She was in the shower by the time he hung up the phone.
Day 2
At 34th Street the city suddenly went dark. Signs blinked off, streetlights winked out, only the strange glow of the traffic lights, red, green, yellow, red, then green, then yellow. The radio was a man saying to stay inside, that Magneto and the Brotherhood were again launching a terror attack on Manhattan, demanding the release of one of their members from custody.Four police officers lounged at a barricade under a massive mural that said in capital letters three stories high DIE MUTIE. One tapped on her window with a nightstick. "You can't go through here, miss." he said when she rolled her window down. He pointed back at the street she had driven down.
"I'm a doctor," she said. "I have to get to the hospital."
"Sacred Mutie?" smirked the officer. "They'll get along without you, doctor."
"Or not." scoffed another officer, the others laughed.
"I got called in." Ana said. "It's my second day. I'm going to be fired."
"We have our orders too." said the officer. "You can't come through here. Go around."
"There is no way around." she said. "It's in the middle of Mutant Town. Give me a break, I need this job."
"Yeah, you must need it if you got stuck in a garbage can like Sacred Mutie."
Ana bit back her response but the officer's face turned from mocking to stone-faced and expressionless. "You got something to say about that?"
"Just please let me through." she said.
The officer started to answer her, he drew breath, his lips parter, and a man with wings fell from the sky, skewered like a butterfly with a metal spear through his chest, stabbed through her windshield and slammed into her car with a jolting crash so loud it didn't seem to have any sound at all, splashing glass and splinters of metal and plastic out of her dashboard like a grenade going off.
"Shit!" yelled the policeman, leaping back, grabbing at his gun. Ana was only dimly aware of this. She felt woozy, dizzy, she saw blood on her hands, was it his or hers, did it even matter? There was blood on her scrubs, but she had changed scrubs, she put on her scrubs in the dim light streaming in from her bathroom in the dark but she would have remembered blood, whoever's blood it was, the police were yelling at her, she heard them say things:
"Is he dead?"
"Fuck, her car is totaled."
"He's still bleeding."
"He's not dead."
"Shit, it's Worthington."
"Lady, you okay?"
"She's breathing."
"I'm...I'm in shock." Ana heard herself say distantly. "Call an ambulance."
She saw the wing twitch, spasm, he was still alive. "Call an ambulance." she repeated, her lips numb.
The next thing she knew she was trying to sit up and a hand on her chest was holding her down.
"Damn, girl, if you wanted to ride with the Cowboy, you should have just asked for my digits." came a void, low beneath the screaming of the sirens. "Now lie still so I can finish stapling up the billionaire on the rack next to you."
Her vision cleared slightly. She hurt all over. "Acetomenaphin." she croaked. "And water."
"Damn." Cowboy said. "You don't seem to understand who is in charge in my box." He helped her sit up only a few inches and gave her a small sip from a bottle and a little green pill.
When she sat up she could see a massive compress on the winged man's chest and blood splattered across the inside of the ambulance.
"Warren Worthington?" she mumbled.
"Real live X-Man." Cowboy said, sardonically. "Real live hero." Cowboy's partner snorted with wry amusement from the front seat. Ana felt the ambulance slow, heard shouts, cries, people outside it. She tried to sit up again.
"Don't." Cowboy said. "Seriously now. Do not try to get up."
"I..."
"Don't." Cowboy said, his voice almost tender. Everything went grey.
Adderson leaned into the grey. He looked annoyed. "Doesn't the insurance at this hospital allow you to get treatment someplace else? Someplace good?"
"You said to come in." Ana groaned. The quip sounded weak.
"And you even brought down a new donor. A billionaire. You know, most people would have settled for a millionaire. You don't have to suck up to the oversight committee that much. It's embarassing."
"She's in..."
"Save the bullet, Cowboy." Adderson snapped. "I've seen internal blunt trauma and shock before."
"Whatever you say," said Cowboy good-naturedly.
"Get your box out of the driveway." Adderson ordered. "Nurse?"
"On it." someone said.
Ana woke with such a jolt that she didn't realize she didn't realize she had passed out. She saw the sun through the pebbled glass window, she must have been out for hours. She reached up, someone had put fresh scrubs on her. Her room was quiet, dingy, dim. The one thing the hospital had in abundance was space. She slowly sat up, gently removed the IV, sealed herself up.
She pushed the door open. Where were her shoes? The hallway was full of people, noisy, loud, urgent. "What the hell is going on?" she said.
Nobody answered.