bother the others. The display showed a number I didn’t recognize. “Celia Graves.”

“Celia? It’s Molly Murphy. I’m sorry to bother you. I just needed to hear a friendly voice.” She sounded like crap. The little hiccupping sounds in her breathing told me she’d been crying.

“What’s wrong, Molly? Is Julie…?” No, I wouldn’t say the word. But my brain kept thinking it, no matter how hard I tried to shove it away.
Dead dead dead. You’ve failed.

“Not …
yet.
But she keeps getting worse, Celia. The medicine isn’t working. The doctor doesn’t know what to do. He told me I had to … prepare for the worst. How am I going to tell Mick, Celia? He’ll be here from the airport any minute. How am I going to tell
Beverly
?”

I didn’t have any answers and found a chill settling over me. “I don’t know, Molly. But I’ll come to the hospital.” Maybe whatever guardian angel was watching over me would take pity on her.

I hung up the phone and walked back to the living room. Alex was working with Dawna, explaining how she should turn her body when attacked from behind. “Hey, guys. That was Molly Murphy on the phone. Julie’s taken a turn for the worse and she’s asked me to run over to the hospital.”

Alex responded immediately, taking her hands off Dawna’s arm. “Oh, man. I’m so sorry, Celia. Just give me a minute to pack up the dummy and we’ll be out of here. We can pick this up another time.”

I shook my head and grabbed my purse. “No, don’t bother. You guys are welcome to stay here and keep working. Just lock up when you leave. I trust you both and who better to watch the house than a cop who’s
looking
for a fight?” I smiled, fangs and all, and they both laughed.

It only took me a few minutes to get out of my sweats and change into something more presentable and put on enough makeup to not look three days dead. The trip to the hospital was slow because of traffic. All the hospital lots were full, and there were news vans parked on the street. Crap.

I had to park blocks away, far enough that even with the sunscreen I’d slathered on my skin was feeling the burn. Dark sunglasses cut down on the glare, but the combination of bright sunlight and the workout with the dummy had brought the headache back with a vengeance.

There were reporters at both the main and ER entrances. I’m not exactly a celebrity, but recent events had raised my profile enough that I didn’t want them to notice me. So I slipped around to one of the unmarked entrances at the back of the building and worked my way through the maze of hallways until I was just outside the isolation ward.

The first person I spotted was Bruno, sitting in a chair in the main hall with a magazine open on his lap. I raised a hand to catch his attention, and something in my face must have told him something was wrong, because he stood up and opened his arms. I walked to him and let myself be enveloped with warmth and caring. “Hey, you okay?” His voice was concerned, warm.

I nodded against his chest, but it was a lie. “Julie’s worse. Molly asked if I could come. Why are you here?”

“Follow-up saliva test. I’m just waiting for the lab to call me. They’ve been backed up. Did you get the message from Dr. Gaetano?” I shook my head and he gave an extra squeeze. “I overheard him leaving it. Your results came back clear. So you shouldn’t have any other problems.”

It was a relief and muscles I didn’t know were clenched loosened a bit. But that didn’t solve the bigger problem. “That’s good. But how many others
aren’t,
Bruno? How many kids are going to wind up here, just like Julie?”

He paused for long enough that I pulled my cheek away from his shoulder to look at him. His eyes were both sad and angry. “A half dozen people more showed up overnight, Celie. All students and teachers from Third Street. The quarantine and isolation wards are filling up fast. Nobody’s said anything. Not a word. But I can feel the tension in the hallways. They’re getting worried, and especially since Julie’s not improving. Have you heard from Creede?”

I shook my head and didn’t want to ask the next question because part of me didn’t want to know. I wasn’t sure I could deal with the combination of emotions that would result. “Any word on my mom?”

He shook his head, just a fraction, and put a hand on the back of my head to pull me against him again. “They haven’t said anything except they’re still waiting on tests. The first batch was inconclusive.”

I knew I should go to visit her, but what would it really accomplish? She was angry and scared and I was angry and scared and we would just feed off each other’s emotions like we always did. But I had to ask, to see if I was being unreasonable. “Should I visit her?”

Bruno let out the sound that he always made when confronted with a seemingly insurmountable problem, part growl and part thoughtful hum. “She’s headed back to jail from here?” I nodded and closed my eyes before shaking my head slightly in frustration. He sighed and I felt his forehead rest against my temple. “It won’t do anything but get you both upset. But it’ll be a sore point if you don’t, too.”

That’s what I was afraid of. I just needed to hear it out loud. “Then you think I should, huh?”

He pulled back slightly and touched me under my chin with his fingers. “Well, your gran is here. In fact, she’s already pissed that you haven’t been here doing vigil with her. So, while it won’t do any good with your mom, you probably need to do it anyway.”

Oh, crap. Gran. Here. I should’ve known. And she
would
be pissed. Damn it.

Bruno pulled me close again, letting me rest my head on his shoulder. “It’ll be okay … eventually.”

That made me laugh. It was a little hysterical, but it was better than crying. And it was exactly the reaction he’d planned. Nobody knows me better than Bruno. He “gets” me. We have the same sense of humor, share most of the same attitudes. When it works with us it’s so very good. I took the moment of solace he offered and let my mind and body be whisked away to a better place.

Until the screaming started.

We both reacted as if cattle prods had been shoved into our spines. We sprang away from each other and turned, searching for the danger. It was interesting seeing which people ran toward the danger and which ran away. The doctors and nurses, by and large, went toward. The clerks and orderlies, away. I would have thought at least the orderlies would stay. They’re usually stuck with the strong-arm stuff when it came to violent patients. But the looks on their faces as they passed by the waiting room said they wanted no part of whatever was down the hall.

There are laws about what you can bring into a hospital, so all I had were charm disks. I came on such short notice to comfort Molly that I didn’t even think about bringing my knives. Well, I wasn’t totally unarmed. I had a level-nine mage by my side.

And who needed more than that?

We rounded the corner and got our first look at the future of the city, and possibly the world, if we didn’t stop this disease. The man was big, tall, and bulky like a construction worker or pro boxer. He filled the hallway, standing still but sensing around him, searching for something to attack. His skin was black—and I don’t mean like an African-American’s, but black like something from the back of the refrigerator, where you would rather throw away the bowl rather than risk taking off the plastic wrap. What remained of his clothing was stuck to the goo oozing out of the lesions that covered his skin. Doctors and nurses surrounded him, completely baffled about what to do.

Bruno skidded to a stop beside me. I wondered what our options were. “Jesus. Is that the endgame of M. Necrose? I’ve never seen it.”

“Yeah. But he’s way worse than Principal Sanchez was. This guy’s eyeballs are missing. That is, except for what’s left dangling on his cheek. And for the record,
eww.
But he’s tracking the people around him.” One arm made a grab for a nearby nurse and managed to catch the fabric of her scrub top. She was quick, I’d give her that. She stripped out of that thing so fast you’d think it was burning. Her bra was snow-white, matching her widened eyes.

I could smell the death on him, but he sure was active for a corpse.

Bruno said, “I might not be able to pack the body-binding spell into a charm like Creede, but I sure can cast it directly.” I felt the hairs all over my body rise in unison as he raised power without half-trying. He whispered the words and I felt the energy leave his outstretched hands and fly toward the zombie in the hallway.
“Corpus bidim.”

The spell should have frozen the man’s muscles, causing him to fall straight over and hit his nose on the linoleum.