Critical Condition (15 page)

“So?”

“As in they live at the equator, where it’s really hot all the time?” Zimmerman grabbed Lydia’s hand, almost pulling her off balance and sideways into the seat with him. “Please don’t let anything happen to them. It’s my job on the line.”

Trey looked up from his work. “Go on, look for his penguins.”

Ugh. Last thing she wanted to do. Lydia was not a big fan of birds.

“How am I supposed to catch them?” she asked, waving her cast, using her arm as an excuse for the first time since she’d broken it. Trey did a double take, raising one eyebrow.

“What’s wrong? You’re not afraid of a little penguin, are you?”

No. It was their big beaks she was afraid of. Not to mention their flapping wings and sharp little claws. Did penguins have claws? They definitely had beaks—maybe teeth as well. And who knew what kind of diseases they carried?

Her face twisted with revulsion. Trey’s laughter filled the van. “You
are
. Dr. Lydia Fiore who isn’t afraid of anything—fire, guns, hit men—is frightened of cute, cuddly little birds.”

“I’m not afraid. Just”—she fumbled for an excuse—“inexperienced. I’ve never been around birds.” By choice. Not after the viewing of Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Birds
that she and Maria had sneaked in out of a rainstorm for and stayed all day, watching the movie three times before leaving. She’d been six or seven at the time and still had nightmares, would even cross the street if she spotted a crow or starling in her path.

“You can’t let them die,” Zimmerman said. “I’ll lose my job!” He sounded more concerned about his job than his wayward birds.

“We’ll come help you as soon as we’re done,” Trey assured her. “But this seat jumped its track. It’s going to take me a while to saw through the supports.” Lydia stood there, not really liking her options. “C’mon, you don’t want to be responsible for them freezing out there.”

Lydia sighed. “Okay, I’ll go look for your penguins.” “They’re in carrier boxes, but those are only for convenience, not very sturdy. You need to keep them warm,” Zimmerman said.

“Right.” She edged past Trey, bracing against the overhead wall of the van as she made her way back to the door. She grabbed the first of the brown cartons she’d noticed before. It was just cardboard folded together. The inside was empty except for the stench of bird poop.

But as soon as she touched the second box, she knew she’d found something, though it wasn’t very heavy, maybe five or six pounds. She thought penguins were big fat things, waddling around on ice. “Here’s one.”

“Is it okay?” Zimmerman called.

She risked a peek inside. The bird was curled up, filling the entire container.

“It’s not dead, is it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. If it was hurt, what the hell was she supposed to do about it? She knew nothing about bird anatomy except which bits of a fried chicken tasted best. “It’s not moving.”

“You’re a doctor,” he shouted. “Do something!”

 

 

GINA RAN THROUGH THE DARK, EMPTY HALLWAYS of the ER, her pulse beating so hard that it made her vision throb. She could only focus on a small area in front of her, had to whip her head around every time she heard a sound, imagining one of Harris’s men lunging out of hiding to tackle her. This wasn’t fear, fight, or flight. This was outright terror.

The lights went out for a few moments and she froze, certain it was a trap. Then Tillman’s voice whinnied through the overhead speakers. Something about losing power. Liar. They should have plenty of power.

“They’re just herding everyone into the auditorium,” she said aloud. Her voice sounded loud in the empty corridor. Too loud. She forced herself not to run—that had been a mistake, galloping through the hallways like that. She had to be smarter, more careful. Guerrilla warfare. Sneaky, silent.

Hard to do when your heart was about to scramble right up and out of your throat. She slowed her breathing. After a few deep breaths her vision returned to normal. She stuck to the little-known back hallways and entered radiology from the employee entrance. The door shut behind her with a squeak that made her jump although there was no one else to hear it. The place felt even more cold and deserted than the ER.

Even in the best of times radiology was a maze. The lights were still on here, but that didn’t do much to ease the whole spooky-mansion-with-Freddy-Krueger-ready-to-jump-out atmosphere.

ER docs hated radiology—patients got lost there, both physically and medically. Not that radiology and its denizens didn’t feel the same about the ER, a place that seemed to exist solely to thwart their carefully arranged schedules and pull their techs for stat portable films. The Hatfields and McCoys played out in the so-called civilization of an urban medical center.

Despite that, right now, Gina would love to stumble across a surly radiology tech. She’d never find an actual radiologist—they were an obscure race of creatures, rarely seen in the daylight, and never on a weekend or holiday, especially not since new technology allowed them to do most of their work from home. One of the ER staff’s greatest joys was to pull a radiologist out of bed at three A.M. to perform an intervention like an angiogram that they couldn’t turf to the poor tech working nights.

But now it was just Gina wandering empty hallways, head twisted so that she could look over her shoulder, back pressed against the wall, and feeling like a gothic heroine entering Bluebeard’s forbidden chambers. She’d come into radiology from the back, the X ray area, which meant weaving through a myriad of changing rooms, waiting areas, viewing rooms, and procedure areas before she’d reach the CT suite where she hoped to find her mother. Maybe she’d feel less nervous if she had any idea about what to do after that, but she’d settle for finding LaRose first and figuring out the rest after she knew her mother was safe.

Footsteps sounded behind her. Gina froze, pressing her body against the wall—as if beige paint could conceal a five-ten black woman in a bright white lab coat. Holding her breath, she listened. Nothing. Maybe she’d imagined it.

There was a fluoroscopy suite across the hall. Looking both ways, seeing no one, she flung herself across the empty space and through the door. She grabbed it before it could click shut and closed it herself, slowly, slowly, without a sound.

The room was dark. She didn’t dare turn on a light. The Maglite seemed too bright, too risky, so she used her penlight. The patient bed with the c-ring was in the center of the room, carts of supplies pushed against the walls surrounding it.

On the opposite wall was the revolving door leading to the darkroom and film-developing area. To the left of it was another exit leading to yet another hallway—one that would get her closer to CT.

Using her tiny beam of light to guide her, she skirted the equipment and edged along the wall toward the exit. Her breathing was so loud, it sounded like she was using a megaphone, but it wasn’t as bad as the pounding in her ears echoing her pulse. She wasn’t tiptoeing, but each step felt as treacherous as stepping off an abyss.

She’d almost reached the black plastic revolving door when she heard footsteps again. She wasn’t imagining them. They were close—and getting closer.

A shadow passed beneath the slit of light below the exit she’d been aiming for. Was he coming here? She skipped her penlight’s beam around the room. There was nowhere to hide. The footsteps stopped and she heard a man’s voice, although she couldn’t make out his words. There were two of them!

Panic seized her and she rushed into the open revolving door of the darkroom entrance. She stopped it halfway, not wanting to reveal herself if one of the men had gone into the darkroom next door. It was pitch-black in the narrow cylinder—it was designed that way, so that no light would accidentally contaminate the darkroom or expose any film. But she’d never realized how tiny the chamber was. It was like being trapped inside a torpedo. Or a coffin.

She wished she hadn’t thought of that particular metaphor. Visions of being buried alive flooded over her.

Her breath reverberated against the plastic walls and she was disoriented—if she hadn’t been standing on her feet, she’d have no idea which direction was up. She was about to risk entering the darkroom—anything to escape this claustrophobic sensory deprivation chamber—when she heard a man’s voice.

If one man was in the darkroom, was the other behind her, in the fluoro room? If so, then she was trapped between them, nothing more than a plastic wall separating her from them.

She covered her mouth and nose with her hands, hoping to muffle her breathing. Because there was no way in hell the plastic wall of the revolving door would stop a bullet.

 

 

AMANDA SWAYED AS A NASTY BLAST OF WIND shook the skywalk. She would have fallen if not for Lucas. Damn, she’d never had trouble finding her sea legs before, not even in the worst storms back home on her father’s boat. Then she looked down and realized what the problem was: Gina’s damned stilettos.

“Keep going with Jerry,” she told Lucas.

She stopped and leaned against the glass wall, tugging off one high heel and then the other. That was much better. She caught up to the two men just as Lucas was opening the door at the opposite end of the skywalk. Together they pushed Jerry through, let the door clang shut behind them, and stopped to catch their breath.

The research tower was brand-new, and it showed. On the Angels side, where they had just come from, the lobby was painted a dingy gray and featured peeling linoleum. Here the walls were covered in mauve wallpaper and hung with tasteful photographs of famous Pittsburgh scientists, and the floors were done in a nice industrial pile carpet. Even the emergency lighting seemed brighter than it had on the Angels side.

“We’re not going back that way,” Lucas said as he pressed his nose against the glass door and measured the arc of the bridge’s movement with his finger. “If it oscillates at a certain frequency—”

“It will collapse,” Amanda said. “Like that movie they show in science class, that bridge.”

“The Tacoma Narrows Bridge.” Of course Lucas would know—he knew everything. It was really annoying at times. He turned away from the view and leaned against the wall. “What’s your plan?”

Jerry spun his wheelchair around and looked up at her with expectation. She’d gotten them this far—was she now supposed to come up with a plan to save everyone in the hospital?

“Gina said they were gathering people in the auditorium. We’ll sneak down to the ground floor, cross over, and surprise them.”

Lucas frowned. “She also said they were planning to burn the hospital down. So where do we take the hostages once we’ve rescued them?”

Good point. “We can’t take them outside.”

Jerry drummed his cane against the arm of his wheelchair. “Bring them here.”

“To the tower?” Lucas looked up at that, his gaze searching, then glanced out across the distance separating the tower from the main hospital building.

“Do you think it’s far enough away?” Amanda asked him.

He thought for a moment longer. “Maybe. If they’re really planning to start a fire—and there are countless ways to do that, given all the flammables the hospital uses every day—then probably. We could move everyone to the fire stairs farthest away from the hospital building. But if it’s some kind of explosive device—”

Amanda blew her breath out. “We’ll have to take our chances. Jerry, can you manage the stairs? The last announcement said the power would be cut in a few more minutes and I don’t want to risk being on an elevator when that happens.”

“The elevators have a backup battery that’s designed to lower them to the bottom of the shaft,” Lucas said. More exciting tidbits from the safety committee, no doubt.

“But they might know that and be waiting.”

He nodded. “Or they could just grab the fire key from the security office, and that would lock them all down on the basement level as well.”

“Either way, we should avoid them. Jerry?”

Jerry didn’t hesitate; instead he climbed out of his chair and headed to the fire door, pushing it open. “Let’s go.”

GINA STOOD FROZEN, TRAPPED IN THE UTTER BLACKNESS of the darkroom’s revolving door. Her breathing cocooned her, smothering her hearing. The men could be right outside the door on either side and she wouldn’t be able to hear them. They could be raising their guns, taking aim, right now, right now, right now. . . .

Panic clawed up her nerve endings. She forced herself to stand still, not move a muscle. It took all her willpower not to run screaming from her hiding place, just to end the awful anticipation.

Crazy, that was crazy. She’d get herself killed.

She had to find a way to calm down. Breathe in, breathe out. She’d been in danger before.

There was another time she’d felt powerless like this. Out of control. Her sophomore year of college when she’d realized she wouldn’t be making the dean’s list. The thought of facing Moses’s wrath and LaRose’s disappointment was crushing, too much for her to bear. Her eating disorder, always barely manageable—a tightrope of pleasure and pain—had flared, turned into a wildfire single-mindedly bent on her destruction.

Suicidal fantasies had combined with depression and despair to leave her feeling helpless, unable to even fight for her life. If it hadn’t been for a resident advisor who refused to put up with Gina’s excuses, denial, and bullshit, she wouldn’t have survived.

That RA reminded her a lot of Lydia, Gina thought, an unbidden smile curling her lips. What would Lydia do now?

She wouldn’t give up, that was for damn sure. She’d go out fighting.

Gina took another deep breath. Unlike back during her sophomore year, now she was in control of her actions. She couldn’t stay here forever—she had to find her mother.

She patted her pockets, taking inventory. Jerry had often told her of the power of a well-aimed bright light and the element of surprise. She gripped the Maglite in her left hand.