Page 23
“‘If there’s no meaning in it,’ said the King, ‘that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn’t try to find any.”
-Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Two hours later, Mull was ducking under the crime scene tape and re-entering the crumbling structure of the hospital’s north wing. Whatever had exploded inside had done a number on the surroundings.
She stepped over the burned wreckage of what appeared to be an office chair, searching for Oz. The man had refused medical attention and was still in here somewhere. Mull wasn’t a mental health professional, but she knew a lot about what crazy looked like. And Oz wasn’t doing too well.
After the building exploded, it took her fifteen full minutes to even get him to look at her. Instead, the man just huddled in a ball with his eyes closed, slowly rocking back and forth. Whatever the man had done to the mystery assassin, it had pushed Oz to the edge of something bad.
Mull wasn’t sure what the exact nature of Oz’s powers even were, but she was seriously worried about him now.
She wasn’t used to Oz being delicate or in danger.
Oz was… Oz . He was the most responsible and with-it person she’d ever met.
Oz was the man who helped you with your problems, he wasn’t someone who had serious problems of his own.
Yes, he was often distracted with compulsions and rituals and tirades about cleanliness, but that was understandable and kind of cute.
This was something different. And she didn’t like it.
Oz was the most ordered and… safe person in the world.
He was extraordinary .
There was something wrong with Oz. Deeply wrong. Something she’d never noticed before. The foundations of the man weren’t as rock solid as he liked to pretend, and whatever had happened tonight, it had shaken him. Shaken him bad .
The thought of that scared her more than she would have anticipated.
It didn’t take her long to find her wayward partner.
He was standing in the area where one of the nurse’s stations had once been located.
He was wearing a decontamination suit that would have made Darth Vader jealous, carefully placing all of the brochures for blood pressure medication back onto their scorched display.
The action was a complete waste of time, since this wing of the building itself was a total loss, but Oz’s mind wouldn’t let him escape it.
Instead, he was using a ruler to meticulously arrange the pamphlets into orderly stacks, using the level to make sure they were straight.
Mull didn’t claim to be an expert on whatever-the-fuck was wrong with Oz, but she understood generic crazy. If Oz’s condition was going nuts and making him waste his time like this, something deeper was going on with him.
“Hey,” she stopped a few steps from him, feeling like she wandered in on something personal, “you okay?”
He moved one of the stacks an infinitesimally small amount to the left, his entire concentration on ensuring that it was the proper distance from its neighbor. “Where were you?” He asked, avoiding the question. “You shouldn’t be alone right now.”
“I was looking into something.” She leaned against one of the columns, then thought better of it as a piece of the ceiling fell down at her feet. “How are you doing, Oz?”
“I’m fine.” He assured her, sounding distant. “Why?”
Mull shrugged. “Oh, no reason. Just the fact that you’ve been screwing around in here for two hours.”
“I’m investigating.”
Mull looked around at the circle of order he’d made in the midst of the chaos of the rest of the lobby. “How is this helping?” She took a step towards him. “Oz, you’re kinda freaking me out here, which is really hard to…”
“How is Wyatt?” Oz asked abruptly, cutting her off. “Did he make it?” His tone implied that Oz was pretty sure that the other man was dead.
“He got banged up, but he’ll pull through.” Mull leaned against the counter next to him. “Tyrant’s not lucky enough for Wyatt to die in the field.”
Oz let out a long breath. “It’s my fault.”
“I don’t see how. Unless you were one of the guys in the super-suits. ”
“I was on-duty, I knew there was a problem, I should have stopped them.”
“You don’t even know who they are.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Your problem is that you take on too much responsibility.” She informed him softly. “You need to learn to say ‘fuck it, shit happens’ more.”
“It doesn’t happen if you’re careful.”
“It happens whether you’re careful or not. This is a messy business.”
Oz ignored her logical observations about the nature of superheroing in the city, and continued to mess around with his stack of pamphlets. The process of getting them exactly right was made more difficult by the fact that his hands were shaking.
Mull’s frown deepened, growing increasingly worried.
Oz’s patience snapped and he swept all of the brochures off of the counter in frustration, then kicked the singed supports of the desk several times until they broke in half.
He watched the cascade of leaflets as they floated back down to the floor, then silently began to pick them all up again.
Mull had never seen anything like it before. Something was triggering him though, she just wasn’t sure what.
She stepped closer to him, taking his hand to stop him from fussing with the pamphlets for a moment. “Oz, seriously…” she met his eyes, “are you alright?”
“You almost died.” He said softly, looking away.
“But I got better. That happens.”
Oz was an intelligent, kind man. But something was broken in his head at the moment. And there wasn’t anything she could do to help him with that.
She wasn’t used to thinking of Oz as weak, but at the moment, her first impulse was to wrap her arms around him as tightly as she could, and tell him that everything was going to be okay.
But she didn’t. Because she wasn’t that kind of person today. And because she was fairly certain the man would be freaked out by physical contact anyway.
A man didn’t wear a decontamination suit if he was looking for hugs from random people.
Oz was strictly the kind of man you admired from afar. Because he didn’t want you any closer. And even if he did, you’d only get him killed anyway. Oz was a man of perfect order, and Mull was sheer chaos .
He was better on his own, like the hero in a western. He wandered the city, righting wrongs. He didn’t get involved with the local riff-raff.
“I killed a man tonight.” He calmly observed to no one in particular, like the idea amazed him.
“Meh. He seemed like an asshole anyway.” Mull snorted, expecting her companion to share in the joke. But instead, he continued to simply stare at the floor. “Oz?”
“I’m fine.” He assured her, picking up more of the fallen papers. “I… I’ve just had a long night, Miss Quentin.”
“Cops kill people in the field all the time.” She tried, wanting to make him feel better. “He left you no choice.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Oz asked suddenly, turning to look at her. “Because just because you’re okay today doesn’t mean that your wounds won’t return tomorrow when you no longer have these powers.”
“Oz, you’re changing the subject.” She took another step closer to him, softening her voice. “Are you going to be all weird about this now? Because of some piece of shit that was trying to kill us all?”
“I do not regret my actions. I regret his.” Oz cleared his throat. “But I would kill him a million times over to keep you safe. Without a second thought.”
“Thanks, Oz. But… I don’t really need protecting today.”
He met her eyes again. “I think you need to be protected more than anyone I’ve ever met in my life, Miss Quentin.”
“I run into a few problems…”
“Like getting thrown off a roof, stabbed, shot with a shotgun a couple weeks ago…”
“…but I can take care of myself, there’s no need for you to worry. Or to get all bent out of shape about some dirtbag you had to take out. Besides, it’s not like this is the first person you’ve ever killed.”
He was silent for a beat. “You shouldn’t go anywhere without someone else with you. It’s too dangerous.” He pointed at her. “From now on, if you’re going somewhere, I’m going too.”
Mull had no objections to that. It would allow her to keep a better eye on him, both to protect him from whoever was trying to kill them and to make sure he was taking care of himself.
Oz’s problem was that he cared more about other people than he did about himself.
Mull didn’t give two shits about other people, so she was the perfect person to ensure that Oz didn’t ”selfless” himself to death.
“Do you have any idea who could have attacked us like this?” He asked, placing his pile of brochures onto the remains of a table, then squatting down to retrieve some more.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. “I tracked the registration of every car in the parking lot.”
“You think the assassins drove here?”
“I don’t think they rode in on elephants , Oz.
Had to get here somehow.” She flipped through the pictures on her phone.
“Every car in the lot belongs to someone who has business at the hospital or in the area… except one .” She held up the image of the vehicle in question.
“A 1971 Buick ‘Boat tail’ Riviera. Tags come back to one ‘Willis Gibson,’ a man who doesn’t seem to have existed until Halloween, when he rented an apartment uptown. ”
Oz looked at the photo, his sharp eyes memorizing the man’s features. “Do you recognize him? Was he one of the attackers?”
“Nope.”
“Was the car stolen?”
“Doesn’t appear to be, no. Or if it was, he didn’t report it. He bought it at a dealership last week. Paid cash.” She put her phone away. “Why would this random no-account asshole send men to kill us?”
“I don’t know.” Oz got to his feet, voice filled with hard determination. “ Let’s go ask him .”
****
Table of Contents
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- Page 23 (Reading here)
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