Interference

by S. L. LUCK

  “I hear you. It would make much more sense on a screen, but right now it’s on the fifth floor in our ICU. We had to move three other patients from that unit to our cardiac unit and fly two to Toronto just to make room. I’m not making this up. I wish to God I was. Her whole body is a live wire.” The doctor’s cheeks puffed wide as he blew out a long breath.

  Dan saw the seriousness in Huxley’s face but couldn’t reconcile the story with the factions of reality. “I want to believe you, Greg, but it sounds like fiction to me. You’re telling me she’s a conductor of electricity?”

  Huxley shook his head. “We’re all conductors of electricity, but from what we can see,” he paused to steady his next words, “she seems to be a generator of it.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Huxley pulled at his bottom lip. “Originally, we thought the charge was coming from her monitor, but now we’re sure that isn’t the case. Nothing from the IV pump, either. The only other thing connected to her body is her collection bag. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never heard of electric piss, and we can change the bag, no problem.”

  “Can I see her?” Dan asked.

  “I insist you do. Maybe if you believe me, you can wrangle up your own kind of help and figure out what the hell is going on. I tell you, Dan, I’m this close to calling the Feds.” He thrust his thumb and forefinger out to the police chief.

  Dan leaned backward in his chair, recoiling at the idea of outside intervention. While he felt that good policework required teamwork, he also knew that inputs with ego and superiority often halted progress, sometimes completely. To Huxley, he said, “If you feel the need, Greg, I’m all for it, but remember what they did when you called them in for that Smith boy? The one with that stuff on his leg that was making him hallucinate? They damn near shut down the city when the kid just had a reaction from that pit in Tar Vat Bay. They wanted us to block a five-mile radius around the city. What a nightmare that was.”

  “Terrible way to end a family vacation.”

  Huxley recalled that the kid hadn’t told his parents he’d fallen near the tar pit, so it was three days later when they returned home that the boy began to hallucinate. The boy was at the age where baths were avoided at all costs, so the toxins had plenty of time to leach into his skin. Unaware, Huxley had ordered every blood and diagnostic test he could think of, but they had all returned inconclusive. Eventually the boy began to improve, but then his little sister, who had no previous symptoms, fell into a coma shortly after he was released from the hospital. Their parents had also developed nausea so severe they had to be hospitalized. Huxley had consulted with professionals across the continent, and when investigations inside the Smith family home provided no further information, he alerted the Public Health Agency.

  Concerned with the possibility of virulent transmission, the PHA had just convinced the minister of health to authorize a lockdown on the city just as the source of the trouble was discovered. Not only had the Smith boy fallen into toxic tar, but his little sister had collected several containers of the material during a family hike. The “black slime” she subsequently took home and played with led to the hospitalization of her entire family.

  Until Anabelle Cheever, the Smith family had been his most difficult professional experience, and he now called on that experience. “We both want to avoid that, Dan. It’s absolutely a last resort, but we can’t discount it completely. The law compels us to do what is right, no?”

  Dan said. “We’ll do what’s necessary, but let me ask you this: is she contagious? Whatever she has, or whatever is happening to her, are any of your other patients like that? Any symptoms of … electrification?” Immediately Dan felt ridiculous for saying the word, for playing into a situation that made no rational sense.

  “No, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen.”

  “If you ask me, none of this can happen.”

  “You’re right on that one, but it is, and we have to deal with it, which leads me to the main reason I called you. Chung’s all over this place. She’s practically in the nurse’s laps. We’ve asked her to leave and had her escorted out, but she just keeps coming back. She snatched a stack of patient files right off the fifth-floor nursing station, and our guys had to trap her in the stairwell to get them back.”

  On the other side of Huxley’s desk, Dan’s eyebrows went up. “You still have her?”

  The doctor shook his head. “No. She sweet-talked a new guard who let her go. He’s looking for a job, if you want him.”

  “I’ll pass.”

  There was a shuffling of feet in the hallway outside Huxley’s door, but he ignored it. “Ms. Cheever needs some protection, I’m afraid. Can you swing it?”

  “We can do that.” Dan reached into his pocket. His fingers fluttered quickly over his phone as he typed a message to Sarah, then he looked up at Huxley. “I’ll pay a visit to the station, too. Sometimes a warning in uniform is all it takes. Even TV folks have hearts if you look close enough.”

  “I appreciate that. I—”

  Beeps and bells and bellows rang out from the other side of Huxley’s door, then the doctor’s phone rang. He looked at the number on the screen and lifted the receiver to his ear. He hadn’t uttered a single word when the voice on the other side of the line hollered loud enough for Dan to hear. Everywhere … cats … inside. Slowly, slowly, Huxley drew the phone away from his ear. Then he rose from his desk and went to the door. Sensing trouble, the police chief followed the doctor into the hallway, where bullets of fur were zipping down the corridor, flashing into rooms, bounding over chairs, and thrashing into panicked nurses and horrified patients.

  “What the bloody hell?!” Dan cried. He thought to draw his gun but quickly holstered it. Instead, he whipped out his phone and called Sarah, directing her to send a squad of officers and animal control to Garrett General. He stepped back into Huxley’s office as a large tabby zoomed past his legs, a length of IV tubing dangling from its mouth.

  “Who let them in?” Huxley shouted down the hall, but everyone was too busy fending off cats to answer.

  Dan shook an orange cat off his leg.

  One of the nurses tossed her apple juice at a charging Persian and it scrambled away. This gave Huxley an idea. “The supply closet!” he called to Dan and led him six doors away to a public restroom, beside which was a small room.

  The doctor fumbled with his key, glad he had had the foresight to take them from his drawer. Growls and hisses and shrieks resounded behind them, and soon the men were armed with mops and a bucket full of water, which they now rolled out in front of them. A whizz of black shot toward them. Huxley dunked the end of his mop into the water and whipped it at the cat. Great splashes of water hit the cat’s face, and its nails skittered against the floor as it retreated, meowing angrily.

  Dan saw the hasty withdrawal and dipped his own mop into the bucket; now both the doctor and the police chief were dashing down the halls, swinging their wet weapons this way, that way, corralling the wayward animals into a corner near the elevators. Without warning, a bell rang and the farthest doors opened to the faces of two elderly women swaddling large bouquets of flowers in their arms.

  “Gah!” one of the women cried, dropping her flowers as seven cats rushed into the compartment. Quickly, she pulled her stupefied companion from the elevator just as the doors closed on the frenzied felines.

  Huxley ran to the nursing station and hailed help to Elevator B at all levels, then he ran back to the elevator Dan was guarding.

  A breathless nurse rushed to them and clutched his wrist. “You got them all, thank God, but we’ve got more on the fifth and maybe a dozen in the ER. Can you get them?” He bent forward with his hands on his thighs, panting. Blood dripped from his left wrist, where he’d been bitten by a cat.

  “You all right, José?” Huxley asked him.

  The nurse nodded. “But I can’t leave the floor. Three of them attacked Brenda, and she’s getting treated for a sever
e allergic reaction, so we’ll be short until we get cover in. You go, I’ll watch the elevator,” he said.

  In the middle of the corridor at the nurses’ station, the phone began to ring, but all the nurses were in patient rooms or receiving medical treatment themselves. From behind the desk, something began to beep, but that, too, went unanswered.

  Then the instinct which had carried him through many years of tough police work surged through Dan. He instructed the nurse. “Call security and have them lock the elevators down, but make sure there are no people inside; then watch this door, and whatever you do, don’t let them out if they make their way back. Get a bucket of water; that will send them scrambling. Hux, we need to stick together. Which floor has more people?”

  “The first, our ER, of course. The fifth is where our ICU is, but we only have one patient there: Ms. Cheever.” His eyes swung over the police chief, who was suddenly overcome with indecision.

  Finally, Dan said, “We can’t leave her.”

  He led Huxley back to the supply closet to fill another bucket of water. Even inside, the sirens sounded close, so near to the hospital that they seemed part of the facility itself. Sarah’s voice erupted from the radio on Dan’s chest, and he knew that help had arrived.

  “Dr. Huxley! Dr. Huxley!” José rushed from the nursing desk waving his arms as Dan and Huxley rolled their buckets out of the closet. “You”—he breathed heavily— “you don’t have to go to the fifth anymore.”

  “Why not?” Dan asked the nurse, whose wrist was still bleeding freely.

  “They’re all dead, sir,” José told him. “The cats. I think they’ve been electrocuted.”

  8

  From inside Sylvia Baker’s sleeping body, Pandora felt the itch. The feeling crawled over her like a newly hatched sac of spiders. She felt a tingle in places that never tingled and prickles in places that never prickled.

  The sensation was uncomfortable not only because it provoked the same grating irritation of human mosquito bites in hard-to-scratch places, but also because the feeling portended an upheaval she’d experienced only once before, with the medicine man.

  She’d made the mistake of taking his witchcraft lightly and remembered now how he had whispered to a crow, sourced its cunning, and targeted its dark flock upon her. Until then, Pandora had been able to control anything with a heartbeat, anything that breathed, but the medicine man had siphoned that power with his chantings and burnings and swingings, and then she’d felt what she thought she would never feel: discomfort. The birds had started slowly, nagging at her spaces, pulling her togetherness apart, and, unfamiliar with the sensation as she was, Pandora had actually thought it signified a strengthening of her power. How naïve.

  While she came to understand that she was immortal, she also knew that her immortality was predicated on human acquisition: she needed hosts to survive. Her existence outside of the human body was great, but eventually she became malnourished and ineffective. When the itch first came, she thought that perhaps whatever deity made her had finally put in what was left out, and that she might never need a host again. She realized her foolishness the moment the itch became pain, a realization that almost came too late. Presently, she sought outside of herself, looking for the medicine man, but he was far away in Africa, where his powers couldn’t reach her. No, some other force was working to disconnect Pandora, but she wasn’t sure who or what that was. She only knew that it was close.

  Centuries ago, after her experience with the medicine man, she would have fled from whatever lurked after her. But Harold was gone, and Pandora was alone. He was the first one she’d ever really grieved, and that sorrow had to go somewhere. She would channel her heartache, that terrible thing, first into discovery and then into, well, death—of course. That would make her feel better. It always did.

  While she didn’t necessarily require rest, rest she did once Sylvia’s son Troy left the hospital. She would have preferred him to stay longer so she could get better acquainted with the darkness she knew was within him, but something about the bus accident gave Pandora the rare sensation of exhaustion. Death was her fuel, but the fuel in Garrett was low-grade and unsatisfying, so Pandora settled more deeply into Sylvia’s body where she might slowly recover.

  She wondered at her problem until an unfamiliar stirring rose inside her, constricting her cells and then stretching them apart. Near. Far. Tight. Loose. Up. Down. At amusement parks before she weakened a cable or loosened a belt or removed a bolt, she had seen riders experience what she now felt. Their vomiting and the bile coloring of their skin would be Pandora’s too if she were of the flesh. She did feel their loss of control, however, and that brought on a terrible fear, inadvertently making Sylvia shake. The woman stirred but didn’t wake, so Pandora reached outward, seeking the source of their problem. Out and away and through walls and around corners, up staircases, down elevator shafts, inside roofs and through doors went Pandora’s ethereal fingers. Kneading, exploring, she investigated. The response was feral, frenzied in a manner that made little sense, as if a filter had been placed over her unfailing sight. The interference was jarring.

  That’s what it was—interference. With the medicine man, she could still see, could still hear, but this new thing, whatever it was, obscured her. Another deity, perhaps? God coming to banish her? Pandora pushed at the thing, but it didn’t budge. Again she raged at it, collecting all her energy and one, two, fifteen, thirty times she attacked the thing, but the thing went on as if Pandora had done nothing at all. In her normal state, the thing would have been obliterated by such an effort, but in her emaciated condition, it was like bubbles hitting a mountain; nothing moved, and Pandora was left winded. She collapsed into herself, recovering with nibbles of Sylvia’s soul, when the door slowly opened and something entered.

  Light sliced into the darkened room as the door fell wide by the rush of a small animal. Pandora, in Sylvia, sat up. The woman rubbed her eyes, swinging her new attention to the door, the foot of the bed, the chair in front of the far wall.

  “Hello?” Sylvia Baker said. From under her bed, something hissed. “Hello?” Sylvia said again, pulling her blankets to her chin.

  Awaking alone in a hospital room was bad enough. Awaking alone in a hospital room with a dead arm and an animal hissing under the bed was much, much worse. She reached for her right hand and pulled her arm away from the edge of the bed and over her stomach, then she reached for the call button hanging from a cord near her left ear.

  Growling erupted beneath her. Sylvia shrieked. She pawed the button and accidentally knocked it off the bed. It cracked against the floor.

  Skittering over the floor towards her feet, the animal snarled.

  “Help,” Sylvia croaked, but her voice was still not strong enough to yell. “Help,” she whispered again.

  The blanket was tugged from her hands. Then the stomach-emptying sound of nails scraping against metal told her the thing was climbing onto her bed. She looked at her monitor and began slapping buttons. Green lines blipped. Blue lights flicked. White numbers vanished and returned, vanished and returned, a high tone rang out and angry sounds rose forth from the thing crawling up the foot of her bed.

  Sylvia pounded the monitor again and again until the tones from the machine were bleeping and ringing, and she was sure someone would come running. A paw rose and gripped the mattress, and for a moment, Sylvia tilted her head at the inconsequential thing. But when a second paw seized the blanket, it brought with it bright spots of blood that soaked into the sheet. Then a cat’s head sprang up and dropped someone else’s finger beside her foot.

  She screamed. Fear thundered up her throat and she scrambled her half-paralyzed body off the bed, taking her monitor and IV bags with her. The crash sent the animal away, then it turned and paced toward her. Too slowly, she tried crawling away from the cat, but it was on her, pawing at her face, cutting into her neck, scraping the delicate skin from her arms. Sylvia drew her knees to her chest and covered the top of h
er head. She closed her eyes and prayed. Then she felt wetness on her face and the cat scrambled away.

  Sylvia looked up and saw the silhouette of a man with a mop in the doorway. Seconds later, another man entered the room with a looped pole. Her eyes adjusted to the brightness behind them, and then she recognized two former students of Westgate Elementary: Dan Fogel and Jesse Cardinal. Even with her stroke, her memory hadn’t failed her, and she was thankful for the police chief and the animal control officer.

  “Oh, thank you! Thank you!” she cried into the floor. “Thank you,” she whimpered again.

  Dan hit a switch on the wall and light flooded the room. Crouched low, Jesse dashed past him to the supply cart in the corner, under which the cat huddled. It hissed, spat, growled, moaned. Jesse leapt back as paws sliced at his foot, then he carefully leaned over with his pole and moved it toward the cat while Dan blocked the doorway in case the animal decided to bolt.

  “You ready?” Jesse asked without looking away.

  “I’ve got the door,” Dan said.

  With her head against the floor, Sylvia had a clear and terrible view of the cat. It looked at her with bulging, mean eyes and then swung its head to Jesse’s pole at its back. The supply cart shook as the cat went wild. The pole whipped in Jesse’s hands, up, down, back, lashing around while the cat struck at it, hit it, bit the loop with its bloody jaws. The supply cart tipped over and then a quick step forward gave Jesse a better angle. He lunged the loop over the cat’s neck and yanked the pole back to tighten his hold. Minutes later, Jesse secured the cat in a carrier and hauled it to his van with the others, then went back inside to collect his pole.

  “It’s okay Mrs. Baker, it’s going to be okay,” Dan comforted Sylvia as Jesse entered. Over his shoulder, Dan said, “See if you can find her a nurse, will you? There’s got to be someone who can help her.”