A Hard Rain: Book Two Of The Shift Trilogy

Chapter 5

Charlottesville, Virginia

Greater Monticello

December 2012

Neko Lemay heard human voices whispering unintelligibly. She felt as though she was coming down from the worst trip since she went out to a cow pasture in high school and wound up with a nasty crop of mushrooms. Light pierced through her eyelids, so she didn't even try opening them. Over the last day, week or hours—she couldn't tell which—Neko had fallen in and out of consciousness. She was at the Our Lady of the Random Miracle, Greater Monticello's hospital. That much she knew. A nurse had tried to calm her down as he administered a needle into her. Before she slipped out of consciousness, her last thought was relief, seeing Rita standing over her safe and sound brushing her red locks back from her eyes.

Her shoulder wasn't in the searing pain it had been before her mind drifted off into a sinister version of Toy Storymeshing with memories of Grey's Anatomy. As her mind emerged back into something she would call reality, she felt a dull aching throughout her body. The voices were becoming more distinct now.

"...was able...the arm...severe nerve damage..."

"But will she be able to use it again?" She recognized the concerned woman's voice. It was now coming to her. She had been shot defending the reverend. She saw fragments of herself spew out from her shoulder. The woman talking sounded like Rita and she was asking about her arm. Neko held her breath trying to hear the man's answer.

"Ma'am, I don't know if she will ever have use of her arm. If the wound doesn't get infected, we can save her."

"Jesus."

Neko froze at the words spoken, unable to buffer what she had just overheard.

The low male voice continued dispassionately giving an antiseptic report. "We won't know about the infection for another few days. Unfortunately, the antibiotics we produce aren't much against the super strains that emerged before the Shift. Even the antibiotics we had were beginning to waver in their effectiveness. I was able to get all the fragments out and it was a clean exit."

"Akil, how am I going to tell her?"

Neko must have given herself away because they abruptly stopped speaking to each other.

"She's awake," Akil whispered.

Neko strained to see in the light, her eyes refusing to focus. She felt hands clasping around her left hand before she saw that it was the reverend.

"Hi, Rev," her voice croaked weakly.

"Hey, girlfriend."

That was a bad sign. Whenever the reverend called her "girlfriend," something was amiss. But she already knew that.

"Um, everything's going to be fine." the reverend said as she brushed her hair with her long fingernails. Neko tried to act as if she hadn't heard the prognosis and sniffed a nod.

Out of the shadow another figure appeared. Despite the blurriness, she could see the tall dark stranger with the beard was striking. That was until she realized it was her friend, Ezra Rothstein, whom she always thought of as a little brother. It disturbed her that he looked so good. It must be the drugs.

"Hey, dork."

"Hey, psycho," he responded with his term of endearment for her. "I heard you saved the chief magistrate's life."

Neko nodded and touched his beard. Ezra chuckled. "Yeah, I got sick of trying to maintain a goatee out in the bush."

"You look hot," she whispered. Oops. She knew she was going to regret that later. When they first met right before the Shift, she and Ezra were competing in the National Finals that were taking place in Charlottesville. She had flown from Washington State to compete, but Charlottesville was Ezra's hometown. During the competition, he wouldn't shut up in his desperate play to impress her, but he was a boy still in high school while she was two years his senior sitting from the majestic height of nineteen.