Camila waited for the big, bald guy to wheel Firebreak out of the room and into the hall before she got up from her chair. Once they were well out of sight, she picked up her things and surreptitiously left the recovery room, heading into the hall where hospital staff scrambled to wheel equipment into a brightened room nearby. She did her best to stay out of the way as she followed the signs to the nearest stairwell and ducked inside, digging into her pocket to retrieve her receiver. When she got it situated in her ear, she tapped it twice to activate the it.
“Banks, did you get all that?”
Yes, mum. The tablet recording device has distinct limitations, but the stress levels in Firebreak’s voice indicate a high probability of deception. I don’t think he is interested in you romantically.
“What? No, not that, Banks. He wants his bandolier back. Something’s going on here in the hospital.”
No, mum, I did not get that. I flagged thirty-seven different stress indicators in the conversation. I leave the subtleties of human communication up to you.
Of course Firebreak wasn’t being straight with her. It was written all over his face when she asked him about the weird drawings in his little message tubes. If the man had evolved his powers, this could be their ticket out of obscurity. This might not be a dead end assignment after all. Sure, there were still challenges. Burning things to ash didn't tend to endear one to the public, but she could work with it.
Also, did Banks just get catty with her?
She flew down the stairs as quickly as her shoes allowed. Her good ones she'd bought for hiking, climbing, and (apparently) assaulting tentacle monster lairs were ruined, and that left her with the heels, unsuited as they were for this kind of activity. Still, she took the stairs two at a time and hit the door on the ground floor, slamming it open. She’d come out in a long hallway in the administrative part of the hospital with various offices and departments, their labels next to the locked doors of unoccupied rooms. No one seemed to be here this early in the morning.
“Give me sit-rep on the hospital. What’s happening?” she puffed as she ran, working her way back toward the ER and the connected entrance that led to the parking garage.
Hospital staff are currently responding to two incidents, mum. One is a code blue on the fourth floor, room 4608. Patient: Brian Maldonado.
She stumbled, feeling like she’d just been struck. “Wait. Our Brian Maldonado? The one whose house we just burned down?”
The same, mum.
Code blue. That was cardiac arrest or something of that nature. Was that the alarm that Firebreak's nurse had to attend to?
Cammy barreled into the two double doors leading to the ER. The reception desk was on her left where the nurse on duty, the one in the military fatigues she’d encountered before, shouted at Cammy to slow down or she wouldn't be welcome back.
Johansen ran up to the desk and leaned against it to speak, slapping her hands on the top of the counter to arrest her momentum. The nurse, a severe looking young woman with a sergeant’s insignia on her chest, got up and took a breath, presumably in preparation to give Cammy a good ass chewing, but Cammy didn’t let her.
“You have a security threat on floor four.” Cammy declared.
Interrupted before the tirade train could leave the station, the nurse opened and closed her mouth, looking like she’d just been short circuited.
“Security threat. Fourth floor. Big guy. Bald,” Cammy continued on, hoping the all business approach worked in military circles as well as it did at the Company.
The nurse sat back down in her chair and turned to a screen behind her desk, pressing a couple buttons on the keyboard. “What was this suspicious man doing?”
“Nothing. He’s dressed as an orderly, but he doesn’t work here.”
The nurse raised an inquisitive eyebrow. “You’re sure about that?” She looked skeptical, but her fingers kept moving until she encountered something she didn't expect. “Wait. What the hell?” Her demeanor changed in that moment, seeming to go from beleaguered if dutiful receptionist to soldier in the span of a second. She reached over and picked up the receiver to a red phone on her desk. “Sai, what the hell am I seeing on my security feed?... What do you mean?... Work on it faster, I’ve got alarm indicators on all my screens, but the externals aren’t going off... Which is it?... Yes or no?”
That didn’t sound great, but it fit with what Cammy had guessed from Firebreak’s sudden interest in the big guy and his need for his stuff.
The nurse turned back to Cammy after setting the receiver down. “Sorry, ma’am, it’s time for you to leave. Everyone has to leave. There’s a fire in the building, and protocol dictates we get everyone who is able outside.”
Cammy’s heart sank down into her belly and flipped onto its back, dead.
Oh, Jesus Christ, Firebreak. We are not burning down a hospital today.
The nurse seemed to mistake the look on Cammy's face for something other than dawning horror. "I appreciate your desire to help. If you want to keep doing that, head outside and tell anyone in the lot not to enter the building. Don't worry. We train for this."
“I- Uh. Thank you. I will,” Cammy mumbled then turned to go.
She was across the waiting room and through the door to the parking garage walkway when she triggered her earpiece again. “Banks, meet me at the door.”
Yes, mum. Already on the way. The hospital is now responding to a code violet and a code red.
“Can you see them on the feed?” she inquired hopefully.
No, mum. The security system appears to be inaccessible at this time.
"What do you mean? You can't get in because it's designed that way, or is it something else?"
There is an administrative port available to me, but the hospital's security system appears to be in a state of perpetual cycling.
"Intrusion?"
It is consistent with current trends for digital intrusion, mum.
She ran down a black and white patterned hallway, zipping past glass windows that overlooked a serene garden sitting between the hospital building and the garage. As she ran, doctors in white coats and kitchen staff in black and white uniforms shouted questions at her or yelled surprised expletives over spilled coffee when she brushed past. Two MPs in ballistic vests double-timed it in the opposite direction, hands on their gun belts. They paid her no mind. They had other places to be.
Johansen came out into the parking garage and around the glass security kiosk, pushing through another set of double doors just as Banks pulled the origami beetle up to the curb. Opening the driver’s door, Cammy ducked in and scrambled to the glove box, grabbing her Mark II.
Better to have it and not need it than the other way around.
After she secured her firearm onto her hip, she reached into the center console and grabbed Firebreak’s “important papers.” All of them were the same type of paper, uniform in size and neatly rolled, but that’s where the similarity ended. Each one of them had a strange arrangement of symbols, crisscrossing lines, and irregular shapes that hurt to look at. In all her research in preparation for her assignment, she'd never come across references to anything like them.
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“Banks, you’ve imaged these right? All of them are documented?” She had rushed the process as they followed the ambulance from Gregory Basin to Ironside, one hand on the wheel and the other using the tablet to scan, and she wanted to make sure she didn’t miss anything before giving them back.
Yes, mum. All twelve images have been stored, and I am devoting ten percent processing power to analyzing them.
There was no time to put them back in the tubes if Firebreak was already fighting for his life, so she stuffed them into her purse. She also went around to the back hatch and grabbed an extra mag for the Mark II and a jacket to hide the holster on her hip from casual eyes. Confused and worried looking people were filing out of the doors into the parking garage now. The doctors were almost all on their phones, while patients’ families looked back over their shoulders wondering if their people inside would be okay. The kitchen staff talked amongst each other nervously, a couple of them casting sidelong glances at Cammy’s illegal parking job and the bulge at the small of her back.
“Sit-rep, Banks,” she demanded as she closed the hatch and jogged back toward the door to the hospital. The tires squealed as Banks left the curb to make room for evacuees and emergency services.
The hospital is in full evacuation now, mum. At least one fire on floor four according to emergency calls and loss of primary power throughout the building.
To get back into the building now, Cammy had to swim against the tide of humanity filing out of the walkway . Patients that were still ambulatory shuffled out alongside nurses and hospital staff while others were pushed in wheelchairs or wheeled out on gurneys trailing IV racks and attendants. Wading into the press proved next to impossible. Most of the staff were active duty military or veterans, and more than once strong hands arrested Cammy’s progress and forced her to turn around, telling her that everyone would be evacuated and no one would be left behind. When she persisted, a pair of soldiers in multicams went so far as to pick her up and drag her to the ramp leading outside before she convinced them she got the message. She wasn’t going to get into the hospital this way, not if she wanted to make a difference for Firebreak.
The volume of voices in the echoing parking garage made it hard to hear anything distinct anymore, so she cupped a hand to her ear to try and isolate the sound coming from her earpiece.
“I need another way in, Banks.”
Yes, mum. Proceed fifty meters west and take the stairs down. Then follow the walkway to the back of the building and take the stairs next to loading dock two. According to building schematics this should lead to the subterranean maintenance tunnel system.
She patted the holster that held her Mark II, making sure it was secure before she set off. Then she flew down the stairs and out of the metal doors into the early morning air. The sky was the dull gray of a pre-sunrise day, but still dark enough that the street lights remained on. They hummed away overhead and cast pools of yellow onto the path ahead. A sidewalk led her around the side of the building and to a pair of loading docks where a beige cargo truck sat backed up to the lip of one of the ramps with its engine on and the driver sitting at the wheel.
You’re in the right spot, mum. The stairs should be on your left.
There they were, a wide, concrete staircase with worn reflective safety tape stuck to the edges of the steps. She put her hand on the railing, preparing herself for more stairs in her impractical shoes, but she stopped. The driver of the truck was potentially in danger. It would be best if he at least pulled away down the street to make room for the fire department or the police or whoever got here first.
Cammy turned around and jogged over to the passenger side of the truck then pulled herself up using the climbing handle and foot rail. Once she was up, she saw the truck driver, a wiry man wearing a brimmed cap, a gray button down mechanic’s shirt, and khakis, typing furiously on a laptop affixed to the center console of the cab and rocking back and forth nervously.
Cammy reached up and knocked on the glass to get the man’s attention.
A few things happened at that moment. A black handgun with a suppressor suddenly appeared in the truck driver’s hand aimed at Camila’s face, the hammer being pulled back by the double action trigger. Cammy, in her shock, gasped and slipped off the handhold with which she’d been supporting her weight. The man’s eyes burned with frenetic intensity as they met hers just before the hammer slammed home.
The gun fired three times with the muffled *pop* *pop* *pop* of subsonic rounds. The first of the bullets shattered the glass where Cammy's head had just been, while the second and third tracked Cammy downward punching blossoming holes in the truck’s passenger door and spewing shredded pieces of bullets and metal truck bits across Cammy’s face.
She hit the ground with a *woomf* managing to land in a semi-controlled manner, backside first then doing a sloppy breakfall with her remaining momentum, tucking her head to protect it from the asphalt and cushioning the fall with her arms. However, the wind had been knocked out of her by the landing, and she could feel her diaphragm spasming in an attempt to restart the respiratory process. Above her, the cab of the truck rocked with the man’s weight as he climbed over the center console and gear shifter presumably to be able to fire at her again from the passenger window.
There was no time to think. She only knew that she needed more time to think. Cammy rolled to her left until she was on all fours then scrambled under the truck’s attached trailer, having to slide on her stomach to get all the way underneath and out of sight.
Crazed, panicked cursing could be heard above her from the broken window of the cab, followed by the impact of a shoulder on the apparently uncooperative truck door and the tinkle of falling glass. The driver rammed his body into the inside of the door again and again, trying to force the mechanism open that one of his earlier shots must have fouled.
As she lay there on her stomach near the back wheel well of the truck, cold shivers passed through Cammy’s body, and her mind raced. Her conscious mind was subsumed by an all-encompassing need to be just about anywhere else right now, but that wasn’t an option. With a shaking hand she reached to the small of her back and drew her Mark II, fumbling it onto the pavement before reclaiming it.
When it came time to write her report about this incident, she would leave that part out, assuming she lived.
She swallowed and positioned herself, gun aimed at the foot railing where her assailant might step down, her breath finally returning to her in shallow gulps. With her ability to breathe restored, it wasn’t long before she was able to think more clearly as well.
She did what her training told her to do. She called for help.
“Banks!" She shouted her voice involuntarily high and shrill. “I’m under fire!”
Understood, mum. I have notified the authorities of your position and status.
The police were already on their way, Cammy was sure, but the response time would still most likely be too long to help her. Information in a crisis situation never propagated perfectly, and it could take valuable minutes to get the proper people to respond. She would be on her own until she wasn’t, and she had to deal with that.
The sound of the truck’s door finally giving way and groaning as it swung open brought her back to the moment. She had expected the man’s boot to come down onto the railing and thereby giving her a shot. Instead, the truck’s driver led with his gun, apparently hanging upside down from the truck’s cab to get a view of the undercarriage. The man's weapon, a suppressed pistol she wasn't familiar with, panned from side to side, sweeping every angle, then the trucker's face came into view.
Hands shaking, Johansen let off a shot with her Mark II. There was the sizzling *crack* of the mag-assisted bullet leaving the chamber and the near instantaneous shearing of the truck’s steel frame where the bullet tore through. The driver, wide-eyed, ducked back into the cab of the truck. The cab’s suspension squealed as he repositioned himself again, cursing frantically all the while.
The truck driver had Cammy at a disadvantage now, knowing where she was, so she crawled forward with her weapon leading the way, until she laid behind the front driver's side tire. However, instead of trying to shoot her again, the driver had other ideas. The truck’s brakes disengaged with a hiss and the vehicle rolled forward, its engine revving in low gear. When she looked back the way she came, the spare wheel mounted near the rear was slowly coming her way. Her cover was about to be gone, and the truck might not stop there, fleeing the scene instead of trying to finish what the driver started.
“Banks, signing off. Power down my receiver.”
Yes, m-
But Cammy already extracted the earpiece and rolled over onto her back. As the spare passed her, she reached up, flipping the deactivated earpiece up and into the mounting that held the spare in place. Then the truck was clear of her, rolling past the yellow painted lines of the loading dock and coming to a stop before it could pull onto the access road that ran along behind the building.
Cammy rolled to lay on her stomach, pistol in hand, readying a shot for when the driver poked his head out of one of the side windows.
That’s when she heard a crash behind her. Then the metal security door to the loading dock flew in a shallow arc over her head to slam into the pavement and skid, sparking off the asphalt until it came to a stop against the truck's rear passenger tire. A shirtless, horrifically burned and extremely pissed looking Hugh stomped through the opening, bellowing in rage and carrying a limp military policeman, whom he held by the combat harness in one meaty fist.
That’s when the truck driver made his move, leaning out of the driver’s side window and letting fly with his subsonic rounds. Forced to address the more immediate threat, Cammy held her breath and steadied her aim, drawing a bead on the man with the gun.