Thel turned to her apprehensively but decided to ask for help rather than zapping her way to James. “I’m looking for my friend. He had a collapsed lung—”
The nurse’s voice was suddenly filled with what seemed to be genuine sympathy. “Oh. What is your friend’s name?”
“James Keats.”
The nurse pulled out a pocket electronic instrument that fit in the palm of her hand and began to tap the surface, inputting James’s name. “Yes, we do have a patient by that name. It says here that he’s still in the operating room.”
Thel felt her heart jump as she heard the words. An operating room? A Purist operating room? She had learned about medical operations when she was a girl taking history in school. An operation meant they had cut open his body. An operation meant James had been sliced open, and they were moving his insides around with crude metallic instruments. An operation meant he could die. “I-I need to be with him. Where is he?” Thel asked, her voice now filled with urgency.
Thel’s sudden shift was like so many shifts that the nurse had seen before in her thirty years working in the medical field. She knew Thel had instantly become unhinged like a cat feeling the first drops of a summer rainstorm. It was trouble. “You’ll have to wait until after the operation.”
“I need to be with him right now,” Thel asserted. “Please take me to him.”
“Miss, I can’t do that. I can take you to a waiting room—”
Thel snatched the electronic device from the nurse with one hand and then rendered her unconscious with an energy flash with the other. The nurse collapsed, but Thel cushioned her fall, letting the woman crumple against her. All the while, Thel’s eyes were on the screen of the device as she read the location of the operating room James was in.
“Hey, what the hell is going on?” asked a doctor as he and another doctor turned a corner and came upon the scene. Thel, startled, looked up from the screen before turning to run down the hallway toward a stairwell. The doctors followed in pursuit. “Stop! Hey!” One of the doctors grabbed a wall phone and requested security over a public address system.
Thel reached the stairwell before either of her pursuers and climbed over the railing between the flights of stairs that spiraled up the many floors of the hospital. To the doctors, this looked like a suicide attempt. “Wait! Don’t!” one of them shouted. They then looked on, stunned, as Thel began to fly straight up, four floors to where she believed James was. “Oh my God! An outsider!”
When Thel reached James’s floor, she burst into the hallway and raced toward his room.
“…455…457…” Thel said to herself as she neared Room 460, the room in which James had been cut open at the hands of those barbarians. She stood on the balls of her feet, almost tiptoeing with expectation. When she found the room, she slammed the doors open, only to find it completely unoccupied. What she did see terrified her. A white orb still shined from the ceiling onto the operating table, a stain of crimson where James would have been and several bloody metallic instruments on a small table next to the bed. “No…no!”
Thel exited the room as quickly as she had entered it.
Immediately, two soldiers were upon her. “Halt!” one of them had time to shout before they were both rendered unconscious with the speed of a thought from Thel. Increasingly desperate, Thel didn’t bother to cushion their falls as they crashed to the hard linoleum floor and she ran back down the corridor, desperately peering through the windows of each room before she moved on. The two doctors that had begun this pursuit reached Thel’s floor, only to see two crumpled soldiers and a terrifying outsider preternaturally gliding over the floor towards them at a terrifying rate.
“No!” one of the doctor’s squealed before Thel caught him by the throat and thrust the electronic device she had procured from the nurse into his face.
“James Keats. Where is he?”
“Okay, okay! You just have to refresh…” The doctor hit a button with his wildly shaking finger, and a new location appeared on the screen. “He’s in a recovery room on this floor, Room 489!”
Thel released the man and flew through the hallway and around a corner on her way to 489. Again, she burst through the doors; this time the room was not empty. Four hospital staff members were wheeling James’s unmoving body on a bed into a place in the corner of the dimly lit room. “Oh my God!” Thel gasped. James was ashen in appearance, and his torso was completely bound in white bandages. A plastic tube was in his mouth, and several wires were attached to his arms and chest.
“What have you done to him?” she asked, still levitating above the ground.
The hospital workers gaped, both terrified and dumbfounded.
“What have you done to him?!” she screamed at them when they didn’t answer.
“Thel!” Old-timer called as he exploded into the room. Several soldiers burst in behind him, including the young guard Thel had rendered unconscious outside of their room.
“Halt!” the young guard shouted as he trained his weapon on her and crouched down on one knee, the other soldiers doing the same. Thel grabbed one of the hospital staff and placed him in a headlock with her right arm, her left hand jammed, open-palmed against his face.
“Stay back, or I’ll fry this monkey’s brain and feed it to you! I’m staying with James! I want to know what you’ve done to him!”
“Release your hostage, ma’am, or we will open fire!” the guard shouted.
“You will not!” commanded James’s doctor as he strode into the room with all the authority he could muster. “Put your weapons away! This is a hospital! Haven’t we had enough death for one day?”
“I can’t do that, Doc!” the guard replied. “She’s a hostile threat!”
“So what are you going to do?” Old-timer demanded of the guard. “She can stop those bullets and tear this whole hospital apart before you’d have a chance to duck. She wants to stay with him, so she’s going to stay with him.”
“Put those guns away!” James’s doctor commanded a second time. This time the guard relented, and the other soldiers followed suit, lowering their weapons.
“What did you do to him?” Thel asked the doctor, her voice giving out as tears began to stream down her face.
“He’s going to be okay. We fixed his lung, and we’ve taken care of his broken bones. He only needs time to heal. Now please, release that man,” the doctor replied gently.
Thel let the staff member go before rushing to James’s side. She felt ready to collapse, but she managed to drape herself over James’s still body and sob. “Thank you,” she said, not sure who she was speaking to. Who was she grateful to? Was it God? Was it fate? Was it James himself? She didn’t know.
“You’re welcome,” said the doctor.
9
Rich and Djanet leapt to their feet as soon as Old-timer reentered their room; they had been waiting nervously ever since they first heard the commotion outside and Old-timer had gone with the troops to the hospital in pursuit of Thel.
Rich wiped the sweat from his palms and tried to fill his dry mouth with spit again so he could speak. “What happened?” asked Rich.
“She’s fine,” replied Old-timer as he placed a reassuring hand on Rich’s shoulder.
“Where is she?” Djanet asked, still reluctant to trust the Purists.
“With James. He’s going to be okay.”
“Oh thank God,” Djanet replied as she and Rich heaved sighs of relief. “Thank God.”
Lieutenant Patrick entered the room, short of breath, with Alejandra close behind and equally winded after their double-time trip across the complex. “What the hell happened?”