by Tarah Benner
Finally, Lark heard the clang of a tool on the metal tray. The doctor withdrew the needle, and Lark let out a pathetic whimper. The woman squeaked out of the room, and the nurses lifted her back onto the gurney.
Lark didn’t put up a fight. She was demoralized, exhausted, and emotionally drained. She didn’t know why they needed her spinal fluid, and she didn’t care. She just wanted to curl up and disappear.
She heard Baldy’s labored breathing behind her as he pushed the gurney, and suddenly the room began to spin. Nausea hit her like a punch to the stomach. They rolled her back into the hallway, and soon the vertigo was too much for her.
She sat up so quickly that she conked heads with Baldy and vomited over the plastic rail. Her stomach was practically empty, so all that escaped was a sickening drip of yellowish bile.
“Fucking bitch,” Baldy muttered under his breath, as if Lark had puked on purpose.
“Later,” said High-top. “We gotta get her moved.”
“I don’t want her puking on me.”
“Then fucking sedate her ass,” said High-top.
Suddenly the gurney stopped, and Lark felt movement around her. She opened her eyes. Baldy was fumbling with a syringe of clear liquid.
“No,” she groaned, trying to distance herself as much as she could on the narrow gurney. “Don’t —”
But Lark was too weak to put up a fight. She felt the hot, damp breeze of Baldy’s breath on her face and then another pinch as the needle sank into her skin.
She glared up at him, wishing an earthquake would topple the building and bury him under a pile of brick and concrete. Or, better yet, that a tornado would send a shard of metal flying through a window to skewer him like a pig.
A warm fog settled over her as they rolled her down the endless hallway. She was floating immobile through a cold narrow tunnel, but she no longer had the will to move or speak. Darkness pressed gently around the blurred edges of her vision, and Lark finally succumbed to sleep.
sixteen
Lark
Lark came to with the feeling that someone had clobbered her in the spine with a baseball bat. Her body felt foreign and strangely feeble, as if the doctor had found a way to sap her of all her energy.
She opened her eyes. She was lying flat on her back in a dreary cinder-block room. The only source of light was the fluorescent strip mounted above her headboard, but she could make out two doors, a few pieces of machinery, and a tray table that held a pink plastic dish shaped like a kidney. There was an IV catheter stuck in her arm, but judging by the fact that her senses seemed to be sharpening, the little plastic tube was only carrying fluids.
It had to be after hours. There was no clock in the room, but the sparse lighting gave her the feeling that it was nighttime. How long had she been out?
She still felt vaguely queasy, but that sensation was only barely breaking through the haze that surrounded her. She suspected that the sedative was still wearing off, and she felt a surge of rage directed toward the asshole nurses who’d forced her into a spinal tap and then sedated her against her will.
For several minutes Lark just lay there, stewing in her spiral of fury. The blood pumping through her veins seemed hotter than normal, charging through her with the burning need for revenge.
She was determined to get those seeds, but she didn’t just want to save the world. She wanted to ruin GreenSeed.
Losing those patents would cost them millions. It wouldn’t make up for the pain and suffering they’d caused, but it was the best that Lark could do.
The trouble was that the nurses had left her handcuffed to the bed. They’d cut the zip ties, but Lark’s range of motion was limited by her right arm, which was secured to the plastic railing.
She dragged in a deep breath and let it out slowly. Bernie had been held captive under nearly identical circumstances, and she’d escaped. There had to be a way out.
Lark looked around, following the thin plastic tube trailing off the side of her bed to the bag of fluids it was attached to. The bag was suspended from a weird strap that was bolted to the wall — not the normal metal stand.
She grinned. Clearly Bernie had made an impression. There was no phone in her room, so the option of strangling a nurse with the cord was out. The only things within her reach were the two flat pillows under her head, a thin cotton sheet, a puke pan, and her chart.
A jolt of excitement shot through Lark’s chest. Someone had left her chart lying on the tray table — a notebook’s worth of papers secured to a clipboard. Part of her was dying to know what the fuck they’d been writing about her, but more important than her file was the clipboard itself.
It had a solid hardboard back and a thick metal clamp. Lark shivered. Her body was practically thrumming with excitement. It was less than four feet away. She was sure that a little maneuvering would allow her to reach it, and if she could get the clipboard, she would have a weapon.
Scooting her butt to the very edge of the bed, Lark reached her uncuffed arm over her chest and stretched her fingertips toward the tray table. It was still out of reach.
Cursing, Lark rolled herself onto her side and flung a leg over the railing. A sudden spell of dizziness hit her as soon as she sat upright, but she clenched her eyes shut and reached for the clipboard.
Suddenly, the door behind her burst open, and Lark’s heart leapt into her throat. She was straddling the rail of her bed. The door stopped about a foot from the jamb, and she heard a distant trill of laughter.
A woman was standing on the other side, calling down the hallway behind her. In one desperate motion, Lark flung herself over the railing and back into bed, shoving the clipboard under her pillow.
The door shuddered as the nurse took another half step inside. Lark glanced to her right and saw that her IV tube was tangled. She reached over to fix it, keeping one eye on the door, and gave the tube a hard shake.
The door moved again, and the nurse behind it giggled. “You’re a slut! Stop it!” Another burst of girlish laughter. “Okay, I will. Hang on.”
The door opened all the way, and the overhead lights flickered on. The intruder was a short girl in her midtwenties with a thick smattering of freckles and strawberry-blond hair. Lark let her eyelids droop to feign sleep and stirred on the bed.
The nurse approached her slowly, checking the foot of Lark’s bed for something. Her thin stenciled eyebrows crinkled together, and then she turned and left the room.
Lark let out a sigh of relief. She suspected that the nurse was looking for the clipboard. There was no time to waste.
Keeping an eye on the closed door, Lark pulled the clipboard out from under her pillow. Her eyes skimmed over what looked like a record of her vital signs before settling on the heavy metal clip holding the papers to the board. It was sharp and pointy at the ends and tapered to a smooth circle at the top.
She bent the clip back and wiggled it experimentally. It wasn’t loose, but she suspected that with a little bit of leverage, she could pop it right off.
Holding the board under her left arm and the clip in her right hand, she bent the board apart until the clip popped off.
Voices from the hallway drifted through the crack in Lark’s door. The nurse was coming back.
Without thinking, Lark shoved the useless board and the stack of papers back under her pillow. She hiked up her hospital gown and slid the metal clip into her underpants. It was cold and uncomfortable, but she could handle it.
A second later, the door burst open, and the nurse flounced back in looking harried. She was muttering obscenities under her breath, and Lark sensed that she’d gotten in trouble.
Lark shifted under the covers and made a low noise in the back of her throat.
The woman stiffened, her big doe eyes zeroing in on Lark as though she were a wild animal that they had captured. She hadn’t expected her to be awake.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” said Lark.
“Umm . . .” The nurse glanced at the door, unsur
e what to do.
“Please.” Lark started to sit up and pretended to realize that she was strapped to the bed. “I have to go . . .”
“Okay, okay,” said the nurse anxiously. She held up a hand. “Just . . . hold on a minute.”
She dashed back out of the room, and Lark swore under her breath. The nurse was going for backup.
Lark didn’t know what to do. She hadn’t planned to take on two of them. She was confident that she could overpower the petite idiot nurse, but if she returned with Baldy or High-top, Lark was screwed.
A few seconds later, the nurse reappeared. “I paged my supervisor. It’ll just be a minute.”
Lark felt a surge of satisfaction. So it was after hours. If half the staff was gone for the night, the supervisor could be on another floor. This was Lark’s best chance.
“I have to go now,” Lark whined in a tone that she hoped conveyed her urgency.
“Just hang on a minute.”
“I can’t,” said Lark, screwing up her face to make it look as though she were experiencing severe GI distress. “I think it’s the meds . . . It’s an emergency!”
“Number one or number two?” asked the nurse.
“Number three!” Lark cried dramatically.
“All right, all right,” snapped the nurse. She looked annoyed and a little panicky. As someone at the bottom of the totem pole, it was probably her job to clean up any accidents.
The nurse sighed and breezed out into the hallway. She exchanged a few words with a man standing on the other side of the door, and Lark cursed to herself. There was an armed guard just waiting for her to try something stupid.
The nurse returned a moment later. An exasperated and slightly overweight male guard shuffled in after her, looking irritated that she’d interrupted whatever he had been doing.
He eyed Lark suspiciously as he unlocked the handcuff that was secured to the bed. Then he cuffed Lark’s wrists together and tugged her into a standing position. Lark hunched over so that they wouldn’t see the odd bulge in her underwear, feigning another stomach cramp.
The nurse flung the bathroom door wide open, and Lark stumbled inside. The nurse trailed in after her but didn’t bother to close the door.
Lark cleared her throat loudly.
The guard rolled his eyes and turned to face the opposite wall. This wasn’t going to work.
“I can’t go with him there!” Lark whined.
The nurse looked conflicted. Lark knew she was pushing her luck. The nurse was probably breaking protocol by taking Lark to the bathroom on her own, but it was the guard who spoke up first.
“I thought it was an emergency.”
“Trust me,” groaned Lark. “You don’t want to see this.”
The nurse threw the guard an exasperated look and pushed the door closed. Lark was still hunched in a show of pain, but she was worried that if the nurse looked too closely, she would see that Lark was packing something she shouldn’t be.
With some difficulty, Lark hitched up her smock, careful to keep the fabric bunched in front of her.
“Can you hold this?” she asked the nurse, hesitating as she considered what she was about to do.
“Sure,” said the nurse. She took the wad of fabric from Lark, and a surge of guilt shot through Lark’s chest.
This girl was around her age — just starting her career. She didn’t know what the hell she was doing. She might not have even known the extent of what GreenSeed did. This wasn’t her fault. Lark couldn’t bring herself to stab the nurse, but something had to be done.
Lark scooted back toward the toilet, bracing herself for a fight. Then the nurse’s eyes narrowed, and Lark saw her gaze land on the unsightly bulge in her underwear.
Lark let out a theatrical moan and screwed up her eyes in pain, but it was too late. A bewildered expression flashed across the nurse’s face, followed swiftly by realization.
Everything happened very quickly after that. A look of terror flashed through the nurse’s eyes. She was already hunched over, so Lark grabbed her by the head and yanked her forward. The nurse let out a shriek as Lark pivoted on the spot, and then she bashed the nurse’s head into the wall.
seventeen
Lark
The nurse hit the wall with a painful-sounding smack. She cried out in pain, and Lark used her momentary paralysis to turn around and click the lock on the bathroom door.
The nurse bounded back, blood spewing from her nose, and Lark grabbed her by the ponytail and tugged. She screamed, and Lark used all her bodily strength to shove her into the adjacent wall.
This time, the nurse was ready. She stopped herself from face-planting into the cinder blocks and pivoted on the spot. The guard outside must have heard the commotion, because the bathroom handle jiggled loudly, and he began pounding on the door.
The nurse lunged toward Lark, but Lark tucked her chin and threw her full weight into the girl. They collided with a painful smack, but Lark was stronger. She managed to push the nurse back and trap her against the door. Lark’s wrists were still shackled together, limiting her mobility, and as she struggled to keep the nurse pinned, the girl squished her hands between their bodies until they found Lark’s throat.
The nurse squeezed — pressing her thumbs down on Lark’s windpipe — and Lark felt her airways close. She jerked her weight around to dislodge the nurse, but her feet slipped uselessly in her stupid disposable shoe covers.
Panicking, she dug her fingernails into one of the girl’s wrists, prying it away from her throat. She couldn’t punch with her wrists bound, but she dragged in a desperate gulp of air and whipped her right elbow around.
It caught the nurse cleanly in the mouth. She shrieked and aimed a punch at Lark, and Lark felt a sharp sting travel up her nose. It hurt, but it was the nurse who was doubled over in pain.
It occurred to Lark that the nurse had never punched anyone in her life, and, judging from the way she was cradling her arm to her chest, she’d broken one of the bones in her hand.
Feeling horrible, Lark took her shot. She rushed the girl, grabbed her around the neck with the chain of her cuffs, and drove a knee up into her gut. The girl cried out in agony, but Lark kept going until she crumbled to the floor.
The pounding on the door suddenly grew louder and sharper. It sounded as though the guard was using a piece of furniture as a battering ram. Lark fumbled in her underwear to retrieve her makeshift weapon, emotions raging inside of her as she braced herself for what she was about to do.
Lark was normally a clean fighter. She never kicked someone when she was down, and she never pulled a weapon first. But this was different. This was life or death. If she didn’t stop the guard, she would probably be shot trying to escape. At the very least, she’d be spending the rest of her life behind bars, and Lark couldn’t handle that.
The door shuddered. Lark gripped the metal clip in her hands and readied herself for a fight. Beside her, the nurse moaned and tried to sit up, but Lark aimed a kick that caught her squarely in the ribs.
The nurse howled and fell back to the ground, and a fresh wave of guilt washed over her. She was a monster. She deserved to be locked up, but she refused to surrender.
The broken handle clattered to the floor, and half a second later, the door swung open. It banged off the bathroom wall, and the guard appeared in front of her.
Lark didn’t think. She flew forward with speed as she’d never achieved before and plunged the sharp edge of the clip into his jugular. The guard howled like a wounded animal as blood splattered Lark’s face. She withdrew the clip and plunged it in again, twisting at the waist and catching him with a backwards elbow as she swung around.
The guard doubled over as a spurt of blood gushed from the wound. Lark took the opportunity to wrap her cuffed hands around his neck and knee him in the groin. The guard let out a sickening grunt, and Lark let her knee fly two more times for good measure.
Standing on her tiptoes, Lark bent over the guard’s back and yanked his f
irearm out of its holster. Then she staggered back as far as she could and pointed the gun at his head.
Lark was breathing hard and fast, but it was nothing compared to the guard. His face was beet red, and he was glaring at her with a murderous expression. To Lark’s right, the nurse was still whimpering on the ground in the fetal position.
“Get down!” Lark yelled. “On the ground! Hands up!”
The guard stared at her, seething with rage. Slowly, he raised his arms over his head but didn’t lower himself to the ground.
“Get the fuck down!” yelled Lark. Adrenaline was coursing through her veins, charging her with manic energy and narrowing her vision to a point.
The guard swallowed. Lark knew she had to gain control of the situation fast. If she didn’t, the guard might decide to rush her in an attempt to steal back his weapon.
The guard was watching her warily, but he wasn’t truly afraid. Did he think Lark was too soft to pull the trigger? Too scared? Too weak? It was time to show him that she wasn’t screwing around.
Setting her jaw in a cold expression, Lark racked the pistol. “Get — the fuck — down — before I shoot you — in the head.”
The guard’s nostrils flared, but he didn’t move an inch.
“You don’t think I’ll shoot you?” asked Lark.
The guard’s eyes flashed, and he cracked a wry grin.
“I’m in for murder, motherfucker,” said Lark. “Try me.”
At those words, some of the color drained from the guard’s face. He swallowed, fighting his stubborn, macho instincts, before dropping to his knees on the cold, hard tile.
Lark closed the distance between them. Pressing the gun to his temple, she reached down to his belt and fumbled for his keys.
This time, the guard was ready. His arm flew up without warning, knocking the gun askew. He threw his weight to the side, colliding with Lark’s legs and sending her flying toward the toilet. She couldn’t throw out her arms to catch herself. Her head cracked against the commode as she hit the ground, and the guard clambered over her legs. He was going for the gun.
