by JJ Pike
The doctor held out his hand, relieved there was someone he was allowed to talk to. “You are?”
“Josephine Heska, Sean’s aunt on his father’s side. When his parents are traveling, I am his legal guardian.”
“Do you have ID? You understand, HIPAA…”
“Here’s the thing,” said Jo, “we came here directly from the accident site. I didn’t bring a bag or a purse. Nothing. But my boss can verify my identity, if that would be okay?”
The surgeon shook his head. “I’m sorry. That’s not enough…”
Jo hit speed-dial. “State Department. They’ll verify who they are and who I am, just give me a second.” She waited while the phone rang. “Jim, Jo here. Hey, my nephew Sean Heska was in a freak accident. I’m here at the hospital with his surgeon and they need verification that I am who I say I am. Do you mind?” She handed the phone to the surgeon.
The surgeon ran over a few perfunctory questions, but he didn’t spend long on the phone. Whatever “Jim” said on the other end was enough to get them access to Sean’s medical history.
“He was a very lucky young man. One inch to the left and he would have bled out. Whoever left that shank of wood inside him saved his life. He’s going to have a nasty scar and it’s going to hurt like the dickens for a while, but he’s young and fit and there’s no reason he shouldn’t make a complete recovery. I did a great job stitching him up, if I do say so myself.”
Petra broke down, but they were soft, loose tears—not the barbed kind that had ripped their way out of her when he’d first fallen through the floor. She sobbed until she was at Sean’s side in the recovery room, then held his hand while he was wheeled to his ward and refused to let anyone else near.
“How did you do that?” said Aggie. “How did you get someone from the State Department to vouch for you? And how did they know what to say?”
“I fed them the information,” said Jo. “I told them who I was and gave them ‘my nephew’s’ full name. Wasn’t hard for them to put it together.”
Aggie stared at Jo. Who was she and why was she hiding out in the woods? Why wasn’t she in Washington or the Middle East or someplace where they needed operatives? She was damned impressive.
“You haven’t asked me about the industrial sabotage data,” said Jo.
“What do you know?”
“We have a shortlist of ten names and two of those names belong to people your mom knows.”
Chapter 9
Paul put the dead woman’s hand down on the bed. He wanted to run, hide, make this all go away. But, he couldn’t. He had to do exactly what his dad had done. He had to walk into the danger in order to find answers. He shuddered. The thought that someone had released a pathogen on the streets of New York City was horrifying. He straightened himself. He was going to Yoshida the heck out of the situation, no matter the cost. Thirty-eighth Street and 11th Avenue might be out of bounds to some, but he would find a way to get as close as he could as soon as he could and track down his folks. What other options were there? Petra would never look him in the eye if he gave up and went home empty-handed.
The doors swung open. A gaggle of doctors swept in. These were the big cheeses. The junior medical staff scurried and leapt out of their way. Weird how they were all dressed exactly the same—white suits, white booties, white gloves, and white face masks—but their body language told you who was who. The guy in the front, he was the Biggest Cheese. People fell in behind him. The ones at the back with clipboards and pens and electronic note-taking devices, they were assistants and junior doctor types. It was the ones in the middle who interested him. They were going to be more accessible than the big boss, but have more answers than the peons in the rear of the train.
“What we have here…” A tall man stepped forward. “…is one of our isolation wards.” He was briefing the group, so he probably worked here in the hospital. The rest of them could have been brought in from outside. Or, his heart leapt, perhaps there was someone from K&P in the mix? There had to be. They were the experts on all this. He was worried that they’d be able to hear his heart hammering in his chest. He inched forward so he could hear better.
“Triage did a great job of keeping the truly sick separated from those who’d only been mildly injured. Our hope is that these patients’ symptoms will not progress and we’ll be able to release them in due time. Wards two, three, and four are a different matter. We won’t be visiting those directly because of the possibility of transmission, but we wanted you to see how the patients were being housed.” He walked to the nearest cubicle and addressed a young woman. “You, madam? Can you tell me why you’re here?”
“Because they’re idiots,” she said.
A titter ran around the ward.
The tall man nodded. As if he’d been expecting that answer. “Want to tell us why?”
“Because there’s nothing wrong with me.”
He nodded again. “But the triage nurses elected to send you here, why is that?”
“Because of this.” She rolled up her sleeve to reveal a Celtic cross on her arm, wreathed about with ivy. The edges of her tattoo were still red. It was new.
“Ah,” said the doctor. “So, you have newly broken skin. Very good.”
“No, it’s dumb,” she said.
“We’re being overly cautious, as you can see.” He did that doctor thing and talked to his colleagues rather than the woman he’d just been addressing. They were such morons that way. How difficult was it to be decent? The Mighty Cheese didn’t look her way again, but talked and pointed and made his comments about her to the people he needed to impress. “Everyone here has the smallest of abrasions, like this young lady here. If they were within a three-block radius of the initial blast, we’re keeping them here for 48 hours of observation.”
Paul looked at the dead woman on the bed behind him. He raised his hand. He had something the Big Cheese needed to see.
“You will all be seen, no doubt about that,” said the tall man. He was trying for “jocular” but it fell flat.
“I honestly think you need to see this,” said Paul.
The patients in the cubicles close to his stepped away.
“Do you have worsening symptoms?” None of the gaggle of doctors came any closer. They were like a collective statue, hanging as close to the doors as possible. This thing had people spooked.
“Like the ‘young lady,’ I have no symptoms at all,” said Paul, “but this woman beside me is dead.”
There was a moment of silence, then a murmur, then a shout. That’s all it took. One person panicked and they were all instantly infected with the “let me out of here” bug. Then went from zero to 60 in a few seconds. Paul ducked and backed into his cubicle to make way for the stampede. He did not want to be at the head of that. People who led the charge were usually met with bullets or got crushed.
Neither of those things happened.
The crowd surged towards the doctors. The wall of white coats and stethoscopes parted to let them pass. The rabble—for they were no longer individuals, Paul was sure of that—pounded on the locked doors, screaming and crying and venting hours of pent-up rage and fear and doom. The ward doors gave way and a massive tsunami of human anxiety flooded into the corridor, swarming towards the main doors.
Paul hung back. Two minutes ago, these had been reasonable people. Now they were red-faced, open-mouthed, foul-tempered animals hammering at the keypad that held the code to release them all. It didn’t take long for someone to find a fire extinguisher and start beating on the windows.
Paul watched the violent assault on the outer doors for a minute, then did what any level-headed survivor would do and headed the other way. With a riot underway, he wasn’t going to be noticed. He hadn’t planned it, but he wasn’t going to miss the opportunity. What would Mom say? “When you see your chance, go for it.”
He waited by the far bay doors. Eventually someone was going to come in. The nurses’ station outside the double doors had to hav
e sounded the alarm. The clock on the wall said 11 a.m. How had that much time passed? He waited, his back against the wall, doing a decent impersonation of the invisible man. No one paid him any attention. At 11:04 precisely, the bay doors slammed open and a cordon of hospital security guards—most of them overweight, all of them pumped up—charged onto the ward.
Paul slipped, unnoticed, into the corridor and padded away from the pandemonium.
He followed the exit signs, but they seemed to be leading him nowhere. It occurred to him that he might just be exiting one ward to enter another. He pulled his mask up over his mouth. If he was going deeper into the diseased wards, he wanted as much coverage as possible.
He eased open yet another swing door and stopped. Was he really that lucky? Over by a massive glass window—the kind they have in maternity wards, so everyone can see in—was a figure he’d only hoped in his wildest imaginings he’d see again. She was short. She had black shoulder length hair. She was wearing a white coat and a face mask, but it sure looked like the Professor from behind. He tiptoed towards her, begging the universe to let it be her.
She was chatting to another doctor-type as they walked away from the observation window. He didn’t want to interrupt them, but he didn’t want to let them get away either. What was he going to say? How was he going to explain himself? There was so much to download and so much he needed to hear. It wasn’t until she had her hand on the door that he dared speak.
“Professor?”
She turned. It was her. He ran. His booties were slick and he had to grab onto a curtain to stop himself from falling. “Professor?”
She cocked her head. Perhaps she was smiling under her mask. “Can I help you?”
“It’s Paul,” he said. “Paul Everlee.”
“I’m sorry…” The Professor lowered her mask. It wasn’t her. The disappointment crashed in on him, threatening to wash him down the hallway and into the drains, then out to the Hudson and then the Pacific. It was overwhelming.
“Paul?” The man beside this so-called Professor peered at him. “Did you say your name was Paul Everlee?”
Paul nodded.
“Well, what do you know!” He held out his hand. “Dr. Stephen McKan. We met in the summer, when your folks had us all over.”
Paul fought back the tears. Someone he knew. Kind of. Or at least someone who knew him. He didn’t remember a “Stephen” off the top of his head, but if there was someone here who knew his mom and had been to their house, that was good enough for him. This was the beginning of his actual fight. He needed to convince this guy to let him go look for his mom. Because wherever she was, his dad would surely be close by and once they were all reunited they could all go home.
“I came down with my dad,” he said. “To look for my mom.” Best start at the beginning and tell him everything. That was what Mom would advise.
Stephen’s face fell. Paul wasn’t imagining it, the guy was welling up. He was going to cry. As in real tears. And more than one. They rolled down his face, like he was in private rather than standing in the middle of a hospital with people watching. A memory nibbled at the edges of Paul’s mind, but didn’t break through. Who was Stephen McKan and how did he know Mom?
“Your mother,” he said. “Your mother was a brave woman.”
Paul’s entire body froze over. His heart wasn’t moving, his blood had stopped flowing, his brain was on pause. McKan had said, “was.” Past tense. Over. Done. Dead.
“She wouldn’t take no for an answer,” said Stephen.
The room swam in and out of focus.
“She was determined to stop them from detonating.”
The woman who wasn’t the professor nodded.
“She had a theory that the blast would energize MELT, making it even more volatile.” He looked at his colleague and the two of them nodded. “It seems she was right.”
Paul felt some sensation in his far extremities. His toes were still alive. Maybe his fingers, too. But his mouth didn’t work. Couldn’t work. There were no words to be spoken if his mother was dead.
“From what I can piece together, she was last seen looking for the chief firefighter so she could persuade him to halt the demolition.” He held out a hand and patted Paul’s arm. That was how Paul knew sensation was returning there, too. “They had already begun the process of capping the basement where MELT had run rampant. That, at least, was a success. But before they could take the building down safely, the whole thing collapsed.”
The un-Professor made a tent of her hands, then let either side of the triangle fall.
“And that, as they say, was that.”
“But, where was she?” said Paul. Good, so his mouth was working again.
“Where was she?” said Stephen.
“When the building fell. Where was she?”
“I’m sorry, Paul. I don’t know the answer to that question. She went, as I said, to find the Fire Chief and we haven’t seen her since. I keep hoping she’ll show because she cared very much about this project, but as of yet…”
Paul felt everything inside him light up; like Christmas when you’re six and the snow has come and you’ve left cookies out for Santa and the reindeer leave footprints in the snow and there’s a new bike, just like you asked for. The idea that his mother might be alive, the fact that they still expected to see her, was like a million Christmases all at once.
“Are you here alone?” said Stephen.
“No,” said Paul. “Well, yes. I came down from the cabin with my dad.” They weren’t supposed to tell anyone where the cabin was. At least he had enough about him to remember that. “We heard that K&P’s headquarters had collapsed. We couldn’t reach Mom, so we came looking for her.”
Stephen nodded.
“Me and Dad were by K&P when the bombs started to go off.”
Stephen held his hand over his mask, adding another layer of protection. “You should be in quarantine, Paul.”
“I’m fine. None of my skin was exposed. I wasn’t cut, I didn’t breathe any ash in, I made it out of there without a single injury.” No need to tell them about the lesions inside his mouth. He was double-double sure they weren’t related to the explosion or the clouds of dust or anything that was going down at the blast site. Double sure.
Stephen didn’t move. “Still. There are protocols in place for a reason. Your mom would want you to get the best care.”
Paul shrugged. “I was in a low-risk isolation ward, but the inmates rioted.”
Stephen raised his eyebrows. “This is the first we’re hearing about a riot.”
“Yeah, well it just happened.” Why hadn’t he found the real Professor instead of this guy Stephen? He was kind of weird and overly solicitous. The memory nudged him again. It was getting closer. If he had a minute to himself, he knew he could piece together who this doctor was and what he did and whether he was going to be any use in the search for his mother. He needed to get away from Stephen before he made him go back to the isolation unit. He took a couple of steps back. “You haven’t seen my mom?”
Stephen shook his head.
“Who do I talk to, to tell them what I saw when the buildings came down? The cars, the buildings, the humans…” The walls around him shimmered and wibbled. Was he dehydrated? Hallucinating?
“We know all about that,” said Stephen.
Paul shrugged and took a couple more steps back. That meant someone else had made it out from the blast site and already made a report about the weird pocking on those buildings not facing the initial explosion. They already knew this was a corrosive material that probably didn’t originate in K&P. That was good. He could tuck away the horrors he had witnessed and concentrate on finding his parents.
“Why don’t you come with me?” said Stephen.
Paul fought off another wave of nausea.
“I can get you checked out, get you something to eat.” That was fishy. A minute ago, he was intimating he had to go back to isolation, now he was being all chummy and
offering him lunch. You think I was born yesterday, sucker? I’m not falling for that. He snuck a look over his shoulder. He needed to get out and start the official search for Alice and Bill Everlee. He didn’t want to go back the way he came. That would defeat the object. There was that NICU unit with the big windows. There had to be a door leading in there. But would there be another exit or would that leave him trapped?
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Stephen, “but I have no desire to hurt you. This has been a trying day for all of us and I know your mother would want me to keep you safe, even if that wasn’t what you wanted.”
It was majorly annoying, the way he kept mentioning Mom and what she would want. It was none of his business. Of course she would want him to be safe, but she wouldn’t want him to be a coward and slink back to the isolation ward when there was no good reason for him to be there.
