Chapter 10

Her Firenze was traveling true and fast through the back streets and alleys of Scottsbluff, streaking through the evening darkness like a shadow while the police cars were like pulsing dragons, flying here and there, and everywhere, looking for her. Shannon was miles from home, fleeing the hospital grounds via her beloved bicycle.

After weeks of sneaking into the facility with increasingly more and more security, it was now apparent and near impossible to visit and heal any of the patients with her skills of blue lightning.

I guess I'm done being the good Samaritan, she thought briefly. It had finally sunk into Shannon's head that what she was doing was taking revenues from the hospital by healing all those people. A hospital, over and above all things, was a business and if they couldn't perform operations, or keep people in their beds, or charge them seven hundred dollars for an aspirin, they weren't going to be able to make any money and the facility would have to close down. The administrators, nurses, doctors, the community, everyone didn't like that idea and it wouldn't be a good thing either, on the whole, she'd grown to understand.

So even in healing people, her fellow beings had prevented her from doing this kind of good.

All the police, knew, for the moment, was some girl on a bicycle was riding away on her bike, having broken into the hospital after hours, and they, the police, would probably assume it was for drugs, not knowing the true story.

She had been seen simply holding a person's hand in one of the rooms, in the process of transferring some of her blue lightning power into the patient, when a nurse walked in on her. The nurse hadn't prevented it from happening but she drilled Shannon about what she was doing there? Who she was? If she was a relative or not? That she shouldn't be there after hours, and if she wasn't a relative she would have to leave. After the tongue lashing, Shannon mildly agreed to do as the nurse had said. But then the terminal lady got out of bed and said she felt fine and wanted to go home. The nurse looked at them both with shock, maybe thinking some kind of illegal drug had administered, and tried to stop the old woman, demanding to know what Shannon had done.

After saying all she did was try to comfort the patient by holding her hand, the nurse had given her a dirty look and ran off down the hall to find an orderly or one of the newly hired security force they had installed. The hospital had been invaded by some do-gooder, was all they knew, but they didn't like it. Not one bit. It meant their jobs.

Shannon smiled at the woman, dressing, and then when her back was turned, quickly made a hole for the next room and disappeared through it then closed the hole as easily as turning a page in a magazine.

There was such a ruckus in the next room when the nurse and someone else came back, though, with shouts from hallway, lots of yelling, Shannon knew it was time for her to go. This was the fifth time this had occurred

She made a hole in the wall to the outside, but then looking at the patient suffering in bed, there in that room, her heart went out to the old gentleman and closed that hole to the outside. She went to him and touched his hand, felt the blue lightning leap into his body as she concentrated with thoughts alone of healing, wherein, the man's eyes opened wide and a smile came to his face. Shannon remade the hole to the outside wall and stepped quickly through it, putting her balaclava back on, and closed the hole, again, behind her.

She ran to her Firenze, hidden in the landscaping bushes beside the building, and peddled away as fast as she could even though she was very tired. Someone outside the building, a guard, recognized her leaving, as she had been seen several times in the past weeks, fleeing various rooms and patients, as well as the hospital itself. Now she was on the run for her freedom, sort of. If someone caught her, she would merely tell their minds they saw nothing and have them leave her alone. But not being seen, or caught altogether, would be better.

She was avoiding the flashing cop cars, now, and their blinding blinking lights when one of the police cruisers saw her and made a 'B' line towards her over a curb and through an empty dirt lot. This guy was wacko-rookie-serious.

She was in the business district going very fast when she noticed the spaces between the buildings and went through the next narrow alley between two structures. They were too narrow for a small car to pass through, much less a big wide police cruiser. She saw light flood the alley from his car as she accelerated through it then heard a shout-out to stop, behind her, and then a simultaneous shot and something else from a gun. Shannon felt like a sledge hammer had struck her in the back, that same instant, and she crumpled forward, crashing her bicycle and falling in a painful wreckage in that narrow alleyway, twisting to the hard littered ground. She gasped in pain and looked down at a ragged hole in her chest, right through her right breast. The bullet had gone completely through her body and she was seriously bleeding. Her eyes were glazing over and she knew she would soon pass out. In her last moments of consciousness, thoughts of healing herself filled her mind before the darkness came and claimed her.

When she awoke, Shannon was laying strapped to an ambulance gurney. There were at least five police cars and two Sheriff's vehicles around her. She saw a couple of private security people from the hospital, too, that had come to enjoy the capture of that terrible person that had been healing terminal patients.

Her balaclava ski mask was off. She had been seen and identified, at least visually. She didn't carry I.D. with her on these rides to the hospital. A man and a woman were working on her but the E.M.T.'s looked confused. She had a torn and bloody back and chest in her clothing, which they had flagrantly cut open revealing her one breast to the world and half of her back, but there were no wounds to be found, not even scratches and contusions, so they strapped her down. They had even given her an I.V. but it kept falling out of the cut open clothing of her naked arm.

What really made Shannon angry, however, was not being shot, though that certainly was something she would be dealing with shortly, but it was her ruined clothing that really upset her.

She had searched high and low for some close fitting clothes for her winter rides that didn't have names or advertising all over them. She hated the price's and looks of those clown-like uniforms on most bicycle clothing all of the shops carried, merely to rub the egos of wannabe riders to look like they were factory sponsored bicyclists and that good, even if ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of them weren't. She had searched store after clothing store, away from bicycle and sports shops, for these kinds of clothes and now they were ruined. She wasn't happy about that. Not in the least.

She told the two people working on getting another I.V. into her to stop what they were doing and undo the straps holding her down. It was said inside her mind, via a mental 'push' Shannon did, without a word being spoken, and then told them to go into the ambulance and sit there for two hours.

They obeyed her like low willed sheep and when one of the two nearby policemen noticed she was sitting up, she asked him who had shot her. It wasn't a vocal question. She was using the power of her mind to 'make' him answer her.

"Jack Sorensen, over there," he pointed.

Shannon looked to see a cocky young officer bragging and chewing gum. He heard his name being mentioned and swaggered over to her gurney as she stood up, a disgusting smirk on his face.

Shannon told him with her mind; Draw your weapon, cock it, and stick it in your mouth. Anytime you can, from now on, for the rest of your life, do that whenever you see a pistol. Do not fire it, but keep it in your mouth until it is forced away from you.

The officer did as he was told and multiple people rushed to him yelling, "Gun!" with a lot of scuffling going on, where they finally wrestled the gun away from him, then handcuffed and put him in protective custody. That would keep him off the police force for good, the trigger happy lunatic.

Then she asked an officer standing off alone by himself, Where's my bicycle? Again without speaking.

"It's in the back of that police car's trunk," he said.

She could see the bent front wheel sticking out and knew she'd never be able to ride it home.

Follow me, she told him again, using her mental power, and like a puppy, he did. Get in and drive, Shannon told him. Before getting inside the car, she told all the people looking on from their homes and porches, and every policeman and onlooker to forget the woman they had seen and go home and sleep. She couldn't believe the amount of people that were up at three a.m ... That was all she had to do. No one there would remember her.

She told the policeman that had taken her home, the same thing, and had him leave and forget her, her home, or what the bicycle looked like.

Shannon took her bike into her house, at last. She walked it back to the rear room where she kept her two riding bicycles and put the Firenze in the work stand, clamping it in place from the frames seat tube and removed the mangled front wheel. The rim could not be straightened and most of the spokes would have to be replaced, but the hub looked fine, she thought. She would know later, if it was damaged, too, or the front fork. She spun the rear wheel and it was still true, so that was a good sign. She laid the front wheel gently on the work bench and touched the red bike lovingly before she went to her bedroom.

She removed her top layers that were cut open at the bullet wound and arm, and looked at them. They were completely useless, Damn-it, but glancing at her chest and back, in a tilting dressing mirror, there was no sign of a bullet hole that seemed to have ever happened. The blue lightning had completely healed her as it had the terminal patients at the hospital.

She took the blooded clothes outside, dropped them on the driveway and went into the garage and brought back some gasoline. She doused the bloody rags with the fuel and lit the pile on fire, crossing her arms over her naked breasts while she watched the clothes flare and settle into a steady, smelly, smoking burn. It was still very cold and very much winter, feeling her nipples contract and harden, but she wanted to get this over with. The clothes were evidence in case she forgot something or someone in forcing them to forget her hospital involvement.

She watched the synthetic materials turn into a bubbling blob of plastic there on the ground and when it was nearly burned out, left it there on the cement to sizzle away on its own and went back inside the house.

She hustled to the main bathroom and removed the rest of her clothing, tossed them into the clothing hamper, checking her naked form, once again, in the floor to ceiling wall mirror in there, for any kind of sign from the gun shot. There was nothing but some surface smears of wiped away blood. She couldn't help but check for moles or other blemishes while she was at it. For month's she'd been perfecting her skin, using her power to rid herself of anything she didn't like and could find no flaws. Her skin was as pure as a babies. She knew she was pretty, but didn't know just how exquisite and perfect she looked and without dwelling on her appearance more, stepped into the shower and scrubbed the sweat of her ride and the effort of healing others and her last ordeal off of her body, to a point.

It had always exhausted her, that process of healing. She was very tired, now, and dried quickly then went straight to her huge bed. Shannon covered herself thoroughly in the darkness of her warm home, knowing this was the last time she would try to heal anyone over there, in the hospital. Damn them, she cursed. I thought I really had a good thing going there, what I was doing. I was helping people. Really helping them.

Then she thought of that nurse that had caused so much of the trouble, that evening. Shannon didn't know if her power could reach that far, but had suspicions it could. She concentrated and made the woman forget her face and ever having seeing her. She had had her balaclava pulled off in the hospital.

It took her over an hour, but at last, blessed sleep claimed her and she slept for a long, long time.

When she awoke from her long sleep, high into the afternoon, Shannon knew she had to recharge. But when she heard the mild patter of drops on the roof, after walking to the living room, then looked outside to see it was actually raining, again, for the third day, and her heart sunk just a little. The off-on rain was kind of in the way of her plan for the morning.

She knew, from past experience, that if she rode her beautiful Vincent motorcycle past one hundred and twenty miles per hour, the blue lightning would appear and recharge her system like she was a renewed battery. It was almost instantaneous, but knowing that wasn't possible, right then, or possibly, for the rest of the day, being unsafe in the rain, Shannon would have to wait. She would feel just as strong as always in another cycle of the earth's turning, or so. She didn't know why, exactly, these things occurred, they just did.

She thought of going back to bed, but didn't, standing naked in front of her living room window, peaking out at the weather. She was still a bit upset that she couldn't go back to the hospital, all because of money, and help those poor dears that were dying or just plain suffering. She hated money, but she was a master at stealing it, wasn't she? she admitted to herself. And knew she was a walking talking oxymoron. Yet Shannon still wished society was such that everyone could have what they wanted without the stuff, the filthy lucre, as someone had put it, but that wasn't what kept the world functioning, was it? This world at least. So, money was necessary and you had to have it. She had grown up poor and was a millionaire, these days.

Shannon slapped the curtain closed and went to the kitchen, still pissed off about the police and her being shot, but mostly because of the damage done to her Firenze. It was her baby, her darling, the bike that had brought her here to Scottsbluff and had helped her to gain this blue-lightning power. She opened the already opened bottle of orange juice and drank for at least ten seconds from the lip and gasped as she replaced it on the top shelf of the fridge, slamming the refrigerator shut with a muffled, cushioned, sound.