The next shift without Casey was a haunting one to say the least. Herrmann was selected to fill in as acting lieutenant, not a job he took with any pleasure this time. Every minute that wasn't spent running drills or responding to fires or car crashes, the silence in the firehouse was overwhelming, but nobody seemed to know how to get away from it.

Kelly sat in his quarters writing up an incident report, and for the tenth time since he got there, he turned and looked over at Casey's empty office. That was like being kicked in the gut, knowing he should be there, and he wasn't, and knowing where he was instead, and wishing to God he wasn't. He wondered how Casey was doing. He wished he was back at the hospital with him, he could at least keep an eye on him and know how he was doing. It was hard enough being there and seeing it, but it was worse living every minute of the day dreading his phone ringing and somebody from the hospital saying they had bad news.

The sound of somebody knocking on his door about made him jump. He turned in his seat and saw it was Otis. This was a surprise, almost nobody ever came to see him in his quarters, everybody always went to see Casey if they had something to say.

"Can I come in?" Brian asked as he opened the door.

Severide recovered from the shock and waved him in, "Sure, come on in. What's up?"

"Heard anything out of the cops yet?" Otis asked.

"Not since they went to see that girl yesterday," Kelly answered as he turned towards his report again.

"Think they'll catch the guy?" Otis asked.

"I hope."

"Me too."

Kelly tried to concentrate but couldn't. He dropped his pen and turned his chair around and asked Otis, "Let me ask you a question. That movie you were talking about last week, the one where the women got hypnotized."

"Yeah, what about it?" Otis asked.

Even now it seemed too farfetched to have any connection, but Severide was hoping they could find an answer in it. "How did they stop the guy who was doing it?"

"Oh, well that's the thing, the hypnotist wasn't the one doing it," Otis told him.

"Huh?"

"He hypnotized the women when they came up on stage as part of his show, but afterwards, somebody else came along and made them mutilate themselves."

"How?" Kelly asked.

"You know the theory that you can't hypnotize anybody to do anything against their will?"

"No," Severide shook his head.

"Yeah well, it's a very popular idea, you can't hypnotize somebody to kill themselves if they're not suicidal, you can't hypnotize somebody to commit a murder if they don't already plan to do it," Otis said.

"So what happened?"

"Well it was finally found out with the last victim, every single one of them thought they were doing what they normally did before going to bed, you know, have a cup of coffee, wash their hair, take a shower."

Kelly's eyes narrowed, "What?"

"That's what the last woman was told to do, take a shower and go to bed, only she was interrupted and the trance broke, she was the only one who didn't actually go through with it," Otis explained.

Severide slowly nodded, "And the movie was made 50 years ago before there were laws about water heaters having a limit of 120 degrees temperatures, so scalding to death in the shower was a very real possibility."

"I guess so," Otis replied.

Kelly chewed on that one for a minute, repeated to himself under his breath, "Take a shower and go to bed," then he groaned and got out a louder, "Oh my God."

"You really think there's a connection?" Otis asked.

"I don't know, but you said yourself they're very similar," Severide said, "woman leans over a burning stove and sets herself on fire, two people cut their faces wide open, two of them drink household cleaners thinking it's coffee, it does sound like there's a link."

"Yeah but that was just a movie, how could anybody pull that off in the real world?" Brian wanted to know.

"I don't know," Severide shook his head, "but I'm worried how much further this thing can actually go."


Kelly was aware of somebody talking to him. He knew it was the paramedics. He tried to look up at them but everything was blurry and some of it was doubled. He tried to answer their questions but his head was in a fog and nothing he said came out right, he wasn't sure what made it wrong but he just knew it wasn't what he was trying to say.

Everything had happened so quick he still wasn't sure what all actually had happened. They were on their way to a call, and suddenly there was a loud crash, the whole truck jerked, and they careened too far to the side and the truck had flipped over. Then it was black for a long time. Then he'd heard various noises, people yelling, glass breaking, saws cutting, but he wasn't hearing anything from his own crew, and that was the silence that scared the hell out of him.

As they were removed from the Squad truck one by one, he'd heard the paramedics talking. Tony had been impaled when the windshield shattered and had lost a lot of blood. Capp had been knocked unconscious when the truck turned over and EMTs suspected internal bleeding. Kelly didn't know what was wrong with him, all he knew was he couldn't turn his head, he couldn't see straight and he could barely talk. He was in and out of consciousness the whole way to the hospital. It wasn't his first time being the one strapped to a backboard instead of putting someone else on one, but the view of looking up at everything and everyone was always a disorienting one. He felt the gurney jerk under him as the wheels were put down and he was unloaded from the ambulance, he saw the other ambulances nearby and Capp and Tony were being brought out too. Severide tried to sit up and see them but the EMTs restrained him.

"Are they gonna be okay? Are they gonna be okay?" he asked.

He saw Chout hovering over him.

"Just take it easy, Severide, everything's gonna be taken care of."

Kelly tried to look back, and at first he thought he was seeing double, but he realized there was an extra ambulance beside theirs.

"Hey hey hey!" he tried to sit up again, "What's that? Who's in that one?"

"Don't worry about it, Kelly," Chout told him.

"Wait!" Kelly wanted to see who was in it. He saw the EMTs open the doors, and the gurney was eased out...it was a body bag resting on it.

"Oh my God, who's that? Somebody died, who died?" Kelly demanded to know as he was wheeled up to the automatic doors of the hospital entrance.

"Kelly!"

He knew that voice, he couldn't see who it was but he knew it was Antonio. A few seconds later the Intelligence detective came into his view and stood over him.

"Antonio what's going on? Who died? What happened?" Severide demanded to know.

"Is he critical?" Antonio asked Chout.

"I don't think so."

"Stop here for a minute."

"Are you sure that's-"

"Do it."

"Okay."

As the gurney he was strapped to stopped, Kelly heard an onslaught of voices and saw the other members from Squad being rushed past him as the attending doctors looked them over. Capp had been bagged for oxygen, Tony's clothes were sated in his own blood, in a few seconds both of them were out of his sight.

"What happened?" Kelly wanted to know.

Antonio leaned down and told him, "A woman jumped off the bridge you guys drove under, apparently it was timed just right, she hit the edge of the truck's roof and the windshield at the same time. That's what caused the crash."

"Oh my God."

Something that Antonio said particularly stuck out in his mind.

"timed just right"

"Not a suicide," he said.

"We don't know that yet," Antonio told him.

Kelly started laughing but there wasn't anything funny about it.

"Casey was only half right," he said.

"What's that?" Antonio leaned in closer to hear him.

"It wasn't all random," Kelly realized, "Somebody's actually trying to kill us."

"Kelly."

"Somebody's trying to kill all of us."

"Doc, I think he's going into shock," Antonio told Halstead as he came to the front.

Kelly felt rather than saw a light being flashed in his eyes, and he heard people talking, but it all became muffled and everything gradually went dark.


The next thing Kelly was aware of, he was laying in a hospital bed, and Will Halstead was facing him, talking, at first the words were jumbled and didn't make any sense, but gradually he realized Will was updating him on the others' conditions.

"Tony had transfusions to put back two liters of blood, he has 500 stitches, he'll be kept under observation for a couple days to make sure there are no complications. Capp has internal bleeding in the abdomen, we're keeping him under observation as well to see if the bleeding stops on its own or if he'll have to have surgery, right now it's a slow bleed and we're hopeful it won't advance from here. And you have a concussion and will be kept under observation until we're satisfied you're not going to slip in a coma at a moment's notice."

"And Casey?" Severide croaked out.

"Still unconscious," Halstead answered.

"No change?"

"The skin is trying to repair itself, all it's doing is making new blisters, which break, which take off the new skin, so the nurses have to scrub it all off so infection doesn't set in, and the whole process starts again," Will told him, "It's going to be a vicious cycle for a long time."

The night they'd brought Casey in, Severide couldn't really see any good in putting him in a medical coma aside from making it easier on his body to recover, but he was grateful now that Casey was, if he was conscious now and knew what had happened out there today, that would be enough to push him over the edge.

"The woman?" he asked, though he already knew the answer to that one.

"DOA," Halstead said. "Somebody takes a header off a bridge and crashes through the windshield of a moving fire engine, I don't think anybody's going to beat those odds. Bringing her here was just protocol...and there is a very anxious Battalion Chief in the waiting room to see you."

Severide glanced to the window and saw it was pitch dark outside, how long had he been asleep?

"Send him in," he said, dreading to think how long Boden must've been waiting.

A few minutes later, Wallace entered the room. "Kelly, how're you feeling?"

"I think I got a headache," he replied. "How're the others?"

"They're doing fine," Boden said.

"How's Casey?"

"Lucky he doesn't have to feel what's going on right now," Boden answered.

Kelly grimaced at that mental image.

"Casey wouldn't say what he was really thinking because he was worried it sounded crazy," Severide told Boden, "but he was right, everything going on, it's not random, somebody's trying to kill us."

"Just take it easy, Kelly," Boden told him.

"That woman who landed on the truck...if she did jump then somebody helped her, you can be sure of it."

"The cops are going to find out one way or the other," Boden assured him. "Kelly, you just need to take it easy and rest right now."

"Chief, what happens now?" Kelly asked, not able to bring himself to ask the obvious question, what was 51 going to do without a Rescue Squad?

Whatever the answer was, it wasn't readable on Boden's face. He looked Kelly in the eyes and told him, "Everything's going to work out, Severide, you just do what the doctors tell you and recover."

Now Kelly was starting to figure out why Casey had been so upset with him that last night. There were few feelings in the world worse than nobody answering your questions because they didn't think you could handle it.


After Boden had left, Kelly broke out of his hospital room and went to see Casey again. He managed to avoid running into anybody who would know he was supposed to be in bed, and got to Casey's room without anybody reporting him to the doctor or to security. He closed the door and headed over to Casey's bed, and stopped. Halstead hadn't been kidding when he talked about that 'vicious cycle'. Casey was still unconscious, and he looked worse now than he had the last time Severide had been in to see him. Severide swallowed hard, and made his way over to the bed, he watched Casey while he slept, and reached down and carefully stroked a hand over the back of his head, one of the few places it was actually safe to touch him.

"I'm sorry, Casey, I should've listened to you," he said quietly, trusting that his friend could hear him, "you knew this could happen, but you didn't want to say it because it sounded too weird to believe."

In the last few days everything had come together and started to make sense. Casey had told the others he was worried about going to sleep at night, but he'd changed the topic and said within a month the whole city could be burnt down. That wasn't what worried him, now Severide got it, since they had no way of knowing who could be the next victim, and all they knew was that it was people with no history of drugs or mental problems, Casey knew that qualified him, and everyone else at 51. What he'd been so worried about was going to bed normal one night, then waking up the next day and being like all the others, and not even realizing it, and that's what had actually happened. In the last several days he kept replaying the events of the night Casey was brought in...every other night off shift they couldn't sleep and they sat up watching TV. That night Severide had decided to leave Casey alone so they might both get some sleep. If he'd just gone to his room like he'd done every other night, then this wouldn't have happened, at the very least he could've stopped Casey, maybe even found out what was going on.

"I'm sorry I didn't take you seriously, Casey," Severide told him.

There was no response, he knew there wouldn't be.

Suddenly Kelly felt the presence of eyes on him, he turned around and saw the door was still shut. He went over to it and looked out in the corridor, he could hear all the typical sounds of the hospital, but he didn't see anyone around. He closed the door again and went back towards Casey's bed, but he couldn't shake the feeling that they were being watched. Then he remembered what that teenage girl had said when he and the cops had gone to talk to her.

"I saw him again, when I was in the hospital. I looked out the window and he was standing across the street, it was like he was staring straight at me."

Kelly looked over towards the window. It couldn't be. It was impossible. But...he walked over towards the window and pulled back the blind and looked down to the street. The lights from the hospital and the streetlights on both sides of the street kept everything pretty well illuminated, and there were several people down there, most of them were walking one way or another, but one stayed where he was, casually pacing around under one of the streetlamps. He stopped, reached into his coat pocket for something, put a cigarette in his mouth then cupped his hands around the end of it to light it. He pocketed his lighter, then looked up, and seemed to look straight at Kelly, and Kelly was able to look straight down at him and get a good look at him.

"Still wearing the mask?"

"I hope so, if not, he really must be something out of hell," the girl told them.

Severide felt his eyes bulge and he turned away from the window and ran for the door. He ran out into the hall and almost collided into Maggie.

"Kelly, what're you doing here?" she asked.

"Maggie, call the cops!" Kelly told her.


"You saw him?" Antonio asked. He and Voight had taken it upon themselves to respond to the call about a disturbance at the hospital. They were gathered in Severide's room and Kelly leaned his weight back against the dresser as he told them what happened.

"He was right down there looking up at me," Kelly told them.

"But you were in Casey's room, right?" Voight asked.

"Yeah."

"So how would he know where you were?"

"All I know is he was there," Kelly told them.

"You're sure it was him?"

"It had to be, I saw him."

"Well we went back and had Lena talk with a sketch artist," Antonio said, "can you describe what the guy looks like?"

There was no doubt in his mind. He would remember that face until the day he died.

"He looked..." Now Severide had a very good idea why Casey hadn't wanted to talk about what was really going through his mind. He knew how pertinent it was that the cops got all the details about the guy responsible for this, as fast as possible, but even he was reluctant to tell them what he'd actually seen, because he knew how ridiculous it sounded.

"He looked," Kelly tried again, "like...his whole face had been stitched together."

Antonio nodded slightly, took out his phone, and pulled up a picture and showed Kelly. The sketch composite showed a man with slanted eyes that sat far apart from one another, the hair on top of his head was black and stringy, and there were long scars running the full length of his face that bore resemblance to barbed wire. It looked like every part of his face had been stitched together, the forehead, the cheeks, the skin surrounding the eyes, the nose especially looked like several stitches had been used to put it in place.

"Like this?" Antonio asked.

Kelly stared at the picture and merely nodded.

"Do you have any idea who he is?" Severide asked.

"Not yet but we're working on it," Voight said. "In the meantime Casey's going to have a round the clock security detail posted outside his room until he leaves Med, nobody will be allowed in without clearance."

"That's it?" Kelly asked.

"Kelly, the good thing is with this description, there's no way that guy would be able to get in here without somebody noticing," Antonio told him.

"I wouldn't be too sure about that," Severide murmured in response.


Kelly made the rounds to see how his crew was doing, everybody seemed to be fairing alright, and he managed to avoid running into Maggie or anybody else that was authorized to send him back to his own room. After checking on his men he went towards Casey's room, but stayed around the corner and watched the security guard who was stationed outside the room. Severide stayed there for half an hour, he never saw anyone even come down the hall near the door. Maybe he was being ridiculous thinking the guy he saw out the window would actually come in here and try to kill Casey, but after seeing him with his own eyes, and being left with the distinct impression that he saw the devil himself, Kelly didn't feel he could leave anything to chance.

"What the hell are you doing out of bed?"

Severide turned and saw Dr. Halstead glaring at him.

"I'm fine, Will," Kelly insisted.

"We'll let the CT be the judge of that," Will replied, "In the meantime you're going back to your room before I have security escort you."

Severide pointed towards Casey's room, "Are you sure nobody can get in there?"

"Nobody is getting into Matt's room, now get moving."

Kelly was led back to his room, and he had a good idea that it would be a while before nobody was watching for him to slip out. He went to the window, pulled the slats in the blind open to look out, and he didn't see anyone down in the street. He let the slats fall back into place and went over to his bed, but he didn't go to sleep. He alternated between watching the clock and staring at the ceiling all night, and finally fell asleep sometime around dawn.

When he woke up, there was someone in his room with him.

"Tony!" Kelly exclaimed as he shot up in the hospital bed, "What're you doing here?"

Tony's Squad uniform was long gone and had been replaced with one of the hospital's paper gowns, various parts of his face and body were bandaged and stitched, still he didn't look the worse for wear.

"I've been authorized to sit on you if you try leaving this room," he told the lieutenant, "So what's going on, Kelly?"

Severide groaned as he moved around in the bed, and he answered, "Somebody tried to kill us."

"Gee, tell me something I don't know," Tony remarked sarcastically.

"I'm serious, Tony," Kelly said, "everything that's been happening lately, it's all been arranged, all the accidents we responded to, what happened to Casey, the woman that jumped off the bridge, it's all been planned."

"Now why would somebody do that?" Tony asked.

"I don't know," Severide admitted, "but I know it's true. I saw him."

"Who?"

"The guy who's responsible for all of it, he was standing outside the hospital last night, he was looking at me."

"How do you know he's it?" Tony asked.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you, but I know," Severide told him. "Have you heard any update on Casey?"

"Still unconscious, past that I don't know."

"And you?"

"A little lightheaded, but I'm told that happens when you lose four pints of blood," Tony answered.

"And Capp?"

Tony made a face, "You're kidding, right?"

"Did they operate?"

"No, and probably just as well, I don't think there're enough drugs in this hospital to make him stop acting goofy," Tony said. "Last I saw him he was cutting eye holes in his newspaper."

Severide busted out laughing.

A/N: Only one more chapter to go!