Fallen Masters Read online

  “No,” Omar said.

  “You two have been chosen,” the One said. “This is a call to action.”

  “Who has called?”

  “You have been called,” he said without answering the question.

  “What have we been called to do?”

  “It is a call to action against all mankind, not just Christians, or any specific Muslim sect, or any religion—but all mankind. It is a cleansing of those not on our path of righteousness.”

  “A cleansing,” Omar said. “A much-needed cleansing. I have been saying this all along.”

  “Yes. A necessary cleansing. You will need a martyr. A young martyr. I believe you have such a person in Shakir. Can there be a more noble beginning for a boy of faith?”

  “Surely you mean an ending,” Muti said. “For if Shakir martyrs himself for the cause, for his uncles, will it not mean his death?”

  “It will be his rebirth in the other world, a world where he will be received with honor, and glorified, and empowered beyond anything imaginable on earth.”

  “What would you have him do?” Omar asked.

  “Omar, this is one of my children,” Muti said, wondering how this being would know anything of his family, much less have the authority to announce that his firstborn son was to be a martyr to some nameless cause.

  “And you are my younger brother,” Omar reminded him. “You will do as I say. And I say that Shakir will be martyred.” Muti stared at his brother in dismay, and then turned and looked into the eyes of the One. And recognized the passion—and something else—that he had been seeing in his brother’s eyes for some time. Tears came to his own eyes as he realized that he had already embarked on a path that he could not abandon.

  “Do you read the papers?” the One asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Have you read of the murders in Belfast?”

  “I have read of them.”

  “The sign for you will be the twelfth and final murder to take place in Belfast. The heart of each of the victims has been removed. When the twelfth murder takes place, the last heart will be procured and the circle will be complete. The hearts have been buried and the placement of the bodies from an aerial perspective will to point to a date in the future … when the planetary lineup is completed. Then, my followers, when the last body is found with its inscription of a glyph, it will be the call to action not just for you, but for an organized cadre around the world, a thunderous movement that will shake the world. Fear and panic will rule. And that will lock the code to our cleansing. When that happens, you and many others around the world will launch coordinated attacks against mankind. We will see justice, and humanity will finally be set on the right path.”

  “What is the code?” Omar asked.

  “You will know.”

  “How will we know?”

  “You will know,” the One repeated.

  “If we must do this, let me martyr myself,” Muti said, feeling locked into this future but praying that he could at least save his beloved son. “I will not sacrifice my son and his future when he does not yet believe. I do believe. Let me take his place.”

  “No, Muti,” insisted Omar. “Shakir’s very innocence is what makes him the proper messenger. We will instruct him to the honor being bestowed upon him.”

  “But—”

  “No more … The decision is made.” Omar looked toward the front of the restaurants and saw that all the blinds were up, the OPEN sign was pointing toward the street, and the One was gone. He was in charge of the operation, and he needed to regain control over his brother and family. “We’d better get this place shut down.”

  “But I thought it was.”

  “Can you not see now, Muti, that the One was sent to us to give us this message? Can we deny this charge?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Shakir is the chosen one. He has been blessed by Allah.”

  Or cursed, Muti thought, but he didn’t say the words. He thought of Asima at this moment, since it was her son they were talking about—as well as his.

  CHAPTER

  27

  Atlanta

  Conditions at the hospital were still erratic, and even Tyler was beginning to feel the pressure. Why wasn’t Henry Emory here? There was no excuse for him not being here now.

  “Where is Dr. Emory?” Tyler shouted to Rae Loona, the head RN on duty.

  “He is unreachable, Dr. Michaels. We paged him four times!” she yelled back.

  “Well, page him again, damn it! And if he doesn’t answer the page, call him at home!”

  “You think I didn’t think of that?” Rae replied, and when Tyler turned he saw her staring at him with such an intensity that suggested she would resort to physical violence if he ever spoke to her like that again.

  Tyler looked back at her with a sad puppy dog look and a devilish wink, and Rae, no longer able to maintain the evil stare, began laughing.

  “Mikey, you are one crazy doofus, did you know that? But don’t be disrespecting me when I haven’t had my caffeine. Did you know I gave up caffeine, Mikey?”

  Tyler hated when she called him that, but it was also oddly endearing, so he just went with it. “I take it that’s because the love of your life doesn’t use caffeine?” He couldn’t resist.

  “Of course. My John Travolta doesn’t allow such poison to pass his lips. That’s why I love him. Or, I should say, that’s one of ten thousand reasons I love him!” Rae handed Tyler his white coat. “Take off that penguin jacket,” she said. “You’re scarin’ my patients.”

  “Your patients?” Tyler asked as he took off his tuxedo jacket and handed it to her. He put on the doctor’s white coat.

  “My patients,” Rae said, handing back the jacket. “And don’t you forget it.” She turned to the doctor and added, “Mikey, we are going places. And I mean go-ing pla-ces!”

  He had no clue what she was talking about, but he was used to that—and he didn’t question her.

  Nobody in the history of St. Agnes Hospital had ever messed with Rae Loona. Some even nicknamed her Raeving Loonatic. Although she had been at St. Agnes for only thirty-five years, legend had it that she had been there for a century. And certainly her presence was so dominating that it seemed as if she had been there that long. Onetime director of nursing for the entire hospital, she had stepped down after several years to devote herself to clinical work on the floor. She loved her patients. She was passionate, determined, and dedicated—with a vengeance.

  Rae had lost her only child to cancer and her husband to heart disease. Since that time the patients had become her family, and she rejoiced with them when they recovered, wept for them when they did not.

  She was an RN—a registered nurse, with a button that proudly proclaimed: “RN MEANS REAL NURSE.” As far as she was concerned, LPN meant, “let’s play nurse,” not licensed practicing nurse. None of the other alphabet nurses were allowed to work with or around her. And if any LPN gave her any of their crap, she would highlight the word “practicing.”

  Rae was famous for single-handedly getting the hospital through a nursing crisis a few years earlier.

  Already experiencing a nursing shortage, the condition was exacerbated when a strike occurred. She called a meeting of the nurses who worked with her. The meeting was unauthorized, but nobody on the hospital staff would dare to call her on it.

  “Listen to me,” she told the nurses. “If you walk out of this hospital for any reason other than death—and when I say death, I mean your own, and even then you better be three days dead before you leave—especially if you leave because of some dispute over salary, I will personally make sure that any salary increase we get won’t do you any good because you won’t be working here anymore.”

  “How are you going to do that, Nurse Loona?” one of the other nurses asked. “You don’t have the authority to fire us.”

  “Oh, I have no intention of firing you,” Rae said. “If I fire you, you can draw unemployment. No ma’am, you will
leave here of your own accord.”

  “What makes you think we would do that?”

  Rae smiled at the nurse, but it wasn’t a friendly smile, it was the smile of a lioness contemplating her meal.

  “Trust me, child,” she said in a voice that was a mixture of steel and velvet. “When Rae says you will be leaving of your own accord? You will leave of your own accord. There’ll be no Welcome Back, Kotter here for you! Wasn’t my Johnny so haaaaandsome as a Sweathog?” It was a rare day when she didn’t talk about the love of her life, John Travolta—to whoever would listen.

  And there was no misunderstanding what Rae meant. She would make life in the hospital hell on earth for them.

  That nurse, and all the other nurses learned that negotiating and salary disputes were a distant second to the quality of patient care. And as Rae described it later, “Once they were lost, but now they are found; were blind but now they see.”

  For a period of six days, there were only ten nurses looking after three floors of patients. Rae made sure that administration knew who the dedicated ten were, and every one of them wound up getting a five-thousand-dollar bonus. Rae negotiated that for them, not for herself. Each of the nurses got it, but she declined. Not one of those ten RNs ever forgot that level of dedication, and each one of them has made sure that Rae, who had no family of her own, was never alone on a holiday. This holiday she was with her family, in the ER, doing what she did best: running St. Agnes.

  Everyone who knew Rae, or even knew about her, knew that they needed to stay on her good side. (Younger nurses had to be convinced that Rae actually had a good side.) The stories about her were priceless and relentless. The doctors for a fifty-mile radius knew the story of her pushing a patient in a bed out the front door of the hospital when the insurance company said they would no longer pay for treatment. There was Rae, pushing a patient down Peachtree Avenue saying that she was headed to Southside General.

  What people didn’t know was that Rae had called the local TV stations, and CNN, and all had camera crews waiting outside to cover the story of how St. Agnes would turn its back on a twelve-year-old boy whose single mother couldn’t afford treatment. Miraculously, the good-natured board of trustees decided to take his case pro bono.

  A reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote a story about her, calling her the “crazy middle-aged black nurse from St. Agnes.” WSB TV-2 interviewed her about that story and she remarked that the writer was incorrect, she wasn’t black.

  “I beg your pardon?” the interviewer asked, the expression on his face showing his obvious confusion over her answer.

  “I’m more of a Hershey’s milk chocolate,” she said with a straight face. What she didn’t say out loud was that she was convinced that her Johnny Boy—John Travolta—drank gallons of chocolate milk every day. She had nothing upon which to base such an assumption other than her super-active fantasy life. And she didn’t care who knew it!

  Everyone on the hospital staff who watched the interview got a big laugh out of it, and they felt a sense of pride about working with her. And ever since that time, Rae had found dozens of Hershey chocolate bars, mysteriously and anonymously left at her nurse’s station. She kept a supply in a Grease mug on her desk. Generally, she gave them out to the children, to each child patient when she could, and to children of patients’ families.

  “I will try Dr. Emory again,” Rae said. She held up her finger and wagged it at him. “But not because you told me to. It’s because I was goin’ to try him again anyway.” She picked up the receiver and began punching in numbers.

  That reminded Tyler that he had intended to call Karen, so he reached for one of the other phones and started to call home, when he recognized a patient that was lying on one of the gurneys.

  It was an old high school classmate, Buddy Amendola. Buddy had been the starting quarterback on the high school team, then was recruited by the University of Georgia but didn’t have what it took to make the team there. Dropping out of college, he had come back to Atlanta and was now a police officer. Tyler had run across him a few times since then, mostly when he was bringing in either a shooting or traffic victim. Now he was a victim himself, his uniform soaked by his own blood, urine, and snow.

  Without completing his call, Tyler hung up the phone then hurried over to his old friend. Buddy was trying to speak, but was inaudible.

  “What happened to him?” Tyler asked one of the interns.

  “He was attending the nine-car pileup out on 285 when a vehicle hit him head-on. He didn’t even see it coming. I think he has cerebral edema. His blood pressure is dropping, he has been in and out of consciousness, he has thrown up, his eyes are blinking and rolling and his heart rate is dropping.”

  Tyler shone a penlight in Amendola’s eyes.

  “Good call,” he said to the intern, who beamed under Tyler’s compliment. “Get him up to the OR.”

  “Dr. Michaels, we can’t take him to the OR,” Nurse Loona said.

  Calmly and with calculated precision in his voice, Tyler turned to face Rae. “What do you mean we can’t take him to the OR, Nurse Loona?”

  There was a different atmosphere to the hospital tonight. There were no rabbits for her to pull out of a hat, this was a grave and grim circumstance. The hospital was at capacity, the holiday weekend was anything but a holiday, and having the hospital inundated with twenty-four people with various degrees of injury up to and including critical, was overwhelming even to Rae. “Sir,” Rae said pointedly, “there is nobody to operate on him. We can’t locate any of our on-call staff. In case you haven’t noticed it, the weather is a bitch and the hospital’s communication system is not operational during this whiteout. I know that to Yankees, a little old six-inch snowfall is nothing, but to us folks here in Atlanta, Mikey, it’s a blizzard. And Rae doesn’t have a good feeling about how this is all going down.”

  Sir? Rae had called him sir? Tyler detected concern in Rae’s voice, and the fact that she referred to him as sir slightly unnerved him. Tyler knew people said he had ice water in his veins because he never got flustered, no matter the crisis. What people didn’t know, was that Tyler fed on Rae’s steadfast strength, and to know that tonight, even Rae was showing some of the pressure, he had to take a few deep breaths in order to steady himself.

  “Okay, here is what we are going to do,” Tyler said. “I want you to call over to EMS and see if they can reroute any other patients that are noncritical to Southside General and Atlanta Mercy.”

  “All right,” Rae agreed without complaint or other feedback. That was another good thing about Rae, Tyler thought. For all the acid in her tongue, she knew when she could talk back and when she ought to follow orders without comment.

  At that moment, three more EMS crews arrived, bringing in the remainder of the crash victims. One of the vehicles involved had been a church bus with four adults and eight teenagers on board. Two of the adults had been killed outright, and the other two were critical. The two adults killed had been the parents of two of the teenagers.

  “Triage! Triage!” one of the EMS men was yelling.

  Tyler took a quick look at the injuries and determined that Buddy needed him the most, and first. As he began prepping for surgery on Buddy, he told one of the nurses to hang a couple of bags of antibiotics on the two young teens whose parents perished in the accident.

  “What else do we have?” Tyler asked.

  “A senior with a double hip fracture, and a drunken college kid with a broken arm, leg, and nose. They think the kid may have been the cause of the whole thing.”

  “We have a woman in labor here!” a nurse shouted.

  “What do we do?” another nurse asked.

  “The kid is going to be born with or without a doctor,” Tyler said. “That’s been happening since the beginning of time. If it is a girl, tell the parents to name her Agnes after the hospital. Page orthopedics for the other two, and get a psychiatrist to consult with the college lush. I’ll be in surgery.”
>
  Prepped, wearing scrubs and latex rubber gloves that allowed him to feel the touch, Tyler let the OR nurse put his surgical mask on; then he walked into the operating room where Buddy, clothes cut from him, lay under a sheet.

  “Buddy, I remember when three big linemen tried to turn you into a post-hole digger,” Tyler said quietly. “If you survived that, you can survive this. And I promise you, I’m as good at this as you ever were at throwing a football.”

  Tyler held his hand out. “Scalpel,” he said.

  CHAPTER

  28

  Things were still hectic in the emergency room. Susanne, one of the ER nurses, had called orthopedics on Dr. Michael’s authority, and now she was trying to calm the senior with the hip break. Mr. Reynolds was clearly suffering from dementia and had no idea where he was or what was happening to him, and he was starting to become volatile. Sue hated to use restraints on the older patients, but they tended to rip the IVs out of their arms.

  “Dillon, you are going to have to help me here. Get him restrained.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the young nurses’ assistant replied. Dillon was conscientious and did his work well. He was also quite strong, and it was that—having a strong arm the nurses could call upon when need be—that made Dillon more valuable than some of the other nurses’ assistants.

  Leaving Mr. Reynolds in Dillon’s hands, Sue turned her attention to the patient in bed four. This was the pregnant woman, and her water had just broken.

  As Sue got closer, she spoke to the woman, keeping her voice upbeat so as to keep the woman calm. “Okay, now, let’s have a look-see here,” she said. She picked up the EMS chart, then gasped. The name on the chart read KAREN ANN MICHAELS.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. She looked into Karen’s face and saw her eyes closed, but whether she was holding them closed or she was unconscious, Sue didn’t know.

  “Rae!” Sue called. “Rae, you better get over here quick!”

  “What is it?” Rae asked. She had heard the fear and shock in Sue’s voice, so she responded quickly without any acerbic comment. When Rae walked into the triage room and saw the patient, she didn’t have to check the EMS chart. She knew instantly who it was, and her stomach dropped. Her maternal instinct kicked in.