L.L. Foster - The Awakening

To get her bearings in the sepulchral hall, she looked around and realized she'd wandered into the cancer ward. Several yards away, a nurses' station stirred with lights, machines, sounds, and kindly-looking women.

No. Not here. Making haste, Gaby turned to leave before she got noticed.

Mere seconds before she reached the elevator, she detected the soft cooing of a woman. It was a familiar sound, one of insanity and surrender.

One without hope.

Her eyes closed. Father had made those indecipherable sounds too, when the cancer had reached his brain and modern medicine numbed his pain. They sounded placid enough, but Gaby knew the truth. They meant nothing, no more than the body issuing them.

Unable to help herself, she slowly turned and looked into the room.

A shrunken female form, barely clinging to life, rested flat on her back in the bed. Beside her, a plump nurse gently eased a damp cloth over her arms. The cancer victim made another pleasurable sound, and the nurse smiled.

"It's all right, Dorie. I'm here. Your family has been to visit, but they needed to go home. You know you're very loved, my dear. Very, very loved. They all care so much. And I care. I'll be here until morning, and then Eloise will take my place. You know how you like it when she brushes your hair."

Hot tears welled in Gaby's eyes, choking her, blurring her vision of the deceptive scene. Someone touched her arm, and she flinched away, coming back to the here and now in a crashing disturbance.

"Hey, it's okay," the man said. He wore a cleric's collar and a sympathetic smile. All around him, a swelling purple aura swam and shifted, indicating a noble and spiritual soul. "Is Dorie a relative of yours?"

Gaby straightened as much as she could. To her horror, she could feel her nose running, but she had nothing to wipe it.

The man handed her a hankie. "It's so difficult, I know."

Gaby snatched the hankie and wiped her eyes first, then blew hard. Uncaring of decorum, her voice broken with pain, she said, "It's fucking inhumane."

The man peered in at Dorie and nodded. "It's not something we can easily understand. But we all do what we can."

"There's nothing that can be done!" Gaby didn't mean to raise her voice, but memories of Father growing weaker by the day still infested her mind. Over and over, she visualized the awful treatments that made him suffer more than the worst torture. She remembered his agony, his prayers, and then his blankness. She remembered… everything.

"Sometimes, no," the cleric agreed. "But the tenderness does help soothe the pain."

"You can't know that." But Gaby prayed that somehow he could.

In answer, he patted her and his compassionate smile came again. "I thank God often for the angels here on earth, the ones with the patience and caring to take on so much suffering day in and day out."

Damn it, her eyes flooded again and the hankie received another loud honk. Choking out the words, Gaby said, "I can't be in here. I have to go."

He squeezed her shoulder. "Of course, child. Go, collect yourself."

But Gaby knew the nurses would stay.

The cleric would stay.

They weren't cowardly like her.

Angels on earth, he'd called them. It must be true, because even as she rushed to escape, she felt the cottony softness in the air, and around the black spots of imbalance and the gray shadows of sickness and lugubriousness, she saw the cocoon of sympathetic green and calm blue hues. They came from the caregivers.

They came from angels.

Two nurses rode the elevator with Gaby, speaking low to one another, giving her privacy in their averted gazes.

One said, "I wish Dr. Chiles could always be on call. I really don't like dealing with Dr. Marton."

"No one does," the other nurse replied. "Talk about clinical."

"And lack of feelings…"

The nurses grew silent, leading Gaby to wonder about Dr. Marton. Was he like the doctor Father had, detached to the point of leaving a body shivering cold? Gaby had hated talking to the doctor, listening to his evasive non-answers and lack of respect toward a man who was no longer a man, but a shell with a disease.

The elevator doors opened and Gaby launched out, almost running, so anxious to breathe in fresh air that she thought she might hurl. In the very back of her mind, she thought she sensed a laugh, but the distress of her body kept her from reading it clearly.

She burst through the emergency room doors and, doing all she could not to fall to her knees, sucked in the humid summer air.

She could have returned to her apartment at that point, but she didn't want to.

Ignoring the strange crowd loitering outside the hospital, hoping to buy prescription drugs or trade sex for favors, Gaby headed for the street. She had a few miles to go before she'd reach the apartment. But she intended to go beyond that.

She intended to seek out the woods where she'd located the abandoned isolation hospital.

For some reason, she felt drawn there.

A sweltering, setting sun cast the dreary neighborhood in a muggy haze. The reflection off the blacktop patches on broken concrete roads could blind a person and added to the smothering heat, but Gaby didn't move from her position at the front of her apartment building. Sweat dampened her scalp and pasted her hair to her forehead, temples and neck. Even though she'd cut it, her hair still felt too thick and smothering.

Sunglasses in place, flip-flops kicked to the side, she sprawled boneless on the scabrous steps and surveyed every inch of the surrounding area. For the past four nights, she'd tried to go back to the isolation hospital. Each time she had to alter her plans, knowing someone followed her.

Detective Cross?

Morty?

Or someone, something , else?

Sleep became elusive, as did peace of mind. Her thoughts twittered with too many possibilities, too many questions. For once, she begged for a calling from God, a summons to attack, a divine guide to the evil that plagued her.

No summons came.

She wanted to curse God, but it wasn't easy. Commination against Him stuck in her throat. Her faith was such that if He didn't send her after the demon, she knew there had to be a reason.

It just sucked that the reasons were never in her understanding.

As Gaby pondered her quandary, a shadow climbed the stairs and crept over her.

Already sensing whom she'd see, she glanced up, and there stood Luther Cross. Too tired and strung out to care, she diverted her gaze away again.

Dressed in another button-front shirt and tidy slacks, he sank down to sit beside her. "You are one hard woman to track down, Gaby Cody."

Her first and last name. What else did he know of her? "Drop dead." Mentally, she retracted that order, just in case He was listening—which she doubted. God couldn't be bothered with such pettiness. She just didn't want to take any chances. Her soul had blackened enough already.

"I'd rather not, thank you. And I'd rather not arrest you, but I will if you make me."

"Yeah?" Stiffened arms braced behind her, Gaby tipped her head back so that the sun caressed her throat. "For what?"

"Assaulting an officer?"

In her tautened position, the laugh sounded more like choking. "An officer who molested me?"

He chuckled—and Gaby felt his gaze on her chest. "Touché. Not that anyone would believe you."

Too drained to measure her words, Gaby straightened and asked, "Why not? Because I don't have anything to grope, or because you have a pure aura? We both know you still did it."

For half a minute, Luther remained utterly silent. Gaby listened to the rumble of engines and the quieter thrum of tires on pavement as cars went past. She heard the muted congestion of voices across the street, a few doors down, at the end of dark alleys. She heard doors opening, a dog barking, and off in the distance, the lone but not unfamiliar wail of a siren.