“Guns! Guns! Guns!” Greg shouted.
Oliver gripped the steering wheel. “Will you shut him up?”
“Greg,” Richard said loudly, “Oliver will know what to do when the time comes.”
Richard wasn’t helping either. Oliver had no idea what to do.
None of them did.
When they reached the hospital, Oliver drove right for the ER. Dozens of people lined the sidewalks outside the entrance, hunched over and looking ill. But the people who had Oliver’s heart jumping were the ones holding assault rifles. He’d never seen the hospital so heavily guarded.
Oliver screeched up to the curb and jumped out.
“Hey! You can’t park there,” one of the guards called.
“I’ll move the car,” Richard said. “Just get Carrie inside.”
Oliver opened Carrie’s door, careful to catch her shoulder before she slumped out. Then he slipped a hand under her legs and lifted.
Two security guards met him at the car, waving their guns around as they spoke.
“No one is allowed to park here,” the first guard demanded.
“Sorry. My friend is really sick,” Oliver said, straining to keep hold of Carrie. “She needs a doctor right now.”
The security officers tightened their grips on their rifles, blocking the door. “Cards first.”
Each of them wore green uniforms like Oliver, but both had more gold arm bands. They outranked him, and he was desperate.
“Please,” Oliver begged. He couldn’t hold Carrie and grab the cards from his pocket. Richard had already pulled away to find a parking spot. “I’m an officer in Kane County, and she’s dying. Please let me get her inside and then I’ll show you our cards.”
“No entry without ID,” the first guard said. “No exceptions.”
A nurse came barreling out of the hospital wheeling a gurney. “Here, officer. Put her on this.”
Oliver laid Carrie down. The sight of her frail body on a stretcher about put him over the edge. Her limbs flopped in whatever position he’d laid her in, and he was too frazzled to tell if she was still breathing.
She looked dead.
In a daze, he pulled out his and Carrie’s cards and handed them over. The guard swiped them through his devices while Oliver held his breath. The lights flashed green on his card first and then—miraculously—on Carrie’s.
Thank you, Ashlee.
The guard held Carrie’s card next to her face. Both showed her drawn, gray skin and her mom’s blue blouse askew on her body. Plus, the picture quality was sub-par. Ashlee had forged the date, making it look like Carrie’s card was issued months ago, but Oliver could see the wheels churning in the guard’s head. The picture was obviously less than twelve hours old.
Be like Greg.
“We don’t have time for this!” Oliver snapped. “Let us in!”
Nodding, the guard dropped Carrie and Oliver’s cards into clear pockets hanging from lanyards. Then he hung the lanyards over their necks, pictures facing outward. With the nurse’s help, Oliver pushed Carrie’s gurney through the glass doors.
The waiting room was packed. People crowded every inch, old and young, in wheelchairs, regular chairs, window ledges, and sprawled on the tile floor simply for a place to rest.
“Take a number there,” the nurse said, helping Oliver steer the gurney through the bodies. “They’ll call you when you’re ready.”
“But she’s dying,” Oliver protested, eyeing the massive crowd.
Her eyes softened. “So is everyone. I’m sorry, officer, but you’ll have to take a number.”
Oliver left Carrie near a far wall to grab a paper ticket from the reel.
“Ninety-eight!” a receptionist called.
Oliver glanced down at his number. One hundred and sixty-two. The room spun. He was too exhausted to do the math, but he knew it was too long. Too long!
They hadn’t come all this way to have her still die.
Around the room, people held their heads or shivered in blankets, pale with cold. Babies were crying, adults were moaning, and others tried to console loved ones. It was one giant sound of misery that Oliver felt as much as he heard. Most looked like yellow card holders—people the president shouldn’t be trying to kill. Oliver couldn’t believe how fast this virus had spread.
Where did it end?
A few minutes later, Richard walked inside supporting a hunched-over May around the waist. CJ struggled behind them, wrapping a lanyard around his neck.
“Oh, no,” Richard breathed as he looked around. Spotting Oliver off to the side, they lumbered over. “What number are you?”
“One hundred and sixty-two,” Oliver said, feeling hollow inside.
Richard’s eyes snapped to Carrie’s still form. “You have to do something.”
“I know, I know.” But everyone was in the same predicament.
Oliver and Richard helped May and CJ to the wall where they could lean. That was the best they could offer. May immediately sank to the hard, tile floor, head against the wall, blanket around her. CJ did the same. Oliver wondered if they’d ever get back up.
Richard studied Carrie. “Is she…?”
“Still breathing,” Oliver said. “I think.”
The white-haired nurse who had brought Oliver the gurney walked past.
“I’ll be right back,” Oliver said to Richard. Then he stormed across the waiting area, each step growing angrier until he snagged the nurse by the arm. “I can’t wait for them to call our number. My friend is dying.”
“I’m sorry, officer,” the nurse said, “but—”
Oliver rocked forward. “Do you really want to bring down the wrath of the entire Illinois State Government on this hospital? That is the daughter of a high-ranking official. Her father ordered me to bring her here because he’s off fighting rebels. But if her father finds out she died because of some stupid number, he’ll…he’ll…” He ran out of lies, but the nurse still paled.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “Sorry, sir. I didn’t realize. Just give me a moment.”
The nurse disappeared down a hallway.
Richard was nodding when Oliver headed back. “Even Greg would have been impressed with that performance,” Richard whispered. “Nicely done.”
For all Oliver knew, he’d put Carrie in greater danger by claiming she was government material. Daughters of officials had green cards, not yellow. But seconds later, the nurse was back, waving Oliver forward.
“Right this way, officer,” she said.
Richard clapped Oliver on the shoulder. “Good luck.”
Oliver eyed May and CJ huddled together on the floor. “Same to you. Here. Take this,” Oliver said, handing Richard his paper ticket. “I’ll try to find you soon.”
Then Oliver pushed Carrie’s gurney down the long hallway.
* * * * *
Greg drove himself mad as he waited. He tried to catch up on sleep, but Oliver’s dark trunk steamed with trapped summer heat, making him sweaty and miserable. He could barely breathe let alone nap, and his brilliant plan no longer seemed so brilliant.
So close, and yet a million miles away.
What good did it do to rot, trapped in temperatures nearing the surface of the sun, while Carrie and his family suffered inside? With luck, they’d be in there for days receiving treatment. Oliver couldn’t really expect Greg to stay in this trunk for that long, could he?
Patience, he told himself.
By now, Carrie should be on medicines. She should be hooked to IVs and machines and all sorts of life-saving needles. He shuddered. He’d never been a fan of needles, but that had been cemented in Raleigh where he’d watched his sister die. Once the money ran out, they had cut off Kendra’s medicine. She hadn’t lasted an hour.
And now Oliver didn’t have enough money.
How would a quiet guy like him demand that the same thing didn’t happen to Carrie?
The thought put Greg over the edge.
Feeling around the dark trunk
, he found the release lever, careful to keep hold of the lid so it didn’t fly open in the middle of the crowded parking lot. The stifling air whooshed out, and he took a few breaths, feeling his thoughts clarify with the cooler air.
For a time, he just peeked out of the small opening. Whenever a car passed, he shut the trunk again. After an hour of this—or what felt like an hour and was probably only three minutes—he climbed out and hunkered behind the back tire. He tried the driver’s door handle, but Richard had locked the doors and taken the keys with him.
Crouched low, Greg surveyed the hospital. It was several stories tall with loads of security officers guarding the entrances. There was no way he could slip in unnoticed.
At least not the conventional way.
He started creeping toward the hospital. Whenever a car approached, he stopped at the nearest parked car and pretended to search for keys. All the while, he scanned every inch of that hospital for another way in. Doors. Windows. Roof. His training had to be good for something.
He crossed two full parking lots before he found it.
A food service truck pulled into a fenced area. The gate around it was shut, but Greg didn’t let that deter him. The fence connected to the hospital in two spots, one in the wide open, and the other within a patch of huge shrubs. Greg worked his way along the fence over to those shrubs. They were thicker than they appeared, but he ducked inside them anyway, ignoring the scratches and pull on his arms as he inched up.
Peering through the slats in the fence, he saw three men and a woman unloading food supplies from that truck. Two guards with rifles kept watch while they worked. In Greg’s mind, assault rifles were major overkill for a hospital—although this was food. His empty stomach growled. He couldn’t even remember his last meal. The guards were distracted as they complained about over-extended work hours. Neither of them checked the shrubs behind the fence.
As the four unloaders took another armful inside, Greg scaled the fence and dropped to a crouch behind another tall shrub. Then he worked through his options: lie to the workers, say he stepped outside for a smoke and forgot his green card, or take down all six of them, including the armed guards. He’d been trained to do as much. Swift upper punch to the smaller guard’s jaw, then use the gun to take down the others. With his good aim, he might even be able to incapacitate them without major injury. However, he refused to use violence. So he scanned the area for another option.
The longer it went, the more appealing the McCormick fallback option became.
A sudden boom sounded as the hospital metal doors slammed shut. The two guards pulled down the truck’s hatch. All the others had disappeared inside the hospital. Then the guards climbed in the truck, pushed a button to open the gate, and drove off.
Cursing himself, Greg stayed behind his shrub. Once the truck disappeared, he tried the large metal doors, but they didn’t have outside handles. It was just a giant gray barricade to the hospital. He wanted to kick it in frustration.
All his “specialized” training, and he couldn’t even break into a stupid hospital. Maybe they should have spent less time teaching him survival skills and how to shoot kids, and more time teaching them—
His thoughts skidded to a halt.
Survival skills.
Whirling around, he eyed the huge dumpsters in the far corner of the fenced area. He ducked low and slid behind the first dumpster. He lifted the lid. Everything inside was bagged, making it impossible to decipher the contents. He and his mom had escaped Raleigh’s Municipality in a dumpster like this one. The smell had clung to them for weeks.
Knowing where he was headed but not all too thrilled about it, he searched for a better option. But the last few days had worn him down, and his ideas were mush.
Sighing, he used his good leg, caught a foothold on a ridge of the dumpster, and heaved himself inside. He dug through the reeking filth, tearing bags open as he went to find anything with one specific trait:
Flammable.
fifty-five
THE MEDICAL STAFF OPENED UP other sections of the hospital to accommodate the bulging ER.
Oliver waited with Carrie’s gurney in a small corner of Obstetrics. Three minutes. Five. At fifteen minutes, he fretted that they had forgotten them. He had a staff meeting in half an hour, and he was at least twenty minutes away. If he missed it, Jamansky would call his house. If Oliver didn’t answer, Jamansky would go looking. But Oliver didn’t dare leave Carrie in this abandoned part of the hospital, so he paced and fretted.
Finally, he saw a doctor coming down the hallway with two nurses wheeling machines behind them.
“I apologize for keeping you waiting, officer,” the doctor said. She picked up Carrie’s yellow card, scanned it into her handheld computer, and then added, “We didn’t realize we had a VIP here because this patient doesn’t have a green card.”
“Her father wanted to protect her identity,” Oliver said. A lame excuse. Even he didn’t know what he meant by it, but the doctor nodded as if it made perfect sense.
Grabbing her stethoscope, she listened to Carrie’s heart, lungs, and neck while the nurses hooked Carrie up to several beeping machines.
“Who is her father?” the doctor asked. She lifted Carrie’s eyelids and shined a light to check her pupils.
“Blood pressure at 88/59,” one nurse reported.
“I…I’m not allowed to say,” Oliver answered, feeling his own blood pressure surge. He would pay for these lies later.
“No. Of course not. My apologies,” the doctor said. “How much money did her father send to cover her expenses?”
Sweat trickled down his forehead. He’d forgotten. In all the guard mess downstairs, he never grabbed CJ’s extra money from Richard.
“I think…I think about fifty.” The doctor’s eyes darted up to him, and Oliver added, “But he’s sending more. I’ll have the rest tonight.” Not that he knew where to get more money. If his uncle had a dollar to his name, he could try there, but the old drunk already lived off Oliver’s paychecks. There weren’t even banks to rob anymore.
“Oxygen at 87%,” one of the nurses said. She attached a clear tube under Carrie’s nose.
The doctor checked Carrie’s wrist for a pulse and then moved around to slip off Carrie’s socks. She felt her ankles as well. “How long has she been unresponsive?”
Oliver couldn’t answer. He stared at Carrie’s bare feet. They were blue. Not gray. Blue. It was 90 degrees outside, but her feet were blue. The reality of losing her fully hit him.
It was too late.
They were too late.
“Do you know what her symptoms have been?” the doctor asked as if this was just another typical day at the office.
No time, no money, and no sleep, and Oliver snapped.
“Look at her! She’s dying. She obviously has G-979, so do something!”
The doctor looked up. “She has what?”
“Don’t play dumb. You know what this is. You have to fix her. You have to fix all of them. People are dying!”
The doctor seemed to age right before his eyes. “I’m afraid this woman has a progressed case. It might be too late, and we can’t afford to waste our—”
“No!” he roared. “It’s not too late. You will help her, and you will help her now!”
With a weary nod, the doctor turned back to the nurse. “5 milligrams every hour. Let me know if it’s having any effect.”
* * * * *
The numbers in the ER ticked by painfully slow. A few chairs finally opened up, so Richard was able to move May and CJ. Then he leaned against the wall next to them, watching the mobs of people. Most looked like May and CJ. Closed eyes. Pinched foreheads. One poor man vomited in his own hat. Several parents hovered frantically over their children. How many realized their brains were swelling? How many knew the government was behind this?
The longer it went, the heavier Richard’s body became. He hadn’t told anyone that he’d woken this morning with his own stabbing headache.
He distracted himself by watching others.
A few chairs down, a mother was trying to console her crying baby. The child, no more than six months old, was hoarse with tears, barely able to catch a breath through its raspy wails. The mother rocked him faster, desperate for their number to be called.
“What is going on?” someone shouted.
Wincing at the loudness of the voice, Richard turned. A man had come up behind him. He looked mid-forties and had his arm around a woman who wore a heavy winter coat.
“There’s nowhere to sit!” the man yelled. “My wife can’t stand up!”
Richard flinched again as the man’s booming voice sliced through his headache.
“Do you have a number yet?” Richard pointed to the number reel. “I can stay with your wife while you get one.”
Huffing, the man handed her off to Richard. The woman leaned against Richard without even looking at him. Her face stayed pinched.
“Your head?” Richard asked.
She nodded.
Mine, too, he thought.
It took a few minutes for the man to work his way back through the crowd. By then, his face was red with fury. “Two-hundred-and-three? This is madness!”
Richard nodded. At least CJ and May were holding up. May’s chin was on her chest, and she was snoring softly, but that was better than some in the crowd who looked to be on death’s door.
The man grew suddenly quiet. “Is it just me, or does everyone here seem to have the same illness? Is this an outbreak or something?”
“I believe the official term is genocide,” Richard said, rubbing behind his ear.
“Genocide? What do you mean?”
Richard didn’t clarify because he noticed the mother out of the corner of his eye. She had stopped rocking, and her baby had stopped crying. Both should have been a good sign, except the way the mother stared straight ahead and the way the baby slumped on her shoulder.
“Dead,” Richard whispered.
These people had their citizenship. What would happen to the millions without?
The man tugged on Richard’s sleeve. “Are you implying the government did this to us?”
Citizens of Logan Pond Box Set Page 83
