by Robin Cook
“This is no time for recriminations,” Joanna said. “And just for the record: You didn’t make me come here. I came here on my own accord.”
“Thanks,” Deborah murmured.
Joanna switched off the flashlight. “I think we’d better let our eyes adjust to the darkness. We can’t be running around with the light on.”
“You’re right,” Deborah managed, trying to get ahold of herself.
A few minutes later, with a final jolting screech, the elevator stopped. Pure silence returned in a smothering rush. The women leaped to the door. As quickly as they could they got it open, only to be confronted by an impenetrable wall of darkness.
“There’s no choice; I’ve got to turn on the light,” Joanna said. The click sounded loud in the silence. She rapidly ran the beam around the small, windowless room. It was the freight elevator vestibule with a wide double door.
“They’ll quickly figure out the elevator is here on the third floor,” Deborah said. “So they’ll be here soon. Let’s find a stairwell and get up to the top floor. That’s where we should find a place to hide until we figure out what we’re going to do.”
“Agreed!”
Deborah pulled open one of the doors to the corridor, and Joanna stepped through. Quickly Joanna beamed the light up and down the hall. Even though she was now forewarned about all the medical paraphernalia cluttering the old hospital, she was still taken aback by the scene. She hadn’t expected to see framed prints still on the walls, nor a laundry cart with folded sheets still on its shelves. “It’s like there was a fire drill and everybody ran out and then never came back,” she said.
“There’s an exit sign,” Deborah said, pointing toward the south. “That must be a stairwell. Let’s go!”
Joanna kept her hand over the flashlight lens. She wanted to limit the light to just what she and Deborah needed to avoid the gurneys, supply carts, and old wheel chairs. They moved quickly. Arriving at the stairwell, Deborah cracked open the door. For a second they listened. All was quiet.
“Come on!” Deborah urged pushing into the stairwell.
They started up the stairs at a run but slowed immediately because of the noise they were making. The stairs were metal and reverberated like kettle drums in the confined space.
They got only as far as the intermediate landing before both women froze in place. They’d heard a door somewhere below burst open and slam against the wall. Joanna recovered enough to switch off her flashlight.
In the next instant, booming footfalls resounded against the metal treads, accompanied by a flickering glow that filtered up the stairwell. One of the men was running up the stairs clutching a flashlight.
Joanna and Deborah edged to the rear of the landing and pressed themselves up against the bare brick as the sounds and the light rising from below rapidly reached a crescendo. Simultaneously one of the men in black appeared on the third-floor landing no more than twenty feet away. He was so close to the women that his labored breathing was clearly audible. Luckily, he did not look up but rather concentrated on getting into the third-floor corridor and down to the freight elevator as quickly as possible.
The instant the stairwell door closed behind the man, Joanna and Deborah restarted their climb to the fourth floor. Too scared to switch on the light, they had to move slowly by feel while they struggled against succumbing to their renewed panic. The fourth-floor landing was particularly difficult to navigate in the darkness due to stacks of empty cardboard cartons.
Once they were in the fourth-floor corridor, Joanna again switched on the light. Keeping her hand over the lens, they started out, heading north and moving as fast as the cluttered hall allowed. Both instinctively felt that the farther they were from the part of the building occupied by the Wingate Clinic, the safer they would be. They also tried to be as quiet as possible on the aged wooden flooring in deference to the man searching for them on the floor directly below.
They reached the fire door leading to the tower. Without discussion they traversed the tower and passed through the opposite fire door into the north wing. Except for an occasional creak of a floorboard, they were silent, each consumed by her own fears.
The wards in the north wing were a mirror image of those in the south wing, arranged lengthwise along either side of a central corridor. Each ward was separated from its immediate neighbor by side rooms, and each ward had twenty to thirty beds. Most of the beds were covered with bare mattresses although a few also had moth-eaten blankets.
“Any ideas about where we should hide?” Joanna whispered nervously.
“Not yet,” Deborah said. “I suppose we could climb into cabinets in one of the many storage rooms, but that might be too easy.”
“We don’t have a lot of time.”
“Unfortunately I think you’re right,” Deborah said. She directed Joanna to shine the light into the room between the last two wards on the northwest corner of the building. Instead of being a storage room like most of the others, it had been set up as a minor procedure room with an iron examining table and a sink. The opposite wall had a large, glass-fronted instrument cabinet. Pushing through a connecting door they found a small storage room for linens and dressings along with a large, old-fashioned sterilizer.
Deborah quickly went over to the sterilizer, and while Joanna held the light on it, she pulled its door. It resisted at first, but then slowly creaked open.
“What about this?” Deborah asked.
The sterilizer was about three feet in diameter and about five feet deep. Joanna shined the light inside. There were a number of stainless steel boxes sitting on a metal grate. “Only one of us would fit even if we took the stuff out,” Joanna said. “And even that would be a squeeze.”
“I guess you’re right,” Deborah said. She let go of the sterilizer and hurried over to the connecting door leading to the end ward. Joanna followed her with the light, continuing to keep the lens mostly covered. When Deborah pushed open the door, Joanna turned out the flashlight. A meager amount of moonlight filtered in through the windows, enough to illuminate the larger objects in the room.
The ward was the same size and decor as the others but differed by having in it a six-foot-long, horizontal cylinder mounted on legs. It stood about waist height in place of one of the beds lining the interior wall of the room.
“Now there’s a possibility,” Deborah exclaimed.
“What?”
“That cylinder,” Deborah said, pointing at the large object. “I remember reading about them. They were called iron lungs and were used for people who couldn’t breathe, like patients in the nineteen-fifties with infantile paralysis.”
The women walked as quickly as they could through the dark ward and approached the old-fashioned ventilator. It had appeared light gray, but as they got closer they could tell it was yellow. Along its sides were small, round, glass viewports. The end facing out into the ward was hinged and contained a central, black rubber collar to fit around a patient’s head to make a seal. Just above the collar was a small mirror oriented at a forty-five-degree angle. Below the collar was a platform for the patient’s head.
While Deborah unlatched the front cover, Joanna nervously glanced around. She was concerned about too much time passing. They needed a hiding place, and they needed it sooner rather than later.
As Deborah pushed the iron lung’s door open, it squeaked but not as loudly as the sterilizer.
“Shine the light in,” Deborah said.
“Deborah, we can’t be fooling around here,” Joanna complained.
“Shine the light in!” Deborah repeated.
The moment Joanna did as Deborah suggested, a distant fire door banged against a wall followed by the flickering of a flashlight beam out in the main corridor.
“Oh God!” Joanna voiced. She turned off the light.
“Well, this has got to do,” Deborah said. “We’re hiding in here.” She grabbed a side chair from between the beds and shoved it under the front lip of the iron lung.
She gripped Joanna’s arm. “Quick! You first, and feet first!”
The play of flickering light increased in intensity through the open doorway to the main corridor.
“Quick!” Deborah repeated.
With some reluctance but feeling she had little choice, Joanna climbed up on the chair. Holding on to the upper edge of the cylinder’s rim, she got one foot inside. With Deborah supporting her backside, she got the other one in as well. She then slid her body in.
Deborah grabbed the chair and returned it to where she’d found it.
“Where are you going?” Joanna demanded in a whisper when Deborah disappeared from her view.
Deborah didn’t answer but reappeared almost instantly. “I’ve got to get in without the chair,” she said. “It would be too much of a giveaway.”
Using the strut between the iron lung’s two front legs as the first step, Deborah rose up so her chest was above the iron lung’s top. Finding a narrow toehold in the top of the leg where it was welded to the iron lung’s body, she draped herself over the top. Then by swinging around, she was able to get her feet into the cylinder’s opening. But then she ran into trouble. She couldn’t figure out how to get the rest of her body in without falling to the floor, even if Joanna tried to hold onto her legs.
“This is not going to work,” Deborah said. She twisted to the side, and dropped back to the floor.
“You’ve got to hurry,” Joanna rasped in a whisper. The light from the hall was brighter still and was now accompanied by voices. It was the two men coming all the way to the end of the corridor.
Deborah stuck as much of her upper body head first into the iron lung as she could. “Grab onto me, and pull,” she told Joanna out of desperation.
With a little leap and Joanna’s help, Deborah managed to get herself into the iron lung but not without scraping the front of her thighs and shins on the front lip of the metal cylinder. She had to claw herself into the depths. Because of the tightness of the space, the two women ended up on their sides pressed against each other head to toe.
“Try to close the door as much as you can,” Deborah whispered from the recesses of the ventilator.
Joanna reached out and grabbed the rubber collar and pulled. The door slowly began to close, but as soon as it squeaked, she stopped. It was none too soon. A flashlight beam came into the room and moved about. For a brief moment the beam came directly inside the iron lung through the three glass side ports on the side facing the door. Then the beam dropped and arced around the room beneath the beds, searching out the recesses.
Both women involuntarily held their breaths. One of the men quickly walked up and down the center of the ward, passing within ten feet of the half-open iron lung not once but twice. He was bent over and swinging the light from side to side beneath the beds to illuminate their undersides, particularly up under the heads and along the sides of the intervening tables.
“See anything?” the man suddenly shouted, causing both women to start.
From the ward across the hall the other man answered with a negative.
A moment later the man who’d come into the women’s ward could be heard in the connecting room rapidly slamming open cabinets and cursing loudly. The flicker of his flashlight could still be seen by Deborah through one of the viewports until he moved beyond the procedure room and on into the next ward.
Almost in unison the women let the air out of their lungs and took in deep breaths. For Deborah it was hardly fresh.
“That was almost as close as the freight elevator,” Joanna whispered.
“They must be sweeping the building as you suggested,” Deborah said.
“Let’s stay put for a while in case he comes back,” Joanna said. “And we’d better start thinking about what we’re going to do to get ourselves out of here.”
Time dragged by, especially for Deborah, who began to feel claustrophobic wedged down in the base of the narrow cylinder designed for one person. For her the situation was hardly conducive to thought. The smell of the old bare mattress was ripe and the dust bothersome. On several occasions it took sheer will for her merely to avoid sneezing. Eventually she began to perspire and experience a progressive shortness of breath.
After almost a half hour Deborah couldn’t take it any longer. “Have you heard anything or seen any lights?” she asked.
“The only light I’ve seen has been some flickering through the windows,” Joanna said. “There’s a light outside that wasn’t there before.”
“Nothing inside the building?”
“Not a thing,” Joanna said.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” Deborah admitted. “Push open the door and try to do it without making any noise.”
Joanna pushed on the door. It swung almost fully open without making a sound.
“I’m coming out,” Deborah said. “If I put my hand someplace you’d rather I didn’t, I’ll apologize in advance.”
With a lot of wriggling and grunting Deborah managed to ease herself back out of the iron lung. Her eyes scanned the room, noticing that the ambient light had increased as Joanna had mentioned. Then she mopped her forehead with the back of her hand and ran her fingers through her damp, shoulder-length hair. She felt bedraggled and exhausted, yet she knew the night was still young, with more trials ahead. In her mind’s eye she could picture the razor-wire-topped fence, and she knew that even if they managed to get out of the building, leaving the premises was not going to be easy.
“How about getting that chair?” Joanna said.
“Oh, sorry,” Deborah said. She’d been distracted by her worries. She dragged the chair over to the mouth of the iron lung.
“Did you come up with any ideas about getting out of here?” Joanna asked as she extracted herself from the ventilator.
“I didn’t,” Deborah confessed. “Jammed in that tube the way I was, I couldn’t think. What about you?”
“Something did occur to me,” Joanna said. “The power plant could be the way to get out of this building.”
“How so?” Deborah asked.
“If they’re creating heat over there to heat this building, it’s got to get here,” Joanna said. “There’s got to be a tunnel.”
“You’re right!” Deborah said.
“I noticed that the freight elevator control had six buttons,” Joanna said. “I hadn’t given it any thought until I started thinking about a tunnel. This building must have a sub-basement. Maybe that should be our goal. The more I think about our trying to get to a phone in the Wingate Clinic the more risky I think it would be.”
“But I haven’t seen access to a sub-basement,” Deborah said. “There wasn’t any in the stairwell we used tonight when we got here, or the one I used this afternoon.”
“Let’s check out the freight elevator,” Joanna said.
“We can’t use that,” Deborah said. “It’s too noisy.”
“I’m not talking about using the elevator itself,” Joanna explained. “Usually they have a ladder in elevator shafts. I don’t know why, I guess for maintenance.”
“Where did you learn this?” Deborah questioned. She was impressed.
“It’s thanks to Carlton,” Joanna explained. “Mindless action movies are his favorite, and at one time or another I’ve had to suffer through watching most of them. There’ve been dozens of scenes in elevator shafts.”
“I suppose it’s worth a check,” Deborah said. “Do you think we’ve waited long enough?”
“There’s no way to know for sure, but since we can’t stay here all night, we have to do it sometime. Let me check the hall.”
“All right, you do that,” Deborah said. “I want to see what this extra light is, coming through the front windows.”
While Joanna cautiously made her way over to the archway leading out into the corridor, Deborah crossed the ward. Bending over at the waist to keep her head down, Deborah approached one of the windows. Slowly she raised her eyes above the sill and found herself staring into multiple au
tomobile headlights positioned to illuminate the building. Although the cars were at a considerable distance down the lawn, Deborah quickly ducked out of sight to be sure not to be spotted. She’d caught a glimpse of several uniformed guards silhouetted against the lights. They had large dogs on leashes. The two men in black had called in reinforcements.
Deborah quickly joined Joanna who was waiting for her at the archway and told her what she’d seen.
“Dogs are not good,” Joanna said gravely. “These people really mean business.”
“I think we already knew that,” Deborah said.
“It also means leaving the building underground is suddenly a necessity,” Joanna said. She then opened her mouth to tell Deborah the main corridor was clear when the sound of a bullhorn coming from outside startled her.
MAY 11, 2001
12:37 A.M.
JOANNA MEISSNER AND
Deborah Cochrane!” A voice echoed against the front of the building. “There is no need to extend this charade. Don’t make us come into the building with dogs, which we will do if you don’t come out on your own accord. The Bookford Police are on their way. I repeat! Come out immediately.”
“So much for our carefully crafted aliases,” Deborah said. “If I thought they’d turn us over to the Bookford police, I’d walk out of here in a heartbeat.”
“They’re not going to turn us over to anyone,” Deborah said. “That’s my point,” Joanna said. “Come on! Let’s check out the freight elevator before I lose my nerve.”
Gaining some familiarity with the building, the women retraced their route back through the fourth floor to the stairwell they’d used earlier. At first they tried to descend without turning on the flashlight but quickly realized the risk of knocking some of the unseen debris down the stairs was greater than the risk presented by the shielded flashlight. They turned it off again before they entered the third-floor corridor. While in the corridor they heard the bullhorn message again.
They had to turn the light on again in the freight elevator vestibule. The elevator was exactly the way they had left it with the doors half open. Joanna shined the light into the car. Through the wire-mesh of its back wall a ladder was visible attached to the brick of the elevator shaft.