I am here to help you, I know that now.
We meet at the First Baptist on Western every Tuesday and Thursday at 6:30pm. Light refreshments may be offered, eternal salvation guaranteed.
Every flier he and Stack handed out that day was a seed planted. Maybe the smoker wouldn’t look twice at it, but his wife could find it while doing the laundry. Maybe he’d pull it out and laugh with his buddy at work. But that seed could sink deep into someone’s brain only to bloom when they heard about strange things happening around the world.
Randall had seen these things with his own two eyes, had heard the stories police officers muttered to one another when they thought no one was around. People were gonna be scared and looking for answers and Randall planned on being there for them.
Stack’s voice pulled him from an almost trance-like state. He held a sweating bottle of water up to Randall, his brow furrowed in confusion.
“You alright, man? I was sayin’ your name,” he frowned.
Randall gladly accepted the water. As he drank it in with greedy gulps, he was surprised to find the sun had sunk below the building. There were plenty of hours left in the day, but it was well past noon.
“You were sayin’ some weird things up there, do you know that?”
“Was I?” he asked dreamily, unable to remember the last few hours. It happened often enough, it wasn’t alarming.
“You think it’s about quittin’ time?” Stack asked.
Randall stepped down from the crate, his muscles and joints stiff. “How many more sheets do we have?” he asked between sips.
“I dunno, a bunch,” Stack replied.
“We stay until they’re gone. Tomorrow, we print more, then stay until those are gone. That’s all we can do for now.”
Stack did his best to conceal his frustration and boredom. Randall knew he’d been hoping for a more exciting position as second-in-command. He gave his friend’s shoulder a hard squeeze, half comforting, half reminding him who was in charge.
“It won’t take long until the tide changes and all this will be a distant memory.”
Stack squinted at him, obviously dubious. “And when will we know that’s happened? I can’t be standing out in parking lots for the rest of my life.”
“You’ll know,” Randall grinned. He finished the bottle of water and nodded. “Hand out the rest of those to anyone who’ll take them. Come back to me when you’re finished and I’ll buy you dinner. Sound good?”
He perked up at the promise of food. “Fuck yeah, you got it.” A simple man, Randall thought.
After a quick roll of the head, Randall stepped back onto the milk crate feeling refreshed and invigorated. The crowds had changed. It was no longer the unemployed, the retired, or stay-at-home moms. Families filtered past, workers either finishing a shift or heading off for one. This late in the day, everyone was distracted, so he had to cut through.
“I don’t want to scare you,” he shouted, “but the end is coming. God has granted me first vision of this horrible plague.”
A few fearful, doubting glances were cast in his direction but no one stopped. It did nothing to deter him. All he was doing was throwing seeds into a bed of dirt, hoping a few would take root and sprout.
“Now is the time for action, before you are confronted by the gruesome reality rushing toward us. Put your faith in God and he will show you the way. Let me, a humble servant, guide you to his message.”
San Francisco
May 22nd
“I don’t know if I’m up to this,” Penelope yawned. “This is my third cup and I’m still not awake.”
Cameron continued to stare at the table top, head resting on his palm. “It doesn’t care if you’re ready or not. It’s coming.”
“How many did Lal say came in today?”
“Enough.” Cameron traced an invisible line across the table, shifting and pushing whatever was in his way.
Penelope had seen Cameron in stressful situations. She wondered if this is what the moments before combat felt like. This tense boredom, knowing the world was about to explode apart and there was nothing you could do to stop it. She wanted to simultaneously run away and dive straight in, get it over with. How many times had Cameron sat in a position like this, waiting? Is this how he coped?
While grateful to know that a wave of these sorts of patients were coming in, it did nothing to alleviate her own anxieties. And when she was anxious, she tended to ramble.
“At least we can see it coming, right? We’re well staffed, we’re prepared.”
“No fucking thanks to Hung or anyone else.”
“Hey, it was your idea to leave them out of this. You know there’ll be questions afterward, right? They’ll notice the increase in staff and wonder how we knew.”
Cameron swiped his desk clean with an angry push. “Good. Besides,” he snapped, pointing an angry finger at her, “he left me no choice. I still don’t know where he took Mrs. McKenzie. If another one comes in like her again…”
“I know, I know. We’ve gone over it a hundred times,” she nodded.
Penelope drank the bitter, tepid coffee and looked away. She needed to get her mind off the incoming wave before she screamed. “Joey wants to move into a unit.” Cameron sniffed and crossed his arms, as she rambled on. “He keeps saying he needs the help, he misses being around people.”
“I thought the point of marrying a doctor and having kids was to be able to afford help,” he snorted.
Relieved she’d gotten him to engage, Penelope launched into the conversation fully. “That’s just it. He doesn’t want to stop being a stay-at-home Dad. But the word nanny is tantamount to divorce in our house.”
Cameron leaned back in the chair, threading his hands behind his head. “So move into a unit.” She made a grunt in disgust which finally drew his gaze over. “What? You didn’t mind it when we were together.”
Before she could catch them, her eyebrows shot up. In the five years they’ve been working together again in San Francisco, he hadn’t brought up their past once.
She shifted under his scrutiny. “We uh, we didn’t have a kid. It was different.”
“That it was.”
The air hung heavy between them, a whole history of good and bad memories clogging their minds and holding their tongues. Penelope was on the verge of apologizing, for what she wasn’t sure. She jumped when Cameron abruptly stood.
“We should do a quick round before it hits.”
Swallowing a stomach full of emotions down, Penelope nodded. “Yeah, sure.”
The pair visited each guarded room, greeting each bored police officer stationed out front. Because the patients didn’t require anything more than basic monitoring, they were all watched by a pair of nurses at the central station. Cameron and Penelope coming in wasn’t routine but also not rare.
“You know Hung will hear about this,” Penelope muttered as she shut the door.
“I hope he does.” Cameron stalked to the first bed and stooped in front of the patient, a young woman with yellowing bruises on her face. He stood only a few feet away, his eyes directly in line with hers. “She was in the first wave, right?”
“I believe so, yes,” Penelope replied. It was unnerving. It almost seemed like they were looking directly at him. Catatonic patients typically have a dull, fish-eye aspect. It’s like you can almost see the wheels whirring on behind the scenes but there’s no spark, no light. Several times she’d tried to explain it to Joey but every time it came off sounding vaguely… religious.
Cameron performed the same motion in front of every patient. He’d scan their chart, give them a quick look over, and stoop directly in front of them. While examining the fifth one, he dropped his bombshell.
“I’m being followed.”
“You what now?”
“I’m being followed,” he replied as casually as if he were ordering lunch. “I’m pretty sure it’s Hung or maybe someone from the CDC, but I’m definitely being followed.”
&
nbsp; Mental alarm bells began to ring again in Penelope’s mind. As she searched for the right tone to respond with, Cameron laughed.
“I’m not losing my mind.”
She sputtered. “I wasn’t thinking that. You’ve been under a lot of pressure in an odd environment. It’s understandable if you…”
Cameron straightened and approached her after examining the last patient. They were in the center of the room, eight beds with eight silent patients facing inward. He leaned close, his lips brushing her ear.
“I’m only telling you in here because I know they’re listening. If it’s something sinister, then you know. If it’s just surveillance, then they’ll probably back off.”
Penelope shook her head and pulled away, dizzied by his intensity. “Maybe you should go to the police. Tell someone about it, about everything.”
Cameron smiled warmly for the first time in recent memory. It was on the loving side of condescending. “I would if I thought it’d help.”
He put an extra step of space between them and rested his hands on his hips.
“What? What are you thinking?”
“Can you imagine what it’s like? To be trapped inside your own body without being able to move? Imagine in they are aware in there, listening to us right now, unable to scream out and tell us.”
Penelope’s heart softened. Any thoughts that Cameron had lost the plot were wiped from her mind. His gruff exterior made it easy to forget he had a soft heart. It may have been padded with steel wool and razor wire, but it was still capable of breaking.
“We are. We’re doing the best we can,” she comforted, squeezing his hand.
When their eyes met, she saw a new sparkle there. He smiled, softer this time. “It really is like being caught in… stasis.”
Penelope frowned at his odd statement. He held her gaze intently, almost boring into her with his eyes. The sensation made her skin crawl until she finally had to look away over his shoulder.
She blinked a few times, unsure if what she was seeing was just a trick of the shadows. She looked at each patient and gasped. With every fiber of her being, she wanted to run to the door but her feet remained rooted to the spot.
“They’re looking at us,” she whispered.
With Cameron, she scanned the faces of all eight patients. With an impartial, benign gaze, all eight patients had turned their focus directly on the pair in the center of the room. She was too caught up in her own, but Penelope would later remember Cameron’s reaction.
He performed the same behavior as he had when they first entered the room, only this time, every patient followed him with their eyes. Their bodies perfectly still, their heads and eyes were the only parts moving. One by one he crouched in front of each bed, allowed a second of eye contact to pass, before moving onto the next.
Penelope swallowed a gasp as she made contact with the door. She’d been moving backwards without realizing it. Each catatonic patient was only concerned with one person. Cameron, who seemed completely unfazed by the stunning development. In fact, looking back, it seemed as though he’d almost been expecting it.
As he bent in front of the very last bed, they were both paged to the emergency room downstairs. Penelope opened her mouth to ask or say one of the thousand things running through her head, but at the call, she clapped her mouth shut.
And as casually as if asking her to dance, Cameron strode to the door. “Shall we?”
Despite thirty-two patients rolling through the doors at a rapid pace, the emergency room was almost still. Maybe it was because she was lost in her own head, running through the events that’d happened upstairs, but Penelope couldn’t believe how calm the ward was. Like a complex machine, each person and cog moved in absolute harmony.
Every time she attempted to pull Cameron away to discuss what had happened, something pulled them apart. The one time in three hours she did manage to get him to herself, she lost all train of thought.
“I think we need to move some of the first ones upstairs or we’ll run out of beds soon,” she’d said. What she really wanted to say was, What the fuck happened up there, Cam? The words failed her.
She did take a moment to scan the bizarre scene. The emergency psychiatric ward was always different from a typical emergency department. Psychological cases took longer to sort through and diagnose. A patient walks in clutching the bone protruding from their leg, it’s pretty simple to figure out what’s wrong. A patient comes into the psych ED raving and largely uncooperative, it takes some time to sort through their case. On top of that, most issues she saw downstairs weren’t fixed by a simple cast.
So to see the ward running smoothly, calmly, quietly, was almost as bizarre as eight catatonic patients turning their heads in unison.
At what, though? She wondered. Were we lucky enough to see a breakthrough in their treatment? Or was it everything he was going on about being trapped in their own body. Even the memory of it made her shiver.
Nearly each bay was filled with a quiet and still patient. As Penelope scanned over the logs for the night, she had to remind herself that for every calm patient she treated here, there was a dead body being bagged and tagged out there.
Penelope was at the central desk nibbling on a protein bar she didn’t want but needed. She was idly chatting with a pair of nurses she’d gotten to known since the crisis had begun when a blood-thickening scream echoed down the hall. It sucked the air out of the ward. Every person froze for a moment until the next scream broke them free.
Penelope and Cameron jogged to the incoming patient from different sides of the ward, meeting as the bed rolled inside. Immediately, she could see why the EMTs, nurses, and two policemen escorting the bed were in pale shock.
With his calm, I-have-everything-under-control voice, Cameron stepped up. “What do we have?”
“Female, mid-twenties, multiple lacerations to her arms, legs and face.”
The girl thrashed against her restraints, clawing at every person who came near. Penelope noted dark blood and flesh caked under each nail of her long fingers, at least, under the ones that hadn’t torn away from her fingers. Her eyes rolled in her head like a spooked horse.
“Okay, let’s get her fully restrained,” Cameron continued. The nurses exchanged worried looks over the patient before Cameron barked his order again. “Sedate her if necessary.” He turned to Penelope with the same sparkle in his eye she’d seen upstairs. “I believe this is an acute and transient psychotic episode, wouldn’t you agree, Dr. Mercier?”
Falling into place, she agreed with his diagnosis just as they’d planned. “Absolutely. These lacerations look superficial to me, so let’s get these bandaged up first. And give her something to calm down, will you?” she barked. “Doctor?” she added, tilting her head to the far side of the ward.
Once she and Cameron were alone, it was nearly impossible to hide their giddiness. “We need to get her in for an fMRI straight away.”
“It’s good this wave is late. Hung won’t be around, but he might have people watching in different departments,” said Penelope. “Which nurses do you trust down here?”
Cameron scanned the ward casually. “There are a few, but everyone has a price. If we make it seem like we’re interested because we’re bored of these botulism cases, then we might not raise any suspicions. This could be the last chance we have before all eyes are on us.”
“Still, let’s keep it as quiet as possible.”
“It’ll be hard to do tonight.” He dipped his head low, his voice even lower. “Have you noticed how strange people are acting? Like they’re watching us?”
“They’re the ones you’re paranoid are watching us?” Penelope scoffed, laughing at the absurdity of it all. “Before you go home tonight, I want an explanation for what happened earlier.”
Cameron gave her an old wicked smile she hadn’t seen for years. “I’ll do my best.”
Penelope paced the hallway outside as she spoke to her husband. Every step felt like she was strug
gling through ankle-deep snow. Her limbs were heavy, eyelids drooping, and the last thing she needed was a royal guilt trip.
“You said you’d be home for Anna’s doctor’s appointment. I know you’re busy, but if you can predict these waves coming in…”
“I have other work to do too,” she reminded him, pinching the bridge of her nose.
“How could I forget?” he snapped.
She couldn’t remember the last time they’d spoken without it devolving into an argument. All she wanted was to find some magical combination of words that would make this conversation resolve happily. Unfortunately, that was a mystery she wouldn’t be able to solve tonight.
“Sweetie, I’m sorry. I really am. But you need to understand things move so quickly here, I don’t always have time to take a piss, let alone call you.”
He sighed. She could hear his fingers drumming on a table or counter. “I miss you,” he whispered as if he hated saying it.
Penelope’s heart clenched. “I miss you, too. I promise, this is worth it. This is…”
Cameron popped his head out into the hallway. “We’ve got images coming in.”
She acknowledged him and sighed again. “I’m sorry. I have to go.”
The connection was lost, love drained from his voice. “Of course you do.”
A new terrifying thought popped into her head. “You’ll be there when I get home, right?” What scared her more was that the question didn’t sound new to her husband.
“For now.”
Shaken from her conversation, Penelope ended the call and refocused her energies on the task at hand. As long as this pans out to be as big as I think it is, it’ll be worth it.
She quickly shut the door behind as she stepped into the dark room. Cameron and the technician, Hannah, were staring at a wall of monitors, three across and two high.
Cameron glanced back over his shoulder. “You won’t believe this.”
Penelope’s eyes darted from screen to screen as each layer came in. She understood the basics of what was happening. Oxygen floods to certain parts of the brain when it’s activated. The radioactive dye coursing through the patient’s body picks up and throws back the oxygenated, active sections. So when a person sees a human face, specific parts of their brain will light up. When presented with a photo of a house, different sections light up. Layer by thin layer, the machine scans through the brain to create a 3D model. Outside of clinical research papers, she’d never spent any time with the technology. But even to her, these pictures were odd.
Stasis (Book 1.2): Beta Page 2
