by Jon McGoran
I figured the people in the hospital probably already knew something was up.
For a half a second, no one moved. As we stood there, stunned, taking it in, a guy in a janitor’s uniform ran past us and burst through the doors into the stairwell across the hall. The building shuddered violently and Reivik whimpered. I passed her over to Rex. He took a step back, as if he was going to protest, but then he nodded and slung her over his shoulder with a sigh.
I peeked out and looked both ways. There was no one else in sight.
I nodded at Rex, then turned to the others. “Come on,” I said, and I clomped across the floor to the stairwell. In the moments that I stood there, holding the door open and waving the others over, the smoke thickened perceptibly. Rex came over and took the door, while I climbed the steps to the first landing, to the doorway we had escaped through the first time. I swiped Reivik’s card through the slot and opened the door.
The wind had picked up considerably, and it pushed the blustery cold into the stairwell. I held the door open and waved the others outside.
“Run straight across, past the construction site and into the woods,” I told them. “Get as far from here as you can.”
They streamed past, wide awake now, some of them still sick or injured with whatever had brought them to the hospital in the first place, but all of them desperate to get away. I thought back to the first time we’d come through that hospital, before we had witnessed what was going on in the conversion units and in the mines. What had brought us there in the first place was Doc, and the hopes of finding something to exonerate him. Hopefully we’d done enough, and had exposed enough, to bring down OmniCare and Wells and everything they were trying to do. But knowing H4H, knowing Wells’s resources, I now began to worry it might not even be enough to get Doc released, let alone topple OmniCare.
The last few of the chimeras ran past me, then Rex brought up the rear, still carrying Reivik. He paused in front of me, looking concerned, as if he could sense what I had in mind.
“Time to get out of here,” he said, edging toward the door. Outside, the other chimeras were sprinting across the snowy grass. Smoke rose from several of the basement windows.
I crossed to the other side of the stairwell and peeked through the door leading to the lobby. It was a mess. The floor was strewn with papers, broken glass from windows, and odd bits and pieces of medical equipment. Water still trickled from the sprinklers, and the haze of smoke pulsed in the flashing red lights. A handful of medical staff were clustered at the front entrance, pushing a few patients on rolling beds. They seemed to be the last ones. The parking lot out front was jammed with patients in beds and people milling around, plus cars and ambulances and school buses.
I turned to Rex. “Get everyone to safety,” I said. “Including yourself.”
“Let’s get you to safety, too,” he said.
“I will. But I need to do something first.”
“What are you talking about?”
The building shuddered violently, and outside, half a dozen windows fell from the upper floors, shattering on the icy ground. Reivik squirmed and made frantic muffled noises, which we ignored.
I went over to Rex and tilted my head, finding just the right angle so I could press my lips against his. He put his hand—warm, soft, strong—on the side of my neck, holding me there.
“I’m two minutes behind you,” I said as I pulled away. Then I ran up the stairs.
CHAPTER 57
As I rounded the steps and headed for the next floor, Rex called after me, “Jimi, no! We don’t have two minutes!”
I knew he might be right. I hoped he wasn’t.
As I passed the second floor, two older men in business suits ran down the steps past me. They both glanced up at me, then back at their feet, focused on more pressing matters than how strange it was to see a seventeen-year-old girl in an exosuit running up the steps while they were fleeing the building.
Smoke seemed to be following me up the stairs.
When I reached the fourth floor—the top floor—I swiped Reivik’s card through the slot. This time, though, the panel flashed red, and the words ACCESS DENIED scrolled across. I cursed under my breath. Reivik’s name tag said SENIOR MEDICAL STAFF, goddamn it.
The smoke from below curled against the ceiling, languid, unhurried, but inexorable. I stepped back, making sure I wasn’t too close to the steps, and kicked the door as hard as I could.
The boot of the exosuit smashed through the door easily, sending chunks of it skittering down the marble floor of the elegant hallway.
It was different up there, as different from the hospital floors as they had been from the mines. Even doused in water from the sprinklers and bathed in flashing red light, the luxury was obvious: paneled walls hung with paintings, heavy wood doors, floors covered with marble tile and thick carpet.
To my right was a receptionist’s desk, to my left a plush seating area, and straight ahead a short hallway, all of it soaked and dripping. The floor trembled and a large window in the seating area cracked and fell inward, letting in a gust of cold air that somehow smelled even stronger of smoke.
I trotted down the hallway, past doors left open to reveal wet, chaotic-looking offices, strewn with paper as if they had been abandoned in a hurry. At the end of the hallway, there was a thick glass wall with a glass door set in it, both beaded with water. The door was etched with the words DR. DAVID CHARLESFORD, PRESIDENT AND CEO in an elegant white font.
Beyond the glass wall was another reception desk and seating area, even more luxurious than the first, and a double set of dark wooden doors.
I pushed on the glass door, but it was locked. Then I pushed harder and it shattered easily, littering the wet carpet with a million tiny shards that crunched underfoot. I shoved the wooden doors with both hands, and they split and swung open.
The office inside was huge, with windows on three sides, and what probably would have been an amazing view if not for the low clouds and the black smoke sliding up the outside of the building.
A single red light was flashing on the ceiling.
Against the wall across from me was a four-drawer steel file cabinet. And standing next to it, stuffing files into a courier bag, was Dr. David Charlesford, President and CEO. He paused, holding a folder halfway between the open file drawer and the bag, staring at me the same way he had before, with his head tilted slightly down and his eyes looking up, as if the Wellplant was looking at me, too, like a third eye.
I got the sense he was considering his options, calculating them. When he let go of the files, I knew he would only do that so he could grab something else. And I knew it wouldn’t be anything good.
The courier bag dropped to the floor and I crossed the space between us in two strides, reaching him just as he was raising a gun. Without thinking, I backhanded it out of his grasp.
The gun flew across the room so hard it dented the wall before bouncing onto the floor. Charlesford’s features melted into a grimace of agony and anger, and I realized the force of my slap had mangled his hand. He clutched his wrist with his good hand, unable to utter a sound until he finally managed a strangled whisper. “You…little shit.” He looked up at me—with his eyes this time. “I’m…a surgeon.”
I tried not to picture what kind of surgery he did, but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t feel bad if he couldn’t do it anymore. “You’re a murderer,” I said.
He snorted and sneered through his pain, then a strange calm fell over his features. “A temporary conversion on a bunch of punks? Please.”
“You killed them. Dozens of them. I saw them.”
I stepped toward him but he backed away, now dipping his head again. “A small price to pay,” he said evenly, “for the next level of human development.”
He dove for the gun, grabbed it with his good hand, and came up with it, pulling the trigger. But it was as ruined as his hand, managing only a feeble click.
Several things happened then, all at the same time
.
The building heaved and shifted, and the floor between us split, the carpet tearing as the crack opened several feet wide, releasing a billowing column of black smoke. Charlesford spun and threw himself against the wall behind him, which opened, revealing a perfect rectangle with gray daylight painting the wall behind it. A secret door.
I vaulted over the crack and pushed through the door after him.
It led to a narrow staircase up to the roof. It was a tight fit in the exosuit. I had to turn sideways to get through it. As my metal foot hit the first step, I heard the roar of a quadcopter and I knew I was probably already too late. I continued anyway, pushing myself sideways, bracing myself with one hand as my legs pushed me upward.
I reached the roof just in time to see the copter lift unsteadily into the fierce winds and the swirling black curtain of smoke rising on all sides. Ice crystals assaulted my face.
In the distance, emergency copters were headed toward us, their flashing lights a stark contrast to the dark gray sky.
I turned and dropped back down the stairwell into Charlesford’s office, now quickly filling with smoke. The chasm that bisected the floor had doubled in width. A side chair tumbled into it.
I closed the breathing mask over my face and hopped over the hole in the floor to the file cabinet. The suit announced, “Air supply, five minutes. Please change canister.”
There were a half a dozen files in the courier bag on the floor, and a few more sticking up from the top drawer. They all seemed to be patient files but my metal hands were too big to flick through them. The other three drawers were locked.
I felt like I needed to think, to be smarter than I was. What should I be looking for, specifically? The thickening black smoke, the flashing red light, and the almost constant trembling of the rapidly disintegrating building did not help me concentrate.
I clenched my metal fists, almost paralyzed with frustration. The exosuit was incredibly formidable, but what I needed now was brain power. Brute strength was no help.
Or maybe it was.
I grabbed the courier bag and stuffed it into the open drawer, slammed it shut and tapped the button to lock it.
Then I picked the whole thing up, jumped across the gap in the floor, and started running.
The floor splintered under my feet. Behind me, the crack widened, and the half of the room where I had just been standing seemed to tilt. Then it slowly pulled away from the rest of the building.
I ran through the doorways I’d smashed open, and into the main lobby of the fourth floor. The file cabinet wasn’t heavy enough to test the exosuit’s strength, but it was an awkward size and shape to carry, especially while running through a building that was coming down around me.
I was almost back to the stairwell when another crack appeared, a couple of feet in front of me. I skidded to a stop and watched in horror as it yawned open, spouting oily black smoke lit from below with a hellish shade of orange.
I looked back toward Charlesford’s office as that side of the building fell away completely. Swirls of black smoke and red embers wrestled with wind-driven snow. I ran to the seating area and put the file cabinet down next to one of the windows that had fallen in.
As I leaned through the window, smoke streamed out beside me, whipping away on the harsh wind. The parking lot was packed with people, loading the patients onto school buses and ambulances. A string of vehicles were already rushing away, up Bogen Road toward the SmartPike. A pair of fire trucks were coming toward us from the opposite direction, to join the two that were already spraying water on the far side of the building. A few people were standing on the grass, but luckily they seemed to be at a safe distance. Then I looked directly down, and saw a lone figure, much closer to the building than anyone else. Much bigger than them, too.
I flipped up the breathing mask. “Rex!” I cried out, waving my arm.
He looked up and waved back frantically. “Jimi!” he called out, his voice faint from the distance, barely penetrating the din of background noise from the fire and the sirens and the wind and the groaning of the building.
He came even closer and I moved both arms to the side, mimicking the motion of pushing something away. “Get out of the way!”
He waved back, and then beckoned with both arms, like he was telling me to come. I couldn’t make out what he was saying.
“Get out of the way!” I shouted again, still motioning with both arms for him to get out of the way.
Again he waved back, but didn’t move. The smoke was getting thicker and darker around me. I could feel heat on my back, even as I felt the cold air on my front.
I couldn’t think of a way to get the message across, and I was running out of time for being subtle.
I flipped the breathing mask back down over my face and withdrew from the window, back into the smoke-filled building. The suit’s voice announced, “Air supply, two minutes. Please change canister.” Hefting the file cabinet with both hands, I lifted it to the edge of the window.
I could still see Rex, getting closer and closer. With a quick prayer that my aim would hold true and that I wouldn’t hit him, I heaved it outside.
For a second Rex just stood there, and then he flung out his arms and widened his stance, like something from an old cartoon, as he gauged the file cabinet’s trajectory. When it was halfway down, he darted to the left.
The cabinet hit with a thunderous but truncated gong, as it embedded itself into the icy mud.
Before Rex or anyone else could run over to see what it was, I squeezed through the window and threw myself out, too.
CHAPTER 58
As I fell, I thought about Galileo, about the experiment we had studied in physics class, where he dropped two spheres of different weights from the Tower of Pisa, proving, he said, that just because an object has more mass doesn’t mean it will fall any faster. We would have to agree to disagree on that, I thought, because as I plummeted through the air in that five-hundred-pound exosuit, it seemed like the ground was coming up at me pretty damn quick.
I twisted and contorted, trying to maneuver the suit so my feet were under me, so they could absorb as much of the impact as possible when I landed, and so I could roll forward, the way skydivers do, the way you’re supposed to do when you land from a great height and don’t want to break every bone in your body.
I did manage to land on my feet, but that was about it. I hit the ground with a massive, violent jolt, and a chorus of breaking, snapping, cracking, tearing sounds that I hoped were all coming from the exosuit and not from me. The suit did its best to absorb the force of the impact, and I guess it did a pretty good job, considering I wasn’t completely splattered, but I definitely still felt it.
I tried to go into a roll, my muscles remembering the plan even as my brain was focused on ringing like a bell. But the suit was dead, and I couldn’t move at all. My legs were embedded shin-deep in the mud. I was facing away from the hospital. I could see the edge of the parking lot to my right, the people staring at the hospital. But I couldn’t see anybody else.
Then the exosuit started to shift, almost imperceptibly at first, but then it was undeniable: I was tilting forward. A sucking sound came from my feet, and I toppled like a tree.
The ground came at me slower this time, but it was closer, and this time the exo-feet didn’t absorb the impact. As the my face approached the mud I thought, Thank God I’ve got this breathing mask on.
Then I hit, and everything went black as the mud blotted out all light.
I took a deep, calming breath and told myself not to panic. Then a cheerful voice told me, “Air supply depleted. Please change canister.”
Frantically, I tried all the hand gestures Claudia had shown me: I wiggled my fingers in the gel, clenched my fist and counted up and down with my fingers. But nothing worked. I tried to slip my arm out of the exosleeve so I could try to find the release button under the chest plate, but I was pinned against the mud.
It was cold and wet and dark. The
mud seeped through the coveralls and into my clothes. I could feel my tears gathering inside the mask. After all I had just been through, it appeared that I was going to suffocate in a pile of mud.
Then I started to rise, tilting sideways. The mud sucked at me, like it didn’t want to let me go. But something else was lifting me up—like it didn’t want to let me go, either.
The ground came into view through my muddy breathing mask, then the trees and the flashing lights of police and emergency vehicles. I saw the crowd in the front parking lot and the hospital, fully engulfed in flames that totally outmatched the arcs of water from the fire hoses now trained on it. Then I saw the sky, buzzing with all sorts of copters and drones. And finally I saw Rex, his face red and his muscles bulging and shaking as he lifted me and turned me over. His jaw was clenched with effort, but as he eased me to the ground, his eyes caught mine staring at him. He smiled despite himself.
Maybe I distracted him, or maybe it was just the mud, but at that moment, his foot slipped. He dropped me the last few inches, back onto the cold wet mud, with a thud that was totally unmitigated by any servos or shock absorbers. He landed on top of me, his face just an inch from mine.
He pulled off my breathing mask, and I smiled. Without the mud pressing in from the front, I was able to pull my arms out of the exosleeves. I put one muddy hand on the back of Rex’s neck and said, “Well, this is convenient.”
He smiled as I pulled him closer, and we kissed. For a while. Until I remembered we were surrounded by several hundred staring strangers. And that we had to get to Centre Hollow. Immediately.
I put my hand on Rex’s cheek and pushed him away.
“What?” he said. Then he looked up at the crowd gathering around us. The flashing lights seemed closer. A few of the copters even seemed to be circling us instead of the hospital.
“I’m freezing,” I said. “And we need to make sure everyone got to Centre Hollow okay. And I’m a little worried the ground is going to give way under us. But before any of that, I need to get out of this thing.”