Fall of Night: A Templar Chronicles Novel

by Joseph Nassise

  The lobby was literally jam-packed with people. They filled the waiting room chairs, leaned against the walls, and even sat cross-legged on the floor. At center stage were the television news crews, reporters standing with wireless microphones in small circles of light while being filmed by the portable cameras in the hands of their assistants. Gabrielle counted at least four different logos from major networks, as well as half-a-dozen others that she didn’t recognize.

  Probably local affiliate stations, she thought.

  A few police officers and hospital security guards moved among them, doing what they could to keep order in all the chaos.

  The majority of people in the room, however, looked like every-day people. Locals, maybe.

  A single glance told her that they were from all walks of life; young, old, rich, poor, it didn’t seem to matter. They huddled together wherever they could find room, some even resorting to sitting on the laps of those closest to them. Unlike the news crews, who seemed to be in a constant state of activity, the others sat calmly and quietly, patiently waiting for something.

  Waiting for what? she wondered, and then, hard on the hells of the first thought, came a second.

  What if it’s not a what, but a who?

  From over her shoulder, Magda confirmed her line of thought without being asked.

  “They’re waiting for you.”

  “For me?”

  The idea seemed preposterous.

  “What the heck for?”

  Instead of answering her, Magda inclined her head back toward the mass of people just on the other side of the door. “What do you see?” she asked.

  “A whole mess of people,” Gabrielle replied.

  Magda shook her head. “You’re not looking hard enough.”

  Frowning, Gabrielle turned back and surveyed the room a second time. That’s when she noticed that for every two or so healthy people in the room there was a third who was not. Without even turning her head she could see an elderly woman struggling to draw a breath of clean air from an oxygen tank hooked to the side of her wheelchair, a young man cradling the stump of his left arm in his other hand, as if to hide the deformity from those around him, and a young girl, probably no older than six or seven, the bandana tied around her head to hide the fact of her baldness, telling the story of her cancer to anyone who bothered to notice.

  It hit Gabrielle like a blow to the chest.

  Several of those gathered in the room carried signs asking for help from the Miracle Woman of Juarez, pleading with her to intercede for them in her prayers, to beg God to help them with their particular afflictions. Everywhere Gabrielle looked she saw another hope-filled face betting it all on a complete stranger.

  Their show of faith – misplaced though it may have been - was both humbling and frightening at the same time for she had done absolutely nothing to deserve it.

  Yes, her being here was a miracle, but it was a kind of miracle altogether different than the one the people believed had taken place. She’d possessed a helpless woman’s body, for heaven’s sake!

  Whatever savior these people were looking for, she certainly wasn’t it.

  And therein lay the problem.

  She had little doubt that if she stepped outside the stairwell, if she showed her face to the people waiting in the lobby, she’d be instantly recognized, and worse, mobbed by those waiting there. The security guards and police would try to maintain order, but in the end it would be little more than a fruitless gesture unless they were willing to use force and that was the last thing Gabrielle wanted to happen.

  For a moment she didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

  Without taking her gaze off of the “faithful” assembled out in the lobby, Gabrielle mumbled, “How on earth…”

  “Does it matter?” Magda asked. “You woke up when no one expected you to, with no sign whatsoever that you’d been injured in the first place. Even your scars are gone! Someone, somewhere saw that as an answer to prayer, a sign of faith, and suddenly the ‘Miracle Woman of Juarez’ has been personally blessed by the Virgin Mother and brought back from the verge of death. You’ve been made whole and now they want you to do the same for them.”

  Gabrielle turned and stared at her, incredulous. “But I can’t do that!”

  Magda snorted. “Yeah, no shit.”

  The anger in Magda’s tone brought Gabrielle up short.

  “Why do I get the feeling you think this is somehow my fault?” she asked, letting the door to the lobby slide quietly shut as she did so.

  Her therapist glared at her for a moment, but when Gabrielle refused to turn away, her expression softened.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It’s not your fault; I know that.”

  “But?”

  Magda shook her head. “No buts.” She waved at the door to the lobby. “It’s all that fanatical, religious shit. Just gets my goat. No offense but you gotta be a little nuts to believe in all that stuff anyway. Santa Ana? Mi culo!”

  There didn’t seem to be a lot that Gabrielle to could say to that so she just let it go, but as Madga led the way back up the stairs, Gabrielle found herself thinking that not just Madga but the world was soon going to find out that there might just be a bit more to all that ‘angels and demons’ stuff than anyone ever imagined if the Adversary had its way.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Extend your hands in front of you palms down, please.”

  Without saying anything, Gabrielle did as she was asked.

  “Now I’m going to push down on the backs of your hands and I want you to resist me while I do so. Don’t let me push your hands down if you can help it, alright?”

  A weary sigh threatened to pass her lips, but she suppressed it and once again did as she was told. She and the doctor had been doing these very same exercises every day since she’d first regained consciousness and she could have done them in her sleep at this point, explanations or not.

  “Good. Now turn your hands so your palms face each other, pinkie fingers aimed at the floor, and resist my efforts to push them toward each other, okay?”

  The two of them went through another half-dozen body exercises and then out came the doctor’s flashlight.

  “Follow this with your eyes, please.”

  Left, right, up, down, in toward her face and then slowly back out.

  “Okay, that’s good. Very good, in fact,” Vargas said, stepping back. He put the light away in the pocket of his lab coat, picked up Gabrielle’s medical file from the bed next to her, and began making notes.

  Gabrielle gave him a moment and then asked, “Very good, huh? So that means I can get out of here soon?”

  Without looking up from the file the doctor shook his head. “We still have quite a bit more testing to do, I’m afraid. We’re going to need at least a few more weeks to get them all scheduled.”

  This time, Gabrielle couldn’t hold back the sigh.

  That got the doctor’s full attention. Pursing his lips in disapproval, he closed the file folder, looked her in the eye, and said, “These tests are important, Anna, and you really need to take them seriously. We need to make certain that there isn’t any long-term damage to your neurological system before releasing you. We don’t want you suffering additional injury because we were not quite thorough enough, now do we?”

  He’s lying.

  The thought swam up from somewhere in the back of her mind, as if it had just been sitting there, waiting to surface. As with Madga earlier that afternoon, Gabrielle knew with complete certainty that she was correct. Dr. Vargas was keeping her here for some reason that had nothing to do with her current health or rate of recovery. She could feel it, like a discordant humming way down deep in her bones that made her want to grind her teeth in response.

  But why?

  She didn’t know.

  There were no more tests; at least none that needed to be run to determine her overall health or medical stability. They wouldn’t be allowing her to push so hard during physical ther
apy if they were honestly concerned that she might jeopardize her recovery.

  There was something else going on here.

  The obvious answer, she thought, was simple greed. She already knew her case was extraordinary; they weren’t calling her the miracle woman of Juarez for nothing. Vargas was clearly trying to understand what had happened to accelerate her healing in so significant a manner and she didn’t blame him for that. It was his job, after all, to understand what was going on with the patients under his care. But there was more to it than that. Understanding what was happening was only the first step. No doubt he’d realized the potential implications – both personally and financially – of turning that understanding into a process that could be replicated in other patients. Doing so could potentially be worth millions, perhaps even billions, of dollars over time provided he could figure out a way to claim ownership of the protocol or patent the process needed. The notoriety he would gain by being associated with the discovering the procedure would alone be worth a pretty penny in speaking and appearance fees, she knew.

  But something told her that there was even more to it than that.

  Maybe it had to do with the cost of her care? It couldn’t have been cheap and someone clearly had to pay for it all. Maybe that was Vargas’ game; keep running tests, and therefore increasing the cost of her overall care, and then use that as leverage to claim ownership of whatever those tests revealed?

  No, that didn’t feel right either. While she wouldn’t put it past the hospital to pull that kind of nonsense, it felt a little too convoluted. Vargas was up to something else.

  Not wanting to raise his suspicions, she smiled and nodded. “You’re quite right. The last thing I want to do is jeopardize my recovery.”

  “That’s the spirit, Anna. A positive attitude will only help your progress. And while I hate to bring it up, there is still the issue of your fractured memory. I’m sure you’d like to see some improvement in that as well.”

  She’d definitely like to see her memory improve, but she really didn’t believe that Vargas could help in that regard. She suspected the problem was more a result of her consciousness not being native to the body it was currently in than anything to do with the physical damage Anna had suffered in her accident.

  And that wasn’t exactly the kind of problem she could discuss with the good doctor even if she trusted him.

  Which she didn’t.

  So she smiled and nodded and did what she could to appear compliant to his suggestions regarding her care while inwardly she was just counting the minutes until the exam was over. When he finally signed off on her chart for the day and took his leave, she breathed a quiet sigh of relief.

  Gabrielle wandered over to the window and stared out at the streets of Jaurez below, thinking about her next move. Truth was, if Dr. Vargas had signed off on her release, she wouldn’t have known what to do anyway. She knew she had to find her husband and tell him about what the Adversary had done, but after that things got pretty hazy. She remembered her husband’s name and what he looked like, but had no idea where he was or how to find him.

  And without a computer or cell phone, she couldn’t do much even if she did.

  She was tempted to ask a nurse for help, but they would no doubt report the request back to Vargas, who in turn would see it as a regression. After all, she’d already admitted that her so-called husband was just a figment of her disorientation upon awakening from her coma. He’d just add more tests to his already lengthy list and that wouldn’t help.

  Another option might be to bribe one of the orderlies to do some digging on the internet on her behalf, but she didn’t have anything to bribe them with, besides her body, and she wasn’t that desperate, at least not yet.

  For now, she’d simply have to bide her time and hope Dr. Vargas released her soon. Once he had, she could figure out how she was going to track down Cade.

  .

  CHAPTER SIX

  Nearly four thousand miles northeast of Juarez, deep in a tunnel outside of Montpelier, Vermont, Knight Captain Matthew Riley held up a clenched fist, silently signaling those behind him to stop as he knelt to examine the tracks on the floor ahead.

  The men of Echo Team’s First and Second Squads came to a halt as instructed, taking up defensive positions in a staggered formation along either side of the tunnel, their weapons at the ready and covering their commander while his attention was elsewhere.

  The team had been ordered to Vermont earlier in the week after reports of “bipedal, lizard-like creatures in the woods outside of town” had begun to pop up on the dark net, that portion of the internet frequented by hackers, UFO nuts, and, of course, conspiracy freaks. The Order monitored it regularly for just such activity, for while the rest of the world thought such stories were nonsense, the Templars knew better. In between the obviously false stories about the infamous Bat Boy of Indonesia or the real location of the lost island of Atlantis, there were others that contained a glimmer of truth to them, stories that might indicate the presence of paranormal or supernatural elements operating in secret on the fringes of human society. Those were the stories that the Order was most interested in and it had been just such a tale that had promoted Echo’s presence in Vermont that evening.

  Riley and the rest of Echo Team had set up shop in a local motel, explaining away the weapons in their vehicles as nothing more dangerous than realistic-looking paint-ball replicas when asked by the locals, and then set out in groups of three to search the area in question for any signs of the so-called lizard men.

  For the first three days of the search they didn’t find a single piece of evidence that there was anything unusual happening in the area. Riley was about to call it quits when Second Squad came upon a set of Croatan tracks. Apparently the lizard people sightings were authentic after all.

  Croatan were small, bipedal goblin-like creatures that reminded Riley of a cross between a pissed-off velociraptor and Gollum from the Lord of the Rings. In addition to being ugly, they also had a penchant for human flesh and that meant Echo’s mission was far from over.

  After that, their luck changed. Within hours of heading into the woods just north of town, Riley and his men ran right into a pack of armed Croatan. He called for their surrender, as the Rule required, only to have his request met with a barrage of stone-tipped arrows heavy enough to force him and the rest of his squad to seek cover. They returned fire, killing several of the creatures in the process, but hadn’t been fast enough to prevent the survivors from hightailing it into a nearby cave, which, on closer inspection, turned out to be the mouth of the underground complex of old mining tunnels.

  The same tunnels in which the members of Echo Team now found themselves.

  Riley was not a happy camper.

  For one, he hated tunnels. In his time with the Order he’d been in a couple hundred of the blasted things but he was no more comfortable with them now than he’d been on day one. At 6’ 2”, he was always having to move through them partially bent over and all that earth and rock so close to the top of his head set his nerves to vibrating something fierce. He wasn’t claustrophobic - tight, enclosed spaces in general didn’t bother him - just the ones underground apparently.

  Like the tunnel he was crouched in now.

  To be fair, the tunnel was fairly expansive. It was wide enough to walk three abreast and the ceiling was several inches over his head. It wasn’t the size of the place that bothered him, but rather the sense that there were thousands of tons of rock and dirt just hanging over his head. The walls and ceiling were supported by thick wooden timbers every hundred feet or so, but the timbers themselves weren’t in the best condition and did little to reassure Riley that the whole place wasn’t going to come crashing down around his ears at any second.

  He scowled at the tracks that were barely visible in the dust on the tunnel floor. It was too damn dark to see them clearly, given that the only illumination was a faint blue-green sheen coming from the lichen covering the walls on e
ither side. Riley was tempted to use the flashlight on his belt, but he knew the Croatan would be able to see the light from a long way off. Using it would simply give away their position, allowing the enemy time to mount an ambush.

  The scaly little bastards.

  A bit grumpy tonight, aren’t we? an inner voice asked and Riley could only snort in amusement at his own irritation. The events of the last several weeks, from Cade Williams’ arrest to his escape and eventual defeat of the Adversary, had put the entire Order on edge, himself included. Given that Williams was not only an old friend but his former commander and squad mate, the events involving the Adversary were particularly upsetting to him. Cade’s subsequent disappearance even more so.

  He would rather be out looking for Cade and helping his friend clear his name of the bogus charges trumped up against him than just about anything else, but orders were orders and Riley had been a Templar far too long to simply ignore them without proper cause.

  Which leaves me chasing scaly little bastards around in the dark.

  He shook his head to clear it of all the extraneous thoughts – wouldn’t do to get distracted at this point – and refocuse his attention on what to do next. The tunnel they’d been moving down forked left and right a few feet in front of him. It was hard to see clearly in this dim light, but it looked to him that the tracks continued down both branches.

  They split up, he realized.

  That left him with two options. Split his team as well – thereby lessening the firepower they could bring to bear in any given situation – or allow one set of Croatan to escape while his entire squad followed the other. Truth be told, he didn’t like either option.

  For a moment he considered turning around and heading back above ground. He could call in reinforcements and they could give these tunnels a proper scouring.