by S. A. Beck
Two people were looking through the door’s window at her, talking in low tones.
“We’ve come to help, Dr. Yamazaki,” a voice said close to her ear.
She turned her eyes and saw another two people standing by her bed. For a moment, confusion blurred her thoughts. She looked back at the door and saw two people there. Turning back, she saw two people at the side of her bed.
Were there two or four?
No, there were four. She just hadn’t noticed them come in.
She sighed and closed her eyes. Her life was over. Why couldn’t she just die and get it over with?
“Can you understand me, Dr. Yamazaki?” the voice asked.
She opened her eyes again. Two people in doctor’s scrubs stood by the bed. They were both mixed race with bright blue eyes. Dr. Yamazaki looked toward the door. The other pair who stood there looked the same.
Black skin. Blue eyes. Asian features. That meant something. She used to know what.
Maybe Yuhle and Ying could explain it to her once they got back from the observatory.
“Dr. Yamazaki, I’m going to lay my hands on your head for a moment. Don’t worry if you feel a strange sensation. It will help your condition. I need you to remain calm and quiet. Do you understand me?”
“I already had an injection.” She heard her words come out as a mumble.
“What did she say?” the voice asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” a second voice replied. “Do your thing.”
There was silence for a moment. She felt someone touching her head and a slight dizziness.
“Hurry up,” the second voice whispered.
“It’s done.”
Dr. Yamazaki hadn’t felt the injection. Had they given her one? She didn’t feel pain anymore, only despair.
One of the figures bent over her. “Dr. Yamazaki, you will feel better very soon. There will be a period of disorientation and nausea. Don’t worry, that’s normal. It will take a couple of hours before you’re completely better. In the meantime, please lie quietly. We’re going to take you out of here. You’re in danger.”
Dr. Yamazaki felt confused. Take her out of the hospital? She was in danger?
Wait, yes, she was in danger. She couldn’t remember why though. It probably had something to do with her assistant Yuhle and the genetics project.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked as she heard the clamps securing the wheels on her hospital bed being released. The two figures wheeled her bed toward the door.
“What was that?” one of them asked.
“Where are you taking me?” She tried to enunciate, and she heard her words come out clearer.
“You’re getting better already. We’re taking you someplace safe.”
The hospital room doors opened, and they wheeled the bed into the hallway. Dr. Yamazaki turned her head and saw three people waiting in the hallway. Two of them were women. All of them, like the two who had taken her from her room, had the same strange mix of racial features.
What did that mean? She knew it was important.
They wheeled her down the hall, whispering among themselves and sounding nervous.
“Excuse me, where are you taking this patient?” demanded a stern woman’s voice. Dr. Yamazaki thought she recognized the voice as her regular nurse’s.
“We’re taking her in for an EKG and a blood test.”
“I wasn’t informed.”
Dr. Yamazaki turned her head and saw her regular nurse talking with one of the men who had come into her room.
The nurse looked at her, and her jaw dropped. “She turned her head! And her eyes are focusing as well. That’s remarkable. She hasn’t had this much improvement for weeks, if at all.”
“Yes,” the man said. “That’s why we’re taking her for tests.”
The nurse studied him then turned to look at each of the strangers in turn. “Just who are you, anyway?”
“We have IDs.”
“I can see that. The thing is, I’ve been working here for years, and I don’t recognize you.”
The man speaking to her jabbed a hypo into her neck. The nurse’s eyes rolled up, and she slumped. He stopped her fall, shouldered open the nearest door, and dragged her inside. He reappeared a moment later, calling over his shoulder, “You just sleep for a while, lady, and by the time you wake up, we’ll be long gone.”
The strangers continued wheeling Dr. Yamazaki down the hallway. Her mind spun. What was going on?
They barely made it ten feet before there was a shout behind them.
“Hey!”
The sound of running feet.
Dr. Yamazaki turned her head and looked over her shoulder. The wave of nausea this movement produced kept her from wondering how she was able to do it at all.
Two burly men in black suits ran down the hallway toward them. They looked familiar. A flash of a memory of being pulled out of a classroom came to her, but she couldn’t recall the time or place.
The two strangers at the back of the group turned to face the men in suits.
The newcomers stopped. One pulled an ID out of his pocket. “Federal agent. Stop what you’re doing and get up against the wall!”
One of the doctors kicked him in the stomach. The agent doubled over and flew backward a couple of yards, landing hard on the tile floor. The other agent cursed and pulled out a semi-automatic pistol.
The second doctor lashed out with a karate chop to the second agent’s wrist. There was a loud snap muffled by the gun going off. A bullet whined overhead and burst a fluorescent light on the ceiling, sending down a cascade of sparks and glass.
The doctors gave the agent a couple more punches, and he dropped to the floor, unconscious.
Yamazaki heard screams from down the hallway. An alarm sounded, wailing high and piercing in the echoing hallway.
“Damn it! Let’s get out of here!” one of the doctors shouted.
“Where are you taking me?” Dr. Yamazaki demanded, struggling to get up.
A gentle yet firm hand pressed her back down on the mattress. “You just lie back and relax.”
The doctors hurried her down the hallway. Nurses and visitors leapt out of their way. They turned a corner and came to an elevator. One of the doctors jabbed a button.
“Who are you?” Dr. Yamazaki asked.
“We’ve come to help, just like you tried to help us,” one of them said.
“What?” she asked, confused. Her mind was still whirling. Even though her thoughts were becoming clearer by the minute, it was all going too fast. She didn’t have time for her muddled mind to catch up.
The elevator door pinged open. The doctors hauled a couple of startled orderlies out of it and pushed her bed inside. Dr. Yamazaki raised her head again and looked out into the corridor. Just as the doors were closing, a pair of hospital security guards rounded the corner.
“There they are,” one of them shouted, pointing.
The doors slid shut.
“Come on, come on,” one of the doctors muttered impatiently, jabbing the ground floor button.
The elevator jerked to a stop.
“What did you do!” one of the doctors cried.
“Nothing, just hit the button!”
“It wasn’t him. It was the security guards. They did a manual override. We’re trapped!”
“Not for long,” one of the female doctors said.
She clambered onto Dr. Yamazaki’s bed and pushed on the ceiling. An emergency hatch wrenched free, the screws squealing and snapping. She hadn’t even bothered to turn the handle.
Dr. Yamazaki’s eyes widened. Strange features… super strength… she knew these people. They were what she’d been studying with Yuhle. What were they? Where were they from? She had to remember.
She didn’t get the chance. The woman disappeared into the elevator shaft, followed by another. Then a third of these strange people lifted Dr. Yamazaki up into waiting hands.
Things grew dark as she was carried up the elevator
shaft. The man who carried her held onto her with one hand and shimmied up the elevator cable with his other hand and two feet. Impossible!
But no, she had been studying these people because, as unbelievable as their powers were, they were all too real.
“Let’s go up a couple of floors. They’ll still be waiting at the door.”
“So what? They don’t have guns.”
“The cops who will join them any second sure do.”
“Right, we’ll go up another floor and come down the stairs.”
Dr. Yamazaki’s stomach churned. Even the simplest movement of her head made her feel ill, and now she was being carried like a rag doll up a dark elevator shaft. She gagged and her breakfast came up, falling onto the man climbing below her.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” he cried out.
The man carrying Dr. Yamazaki laughed. “You join the army, and you pay the price.”
Army? What army? Certainly not the US army, that’s for sure. She tried to voice the question and found she felt too weak. They probably wouldn’t answer her anyway.
There was a screech of metal above her, followed by a flood of light and several screams. Dr. Yamazaki looked up, feeling her stomach quake again. The woman who had led them out of the elevator had pried open the elevator doors on a higher floor and was reaching down to grab her. As the woman lifted her into a hallway, the dribble of vomit on Dr. Yamazaki’s chin smeared off on her shoulder.
“Sorry,” she mumbled.
The woman looked at her ruined shirt with distaste then shrugged. “I’ve made bigger sacrifices than this.”
They were surrounded by a half circle of astonished nurses and visitors who backed away as, one by one, more dark-skinned doctors with brilliant blue eyes climbed out of the elevator shaft.
“Let’s move!” the woman holding Dr. Yamazaki barked. “The cops won’t take long to figure out where we are.”
They hurried down the hallway, the crowd parting before them. Dr. Yamazaki spotted a security camera and wondered if her abductors realized they had already been noticed.
The group burst into the stairway and hurried down. They rounded one floor then a second. As they came around another turn, there was a loud bang and the lead man staggered back, clutching his arm.
“I’ve been shot!”
Dr. Yamazaki caught a glimpse of a pair of blue uniforms in the stairwell below them before her group hurried back around the corner. Another shot pinged off the wall, the ricochet whining past her ear.
“Careful, you idiot!” someone shouted from below. “You might hit the hostage!”
It took a moment for Dr. Yamazaki to realize that the cop meant her. Am I a hostage? She clung to the woman carrying her. They certainly had taken her without her permission, but they were curing her too. She looked with amazement at her hands, once so useless and now holding on with a child’s strength to the strange woman who had pulled her out of the elevator shaft.
The buzz of a radio echoed up the stairwell as the police called for backup. The doctors huddled against the wall, out of sight from the police below.
“What do we do?” the woman carrying her asked.
“Break through,” replied the man who had been shot. He was still gripping his arm, blood trickling through his fingers, but otherwise he looked remarkably unhurt.
“How?” one of the others asked.
The man who was shot inclined his head and hurried up the stairs to the next floor. Curious, the others followed. He opened the door, peeked through, and slammed it without going through.
“No one there yet,” he whispered. “Guard this door. I’ll clear the way below.”
Dr. Yamazaki heard the police whispering on the floor below, then she heard stealthy steps on the stairs. The shot man nodded to his companions and walked down the stairs.
“I give up!” he called. “Don’t shoot!”
He rounded the corner, raising his one good arm.
“Hold it right there, buddy!” one of the cops ordered.
“The others ran off upstairs. I don’t have the strength to go with them. I surrender!”
“On your knees!”
“Don’t shoot! I’ll tell you everything!”
There was a thud and a groan, followed an instant later by a shot and a loud crash, then the sound of a body tumbling down the stairs.
“The way’s clear,” the doctor called up. His voice sounded strained.
They hurried down, Dr. Yamazaki feeling ill as she bounced along in the woman’s arms. The strange woman didn’t seem any more tired from running around with her than if she had been holding a bag of groceries. As they rounded the corner, Dr. Yamazaki saw the doctor leaning against the wall, clutching his side. One cop lay groaning at his feet. The other was sprawled on the landing several steps down.
“You’ve been hit again!” one of the other doctors exclaimed.
“Thanks for stating the obvious.” The wounded man grinned. “I’ll live, but you’re going to have to carry me.”
One of the doctors hauled him up onto his shoulders, and they stepped over the policemen.
“You didn’t kill them, did you?”
“Of course not. Not that I wasn’t tempted. The bastards shot me twice.”
“We should have planned this better,” the woman carrying Dr. Yamazaki muttered. “Some army this is. What a joke.”
They hurried down to the bottom level and burst out into an underground garage. Dr. Yamazaki looked around and breathed a sigh of relief when she saw no one. While she still didn’t know what was going on, she was placing her bets on her abductors. Those federal agents upstairs were her enemies—somehow she knew that—and while the police and hospital security were only doing their jobs, they would hand her over to the federal government, then she’d be lost forever.
The last person in line peered up the stairwell then hurried back and shut the door. “They’re coming. Get in the van.” He bent the metal door handle until it twisted off with a loud snap.
Everyone ran across the garage to a van marked Industrial Plumbing, Ltd. They opened the back and hurried inside. Dr. Yamazaki was placed on a cot, and the others shucked off their medical scrubs and replaced them with workman’s overalls. The wounded man had to be helped into his. While he looked pale and in pain, Yamazaki noted that his bleeding had stopped.
“Who are you people?” she asked as someone put a trench coat on over her hospital robe.
“We’ll explain everything if we survive the next five minutes,” someone said.
The woman who had carried her put shoes on Dr. Yamazaki’s feet. Another woman got into the driver’s seat and backed the van out.
Ignoring the nausea that pulled at her stomach, Dr. Yamazaki struggled to sit up and looked through the windshield between the driver’s and passenger seat. They were driving up the ramp toward the exit. Bright sunlight made her blink. By the entrance stood a little security box and a red-and-white-striped traffic barrier.
“Got your parking permit?” the wounded man joked.
“No time for that.” The driver laughed, slamming on the gas.
They smashed through the barrier and peeled out onto the street. Dr. Yamazaki’s head spun, and she threw up again, most of it ending up in the cup holder between the seats. Someone tried to push her back onto the cot, but she batted the hand away. She had to see what was going on. The van swung into traffic.
“No cops in sight. I think we lost them,” the driver said.
“They’ll be on us soon enough,” one of the others replied.
They continued driving, zigzagging down back streets and into a residential district in the hope of eluding pursuit. Dr. Yamazaki had enough time to clear her thoughts a little.
Atlanteans. These people carried the Atlantis gene. She had been studying them for the government, heading a secret project called… something… headed by a General… Mitchell? No, that wasn’t it.
“Damn it, why can’t I remember?” she cried, slamming her fi
st against the seat in front of her.
“It will come with time,” one man said.
She was about to ask what he had done to her when another voice made everyone turn.
“Hey, that car has been following us for a while.”
That came from the wounded man, who was sitting up again and looking out the back window. Dr. Yamazaki saw a black sedan tailing them from a discreet distance. The van screeched to a halt, and Dr. Yamazaki was thrown between the driver’s and passenger seats.
And that saved her life.
A burst of machine gun fire smashed through the windshield. The pair in the front two seats jerked as bullets tore through their bodies. A heavy weight fell on her as one of the Atlanteans sitting beside her took a bullet to the head.
There was a loud crash, and the van rocked from side to side. Dr. Yamazaki stared wide-eyed as two of the surviving Atlanteans kicked the side of the van, buckling and finally tearing through the metal. Within moments, a huge hole yawned where there had been a solid wall of steel. One of them grabbed her, and they leapt outside.
In front of the van, a black sedan sat across the two-lane residential road. Two men with machine guns were pouring fire into the van. Behind the van, the sedan that had been following them had blocked off the road as well, and two agents were emerging from the car.
One of the Atlanteans leapt a full ten feet to crash into the driver of the rear car as he got out of the vehicle. The man fell hard to the pavement and did not rise. The Atlantean leapt over the car at the other agent, who pulled out a pistol and fired twice before getting knocked down.
The man holding Dr. Yamazaki sprinted for the car. Dr. Yamazaki looked back at the agents wielding machine guns just in time to see them aim at them.
“Look out!” she screamed.
Too late. A burst of gunfire hit the Atlantean in the back. He hugged Dr. Yamazaki close to shield her and staggered to the car. His comrade had already gotten inside and gunned the engine. Dr. Yamazaki was tossed in the backseat, and she cowered as the car screeched in a U-turn and peeled down the road.
Bullets smashed through the rear window, and the sedan swerved, straightened out, and picked up speed.
