Unfettered II: New Tales By Masters of Fantasy

by Shawn Speakman

  Then he went limp and made slow, regular rasping sounds.

  I eased off the pressure and gave him his arm back. It fell limply to the sidewalk as he cried. “Buddy,” I said, “hey, it’s going to be all right. I’m Waldo. What’s your name?”

  “Stan,” he said in a hollow voice.

  “Hey, Stan,” I said. “Try not to worry. We’re going to get you taken care of.”

  “You’re killing me,” he said. “You’re killing me.”

  “Your pulse is erratic, your breathing is impaired, and your eyes are showing different levels of dilation, Stan. What are you on?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “You’re killing me. Damn you.”

  In a few minutes, the ambulance arrived. A few seconds later, someone tapped the side of my chest with my glasses and I put them back on. I looked up to an EMT, a blocky black guy named Lamar. I knew him. He was a solid guy.

  “Thanks, man,” I said.

  “You tackle this guy?” he asked. “Shoot. You ain’t no bigger than a chicken dinner.”

  “But spicy,” I said. I gave him everything I had about Stan, and they got him checked, loaded up, and ready to head out to the ER in under four minutes.

  “Hey, Lamar,” I said, as he was rolling the gurney.

  “Yes, Examiner Mulder?”

  “Scully was the ME,” I complained. “How come no one calls me Examiner Scully?”

  “Cause you ain’t a thinking man’s tart,” Lamar drawled. “What you need?”

  “Where are you taking him?”

  “St. Anthony’s.”

  I nodded. “Is there anything, uh, odd happening over there lately?”

  “Naw,” Lamar said, scratching his chin. “Not that I seen. But it’s only Tuesday.”

  “Do me a favor,” I said. “Keep your eyes open.”

  “Hell, Butters,” he said.

  “Let me rephrase that,” I said. “Let me know if you see anything odd. It might be important.”

  Lamar gave me a long look. I already had a reputation and history with supernatural weirdness, even before I met Harry Dresden and learned how scary the world really is. Lamar had gotten a few peeks at the Twilight Zone too, over the years, and wanted nothing to do with it, because Lamar was pretty bright.

  “We’ll see,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said. We shook hands and he left.

  Michael came to stand next to me as the ambulance pulled away.

  “You hear that?” I asked him.

  “Most of it.”

  “What do you think?”

  He leaned on his cane and blew out a slow breath through his lips, frowning in thought.

  “I think,” he said finally, “that you’re the Knight now, Waldo.”

  “Somehow, I just knew you were going to say that,” I said. “It might be nothing. I mean, I suspect Stan was strung out on uppers and downers and God knows what else. And if some commuter had been the one to try to wake him, he might have strangled them. Maybe this was a low-level warmup quest, you know? That might have been the whole thing right there.”

  “Maybe,” Michael agreed, nodding. “What does your heart tell you?”

  “My heart?” I asked. “I’m a doctor, Michael. My heart doesn’t tell me anything. It’s a muscle that pumps blood. My brain does all of that other stuff.”

  Michael smiled. “What does your heart tell you?”

  I sighed. I mean, sure, it could have been something really simple and easy—mathematically, that was possible. But everything I’d seen about the supernatural world told me that the Knights of the Cross were only sent into matters of life and death. And like it or not, when I’d decided to keep the Sword of Faith, I’d decided to get myself involved in situations that would be scary and dangerous—and necessary—without actually knowing exactly what was going on, or why I was being sent.

  I wasn’t really hero material. Even with my recent training, I was small, and skinny, and rumpled, and I’d never drunk from the fountain of youth. I was a mature, nerdy, Jewish medical examiner, not some kind of daring adventurer.

  But I guess I was the guy who had been given the Sword—and Stan needed my help.

  I nodded and said, “Let’s head back to your place.”

  “Of course,” Michael said. “What are you going to do?”

  “Get the rest of my stuff,” I said. “And then check up on Stan at St. Tony’s. Better safe than sorry.”

  Michael pulled up to the hospital in his solid, hardworking white pickup truck, and frowned. “God go with you, Waldo.”

  “You still don’t like it, do you?” I asked him.

  “The skull is a very dangerous object,” he said. “It doesn’t . . . understand love. It doesn’t understand faith.”

  “That’s what we’re here for, right?” I asked him.

  “It’s not for me,” Michael said, setting his jaw.

  “You think I should take it on my first quest with me?” I asked.

  “God Almighty, no,” Michael said.

  “Just keep an eye on it until I get back.”

  “If it fell into the wrong hands . . .”

  “It won’t be my problem, because I’ll be all dead and stuff,” I said. “Michael, give me a break. I don’t need you rattling my confidence right now, right?”

  He looked chagrined for a second and then nodded. “Of course. If you weren’t the right person, the Sword wouldn’t have come to you.”

  “Unless it was an honest accident.”

  Michael smiled. “I don’t believe in accidents.”

  “I’d better get out. If God has any sense of humor at all, you’re going to get rear-ended any second now,” I said, and got out of the car. “I’ll call you when I know something.”

  “God go with you,” Michael said, and pulled away, leaving me standing on the curb alone.

  Just me.

  Oy.

  I took a deep breath, tried to imagine myself about two feet taller than I actually was, and walked quickly into the hospital.

  Moving around a hospital without being noticed is pretty easy. You just wear a doctor’s white coat, and some scrubs and some comfortable shoes and walk like you know exactly where you’re going.

  It also helps to have a doctor’s ID, and an actual MD, and to actually be a doctor who has sometimes worked there and to actually know exactly where you’re going.

  I’m a doctor, dammit, not a spy.

  “Patterson,” I said to a lanky ER nurse with a buzz cut and a lumberjack’s beard. “How’s my favorite druid?”

  Patterson looked up at me from a form-field-filled computer screen and squinted. “Waldo Butters, AKA Iputthepalin the Paladin. Your guild stiffed our guild on a treasure roll two weeks ago.”

  I pushed my glasses up on my nose. “Yeah, I’ve been kind of busy. Haven’t been online to keep the powergamers in check. My word, I’ll have Andi look into it, and we’ll make it up to you guys.”

  The nurse scowled at me, but let out a mollified grunt. “Hell are you doing down here? They kick you out of Corpse-sickles-R-Us?”

  “Not yet,” I said. Though they might, with as many times as I’d called in sick lately. I hadn’t been sick. Just too bruised and sore to move right. “Look, I’m kind of here on something personal. Maybe you could help me out.”

  Patterson stared at me with unamused eyes. Not to get too much into the details, but HIPA basically means that no one who wants to remain working in the medical field can share any patient information with anyone who isn’t directly involved in that patient’s care, unless the patient gives permission to do so. It’s the kind of thing people get reflexively paranoid about. Also the kind of thing you have to ask a favor to get them to overlook.

  “Why should I?” he asked.

  “Because I have something you want,” I said.

  “What?”

  I leaned a bit closer, and looked up and down the hall theatrically before speaking in a lowered tone. “What about . . . a blue murloc egg?”
>
  Patterson sat up ramrod-straight and his eyes widened. “What?”

  “You heard me,” I said.

  “Dude, don’t even joke about it,” he breathed. “You know it’s the last one I need.”

  “2005 was a very good year,” I drawled. I reached into my pocket and produced a plastic card from my wallet. “Behold. One code for one blue murloc. The rarest pet in all the game can be thine.” Patterson reached for the card with twitchy fingers, and I snapped it a bit farther away from him. “Do we have a deal?”

  “It’s legit?”

  I dropped the drama voice. “Yeah, man, I was actually at the con. It’s real, you have my word.”

  Patterson crowed and seized the card with absolutely Gollum-esque avarice. “Pleasure doing business with you, Iputthepalin.” He gestured for me to join him behind the desk, and rubbed his hands together in mock-epic greed. “What you need?”

  That’s the thing about knowing a lot of gamers. They do not necessarily count their riches with bank accounts. Not when there are virtual status symbols to acquire.

  “Guy got admitted a couple of hours ago, ER, first name Stan,” I said. “I sent him in with Reg Lamar, probable overdose. I want to see him.”

  Patterson started thumping on computer keys. “You sent him in?”

  “Out jogging this morning, found him seizing,” I said.

  He stopped typing for a second, and looked at me. Then he looked back at the monitor and said, “Someone’s taking his character way too seriously.”

  “Nah, I just have too many corpse-sickles already,” I said.

  “You’re just lucky it happened in the morning. We start getting busy come the afternoon.”

  I started to tell him that luck hadn’t had anything to do with it, and felt myself shiver.

  I mean, that’s kind of a huge thing to think about, you know? That in all probability, luck really hadn’t been involved. That God, or some version of God, who the Knights simply referred to as the Almighty, had knowingly arranged for me to be in the right place at the right time to help Stan—and that He (or She, or It, I mean I didn’t want to get too presumptuous, all things considered, and how should I know?) had done so in such a way as to make it uniquely possible for me, personally, to go help Stan.

  Could God, with all the majesty of the universe at his disposal, with the uncounted myriad of life forms to look after throughout practically uncountable galaxies, really be all that interested in one little drug addict? One little medical examiner, playing at being a hero?

  Answer that question with a yes or a no, and tell me which is the more terrifying. I’m not sure I can.

  I’d asked Michael the same question, more or less. He’d been of the opinion that God couldn’t not be interested on a personal level. That He knew each and every one of us too well to be anything less than passionately involved in caring about our lives and our choices.

  And honestly, that seemed a little stalker-y to me. I mean, bad enough when your mom is too interested in what you do. Do you really want God looking over your shoulder at every moment? Me, personally, that was too embarrassing to even consider.

  In the end, I’d decided that whatever the Almighty might care about or not care about, He seemed to be interested in helping people who needed help, at least where the Knights of the Cross were concerned. So, okay. Fine. I could work with the Guy. But all these deep questions bothered me.

  “Here he is, top of the list,” Patterson said. “Oh, Stanley Bowers. Been in and out a lot lately. I think I know this guy. Addict. One of the worst I’ve seen. Got maybe a year left in him if the weather isn’t too bad. Got a sedative, saline, observation.”

  “How’s he get the drugs?”

  “Disability, and some kind of court settlement. Pretty much sticks it up his nose. Won’t do rehab.”

  “Family?”

  “Nah. We’ve looked.”

  “Damn,” I said.

  “You want to help guys like this,” Patterson said. “But he doesn’t want to help himself. You know? You can’t save someone who don’t want to be saved.”

  “Doesn’t mean we can’t try,” I said. “Where is he?”

  Patterson peered at the monitor and rattled the keys a couple more times. Then he said, “Huh. That’s weird.”

  As a medical examiner, I don’t spend a lot of time in pediatrics. Neither, as a rule, do adult junkies—but for some reason, Stan had been moved up with the kids.

  I rode the elevator up, trying to look distracted and disinterested like a proper physician, most of whom were operating on not much sleep at least part of the time—but it was tough, because I was feeling something that I suspected was a deeper than usual anger.

  Whatever had hurt Stan was bad enough. But now there were kids involved. And some things you just don’t do. You know?

  I walked briskly into pediatrics. There are a ton of pediatric physicians at St. Tony’s, plus various pediatric specialists, consulting physicians, et cetera, et cetera. The floor was busy, its beds full, and the nurses had their plates full—and to make things worse, there were renovators at work on the floor. Plastic sheets hung from some of the walls, shutting parts of the floor off from the rest, and buckets and tools and sawhorses and materials were stacked up, blurry shapes just out of sight on the other side of the first layer of curtains.

  Workmen, tagged with hospital tags and clearly utterly ignorant of the place’s rhythms, were walking out, evidently headed to an early lunch break. One of them was flirting with a young nurse who obviously had a mile of work to do. It was kind of pandemonium, or what passes for it in an orderly hospital.

  I confess that I took advantage of it. I breezed in without any trouble, swooped up an armful of charts, and kept moving as though I knew exactly where I was going, scanning the charts as I did.

  I stepped into the first room where a girl, maybe eight or nine, was curled up into a fetal position on her side. She had a very pale little face, and hollows under her eyes as dark as tire marks on a city road. Her hair was brown and listless. I checked charts and found hers. Her name was Gabrielle. She twitched violently as she slept. Her breathing was unsteady, and she made constant sounds as she exhaled.

  I’d never been a father, but I didn’t have to be to know that little girl was in the grips of a nightmare. And given the medicine in her IV, she wasn’t going to be able to get out of it.

  I read the charts and they told me the story. Seven kids, plus Stan, were down with a remarkably similar set of symptoms. Paranoia, hysteria, insomnia, and a refusal to go to sleep due to horrible nightmares, especially any time at night, necessitating chemical intervention.

  Eight people.

  Holy moly.

  If that many people were down, and a Knight of the Cross had been sent to deal with it, even if that Knight was me, it meant that there was a supernatural predator of some kind at work. A genuine grade A monster. That was all mine to deal with.

  Just me.

  I guess maybe this wasn’t a beginner’s quest.

  I slipped out of the room and into the next one in the hall, and found Stan. He’d been restrained as well as being sedated, which dammit, should not have been happening in his condition. He should have been on saline and close monitoring until his body had a chance to process whatever combination of street drugs he’d been on that nearly killed him. He was in the same condition as the little girl, or worse—out of it, obviously suffering from some terrible dream and unable to escape it. His pulse was thready, his breath erratic, and his monitoring equipment had been jiggered—it was showing numbers that could not possibly have matched up to his respiration and heartbeat.

  Someone had done this to him.

  “Jesus, Stan,” I said. “I sent you into this. I’m sorry. I should have listened to you.”

  He didn’t respond, though his head kind of twitched in my direction. There was something desperate in the little movement. I bit my lip and put my hand on his head. “Hang in there, buddy,” I tol
d him. “Whatever power is given to me, I’ll use it to help you. I promise.”

  If whatever had done that to Stan and the kids found me snooping around, it would be happy to do exactly the same thing to me.

  My heart started beating faster. It took me a second to realize that it was pounding in time with rapid footsteps coming down the hall. Women’s heels. Click, clack, click, clack, firm and purposeful.

  I had a couple of seconds to realize that my fear and the footsteps were connected, and then, just in case that hadn’t been enough . . . an open square, maybe four feet by four, made of red light, appeared on the wall, evidently tracking the movement of something hostile coming down the hall toward the door to Stan’s room.

  I eyed the ceiling and muttered, “I get the point.” I looked around the room and weighed my options as my terror increased, and then ratcheted up more, and I panicked. I stepped into the bathroom and shut the door until it was almost all the way closed, and held very still.

  The monster stepped into sight. She wasn’t much of a monster as they went—maybe five-four in the low heels, a woman of slender build with dark hair. She was of Asian extraction, and her nametag read “Dr. Miyamune.” Behind the thick, dark rims of her glasses, her eyes were absolutely crystalline blue.

  As she came into the room, she paused, and her eyes swept back and forth, right past me. She didn’t look old, maybe mid-thirties, like a doctor who had finished her internship and was a few years into a specialist’s residency. Those blue eyes fastened hard on Stan, and suddenly she wasn’t just a woman in a white lab coat any more. She changed, right in front of me.

  It wasn’t a physical transformation. I mean, a camera wouldn’t have shown you bupkis. This was something deeper, something intangible. Her posture changed, slightly, from rigidly proper into a more relaxed, looser-limbed tension. Her eyes narrowed. It was her mouth that was worst. Her lips just sort of lifted away from her teeth. The expression was damned creepy, and I felt a little sick at the stomach.