Snake Skin

by CJ Lyons

  It took a few seconds for the words to penetrate. No one had ever needed her help before. Never.

  Curiosity niggled at her, returning her back to her body. Now she felt her ankle throbbing, the chill of air-conditioned air stroking her naked arm, cold fluid flowing into her vein. And once again, greedy fingers pinching her, this time twisting her earlobe.

  She pulled away, eyes still shut, raising her hands to ward off the persistent intruder.

  "He's going to kill her. You've got to help me."

  The sound of a gunshot shattered all illusions.

  She opened her eyes. The room was dark except for a light from the bathroom and the red call button alarm.

  "Who are you? What do you want?" Her voice was raspy as a rusty knife, scraping her throat. "Leave me alone."

  "My mom. She saved you. But he came and took her. Please, you have to help." The girl's words were strung together so close that she almost missed their meaning. The girl grabbed her arm.

  Another shot thundered through the room, it sounded close. Then there were more, too many to count. Ashley covered her ears, wishing for her warm oblivion.

  The girl dropped her arm, ran to the door, edged it open a crack.

  "Mom got him, she got his gun." She started to open the door but stopped and quickly shut it, leaning against it, her eyes widening with fear. "She's bleeding and he says he has a bomb. Says he'll kill us all."

  Lucy kept her grip on Fletcher, one foot planted on his wrist as she leaned over to open his jacket and search for confirmation of his threat. He lay there, grinning, mocking her with his nonchalance as his jacket fell open, revealing a vest brimming with C-4 explosive.

  "I think you might want to be a little nicer to me, Lucy." He said. "Drop the gun."

  Parents, children, and nurses milled around in the periphery of Lucy's vision. She couldn't see Burroughs or Melissa.

  "Let me get these people out of here first," she stalled. She saw a woman at the nurses' station hang up the phone, hopefully that meant the cavalry was on the way and the hospital was being evacuated.

  "Help me up and give me my gun back. I won't interfere with the evacuation as long as you take me to see Ashley." He narrowed his eyes, his gaze boring into hers. "Now."

  Lucy heard hushed voices behind her as the nurses worked on getting people out of the line of fire. It wasn't like she had any choice but to obey. Fletcher could have half a dozen ways to detonate the C-4 and there was nowhere she could contain him that wouldn't expose civilians to harm. "All right."

  She removed her weight from his hand and watched him climb to his feet. He kept the deadman's switch clenched between his left thumb and forefinger, shaking the blood back into his other hand and grimacing. "My gun."

  She handed it to him. He didn't seem to have any problem handling it. Should've broken his wrist when she had the chance.

  "Very good, Lucy. Now. Take me to Ashley."

  "I will, but you're not going to like it."

  "Why not?" He squinted at her, ignoring the crying children and sobbing parents who were scuttling away from them, trying to make their escape.

  A few fathers made eye contact with Lucy, looked like they planned to play heroes, but she shook her head at them and a nurse hustled them away. She saw blood on the floor as she stepped back, wondered for a moment if it belonged to Burroughs or Melissa before she clamped down on those distracting thoughts. Megan was safe—or would be as soon as she got Fletcher out of here.

  "Where's Ashley?"

  Lucy blew her breath out, her chest and shoulders collapsing with the weight of the day. "You heard her mother. Ashley's dead."

  Other than the occasional nick while shaving her legs, Cindy had never seen blood before. One of the curses of being perpetually healthy and usually assigned to fluff pieces.

  Now, suddenly, she was drowning in it.

  Burroughs had gone all Lethal Weapon on her when he heard what sounded like a gunshot, drawing his gun and telling her and Melissa to remain in the family room. Yeah, like they were going to stay like sitting ducks waiting for the slaughter. Not to mention the fact that odds were it was Fletcher doing the shooting.

  Still, Cindy hadn't followed him outside. She waited, listening, when a second shot sounded. That noise had catapulted Melissa into action.

  "He's here. He's killed Ashley," she began crying, pushing Cindy aside and running out into the hallway.

  Cindy heard Melissa shouting, Burroughs yelling, the sound of more gunfire, then silence for a long moment. She poked her head out the door, saw no signs of a threat, and stepped outside.

  That's when the screaming started. A nurse was on her knees beside Melissa, trying to stop the blood gushing from Melissa's neck. She yanked Cindy down, pressed Cindy's hands over the massive wound. "Hold pressure."

  The nurse scuttled around the corner where Burroughs' legs jutted out, toes down. Not a good sign, a tinny voice echoed through Cindy's mind even as her hands squished blood, trying to force it back into Melissa.

  Children were crying, wailing, parents shouting and screaming, people running, slamming doors, but Cindy's entire world was one woman and a whole lot of blood. Surely too much blood?

  Melissa's mouth open and closed. Bubbles appeared, gurgling through the blood. Her eyes drifted halfway shut, looked glazed, vacant.

  Still Cindy pressed, her entire weight leaning on Melissa's neck. Then she noticed that the blood wasn't gushing any more. Instead it was seeping, pushed out of Melissa's body by the pressure Cindy was so diligently applying. Gingerly, she slid her fingers to where she thought the pulse should be. Nothing.

  Burroughs still wasn't moving and the nurse hadn't re-appeared. But she heard everything, heard Fletcher tell Guardino about a bomb. A bomb? She rocked back on her heels, her hands raising from Melissa's skin leaving bloody palm prints behind. Blood splattered the floor, her slacks, trailed down her arms.

  It wasn't her job to be making life and death decisions. She was only here to observe, not get involved. She climbed to her feet, staggering towards the elevator, towards escape.

  "Out of our way," Fletcher ordered her. He held a gun in one hand and a car alarm remote in the other. His arm was wrapped around Guardino's neck, the gun at her head.

  Very theatrical, but it worked for Cindy. Once she saw those clay-colored bricks strapped to his chest, anything he said was fine by her. She backed away, her heels skidding in Melissa's blood, hands held up in surrender.

  "Thank you," he said as the elevator doors opened and he and Guardino climbed inside.

  Cindy blinked as the doors closed. Blinked again and in a thunderclap realized that all around her people were moving—nurses herding patients and families down the emergency stairs, two more rolling Burroughs onto his back, another talking furiously on the phone.

  She watched as Burroughs opened his eyes, one hand slapping against the floor. "Gun," he gasped. "Where's my gun?"

  Cindy saw it. It had skidded under the clerk's desk. She knelt and retrieved it, then crawled over to Burroughs.

  The nurses were trying to restrain him, pulling his shirt up, checking him for wounds, but he kept batting their hands away. "I'm fine, I'm fine."

  "Holy shit," one of the nurses said, raising the small pager-sized device needled into Burroughs' belly. His insulin pump. There was a ugly red area below where the pump had been attached.

  "The bullet. It hit your pump." The nurse turned the pump over, the silver of the bullet catching the overhead light and gleaming.

  "Tell me about it," Burroughs grunted, still wheezing as if he couldn't catch his breath. "Hurts like a sonofabitch. Give me my gun and help me up."

  Cindy handed him his gun. She held onto his waist while the nurse caught him under his arms and together they helped him up. He leaned heavily against the counter, breathing fast and shallow. His color was pale and he was sweating.

  "Where'd they go?"

  "Down," Cindy answered.

  "Ashley. Did he get Ashle
y?"

  "No. It was just Fletcher and Guardino."

  He glanced at the elevator then down the hallway. "I have to get to Ashley."

  Staggering, he stumbled down the hall, one hand brushing the wall as if he needed a guide. Cindy looked down at her bloody hands, at Melissa's body and decided it was better to be with a man with a gun, even if he was a bit wobbly, than out here on her own. She raced after him, heels click-clacking on the linoleum.

  He stopped in front of a door, waving her back as he held his gun at the ready, using both hands to steady it. He kicked the door in and stepped inside. Cindy saw the lights click on and followed him.

  The room was empty.

  "Ashley," Burroughs groaned, slumping against the wall, his gun dangling uselessly in his hand. "Where is she?"

  She allowed the girl named Megan to herd her down the stairs. People rushed past them, some parents, some nurses carrying small children, IV tubing and monitor wires hanging from their bodies. The sound of weeping, panicked voices, and pounding footsteps vibrated into her awareness.

  But all she really heard was her mother's voice saying that she was dead. She hadn't been able to see her mother—Megan had been yanking her in the other direction, but Megan had been looking that way and the terror in her eyes after the gunshot told everything.

  Her mother was dead.

  Her mother said Ashley was dead.

  Maybe her mother was right. About everything.

  Suddenly they were alone in the stairwell, everyone else streaming out the doors to the first floor. Megan stood on the landing below the main floor, hefting her mother's gun.

  "The morgue. She's bringing him to the morgue," Megan was saying.

  It made perfect sense. If she was dead, then the morgue was the place for her.

  Then it dawned on her that the "he" Megan was talking about was Jimmy. He had saved her once—had he returned to save her again? Bring her back from the dead?

  "I'm going with you," she told Megan, clamping her hand over the younger girl's wrist.

  Megan gave her a hard look, then smiled as if relieved to have company on this quest, even if her companion was a nameless dead girl.

  "Okay," she breathed out. "Let's go."

  "It was your job to keep her safe!" Fletcher shouted once they were alone in the confines of the elevator. He shoved Lucy away from him, throwing her against the wall. "Isn't that what you always say, the children come first? How the hell could you let this happen?"

  He waved the Glock in her face as if the threat of blowing the entire hospital to kingdom come wasn't enough to get her attention. Lucy felt laughter bubbling up and swallowed, stomping it down hard.

  "When I tackled her, she hit her head," she improvised. Pain lanced through her shoulder, down her jaw, seemed determined to rock her entire body as it stampeded along her nerve endings. Her knees kept threatening to give out on her—worse of all, she was so exhausted, that she was about ready to let them surrender. "The doctors said given her weakened condition—she was severely dehydrated and her electrolytes were out of whack—that she had bleeding in her brain. It was slow, didn't show up for a few hours, until after they gave her enough fluids to bring her blood pressure back up."

  Tears were streaming down his face as she spun a tale using everything she'd ever learned watching from TV and autopsies. "I'm sorry. We tried to save her, but—"

  "Didn't try hard enough." His voice was low and deadly and Lucy feared she'd pushed him too far.

  The elevator came to a halt and the doors opened. He shoved her out, his weapon pressed against her spine.

  "No one cared about her except me," he continued his lament as they followed the signs to the morgue. Their footsteps echoed in the dimly lit, empty corridors. "You should have left us alone. I could have made her happy. Taken care of her."

  They turned a corner and came to a halt in front of a wooden door labeled: Pathology. Authorized Personnel Only.

  Fletcher nudged her and she tried the handle. Locked. No surprise. They wouldn't want just anyone waltzing in to visit the dead.

  A frustrated growl emerged from Fletcher's throat as he raised the Glock, the barrel resting alongside Lucy's face. A flick of the wrist and he'd be firing a forty caliber hollow point into her brain.

  Torn between closing her eyes and needing to watch every second, she edged her gaze to center on his trigger finger. Braced herself, images of Nick and Megan cascading through her mind as he squeezed it.

  The explosion was deafening.

  Chapter 40

  Monday 2:17 am

  Burroughs clutched his belly, wanting to hurl but knowing it would hurt too much and waste too much time. He lurched back out into the hallway only to collide with a man.

  "Where's my wife? Where's Megan?" the man asked Cindy who exited Ashley's room behind Burroughs. "What happened?"

  "Fletcher," Burroughs said, recognizing the man as Guardino's husband. The white water rafter. Callahan, that was his name. He slowly moved down the hall, wishing he could run, wishing he could fucking breathe.

  "Fletcher has them? Where?" The man didn't get hysterical, instead cut to the essentials. Burroughs liked that in a man, especially when he could barely draw enough air to keep himself upright, much less talk.

  "The morgue," Cindy answered for him.

  Callahan sprinted to the elevator, jabbing the button. It opened just as Burroughs arrived, crammed full with patients in wheelchairs and their nurses.

  "It's no good," Cindy said. "They're evacuating the building because of the bomb."

  "Bomb? What bomb?" Callahan asked. He didn't wait for an answer, instead spotted the staircase on the other side of the elevator bank and ran to it.

  He was halfway down the first flight by the time Burroughs made it through the door. Burroughs would have shouted at him to stop, after all he was a civilian and unarmed, but it took every ounce of energy he had to stay upright as he hurtled down the stairs, pain ricocheting through his body with every step.

  Pressure built in Lucy's ear, deafening her and sending a shockwave of pain through her body. Then it released, a gush of fluid seeping down her neck, the sound of Fletcher's breathing abnormally loud in that ear. He sounded like a beached whale making love, huffing and puffing as he holstered his gun and reached through the large hole he'd blown in the door to turn the handle.

  She could have trapped him there, taken him, but it wouldn't have done any good—not with the deadman's switch. She had to get him inside, into the most secure place she could think of.

  He pushed her through the open door. The labs were dark. She groped along the wall, found the lights and suddenly they were surrounded by stainless steel tables, bright and expensive looking microscopes and a thick steel door marked: Autopsy.

  Lucy shook her head, trying to quiet the whooshing noises the gunshot had left behind. Her balance was off and she had ruptured an eardrum. Least of her worries.

  She led the way to the stainless steel door. It wasn't locked. Opened it. Beyond was a tile walled hallway. To the right was a glass walled room with autopsy tables. To the left was a larger area with several empty stretchers and X-ray equipment.

  And straight ahead lay what she'd been looking for, hoping for. The large, wide, thick steel door of a walk-in refrigerator.

  "She hates the dark," he said, shoving her forward. "Get her out of there."

  "You're the one who put her in the dark," she reminded him. "Who tortured her."

  Now that they were here, she needed to stall, give the staff time to evacuate as many patients as possible. She had no earthly idea if her plan would work given the amount of C4 strapped to Fletcher's chest.

  "I know," he blubbered. "I need to make things right. That's all I wanted, was to make things right for her, give her a chance at a new life."

  "Abusing a fourteen-year-old girl was your way to make things right?" As she spoke, Lucy heard movement behind her. She edged toward the refrigerator door at an angle, trying to catch a gl
impse in the reflection from the darkened windows of the autopsy suite.

  "I haven't abused anyone!" His voice quavered and more worrisome, so did the finger holding the deadman's switch.

  Lucy stopped and turned to meet his gaze, keeping his attention cemented on her. "I saw the barn, Jimmy. Saw where you kept Ashley—you had her tied up like an animal. And you tortured her with snakes. What else did you do to her, Jimmy?"

  The movement at the entrance had stopped. Lucy got a look in the dark windows and felt her resolve crumble. Megan took a step forward, gun in her hand, aimed at Fletcher. Beside her stood Ashley. Fletcher had his back to them. Lucy meant to do everything in her power to keep it that way.

  "You're sick, Lucy. I never touched her—not the way you think. I saved her. It was all necessary, for her own good."

  Lucy could almost reach the door handle, just a step farther. She kept sidling toward the refrigerator, trying to pull Fletcher along with her, praying for Ashley and Megan to leave. Instead, she saw Ashley take the gun from Megan's hand. Her breath caught in her throat as she remembered Ashley firing the revolver at her earlier.

  She reached out, yanked the refrigerator door open. Only one weapon left—the truth.

  "Torturing a little girl is for her own good? How about the girl you killed at the Tastee Treet, Jimmy? Did you know she had a little baby, only four months old? What about Vera Tzasiris? She was only nineteen, barely spoke English—did you torture her before you killed her?"

  His head jerked in a nod as she hammered him with each accusation. "I didn't have a choice. They all had to die—so that I could save Ashley."

  "It wasn't Bobby," Ashley's voice sounded raw and harsh as it echoed down the tiled hallway. "It was you. All along, it was you."

  Fletcher startled, almost dropping the deadman's switch as he whirled around. Lucy clamped her hand over his, holding the switch down.

  "Megan, Ashley, run. Now!"