Chain Reaction

by Rebecca York

Expecting guards to swarm down the hall or Nurse Dumont and Hank Riddell to come charging back, Gage raised his head and looked wildly around. But nobody came to the maintenance man’s rescue.

  Leaping up, Gage ran toward the nearest door. It was locked. So was the next one, and he felt panic rising in his chest. The third knob turned, and he found himself staring into a large utility closet with cleaning products and rags arranged neatly on shelves around the walls.

  Jackpot!

  He dashed back to the man on the floor and saw his name was embroidered on his uniform shirt.

  “Tucker.”

  First or last name, he wondered as he caught the man’s limp body under the arms and dragged him inside the closet.

  After he’d hidden the guy, he went back for the telltale mop and bucket. There was nothing he could do about the wet floor.

  Sweat had broken out on his body. Ignoring the clammy sensation, he turned on the light, then quickly stripped off the guy’s shoes, slacks and shirt, leaving him with his shorts and sleeveless undershirt.

  Knowing that every second he stayed here brought him closer to capture, Gage discarded the hospital gown, then pulled on the shirt and pants.

  There was no rope on the shelves, but he used several long rags to tie the man’s hands and feet and to gag him.

  Before he finished, Tucker was already stirring, and Gage worked faster.

  The man’s eyes blinked open. For a moment he looked confused, then he focused on Gage and made a mumbled sound. When he kicked out, Gage jumped back.

  “Sorry to leave you here, but somebody should come looking for you soon.”

  Gage pulled on the man’s tennis shoes. They were a size too big, which he figured was better than too small.

  Somebody had left an Orioles baseball cap on one of the shelves, and he put it on, pulling the bill low over his face.

  He opened the door again and scanned the hall, wishing he had some kind of weapon. No, scratch that last thought. If he had a weapon, that would give Morton an excuse to shoot him.

  He shuddered. Did they shoot patients in this place?

  When he looked back at his captive, he saw the man was staring at him with narrowed eyes, probably fixing his features in his mind so he could give a description later.

  Turning away, Gage snatched up the bucket and mop, hoping the props would make him look like part of the janitorial staff.

  As soon as the door closed, Tucker started thumping his legs. Gage was tempted to go back and tie him down, but he couldn’t spare the time.

  Avoiding the wet floor, he strode purposefully toward the stairwell. When he reached the fire door, he hesitated. He’d intended to spring Vanderhoven, but now he realized that staying around this place was too dangerous. If he didn’t get off the property quickly, he might not get out at all.

  Once he got out, he was going to have a chat with Evan Buckley. If the guy knew what had happened at the lab, Gage was going to get the information out of him.

  He sprinted down several flights of steps, praying that he wouldn’t run into Riddell or Dumont coming back up, and finally reached the first floor, where he found himself in another hallway.

  When a woman stepped from one room into another, he set his bucket on the floor and started mopping, keeping his head down and his shoulders slumped as though he was tired of washing floors for a living.

  As he’d hoped, she didn’t give him a second glance as she went about her business. He was one of the invisible legions who took care of the grunt work. She wasn’t dressed like a nurse. He guessed this must be the administrative level of the hospital.

  So far, it appeared that nobody had cottoned to the unfortunate incident upstairs between the maintenance man and the escaped nut case.

  Picking up his bucket and carrying his mop, he turned in the other direction, heading toward the back of the building, wondering if he could get out a window. No such luck. They were all barred.

  He felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle when he heard a familiar voice coming from one of the offices.

  Dr. Morton.

  Gage was tempted to run in the other direction. Instead he walked quietly toward the doorway and stood just out of sight where he could eavesdrop on the conversation. The doctor was talking to someone, then he’d pause and wait for a response. But Gage couldn’t hear anyone answering, which meant the doctor must be on the phone.

  Pressing himself against the wall, Gage crept closer.

  “That’s your problem,” the doctor said matter-of-factly. He listened for a minute. His voice turned angry when he said, “Don’t tell me how to do my job. Of course I understand why we need to keep them isolated.”

  After a pause, he continued. “You certainly made the right decision having them transferred here. Initially they were quite agitated. They’re much calmer now.”

  Were they talking about him and Vanderhoven? They could be. Of course, there would be a lot of patients here who were agitated when they arrived at the nut house.

  After a moment’s silence the doctor continued in a more moderate voice. “It would help to know the aftereffects of the lab accident.”

  Lab accident? That certainly changed the focus of the conversation. Gage waited for some clue about the aftereffects, but Morton only said, “He’ll be ready for an interview in a few hours.”

  Gage wished like hell that he could hear the other end of the exchange. Were they really discussing him? Or could it be Vanderhoven?

  Gage fought a wave of nausea as he remembered trying to crawl to safety then passing out.

  He needed to find out what they’d been up to in that lab. But Morton was doing a lot more listening than talking. The doctor’s voice turned testy when he said, “We’re very aware of security precautions here. I don’t appreciate your stationing a guard at our facility. And don’t tell me that’s not the man’s regular job. It’s his assignment here.”

  It sounded like they meant Hank Riddell—a reminder that Gage was pressing his luck by hanging around. Turning quickly, he hunched his shoulders again and ambled toward the back of the building.

  He came to a door at the end of a corridor. Instead of a knob, it had one of those metal bars that spanned the width at waist height.

  When he pushed it, the door swung open. In the next second, an alarm bell began to clang.

  With a curse, Gage bolted through the doorway and into the late-afternoon sunshine. As he ran, he realized he was seeing the same view as the one from his room: a wide stretch of green lawn with trees on the far side. If he could reach them, he’d have a chance.

  Still weak from his enforced bed rest, he’d made it only a quarter of the way across the lawn before he was gasping for air and fighting a stitch in his side. But he kept running.

  When he was about ten yards from the trees, a voice rang out behind him.

  “Stop.”

  Gage speeded up, the breath wheezing in and out of his lungs.

  “Stop or I’ll shoot.”

  Gage knew his only option was to plow ahead.

  He kept running as fast as he could, the pain in his side almost too much to bear.

  Before he reached the woods, he heard a bullet whiz past his head.

  Another shot rang out. With a silent thanks to the supreme deity, Gage reached the trees and leaped into the cover that the branches provided, then angled off to the right. In thirty yards, he almost ran into a ten-foot-tall fence made of black vertical rods held together with horizontal cross pieces at the bottom and top. Under ordinary circumstances, he could have scaled it easily. In his present condition, he knew he didn’t have a chance.

  He kept bearing to his right, but he picked up the sound of someone crunching through the leaves, looking for the escaped prisoner. The guy with the gun. And he seemed to be catching up. No surprise, since he was undoubtedly in better shape than a patient who’d been in bed for days.

  Gage had taken out the maintenance man, but he didn’t give much for his chances against an ar
med opponent. What were they going to do—shoot him and tell the authorities it was self-defense?

  Every breath Gage took now was agony, and he knew he couldn’t run much farther. When he spotted a fallen log, he stopped short, then dropped down beside it. Digging into the leaves that covered the forest floor, he wedged his body along the lower edge of the fallen trunk and under some branches, praying that up against the log and wearing a gray uniform, he’d be hard to spot.

  Footsteps crunched toward him, and he went rigid, holding his breath. When the pursuer sped past, he dragged in air, then lay there panting. He was safe for the moment, but he knew that when the guy didn’t catch up soon, he’d double back. And the next time he wouldn’t speed on by; he’d be looking for Gage’s hiding place.

  Gage gave himself a few moments to rest. Then he heaved himself up and started in the other direction, angling toward the fence.

  When he reached it, he stopped. Unless he could get past the barrier, he was trapped on the hospital grounds. In frustration, he shook the metal bars, hoping they might have rusted at the top or bottom. No such luck.

  But as he held on to the vertical rods, wishing they’d open up for him, something truly strange happened. The solid metal seemed to give a little, and when he dragged his hands apart, the upright shafts bent as though they were made of hard rubber.

  Elated, he pulled again and felt the bars bend, opening a space in the fence. When it was just wide enough to accommodate his body, he slipped through. Then he took an extra moment to pull the barrier back into place so nobody would know how and where he’d gotten out.

  Before Riddell or whoever it was could come back and spot him, he took off through the woods, running as fast as he could, which was about as fast as a wounded water buffalo.

  He almost blundered into a creek. Stopping before he got his pant legs wet, he found some stepping stones and crossed, working hard to keep his balance. He needed to rest. But he was afraid to stop so close to the hospital grounds.

  On the other side of the creek, he spotted several houses. When he saw shapes waving in the breeze, he froze, till he realized he was seeing laundry flapping on a line in back of a clapboard rancher.

  Grateful for the gathering dusk, he slipped from tree to tree, studying the back of the house. He could see a woman in the kitchen, preparing a meal, but she was looking down.

  Taking a chance that her husband wasn’t lurking around with a shotgun, he hurried to the clothesline and took down a pair of jeans and a dark T-shirt.

  With his booty tucked under his arm, he ran along through the woods for fifty more yards, then shucked his janitor’s clothes and pulled on the new ones. He balled up the uniform and shoved it into a pile of leaves someone had raked into the woods.

  Then he allowed himself ten minutes rest sitting against a tree trunk with his head thrown back. He wanted to fall over and go to sleep. Instead he walked back to the road and ambled along more slowly, like a guy out for a stroll.

  He had a lot to think about—starting with the assumption that he’d been exposed to a dangerous chemical agent in that lab accident.

  It hadn’t killed him. But he was pretty sure it had done something. And he wanted to wrap his mind around exactly what that was.

  He’d had some lucky breaks in the past hour. But were they really luck?

  He’d badly wanted to get out of the restraints holding his wrists, and they’d loosened. He’d thought the door to his room was locked, then it had opened for him when he’d grasped the knob. And finally there was the totally strange business with the fence. It was made of solid metal bars designed to keep the nut cases inside the hospital grounds. Yet when he’d pulled on them, they’d opened up for him as though he’d been parting thin tree branches.

  So where was he going with that information? He might be an impulsive guy, but when he stopped to study a dangerous or questionable situation, he tried to use logic. In this case, logic told him he was thinking something that had to be impossible. At the same time, logic also told him that the recent experiences added up to a pretty strange conclusion.

  Stopping, he looked around and spotted a length of fence post that might have fallen from the back of someone’s pickup truck. Gingerly, he retrieved it from the ground, hefting it in his hands. It was about four inches in diameter, strong and solid, and he thought that what he was planning to try with it was crazy.

  Still, he carried it into the woods and went ahead with the plan, holding the wood out in front of him, balancing it on his flattened hands and focusing on the physical act of breaking it across the middle.

  For several seconds, he thought that he’d let his imagination run away with him. But he kept pouring mental energy into the experiment, picturing what he wanted to happen and keeping his hands flat so that he wasn’t exerting any physical pressure on the post.

  He felt a kind of vibration go through the wood. Then he heard a crack as the fence post broke into two pieces, falling to the ground near his feet.

  He’d come up with the experiment as a test of his theory. Still, he stared at the wood in astonishment, trying to wrap his head around what had just happened.

  He hadn’t broken the fence post with physical strength. Even under the best of circumstances, he couldn’t snap a four-inch-diameter pole using brute force. He’d done it with his mind.

  Impossible. Yet the broken post lay on the ground at his feet. Unless he was under the influence of some delusion.

  Confusion. Delusion. Maybe that was the side effect of the drug he’d been exposed to.

  Another thought struck him, and he went stock-still. Suppose that was the main purpose? He knew that Cranesbrook had some Defense Department contracts. What if the lab had sold the department on the idea of dousing enemy troops with happy gas? Like those insane CIA LSD experiments in the sixties.

  Squatting down, he picked up one of the halves of the fence post and hurled it into the woods. It sailed through the air and landed with a satisfying thunk that made a squirrel scramble up a tree.

  Maybe he and the squirrel were on the same drug trip. Or maybe the chemical had effects nobody knew about.

  Because strange as it seemed, as far as he could tell, he’d broken the piece of wood with his mind. And not just the wood. He’d gotten out of the restraints, opened the door to his room and bent iron posts.

  He had a new ability he hadn’t been born with. Which led to another conclusion. Suppose the chemical was designed to give our troops special abilities? Or what if someone had been tampering with the Cranesbrook experiments?

  Like maybe Evan Buckley. Had somebody paid him to screw up the procedure in Lab 7? Was that why he’d been acting weird for the past few weeks? Were he and Riddell working together?

  Or had it been Bray? The thought flicked through Gage’s brain cells, and he tried to shove it away. But he couldn’t totally dismiss it. Bray had been behaving strangely too. He’d needed money—badly—to pay for his sister’s hospital bills. What would he have been willing to do to build up his bank account before he disappeared?

  The “why” would have to wait until later. Gage didn’t know what to believe or who was behind the lab accident. He only knew the consequences. He’d like to compare notes with Vanderhoven.

  Still, he had come to another important conclusion. Whoever had released that chemical agent didn’t know what the effect had been on him. If they had, they would have known it was useless to hold him with cuffs and locked doors.

  He felt a burst of adrenaline shoot through his body and had to stop himself from shouting out loud. Super powers! He’d turned into a secret super hero.

  Well, not quite, he cautioned himself. He could work some neat tricks with his mind, but he wasn’t going to take a chance on trying to stop a speeding bullet. He could, however, think of a lot of exciting possibilities for his new talent.

  Down the road, he heard a car coming toward him and tensed. But it drove on by. Still, the intrusion served as a reminder. He was an escaped
mental patient. Obviously dangerous—judging by what he’d just done.

  How much power did he have? Could he perfect the talent? And would it stay with him? That was an interesting consideration. What if this new skill was only temporary and it crapped out on him just when he needed it? Or what if there was a limit to how much he could do in a given period of time?

  He didn’t know how long he’d be able to work magic with his mind, or how reliable the skill would be, but he’d enjoy it while it lasted.

  He kept walking north until he came to a house where several newspapers lay scattered in the driveway.

  Looking toward the front window, he saw a light burning, but he’d bet it was a decoy. Still he approached the structure with caution.

  In the Special Forces, he’d learned how to hot-wire an old car. Maybe now he could do better.

  After waiting several minutes, he walked around the back of the house and found a two-year-old Chevrolet parked by the kitchen entrance.

  The car doors were locked. But when he held the handle and thought about working the mechanism, the lock clicked open. Sliding into the driver’s seat, he thought about turning the ignition. That was a little more complicated. But several seconds later, the car roared to life. Hot damn!

  If he wanted to lead a life of crime, this new twist sure came in handy. He didn’t have any money. Maybe he should stop and borrow some from an ATM. He’d keep track of what he took and pay it back later.

  If he were a criminal, the prospect of free access to ATMs would be pretty exciting. But he wasn’t. He’d been a law-abiding citizen all his life. He’d served in the military with distinction. And he’d started a security company with his friend Brayden Sloane when they’d gotten out of the service three years ago.

  Now he’d sunk to the status of escaped nut case.

  He felt his chest tighten. The first thing he needed to do was go home and tell Lily he was okay.

  A pang of conscience grabbed him. He’d tried to be a good husband, but he knew he’d been neglecting his wife. Now the reasons didn’t even seem important.

  After Five Star had gotten the Cranesbrook contract, Bray had taken the brunt of the new work. Then Bray’s sister had needed his help with her hospital bills and with her new baby, and Gage had stepped in to pull up the slack. He’d started spending more and more time on the Eastern Shore. That was a mistake. He should have figured out how to stay in the Baltimore office and spend more hours at home. He and Lily should be a team. They should sit down and talk about their goals, their hopes for the future.