Her Last Whisper (10 page)

Tony’s inquiry, almost identical to Michael’s, called for a totally different response: a lie, in fact.

“I had a sudden, terrible headache. Almost like a migraine. It’s gone now.”

Running alongside her, Tony threw her an exasperated look. “Would you stop? Pugh might be right: you may need medical attention.”

He was a runner just like she was. Despite the pace she was setting, he didn’t sound even faintly breathless. She would have been equally impressed with Michael’s conditioning, except he didn’t breathe.

Go along to get along:
it was another of her alcoholic mother’s famous axioms, and it sprang into her mind then. Tony’s words dovetailed so well with her needs that, instead of arguing, she appropriated them into her cover story. After all, who was the doctor here? That’s right: she was. Tony and Pugh were in no position to contradict any supposed medical assessment she made.

She shook her head. “What I need is fresh air. I think I may have been exposed to an anesthetic or some other type of toxic gas. I’ll
know more once I get a look at Dr. Creason and the other victim. But the best thing I can do for myself is to get outside right away.”

That produced a huff of laughter from Michael. “Way to lie, babe.”

That he could laugh at all under the circumstances was beyond mystifying to her. She was sick to her stomach, scared out of her mind, and doing her best to save
his
ass. Nothing funny about any of that, as far as she could see.

She shot a sideways glare at him.

Tony looked unconvinced. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she said, and played her trump card. “I
am
a doctor, remember. I know when I need medical attention.”

That seemed to settle it. There were no more protests about rushing for the elevators from him.

With Tony running along on one side of her, Michael on the other, and Pugh panting as he brought up the rear, they overtook the stretchers bearing Creason and, she presumed, the trustee just as the stretchers cleared the air-lock type security doors and were about to be loaded onto the service elevator beyond them. Besides fighting back against the very real possibility that she could lose her lunch at any moment, Charlie was so afraid that the hunter would reappear that she could hardly stand still. Her skin crawled in terrible anticipation. If she could have shoved Michael ahead of her and onto that elevator, she would’ve.

Because the warden was with them, they made it through the security doors in record time. With two stretchers and the accompanying paramedics, orderlies, and guards, the service elevator, which was the size of a small room, was a tight fit even before Charlie, Tony, and Pugh (and Michael, who took up no appreciable space) crowded aboard. Had Pugh not been with them, they wouldn’t have been allowed on.

For that matter, if it hadn’t been for the threat posed by the hunter, Charlie wouldn’t have
gotten
on. Just thinking about how badly wrong this could go sent cold dread pumping through her veins. If the hunter returned now, they had no chance of running, no room to fight. Plus, there was the whole where-are-the-evil-spirits thing.

The memory of how Creason and the trustee had behaved in the infirmary remained all too vivid. If the evil spirits were still present inside their bodies, she really didn’t want to find out while she was locked in a metal box with them.

But under the circumstances there was no choice. The elevator was the fastest—the only fast—way out of the prison.

Michael must have been having similar misgivings, because the look he gave Charlie as he settled into place beside her was grim. “If something goes wrong, you leave it to me to handle,” he ordered her.

Yeah, right
.

Of course, she couldn’t say it out loud, but she gave him a look that she was pretty sure he understood, because he said, “I mean it, damn it.”

The doors were closing behind them. Just before they clanged shut, Charlie caught a glimpse of the third stretcher, the one carrying Spivey’s body, as it came down the hall toward the security doors. With the next run of the service elevator it would be taken to the basement, which housed the prison morgue, for autopsy, she knew.

She shivered.

Then she thought about what had happened to the real Walter Spivey, the part of him that still existed, his soul, and shivered even more. Spookville was a horrible place. What waited for Spivey beyond it was, she felt sure, even more horrible.

She had no idea if the hunter would come back for Michael, or how far it could track him if it did. All she knew was that the more distance they could put between him and it, the safer she would feel.

“How’s the headache?” Tony asked her under cover of a conversation Pugh was having with the guards, and she looked at him and answered, “Better.”

“You might want to sheathe your weapon, Van Helsing,” Michael said drily, nodding at her clenched fist, which, she only then remembered, still had a death grip on the horseshoe, which was perfectly visible at her side. It took her a second, but then she recalled that Van Helsing was a monster hunter from the Dracula
movies and realized that he was comparing her to that fearsome warrior. Despite everything, she almost succumbed to a smile. “Dudley’s been giving it the eye.”

Charlie was reluctant to let go of it, but examining Creason required that she have her uninjured hand free. With a quick glance at Tony—he wasn’t looking at the horseshoe right then, if he ever had been, but had instead been drawn into the conversation between Pugh and the guards—she shoved the horseshoe back into her pocket, making sure it was positioned so that she could grab it again easily if necessary, which she prayed it wouldn’t be. Then she pushed her jitters over the possible return of the hunter to the back of her mind—she had to if she was to remain objective—and turned her attention to the victims as the elevator began its descent with a lurch and a groan. It moved slowly, with a grinding sound that might have been worrisome under other circumstances. The only thing that Charlie cared about at the moment was its nerve-racking lack of speed, but that was out of her control.

Both stretchers came equipped with IV poles. The liquid in the bags attached to them, which Charlie guessed to be saline, sloshed as they moved; a steady drip ran down the plastic tubing into each patient’s arm. The trustee lay as motionless as Creason, but it was Creason’s stretcher that she was wedged in beside and Creason who was her primary focus. Charlie glanced at his blood pressure monitor: the numbers were low, but high enough to perfuse the brain and other vital organs.

“What killed Walter Spivey?” Charlie asked Pugh, breaking in on his conversation without preamble.

As she glanced at the warden, her gaze encountered Tony’s. He was frowning thoughtfully at her. She had no idea why, and no time to question it.

“That’s what I’m hoping you can tell me. The same thing that sickened these men, I presume.” Pugh gestured at Creason and the trustee. “After the infirmary was shut down, a guard found Spivey dead in bed in the locked room they put him in after he attacked you. He was still in restraints. So what we’ve got to account for is two unconscious, one dead—it has to be from the same cause.”

The thing was, she only saw the newly,
violently
dead. Ergo, whatever had killed Spivey had involved an act of violence. Exactly what, she had no idea.

“Not necessarily.” Charlie was finally able to bring herself to look directly at Creason. He seemed smaller than he did when he was up walking around, and infinitely frailer. His eyes were closed. His sharp-featured face was utterly white, as if all the blood had leached from it. The impression he gave was that of a husk, from which a vital inner component was missing. He was breathing, lightly and rapidly, through parted lips that were tinged with blue.

Cyanosis. She glanced quickly at his hands, which rested on top of the blanket that was tucked beneath his armpits. There was evidence of low blood saturation of oxygen there as well: the tips of his fingers were slightly blue.

That her unfailingly kind colleague should be lying there like that made her feel sick. And afraid. Very, very afraid. Spirit possession of human beings was something that she had never before encountered. The mere thought was horrible; the consequences to the victims were, she feared, catastrophic.

A blood-chilling thought occurred: If Michael had not intervened, would she have shared her fellow physician’s fate? Would the second spirit have invaded her body instead of the trustee’s? She had been closer …

She was suddenly, icily sure that she had barely missed sharing Creason’s fate.

I’m so sorry
, she said to Creason silently. Guilt over what had happened to him washed over her in a wave.
If I hadn’t been distracted by the voices in my head; if I hadn’t gone to the infirmary …

“Not your fault,” Michael told her, and as she glanced at him in quick surprise she realized that he was once again reading her thoughts in her face. “You aren’t responsible for the whole damned universe, you know.”

Under the circumstances there was nothing she could say to that, so she didn’t. Instead, she started to lay a cautious hand on Creason’s arm—it was bare, his lab coat and shirt having been removed, she presumed to allow for a medical examination in the infirmary
after he had fainted—but the paramedic at his side blocked her access with an outflung arm.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but until we know what’s wrong with them—”

“This is Dr. Stone. She’s going to be taking a look at these men for me,” Pugh said curtly, and the paramedic stood down.

“If it’s something contagious—” Tony objected.

“I’m almost certain it’s not,” Charlie replied.

This time she was able to put her hand on Creason’s arm. She did it cautiously, because part of her was terrified that his eyes would pop open and he would once again be the terrifying zombie-esque creature that had come after her in the infirmary.

But he didn’t move or respond to her touch in any way. He wasn’t a muscular man, but the biceps beneath her hand felt almost unnaturally flaccid. His skin was cold:
cold as a corpse’s
was the analogy that popped into her mind. She barely managed to repress a shudder. Her stomach gave a threatening heave, and this time it wasn’t only because of her recent too-close encounter with an unfamiliar spirit.

His pulse, like his breathing, was fast and shallow.

Leaning over the stretcher—“You want to be careful there, babe,” Michael warned, and she knew he harbored the same fear she did: that the evil spirit was still there, to be roused at any time—she pinched Creason’s earlobe to assess motor response to a pain stimuli. He didn’t so much as twitch an eyelash. Then, half-afraid of what she might see, she slowly, carefully, opened an eyelid. The pupils were dilated and fixed.

Not good
.

“Could I borrow your stethoscope, please?” Charlie asked the closest paramedic, in a voice so calm, so controlled, that no one would ever guess that her stomach was now roiling and her knees were as shaky as Jell-O. The paramedic passed the stethoscope over, and Charlie draped it around her own neck.

When she listened to the heart, she frowned.

This was light-years beyond a faint.

“Well?” Pugh asked impatiently.

“It’s not a disease, and it’s not contagious.” Charlie handed the stethoscope back to the paramedic, to whom she said, “He needs to get to the hospital as quickly as possible. Tell whoever’s on duty”—it was just after five o’clock, when the hospital dealt with a changing of shifts that could sometimes result in treatment delays—“that these patients need an MRI of the head and chest area as soon as possible.”

The paramedic nodded. Charlie glanced at the numbered buttons by the door, which lit up one by one as they progressed downward: they were on the second floor, with just one more to go.

“Then what’s wrong with him?” Pugh demanded.

“I can’t say for sure. My best guess is, again, some kind of anesthetic or toxic gas such as carbon monoxide. We’ll know more when we get the results of the MRI. And the toxicology reports, but of course they take weeks.”

“You must have been exposed to the same thing.” Tony was looking at her intently.

“You have been behaving very oddly, Dr. Stone,” Pugh chimed in. He glanced around the elevator, and she got the feeling that he didn’t want to be too specific in front of the paramedics, etc. “What you were doing in your office when I came in—it was unusual, to say the least.”

“The ants you thought you saw.” Tony’s tone was carefully neutral. “Might have been a hallucination.”

“This is where you ask ’em, ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ ” Michael said.

“In retrospect, I suppose it’s possible.” Ignoring Michael, Charlie replied to Tony, then glanced at Pugh to include him in the rest of her response. “If I was exposed to anything, I was unaware of it happening and I can’t tell you the source.”

“You
were
in the infirmary with the other victims, at approximately the same time they were affected.” Tony said it as if he was seeking confirmation.

Charlie nodded. “Yes.”

Pugh said sharply to the guards, “We’re going to be evacuating the infirmary. Only one of you travels to the hospital with the prisoner. The others …”

“How bad a shape is he in?” Michael asked, nodding at Creason, and Charlie quit listening to the general conversation to focus on him. Meeting his eyes, she gave a slight shake of her head. Truth was, she had no idea what the prognosis was for a human being who had suffered possession by an evil spirit. Going by the physical signs she had just observed, it wasn’t good.

She didn’t know if Creason would survive. She didn’t know to what degree he might be impaired. She did know that there was nothing she could do for him. Even an exorcism—supposing she knew how to perform one perfectly and could do it there in the elevator with the meager tools she had on hand—wouldn’t work: she was as certain as it was possible to be that the evil spirit was no longer inside him. What she had just examined was the damaged vessel the spirit had left behind. She could only hope that it was strong enough to heal.