A Vagrant Story (45 page)

“But Rum said…”

“Tip two, never believe him either.”

“He did it to me too. All I tried do was thank him for his help.”

“What did he do for you?”

“He was the doctor who…” Henry glanced up to the present doctor. “He ’looked after’ me the first time I was here. Last time he was nice, this time he acted … different.”

Alex set his eyes questionably on the doctor. “Henry, this doctor, he was the one who gave you those pills?”

“Yeah that‘s him. It’s strange though. One minuet he was ready to start a fight then next thing he took off in a hurry.”

“Yeah,” Rum said. “The moment we mentioned Sierra was up on the roof he got all quiet and sort of … strolled off.”

The doctor exploded with awe, nearly falling on top of Rum. “She’s on the roof! Is she alone?”

Chapter 33

Two storage boxes tipped over, Sierra removed the third and final one’s lid as frantically as she did the last. Contents spilled to the snow lined rooftop, she began scraping through the items in a desperate attempt to ring doubt on the things laying in front of her.

The items were wrapped tightly in plastic bags, clear enough to make out the contents. Some contained pill cases while others contained lengthy chords of thick rope. It wasn’t till she saw the photographs that she could put these items together.

Sierra took one photo up in her hand. The picture was somewhat blurry and the tinted monochrome suggested a night time shot. Still clear enough to make it out. It was a photo of an alleyway, angled so as to face out onto the main street where a silhouetted passer-by strolled casually in the distance. The lens must have been for night vision, otherwise that man should have noticed the woman laying dead near the opening of the alley. No. She didn’t look dead. Her eyes were open. She lay still but her eyes were open. They gleamed wide in the night, awake but fast asleep.

There were more like this in the same bag. It looked like a set from a model’s photo shoot. In some she lay sideways, in some on her stomach. In most of the photos toward the back her top had been removed. It continued like this until the very last photo at the back, where her eyes closed.

In another box, she noticed Cylinders filled to the brim with pills. Others half empty, half used. Suddenly the woman’s peculiar state of unconsciousness became clearer, and all the more familiar. The pills Henry had were capable of producing the same effect. Even the eyes of the woman in this photo looked similar to the pregnant woman from the car crash. And Henry did say a doctor at this hospital gave those pills to him.

Sierra dug deeper. They were all like this, those clear plastic bags. The photos had been packed into them, a different bag for a different set, a different set for a different woman. The locations in them changed from alleys to bridges to riverside, but the posed positions of the women stayed the same in each set.

Something snapped in her then. In one move she bundled everything into her arms and dropped them at random back into the crates. One set pack of photos fell to the snow. She intended to snap it up and toss it blindly away like the others, when the woman in this photo set caught her eye. Sierra had seen this woman’s body outline chalked on a filthy stone floor. She’d seen her face framed amidst a pile of dead grievance flowers. This woman, Sierra had seen her face before.

“Annette Lucille.”

For a moment she stared in wide eyed wonder. The only moment needed for the roof access door to click open.

In her first reaction Sierra slid Annette’s photos into her leg pocket along with one of those pill cases. In her second reaction she spun round to meet the oncoming visitor. Shame she’d spent so long staring into these photos to notice the increased snowfall and hazy fog to block her view.

The roof access door slammed shut with a heavy metallic bang. Crunching footfalls approached slowly.

***

Rum and Henry followed doctor Adam lazily down a corridor. The man stopped, trying again in vain to pull an electronically locked stairwell door open.

“Damn it! They’re all locked,” Adam yelled.

“Good. That’ll stop your buddy getting to the roof too,” Rum stated.

“My brother has the keys. He can go where he wants.”

“Let him, I don’t care. What‘s it mean to us anyway?”
“That’s because you aren’t listening to me!”

“We’re sure trying to but you ain’t telling much. You go dragging us off all dramatic and shit without giving us a word why.”

“We have to find your friend. If he catches her up there he’ll…”

“H-Hell what?” Henry said, shaking from some bout of fear fused to his adrenaline.

“Yeah doc, I know she’ll get in trouble for being up there and all but isn’t this overreacting just a little bit?”

“That’s not it. That other doctor … he’s my brother … and he’s … not what I’d call stable.”

“Tell me about it but…”

“Look, I can’t stand here explaining now. We have to get up there!”

The doctor set his sights on yet another stairwell access. He rammed it as if to run straight through, doing so quite successfully. Before ascending he stopped to address the two bums.

“I’ll need help. Come with me.” He didn’t wait for answers.

Henry and Rum remained still, alone in the corridor. Rum looked down at Henry.

“Someone must have spiked the water in this place.”

“Something’s wrong. I have to go see.”

Like the doctor Henry didn’t wait for an answer. He too vanished up the stairwell, forcing old Rum to follow in kind.

***

Dense snowfall hitting her eyes, Sierra blinked desperately to bring shape to the shrouded figure. He stopped approaching, choosing to remain still, staring. He too must have been blinded by the snowfall. Rather than risk the intruder slip past he seemed intent on blocking off the only exit.

“What are you doing up here?” the faceless man yelled against wind‘s howling.

Sierra silenced, backing away to further decrease any visibility he might have of her. Pressed against the parapet, she slid her hands along the top as if ready to leap over any moment.

“I can see you, you know,” the man called again. “Brown coats don’t mix so well with white, unlike my lab coat.”

Sierra hesitated. Suddenly the promise of leaping over felt far more appealing.

“Don‘t worry, I‘m not going to get angry,” the voice said. “Come with me, I’ll take you back down.”

“I-I’m fine,” she spoke in a wincing whisper.

“Careful there, you wouldn’t want to trip over the edge.”

Those crunching footsteps exploded into movement. They came until he could see her straight. He stopped when she could see him too.

Sierra could make out a man of tall stature, his long white lab coat alone dwarfed Sierra’s full size. On his right eye there looked to be a sort of scar, a scratch mark Sierra could only guess to have been caused by a woman’s nails. His head turned to acknowledge those disorderly reorganised crates.

“Have you been playing with our storage crates? That’s hospital property you know.”

“Yeah right!” Sierra blurted, quickly sealing her lips with hands.

“So you peeked. That’s a shame. The sewer rat couldn’t mind her own business, had to go rooting through someone else’s boxes.”

“You killed John’s sister … you caused all this. This is all your fault!”

“John? John … John … John. Doesn’t ring a bell I’m afraid.”

“Annette’s brother.”

“That one’s equally forgettable.”

The figure neared more on every word, until he stood within arms reach, staring down at her. There was no way around. There would be no escape.

“T-these pills … my friend had these same pills. Did you give them to him? Why would you-”

“The reasons why won’t matter to you, not for much long-”

Sierra took her cue. In one spurt she drove her knee into the doctor’s groin, allowing the chance to worm round his hunching figure. She didn’t get far before his recovery. He jump tackled her down. Despite her squirming, the wriggling, he still managed to keep hold of her foot in one great grip.

“You little slut!”

He stood up at once, still holding her foot and twisting her body so she wriggled upside down. He started his counter with snapping kicks, each one increasing intensity until evolving into hard smashing blows. Sierra could only hang in the air, dangling like a punch bag. She took the kicks until his cursing and damning became a hazed mumble in her ringing ears.

The doctor, trapped in all his furious ranting, failed to hear the roof access door open and slam shut. He only stopped the beating to acknowledge those stampeding footfalls booming toward him.

“Who’s there?” he asked, still holding the girl.

Rum emerged from the haze like ghost on the moors. Body taut, fist tightened, legs tearing through snow, he yelled, “Get off her you freak!”

Without hesitating in his assault, Rum delivered that one previously held back smack to the doctor’s face. He followed up with blows of twos and threes and odd double knees till the doctor let his upper body crumble. Only then did he release the girl.

When Sierra did crawl to the safety of Henry and doctor Adam, Rum stood fit and ready for a second bout. His foe on the other hand, raised a palm for surrender, one quickly read by his brother who eased Rum down.

“Please stop, I can talk to him.”

“Talk to him? No brotherly chat’s gonna calm this psycho down.”

“No wait!” the fouled doctor cried. “I give up! Please, I was only trying to tell her how unsafe it is up here when she … she attacked me.”

Sierra didn’t need to shout about his lies. Her body language told everything. Not that she could shout in her current state.

The blonde haired doctor approached his brother, hands held up in defensive neutrality. “Stop lying. I’m not letting you do this.”

From his hunched down state the doctor nodded most knowingly, and from it pulled himself to full composure. “I didn’t see you there, Adam, good brother.”

“This isn’t right.”

“You brought them up here? You promised you wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“You promised you’d stop all this.”

“I wanted to. She found my boxes. I couldn’t help it. It’s not my fault. If my trust in you meant anything, dealing with this girl would have been a whole lot easier. Now things will get messy.”

“I don‘t want your trust. I won’t let you do this anymore.”

“You’ve let me do it long enough. Now some bums are going to change that?”

“It doesn’t matter who they are.”

“Really? I‘ve killed more of their kind in the infirmary and you never bat an eye.”

“That’s not remotely … You didn‘t mean…”

“Are you sure? I‘m not.”

The doctor named Adam took one step closer to his brother. “Say all you want. It stops tonight.”

“We’ll see.”

“Are you going to fight off all four of us? Kill us all?”

From under his long lab coat, the doctor unveiled a small sledgehammer, and bashed it over his brother’s face. He fell at once, unconscious. “You mean all three of you. Two technically, the girl will be sport.”

Rum pushed Sierra into Henry. “Get her out of here!”

The old fool charged the doctor, laying two more punches, enough for the doctor to lose grip on the sledgehammer. Henry snatched it at once.

Rum looked at Henry. “What are you doing? Get out now! Get to the first floor! It‘s safe down there.”

Henry took the hint. He carried Sierra, limping, through the roof access door. Before he could close it full,  some not so positive grunts began emanating from old Rum.

“We can’t let him fight alone!” Sierra cried.

Henry sealed the door behind. The grunts ceased.

It would happen once they dropped not three flights of stairs, when they heard that door rip open again. Heavy, loud charging footsteps banging on the metallic staircase suggested the wrong fighter won the fray.

In the rising panic, Henry dove into the first double doorway down the stairs. This access door separated the metallic roof access stairwell from the regular indoor tiled stairs. In this section of the hospital it was the only one granting a straight stair passage down to the first floor. He found himself hopelessly ricocheting back.

“This one’s locked too!” he cried.

“We can‘t get downstairs?” Sierra replied, holding onto his arm.

“We’ll have to go the long way down.”