Death Rounds

by Peter Clement

  Three strikes and you’re out, they say. On this occasion I figured I was out for a long time. The numbness I felt in my hands, arms, and legs and the stiffness I could feel in the parts of me that weren’t yet numb were the result, I knew, of being cramped in this position for quite a while.

  I tried to take inventory of how badly I was hurt. Definitely some things were wrong. When I tried to look sideways, I could detect a lump that I judged to be the size of a walnut. It seemed to be growing out of my forehead and bulging down over my left eye. That didn’t worry me much. A hematoma, or goose egg, always looked worse than it was. More disturbing was a complete lack of sensation on that side of my face, which might mean nerve damage, and that could be permanent. I made a few more painful attempts to lift my head enough that I could see my surroundings. More spasms seared through the upper half of my back from the bottom of my skull, making me wonder if he hadn’t also injured my neck. After crying out with the pain a few times, I realized that I was hearing with only my right ear.

  The large door to this room was now closed, and my attacker had placed me not too far from the table where he’d cooked up his particular brand of death. As I looked around, I could feel that my surgical mask was much tighter across my face than I was used to, the added pressure against my nose making it hard to breathe. Whoever hit me must have retied it, I thought, but I remained baffled about why he would have. It certainly wasn’t out of any concern for my health. I was bothered by the top of the mask biting into my cheeks just below my eyes, so several seconds passed before I realized my glasses were gone. I looked around; they were lying by my feet, smashed.

  I noticed something else was gone as well, or at least was barely noticeable—the smell. No mask, however tight, could have protected against that reeking odor. I tried to look behind me, and by peering under my goose egg, I was able to see that the metal door leading into where Cam was buried was closed and sealed with duct tape. Leaning against the wall beside it was a shovel coated with traces of fresh earth. I shuddered. Cam’s face, I presumed, had been reinterred. I also saw that some of the boxes that had been piled in the center of the room were gone. Maybe the killer had used additional containers to better cover the grave this time, though I doubted anything would keep the rats away from it for very long.

  I’d been so wrong about Cam, and Janet had had him pegged right all along. Like father, like son—Stephen Mackie wasn’t just remarkable for the way he’ d conducted himself through the hideous ordeal chronicled in his chart. He also deserved credit for getting Cam through it intact—free enough from bitterness that he could make his father proud and become the man and doctor Janet knew him to be. Now Cam lay in the earth, slaughtered. Had I inadvertently set him up to be the Phantom’s scapegoat? The question seared into me.

  I began coming to grips with the fact that Rossit wasn’t the one who’d knocked me out. There was no mistaking that the silhouette I’d seen was the wrong height to have been him. It made sense now, too, his looking into rooms the way he had. He’d no more known where this secret workplace was than I had. What he was doing here, I’d no idea, though I wouldn’t put it past him to have blustered his way past the guards for no better reason than to grab some publicity for himself. LOCAL EXPERT IN INFECTIOUS DISEASES STEPS FORWARD TO HELP OUT DURING CRISIS was exactly the kind of headline I could imagine him going after. Maybe he’d even figured out as much as Williams and I had and knew what kind of equipment to look for. Damn! If I hadn’t kept everybody focused on the asylum, probably Riley’s men would have found this place as well.

  But they had searched the entire hospital at least once, I recalled, after Cam disappeared. Maybe there’d been no odor then; the rats hadn’t yet done their hideous work. Even if the police had looked into that little crypt, they wouldn’t have seen the fresh earth with the boxes over it. Another possibility was that they never saw the entrance to the crypt at all. There were sufficient containers nearby to have made a big enough pile that it would have hidden the door altogether. Likewise the table. The police probably had glanced in, seen only boxes stacked to the ceiling, and gone on with their search.

  The slightest movement of my head sent new pains coursing through my skull, and I was having increasing difficulty breathing through the tight mask. Had my attacker retied it like this to make it hard to breathe? Or yell?

  “Hey! Help me!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. My cry was a bit muffled, but the mask wouldn’t keep me from shouting if that’s what he was worried about. I doubted he would be, though, when I thought about the chances of anyone hearing me. No one was in the subbasement these days, let alone nights, except those of us going through records. Even then, except for me and my trips to the repository, everyone else was usually in the archives at the other end of the hospital.

  But someone who came specifically looking for me might hear. Rossit should have told the police about this place by now. Surely they’d gotten him after I’d called them to pick him up. But where were they? I’d certainly been here longer than the ten minutes or so it should have taken for him to have reached the front door and for them to have gotten back down to this room.

  “I’m in here,” I screamed, thinking maybe the would-be rescuers had taken a wrong turn, but my little burst of hope that someone was on the way quickly faded in the answering silence. What had happened when Rossit got upstairs? Was it possible he would have not told the police about this place?

  I started to feel twinges of panic over what this killer would have in store for me when he returned. I strained my wrists, arms, and legs against the tape, but the more I forced, the more I felt bound by them. My breathing quickened and I began feeling suffocated by the mask. I tried to bend my head far enough to one side that I could rub the bottom tie loose from my jaw with my shoulder, but I only managed to send my neck muscles into their worst spasms yet. I screamed once and then had to hold my upper body completely still to avoid more of the same. I ended up staring directly at the table so laden with death. The sight of it added to my anxiety, and an unbidden thought slithered into my mind. Could he already have infected me while I was unconscious?

  Now it was all I could do to keep my panic from going right out of control. I desperately screened the tabletop. Had anything been moved or used? It took me the better part of a minute to realize one of the six surgical masks was missing. The other five remained spread out, presumably left that way to dry. But dry of what? I tried to steady my breathing, but it shot up again as another question raced into my head. Where was the missing mask? My entire body broke out in a sweat as the realization came. He hadn’t retied mine. He’d replaced it with the one missing from the table—one that he’d wet with something!

  My gaze flicked over the contents of the table for some hint of what that something could be. I stopped at the syringes, then the bottles. This time I knew with the suddenness of a chill. The water! Oh my God! That’s how he was giving people Legionella. The contaminated water—it was in the mask! The steps raced through my head with terrible clarity. He’d injected it into the inner layers, then let the outsides dry enough so no one would feel or notice the wetness. Once the mask was on his victim, the humidity of exhaled breath—trapped in the nearly closed space behind the mask— would mingle with the contaminated moisture in those inner layers. The result would be moist humid air teeming with Legionella, and every time the victim breathed in, he or she would draw the deadly mix directly into the lungs.

  With rocketing terror I realized that was why he’d tied my mask so tight—to maximize my exposure!

  I’d no idea how long I’d been breathing in Legionella. Inhaling the organism in such a concentrated form within such a closed space for an extended period of time would be how he’d achieved the massive exposures needed to infect otherwise healthy adults. I had to get that infested thing off my face!

  I bent my head sideways again and despite the searing jolts of pain tried frantically once more to catch the bottom edge of the mask with my sho
ulder and get it up off my chin. Nothing budged. I looked around for something else I might use to snag it on if I could only rock the chair near it but saw nothing handy at the same height as my head. Then I spotted the shovel. The blade. If I tipped the chair over and somehow wiggled to where it was leaning against the wall, I might be able to hook a corner of that blade onto one of the ties on my mask and rip it off.

  Every breath I took felt hot and moist. Thinking of what I was inhaling only made me breathe faster. By sheer force of will I concentrated on what had to be done despite my fear. I initially verified that I could at least rotate my hands and feet enough to manage a few inches of up-and-down motion with both my arms and lower legs. As I prepared to tip myself over, I figured if I got to the shovel, I could possibly get rid of my ties as well as my mask.

  I calculated that the best strategy was to land on my side. Flat on my back I’d be like a turned-up turtle unable to right myself; if I went forward, I might land on my face and be knocked out again. I started lurching my upper body from side to side against the tape restraints. At first I got no movement at all, but then I won some leverage by throwing in a little hip action, and in no time the chair was rocking. I kept increasing the size of the arc I was tipping through, wanting to go over toward the left, to be as near as possible to the shovel. But I misjudged, and ended up teetering for a few seconds toward the right, trying to reverse my momentum before toppling in that direction anyway. Crashing to the floor I felt pain explode through my shoulder as I landed on it, and I let out a roar. For a few seconds I lay there with my eyes closed, sure that I’d broken it, but the telltale nausea that accompanies a fracture never came. When the throbbing finally began to subside a bit, I opened my eyes.

  And blinked. And blinked again. I couldn’t accept what I saw. Refused to. But it wouldn’t vanish. He had been lying behind a row of boxes near the table, not so much hidden as simply out of sight from where I’d been placed in the chair. I was looking into me face of Gary Rossit.

  That he was dead I had no doubt. There was that unmistakable stillness about him—no breath, no sound, no twitch or flicker of movement in the smallest strand of muscle that always betrays life. His head was toward me, his mask half off, and I could see the purplish color of his skin, suffused with blood that no longer flowed. His eyes, fixed and staring, bulged more than they had in life, and his mouth hung slack in death. His hair was matted with blood at the back, but not a lot. If the bleeding had been the result of an encounter with the shovel, the blow may have knocked him out, but I doubted it had killed him. I couldn’t see his neck from where I lay, but his face had all the features of someone who’d been strangled.

  He must have been ambushed after he’d run from here, I thought, my mind slowly working its way back up to normal speed.

  I’d spoken so harshly of him so often over the years, especially in the last ten days and as recently as a few minutes ago. Yet I felt outraged that he too had been murdered. Whatever I thought of him as a man, he’d had a skill that could save lives, and he’d used it, however it had been twisted up with vicious politics and the perpetual chip he’d carried on his shoulder. In a world where there were those who protected life and those who took it, he’d still been enough of a doctor to put himself mostly on the side of the angels.

  I was going to stop the monster who did this, before he took any more lives.

  The way I was lying put my back to the shovel, which was about twenty feet away. It was going to the longest twenty feet I ever traveled. Using my shoulders and the few inches of up-and-down movement I had in my legs, I managed to make enough pushing motion against the floor that I rotated myself until my head was pointed in the direction I had to go. Then, using my shoulder as a kind of flipper and digging in with the bit of a knee hold I got on the floor, I humped on my side toward that blade, propelling myself, chair included, barely an inch at a time. I hurt everywhere. I was sweating with the strain of each move and breathing hard, always breathing hard and inhaling Legionella.

  At first I wasn’t certain I was even making any progress, but gradually I halved the distance, then quartered it. Each time I heard one of the overhead pipes clank, I was sure it was him returning. If by some miracle I got myself untied before he got back, I needed a plan to deal with him. Continually listening for sounds at the door, I kept humping and pushing toward that shovel, all the while figuring what I could do to nail him. Finally I was a few feet away, then inches, then had my head right up against the blade. I couldn’t help thinking that it had been in the earth alongside Cam’s decomposing body but forced myself to maneuver my right cheek to the top of the steel edge by straining my head away from the floor. I pressed hard into the shovel, hoping some part of the mask would catch or rip, and moved my head down. The steel hurt my skin, but nothing on the mask gave way. Suddenly the shovel shifted, and the handle clattered to the floor.

  “Shit!” I exclaimed aloud, to ease my frustration.

  I eyed the curved blade now lying on the floor, the handle away from me. I rotated around until my back was to the shovel, and my feet could pin its handle to the baseboard. Then I wiggled and humped some more until I got my bound wrists alongside the blade, got a hand on either side of it, and managed to push the tape binding my wrists up against its edge. Wedging the shovel against the wall, I kept pressing as hard as I could with my wrists, drawing the tape up and down on the semisharp steel. The metal kept scraping my skin, but soon I felt a little separation between my wrists, driving me to work harder and faster until, with a lurch, I felt them spring apart. My upper arms were still bound to the chair, but I could bend my elbows, stiff as they were, and slowly brought my forearms around from behind. By flexing my neck, I managed to bring my hands enough toward my face to curl my forefingers under the bottom straps of the mask. When I had my grip, I wrenched and tore the straps off. The mask now napped in front of my mouth like a banner hanging off my nose, still attached by the upper ties. A few more flexes and twists of the neck brought me near enough that my fingers could rip the rest of it away, and the hideous covering wafted to the floor.

  I took gulps of air like a man who’d been underwater, so much so that I made my head woozy. I had to force myself to once more slow my breathing and started clawing furiously at the tapes around my arms and trunk. Within minutes I had them off, then freed my legs as well.

  Of course my cellular phone was gone. Even the erythromycin I’d been taking for two days had been confiscated. I’d no idea what time it was because my watch had been smashed, probably when I’d raised my arm to protect myself. I stumbled over to the door, barely able to move. Knowing full well I was probably locked in, I turned the handle and pulled. As expected, I wasn’t leaving that easily. Nor was this door one of the feeble wooden ones I’d hidden behind in the corridor. It was large and metal, and I knew I wouldn’t be kicking my way out of here either. Instead I resigned myself to carrying out the plan that I’d come up with while I’d been slithering across the floor. I started to get ready.

  Five minutes later I was back in the chair, hopefully close enough to the same place he’d left me in. I’d taken a clean mask from the box on the table and had stuffed the remains of the one I’d ripped off my face into my pocket. I’d returned the shovel to its original position against the wall but had rejected using it as a weapon. I’d first thought of hiding and braining him with it when he came in but had realized he might first open the door a crack, see I wasn’t in the chair, then slam it closed, locking me in again for who knows how long. I had to lure him into the room, then get him. Yet if I was in the chair, twenty feet was too great a distance to reach the shovel and take him by surprise. So I’d looked around for an alternative weapon, something closer to the chair and abundant enough in the room that he wouldn’t notice one of them was in a little different position than when he’d left. I’d made my choice, had placed it so I could grab it readily, and then had reapplied the duct tape around the front of my legs, trunk, and upper arms.
/>   I held my hands behind the chair, took a final glance around the room, and settled down to wait.

  Chapter 25

  Someone once said the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrated the mind. Waiting in that chair, watching the door, and feeling the stillness of Rossit’s unseen remains and Cam’s nearby tomb, it wasn’t hard to think like a condemned man expecting the executioner. Except I doubted I had until morning. Occasionally the pipes clanged, as time passed my arms and legs once more stiffened up, and bit by bit I began to piece together the events of the last ten days in a way that finally made sense.

  The initial step was to realize that I hadn’t pursued the Phantom, that in reality I’d been subtly led to him and to the connections that had pointed at Cam. Once I accepted that starting point, the rest of what I’d seen and learned since Phyllis Sanders first came into my ER simply flowed into perspective.

  Scapegoating Cam, I now figured, had probably been part of the killer’s plan from the beginning. I also began to grasp the sweep of that plan—how this killer had set up the execution of punishers and the collapse of University Hospital. But the scheme had started with the business of the Phantom; that whole episode of two years ago had been carefully created for the sole purpose of making Cam a suspect for what was to come.

  I once more crawled inside the killer’s skin and figured how he’d set it up.

  The initial tit-for-tat attacks against punishers who had gotten away with their cruelty were the kind of benign retributions that allowed hospital gossipers to say, “I know it’s wrong, but they deserved it.” When whispers inevitably turned to who might be responsible, it wouldn’t be too shocking a leap to include Cam’s name on the list. Probably the killer had waited until those whispers had begun and then had escalated the attacks to potentially lethal events with the use of insecticides. That move would lead gossipers to realize that whoever the Phantom was, he was capable of far more dangerous acts than anyone had initially thought. Afterward came his most ingenious maneuver of all—the too convenient double alibi. It would focus speculation on Cam but still leave him off the hook enough that nobody would accuse him openly. Once that seed of doubt about the man was sown, the Phantom’s activities were suspended and the suspicion was allowed to lie dormant for two years, until the killer was ready to start his now deadly game of infecting punishers.