Anywhere But Here

by Remmy Duchene

  EVERNIGHT PUBLISHING ®

  www.evernightpublishing.com

  Copyright© 2017 Remmy Duchene

  ISBN: 978-1-77339-410-7

  Cover Artist: Jay Aheer

  Editor: Karyn White

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  DEDICATION

  To my very talented, So. Thank you for always being there with a kind word, sushi, chocolate, auntie/niecie dates or just your stunning face. You’ve taught me that I am capable of loving someone beyond reason. You’ve taught me patience and have been slowly rebuilding my self-esteem with your laughter, encouragement and hugs. Thank you for all you do to make me smile and for all the times you’ve been my rock when the world seems unfair. But most of all, thank you for always bringing me back whenever I want to be ANYWHERE BUT HERE.

  ANYWHERE BUT HERE

  Remmy Duchene

  Copyright © 2017

  Chapter One

  “Code omega!” The automated voice screamed in English. “Dr. Holstrom, please report to the ER. Code omega. Dr. Holstrom, please report to the ER.”

  The voice yelled the instruction in Marathi and Urdu before the hospital went eerily quiet.

  “One—Mississippi—two—Mississippi—”

  The alarms began blaring.

  “Code omega! Dr. Holstrom, please report to the ER!”

  Dr. Chad Holstrom had been in middle of removing his stethoscope so he could get a nap in after a twelve-hour shift when the call came through. He merely dropped the medical device back around his neck and hauled his body off the cot. On his way out the door, he yanked a couple pairs of blue gloves from a box attached to the wall and booked it down the corridor.

  It’d been a while since the small hospital in the middle of Jaipur, India had a code omega. That meant someone had lost enough blood for it to be life threatening. He hated those—the one he’d experienced was his first day on the job, and it was a girl who refused an arranged marriage. To her parents had not been impressed was an understatement.

  It was hard to believe that was over three years ago.

  He descended a few steps, slid his fingers into the gloves, then burst through a set of silver, double doors that swung both ways. The flapped loudly behind him, but he didn’t turn to look at them. In the ER he found nurses fussing over a man on a stretcher. Chad took a breath to steady his exhausted nerves and dove into the fray.

  Three years and not once had he seen someone with so many life-threatening injuries. Even while he listened to what the nurses were saying to him, Chad was climbing onto the stretcher to kneel astride the victim to rip his blood-soaked shirt open. Out of habit he felt for a pulse and found one—very weak—but it was there. He then began checking the body carefully—but there was so much blood. It was hard to get a hold of any part of the victim without being extra careful. Chad couldn’t help feeling sorry for him, to know someone out there would do such a thing to him. What was this man’s story? Did he, somehow, deserve any of this?

  Chad quickly silenced his thoughts and refocused on work. No matter what this man did, it was Chad’s job to save his life. Even if Chad couldn’t heal him, he had to try every trick he had and a few he would probably have to borrow from his best friend, to try getting the job done.

  The hours ticked by. He’d have to call a few nurses from another floor to help with cleaning up the victim. They worked tirelessly, but the man slipped into a coma. That changed the game drastically. Before, he was muttering things that Chad couldn’t translate, even though his Urdu and Marathi were fluent. Perhaps it was a different language, and since their victim seemed more Sri Lankan than Indian, Chad assumed it was Tamil. When the chaos died down and he was left alone, looking into the battered, swollen face of his patient, Chad couldn’t help the breaking of his heart. It was obvious this man hadn’t fallen off a horse. He was beaten, deliberately. Someone, on purpose, had done this much damage to another human being.

  Angry at the world and how cruel people could be to each other, Chad walked out of the small space, drew the curtain around the victim’s bed and approached one of the medics who’d brought him in.

  “Do you know his name?” Chad asked in Marathi.

  “No. We tried finding out, but there was no identification on his person or in the immediate area.”

  “And his pockets were turned out the way we saw them?”

  “Yes, doctor. We are thinking it was a robbery. But we are not sure. We did call the police, but you know how…”

  Chad nodded, patted the sad medic on the shoulder and went back to his patient. He picked up the admittance papers and wrote John Doe on the line that asked for a name. For age, he guessed between twenty-five and thirty-five. Strange, with a knock to the head how a person’s life could be minimized down to nothing.

  With a sigh, he dropped the clipboard into the bin hanging on the foot of John’s bed, then walked around to the side. He used his flashlight to peer into John’s eyes, but he was still under.

  The machines around the space beeped and whooshed. When Chad first did his residency, those sounds soothed him. They gave him a sense of hope that miracles could happen. But as the years trailed by, and he had to listen to those sounds more and more, they lost their happy hope and filled him with a morbid dread he never thought was possible. At any time, those beeps and whoosh could turn into an alarm—then just like that, someone was gone.

  Chad swallowed the lump in his throat, gave the patient one final look over, then left the space. At the nurses’ station someone handed him a clipboard with John’s results from the CT scanned he’d ordered on their unknown patient. The results weren’t the best, but they could have been worse. There was swelling in the brain—fortunately, no bleeding. That surprised him since there was major trauma to the patient’s head.

  “I hear you have an omega.”

  Chad looked up from the results at his best friend. Surinder Jothinda was a skinny man who stood sleek and well put together. From his slick back hair to the old-fashioned wire-rimmed prescription glasses that adorned his face, everything was immaculately thought out. His brown eyes had lost some of their youthful sparkle, but Chad figured it was the nature of the beast when one became a doctor.

  He smiled grimly. “Yeah. A John Doe. They think he was robbed.”

  “How bad is it?”

  Chad handed over the results and turned to lean his back against the high desk. He crossed his angles and folded his arms over his chest. “I’m not holding out any hope that he’ll survive. The next twenty-four hours will be crucial. Take a look.”

  Surinder accepted the paperwork and scanned them. “The swelling is bad,” he said, flipping to another page. “But at least the brain is not pushing down on the reticular activating system.”

  “No. Not yet.” Chad inhaled deeply then exhaled his next words. “I’m going to keep a close eye on him. I want to get him a MRI when he clears the next twenty-four hours.” He leaned in to point to a few sections of the brain scan. “You see those?”

  Surinder leaned in and peered at the results a little more intently than before. “Are those—lesions?”

  “I’m not sure. They seemed fairly recent but not enough to be from the attack.” Chad rested against the desk again.

  “And they do not seem to be DNA related. He was not born with these.”


  Chad nodded his agreement. “So once he’s stable, I’ll get a more detailed scan. Hopefully, if they are lesions, he won’t have a seizure.”

  “We can only pray,” Surinder said sadly. “A seizure right now will only make things a lot worse.”

  “Amen, brother.”

  “Well, if you need my help on this one, I am all hands on deck.”

  “Thanks, Suri.”

  “Hey, when was the last time you got any sleep? You look like hell.”

  Chad smiled. “I was just about to get some shut-eye when the omega was broadcasted. Since I’m the attending doctor tonight, it fell into my lap. Strange, I was so exhausted before. Now even if I wanted to sleep I’ll not be able to.”

  “I hear you,” Surinder said softly. “But at least try and rest. If anything happens they will call you. I can keep an eye on him while I am here for you, so take the time.”

  Chad nodded and Surinder patted him on the back before heading off toward the elevator. Taking Surinder’s advice, he returned to the doctors’ mess and fell onto one of the cots. He removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes, then set the glasses on the bed beside him. He didn’t bother taking off his stethoscope.

  While he closed his eyes and his lower back throbbed in appreciation, Chad still couldn’t fall asleep. His mind kept going back to John, with his face swollen so much, it was almost as if he had no eyes. Cuts, bruises, a broken arm, a fractured clavicle—then there were the injuries that made no sense. His nurses had picked pieces of asphalt from some of John’s wounds. There were scratches against his body almost as if he was dragged then rolled across a rough terrain. A part of him figured those injuries came from falling out of a moving vehicle, and that only made the mystery around John Doe twice as infuriating.

  Groaning, he shuffled away from his glasses but figured he should pick them up before he rolled onto them. Hauling his tired body up once more, he placed them in his locker then went back to the bed.

  Chad tossed and turned for a bit longer then finally managed to fall asleep. He took a quick nap that was laced with nightmares, all relating to John. When he finally woke up, his body felt a little rested. He took a moment to grab a cup of coffee, rinse his mouth and washed his face, then checked in on John. He read the charts and noticed there wasn’t much change.

  “Who are you, John? And what in the hell did they do to you?”

  ****

  Two days passed, and not much progress was made with John. His MRI came back stating that his and Surinder’s suspicions were correct. John did have brain lesions. They weren’t cancerous—more like scarring from something he had gone through at some point before he was attacked. So far, they seemed dormant and weren’t causing any issues, and a second CT scan showed the swelling was receding. Chad didn’t breathe a sigh of relief yet. He knew all too well how quickly things could change in a hospital—especially with head injuries.

  After checking John’s chart, Chad sat by the side of John’s bed with his guitar in his lap and stared into his face. The swelling had gone down a lot, and the bruises and scrapes were healing nicely. Chad could see that John Doe was a handsome man with a nose that sat in the center of his face perfectly, full lips that were a slight shade darker than the rest of his face, and cheekbones most paid a lot of money to get put in.

  “Someone must be looking for you, John,” Chad said, softly, trailing his fingers over the strings. “I refuse to believe a man like you has no one in this world.”

  He played the intro to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” and stopped. “Did you know Metallica have been together since nineteen eighty-one? On and off, of course because who can work with the same people for so long and not want to strangle each other, right? Well, technically it’s only a part of that because they switched lead singers, someone died … oh and never mention Megadeth to a Metallica fan. It will not end well—long story.”

  He played the intro to the song again before placing his palms over the strings. “You do not want to hear about one of my favorite bands, right? I checked your palms,” Chad said. “They are soft. I do not think you were a farmer or a street vendor. Your hands are too smooth. But you do have paper cuts that have recently healed.” He continued playing the song, and when he got to the chorus he stopped. “Maybe a teacher—or—or a lawyer or maybe you are super rich and you hired people to work for you. Either way, I refuse to believe no one is looking for you.”

  Chad sighed and set the guitar on the floor, leaning against the wall. He eased closer to the bed to whisper. “But you have to wake up. You have to open those eyes. It would be nice to see them the minute they walk in, right?”

  But he got no reply. All he could hear was the faint sounds of someone crying down the way, the beeps and whoosh of the machines John was hooked up to, and footsteps getting fainter.

  “No?” Chad rose. “Okay then. But you do know you can’t stay in there forever. You are going to have to wake up soon for your own sake. The longer you are chilling in there, the more chance you’ll have some damage, and we really don’t want that.”

  “Dr. Holstrom?”

  Chad shook his head and turned to glance over at his shoulder at the nurse behind him. “Yes, Bindi?”

  “I did not know you were on duty in the daytime now.”

  He smiled. “I’m not—technically I’m not here.”

  “But I can see you.”

  Chad laughed. “I know. What I mean is I’m not working right now. But, John has no visitors, so I thought I’d come in for a little bit and keep him company.”

  “That is very nice of you, doctor. When he wakes up he should not be alone. It will be scary for him.”

  Chad agreed with another nod.

  “It is time for John’s bath.”

  He gave her another smile. “If anything changes please page me.”

  Bindi promised she would.

  After taking one final look at the man lying on the bed, he left the space, pulling the curtains in place for privacy.

  Leaving the hospital, he refrained from getting a cycle rickshaw and walked north away from the hospital. The heat was almost unbearable, but after living in India since he was a child, Chad barely noticed it anymore. He’d often wondered why his mother chose to settle down in India. His father was a Jamaican immigrant to Canada, his mother, descended from Nigerians. They’d met in Canada almost forty-two years ago. They didn’t have Chad until ten years later after Chad’s father, Morris, began making his fortune. But soon they were moving all over the world. Chad’s earliest memory of his father was sitting in a large room with chairs decorated with gold trimmings, playing with a wooden horse while his father spoke to men in long white robes and checkered colored head-wraps.

  It wasn’t until later he realized they had been in Dubai. They lived there until he was seven and soon were on the move again. Nigeria, Scotland, England, and Canada were all places the Holstrom family had called home until finally, after his sister Eliza was born, Lillian Holstrom put her foot down and demanded a stable home for her children. Chad remembered pressing his ears against the thin wall of their hotel suite, listening to his parents argue.

  His father was outraged Lillian would even dare raise her voice to him. But she wanted better for her children, and his mother did not back down. Even at that young age, Chad knew his mother was a force to be reckoned with if anyone dared harm her children.

  There were very few things in the world his mother argued with his father about—ensuring all her kids were born on Canadian soil and settling down were the two major ones.

  Glancing both ways, he jogged across the busy street and dipped into a clothing market. Usually, he bought his outfits at the mall, but sometimes, he could find some amazing pieces—or just materials to make a new set of scrubs for work. He stopped and bought some roasted peanuts from a teenaged girl, who blushed behind her headscarf when he bowed his head to her and handed her some rupees. Chad smiled and nibbled on his warm snack as he continued through the market.r />
  He managed to pick up some purple material for new scrubs, a pair of jeans, and some new boxers. On his way out the other side, his cell phone vibrated against his hip, and he instantly grabbed it. “Dr. Holstrom?”

  “Mōṭhā bhā'ū!” Eliza Holstrom cheered.

  Chad couldn’t help laughing. “Hello to you, too, little sister. How are you?”

  “Tired.” Eliza sighed. “Law school is the pits.”

  “Well, you should have become a doctor like me.”

  “And age prematurely? No, thank you. I’m way too fabulous for all that.”

  Chad chuckled. “Are you at least settling in okay now?”

  “Just about. People still think I’m weird. They can’t imagine a black girl speaking Marathi or Urdu, and when I break out the French? Lord have mercy! You would swear I grew a second head or something. I’m already tired of explaining to them that I was born in Canada but lived in India all my life.”

  “Sis, because they have closed minds doesn’t mean you should feel bad. You’re well rounded. You speak four languages fluently. That opens more doors for you. And besides, you got into Yale Law—come on now! Be proud. I’m definitely very proud of you.”

  “I am. But it feels good to know you’re proud of me, Holi.”

  Chad stopped walking for a second as his sister used the nickname she’d created for him when she was a little girl. “It has been so long since you’ve called me that. I never realized how much I missed it.”

  She sighed. “I miss you. How’s Mom?”

  “Good. She is on her yearly trip with Deneeda.”

  “Where are they off to this time?”

  “Brazil—I think.”

  “Don’t they get enough sun in Jaipur?”

  Chad grinned and continued on his way toward home. He spoke to Eliza all the way home, and once he was inside the house with the doors closed, his phone beeped. “Sis, I have to go. Phone is dying, and I cannot let that happen. I have an omega patient I’m tracking right now so if anything changes I must be available.”