Enigma Black (32 page)

“She…she…”

What, is this chick having an asthma attack or something? She looks like she’s seen a ghost
, Blake mused, attempting to be less than obvious about his eavesdropping.

“She’s here…in the ICU.”

“Who’s here?”

“Celaine. I just saw her,” she huffed. “She’s blonde, but she’s here.”

Oh, shit
. Blake could feel a resurgence of adrenaline in his body

“What? Blonde? Madison, I can assure you that there’s no way you saw Celaine. Especially not a blonde Celaine.”

“Listen, I’ve known Celaine ever since she was barely able to walk; and as sure as I am standing here, that was her I saw just now in the ICU. Now, unless you want to let her walk away from you again, I would suggest that you—pardon my French—get your ass down there now.”

Chase had a visibly stunned look on his face as he turned back toward the paperwork he was blindly scribbling on at the triage center. Shaking his head, he tossed the pen aside and ran through the double doors at speeds that made even Blake’s head spin. Cupping his hand to his ear, Blake sped through the double doors and took off after Chase toward the Intensive Care Unit.

“Celaine…” There was no response from the ear bud. Blake sped up, jumping over obstacles, dodging all persons who crossed his path. Up ahead, Chase was waiting at the elevator to go down to the first floor. Blake ran past him in the hopes of finding a stairwell. Looking behind him, he briefly locked eyes with him again as he entered the elevator.

“Celaine, where are you?” Again, nothing but silence greeted him.

Success. A stairwell appeared before him as he rounded a corner. Instead of taking the stairs one by one, he leapt from the top step with his feet making contact on the landing separating the two stairwells. Looks of amazement followed him. He shrugged off the inquisitive stares.

“Celaine, if you can hear me, you need to leave the intensive care unit immediately. That’s a direct order.”

He made a flying leap from the landing, flipping through midair to the first floor. As he was about to take off running again, he was halted by a voice ringing from his ear bud.

“I’m one step ahead of you, boss.”

He smiled, feeling his body begin to relax again in time to look up and see a couple of children staring at him, mouths open wide in amazement.

“I’m healed,” he said, jumping up and down with a sly smile projecting towards them as he walked towards the Intensive Care Unit.

“What’s the emergency?” Celaine’s voice came through the ear bud again.

“False alarm. Where are you?”

“The vents, and I must say I have to thank you for giving me this absolutely wonderful assignment. I’ll have to return the favor someday.”

Of course, now it made sense why she wasn’t responding to him. The signal strength in the ventilation shaft was surely less than ideal. People were entering the hospital in clusters, in time for prime visiting hours. A thought stuck him as the groups of well wishers nonchalantly passed him by. It was just slightly after noon, and people were using their lunch hours to visit relatives and friends. In response to the time of day and the influx of people, the kitchen crew would all be present and accounted for to fulfill patient orders and maintain the snack booths for the visitors. If ever there was a time to strike, it was now. Blake scanned the crowd, still finding nothing amiss. Was the information headquarters’ outside sources gathered wrong?

“Blake…” Celaine’s concerned voice came through his ear bud once more.

“Yeah?”

****

It had been a long time since I’d used my feminine charm to my advantage. For the most part, I used to jeer those women who did what I had just done to the poor, unsuspecting maintenance man who just so happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time when I entered the boiler room. After playing dumb, confusing the boiler room for the ladies’ room, something that was pretty much impossible to do, and complimenting “Pete” on his cute smile and abilities with a wrench, I was granted admission. Heck, if I’d wanted it, I probably could have had full access to almost anything I wished in the boiler room. Pete guided me through the massive room. “The heart of the hospital”, he’d called it. It supplied all the energy needed to run any and all pertinent equipment. During his spiel, it took all I had to act as if I were truly interested in everything he was telling me, including his rant on why his job was probably the most important one here, as he gave me a tour of the room. Smiling the entire time, I sifted through his bull. After all, I was only partially paying attention as my main focus was on locating an entry-way into the ventilation system.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, I located what I was looking for in the far corner of the room. Trying to think of a diversion to allow me to gain entry into the vents, I asked Pete to give me an explanation of the inner workings of a boiler. A terrified look sprang across his face as, I was sure, he was hurriedly attempting to think of a way he could fudge through this one while still maintaining my interest. He turned his back to examine the boiler and started speaking again but I didn’t hear a word of what he said as I was already in the vent by the time he ended his first sentence.

For something that was supposed to supply air to a sterile facility, the ventilation system was by far one of the most unsanitary environments I’d ever been in. Dust covered my hands during my crawl through the tunnels of cold steel that also served as some kind of mortuary for bug carcasses and one lone rat…swell.

Blake’s voice blared through my ear bud, “Celaine, if you can hear me, you need to leave the intensive care unit immediately. That’s a direct order.”

A direct order? There had to be something going on since that was a very un-Blake-like thing for him to say. “I’m one step ahead of you boss,” I replied. I continued crawling through the vents, thinking about what Blake had just said. “What’s the emergency?”

“False alarm”. His tone was more relaxed now, which calmed me. “Where are you?”

“The vents and I must say, I have to thank you for giving me this absolutely wonderful assignment. I’ll have to return the favor someday.”

I came across a fork in the vents, deciding to take it to the left in the direction of what I believed to be angled towards the Intensive Care Unit. The vents clanged underneath my body while I navigated through them, trying to catch a hint of something sinister. One thing I knew for sure was that I was going to have some major difficulties finding my way back out of this thing. I wondered how The Man in Black had managed to traverse these metallic caves without raising suspicion. Surely, someone at the hospital had to notice something amiss. To my right, another potential pathway emerged. As I shifted my body to turn and continue yet another steely ascent, something caught my eye in the tunnel ahead of me.

The closer I came to it, the more I realized that what had caught my eye most definitely didn’t belong here. My stomach twisted into knots upon confirmation of my suspicions. It was the first time I had ever seen a bomb, but just as in many action movies I’d seen, making a positive identification was not difficult.

Oh, God, Chase, please, don’t be here
, I thought to myself. Upon further inspection of the bomb, I could make out a slight ticking noise coupled with another barely audible electronic sound. Carefully, I angled my body around the apparatus, trying to get a better view of it as well as a possible idea as to when it was set to wreak its deadly vengeance. That’s when I saw it.

The green animatronics ticking away before my eyes revealed a sight that I was beyond unprepared for. 00:02:43. Does that say 2 minutes? If so, how many others were there set for the same time, if not sooner? Was there a way to dismantle it? My mind was swirling, clouding both my vision and thought processes at once, rendering me near useless. Please, Blake, be able to hear me now. I pressed my hand to my ear bud.

“Blake…”

“Yeah,” his voice sounded from the other end.

“We have a little problem here.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The Encounter

“Get out of there now!” Blake commanded.

“Is there nothing that can be done to stop this…cutting a wire…anything?”

“Not in two minutes there’s not, and when there’s most likely more than one, there’s most definitely not. Celaine, just get out of there…please, get out of there…do anything and everything possible to do it. I need to start evacuating the hospital, although I fear there’s not much of an evacuation that can be done in two minutes.”

“All right, I’ll be joining you soon.”

“Okay.”

Un-cupping my hand from my ear, I pulled my sweatshirt and pants off, exposing my suit.
Don’t fail me now
, I thought to myself, unclasping my helmet from its holster, securing it into place on my head. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to crawl through the vent back to the boiler room before the detonator went off. My only means of escape would come by breaking through the vents. Forcing my legs against the metal, I pushed as hard as I could until I felt it give a little. There wasn’t much time left; it was probably close to a minute now. My pulse increased, forcing a resurgence of adrenaline through my body. With this sudden burst of energy, I forced both of my feet down in a stomping motion. The vent groaned as it started breaking apart.

“Come on,” I groaned, thrusting my legs down harder against the metal. With a sharp creak, a portion of the ventilation shaft broke loose and swung down like a trap door, nearly taking down other sections of it in the process.

I peered down to see that I was atop the fluorescent lighting fixtures. Lowering myself down from the broken vent, I kicked the fixture, breaking it instantly, sending shards of glass, bits of metal and wire crashing to the floor below…way below. It struck the floor of the commons area that separated the hospital into its various wings. People were frantically strewn about, already in a panic. Thankfully, they’d scattered before the debris crashed down from above. Not surprisingly, the loud crash only exacerbated the utter mayhem that had taken control of the terrified masses.

“It’s now or never,” I say to myself.

Positioning my body, I jumped the nearly forty feet from the site of the broken fixture to the floor of the commons area. Bracing myself for a hard landing, I was pleasantly surprised when my feet landed gently and without incident on the linoleum. In front of me, hoards of people were streaming from the interior of the hospital, many skidding to an abrupt halt upon seeing me.

“Get out of here now!” I ordered. “There’s a bomb!” I rushed in the direction of the Intensive Care Unit, running upstream against the tide of terror. While pushing through the crowd, I couldn’t help but hear the surprised exclamations from the individuals within it.

“Is that another one?” a woman’s voice asked.

“A woman…is that a woman?” an older man asked in disbelief.

Finally, finding a break in the crowd, I took off towards Blake, who I was sure was located at the origin of all the chaos. I didn’t make it far.

****

A bomb. She’d found a bomb. Never had he cared so much about the welfare of one of his partners, and the thought of her up there with an explosive sickened him. He knew she was smart, that she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself. After all, she’d already been one of the most promising partners he’d ever had, not to mention annoyingly beautiful. Of course, it also helped that none of the others had been able to uncover the feelings he’d managed to keep buried away for the last several years the way she had.

There was very little time to be secretive as he ran full tilt down the hallway, throwing off his sweater and snapping his helmet into place. An orderly appeared around a corner, eyes widening at the sight of him.

“Evacuate the building now!” Blake ordered, barreling past him without so much as a glance in his direction.

Without questioning him, the frightened orderly frantically nodded as he rushed down the hall. Blake continued his mission, eyes searching the rough exterior of the wall until he found a fire alarm, abruptly setting it off. Crowds filtered into the hallway, their faces changing in expression from sheer annoyance to pure terror when they recognized who it was who had pulled the alarm.

“Evacuate the building now!”

Just as in the case of the orderly, there were no questions directed towards this masked man whose identity they’d attempted to decipher in the countless stories contained within the local newspaper. Instead, only gasps exuded from the scattered groups. While some began to weep, others ran immediately to the nearest exits, their self-serving acts leaving only a select few to head toward the patient room to assist the patients to safety. Blake shook his head in disgust. The selfishness of others never ceased to amaze him. Emergencies had a strange way of bringing a person’s true colors to light.

There was an unwritten rule at headquarters that, over the years, had been drilled repeatedly into his head. This rule roughly stated that it didn’t matter the death toll, the main focus was apprehending The Man in Black. In Blake’s mind, that rule basically meant that it was completely acceptable for tens of thousands of people to die if the vile monster was apprehended, but not at all acceptable if lives were spared and he was to escape in the process. This rule had never set well with him, and was the one cardinal rule he always seemed to break. Allowing people to die went against the very grain of his soul. His true colors always remained the same shade.

From what he’d witnessed today, he was certain that the Intensive Care Unit would be the wing that would take the brunt of the action. He knew The Man in Black had cased the joint just as he had done, inevitably reaching the conclusion that it wouldn’t be worth it, body count wise, to waste his resources on the pediatric unit. Not to mention, just as in every other attack, he suspected that the vile monster was waiting somewhere in the wings in order to witness the devastation he was about to create. He ran on grief, drank in the destruction. It fueled him, providing him with the sustenance he needed to thrive.