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Our Paranormal Chernobyl
Scene 46: Afterlife
Tuesday, 6:30 pm, Cook County Hospital

"Hi there!" a woman said brightly. Officer Pete Santorum turned, already smiling—and was unable to lift his eyes beyond the most amazing display of cleavage he had ever seen. The breasts looked as organic as a pair of VW Beetles driving uphill, but Santorum was not a man who discriminated.

She was a blonde, dressed in the shortest, tightest nurse’s uniform allowed by physics. She glided up to him and ran a hand through the hair at the back of his neck. "Come to Momma," she said, and yanked him into her chest. His forehead struck the steel beneath the plastic veneer. He collapsed, unconscious, at her feet.

"I’ve got a mind, too, you know," she said.

K stepped out from around the corner, the large black doctor’s bag in his hand, and tsked. He lifted the cop with his free hand and carried him through the double doors. The room was large, with floor-to-ceiling metal cabinets along one wall and a dozen steel tables in the floor. Most of the tables were occupied by sheets in vaguely human shapes.

A hospital staffer in green was working at one of the tables. He turned at the noise, a screwdriver in one hand, and looked at them through plastic goggles. His eyes went wide.

The man reached for the red phone on the wall beside him. B formed her hand into the shape of a gun and shook her head. "I wouldn’t do that if I were you."

He looked at her finger and frowned. "You’ve got to be kidding." He picked up the receiver.

"Bang!" she said. A stream of steel flechettes left the tip of her finger and struck him in the chest and neck. He went down in a fountain of blood, the handset swinging from its cord. B went to him and looked for a clean place to grab hold. Taking care not to get blood on her pristine outfit, she pulled him onto one of the empty tables and covered him with a sheet.

K was stuffing the cop feet-first into a refrigerated cabinet. "So this is the morgue, hmm? Creepy."

"We just have to do a quickie inventory, sweetums." B consulted the readouts on her internal displays and turned back to table the morgue attendant had been working at. Interestingly, the underside of the steel table was supported by three car jacks. And no wonder. The object of the staffer’s attention was a heavy one. He lay on his side, fully dressed, hands tucked beneath his cheek, eyes peacefully closed. The only odd thing about him, and the reason for the elaborate suspension system, was that his clothes and skin were made entirely of multicolored stone. "Scratch #5" she said. "This one’s been fossilized."

"And #7." K had opened another cabinet. Inside was a puffy cocoon about six feet long. "This one’s still cooking, I think." He pushed it back into the wall.

They quickly went through the cabinets and tables. They’d counted off eleven corpses when they suddenly paused.

"Again?" K said, apropos of nothing. His tone was exasperated. After another long pause, he said, "Good! I’m going to drop more stuff on Mr. Arrow Person!"

B let the sheet fall back over the porcupine man she’d been inspecting. "As much as I would love to see you do that, my big strong man," she said, "we haven’t the time. We’re going to get Little Miss Preggers and get out of here before they know what hit them."

"But I want him to know that I hit him," K said, pouting. Then his eyes lit up. Literally: the plastic casing over the optical units glowed brighter. "But what if we run into them?"

"Then, my cutie pie, you can drop whatever you like on that mean old Crossfire."

"Then he’ll know what hit him!"

"Just remember, sweetums." She sashayed toward the door, K following. "If it comes to a fight, Maggie Thorin’s mine. And aren’t you forgetting something?"

K slapped his forehead. "I’d forget my head if it wasn’t bolted on." He doubled back and picked up the doctor’s bag he’d left resting atop a corpse and hurried after her.

The doors swung close, and the room was silent except for the hiss of the air conditioners.

The stone man slowly sat up.

The woman lifted the plastic mask from Laura’s face. Laura bent her head close, and inhaled. His scent was complex, but complete in itself, and right.

The woman placed the infant in Laura’s arms and stepped back, smiling. "-iss him," the woman said.

And Pender did. She kissed him, tasting him on her lips. She closed her eyes, and sighed with something like relief.

The others in the room—two doctors and three nurses, and the battle-hardened agent Mehldau—seemed transfixed.

Something’s not right, thought Mehldau. Women don’t get off tables like that. No way. He had just begun to step towards his boss when he heard someone speaking from the doorway.

"Oooh! Isn’t it darling!"

The ultra-feminine voice had an intimate electronic quality—like Marilyn Monroe cooing breathily into a microphone. Mehldau turned toward the voice, and Pender opened her eyes, heart already racing. It was the robot/Barbie-doll thing Ed had called B, and she was holding a tiny, pink plastic gun. Next to her, holding a much larger weapon that looked like a small Gattling gun, was her male counterpart, K.

For her part, Laura couldn’t think of a worse condition in which to be when she finally came face-to-face with the androids: wounded, in a hospital bed, surrounded by civilians, holding a newborn infant—and the only MCT in the room unarmed. She’d been desperate to confront them all day, but now that they were here, she found herself willing them away. Come back in ten minutes.

"Gosh, I just hate to disturb this swell moment," K said. "But we don’t have all day."

"And don’t get all lunk-headed and heroic," B said to Mehldau, swinging her weapon toward the armored agent. "You MCTs always have trouble keeping your steroids in check."

Mehldau glanced at the large weapon against the wall with a feeling of disgust. But really, who expected this in a hospital of all places? How did they find this room, on this floor, this quickly? And just what were these things?

Well Bob, here we go again. Now wasn’t the time for wishing for what might have been, so he looked away from the heavy weapon and settled his gaze on the… things across the room. He could feel his heart pumping faster, his adrenaline kicking in, bringing everything into focus. His goal was simple: Protect the people in this room.

He stepped quickly in front of Pender’s bed, hands upraised and clearly away from his weapon. "What do you want?" he asked evenly.

Not the baby, not the baby, not the baby… was Laura’s mantra.

"For starters, you face down on the floor," B said. "Now, sweetums."

"All right, whatever you say," replied Mehldau, dropping to his knees. "Could you tell us what you want? Maybe we can work this out?"

He stayed on his knees, hands at shoulder level, palms towards the intruders.

"You PRIMATES never could listen to directions," B said. "But company’s coming, and we don’t have time to squabble." She pointed her index finger at his chest. The long, pink nail was decorated with sparkles. "Bang."

Tiny pink steel flechettes burst from the tip of her finger, sliced easily through the front of the agent’s white armor, and exited the back in a spray of pink.

Bob Mehldau remained in his kneeling position, a concerned look on his face. His right hand reached for his sidearm and managed to lift the gun from its holster. Then he fell forward, and the gun skittered out of his hand and vanished beneath Pender’s bed.

"Mehldau!" Pender shouted, trying to believe what she’d just seen. If it weren’t for the baby….

"I told them they needed better armor," B said. "These guys fall over like Imperial Stormtroopers."

K laughed heartily. The tongueless woman began to scream. K grabbed her arm and yanked her toward him, and she abruptly shut up.

"Let go of her, you plastic piece of shit!" Pender shouted. It was an impotent command, Laura knew, but it had to be said.

"Now, that’s no way for a lady to talk," K said, frowning. Behind him, a 350-pound female nurse charged toward him. Barely glancing at her, K lifted his big pistol and fired. The report was deafening in the tiled room, and the woman toppled forward. The tongueless woman screamed again. The doctor and two nurses who had not already taken cover behind the equipment suddenly dove to the floor.

"We were never very good at stealth," B sighed. "Get out of here, K, and you better carry her." K dutifully lifted the screaming woman under one arm.

"What about the baby?"

"I am not hauling a drooler around with me," B said. "Besides, no pellet, no worries!"

K nodded and stepped out the door.

"And as for you, Agent Pender," B said. "I wish we had time for some girl talk. I’m just dying to know how you manage to look so good in bandages. Oh well!" She shrugged, tossed her hair, and backed toward the door. "Gotta blow this joint!" She stepped into the hallway and raised the toy-like pink gun.

"The baby!" was all Laura managed to exclaim, even as it became blatantly obvious that they didn’t care about any human life, baby or otherwise, beyond whatever their objective might be. She hugged the infant to her and rolled sideways, putting her back between the child and the door. The pain in her shoulder made her cry out.

The tiny missile shot through the doorway and struck Pender in the back, and the world disappeared in heat and light.

The ramp ended a few yards away from the entrance to the ER. Jonathan and Maggie stepped onto the sidewalk. Behind them, the ramp receded into the sphere and the ship’s door closed.

"Want to try the Emergency entrance?" Crossfire asked Magnitude. "Probably the quickest way to get to Pender."

"Yes, but we need to get cops to accompany us before we go see Pender—I don’t think the PRIMUS boys will like it if we try to barge into her room unescorted, and they’re sure to have her room guarded."

"I hope so." As they approached the entrance, Jonathan tried to look through the main doors, their glass glazed by the sunlight, for security of any kind.

It was a large lobby, with about twenty people waiting in plastic seats. In the corner was a plastic play house, where two young kids were pushing teddy bears through the windows. Against the far wall were four booths with glass separating the lobby from the office and ER proper. Two of the booths were occupied by patients, who were talking to intake staff. There was no security in sight.

Suddenly, one of the patients in the booth stood up, looking past the glass, and a few of the people sitting near the booths looked up in alarm. The two hospital staffers visible in the booths turned to look at something deeper in the office that neither Crossfire nor Maggie could see.

A moment later, though, the heroes heard a noise that penetrated to the outside: the crump and blast of an explosion from somewhere beyond the lobby. The sound even carried to Q-Ball’s microphones.

"Change of priorities!" Maggie yelled, rushing inside, shields flaring to life. "I’m thinking one of our other victims just manifested themselves."

Crossfire flanked her on the approach, unslinging his bow. His right hand hovered over his quiver, fingers twitching in anticipation of his decision as to which arrow to choose. "Whatever it is, it isn’t good," he replied, looking through the glass from just beyond where the automatic sensors would push the overlarge emergency doors open.

Crossfire and Maggie could see into the office, and there was nothing dangerous there. The two office nurses in the booths hadn’t moved. Another nurse was running to the west door that opened into the ER proper. And two nurses were standing at the big window along the north wall, hands at their faces in shock.

Crossfire turned to Maggie, "Radio the others down here, there’s no point in subtlety now!"

The archer didn’t wait for a reaction; innocent lives were at risk. He ran towards the door that opened into the hallway. People might start running out the exit doors and he didn’t want to be in their way. He also couldn’t fire any arrows through walls and windows.

"Get everyone out of here!" he shouted to the nurses that stood stock still at the window. Then he pushed on the door in front of him—and it didn’t budge.

Maggie flipped her visor down and called into the radio—"Q-Ball, this is Maggie—we’ve got a situation already. We need everyone on the ground." She looked up, saw Crossfire pressing on the door, and yelled at him: "Move aside!"

Crossfire didn’t even turn around. He simply side-stepped right and brought his forearm up parallel to his head.

No time for subtlety. Maggie ran forward, full-tilt, her fists glowing from the repulsor's light, and slammed into the door with all her might.

The door blew off the hinges. Glass shattered and the metal sheared in half, the top and bottom pieces bouncing off the opposite wall in ricocheting down the hallway.

From the end of that corridor they heard a quick burst of automatic gunfire, then the sounds of women and men screaming.

Maggie sprinted down the hallway, Crossfire following. By the halfway point the archer had passed her and pulled away.

God he’s fast, thought Maggie, breathing hard as she tried to talk in the radio and keep enough breath for running at the same time. If she fired her jets she might be able to catch up to Crossfire—but she was loath to do that in a hospital even though the emanations were safe.

Two people ran past the mouth of the hallway, looking like targets. "Get down back here, now!" Jonathan shouted, hoping he would shock them more than whatever had them scared. The nearest woman, a red-headed nurse in a blue smock, jerked her head toward him, but kept running.

Crossfire brought his bow back up to bear and dashed to the end of the hall. Instead of stopping at the corner, he let his feet slide on the pale yellow linoleum. The momentum carried him out into the open. He still hadn’t chosen an arrow, but he was betting a choice would come to him soon.

He checked left—and felt an electric rush as he realized he’d become a target himself.

Thirty feet away was the plastic woman he’d seen at the autobody. Now, though, she was dressed in a white flared shirt and tight micro-skirt, something Hustler Video would have ordered for the role of Larry Flynt’s night nurse. Her legs were apart, and she was holidng a pink, plastic pistol. She’d been aiming down the hallway where the nurses had fled, but as Crossfire slid into view she smiled brightly and dropped the angle of the barrel a few degrees. "Why, hello there!" she said.

Tex Ritter’s voice sang the words in his head, but Jonathan couldn’t remember the name of the song from High Noon. That bothered him a lot, though he wasn’t sure why. One hand groped back for a taser arrow, he only hoped he’d have a chance to use it.

Crossfire’s telescopic lens brought her eyes right up to his. It looked like she was close enough to kiss, he thought to himself, until he saw her lids narrow ever so slightly. He knew the look all too well. "Twelve o’clock Barbie doll!" he shouted, hoping Magnitude would understand. His hand still reached for the arrow, but the rest of Crossfire simply waited. And prayed, something he was sure his uncle would find ironic.

From behind him, Crossfire heard a loud, hollow sound rumble through the air. It sounded like a bass drum trying speak Welsh. It said, as near as he could tell, "Garl JJiko. Ni, Gat Dean." But he had no time to wonder what that meant, because a tiny pink missile had launched from the barrel of the Barbie Doll’s gun.

"Q-Ball, this is Maggie—we’ve got a situation already." Her voice, coming over the Q-ship’s speakers, was firm. "We need everyone on the ground."

"That doesn’t sound good," DuFord said, and tapped a few keys. The door slid open and the ramp began to extend to the ground.

"DuFord!" Goo yelled. It swiveled to face DuFord. "Priorities! Look for pla-a-astic telepresence transmissions."

Goo seemed to be displeased, as if it were a prima donna forced to work with amateurs.

"Oh. Yes, just a—" The man seemed a bit flustered.

"Ma-a-aggie?" Goo asked aloud, hoping it would be picked up by the ship’s audio system. "Why need everyone? Is it pla-a-astic? Who? What?"

"I don’t know!" Maggie yelled in the radio, a little out of breath from the running. "We have an explosion, gunfire, and people running away. We’re trying to get a closer look."

DuFord said broke in. "I think I’ve got something! I got a dense stream of data on one of the frequencies in the range that Plastics are using, but it’s gone now. They’re cycling through frequencies. But the signal was strong, so they’re either close, or one of their repeaters is."

The two hairs left on Stranger’s neck were standing on end. Something was wrong. Something more than whatever was going on with Maggie and Crossfire. They had let everyone know that they were coming and just when they arrived the shit hit the fan. His instinct was to clear the ship and head towards his new-found companions, but something told him that there was much more to all of this. DuFord had found the strong signal just when everything had started to happen. And whoever was behind all of this must have known that all of the newly created metas would be brought here for treatment. They could have placed one of their signaling devices in the hospital, but they would also want access to their work. Close. Yes, they had to be close. Most of their subjects were now in one place, Stranger and Goo included. Something else was happening, but Stranger could not put his finger on it and there wasn’t anytime to think it through.

"DuFord see if you can figure out where that signal came from, relay it to Maggie, and ask her to tell it to me right away. I think that there’s more here then meets the eye. See if you can get a better overall view of the hospital. I think that this could just be a diversion." He then turned and ran towards the opening.

"LET’S AWAY" he yelled as he leapt towards the doors of the hospital.

As he dropped to the ground, the ER lobby door sprang open. A woman, a three-year-old on her hip, rushed out. There were half a dozen more people behind her, pressing into the doorway. Stranger landed a few feet away from the woman, and she jerked her head up and screamed.

There was no way to get past this crowd until they’d cleared the building. He didn’t have time to wait. He could hear the rat whispering just behind him: A wheel of Swiss cheese seems solid and whole when viewed from without, but it takes only a nibble to realize its true nature. So too is life. When something seems one way, take a nibble and change it.

The words still echoing in his ear, he turned, lowered his shoulder, and ran towards the wall just to the left of the door.

Pender tried to open her eyes, but they were glued shut. She brushed a clotted mass away from her face, and then she could see.

She lay sideways on the linoleum floor, smashed against the wall, the bed overturned behind her. She could smell smoke, and the acrid stench of burnt flesh.

The baby.

Oh God.

She pushed away from the wall, and looked down. The child was still tucked into the crook of her arm. Its face was smeared with blood, whether the child’s or her own she couldn’t tell. Its eyes were wide open.

And then, miraculously, it breathed deep—and let out an angry wail.

From the hallway came the rip of automatic gunfire—short burst. People screamed.

Laura immediately struggled to her feet, baby tucked close to her body, and was surprised to discover that although her hospital gown was almost completely destroyed, she seemed to be uninjured. She started towards the door, then halted at the thought of the baby still screaming with all it had. Naked, unarmed, and with an infant in tow—she wouldn’t be any good in a firefight.

Mehldau lay on his back in the middle of the room, a pool of blood widening around him. His face and hands were bright red—1^st degree burns from the missile, Pender guessed. His eyes were closed, and he wasn’t moving.

On the other side of the room, a short, white woman who must have weighed over 250 pounds levered herself to her feet. "Sweet Lord," the nurse said. Behind her, two other nurses and a doctor got up from the floor.

The gunfire came from beyond the open door. It was a large open area with a nurse’s station in the center. Twenty feet away, the plastic woman was aiming her pink gun at a target out of Pender’s sight.

She passed the baby to the heavy-set nurse. "Look after him—and him," she added, drawing their attention to the downed MCT as she went for the closet. There was another hospital gown in there, but what she was really looking for was her sidearm, which was resting in its holster on the shelf. She snapped the safety off and turned around, and that’s when she spotted Mehldau’s BrickBreaker by the other bed.

A moment later, she had it slung over one shoulder, not quite sure what to do with her pistol. She would’ve put it in a pocket if her gown hadn’t been reduced to a few threads. As it was, she tossed it onto the bed.

"Well, nothing to be ashamed of, Laura," she muttered to herself as she cocked the gun and took aim.

From the hallway, she heard a familiar voice shout, "Twelve o’clock Barbie doll!" It was Crossfire. And a moment later, a loud, hollow sound rumbled through the air. It sounded like a bass drum trying speak Welsh. It said, as near as she could tell, "Garl JJiko. Ni, Gat Dean." The sound was immediately followed by an explosion—a sound with which Pender was intimately familiar: The plastic nurse had fired her pink gun again.

The explosion sent Crossfire flying backward six feet, into the legs of the red-headed nurse, and she went down too.

Maggie gasped as the archer flew past her, and pedaled to slow her mad dash. "Barbie doll," he’d said—and she knew what that meant. She crouched, quick-stepped around the corner, and scanned the large room for her target.

The room was an open space with a nurse’s station situated just south of center, two hospital staffers ducked behind it. Corridors branched off to the west and south, and entrances to the examination rooms were set along the north walls. Doctors and nurses were fleeing the area, but two nurses had stayed in the exposed space, helping an elderly couple to the ground.

The Barbie doll was at the opposite end of the room from Maggie, and getting further every second. She was running fast, but it was doubly impressive for the same reason that Ginger Rogers’ dancing overshadowed Astaire’s—she was doing it backwards, and in high heels.

The plastic woman—the male robot had called her ‘B’ at the autobody yard that afternoon—was holding the same tiny pink gun that had blown apart the wooden gate Maggie had been standing behind, and it was again aimed in her direction.

A woman stepped into a doorway to the left of the robot, and B swiveled her gun to face her. She was naked, and she was raising a PRIMUS "BrickBreaker" rifle to her shoulder. With a shock Maggie realized that the woman was Acting Silver Avenger Laura Pender.

"Honey!" the robot said, surprised. "What are you doing up?" She didn’t get a reply.

Maggie lifted an arm, bringing to bear her own weapon—the EMP sprayer. The robot was fifty feet away, but fortunately there were no innocents in the way.

"Let’s see how well you take to this," she muttered under her breath, and fired. The electroactive muck shot through the air. I hope this works, she thought, and brought up her shield’s power in case it didn’t.

B jerked her head toward the sound of the weapon, and leaped sideways, toward the nurse’s station. The gray-green blob struck the wall, covering a hospital courtesy phone.

B rolled to a standing position, ten feet away from where she’d been a second ago. "No thank you! I’ve been slimed enough today."

Every word B said had Laura hating it a little more. She braced herself and the BrickBreaker against the doorframe and fired. The shell, which was designed to penetrate walls and similar solid obstructions, impacted on B’s left thigh. Apart from leaving an unsightly blemish on her perfectly-tanned skin, it didn’t seem to have much effect on the android besides making her angry in an unsettling, artificial way.

"You’re ruining my tan!" the robot cried.

A second later, yet another explosion. Maggie looked back down the hallway from which she’d come. The wall at the end of the corridor had been blown inward, and Stranger stood in the rubble.

Then from behind Maggie, a woman’s scream, followed by an ear-splitting sound like chisels tearing at concrete. Maggie turned. A gray-black beast charged toward her. It was a stone lion, like one of the pair guarding the New York Public Library. It bounded towards them, its obsidian claws digging great rents in the floor. In the rapidly diminishing space between Maggie and the lion lay a dazed Crossfire, and a red-headed nurse who’d fallen to the floor. A second nurse, the one who had screamed, pressed herself against the wall.

Curiously, Maggie’s emotion at this point was not fear or anger, but plain exasperation. Another variable in the equation, another piece to try to fit in the puzzle, trying to figure out where an animated statue (or a pair thereof) fit into a picture already crowded with runaway scientists, huge corporations, mutant-producing diseased children, and remote-controlled life-sized Barbie dolls, to say nothing of the group Crossfire had described. She had time to mutter "Now what?" before the lion reached her.

The beast suddenly dug in its claws and stopped. It turned its great maned head, surveying the open room, and stopped to stare at B, where she stood behind the nurse’s station. A great, low rumbling seemed to project not from its throat, but its entire body. Its tail twitched, marble tufts scraping the paint from the wall.

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