Chapter Twenty-Three
“Just the Facts, Ma'am”
Chris did his best to sit still while the doctor finished thumping on his chest and checking his pupils. The soldiers outside the door had been quite insistent about this appointment, and he agreed that his appearance was certainly unusual, but still...
"There, there," said the doctor, smiling reassuringly. "This won't take more than another minute or so."
The hospital had been crowded; a line of anxious people stretched out the front door and down the emergency fire lane. Inside, doctors and orderlies half-ran in every conceivable direction, children cried inconsolably, and no one had been able to find a private examining room. Chris had taken one look at the flimsy curtains separating one metal bed from another and protested loudly enough to be taken (with a sigh) to the storage room for his exam.
Once the soldiers had been reassured that the window could not be opened without a hammer and a blowtorch, they grudgingly allowed Chris his dignity and retreated to the hallway. There had hardly been room for himself and the doctor anyway; this room had been stacked nearly floor to ceiling with styrofoam packing crates marked FRAGILE in bright red letters. They also bore the jagged little biohazard symbol, leaving Chris to wonder if his modesty were worth whatever calamity might befall him if the contents of those crates somehow made it into the scratches on his arms.
Chris scowled at the crates, peeling the edge of a hand-written label with one torn fingernail. "I don't feel sick. And I don't understand why I had to be dragged, dragged," he went on in a aggrieved tone, "to the hospital like some invalid. I told you, there's nothing wrong with the water!"
"Because it was blessed by a unicorn, yes, they told me." The doctor turned away and leaned sideways, giving himself enough room to open a drawer. He deftly pulled a syringe out its plastic and tapped the drawer closed. "Still, you can't blame anyone for being careful. We're all being tested for—whatever might be in our systems, and we can't let you off the hook just because you're busy chasing dark horsemen through the streets."
The condescending tone truly rankled. After all, Chris thought as he rolled up his fairly bedraggled sleeve, he had been right to take Brittany to the reservoir. She had been necessary, though hardly overwhelmed with gratitude at her part in saving the world from the Dark. That had been the first time a woman had ever slapped him like that, and certainly under the circumstances it had hardly been deserved.
It wasn't until she had already stormed off that he'd seen the open mouth of the cave...
"Riders, not horsemen, and certainly not Dark!" Or were they? No, no, he remembered quite clearly that the riders from the lake (the Sleepers, wasn't it?) were certainly on the side of the Light. Certainly. They had flowed out of the ground in a pallid morass that his eyes could barely make out as a group of cloaked men on horses. And their eyes... he'd been glad when they rode past him, until he realized that they hadn't stopped. They hadn't stopped. Here he was, the champion for the Light, bearer of the sacred knife, hope of the future and all that, and he was going to have to trail along behind them like some kind of ignorant peasant.
All for an explanation.
"Well, the next time you go chasing horses through the shrubbery, try to avoid the mayor's rose bushes." The doctor seemed far too amused by this turn of events, having never (obviously) been forced to shoulder the burden of prophecy. Chris was about to expound on the trials of epic necessity when the door shoved open, pushing the doctor into Chris's side and sending the blood-filled syringe flying across the room to land, quivering and point-first, in the side of a packing crate.
Nothing happens by chance, Chris thought to himself giddily. He watched the syringe waggle back and forth, happily protruding from the center of a biohazard symbol. The plunger had given way, and a small line of red dribbled out the hole in the crate.
In his fascination with this new, totally unforeseen yet important message, Chris had missed the entrance of the two men who had shoved the door open so rapidly. However, he could hardly ignore the doctor's valiant attempts to stand in his lap, so at last he pulled his attention away from the crates. And stared.
When the men from the national guard had found him traipsing through the mayor's yard, Chris had been following the larger trail from the reservoir. The Sleepers had split up for some reason at the edge of the main road, leaving Chris to flounder into a decision based mostly on the likelihood of his being able to notice such a tremendous swath of crushed plants and churned mud. The soldiers had taken one (brief) look at his unkempt clothing, listened (briefly) to his mumbled explanations, then spoke (again, briefly) into a radio for someone else to guard the mayor while they took him to the hospital.
During the whole (admittedly brief) time they watched him, Chris had felt that no one in the world could have cooler eyes than they had. They had dismissed him as a person of no importance without even blinking. His effort to explain anything had quickly tumbled into repeated attempts to explain everything, and still those eyes had been distant, blank, and thoroughly unyielding.
These men had the same look, only more so. And he couldn’t even see their eyes.
Both men wore dark suits, identical without being off the rack (a disturbing thought), dark ties, dark glasses, dark, dark, dark... But somehow, he couldn't imagine that agents of the Dark, even the ones that could pass for human, would ever wear mirrored sunglasses.
Apparently, the doctor hadn't even had time to protest. His mouth was open, his face frozen into an expression of uncertain indignity, as he stared at the shiny silver badge one of the men held out. It was a leather wallet (good quality, too...) with an ID of some sort encased in plastic. It had the same odd sheen as the badge.
"Agent Johnson." The man snapped the case closed and replaced it in his jacket. He nodded his head toward his companion. "Agent Smith. We're here to retrieve the samples, if you'll wait outside."
The doctor convulsed—that was the only word for it, as if his whole body had been plugged temporarily into a light socket—and began to struggle toward the door. He made small, inarticulate noises of agreement as he swam sideways between the agents and the crates, then used the door frame to lever himself completely out of the room.
Chris glanced at Agent Smith (Or was it Agent Johnson? They couldn't have switched places, could they?), hoping they would leave him enough room to scoot along the wall toward the door. Maybe he could find someone who had seen the riders...
But they didn't glance back at him. In fact, they didn't seem to care that he was in the room at all. As soon as the doctor left, three more men in dark suits began to squeeze in and out of the room, each one carrying a packing crate in his arms and weaving around his fellows like separate pieces of an elaborate machine. In fact, if he squinted his eyes, Chris could almost make out the pattern. Yes, each lifted precisely that way, turned this way, and stepped there and there.
But they were ignoring him. Again.
"Excuse me, Agent Johnson?" Both men turned back to him; and suddenly their attention left him feeling all tongue-tied and gawky. Much like his freshman year at Herschberg. "I, uh, I, what's going on here?" It came out more plaintive than authoritative, but the question seemed intact. All the words in the right place, the 'what' at the beginning, round 'oh' in the middle, the emphasis on 'here'...
"... Which is precisely why our presence here is vital."
With a shock, Chris realized that he had missed whatever the man had been saying. More to the point, he had missed whatever the man had been explaining. Glancing around, it became obvious that he had apparently missed several minutes of explanation; the last crates were being carried from the now rather spacious room. Chris heard himself give a strange mangled sound (reminiscent of the doctor's noises, he thought randomly, if more protesting than agreeing) and fought the urge to grab the man's coat and shake it out of him.
They left while Chris was still shaking his head back and forth in the corner. Surely he had said something about the government, and taking Jill into custody —No, not Jill, the other one, the body. Taking bodies, taking places, taking blood...
I haven't been myself today at all. Chris looked down at the remains of his clothes and shuddered. Whatever could he have been thinking, to chase after those horsemen, chatter to everyone in sight—and more importantly, how did I end up in these clothes?
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