The Awakening s-1 Page 4

  Gaby heaved—and lost control. Hot loamy spew regurgitated out her nose and mouth.

  Ah, shit.

  Swallowing convulsively, she fought back the last of the bile until the spasms receded. She hated puking, and not just because it left evidence behind. Hands braced on the rusted metal of the Dumpster, she drew deep, slow breaths, calming her mind with thoughts of other things, quieter times, until her belly quit trying to crawl up her throat and out of her nose.

  When she could breathe again, she straightened and curled her hands around her aching middle.

  Fucking eggs Morty had forced on her didn't want to stay down. She might never eat eggs again.

  Knowing she couldn't linger, she dragged a bandanna from her back pocket and, keeping her back turned toward the body, scrubbed the blood from her face and hands, up to her elbows. There wasn't a damn thing she could do about her ruined shirt. At least it was dark—a deliberate choice because it made it harder to detect the blood on her walk home.

  And thinking of her walk… she had to get to it, shaking limbs or no, nausea or no.

  She couldn't rest.

  Couldn't indulge pity for herself or her victim.

  Couldn't change her life, or the curse that haunted her.

  Couldn't deny who and what she was: God's minion. For better or worse.

  No one else would see that man as a demon. No one else would know that she'd done humanity a favor. They'd see his disfigured body and label her as the monster.

  If he knew the truth, Detective Cross would try to arrest her, locking her away so that evil had free rein. She didn't want to fight with Cross. She didn't want to have to hurt him.

  Blind fools, all of them.

  Closing her eyes, she said a quick prayer, crossed herself, and thanked God for guiding her, for putting her there in enough time to keep that child safe.

  She asked forgiveness for her weaknesses and her guilt, and she asked for the courage to continue doing what she must, just as Father Mullond had instructed her to do.

  With that complete, Gaby dragged both sides of her big knife over the dead man's sleeve to clean it. She replaced it in her sheath and made sure her T-shirt covered it.

  Mentally calculating her location, she decided to head for the nearest gas station. She needed water in a bad way—both to drink and to wash.

  Putting her shoulders back made her feel stronger. She started out of the lot—and heard footsteps approaching. Her heart shot into her throat and without even thinking about it, she sought cover behind the brick building.

  Darting one quick, cautious glance around the corner, she spotted Detective Luther Cross methodically picking his way up the incline toward the factory.

  Son of a bitch.

  Had he followed her? But how? Why?

  To minimize her chances at getting lost, she wanted to return the same way she'd come. But Cross effectively removed that option. By the second, he drew nearer. She looked over her shoulder, seeing the carnage of the demon's body in all its gruesome display. She saw the Dumpster filled with rot, and beside it, her own vomit.

  A telling scene.

  It wouldn't take a genius to put it all together. If she got herself arrested, who would do her work?

  Think, Gaby. Do something.

  Her frantic, searching gaze fell on the path the boy had taken when he'd left her. Though she hadn't been able to focus on him at the time, her subconscious now supplied her with the image of him stumbling into a cluster of trees that overgrew the property.

  Gaby didn't waste another second. She ran. And this time, running hurt like hell. Without the summons to guide her, to make her movements sinuous and economic, she stumbled in her flip-flops. Twigs and stones nicked her toes. Her lungs labored and her sluggish limbs refused to help. Once safely buried in a thicker cover of trees, she paused to look back.

  Through the leaves and limbs, she could barely see Detective Luther Cross standing over the body and cursing a blue streak while scanning the area. Gaby watched him with narrow eyes and burning annoyance.

  Why did he have to interfere?

  And why did an almost ethereal white veil drift gently around him?

  The detective was a good man, but not good enough to divine her purpose. Not good enough to be trusted by God. He'd arrest, condemn, and lock her away without a moment's hesitation.

  Just once, Gaby wished someone would trust in her the way Father Mullond had.

  Cross pulled out his cell phone and punched in a call, barking into the phone while walking a wide circle around the area, careful not to disturb the evidence.

  Making no sound, Gaby slunk away, farther and farther into the woods. God must have been guiding her, because no twigs snapped. No leaves crunched. When she was far enough from Cross that he couldn't hear her, she began running again, as fast and hard as she could push her drained body.

  Within minutes, the whole area would be swarming with cops. She didn't intend to be anywhere around when they got there.

  As Gaby skulked deeper and deeper into the dank woods, itchy sweat, earthly grit, and the stench of fear coated her skin. She stumbled along until her lungs burned and her thighs felt leaden. She didn't dare stop. Cops could be tenacious, and she knew they'd be looking everywhere for their supposed murderer.

  Frustration clouded her eyes, but she'd long ago given up on crying. Anyway, cursing made her feel better than crying did, and she gave in to the urge to voice her discontent.

  After several lurid, coarse words, her foot caught on a broken piece of concrete. With a grunt of surprise, she pitched forward and landed on all fours.

  A mere inch from her nose, a stone slab crawling with wild ivy and multilegged insects rose up from the earth.

  She'd almost cracked her head open.

  So close to the unforgiving stone, Gaby couldn't quite read the stamped letters. They blurred into unrecognizable gibberish until she cautiously levered herself away. Dead branches from a thorny bush cut into her palms and knees. A broken twig gouged her upper arm.

  She barely noticed.

  The marker sat crookedly upright on the weedy ground, an eerie specter of past life. Filled with a deviant trepidation, Gaby stripped away the knotted, entwined vines and read aloud, "Mulhauser County Isolation Hospital."

  A hospital?

  In the middle of the woods?

  But a quick look around assured her that the area hadn't always been wooded. The abandoned building was the victim of neglect. "Erected AD 1850 by the Board of Chosen Freeholders of Mulhauser County."

  Not since Father died had she been anywhere near a hospital. Her heart stuttered in familiar rage.

  The cold stone boldly displayed the names of a director, supervisor, medical advisor, architect, and assistant. Eyes narrowed, Gaby whispered aloud, "Cancer Research Center."

  Sound and sight receded. Seconds stretched into a Ml minute. Memories overtook her mind, playing in rapid, clicking succession with the jarring clarity of a movie reel.

  Father Mullond growing ill.

  Losing weight.

  Losing strength.

  Losing his sanity.

  Medicines and medical treatment had only robbed him of his dignity and multiplied his suffering. She remembered all the clerics praying to no avail.

  She remembered her useless tears, which hadn't changed a thing.

  Most of all, she recalled the tragic, yet merciful end that had taken too long to arrive. By the time God claimed him, Father had become a wasted, shriveled being, hollow in body and mind, in no way resembling the powerful man he'd once been.

  With a shock, Gaby sucked in a gasping breath and fought off a recurrence of the nausea. She wouldn't think about those awful days, and weeks, and months. She wouldn't think about the year when her world had crashed down around her, when the only friend she'd ever known had been tortured by nature—by the very God she worked so hard to appease.

  She wouldn't think about being alone in a life plagued by evil forces that only she c
ould see.

  "Screw this." Using the marker for leverage, Gaby pulled herself to her feet. Bloody fingerprints remained on the stone as she peered around, at last seeing through the woods to the forsaken hospital lurking within.

  Staring at the building, she sneered, "So it looks big and imposing? It's also dead and empty and… nothing at all."

  Covered in abundant plant life, cut off from human traffic, few people would remember this place or even see it. Life would buzz around it, never once making notice of the atrocious structure.

  "If things get critical," Gaby whispered, "this just might be the perfect place to hide."

  Chapter Four

  Curiosity kept Gaby studying the area. Toward the back of the largest building, which she assumed to be the main part of the hospital, smaller buildings sat like forsaken headstones. Picking her way past poison ivy, needle-sharp thorns and hungry insects, Gaby moved to see all the property.

  Icy, murky auras shadowed the perimeter of the grounds, moving around her in unsettled displacement, possibly depicting paranormal activity. Unhappy spirits? Vengeful wraiths?

  Evil?

  Through practice, Gaby had learned to see all the layers of an aura, to disentangle the meanings and nuances. Proper diet, fresh air, exercise, and sunlight strengthened an aura, just as neglect, alcohol, drugs, stress, and lack of rest weakened them.

  These auras looked massive, filling the surrounding sky, the very air that fed her lungs. It was as if many small auras had combined into one, because despite the size, they lacked real power or purpose.

  Beneath the menace lurked great suffering, crippling pain.

  And more.

  Contact with others could enable an exchanging of energy, or in some cases, the draining of it. Certain people, places, even memories, could suck the very life out of a being. Whenever Gaby felt herself tiring too quickly, as she did now, she removed herself from the source. But this time, she couldn't.

  She edged closer, drawn to a courtyard overlooking the abandoned hospital. The property was so bulky that it even had its own power station.

  A mosquito buzzed past Gaby's ear, landed, and bit her neck, drawing a bead of blood. She swatted it away, engrossed at the sight of yet another structure.

  Enormous trees and waist-high weeds cloaked a ramshackle house off to the side, perhaps the home of someone who once ran the hospital. Between it and the hospital, a swamp that had once served as a pond festered with mosquitoes and thick moss. A disturbed breeze carried an awful stench off the pond to the air around it.

  Wrinkling her nose, Gaby looked back at the house. The roof of the covered porch sank low, threatening to collapse. Paint peeled from every surface. Shingles and shudders had gone missing. Toxic vibes emanated from every unbroken window.

  Remnants of a past life, or warning of a current resident? Gaby didn't know. At that moment, she didn't really care.

  A deserted playground, hazardous with broken equipment that had once held swings, a jungle gym, a teeter-totter, indicated there had been a children's ward, too. Now only crows flapped around, pecking at crawling insects and cawing to one another in high-pitched screeches that cut the stillness with alarming ferocity.

  Gaby started to move closer to the pond, and from nowhere a cold wind went up her spine, making her flesh prickle and the hairs on her nape stand on end. She jerked around, her knife already in her hand as she prepared for battle, ready to face another nightmare.

  Only the eerie, soundless lull of the woods greeted her.

  Cautious and unconvinced, Gaby turned back to the isolation hospital. Multipaned windows were broken, boarded up, or black with age, cobwebs, and filth. No one looked out at her—at least, no one with eyes that she could see.

  And still Gaby had the disquieting sense of being watched, of being mentally dissected. It unnerved her and, knife still drawn, started her on her way in a rush.

  "Fucking paranoia," she cursed to herself, but it could have nothing to do with the eerie hospital and everything to do with the meddlesome detective hot on her trail, so she thrashed her way out of the clinging underbrush.

  Burs caught in her jeans. Muck stuck to her flip-flops and oozed up between her toes. Her panic was a strange counterpoint for a person who fought and defeated the vilest evils, and yet she left the ominous woods as fast as possible.

  One smaller building she passed, separated from the isolation hospital, had brick walls riddled with graffiti claiming it to be someone's "place." A sign even pointed to the Beer Room, making Gaby wonder if it had once been home to a fraternity of some sort.

  Did college kids lurk inside, chuckling at the way she fled? Did she care?

  No.

  She'd always been a freak to society. Nothing new in that.

  As she circled the grounds and finally found her way to a clearing, she tucked the knife away in her sheath at the small of her back.

  Oddly enough, she found that the main complex of the Cancer Research Center was visible from the road. The broad face of the building easily hid the smaller hospitals behind it, but anyone driving by would see it.

  Did they not sense the evil? Were they all so obtuse, so self-absorbed, that they paid no attention at all to such a blatant, rancorous threat?

  To get her bearings, Gaby looked around and saw unkempt, suspicious businesses, dark alleyways, bums, homeless transients, and prostitutes.

  The unfamiliar slums reeked of depression and poverty, but it didn't frighten her. In a way, it explained how the hospital remained so obscure. Once upon a time, the area might have been lucrative and in need of a hospital. In days gone by, the old houses, tall and built close together, might have been the homes of doctors.

  Now they accommodated several families, and from what she could tell, a few of them served as crack houses.

  Relieved that no one would recognize her here, Gaby set off again.

  Every bone and muscle in her body ached. Exhaustion pulled at her. She felt like she could curl up in a corner and sleep—but the luxury of rest was something she couldn't afford, not until she'd reached the safety of her apartment.

  Wherever that might be.

  As she walked along, she looked down each alleyway, always guarding against threats. After a time, she spotted three men in an alley between an ambiguous novelty store and a vacant building. They clustered around a can fire, cooking something and, given their postures, stoned out of their gills.

  Surrounded by cardboard boxes and shopping carts laden with other people's discards, it appeared that they lived in the narrow lane.

  Perfect.

  Most sane people would have avoided darkened seclusion that harbored sinister, desperate men; Gaby thanked God for it.

  When she'd gotten within six feet, one man pulled out a knife. That amused her. He shook so badly and his eyes were so unfocused, he wouldn't be able to hit the wall, much less a person with her skills. "What're you cooking?" she asked, hoping to ease the tension.

  "There ain't enough fer ya. Go away."

  It looked like squirrel to her, probably roadkill. Her still-jumpy stomach pitched in revolt. Such pitiable people. Desolation clung to them, but not malice.

  It'd be best for her to get to the point. "I need a shirt."

  "Ya got a shirt. Now git."

  "I need a different shirt." She dug in her pocket. "Here's five bucks. I'm not picky."

  Two of the three men conferred. The third was too high to even acknowledge or notice her. He stared off at nothing in particular, swaying gently from his cross-legged position near the wall. Gaby briefly studied him. Eyes sunken, complexion sallow and damp, body gaunt, he wouldn't last out the week. His addiction was so ripe that disease riddled his body. Poor schmuck.

  The man with the knife lumbered awkwardly to his feet. Holding the blade out straight, as a novice might, he staggered, steadied himself, and said, "I'll take the money, then you'll git."

  "Not without a shirt." Gaby held his gaze. She felt the power blossom in her and kne
w he wouldn't cut her—even if he really wanted to, which she doubted.

  As she stared at him, he blanched and backed up a step.

  Gaby followed. "I don't want to hurt you, but I can." She kept her tone even, calm, and filled with dead sobriety. "If you don't play fair, I'll show you the kind of pain you've never experienced."

  Beneath grim and bristly whiskers, the man's face went white and his jaw slackened. She could see the wild pulse thrumming in his throat, the sweat gathering at his temples. The hand holding the knife drooped at his side.

  "We ain't got much," he whispered.

  "That's why I'm willing to pay, rather than just take what I need—which I could do." She strode past him to the grocery cart, rummaged through the discarded items until she found a man's navy blue T-shirt with a tear on the shoulder, paint stains on the hem. "This'll do."

  Facing the man, who'd made no move to hurt her when her back was turned, she nodded her gratitude and tucked the five in his front shirt pocket.

  "Sorry to do this, but…" She shrugged, stripped off her rained shirt, and tossed it in their fire. Black smoke billowed out, and then the shirt caught and flames consumed it, singeing the poor critter they intended to consume for dinner.

  She wore no bra, saw no reason to with her mostly flat chest, and so the two coherent men got an eyeful. They stared, not with lust but with utter surprise. They were so far gone that they'd never remember seeing her, much less be able to detail the exchange.

  Being sure to keep her mouth tightly closed as the material passed her face, Gaby pulled the shirt on over her head.

  Though it felt clean, God only knew where the shirt had been and what filth might cling to it.

  She started to take her leave then, but instead she hesitated. Cursing herself for showing any softness, she reached out and removed the man's knife from his limp hand. It was so dull as to be useless.

  "You hold it like this," she explained, turning the knife so that the blade faced his body, the handle his opponent. "That way, your forearm conceals it. And when you lift your arm to stab, you have your entire body weight behind the blade. And you know, it makes it easier to slash across the face or throat."