No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,62
she’d hoped he could. She was soft an’ pretty and perfect, an’ her Pop looked like another weight was lifting off his shoulders. He never had explained what he’d said the first time we’d met, but I meant to take care of his girl the rest of my life, so I figured it didn’t matter.
I didn’t hear a damned word of the ceremony, nothing except the parts where I was s’posed to say I do an’ I will. I got those parts out, and the rest of it I was just looking at my Annie and feelin’ fit to burst. She was always beautiful, but I didn’t think even Princess Grace could hold a candle to her right then. I said so on the way outta the church an’ she said she’d believe me ‘cause I was better-looking than Prince Rainier III, which happened to be true, so to my way of thinking, we were starting out a fairy tale.
Trouble is, fairy tales got monsters in ‘em.
I was at home studyin’ for the last college final when she called me from work. I’d been out of the Army and married for two years, an’ in all that time I’d never heard her sound so strained or upset. I had my shoes on before I knew what was wrong, an’ in the end all she could say that made any sense was, “Please hurry.”
I’d been in and outta the hospital plenty of times over the past year, picking Annie up from work or just coming by to say hello. I knew a lotta the names and faces, and most folks were ready to stop and talk a minute, especially late at night like it was now. But the place was just about deserted, an’ the people I saw were strained and unhappy, like somethin’ might jump outta the shadows if they stopped by them for too long. I tried asking after Annie, but nobody would answer, so I took myself up to where she usually worked.
She wasn’t there. I started to let myself get worried then, and grabbed a nurse who was passing by. “Where’s Annie Muldoon? She usually works here.”
The lady pulled away like she was afraid, instead of just annoyed at my rudeness. She whispered, “I’m not sure. They called everyone with any psychiatric experience up to the third floor a while ago. Annie went up there.” She gave herself a shake and blinked like she was seeing me for the first time. “You’re her husband, right? She called you before she went up. All the patients up there woke up all at once and started screaming about seeing visions. The same visions, all of them.”
“Wait a minute. Woke up?”
“It’s our long-term illness ward.” The nurse was pulling herself together now that she had somebody to lecture about hospital regulations. “One or two of the patients up there are actually comatose, breathing on their own but surviving through IV feeds. Others are terminally ill and spend a great deal of time in medically induced comas for their own comfort.”
Sounded like hell. Dying quick and getting it over with seemed like the best way to go, to me. But I kept my mouth shut, listening as the lady said, “They’ve all woken up, even the ones who were comatose. Nothing will put them back down, and there’s something…something dreadful about their faces. Like there’s no living mind inside them anymore, just some kind of anger trying to escape. I went up to help but I couldn’t bear it. Almost no one’s been able to stay near them for long. Anne is very brave.”
I muttered, “Yeah. Yeah, she is,” and bolted for the third floor. The nurse called, “She said you helped someone who had visions once! That’s why she called you in!”
Annie was putting too much faith in me. I hadn’t done a damned thing to help her Pa. Something else had happened that day, something I didn’t understand, but it was bigger than me. And I was expecting something bigger than me was at work in the third floor hospital ward, too. All I wanted was to get Annie out of it.
About twenty feet down the hall from the ward I got a cold-skin tingle like I hadn’t had since Korea. I stopped, letting that cold wash all over, an’ then I backed up into one of the private rooms and looked for weapons. Not once in the two years since I’d got out had I missed having a