"I can't ask you to--" Lily said.
"Gideon, no--" Delilah said.
Gideon held up a hand. "No, I'm down. Let's do this."
"This isn't like skipping school," Delilah said. "You get caught, you get busted, and you're looking at serious trespassing charges."
"I'm not scared."
"Why?" Lily asked in a soft voice. "Not that I don't appreciate it, but you hardly know me. I can't ask you to risk jail for me."
"It's not about you."
"Are you just lashing out at your dad?" Delilah asked.
"It's not about him. It's about me, okay?" Gideon's face reddened. "Maybe I'm sick of just spray-painting billboards. Maybe I want to help someone, do something that matters for once."
"Gideon..." Delilah trailed off.
"It's about me."
"Okay," Lily said. "I don't get it. But thanks anyway."
"Yeah."
"Gideon?" Delilah grabbed his sleeve.
"Yeah?"
"Be careful."
"I will."
"If the cops are after you, you can hide in our basement."
Gideon nodded, then walked to the doorway.
That spike of guilt returned to Lily's gut. As much as Gideon claimed to be helping her for selfish reasons, she couldn't help but feel like she was taking advantage of him. If anything, it was worse now. Like she was goading him on, enabling him. She could easily, she knew, turn him down, push him away, spare him the risk of involvement.
But she wouldn't, because she needed his help. And for that, she hated herself just a little bit.
CHAPTER SIX
A pair of police cars sat in front of Laton General Hospital's non-emergency entrance, accounting for almost half of the small town's police presence.
"Shit," Gideon said. "What are these assholes doing here?"
He and Lily were crouched behind the brick divider the hospital's sign was bolted to, on the hill facing the hospital.
Lily shook her head. "I don't know. Maybe there was another accident."
"Maybe."
She risked another look past his shoulder, but didn't see any deputies sitting in the cars. "Maybe we should back off."
"We can handle it."
"So what's the plan?"
"Plan?" Gideon picked up a handful of pebbles. "Right. Well, I'm going to distract them and you go inside and see your friend."
"That's it?"
"I'm good distracting."
"I don't doubt it, but what about the doctors and nurses inside?"
He let the pebbles rain from his hand. "I can be very distracting. Don't worry about it. Laton General is a huge hospital for a town this size -- what, fifty rooms on the ground floor, half that on the second floor? Like, why do they need to have beds for half the town? What are they expecting? Why waste so much money on facilities we don't need, especially when Odessa's hospital isn't that far and has much nicer equipment."
"It was built with donations from the Church. You know they like to go big."
He paused. "Whatever, look, I've only seen three or four doctors there, and maybe twice as many nurses and orderlies. Point is that it's a big place, but actually kind of empty."
Her belly felt leaden. "I don't know."
Gideon pivoted to face her. "Look, just act like you're supposed to be there. That's like, half of sneaking around. Look busy, grab a clipboard. Nobody bothers someone with a clipboard."
Lily gestured down at herself. "Yeah, well, I sort of stick out."
Gideon tugged at his copper-colored hair. "Yeah, well, so do I."
She stifled a laugh, realizing that this was the first time since awakening from her coma that she'd felt the slightest levity.
Gideon smiled, then glanced back at the hospital. When he looked back his face was grim.
"What I said before... that this was for me... not entirely true. You're in a rough spot, Lily, and I don't mind helping out a little."
"It's more than a little."
"Yeah, well, now we've got this full blown conspiracy with missing police reports and people moving Ashley out under mysterious circumstances--"
"Conspiracy?"
"Whatever it is. That kind of thing just really pisses me off, you know? I mean, all I want is to do what I can to make the world a better place. And since there wasn't an Occupy Laton, this'll have to do."
Lily smiled. "You're punk rock, Gideon."
Gideon grinned broadly. "Fuck yeah I am. Ready?"
"No. But let's do this thing."
Gideon flashed her a final crooked grin, then stepped out of hiding and started walking toward the police cars.
***
Gideon inserted his earbuds in as he walked, hand in his pocket flicking the controls on his ipod, looking for some appropriate theme music. Looking for inspiration. Most of his play-list was classic punk, the atonal shitty stuff recorded a decade before he was even born, so he didn't have to flip far to find something that fit.
There. Dead Kennedys. Riot. Perfect for a little old-school mayhem. His brisk walk slowed to a saunter matching the song's pacing.
Laton was a peaceful place, and you couldn't really tell from Odessa either, but the world was changing. All over the world, people were standing up to the capitalist-military system that sought to exploit the working class. A lot of people -- even Hugh and Juan -- had missed Occupy Wall-Street's point. They thought it was a joke, a failure for not accomplishing much, but that wasn't what was important. People were standing up. They were spitting in the face of the power elite in a way that couldn't be ignored. Occupy wasn't the end of it. Someday, a revolution was going to rise up and sweep away all the trash. Gideon wanted to be part of that wave.
For now, he'd do what he could. Little things, here and there. Like helping Lily. She might be part of Laton's elite, but she was also scared, confused, and, Gideon believed, in the middle of some messed up town conspiracy.
He stopped at the base of the hill and picked up a fist-sized rock. It would do.
Time to smash the state.
***
Lily watched Gideon approaching the hospital and police cars, wondering what he was up to. She froze when he picked up the rock. She winced when he threw it at one of the police cars. She cringed when it bounced off the windshield.
She watched him pick it up, step away, and throw it again, this time clipping the car's side-mirror.
As he went to grab it again, she saw someone in pale blue scrubs -- an orderly, possibly -- stop in the hospital lobby to watch him.
He threw the rock again, and it bounced off of the car's passenger-side window. This was it? This was his distraction? His plan?
The orderly opened the hospital door and shouted something at Gideon.
Gideon replied with both middle fingers, before grabbing the rock again.
The orderly took a step out, and Gideon hurled the rock towards the hospital. It smashed through the windowed facade next to the orderly with considerable force.
The orderly ran back inside, disappearing from view, presumably to get help.
Gideon bounced on his feet and took a glance towards where Lily was hiding before looking around the parking lot. He found another large rock, picking it up as a deputy appeared in the doorway.
"Hey!" the deputy shouted.
The rock tumbled from Gideon's hand in a half-toss as he spun away and made a run for it.
***
Gideon ran.
The deputies chased.
Jello Biafra was right. It was an unbeatable high.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Lily didn't make her move right away, crouching and watching the deputies chase after Gideon. It was hard to process the absurd sight, but more importantly she wanted to make sure that the three lawmen running after him weren't going to be joined by a late fourth.
Did the deputies always travel in pairs? She tried to remember, but honestly hadn't ever paid much attention to the police. They were just there, a presence, she'd been taught, to hel
p good people, and keep the troublemakers at bay.
Good people like her. Troublemakers like Gideon.
And yet here she was, sneaking through shattered glass into the hospital. And Gideon was rough around the edges, but she'd never heard of him or his fellow stoners doing anything worse than petty vandalism or shoplifting. But here he was, smashing a window and running from the police, just to help her. Risking his freedom and his future for a girl he hardly knew, one who might be -- as far as she knew -- responsible for the death of at least one of her friends.
She stopped herself. There wasn't any more time for guilt. Not now. She would need her wits about herself to find Ashley. There wouldn't be any answers in her injured friend's hospital bed, but at least she could apologize. At least she could say goodbye.
Like she never got to say goodbye to Lauren.
Lily jogged past the reception desk. It was vacant, the nurse probably having gone to help the orderly with the broken glass. Lily pulled out the crumpled print-out that Delilah had given her.
Ashley was in 237. Second floor. Laton general was a large hospital for such a small town.
Lily jogged past the elevators to the stairwell. Less chance of getting caught. That made sense, right? Gideon would know. She didn't feel like being trapped in a small box, anyway.
The second floor was much quieter than the first. The soles of her sneakers squeaked loudly in her ears with each step, sound like nails on a chalkboard. She stopped to take them off, carrying them as she searched for her friend's room.
Lily reached an intersection at the end of the hall. To the left, a plaque directed her, rooms 225 through 235. To her left, 241 to 250.
What the hell? Where was 237?
A soft chime from the elevator prompted Lily to action, and she ducked around the corner to the left. She stopped, back flat against the bricks, ears straining. In her fear every sense felt heightened, every sound was magnified, down to the ticking of a nearby clock and the pounding of her heartbeat.
Footfalls sounded as someone emerged from the elevator and started down the hall. The hallway tiles' echo confounded Lily, and she couldn't tell right away if the new arrival was coming towards her or heading away. Her own heart beat fiercely in her chest, and she felt suddenly trapped, sure that anyone could hear it, sure that at any moment a deputy would round the corner. She was certain that Gideon had been caught, had confessed, had implicated her as not just an accomplice, but as a ring-leader in this scheme. Why had she trusted him?
The steps softened slightly, and she realized with a sense of relief that they were headed in the other direction, away from her intersection. She sagged against the wall, exhaling a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding.
After the footsteps had almost faded, Lily crept off down the hall, keeping an eye out for room 237. The corridor turned, again and again, forming a rectangle as it came back to itself at the intersection.
What the hell? Where was Ashley's room?
She slipped to the corner again and peered down the hall past the elevators, but didn't see whomever had gotten off the elevator. There, past the restroom and nurse's station was what looked like another suite of rooms. Lily hadn't been too aware of what was going on around her when she'd been released after her coma, but she did had vague memories of being wheeled down the hall to the elevator. If that's where she had been kept, it sort of made sense that her friends would have been in the rooms nearby, right?
She glanced at the empty nurse station as she snuck past, wondering who was sharing the floor with her. A nurse, preparing Ashley for transport? A janitor, cleaning wastebaskets? A fourth deputy, patrolling the halls while his coworkers chased after Gideon?
As Lily drew near the suites at the end of the hall, she could see a plaque numbering them 235 to 240. Jackpot.
She crept, carefully, towards the door to room 237. Unlike the others it stood open. She slowed to a stop, peering around the door carefully, ready to jerk back if she saw the tan uniform of Laton's finest.
Ashley caught her eye first. Lily felt faint when she saw her friend, obscured by tubes coming out of her nose and throat, hooked up to some kind of medical machine that was probably the only thing keeping her alive. She looked so small, so pale, so broken, it was all Lily could do to keep from running to her side.
What held her back was the figure standing by the foot of the bed. A man, a boy, a teen her own age with shockingly pale alabaster skin and ink-black hair. He wore a heavy-looking black duster over torn mud-splattered clothes, and seemed to tower over the bed, casting a pall over it, like a shadow, like a vampire, like death itself.
Almost as soon as she noticed the figure, electric-blue eyes set in the shadowed recesses of his face flickering towards her.
Those eyes.
She remembered those eyes.
Memory came crashing down upon her. That face. A shape suddenly in front of the car. Lauren screaming and trying to swerve out of the way. Covering her eyes as they hit. Spinning as the car struck the dark figure with luminescent eyes like sparks, as the car pivoted, as it wrapped around him like he was a cement pole. The images came like snapshot rapid-fire blows, each crashing against the fragile grip on sanity she was trying to hold on to.
"You can't be," she whispered.
He moved towards her, but she was already running. And she was fast.
***
She flew through nightmare, her mind recessed, nothing but prey-animal, acting and reacting.
Hallway.
Stairwell.
Lobby.
Lily was a track star, and no one in the county could touch her. Her flight was dreamlike, strong legs moving instinctively, arms pumping, not even sure that her feet were touching the ground.
The world flashed by, startled orderlies flashed by as she flew through the empty frame where Gideon had smashed out a pane.
She was lightning.
She could tell that he was faster.
***
Gideon was already huffing and puffing when he got back to the hill overlooking the hospital lot, and he gave an inward groan when he saw Lily rocket out of the building's front. It'd taken him almost ten minutes to lose the Deputies, and another ten to double back around to the hospital without being seen again. If they'd spotted Lily...
Well. He was in no shape to help her out, now. Even well rested, there was no way he could catch up with her. Hell, he'd only managed to ditch the deputies because he knew all the shortcuts and hiding places.
Then he saw the figure darting out of the hospital after her, a black-clad form with bone-white skin, something so fast it looked like it was gliding. The way it moved was inhuman, and it was definitely gaining on her.
His eyes flicked back to Lily. He quickly judged her speed and where the twisting streets of Laton would most likely take her.
He started down the other side of the hill. He wouldn't be able to catch up with her, but he knew all the shortcuts.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Lily's muscles burned with lactic acid. Her breath, while regular, strained a ragged edge. She was used to pushing herself, pushing her body to excel, but never this hard. She always held back from what her coach called the red line, from the point where her body would injure itself. Winning races wasn't worth crippling yourself.
Getting away from the thing chasing her was.
Her vision blurred with tears, she almost missed Gideon ahead, by the bridge, beckoning to her.
She altered her course slightly, curving her path towards him. She could see his eyes widen at whatever was behind her, but didn't turn her head to look.
She knew what was coming.
Knew enough about it, anyway.
Gideon stepped back into the mouth of a cement drainage pipe barely tall enough to stand in. She followed, almost slipping on the slick bank.
He stopped just within the entrance, allowing her to pass by.
"Don't stop!" She gulped in breath as her body tried to recover its equilibrium.
"It'll follow!"
"I don't think it can," Gideon said.
A great darkness swept past the entrance at incredible speeds, too fast to see, and too fast to stop. More shadow trailed it, billowing almost like a cloak, debris swept up in its wake.
"What the fuck!" Gideon said.
"Keep moving."
Gideon nodded and squeezed past her, deeper into the tunnel, pulling a small flashlight out of his pocket.
He shone it on the tunnel floor ahead of him, highlighting debris that had probably washed in during Laton's infrequent but torrential rains. "Watch your step."
After a few yards Gideon looked back over his shoulder towards the entrance and she followed his gaze, but the distant circle of sunlight was bright and clear.
Ahead was blackness, and as they drew closer Lily saw that a dark cloth had stretched across the width of the pipe. When Gideon moved it, daylight flashed from ahead.
"Me and Juan strung this up to make people think the pipe was blocked," he said. "So nobody else really uses this shortcut."
"Why?" Lily asked.
"Reasons. But what the fuck was that thing? Why was it after you?"
"It was in Ashley's room. Standing over her."
"Oh, shit."
"Yeah."
"What the fuck is it?"
"I didn't really take a great look. He's tall. Pale. Wearing black."
"That was a guy?"
"What did it look like?"
"Just... darkness. Like you were being chased by a shadow. A flock of shadows."
Another few yards and the cramped pipe opened out into the late afternoon street. The air had a quiet, surreal quality to it. Lily didn't hear any cars, couldn't hear any birds. The world seemed an indrawn breath, waiting in anticipation for an explosive exhalation.
When Gideon broke the silence, it seemed almost a profane thing. "Delilah's house isn't too far away."
Infernal Revelation : Collected Episodes 1-4 (9781311980007) Page 5
