Benchley peered into Jerry’s room, but he was still lying there just as before. Through the curtains the light was dimming as night approached. It would only be another hour or so before the chopper arrived to take him to Sophinia’s.
Then something caught his eye. Jerry’s index finger was twitching slightly. He pushed open the door and listened closely, but all he could really hear was the sound of the machine monitoring his heart rate with a beep here and there.
“Cass...”
Benchley froze and looked at Jerry. He was mumbling her name and his eyes were flickering slightly. Was he waking up?
Benchley entered the room and moved closer to him. “Jerry, can you hear me?”
“Cass...where’s Cass...?” it was barely more than a whisper leaving his mouth, but Benchley could still make it out. He leaned right over, bringing his ear right in front of Jerry’s mouth.
“It’s okay Jerry, she’s fine.”
“Where...where is she...?”
“Sophinia and Claire are looking after her. They’re getting all your blood out of her body. They think she’s gonna be okay,” Benchley said, trying to comfort him in his weakened state.
“She’s okay?” Jerry breathed. Even with his barely audible voice, it was easy to hear the relief.
“Yeah, she’s okay.”
“Good...guess I’ll be leaving now...”
“Don’t talk like that,” Benchley said instantly. “You’re one tough son of a bitch, Jerry, you’ll make it.”
CLICK.
Benchley’s face turned to shock as he felt the metal gun barrel press against his temple. He looked at Jerry whose eyes were wide open and filled with emotionless determination.
“I’m discharging myself,” he growled, his voice as deep as a mine shaft from the bite on his neck. He had snatched his gun while pretending to be so weak as to get him closer.
He pistol wiped Benchley round the face, knocking him out completely. Jerry jumped up out of the bed, but didn’t pull any of the wires that he was connected to off just yet. He needed to be smart about this. He had a plan.
Outside, Goose noticed that Benchley had been gone a while. He started to walk towards Jerry’s door, but before he could get within ten feet of it, Benchley walked out and started off back down the corridor away from him.
“He okay?” Goose asked.
All he got was a thumbs up from Benchley, who was still walking away. Goose just took his word for it and started walking back away from Jerry’s room.
He reached the end of the corridor and turned and when he did, Benchley was gone.
“Benchley? Benchley! We’re supposed to watch the corridor!” he yelled.
He started marching towards Benchley’s end of the corridor but in the corner of his eye he noticed the empty bed in Jerry’s room. He burst open the door and saw an unconscious Benchley with wires attached to him. Jerry had somehow wired Benchley up and rigged it not to set off the alarms. He was good when it came to electronics.
As soon as he pulled them off, sirens went off.
“Benchley! You okay?!” he said shaking him awake.
“Ahh, shit!” the cop groaned, rubbing the bloody side of his head where Jerry had hit him.
“Where’s Jerry?!”
“He’s gone! He took my gun, he said he was discharging himself!”
“No...Jerry, you crazy son of a bitch!” Goose growled and grabbed his radio. “Anybody, I need help up here!” he yelled.
“Goose, what’s going on?” Joe’s voice asked over the CB.
“It’s Jerry, he’s awake and he’s gone!”
“Gone?! What do you mean he’s gone?!”
“He ambushed Benchley, took his gun, radio, uniform, keys, everything!” Goose shouted back.
“Why?!”
“Why do you think? He thinks he’s protecting us, he’s gonna go after Selena alone!”
He didn’t get a response from Joe, but that was probably because he’d just thrown the radio at the wall. What the hell was Jerry thinking?
“He can’t go after Selena alone...she’s a pureblood!” Benchley said, wincing in pain as he rubbed his head. “He’s not that crazy.”
“Oh, trust me, he is!” Goose warned.
“She’ll rip his bones out if she thinks that his marrow makes his blood special!”
“Shut up!” Goose didn’t need to hear that. He already knew. He picked the radio up (it was sturdy) and made sure it was on the open channel. “Jerry, do you copy?”
He waited for a reply but got none.
“Jerry, damn it, I know you can hear me! Answer!”
“You didn’t say ‘over’,” Jerry’s voice sung back after a second of static.
Goose breathed a sigh of relief. Only Jerry would say something like that, but he wasn’t sure how much of Jerry was actually there.
“Dude, what the hell are you doing...over?”
“This is cool ain’t it? It’s like we’re secret agents,” Jerry’s voice laughed over the radio.
“Come on man! What the hell, I thought we were in this together?” Goose asked over the radio.
Behind him Steve, Sarah and Joe rushed up and waited. Joe looked ready to snatch the CB out of Goose’s hands, but he decided to give him a chance to play negotiator instead. He didn’t answer back.
“Oh, for cryin’ out loud! Over!”
“That’s better. She knows who I am, Goose. It’s only a matter of time before she comes after you guys to get to me. I’m not gonna let that happen.”
“Jerry, whatever the hell just healed you obviously wants you alive. Don't throw that away. You can’t do this alone, over.”
“It’s the last thing she’ll be expecting,” he pointed out. “Over.”
“That’s because it’s freakin’ suicide! Over.”
The four of them rushed towards the security station with a dazed and wobbly Benchley following behind. They burst in find Adams glued to the screens. He’d been listening over his radio.
“I got him. He’s moving down the third floor stairwell,” he said.
On the screen, Jerry, still in cop uniform, rushed past one of the cameras before turning a corner. He was picked up on a second camera a moment later.
Adams switched over the channel on his radio and spoke. “All units, we have a suspect in stolen police uniform fleeing custody on the third floor, corridor 3C. He is armed and extremely dangerous, but is to be captured alive and unharmed, out.”
Over half a dozen cops rushed through the corridors of the hospital, attempting to box Jerry in.
“I’m gonna go, I’ve got to talk to him face to face,” Goose said. “Guide me to him.”
“He’s now in corridor 3G, heading towards the pediatric ward,” Adams relayed over the radio.
Goose raced up the stairs towards the third floor just as the police started to close in on Jerry. The direction Jerry was taking was leading him straight towards them. Jerry moved past a pair of nurses that were coming out of a door on his left and continued to follow the signs that pointed to the nearest exit. Just as he turned the corner he suddenly came face to face with six cops, all of whom had their weapons drawn.
“Get down on the ground kid!”
“Drop the weapon!” they yelled, but Jerry had already ducked back around the corner. He ran about twenty feet back down the corridor before stopping and pulling his gun. He took aim and fired at the fire detector on the ceiling, which caused the sprinklers to burst open and alarms to start blaring.
Just as the cops turned the corner, two massive containment doors slammed down from the roof on both sides of the corridor, locking off the area. They were about an inch of bulletproof glass thick and were sealed airtight.
Water rained down all over the corridor, soaking Jerry completely. The pediatric ward was completely locked down.
“He’s tripped the fire alarm!” one of the cops shouted down the radio, just as Goose came running up behind them.
“Adams, you gotta l
ift the doors!” he said.
“I can’t. It’s a built-in emergency procedure. The ward gets sealed off to stop a fire from spreading to the rest of the hospital,” he reported back. “At least he’s trapped.”
“Damn it, Jerry!” he yelled through the glass. “Don’t do this!”
His voice was muffled, but Jerry could still hear him.
“They almost killed Cass. I can’t risk that happening to you guys. I have to do this!” he shouted back.
“Don’t be stupid!”
Jerry didn’t answer. He walked through the door leading to the ward. Inside, several nurses and doctors were tending to frightened patients. Most of them were elderly and bedridden and at the end of the ward was a door leading to the infant care area. He looked around and quickly found what he needed. He walked towards an unoccupied bed with breathing apparatus next to it.
As he passed an elderly patient he stopped and looked down at his partially eaten meal.
“You gonna finish that?” he asked the scared old man lying in the bed. He seemed far more worried about a possible fire than the food or even the water that was falling from the sprinklers. Jerry took his silence as an answer and grabbed a left over sausage from the plate. “I’m starving,” he smiled and scoffed it.
He walked over to empty bed and started pulling tubes from the breathing machine. A few seconds later he detached the large blue oxygen canister from it and headed back towards the door.
“Everybody stay away from the corridor,” he yelled before leaving.
He laid the heavy metal canister on its side with the bottom of it pointing directly at the containment door that didn’t have cops behind it. He then walked over and smashed the glass case housing a fire axe. He grabbed a patient gown from the small cart that was sitting next to the door to pediatrics and wrapped it around the blade end of the axe.
At the other containment door, Goose realized what Jerry was doing, causing his face to drop in horror.
“Jerry, you crazy son of a bitch! Don’t even think about it!” he yelled.
Jerry turned to him and smiled. “Fire in the hole!”
He suddenly brought the axe down on top of canister valve. It broke off, causing the oxygen tank to become a giant metal missile that blasted the containment door to pieces. The hospital rumbled as dust and debris filled the corridor.
“Cool,” Jerry grinned.
He turned and gave Goose a fleeting nod before turning away and disappearing into the dust. It was hard not to think that Jerry was saying goodbye. He watched helplessly, trapped behind the containment door as his best friend ran off to his death.
They rushed back away from the blasted area, heading for the nearest exit, but it was too late. The delay had been all Jerry needed to get to Benchley’s car and drive away. As they arrived at where is had been parked, they noticed a small black box on the floor with a few loose wires sticking out.
“He ripped out the GPS,” one of the cops said.
Goose sighed. “You can’t track the car?” the cop shook his head.
He shouldn’t have been surprised about that. Jerry knew exactly how to dismantle any machine and he clearly didn’t want to be followed.
The police put out an APB on Jerry and the stolen cop car, but after four hours, his Houdini act was going just as strong as ever. It was as if he’d dropped off the face of the planet. As night fell everyone regrouped at Joe’s house.
Sitting there, watching their faces, Goose couldn’t help but feel so sorry for Joe. His nephew had miraculously been restored back to reasonably good health, but it had come with a trade-off. Jerry was out there all alone and fixing to do something incredibly stupid.
Joe was doing a pretty good job of staying calm, but it was impossible to miss just how much his hands were shaking. His eyes stayed fixed on a single random point in the room, but he was looking far beyond it. Some military men called it ‘the thousand yard stare’.
Claire was next to him constantly, as if she were his personal bodyguard. She hated seeing him feel so alone and stayed close to him in the hopes that her presence might help. Occasionally she’d rub his shoulder and send him a sympathetic look.
It was starting to become obvious that Claire didn’t just have an attraction to Joe, but that there were real feelings there as well. It would have been sweet, if it weren’t for the desperate situation. So would Steve’s constant whispers of encouragement to Sarah, who was sitting cross-legged in front of him, leaning back against his legs.
Sophinia and Rachel were talking in hushed tones, but it was obvious along which lines the conversation was running. They were trying to figure out just what the hell had visited Jerry in that hospital room. They had been talking for the last fifteen minutes and Goose was getting impatient. He wanted to know what they were talking about.
“Well,” Sophinia whispered. “I know some things that could do it, but not in ten seconds. For a witch doctor it would take hours, maybe even days.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Rachel nodded, “knocking out the cameras, healing him and putting the barrier up in his mind...it would take a whole team to do something like that.”
“Look, can we forget what healed him for the moment?” Goose finally said in a heavy tone. “It ain’t gonna mean jack if he ends up dead by tomorrow!”
“He’s right, we gotta find Jerry,” Sarah agreed.
“What would be his next move?” Claire asked.
“He said he was gonna use the Boss and the minigun. He thought they might even the odds for him,” said Steve.
“The Boss?” Joe asked, looking up.
“He said it could probably outrun a pureblood,” Goose nodded.
“I’ve amped the engine up by over two hundred horsepower and she’s lighter than before. On flat road or downhill, she could probably hit two hundred, maybe two ten,” his voice was usually so commanding, but now it just sounded hollow and weak.
It actually made Goose want to punch Jerry for what he was putting his uncle through.
“What the hell did you do to that car?” Claire asked in amazement.
“Complete custom job. The original Boss had a lot of flaws. He wanted me to completely rework it.”
“If we were to make it impossible for him to use either of those things, it might cause him to stop and rethink his plans. It might buy us some more time to find him,” Sophinia suggested.
“I could pull the starter motor from the Boss,” Joe said, seemingly agreeing. “He could easily hot wire it so taking the keys wouldn’t work.”
“Alright, we’ll head over to mine,” Goose said, pointing at Sarah and Steve. “Grab the minigun before he can.”
“Better take the grenades too...he seemed kinda interested in those,” Joe reminded him.
“True.”
They all left the house on their separate duties. Goose drove straight up to his place, which was only about eight minutes in the car. They immediately ran to his father’s gun shed and checked the locks. None of them had been tampered with, so it seemed as if they’d beaten him there. Goose went through five minutes unlocking all the bolts again and the three of them stepped inside.
Sarah and Steve hadn’t been there before, so their faces dropped when they saw the size of his father’s collection.
“So...this is why they never found any WMD’s in the Middle East,” Sarah said in shock.
“Yep, sorry George,” Goose quipped.
He walked over and pulled the minigun off of its metal stand. It was a damn heavy thing, weighing almost thirty kilos. Goose only weighed about eighty eight. The twelve kilo M-240 would be much easier to use. He decided to take that as well.
While Steve carried the minigun back to the car, Sarah started to grab as much ammo as she could.
“Sarah, make sure you take the belt feed and the ammo crates for the M-134,” Goose said.
“The what?” she asked, looking truly confused.
“Those, there, for the minigun,” he said, poin
ting to the crates he meant.
“Shit, I hope we don’t get pulled over with a damn minigun in the back seat!” Steve said, as he walked back in a few seconds later.
“Relax, Sophinia’s got all the cops looking for Jerry at the moment,” Goose reminded him.
“Right. We done here?”
Goose thought for a second, staring at the guns. A dark possibility had entered his mind and it wasn’t one he was willing to leave to chance.
Blood Heavy (Blood Heavy Series) Page 28