Talon of God

by Wesley Snipes

  Too bad he wasn’t one of the sane ones.

  Can’t have everything with your stalkers, I suppose.

  “Okay,” Lauryn said, shoving her sleep-tousled hair out of her face. “I’m still not sure why you’re here, but I appreciate that you want to help, so I’m going to go inside and call my friend. He’s the detective who’s working Lenny’s case, and I’d really love it if you could give him a statement about what happened last night.”

  “I’d be happy to,” Talon said, looking up at the dark sky again. “But I don’t think we have time.”

  “Why not?”

  His face grew grim. “The birds.”

  Still confused, Lauryn looked up as well, squinting at the dark sky. For a moment, nothing seemed out of the ordinary, and then, suddenly, she saw it. The predawn sky was full of birds. She wasn’t sure what kind, but they were huge with black feathers and strange, oddly naked heads that made her skin crawl. “What are those?”

  “Vultures,” Talon replied, walking back to his bike.

  Lauryn grimaced. For all her claims not to believe in the supernatural, that was creepy as hell. “And you think they’re a sign?”

  “Are you used to seeing vultures in Chicago? Especially in freezing weather? Yes,” he said, climbing onto his seat, “it’s a sign.

  “But not one I follow.”

  He glowered at the circling birds. “‘The coming of the lawless one is preceeded by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders.’”

  That was a Bible quote for sure, but Lauryn was too distracted to figure out the book and verse this time. She was sure he was right about vultures in Chicago, but then again, she wasn’t really much of a birdwatcher, so she wasn’t as up on the migratory patterns of buzzards. Still . . .

  “So you’re saying, in all seriousness, that you believe those birds are a sign from Satan.”

  “Yes,” he said simply, starting his bike. “Get on. We have to follow them.”

  “What?” Lauryn jumped back. “No! I’m not going to just get on your bike and go bird chasing! I don’t even know you.”

  “So take a leap of faith,” Talon said, flashing her a smile. “It’ll happen whether you believe it will or not, Lauryn. You might as well get a head start while you still can.”

  That almost made a strange kind of sense, but Lauryn had reached the end of her patience. “That’s it,” she said, turning around and marching back toward the house. “I’ve officially reached my limit for crazy. I’ll tell Will to get your statement later. You want to chase birds, knock yourself out. I’m going to get ready for work.”

  “You can’t run from this, Lauryn,” Talon called after her. “You’re part of the plan now. You’ll play your role one way or another, and it’s generally a lot easier if you just have faith and go along from the start. Trust me on this.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Lauryn said without looking, waving over her shoulder as she climbed the steps back to her front door. “Freaking crazy dude.”

  That last part was muttered under her breath. But as Lauryn was reaching for the knob to open her father’s front door, her work pager began vibrating like crazy in the pocket of her winter coat. Her private phone went off a few seconds later, blaring with the impossible-to-ignore piercing ring she’d assigned to the emergency desk at work. Either sound was enough to put her instantly into doctor mode. Combined, she moved so fast she almost sprained a muscle, grabbing her phone and speaking before the call even connected.

  “This is Jefferson.”

  “Lauryn!”

  It took her several seconds before she recognized the voice as Sandy, one of the ER’s head nurses and the most levelheaded person Lauryn had ever met. This was partially because the call was still connecting, but mostly because Lauryn had never heard Sandy in a panic before.

  “We need you in here STAT,” the nurse said breathlessly. “We’ve got three separate 2050s coming in as I speak.”

  That couldn’t be right—2050 was their internal code for a massive incident like a bus crash or a big fire, basically any emergency situation where you were dealing with more than ten people in critical condition at one time. In her six months working in the Mercy ER, Lauryn had only seen two 2050s, one of which barely met the minimum. Three at once didn’t even seem possible. “What happened? Was there a terrorist attack or something?”

  “No one’s sure yet,” Sandy said. “But we’re up to our noses in ambulances with more waiting to unload. The director’s called all hands on deck. Get down here!”

  “On my way,” Lauryn replied, but Sandy had already hung up, leaving Lauryn scrambling to open the door and get inside when Talon’s calm voice spoke behind her.

  “Need a ride?”

  She whirled around to find him perched on his bike, which was now idling directly in front of her house. “You don’t have a car,” he pointed out. “I’d be happy to take you to the hospital.”

  Lauryn didn’t care how many 2050s were coming in—she was not getting on a motorcycle in subzero weather with a crazy stranger. “Thanks, but no thanks,” she said. “I’ve got a ride.”

  Talon looked skeptical, but Lauryn didn’t care. She was already running into the house, yelling up the stairs to her still-sleeping father that she was borrowing his car. By the time Maxwell’s door opened, she’d already grabbed his keys from the hook in the kitchen and headed out the door. It took four tries to start the old Buick in the cold, but she got it going in the end, spinning the tires on the frozen pavement as she floored it down the street toward the hospital.

  And behind her, she could see Talon in her rearview mirror, calmly following on his bike, his head constantly swiveling to the north.

  Where the circle of vultures was getting bigger in the growing gray of dawn.

  6

  One to Watch and One to Pray and Two to Bear My Soul Away

  Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, bless the bed that I lie on.

  Four corners to my bed, four angels round my head;

  One to watch and one to pray and two to bear my soul away.

  —The Black Paternoster, 1656

  Talon followed her all the way to work.

  Another day, that would have been cause for concern, but right now Lauryn was too busy to care. An elephant could have been waiting for her in the emergency room and she wouldn’t have seen it past the mass of patients being wheeled in from the ambulances like victims coming in from a war zone.

  “Dr. Jefferson!”

  Lauryn tore her eyes from the chaos to see one of the trainee nurses sprinting toward her. “Dr. Jefferson,” she said again, panting. “Thank goodness you’re here!” Her eyes flicked over Lauryn’s shoulder at Talon, who’d somehow managed to park his bike and come right back to her side in thirty seconds flat. “Who’s that?”

  “Never mind him,” Lauryn said quickly, determined not to waste any more brainpower on the Talon problem. If he was stupid enough to get in the way during an emergency, security would boot him. She had more important disasters to handle.

  “What’s the situation?” she asked, pumping a generous amount of sanitizing gel into her hand from one of the wall dispensers before donning a pair of latex gloves. “Those gurneys are headed for the burn ward in the basement. Was there a fire?”

  “No,” the nurse said quickly, hurrying to the computer to pull up the charts for Lauryn to review. “There’s just too many patients for the normal ER to hold, so Sandy ordered us to move everyone downstairs to the burn ward.”

  Lauryn swore under her breath. At a hundred and fifty beds, Mercy’s ER wing was made to handle anything Chicago threw at it. If the head nurse was already moving overflow patients into the burn ward, things were even worse than she’d thought.

  “Let’s see,” she muttered, leaning down over the computer screen as she tabbed through the enormous list of ambulance reports. “Wait, these are all drug cases?” There had to be a hundred in the system already, and that wasn’t counting all the p
atients still pending admission. But while their symptoms varied wildly, every single one was marked with the code for an overdose.

  “This can’t be right,” she muttered, paging through the files. “Did admin get lazy with the coding?”

  “No, the code’s correct,” the nurse said, wringing her hands. “They started coming in around 3 am, all showing signs of different street drugs. What makes it weird, though, is that they all presented with the same secondary symptoms of disorientation, cyanosis, subconjunctival hemorrhaging, and hallucinations, even for those who tested negative for all known hallucinogenic drugs.”

  A lump formed in Lauryn’s stomach. Cyanosis meant a bluish or gray tinge to the skin, and subconjunctival hemorrhaging was bursting of the blood vessels in the eyes. Add in the hallucinations and you had the same nightmarish combo she’d observed in Lenny last night. But tempting as it was to jump to conclusions, a good doctor knew better than to make a diagnosis without solid proof, so she went ahead and brought up the results of those patients who’d been here long enough to have lab work done.

  Sure enough, just as the nurse had reported, every patient admitted under the 2050 emergency code so far had come up flagged for different substances, ranging from heroin and meth to plain old pot and party drugs. Other than the list of secondary symptoms the nurse had just rattled off, the only common thread linking all the cases together was a small note at the very end of each lab report.

  Sulfhemoglobinemia.

  “Too much sulfur.”

  Lauryn almost jumped out of her skin. She whirled, her anger spiking when she found Talon standing right behind her at the nurse’s station, reading the patient lab result summaries over her shoulder.

  “Get out of here!” she yelled, shoving his broad chest with both hands. “This area is for authorized personnel only!” She turned to the nurse, who was gaping at Talon with a confused mix of fear and wonder. “Call security to come kick him out.”

  “No need for that,” Talon said, backing off immediately. “But you know, there’s another name for sulfur. In the old days, they used to call it brimstone.”

  “Who cares what it’s called,” Lauryn said. “You’re lucky I’m not calling the cops. Now get. Go be crazy somewhere else. I’ve got work to do.”

  She turned away after that, not even bothering to see if Talon obeyed as she jogged out from behind the nurse’s station to join the stream of EMTs pushing gurneys toward the burn ward deep in the hospital’s basement. She was so sick of this cryptic crap. She had no idea why Talon had fixated on her, but he could take his brimstone and vultures right back to hell. Meanwhile, she had actual work to do saving real people’s lives. And speaking of . . .

  Without slowing her pace, Lauryn pulled out her phone and tapped through her contacts until she reached the number she’d never thought she’d call again. She still wasn’t sure dialing it now was a smart move, but she had to tell someone, and Will was the easiest. As usual, he picked up on the second ring, though she must have woken him up, because his voice was thick and muffled.

  “Tannenbaum.”

  Even with the emergency going on all around her, the intimate sound of her ex-boyfriend’s sleepy voice hit Lauryn harder than she’d expected. “It’s me,” she said when she’d pulled herself back together. “You need to get down to the hospital. We’re having a massive influx of drug cases, and they’ve all got the same sulfur readings Lenny showed last night.”

  For a long moment, nothing happened, and Lauryn began to wonder if she’d gone too fast. But she needn’t have worried. Though he was clearly still half-asleep, this was Will. If it involved a case he was working, he’d rise from the dead to investigate, and this morning was no different.

  “I’ll be right there,” he said, sounding more awake with every word. “Thanks for the tip. Don’t let anyone leave.”

  Lauryn looked around at the four gurneys the transport team was currently trying to wedge into the elevator. “I don’t think that’ll be a problem. See you when you get here.”

  Will grunted and hung up. Lauryn hung up as well, dropping her phone into the pocket of her white coat as she abandoned the glutted elevators and ran for the stairs, taking the heavy cement steps two at a time as she rushed down to the hospital’s fluorescent basement.

  The sun still wasn’t up over the horizon when Will screeched his unmarked patrol car into the Mercy Hospital deck. He was out before the vehicle stopped moving, barely slowing down enough to lock the door behind him as he raced through the freezing predawn dark toward the hospital’s side entrance . . . only to find it was locked until nine.

  Frustrated and in too much of a hurry to go all the way around to the ER entrance, Will banged on the glass, flashing his badge at one of the orderlies inside. Even then, it took some serious convincing to get the man to open the door, not that Will blamed him. Unshaven, in street clothes, and running on less than two hours’ sleep out of the last thirty-six, he wouldn’t have believed he was a cop, either, badge or no.

  After leaving Korigan’s office, Will had spent the rest of the night working his street contacts for any hint of the sword-wielding man who had helped Lauryn, as she’d reported to the police. He’d also pressed hard to try to find out where this new drug was coming from—who was supplying it, who was selling it, that kind of thing. Unfortunately, he’d had zero success on both fronts. No one seemed to know anything about a guy with a sword, and the few pushers he could find who would admit to having heard about a weird green ooze that reeked of sulfur didn’t seem to know anything beyond that. He knew they were lying, but the fear in their eyes was enough to convince him to back off and try again later. Spooking the few informants he had was the last thing he could afford right now. Still, that meant he had nothing, and after hours of dead ends, Will had given up and gone to bed. He’d just drifted off when Lauryn called, yanking him right back into the fray.

  And it was quite the fray. He’d barely made it into the main lobby before it became obvious that the hospital was under siege. Everywhere he looked, patients with discolored, grayish skin and horrifying bloody eyes were lying on gurneys. Some were comatose, while others were strapped down to keep them from rolling off their beds, their bloody eyes wide and rolling as they babbled about voices that Will could only hope were hallucinations.

  He grabbed a nurse, who said Lauryn was in the burn ward. Making his way downstairs, he almost gave up right there. The chaos of the upper floors was nothing compared to the madhouse that was the basement.

  Down here, the otherwise modern Mercy Hospital took a decided turn for the 1950s . . . or maybe the 1850s. Rather than being divided up into several smaller rooms, all the patients had been lined up together field-hospital-style in a huge underground room that made Will think of a combination between a fallout shelter and a Civil War medical tent. But even this basketball court–sized space wasn’t enough to handle the massive flood of EMTs constantly wheeling new patients through the propped-open fire doors.

  Even in the scrum, though, Will had no trouble finding Lauryn. All he had to do was look where the trouble was thickest, and there she was, working with another doctor and a team of nurses to restrain a large man near the back who looked like he was having a fit.

  It was hard to watch. Even with all the help, the man on the gurney was so much bigger than Lauryn, and his long arms were flailing violently as he tried to fight whatever hallucination was attacking him. As always, Lauryn was a medical machine, calmly dodging the man’s violent outbursts as she and the other doctor worked together to push his arms down long enough to administer some kind of shot. Whatever it was, the junkie went quiet a few seconds later, and the team let go of him to move on to the next patient. Lauryn was moving with them when Will ran over.

  “Hey,” he said. “Got a moment?”

  “Do I look like I have a moment?” she asked irritably, giving him an exhausted look.

  “Anything will do,” he said. “Just give me the basics.”

  �
��You’re looking at them,” she said, nodding at the rows of patients on gurneys. “You got here too fast. We haven’t even finished the initial assessment, and we’ve still got more coming in.”

  So Will could see. “And these are all drug cases?”

  Lauryn nodded. “Once I pointed out the sulfur to the director, we went ahead and separated all the ones with signs of sulfhemoglobinemia from the normal ER patients and wheeled them down here. We’re still not sure what’s going on, though, or what’s causing the hallucinations. Right now we’re in survival mode. But we should know more after we finish triage.”

  “When’s that?”

  “No idea,” Lauryn said, and then her eyes lit up. “But I do have some good news for you. You remember the guy I told you about? The one who saved me from Lenny? I found him.”

  “You did?” Will was shocked. He’d looked all night and hadn’t found a trace. “How?”

  “Well—actually, it was more like he found me,” she admitted, putting Will’s guard up at once. “He’s over there if you want to ask him some questions, and if you could do that somewhere else, I’d love it. I’ve tried everything I can think of to get him out of here, but he won’t leave, and we don’t have the resources to make him. We need all the staff we’ve got just to keep up with—”

  A scream cut her off, and they both whirled around to see the big patient she’d just calmed down arch off his gurney like he’d been electrocuted, screaming at the top of his lungs that something was eating his legs. The patient started to convulse a second later, and the already loud room got even louder as a team of people in blue uniforms charged over.

  “Crap, he’s coding,” Lauryn said, racing away from Will to join the team of techs as they hoisted the convulsing man onto a CPR board. “I gotta help with this. Take care of Talon for me.”

  “‘Talon’? That’s his name?” Will called after her, but Lauryn was already locked back into doctor mode, yelling for a nurse to get her fifty CCs of something Will couldn’t begin to pronounce.