April 8, 2031
The day of the bridge attacks, and the first appearance of the Quantum Man.
In the sixty-three years that she had been alive, Janelle Saylor had built the kind of history that should have prepared her for what she saw when she was called to the hospital. All of the building blocks were there; a father who came home from war in a flag draped casket, a childhood on the heroin infested streets of Covington, years of poverty, and a mother and a brother dead with needles in their arms. Then a man entering her life who was so wonderful, that just the thought of him made her want to be a better person, only to learn that her rancid years on the street had robbed them of children. Finish everything off with watching him die from a prolonged and agonizing battle with cancer, and you had a recipe for one tough old bird.
But none of that could have readied her for what she saw that day. It was as if hell itself had vomited forth a nightmare gouged directly from her worst fears. Displayed before her was her eleven-year-old grandniece, strapped down onto a hospital gurney like some sort of animal, horribly dismembered, and shrieking like an escaped soul from hell. The girl’s tortured voice was emanating with such power that it physically knocked her backwards. It felt as if every wail, sob, or scream had teeth and claws that ripped and tore at her heart and Janelle found her mind utterly paralyzed by fear while her heart battled between her need to rush to the child’s aid, and a cowardly panic.
It took everything she had to pull herself back from this inner conflict and gain some semblance of composure. So after she did, she took a deep breath and mustered up the necessary willpower to turn back and slam a lid down on her out of control emotions. She needed a clear head to understand what was happening. The doctors and nurses swarming around the girl’s gurney looked like they were doing everything in their power. But she could also tell by the looks on their faces that something needed to change soon, or her niece was going to die. Being confronted by the hard reality of this made her blood run cold; and for a long moment she couldn’t breathe. Black spots began to swirl in front of her eyes, and she felt her knees buckle. Then at the last second she reached out and braced herself against the wall, barely managing to keep upright.
It took a moment but she finally managed to get her footing and breathe again. She couldn’t understand how this could be happening. None of it made any sense. Where were Aaron and Katrina? They should be here! She had no idea what to do and she couldn’t get away from the overwhelming feeling that she had to do something. The very idea of losing the girl was so unbearable that Janelle just couldn’t process it. Whenever she tried her mind simply balked, either unable or unwilling to accept the input. She was confused. She didn’t understand. This was the little girl who had saved her and now she was powerless to return the favor.
Her husband Oscar had been the kind of man that could fill up a room with his presence. Yet somehow, he always managed to make you feel like you were at the center of it. That’s how he’d filled her life, and her heart, for almost thirty years. So when he died it had been like all of the light in the world had just gone out. Then Aaron called to tell her that the baby had been born and she had come to visit out of obligation. Just a few minutes to pay her respects and go. But the moment she laid eyes on the little girl something had changed. For reasons she could never explain, she fell head over heels in love with the little thing.
Everything from the amazing way she smelled, to her adorably tiny little toenails seemed to testify to the goodness of life again. After that she had devoted herself to the child, moving in for several months to help Katrina manage the home, while Aaron and Jacob worked. Then weekend visits and holidays had served as beacons of hope, lighting her path. At some point things had started to feel better. The times between when she could see Jessica became more bearable, and real joy had gradually crept back into her life. In the end, just knowing that the little girl’s infectious smile and bouncing curls were out there somewhere made the world seem like a place worth being in again.
She sometimes wondered if Oscar hadn’t needed to leave, just to make room for Jessica. But now, after having created this beautiful little girl who was so filled with life that she had brought an old woman back from the depths of despair, God was killing her. And doing it in the cruelest and most awful way imaginable! How could there be a God if he would do this? She knew what her husband would have said. He would have told her to pray. It had been a recurring theme with him and she could practically recite the sermon he used to give about it.
“Remember, no matter who you are and no matter what you’ve done, there will come a time when you can’t do it on your own anymore. In that time… that darkest hour, that moment of your worst desperation - that’s when HE is there. Reach out. All he’s asking you to do is TRUST him when you’ve got nothing left to lose! Just once and see what happens! Is that so hard? Why not? Try him, TEST him on this!”
“Now I know you don’t believe me right now… and that’s fine. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m just crazy... So let’s make it interesting. When your hour comes, try me. Try HIM. Open up your heart to him and say, ‘God, I can’t do this on my own. Please help me.’”
“If no help arrives, then come back here and tell me. I’ll take off this collar, renounce God on the spot, and start selling shoes! But... If I’m right, if God steps in, or sends just the right person to help, you come back here and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ and accept him as your Lord and Savior!”
“I’m ready to make that bet, are you?”
She almost smiled for a moment when she remembered how he always ended that sermon. The first time she met him had been a day when he gave it, and she probably had heard it a thousand times in the twenty-seven years they had been together. But in all those years, not a single person had ever come to tell him that he had been wrong. On the contrary, she had lost count of how many people had come knocking on their door to thank him and to join the church. At his funeral the line of mourners stretched outside and filled the parking lot. The funeral director had been forced to extend the viewing by almost three hours because men and women had flown in from across the country, and even some from across the world. They all took her hand to tell her how her husband had changed their lives, and she had smiled and thanked each one of them as sincerely as she could. But the entire time she had known in her heart that she was a fraud.
She had never held the sort of unshakable faith Oscar had. She was deeply ashamed to admit it, but it was true. Across all the years they had been married, during the entire time she’d called herself a preacher’s wife, she had doubted. Oh, she loved the idea of God. She loved what it meant, and what it implied about the nature of the universe. But she’d never seen anything that convinced her that it was anything more than a nice thought. Maybe she was just weak, or unable to give up her pride. Maybe it was just that last little piece of her that needed to be the master of her own fate.
Either way, she’d never had what Oscar did, and she had never told him. She felt tears welling in her eyes at the thought of him, how she’d promised to open her heart to him, but then held back this one critical thing. The one thing she knew would have hurt him most of all. She had loved him more than she thought it was possible to love, but she’d never been able to tell him. Then he died, and the last thing he told her was that everything would be OK if she just trusted God. That was the moment when she knew she’d betrayed him in the most fundamental way possible, and there was no way back.
Then, a fresh, ear piercing scream from Jessica yanked her back to reality. Despite the drugs they had pumped into her, the girl was still bellowing at full volume, and she could hear the girl’s voice beginning to wear out. The latest shriek of agony had a ragged edge that wasn’t there before, like a saw blade across her vocal cords. She found herself rooted to the ground by the pain she felt for the girl - and suddenly realized that this was it. This was her hour of helplessness and desperation; the one Oscar had spoken of. The one he had told her would come… and he’d been right as always. She’d just never really given in and trusted.
So she thought of Oscar and finally did what she should have done all those years ago when she first met him.
She really prayed.
She prayed that Jessica’s early arrival meant that the girl had the best doctors and nurses working on her... Nearby bays had filled rapidly once victims from the bridge explosions started streaming in, and doctors from other parts of the hospital were being pulled in to assist. A small part of her felt a pang of guilt for her desire to put Jessica before the lives of others, but the rest of her didn’t care. Right now that little girl was the only thing that mattered to her, and the first truly sincere prayer of her life was all she had to give.
According to the orderly who had escorted her here, a man with a black cloth wrapped around his head had come stumbling through their doors a half hour earlier. He’d been holding Jessica, bloody and mutilated in his arms, and at first they just stared at him dumbfounded. Some feared that he was some kind of crazed lunatic there to showcase his grisly handiwork. But then with a choking shout he had held her up in his arms and begged them for help. He had sounded like a man who had lost his whole world and was half mad with panic for the little girl. His arms had been shaking and his words barely understandable through his sobs. Pleading with them to save her, over and over.
When they took her they realized she wasn’t breathing, so they hooked her up to a CPR unit and ran her back to trauma. But rather than follow after her as she was swept away, the man had turned and staggered back outside. The orderly, a very polite and earnest young man, said that he had gone after him to convince him to come back. But when he got to the parking lot the man had disappeared without a trace.
She didn’t know who that man was, but she knew that he had given Jessica her only chance at life, and so she prayed for him too. How he had gotten her here so fast and why he felt he had to run away afterwards was a mystery. It was a shame, because she wanted desperately to thank him, and knew it would probably never happen. Besides, things were still grim for Jessica, despite the man’s miraculous accomplishment.
When she looked up from her prayer she realized that the girl’s condition seemed to be worsening. Monitors attached to her by wires and tubes were wildly blaring alarms and flashing warnings as the doctors shouted orders. From the frantic level of activity and the urgency in their voices Janelle knew this was it. The little girl had drawn within kissing distance of the reaper and nothing the doctors were doing was helping. Her injuries were poised over her like vipers and they were simply waiting for the moment when they could reach out and claim her.
“Please God” Janelle choked out loud as she dropped to her knees with her face in her hands, “Please no... Please God help her!”
Then, without warning... a gruff looking bearded man in a white doctor’s coat came thundering through the double doors to her left and looked more enraged than anyone she had ever seen. As he rushed past her he came within an inch of knocking her to the floor before shoving the other nurses and doctors aside. Then with a deft and obviously practiced move, he popped the caps from the syringes in his right hand into a bin, hooked two IV lines into his fingers and slid down them until their ports nested in his palm. Holding open Jessica’s right eye with his other hand, he curled his right fist down and perfectly lanced two syringes into the IV ports, depressing the plungers.
The effect was immediate. The girl stopped thrashing, and with a twisting jerk her shrieks cut off. But then Janelle watched in horror as Jessica’s lips began to pull back from her teeth, stretching into an impossibly wide grin, while the rest of her face went rigid. With another sharp twitch her eyes flew open so wide that that the irises were dwarfed by the whites on all sides. Janelle, still on her knees looked on in horror. What was this man doing to her?
No sooner had she thought this than a powerful spasm arched the girl’s back so violently that she rose up from the bed. The force of it spiked her blood pressure to the point that blood erupted from the stump of her right wrist. Two of the nurses screamed, and the doctor to the right of the bearded newcomer began shouting “What did you do you old fool? What in God’s name have you done?!”
But the older doctor ignored them all, watching Jessica’s eyes intently as he flicked the first two syringes from his right hand without even looking. They sailed in a neat arc that went directly over the head of the shouting physician and landed in the medical waste bin behind him. Keeping his focus on the girl, the bearded man uncapped and flipped the three syringes he had left into position. Repeating his earlier hooking motion, he gathered the third IV into his palm and waited. For a moment, it felt as if time stopped. Every eye was locked on him as tensions rose, and a hushed silence fell over the room. Janelle could almost hear the seconds ticking by.
Then a low, rising groan began to climb from the girl’s throat, squeezing through the tiny spaces between her clenched teeth. She began to shake like a toy in the jaws of some rabid animal. Her eyes rolled back into her head, and the groan she was emitting escalated into a hair rising warble. To Janelle it sounded as if all the heartache in the world had been trapped inside of her and somehow this strange doctor was releasing it. The most frightening aspect of the cry was how it filled the room, creating a twin echo much closer to her. Then with a start, she realized that it wasn’t coming from close to her, it was coming from her. So she clamped her hand over her mouth to quell her own keening, and watched as the other doctors and nurses stood frozen in astonishment.
Suddenly, the high pitched fluting of the girl’s voice dramatically cut off, and the doctor repeated his earlier hand trick. This time as the plungers depressed Jessica seemed to return to normal, relaxing back down onto the bed and appearing to fall into a deep and peaceful sleep.
After flicking the remaining three syringes in an identical flight pattern to the first two, the bearded doctor, who Janelle could now see was named “Sallinger” by the nametag on his lab coat, turned. This brought him face to face with the younger physician who had shouted at him moments before, and he trembled with barely contained rage. “You’re a god-damned moron” he hissed through clenched teeth. “This little girl has been in a partial epileptic state for the last seventeen minutes, but you were too busy putting Band-Aids on her boo-boos to notice! What the fuck did they teach you in medical school - to deliver a perfectly treated corpse?”
He stood, shaking and seething at the younger man for several horribly tense seconds before finishing. “For your information, I induced a grand mal seizure to reset her brainwave patterns, monitored her irises until it peaked, dropped her out with a Benzo and induced a coma before the epileptica could resurrect itself.” The younger man stood silently, his face flushing hotter and redder by the second as the older man humiliated him. “Now, unless you’ve got any other creative ways that you’d like to try and kill this little girl, I suggest you head down for your pink slip! I’ll call ahead so they know you’re coming. While I’m at it, I’ll be sure to notify the medical board. Perhaps you’ll fare better at a career in the drive-through food industry.”
Without a pause, he turned to glare at the others, “If you want to keep your jobs you will have her in my O.R. in the next three minutes. NOW MOVE!”
With that, the spell holding them all broke, and the staff began rushing Jessica’s bed down the hallway as they barked out orders and grabbed supplies. Janelle watched Sallinger as he stood for a moment. Then as he turned to follow Jessica’s gurney, she took a deep breath and put herself in his path. Sallinger stopped and fixed her with the same piercing stare he had just used to obliterate a medical career. “Who the hell are you?” She felt terribly intimidated, but did her best to stand firm, and replied, “I’m that little girl’s Aunt.... thank you, thank you for saving her.”
The strange and obviously volatile man continued to stare at her for a long moment, and Janelle began to fear that he was going to blister her with a similar tirade. But he didn’t. Instead, he turned back and left, stating his reply flatly... “She’s not saved yet. Keep praying.”
Several minutes later, Janelle retraced the path the orderly had used to bring her in. Eventually she found herself back in the emergency waiting area. It had been virtually deserted when she came in. Now it was overflowing. There was barely room to stand, much less sit, and so she turned back in the hopes of finding somewhere she could wait.
But she had barely taken two steps before she collided with another person. Stumbling backwards, she lost her footing and fell, but was quickly caught up and cradled by a man’s arms. When she looked up to see who had rescued her, she immediately recognized Jacob, her tragically white haired and almost perpetually silent younger nephew. Unlike most people who knew him now, she had seen the boy he was before Tajikistan. She remembered how the light that radiated from Jessica’s eyes had once shown from his. But even though they retained their brilliant blue color, there was only pain and loneliness in them now.
Before she could finish that thought, he used an easy strength to help her up, and then quietly stood back. She realized that he must have been summoned by the same hospital system that called her. Unsure where to start explaining, she stood looking at him as he returned her gaze. The question she most dreaded must have been clear in her expression because she saw tears well up in his eyes. He said nothing; but his face told her everything she needed to know.
Jessica’s parents were dead.
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