Chapter 13:
The whereabouts of
Doctor Silence
They sat together on a steep green hill beneath a lavender-colored sky, watching whales with the wings of moths drift overhead like lost balloons. The air was damp and cool, with a strange flavor to it, an alien taste on the tongue.
"I hate this place," the Lady Natasha Grey said.
Travel had been both good and bad for her, Doc noted. She looked healthier and younger than she had in years, with a warmth to her cheeks and a strength to her movements he was not used to seeing. She had also been an awful companion at times, unhappy with days sleeping under an open sky, miserable whenever they found themselves unsure of where in space and time they found themselves.
"It's an improvement from the last world," Doc said.
An understatement to be sure, the last world had been covered in black and gritty stone, rivers of lava flowing freely, a strange magic in the air that made it hard for them to hold onto their own shape. They both grew wings the moment they arrived there, the Lady's black and batlike, Doc's more reptilian with a silvery, scaled look, and they used them to ride thermals of air over the molten landscape. It was a nightmare, that place, but it had been beautiful as well, something out of a bad dream you couldn't quite let go of.
They passed through a break in reality, an old scabbed over wound in time where another magician had passed through badly. That opening led them here, to this idyllic place, with its strange creatures and wind that sounded like music.
"I hate not knowing where we are," Natasha said.
"I think we're in the Dreamless Lands," Doc said.
They had that feel, the waking hallucination, the senses overlapping and crossing signals unnaturally. He'd only been to the Dreamless Lands once, and then only briefly.
"I'll trust your judgment on that," Natasha said. "I never had much reason to go to the higher planes. No business for me there."
"Not much business for me there either," Doc said.
"What were you doing here, then?" Natasha asked.
Doc raised an eyebrow.
"You're asking me about my life."
"Silence, I've told you a million times. You fascinate me," Natasha said. "Just because I think you're a nostalgic fool doesn't mean I don't like your stories."
Doc smiled, nodded, fixed his glasses on his face.
"Have you heard of the Lady Dreamless?"
"I thought I was the only Lady you know."
"Am I the only Doctor you know?"
"Not even close, Silence."
"I came here to help a friend out of an arranged marriage," Doc said. And then he began to recite:
"Have you heard of the Lady Dreamless?
Promised to a nightmare Prince,
Raised to the sounds of the songs of the Damned,
Queen of the Citrine Tower,
Heir to an empty throne?
Have you heard her story?
Trapped for a millennium in a black gem,
With only the whispers of passing nightmares
To keep her company?
Have you heard of her escape?
How she crossed the black and starless paths
Of faded lands, armed with only her wits
And a wisp of fire to guide her?"
Natasha roared laughing. She fell onto her back and held her belly and laughed until tears poured out of the corner of her flame-filled eyes.
"That was you? You're the idiot who got the Nightmare Prince's bride out of her contract? I thought that was the other guy, the fox-spirit guy. Renard."
"I just helped get her out. We had to. If the Lady Dreamless and the Nightmare Prince got married nobody would have slept in any reality for a hundred years. We did it for everyone's mental health."
Natasha sat back up again, brushing the hair out of her eyes,
"And people say I'm a meddler," she said. "So what does this mean for us?"
"I don't know," Doc said. "But maybe she can help point us in the right direction home."
Chapter 14:
Show and tell
Well, at least they aren't keeping me in a cell, Sam thought. He was being held in one of the suites where agents would crash and set up shop if they needed to work with one of the prisoners or pursue an investigation in the old days. Like a studio apartment, it had a desk, a bed — even a couch, with a small private bathroom. It was also locked.
They didn't do that in the old days.
Prevention walked in without knocking, her agents Lock and Rourke in tow. Sam had taken to entertaining himself by pretending he couldn't keep their names straight, despite Lock having a full head of hair and Rourke keeping his buzzed short. He had to figure out some way of entertaining himself while he was kept essentially behind bars.
Behind bars in a prison he and his former fellow Department agents help fill.
"You look like you had a great meeting with the kids," Sam said. Prevention offered a hard stare. "Did you know Straylight could detect psychic probes?"
"We have never, ever known exactly what powers the Luminae give their hosts."
"Answer the question, Barren."
"I had no idea! I met Horizon a hundred times, more than that, and I never got a good read on his power. You know why?" Sam said. "Because he was one of the good guys, and his powers were none of my goddamn business."
Prevention sat down at a table in the center of the room and motioned wearily for Sam to sit down. She looked tired. If she weren't so hell-bent on messing with the kids, Sam might feel bad for her — she was clearly under orders to rein in the five most ornery people on the planet, and it wasn't going well.
"Well for future reference, yes, Luminae give their hosts psychic defenses," Prevention said.
"You got busted?"
"Oh I got busted. Little punk actually laughed at me," she said.
"The boy is a bit of a showoff," Sam said. "Who agreed to meet with you?"
"Solar and Straylight. The others were noticeably absent. Are you sure you have no idea where the werewolf went?"
"No harm in telling you he went looking into his past. Other than that he didn't talk about it."
"It is remarkably unnerving to know there's a werewolf on the loose and I have no idea where he is."
Sam laughed.
Prevention actually cracked a smile. Her agents, hovering around the room, looked somewhere between uncomfortable and relieved.
"Which one of you has to deal with him if he shows up?"
The agents looked at Prevention for approval. She nodded.
"We've both dealt with shapeshifters before," Lock said. "Hand to hand and with firearms."
"Don't kill the boy," Sam said.
Rourke shook his head.
"Only as a last resort."
"The werewolf is a good boy," Sam said. "The other critter in that body . . . Just avoid him, if you can. You haven't dealt with a full-fledged werewolf?"
"No," Rourke said.
Sam nodded.
"Don't poke the tiger," Sam said. "Or wolf in this case. You'll be thankful for it later."
Prevention crossed her legs, rubbed her eyes.
"Well, in any event, they won't play ball with us," Prevention said.
"Solar shut you down?"
"Not in so many words. Did she pick up the coy thing from you?"
"Have to assume that was Doc," Sam said.
"Doc Silence. Even dead he's still a pain in our backside," Prevention said. "What did he have against us?"
"Us? Nothing," Sam said. "We never tried to tell him what to do."
Sam slunk back in his chair. He felt very old, and very tired. He wasn't old enough to feel like this, and he was so tired of being sick.
"How are you feeling, Sam," Prevention said.
"Like I'm dying very slowly. How do I look?"
"Like you're dying very slowly," Prevention said. "This is why I'm here right now."
"Not to complain about the intel I didn't give you about the Indestructibles?"
"No," Prevention said. "I told you we could help you."
"What could you possibly do to help me at this point," Sam said.
"I can't do anything," Prevention said. "But we have something that can."
Prevention waved a hand at Rourke, who opened the door, and a dead man walked in.
"You," Sam said.
The man walked with the aid of a cane he didn't need before, his shoulder slumped to one side, hair gone gray at the temples.
"Hey, Sam," the man said in a voice Sam Barren hadn't heard in years. The voice of a dead hero. "I see they've got you under lock and key too."
Henry Winter, the scientist hero once known as Coldwall, stood in the doorway, when he should have been long buried in the ground.
Chapter 15:
Plague hospital
Caleb Roth was beginning to think he had been going about this all wrong.
Nobody cared what happened at the mall, he thought. Nobody really noticed if everyone got sick at a diner. These were places of consumption, places of leisure. Nobody had much sympathy for them there, not really.
If he wanted to raise a red flag, he had to go somewhere people cared about.
Even if that meant going to the one place that terrified him.
Caleb looked unwell enough that even among the broken arms and stomach bugs, the wounds needing stitches and accident victims, people took notice when he walked into the hospital's emergency room. He could see the panic in the eyes of the other patients — don't touch me, don't come near me, don't make me sick, I don't want what you have.
Caleb smiled at a heavyset man with a graying mustache who sat holding an ice pack to his forehead. The man squinted back at Caleb, who decided to wink before walking up to the intake window.
The man behind the counter, round-faced with a crew cut, immediately called for help. A middle-aged nurse appeared immediately, and Caleb could see it in their eyes — he's catchy, he's going to make everyone sick, we have to isolate him.
They opened the security doors to bring him in, a doctor appeared with a mask on his face and rubber gloves on his hands. Caleb let them pull him inside, their attention so rapt on how ill he looked no one noticed the growing troubles in the lobby, the glassy eyes, the coughing, the faces turning to ash.
The security door closed and both doctor and nurse helping him slowly fell to the floor. The doctor barely moved; the nurse called out for help, her voice raising the alarm, but Caleb's power, his gift, was already at work in the entire emergency department.
A security guard, gray-haired and thin, reached out to stop him as he let himself into the main body of the hospital. As he wandered from ward to ward, from room to room, touching hands of patients, blowing a kiss to a pretty surgeon fresh out of the operating room.
He took a security guard's passkey and made his way into the intensive care unit, his arms outstretched like an avenging angel, and passed through the oncology ward, smiling as he strolled. He danced in the elder services department, and caused havoc in the behavioral health ward. Of course he stopped for dinner in the cafeteria, eating soft serve iced cream directly from the spout, and poured himself a huge soda from the fountain, no one well enough to demand he pay for what he took.
The pharmacy thought they were about to be robbed, but Caleb took nothing, knowing, through his own trials and experiments that no amount of pills would ever make him feel better.
There was no one to stop him in the employee lounge, as his walkabout through the hospital halls had put all staff on high alert. He spent some time in the administrative offices, far away from the patients, just to make sure he found everyone. The hospital president was on the floor of his office, smart phone in hand, halfway toward completing a call he would never finish.
Caleb meandered through the cardiology unit, marveling at all the broken hearts.
And once he had seen everything else, walked up and down every hallway, Caleb headed for the nursery, singing as he walked slowly up the stairs.