The Law of Nines

by Terry Goodkind

  The man with the ruined arm let out a shriek of pain that echoed through the shower. Alex wrenched the knife from his dangling hand. The shock and pain—the violence of action—had immobilized the orderly. Without giving him any time to recover his wits, Alex immediately rammed the captured knife three times in rapid succession into the small of the man’s back, aiming for the kidney.

  By the way the orderly’s mouth opened with a scream that couldn’t make its way out, the blade had found its mark. He twisted toward the floor, the torn arm hanging, the other reaching blindly back toward the fatal wound. On his way down, Alex ripped the knife across the man’s neck, severing arteries, to be sure of the kill.

  At the same time the second orderly dove in toward Alex before the first had smacked face-first onto the floor. Alex dodged to the side. As the man missed, slipped on blood, and crashed headlong into the wall, Alex wheeled around, stretched up, and slashed the ties holding Jax to the shower pipe. Her hands sprang free.

  She kept her legs tightly locked around Henry as she gripped his hair with both fists to keep from being thrown off his back. As exhausted as she had to be, Alex knew that she couldn’t last long. Fortunately, the violent kick, besides breaking ribs, had taken enough of the fight out of Henry that she was able to keep him immobilized—at least for the moment.

  Alex knew, though, that the big man would recover his senses and wind all too soon and become a raging bull turning on her. Even so, Alex could do no more than free her before he had to turn to the man bounding back off the wall and coming at him, slashing with his knife.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Alex spotted the doctor scrambling away toward the door.

  Alex ducked under a wild swing, the knife missing his face by a good foot. As he sprang up, Alex punched a quick thrust of the blade in under the man’s armpit, hoping to hit the space between ribs. He felt the blade slide over bone on the way in. The orderly cried out and jerked back. Alex had wanted to puncture a lung, but as heavily muscled as the man was, he wasn’t sure the relatively short blade had gone deep enough.

  It slowed the man for only a second. He came back at Alex, swinging with a vengeance. Alex had to dance back to avoid a half-dozen savage thrusts. He waited and picked his spot, and when the man thrust again, Alex stepped inside the attack and slashed down across the wrist. His blade cut cleanly through tendons drawn tight. Once parted, they snapped back up into the man’s forearm. His fingers instantly lost their ability to grasp. The severed veins gushed blood at a prodigious rate.

  The knife clattered to the tile floor. As Alex went for it, the nurse swung the chair. Alex ducked. The chair shattered across his back. In the grip of rage as he was, the pain seemed distant.

  The orderly used the opening to roll under Alex, knocking his feet out from under him. The nurse dove in with the syringe. Before she could stab it into him, Alex threw an arm around the orderly’s neck, getting him in a headlock that also served as an anchor point. He used the man’s weight to brace himself as he kicked the nurse’s hand before she could stick him. The blow broke her fingers. She let out a cry. The syringe went flying.

  Alex had his hands full with the big orderly. It was like trying to hold on to a big, powerful, twisting, thrashing alligator. The injuries weren’t enough to put him out of commission; if anything they made him fight all the harder.

  Alex seized his own wrist to lock his arm tight around the bull neck, applying pressure to the carotid arteries. At the same time he leaned back, pulling the man back over the top of a hip, arching his back to keep him off balance and under control, and to use the man’s weight to add pressure on his neck.

  Above him, it was obvious that Henry was recovering. He twisted away from the grip of Jax’s legs. She landed on her back not far from Alex. Henry went for her. Jax kicked up into his groin. The blow staggered the angry orderly.

  As Henry reflexively bent over from the pain, Jax snatched the keys on his belt. Alex couldn’t figure out what she intended to do with his keys, but he hoped she did something fast, or despite his obvious pain Henry would have her and start breaking her bones. He was big enough to break her neck with one meaty hand if he ever got it around her throat.

  Jax scrambled away, staying just out of his reach. He called her every vile name in his vocabulary as he took swings, trying to grab her.

  Jax pulled the keys out, gathering up the wire hand over hand as it unspooled, turning Henry, keeping him off balance. When it reached the end she scooped up a couple of broken chair legs. In a flash she twisted the legs into the wire, wrapping several loops of it around each stick of wood.

  When Henry lunged at her, she dodged to the side and, with a good grip on her improvised wooden handles, gave the wire attached to his belt a mighty yank. It jerked him around. He stumbled a few steps. In a blink she circled around behind him.

  Jax whipped a loop of wire over Henry’s head as she bounded up onto his back, compressing her body as she planted a foot between his shoulder blades. She let out a mighty cry of rage and effort as she used all her strength to straighten her coiled body while at the same time pulling on her improvised wooden handles.

  For an instant, as he realized the danger, Henry’s meaty hands clawed at the wire around his throat. It was too late. As Jax screamed with effort the wire sliced cleanly down through his throat. Henry’s eyes bulged.

  As Jax, her foot on his back, pulled the wooden handles she’d made, the wire knifed down through the carotid arteries as well as the esophagus and windpipe. It sliced all the way through everything but a bundle of the tougher tendons.

  With most of the supporting neck muscles severed, his head flopped to the side. Alex could see that the wire had to have hit perfectly between two vertebrae, rupturing the disc.

  The nurse screamed at the sight of Henry toppling over. Jax, a foot against his back and her hands holding the wooden handles as if she were holding the reins to a monster, rode the towering orderly all the way down. He hit the tile floor hard. His head smacked the hardest, making a sickening crack on impact. A thick red pool spread across the white tiles.

  The instant Henry landed, Jax snatched the knife from his hand and sprang catlike up off the man, using him as a launching pad to make a dive for the nurse.

  Just as the woman turned to run, Jax landed on her back. They both sprawled forward. Before they hit the floor Jax sliced the woman’s throat just as efficiently as she had once sliced Bethany’s throat in Alex’s bed.

  Alex had been holding the orderly in a headlock for only a moment, yet already the man’s arms moved slowly, blindly, as he tried to fight for his life. When his arms swung, the hand with the severed tendons flopped without control. As he lost consciousness the fight was going out of him.

  Alex used the opening to swiftly reverse his hold and throw a leg over the man. He used the leverage to give power to a quick twist that snapped the big man’s neck.

  As the orderly went limp, Alex untangled himself and scrambled across the floor to Jax. She was just pushing herself up off the back of the dead nurse.

  When she saw Alex her look of lethal rage instantly switched to tears of deliverance. She threw her arms around his neck. He felt a lump in his own throat. With the strength of her hold on him she wordlessly conveyed her profound sense of relief.

  In the sudden silence, their breathing echoed softly in the shower room.

  “Are you all right?” Alex asked as he held her head to his shoulder.

  “I’m not sure. I felt like I’d become lost in some dark nightmare. I couldn’t understand it. I’m better, but I still feel strange, like I’ve lost my mind, lost myself.”

  “You’re going to be fine. It’s the drugs they gave us. The rest of them will wear off in another day or so. Just stay with me. It will get better, I promise.”

  She nodded against his shoulder. Now that the desperate fight had abruptly come to an end, the adrenaline rush was fading. Her arms loosened around his neck as her strength ebbed. Her voice, too, wa
s weak.

  “I thought it was over. I thought I was going to die hanging there. But when I saw you I knew it would be all right.”

  He smiled as he held her shoulders and lifted her away from him. “We’re not out of this yet. I need you to stay strong a little longer. Get dressed. Hurry.”

  Alex found the keys at the end of the wire cable that had nearly decapitated Henry. He hurriedly worked to disconnect the keys from the fitting at the end of the cable.

  “I guess now I know how you felt,” Jax said as she pulled the jeans up her muscular legs, trying to cover herself as swiftly as possible.

  “How I felt? What do you mean?”

  “When I came to save you at your house and caught you with your pants down.”

  Against all odds, despite the blood everywhere, despite the way his heart still pounded from the terror and rage, Alex laughed.

  38.

  HURRY, ” ALEXSAID, avoiding looking at Jax in her half-naked condition. “Hoffmann is probably raising an alarm, getting together help. The last thing we need is to get trapped in here.”

  “Yuri is due to show up, too,” Jax reminded him as she pulled her boots on. “Yuri is not someone to mess with. He’s not like these two in here were, or even Henry. He’s better than good with a knife.”

  “Let’s see if we can get out of here before we have to worry about him.”

  Jax was already moving before she finished pulling the black top over her head. Alex put a hand to the small of her back not only to guide her as she was frantically trying to finish dressing while they headed for the door, but to be ready if she faltered from exhaustion. He couldn’t imagine how she could even stand after having to strain up on her tiptoes all night just to get each breath. She had to be running on fumes.

  “What happened to the nurse they were saying disappeared?” Jax asked as they both carefully peeked around the corner.

  “I strangled her.”

  “I expected something like that,” she said, still struggling to get her breath. “What I want to know is why they couldn’t find her body? How were you able to hide it in this place?”

  Alex squatted beside the door that had been left open when the doctor had run out. He looked out into the well-lit bathroom and then under the row of stalls. It seemed to be clear. He turned back to Jax as she pulled her long blond hair out of the neck of the black top.

  “I activated her lifeline.”

  Jax froze. “You what?”

  “I cut those symbols in her forehead, like I saw you do. When I finished, she vanished.”

  Jax stared at him. “Alex, that was a complicated spell form. It has to be done precisely right.”

  “Well, I guess I was precise enough. It worked. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I practiced for months before I was able to do it properly. Not only does it have to be drawn exactly right, but each part of it has to be added in the correct order, at the proper time. How could you remember it?”

  Alex shrugged. “I remember visual things.” He winced a little as he leaned closer. “I didn’t do magic, did I?”

  “No,” she said with a bit of a smile that put him at ease. “You merely activated a lifeline that was already there within her. It doesn’t take magic to do it, just the precise form to activate it.”

  She looked back into the shower room at the four dead people sprawled on the tile floor. Blood was running toward the shower drains. “I think that maybe I ought to activate the lifelines of these people. I don’t think that we want the bodies left lying there to be discovered. It would be better for us if people wondered what happened, wondered where they were. Until word is sent here about their return we’d have the advantage of the others here in this world being in the dark about what happened.”

  When she pulled her hair back from her face he saw that her hands were shaking. He didn’t know how much strength she had left.

  Alex agreed with her but he feared they couldn’t spare the time. “I think it would be worse if we were to get trapped in here and have it start all over again.”

  “Yes, but what if—” She paused and frowned. “Do you smell smoke?”

  Alex realized that he did. “Yes. That can’t be good.”

  He put an arm around her waist to help her as he started through the bathroom. At the outer door they squatted down again, pressing up tight against the wall to the side in case anyone burst through the door. With a finger, Alex slowly eased the door open a few inches. He carefully checked out into the hallway but could effectively look in only one direction: back toward the nurses’ station.

  The partially opened door allowed a stronger smell of smoke into the bathroom.

  “We’d better find out what’s going on. Are you ready?”

  Jax nodded. “Which way are we going?”

  Alex looked out again. He pointed with a thumb.

  “Toward the nurses’ station. I want to know what’s burning. There are a lot of people locked in this place. Fire in here could end up being a disaster.

  “Let’s stay to the side of the hall and stay low. If there’s anyone waiting in ambush, I don’t want to give them an opportunity to surround us.”

  When Jax nodded, Alex took her hand to keep her close as he slipped out the door. Staying low, they moved quickly along the edge of the dimly lit corridor. He didn’t see anyone in either direction. The lights were on in the nurses’ station. He could see a gray haze of smoke beyond the glass windows. He wondered why the smoke alarm wasn’t going off.

  Jax pulled him to a stop. She was breathing heavily. “I’m sorry. I need to rest a moment. I can hardly move my legs.”

  Alex helped her sit and lean back against the wall. “I can’t believe that you can move at all, after what you’ve been through.”

  She closed her eyes and worked at getting her breath. Besides the physical ordeal, she was still on a partial dose of the Thorazine meant to take the fight out of her. He had stopped taking his, but she was still far from clearheaded.

  Alex pressed a hand to her shoulder. “Rest here a moment. I’m going to go take a peek into the nurses’ station. I want to know what’s going on.”

  “No.” She seized his arm, holding on as if her life depended on it. “We need to stay together. I’m better now. Let’s go.”

  She looked exhausted but he realized that in her drugged condition, in a strange place, in a strange world, she had to be terrified to be left alone, especially as weak as she was. He wanted nothing more than to take her in his arms and hold her tight, protect her, and keep her safe. But they weren’t safe, not yet, anyway.

  He realized that she was probably right, they should stay together. If anything happened, he didn’t know if she had enough strength left to defend herself. Although she never failed to amaze him.

  “If you need to stop to get your breath just say so. All right?”

  Jax nodded as she rose up into a crouch. They stayed low enough as they approached the nurses’ station to be under the bottom of the window. He could hear flames crackling on the other side of the door.

  When he carefully rose up to get a glimpse, he didn’t see anyone at the counter inside. He tried different keys until he found the one that fit the lock. He turned the lock slowly, trying to be as quiet as possible.

  Once he had the door unlocked, he again snuck a quick glimpse in the window. He still didn’t see anyone, so he opened the door and slipped inside. The smoke stung his eyes. He had to resist the urge to cough. They stayed low as they went in.

  Alex peeked over the top of the counter and saw that way in the back the doctor was frantically throwing liquid on the fire already raging in the aisles between the files. An orderly pulled files off the shelves and threw them on the burning pile as the doctor doused them with yet more liquid.

  Alex went back to the wall beside the door, out of sight of the two working to torch the place, and pulled the lever of the fire alarm. Nothing happened. He looked up at the sprinklers. They remained off
. He snatched up the phone to dial 911. The line was dead.

  Jax slipped in the door. Alex squatted down beside her.

  “What’s going on?” she whispered. “What’s burning?”

  “They’ve started a fire to destroy the files.” He kept his voice low even though the noise of the fire covered it. “The fire alarm doesn’t work and the phone is dead. They were obviously prepared to destroy the whole place to cover their tracks if anything ever went wrong. The doctor panicked and is implementing those procedures.”

  They both rose up just enough to take a look over the counter. Alex could see that the fire was already burning strongly and spreading fast. It would be hard to put out.

  He looked around and spotted a fire extinguisher on the wall, but he doubted it would be big enough. He was sure that the hospital had to have fire hoses. He didn’t know where they were, but assumed that they were in the back of the nurses’ station.

  Alex knew that he had to put out the fire or the whole building would go up in flames. He tried to think of where there would be more extinguishers. There weren’t any out in the wards, because they couldn’t trust the patients. The extinguishers were heavy and could be used as weapons.

  The doctor threw more of the flammable liquid on the burning mound of files on the floor until the bottle was empty. It appeared to be a bottle from the pharmacy, probably alcohol. The doctor pulled another from his pocket and threw it against the shelves. The bottle shattered against the steel shelving, spilling the liquid all down the files. Fire erupted up the side of the shelves, the flames roaring and crackling, lapping at the ceiling.

  As he started to turn, Alex saw Jax on the floor. His first thought was that she had passed out from exhaustion. She tried to push herself up on her arms. It looked to be a struggle.

  Realizing that something was wrong, Alex started to bend down to help her. Just then, out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a nurse behind him.

  Almost at the same time as he saw the nurse, Alex felt a sharp stab in his left hip. With an icy flood of dread and alarm he instantly knew what she had done.