Chapter 10/11
Chapters Ten & Eleven
Mon/June/2008 07:00 AM
Chapter Ten -
Pulling The Trigger
“Simon,” Tim’s right hand man, walked out of a maintenance stairwell in the hospital’s front courtyard and glanced around the corner. Dozens of people were rushing out of the buildings. He pulled out a two-way radio and marched around the corner. Like the rest of his men, all of whom were now flooding the building, Simon was dressed in full Seattle firefighter equipment.
The Surgery Pavilion was located in the hospital’s east wing. That’s where the sirens were going off. He wondered what the standard operating procedure was if alarms should go off during surgery. It had to fray a doctor’s nerves. Glad I’m not the one having bypass surgery, he thought to himself as he approached the front counter. Volunteers were wheeling patients out of the cancer clinic. The wheelchairs were mostly occupied by children, many of whom looked excited to see firefighters entering the building. Others looked too sick from treatment to even lift their heads. Simon brushed past one boy, probably in his early teens, whose hairless head and skin looked sore and red from chemotherapy. The boy sat slumped in a chair as a large middle-aged woman in medical scrubs wheeled him towards the exit. The woman looked up at Simon.
“You guys are fast! The alarms just went off!”
Simon said nothing, just marched past her towards the western side of the facility.
The boy gripped the handles of his wheelchair and slowly tilted his head up to look at Simon’s face.
* * *
Renoir hoisted a stack of paperwork and tapped it on the side of his desk. The first task of the day was taming the chaos of his work area. He was stepping down as chair of the department later that year, and the amount of work required for that transition alone was staggering. He had never been one for systems. His office was the picture of chaos. Piles and piles and piles of paper lined every flat surface. The room was freezing cold. Stacks of paperwork blocked sunlight from shining in through the windows, while other piles of documents covered the vents for the central heating system. One day soon he’d get all of this cleared up. In the meantime, his lucky cardigan sweater made up for any temperature problems.
At the moment, he was stacking paperwork by order of importance. In his mind, everything on legal sized paper was unimportant. If it was of any value, it would be printed and bound in hardcover books. The discard piles were at the far end of his desk. They were getting taller by the minute.
He leaned back and let out a long sigh.
“Shit,” he muttered softly.
That’s when the alarms went off in the distance. Then, to Renoir’s surprise, as he turned towards the entrance of his office, a man dressed all in black stepped into the doorway, raised a gun in his hand, and pulled the trigger.
Chapter Eleven - Morgan
She knew he was married, but the way she saw it, she and Nick were together. His “wife” hadn’t called him in months. When they’d first met and started flirting with the possibilities of a relationship, he had tried calling Kendra constantly, but with only limited success. She had to be with someone else, Morgan was sure of it. Why else would a woman leave her husband on one side of the country, then resist his every effort to maintain the relationship? Morgan couldn’t understand this, but then again, she couldn’t understand many of her close female friends either. She had her personal aspirations. She didn’t just leap into things with one guy, and then the next, but if she felt the pull between herself and a man, she felt the pull, an undeniable, unavoidable need to be with that person, intimately, almost violently. She’d felt that with Nick the first time she met him.
She’d come back to school early the previous fall (technically still summer) to set up a new apartment with a half dozen girls she’d met through classes and her sorority. By mid-August they’d made the late summer rounds of Seattle. She’d gone to the parties, hung out with her girlfriends, messed around with the Greek guys she knew on campus. But there had been nothing serious. Nothing until the day she walked down to the Health Sciences building on south campus, had an interview for a student assistant position, then walked out into the hall, and in her nervous post-interview haze, had glided over to Nick’s cubicle and seen him for the first time. He was certainly nothing special. His hair was short and sort of mussed, like he’d combed it fresh out of the shower, then forgotten to brush it again after pulling on his t-shirt. He was short, just an inch of two taller than her 5’6” build. He had the look of a once scrawny college runner, one who was having trouble adjusting to civilian life and was starting to show the tiniest signs of a belly from too much sitting, and too much beer to ease the desk job woes. She thought that was cute. But if one thing got Morgan on the hook from that first moment, it was his eyes. He had great eyes, deep blue, with little trails of darkness sliding back into the pupils. One glance and she was lying on her back in the grass, watching a bottle rocket as it trailed up into space, shimmering and shaking, the dark cone now the center of this man’s eyes. Below those eyes were the marks of disappointment, the slightest wrinkles of age, or fatigue, that rose and fell with the laugh lines at the sides of his mouth.
She knew she could get him to smile. She had her charms, and she used them. A flutter butterflied in her ribcage as she stepped forward, brushed her long blond hair back over her shoulders, and smiled. Her skin tingled. Her breath came easily. She couldn’t remember what she had talked about that day, but it worked. By the end, she’d reached out, put her hand on his arm, and known that she had him.
Now she just had to find a way to extricate him from his disinterested wife.
The sex might help.
That had started quicker than usual, and it had been better than ever. First at her apartment. Then they’d gone away for a long weekend, a record breaking weekend. Then, when waiting to go back to her place in the evenings had become unbearable, they’d started doing it at work. That was some of the best sex they’d ever had.
Was it illicit? Of course. Dangerous? In a way. But she didn’t want to think it through too much, she just wanted to do it. And do it they had. She couldn’t begin to count the number of times it had happened, or the number of hideaways they’d discovered while slipping away. Suffice to say, in a teaching hospital like the University, it was easy to find places to go at it. She’d just lean into Nick’s cube, give him a look that said everything, and he’d follow her out the back door. A short, anxious walk through the building, then the switch of a lock, some fumbling with their clothes, and she was on top of him.
They’d just done it again.
Morgan walked over to Nick, leaned down, and gave him a lingering kiss.
The fire alarms continued ringing in the distance.
“Maybe we ought to pay attention to that,” Nick said.
“I thought it was just a drill. It’s always a drill.”
“Sometimes it’s not. Drills never last this long.”
“All right then, lets go,” she whispered with a wicked smirk. “I got what I came for.”
She kissed him again, her teeth pulling softly on his lower lip. He stood, one hand on her back, and opened the door to the hallway. The sirens were blaring, but the hall remained dark and empty. They stepped out into the open, their shoes tapping softly on the carpet underfoot.
“Do you think Jeff Pepper’s gotten here yet?”
“He should have,” Nick replied.
“Think he’ll like Raj?” Morgan moaned.
“I sure as hell hope not.”
Morgan reached down and took Nick’s hand. His fingers wrapped around her’s, giving them a squeeze. He shot her a look out of the corner of his eye. He loved her, she knew it. She wanted to take him away with her, or just back to her apartment - make a pot of coffee, curl up on the couch, and watch a movie. That would be nice. Quiet and intimate. He wasn’t happy at work. She wasn’t happy without him around. Unfortunately he had to work, and there was no point in her skipping out if he had to stay in this hellhole. So they walked on, and as they walked, a chill crept up Morgan’s spine. She could see it in her mind, like the cartoon ice in a Bugs Bunny short, creeping and crackling down a thermometer as the mercury shot down, then exploded through the bottom. She could practically feel the ice crackling up each bony link in her back.
The sirens were ringing at the end of the hallway, in the hospital side of the building. She could hear someone speaking over the P.A. system, directing people out of the building. Yet on this side of the facility, in the research sciences wing, everything was silent.
“The alarms aren’t ringing in this building.”
“That happens sometimes,” Nick responded.
“Do you have a funny feeling?”
“How do you mean?”
“Just, like, something isn’t right.”
“No.”
They turned and walked into a stairwell, Nick pushed the door open with a clang that echoed through the concrete corridor. Again, all they heard as they walked down the stairs was the sounds of their own footsteps.
“Guess we ought to split up again. Go in one at a time,” Nick said flatly.
Morgan didn’t respond.
They stopped at the bottom of the stairs outside the doors to the Immunology wing. Morgan stepped forward, wrapping her arms around his back. He looked down into her eyes.
“I love you,” Morgan said slowly.
He hesitated. “You too.”
They’d never said it before. Maybe it scared them, but it felt right. Then a slow kiss. Cool lips. Morgan took a step back.
“I’m gonna use the bathroom down the hall.”
“I’ll see you back there.”
Before she knew it, he’d walked around the corner and out of sight. She took a deep breath, then walked through the doors and around the corner to the right, heading in the opposite direction. Her hands ran down the front of her shirt and around her waist, feeling to see if anything was askew. She knew more than a few people were on to their shenanigans, but modesty required that she at least attempt to keep up appearances. God, she was acting reckless. They both were.
She needed to go to the bathroom and get cleaned up. She knew from the many times they’d done this before that there was a seldom used women’s restroom just through the fire doors at the end of the hall. It felt odd walking into a building where the alarms were going off. In the distance, a voice was still directing people out of the building. Morgan walked to the heavy metal doors. For some reason they were still held open. Normally, even during a drill, the metal latches would have been released to let the doors could swing closed. These were still fixed open. It seemed odd. She hesitated as a strobe light flashed in her eyes from the ceiling overhead, then she stepped over the threshold, walked ten steps down the hall, and ducked into the women’s restroom.
She closed the door behind her, locked it, and went into the stall. Something was gnawing at the back of her mind. She was never one of those alarmist girls, but she was starting to feel an unfamiliar panic.
She stood, flushed the toilet, and went out to the sink to wash her hands. As she stood at the basin, looking into the mirror and rinsing her hands under the cold water, she heard it.
Boom!
She jumped.
BOOM!
BAM. BAM.
It took her a moment to identify the sounds. The first image was of a wrecking ball bouncing off the side of the building. Her second thought was of the doors swinging shut in the corridor.
Maybe this was a fire!
She shut off the water and stepped out into the corridor.
The doors were indeed closed.
She ran over to them, and that’s when it all changed.
She tried to force the double doors open. They moved a fraction of an inch, then stopped dead. She pushed harder. Nothing. She peeked down through the narrow pane of glass. A metal bar had been slipped through the door handles on the opposite side. A heavy bolt cut through the bar at a ninety-degree angle, holding it in place. A movement caught her eyes. Morgan peered down the hall through the window, where she saw two men in firefighters’ uniforms carrying guns. Big ones. They were off to the side, half a hall length down, walking away from her. The men turned in her direction as she leaned her weight into the door. One raised his weapon, but the other put a hand on his companion's elbow, motioning for him to wait, nodding towards the locked doors. It made no difference. By the time they fired, Morgan would be gone. She pushed herself away from the door, turning in a half circle, her shoes slipping under her as they fought for traction.
Then she was off, running through the hospital, alarms blasting in her ears, the image of those men and the gun muzzles flashing in her mind. She thought of Nick, somewhere on the other side of those doors, and she ran faster.
“Simon,” Tim’s right hand man, walked out of a maintenance stairwell in the hospital’s front courtyard and glanced around the corner. Dozens of people were rushing out of the buildings. He pulled out a two-way radio and marched around the corner. Like the rest of his men, all of whom were now flooding the building, Simon was dressed in full Seattle firefighter equipment.
The Surgery Pavilion was located in the hospital’s east wing. That’s where the sirens were going off. He wondered what the standard operating procedure was if alarms should go off during surgery. It had to fray a doctor’s nerves. Glad I’m not the one having bypass surgery, he thought to himself as he approached the front counter. Volunteers were wheeling patients out of the cancer clinic. The wheelchairs were mostly occupied by children, many of whom looked excited to see firefighters entering the building. Others looked too sick from treatment to even lift their heads. Simon brushed past one boy, probably in his early teens, whose hairless head and skin looked sore and red from chemotherapy. The boy sat slumped in a chair as a large middle-aged woman in medical scrubs wheeled him towards the exit. The woman looked up at Simon.
“You guys are fast! The alarms just went off!”
Simon said nothing, just marched past her towards the western side of the facility.
The boy gripped the handles of his wheelchair and slowly tilted his head up to look at Simon’s face.
* * *
Renoir hoisted a stack of paperwork and tapped it on the side of his desk. The first task of the day was taming the chaos of his work area. He was stepping down as chair of the department later that year, and the amount of work required for that transition alone was staggering. He had never been one for systems. His office was the picture of chaos. Piles and piles and piles of paper lined every flat surface. The room was freezing cold. Stacks of paperwork blocked sunlight from shining in through the windows, while other piles of documents covered the vents for the central heating system. One day soon he’d get all of this cleared up. In the meantime, his lucky cardigan sweater made up for any temperature problems.
At the moment, he was stacking paperwork by order of importance. In his mind, everything on legal sized paper was unimportant. If it was of any value, it would be printed and bound in hardcover books. The discard piles were at the far end of his desk. They were getting taller by the minute.
He leaned back and let out a long sigh.
“Shit,” he muttered softly.
That’s when the alarms went off in the distance. Then, to Renoir’s surprise, as he turned towards the entrance of his office, a man dressed all in black stepped into the doorway, raised a gun in his hand, and pulled the trigger.
Chapter Eleven - Morgan
She knew he was married, but the way she saw it, she and Nick were together. His “wife” hadn’t called him in months. When they’d first met and started flirting with the possibilities of a relationship, he had tried calling Kendra constantly, but with only limited success. She had to be with someone else, Morgan was sure of it. Why else would a woman leave her husband on one side of the country, then resist his every effort to maintain the relationship? Morgan couldn’t understand this, but then again, she couldn’t understand many of her close female friends either. She had her personal aspirations. She didn’t just leap into things with one guy, and then the next, but if she felt the pull between herself and a man, she felt the pull, an undeniable, unavoidable need to be with that person, intimately, almost violently. She’d felt that with Nick the first time she met him.
She’d come back to school early the previous fall (technically still summer) to set up a new apartment with a half dozen girls she’d met through classes and her sorority. By mid-August they’d made the late summer rounds of Seattle. She’d gone to the parties, hung out with her girlfriends, messed around with the Greek guys she knew on campus. But there had been nothing serious. Nothing until the day she walked down to the Health Sciences building on south campus, had an interview for a student assistant position, then walked out into the hall, and in her nervous post-interview haze, had glided over to Nick’s cubicle and seen him for the first time. He was certainly nothing special. His hair was short and sort of mussed, like he’d combed it fresh out of the shower, then forgotten to brush it again after pulling on his t-shirt. He was short, just an inch of two taller than her 5’6” build. He had the look of a once scrawny college runner, one who was having trouble adjusting to civilian life and was starting to show the tiniest signs of a belly from too much sitting, and too much beer to ease the desk job woes. She thought that was cute. But if one thing got Morgan on the hook from that first moment, it was his eyes. He had great eyes, deep blue, with little trails of darkness sliding back into the pupils. One glance and she was lying on her back in the grass, watching a bottle rocket as it trailed up into space, shimmering and shaking, the dark cone now the center of this man’s eyes. Below those eyes were the marks of disappointment, the slightest wrinkles of age, or fatigue, that rose and fell with the laugh lines at the sides of his mouth.
She knew she could get him to smile. She had her charms, and she used them. A flutter butterflied in her ribcage as she stepped forward, brushed her long blond hair back over her shoulders, and smiled. Her skin tingled. Her breath came easily. She couldn’t remember what she had talked about that day, but it worked. By the end, she’d reached out, put her hand on his arm, and known that she had him.
Now she just had to find a way to extricate him from his disinterested wife.
The sex might help.
That had started quicker than usual, and it had been better than ever. First at her apartment. Then they’d gone away for a long weekend, a record breaking weekend. Then, when waiting to go back to her place in the evenings had become unbearable, they’d started doing it at work. That was some of the best sex they’d ever had.
Was it illicit? Of course. Dangerous? In a way. But she didn’t want to think it through too much, she just wanted to do it. And do it they had. She couldn’t begin to count the number of times it had happened, or the number of hideaways they’d discovered while slipping away. Suffice to say, in a teaching hospital like the University, it was easy to find places to go at it. She’d just lean into Nick’s cube, give him a look that said everything, and he’d follow her out the back door. A short, anxious walk through the building, then the switch of a lock, some fumbling with their clothes, and she was on top of him.
They’d just done it again.
Morgan walked over to Nick, leaned down, and gave him a lingering kiss.
The fire alarms continued ringing in the distance.
“Maybe we ought to pay attention to that,” Nick said.
“I thought it was just a drill. It’s always a drill.”
“Sometimes it’s not. Drills never last this long.”
“All right then, lets go,” she whispered with a wicked smirk. “I got what I came for.”
She kissed him again, her teeth pulling softly on his lower lip. He stood, one hand on her back, and opened the door to the hallway. The sirens were blaring, but the hall remained dark and empty. They stepped out into the open, their shoes tapping softly on the carpet underfoot.
“Do you think Jeff Pepper’s gotten here yet?”
“He should have,” Nick replied.
“Think he’ll like Raj?” Morgan moaned.
“I sure as hell hope not.”
Morgan reached down and took Nick’s hand. His fingers wrapped around her’s, giving them a squeeze. He shot her a look out of the corner of his eye. He loved her, she knew it. She wanted to take him away with her, or just back to her apartment - make a pot of coffee, curl up on the couch, and watch a movie. That would be nice. Quiet and intimate. He wasn’t happy at work. She wasn’t happy without him around. Unfortunately he had to work, and there was no point in her skipping out if he had to stay in this hellhole. So they walked on, and as they walked, a chill crept up Morgan’s spine. She could see it in her mind, like the cartoon ice in a Bugs Bunny short, creeping and crackling down a thermometer as the mercury shot down, then exploded through the bottom. She could practically feel the ice crackling up each bony link in her back.
The sirens were ringing at the end of the hallway, in the hospital side of the building. She could hear someone speaking over the P.A. system, directing people out of the building. Yet on this side of the facility, in the research sciences wing, everything was silent.
“The alarms aren’t ringing in this building.”
“That happens sometimes,” Nick responded.
“Do you have a funny feeling?”
“How do you mean?”
“Just, like, something isn’t right.”
“No.”
They turned and walked into a stairwell, Nick pushed the door open with a clang that echoed through the concrete corridor. Again, all they heard as they walked down the stairs was the sounds of their own footsteps.
“Guess we ought to split up again. Go in one at a time,” Nick said flatly.
Morgan didn’t respond.
They stopped at the bottom of the stairs outside the doors to the Immunology wing. Morgan stepped forward, wrapping her arms around his back. He looked down into her eyes.
“I love you,” Morgan said slowly.
He hesitated. “You too.”
They’d never said it before. Maybe it scared them, but it felt right. Then a slow kiss. Cool lips. Morgan took a step back.
“I’m gonna use the bathroom down the hall.”
“I’ll see you back there.”
Before she knew it, he’d walked around the corner and out of sight. She took a deep breath, then walked through the doors and around the corner to the right, heading in the opposite direction. Her hands ran down the front of her shirt and around her waist, feeling to see if anything was askew. She knew more than a few people were on to their shenanigans, but modesty required that she at least attempt to keep up appearances. God, she was acting reckless. They both were.
She needed to go to the bathroom and get cleaned up. She knew from the many times they’d done this before that there was a seldom used women’s restroom just through the fire doors at the end of the hall. It felt odd walking into a building where the alarms were going off. In the distance, a voice was still directing people out of the building. Morgan walked to the heavy metal doors. For some reason they were still held open. Normally, even during a drill, the metal latches would have been released to let the doors could swing closed. These were still fixed open. It seemed odd. She hesitated as a strobe light flashed in her eyes from the ceiling overhead, then she stepped over the threshold, walked ten steps down the hall, and ducked into the women’s restroom.
She closed the door behind her, locked it, and went into the stall. Something was gnawing at the back of her mind. She was never one of those alarmist girls, but she was starting to feel an unfamiliar panic.
She stood, flushed the toilet, and went out to the sink to wash her hands. As she stood at the basin, looking into the mirror and rinsing her hands under the cold water, she heard it.
Boom!
She jumped.
BOOM!
BAM. BAM.
It took her a moment to identify the sounds. The first image was of a wrecking ball bouncing off the side of the building. Her second thought was of the doors swinging shut in the corridor.
Maybe this was a fire!
She shut off the water and stepped out into the corridor.
The doors were indeed closed.
She ran over to them, and that’s when it all changed.
She tried to force the double doors open. They moved a fraction of an inch, then stopped dead. She pushed harder. Nothing. She peeked down through the narrow pane of glass. A metal bar had been slipped through the door handles on the opposite side. A heavy bolt cut through the bar at a ninety-degree angle, holding it in place. A movement caught her eyes. Morgan peered down the hall through the window, where she saw two men in firefighters’ uniforms carrying guns. Big ones. They were off to the side, half a hall length down, walking away from her. The men turned in her direction as she leaned her weight into the door. One raised his weapon, but the other put a hand on his companion's elbow, motioning for him to wait, nodding towards the locked doors. It made no difference. By the time they fired, Morgan would be gone. She pushed herself away from the door, turning in a half circle, her shoes slipping under her as they fought for traction.
Then she was off, running through the hospital, alarms blasting in her ears, the image of those men and the gun muzzles flashing in her mind. She thought of Nick, somewhere on the other side of those doors, and she ran faster.