“Yes, boss,” Occam said.
I took that as my cue. I picked up Lisa in her baby seat, slid her diaper bag strap over a shoulder, and walked out of the tent, past the men. Both were breathing hard. Neither said a word. Nothing in the ground tried to drag me under. Nothing paid any attention to me at all. On the way out, I paused and read the little girl and myself on a P 1.0. We were not contaminated, the girl reading human-normal, me reading me-normal. The baby hadn’t touched the ground or the pond with bare skin, and I seemed to have some immunity to the come-hither spell. And when my blood had spilled during Soul’s battle with the ground, the dancer hadn’t bothered with me. Because Soul’s blood was more powerful than mine. Yes.
Social services met me at the front gate. I had planned to give Lisa directly to the Langston-Smiths, in direct opposition to rules and regulations, but the social worker took her from my arms in an action that was so natural it must have looked as if turning her over was my intention all along. Media news vans captured the moment, which meant possibilities of national exposure. I hated the idea of my image being seen everywhere, but there was no stopping it. The child protective agency woman did allow Lisa’s parents to hold their baby for a bit before they were all whisked off to UTMC. While the parents cried over their child, the social worker thanked me for being so helpful. And I felt like a traitor to the parents and to Lisa.
I had no faith in the system to do the right thing, despite the recent raid on the compound where I was raised and the removal of over a hundred children for sexual abuse. Some of them had been returned to families who should never have had access to kids. But the system was made up of people, and people made mistakes. They also often tried to do the right thing, so maybe this social worker would see to it that Lisa was returned to her parents. Or maybe not. I had to admit that I was not the person to be making such decisions, but it was still hard to see the weeping parents give their child over to the counselor as armed police looked on.
I should talk to Rick before leaving, I knew that. Proper protocol required that I, a probie who had not followed orders, be censured. I didn’t want to hear him fire me. Or put me on desk duty. So I took refuge, as I had done in the past, by leaving. Rick called it running away. I called it going back to work.
I removed gear from T. Laine’s car and hitched a ride back to HQ with a deputy who was heading that way. In the parking lot, I repacked my Chevy and drove off. I had done everything Rick had asked me to do except reading the land in North Carolina. That, I wanted to do alone, on Soulwood, and could, fired or not. If I was gonna get sacked or stuck at a desk, it might as well be a punishment I really earned. And since I had gone rogue, I might as well go rogue all the way.
The only person who seemed able to hang around contamination and contaminated people without giving in to it—not that anyone but me seemed to have noticed that yet—was me. That placed me in a unique position to find out things that could take the others days. But first I had to eat a late lunch and talk myself into a rebellion that was normally foreign to me.
I wasn’t used to takeout, but I had heard the unit talk about the barbecue at Calhoun’s on the River, and I called in an order. Calhoun’s was on the Tennessee River, literally on the water, with a wharf for people to motor up to and park their boats. Or maybe dock them. Or moor them. I wasn’t sure of the terminology. But the view was wonderful and as I waited for my meal to be packed up, I walked through the place enjoying the ambience. I even had a chance to walk out on the dock, right up to the water. But a sudden feeling of vertigo made me go back inside fast. I marked it to never having been that close to a big body of water, hunger, and the aftereffects of being lunch to the land. I checked my hands, and the slices must have been more superficial than I realized. They had closed already.
I was still getting accustomed to the prices at restaurants, after a lifetime of parsimonious living both on the church compound and as a poor widder-woman, and I gulped at the cost of one meal. I could feed myself for days on the price, which was over ten dollars. But I also had to admit that the hickory-smoked pork barbecue sandwich, which I ate in the parking lot, was as good as anything Daddy had put on the smoker back home. I even put down my cell and stopped reading texts and reports from the other members of the unit just to eat. When I was feeling less peckish, I put the trash in the back of the truck, in the garbage bag I kept there to be dropped off at the dump, and I dialed JoJo on my cell.
“Nell. What?”
“Ummm. T. Laine tried to get in the pond. I didn’t. I held the baby and I didn’t get weirded out. I think I’m immune to the magical whatever-it-is that’s going on.”
I could practically hear her mind ticking through the possibilities in the slice of silence between us. “That might keep your ass from getting fired. What do you want to do about it?”
“I want to go talk to the contaminated people at the hospital. And if they can’t talk, then suss around a bit. See what I can learn.”
There was more silence on the other end as JoJo worked things out. “You called me as second in command because Rick’s pissed at you and you think he’d say no just to put you in your place.”
“Yes.”
“You are sneaky. I like that in a woman. Go to the hospital. Talk to whoever will talk to you. Then go to their houses in the neighborhood and see what you can see. I’ll make it right with LaFleur.” The call ended. I put the cell on the seat of the truck and thought about what I was about to do. Then I pulled out and into traffic, heading to my next stop. When I remembered to breathe, I smelled pork, but it was a good smell. Far better than the stink of death that clung to me from the pond.
* * *
The location of the paranormal unit wasn’t listed anywhere on the website for the University of Tennessee Medical Center, and since I hadn’t made it there when I was a patient in the emergency department, I had no idea where it might be. I flashed my badge and ID to security at the main emergency entrance and was given printed directions to the paranormal unit, on the other side of the hospital campus.
The paranormal unit wasn’t identified as such, for security precautions against paranormal haters and terrorists. It was half of a hallway, sectioned off from a cancer center, via locking doors and security cameras. I showed my ID, made sure my badge was visible, and asked questions that no one wanted to answer. Patient confidentiality, HIPAA rules, and hospital regs stymied me until someone banged on the windowed wall to a patient’s room and shouted that she wanted to talk to me. The nurse I was talking to ducked her head and said, “Sorry,” before she scuttled away like a dog with its tail between its legs.
The woman in the room was dressed in a uni like PsyLED’s, and beyond her, partially visible behind a privacy curtain, was a patient in a bed. The window banger was a family member of one of the contaminated humans, I guessed. And ticked off, if the hammering and the nurse’s demeanor were any indication.
Still pounding on the window as she stripped out of the white uni with its orange stripe, the woman left the room and caught my arm. I got just enough of a glimpse inside to see that the patient within was restrained to the bed and that she was restless, struggling weakly.
The woman shook my arm. “What in God’s name are my family being held for?” she demanded, her voice hushed but carrying along the hallway.
“Held?” The word sounded clueless, which I was. I wondered if she had been contaminated, some kind of magical psychotic break, and I pulled my arm free, backing away.
“Under arrest?” she said, her voice rising. When I looked blank, she said, “In this hospital? Tied down? I’ve been trying all day to get my girls free and take them home to South Carolina, to a hospital where I can get some answers and decent treatment. They aren’t doing anything for my babies here.” She leaned in to me, her tear-filled eyes like daggers, and said, “I want them released to me right now, or charged for whatever crime they’re accused of committing.”
I blinked and understood several things at once. One, no one had told the families about the paranormal part of the incident. They must be trying to keep it quiet. Two, I was the first person from PsyLED who had been on scene in the hospital. Three, we needed someone in authority to talk to the families, not me. Four, I shouldn’t have called JoJo. I should have asked Rick if it was okay for me to come here. And five, the media hadn’t figured out the sick families were connected to the goose pond deaths.
“Oh,” I said, stalling. Needing verification, I asked, “No one has talked to you?”
“No. Not to any of us family members. And we’re ready to go straight to the media if we don’t get answers soon.”
“Ummm.” Soul. Soul was the spox, the spokesperson, the person who should be answering questions. But Soul had been attacked, had transformed and disappeared. I was pretty sure that Soul would have come here after the goose pond, but she had flown away, which wasn’t something I could say aloud. “No one’s under arrest.”
“Then why—”
“Quarantined.”
That gave her pause. “For what?”
“We aren’t sure yet.”
Her tears had dried and her eyes narrowed at me in such a way as to make me need to assure her. “We really, really don’t know yet, but that’s why you have to wear the special white suits when you’re in contact with any patient. Truly, they are getting the very best care available.” That last part might be a lie, because I had no idea if another hospital had better paranormal units and better paranormal specialists than UTMC. But at the moment, assurance was as important as breaking down facts about hospitals.
Comforting people hadn’t been a part of the training in Spook School, but it was big part of life in the church. If she had been a churchwoman, I’d have given her a hug and led her to a private place to talk. Instead I said, “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”
She scratched her fingers through her hair, making it stand up in a faded reddish halo. “Child, I’d kill for a cup.” Then, as if hearing her own words to a law enforcement officer, she said, “Not really. I mean not literally.”
I smiled at her and said, “I understood. Let’s go to the nearest hospital cafeteria or hospital coffee shop. My treat.”
“Let me tell the others that I have someone to talk to. Just a sec.” The middle-aged woman knocked on one door and then another, talking in hushed tones to family members inside. Then she led the way to the coffee shop nearest, where I got us coffees and we introduced ourselves to each other.
The woman’s name was Dougie Howell, pronounced Dug-ee, which was odd but kinda cool. Dougie downed the strong, cheap coffee like she had spent a week in a desert without liquids. She was the mother and grandmother of three of the patients, the grandmother-in-law of two others, and while her hair had dulled down to a strawberry-blondish gray, she still had the take-charge-and-fight-to-the-death qualities of some redheaded churchwomen I knew.