by Simon Logan
“You care.”
“Yeah?” Nikolai says and takes another step forwards. Only a few feet away from Kohl now, the man helpless in his chair.
“Don’t bluff, Nikolai, it doesn’t suit you.” He clicks the trigger again.
More banging and crashing from outside, more shouting.
“Just get it over with so that I can get out of here before they break in,” Nikolai says.
Another step.
“Back!” Kohl shouts, panicking now, clicking the trigger over and over so quickly that it doesn’t have time to properly reset itself each time. “Nikolai!”
And then Nikolai stops. Holds up his hands, fingers spread.
On the bed beside them, Katja is utterly still. She’s stopped responding to the delivery of the doses. Eyes closed, body limp. Kohl is out of breath from the strain and effort. Sweat rolls across his furrowed brow, down across his face and onto the neck brace.
A tired smile spreads across his lips as he looks at Katja and for a while that is all there is in the room—Katja’s stillness and Kohl’s smile.
73.
Until, a few moments later, she opens her eyes.
Looking right back at Kohl, they’re not bleary or confused as he would have expected but as lucid as he has ever seen them. She pulls herself up onto one elbow.
She shouldn’t be able to move that far. The cable ties . . .
Kohl presses the trigger again. The delivery mechanism whirrs and beeps.
She sits up farther, holds one wrist up for him to see. It is raw and inflamed but no longer bound.
Click. Whirr. Beep.
With her freed hand Katja picks up a scalpel blade from the bed and slices through the other cable tie.
Kohl clicks again. And again. He looks at Nikolai who is just standing there, unconcerned. Clicks again.
Katja peels away the surgical tape from her mouth, pulls herself upright, swivels her legs around and off the gurney.
Click. Click. Click.
Kohl doesn’t understand it, sweat now streaming down his face.
Click. Click. Click.
She stands right beside him now. Reaches down and picks up the IV line which is plugged into the delivery machine, feeding it through her hand like a sailor would a rope, only when she gets to the end it’s no longer plugged into the back of her hand.
She reaches out to Kohl, his eyes going wide with panic, and tips his head down, maneuvering it so that he can see properly.
So that he can see what she has done.
74.
It feels as if her head is being wrapped in thicker and thicker layers of translucent cotton wool, the world around her growing fuzzy and distant and if she’s going to get out of there she’s going to need to do something soon as whatever it is that Kohl is pumping into her is threatening to overwhelm her.
“It’s okay, Nikolai. I don’t hold you responsible like I do her,” Kohl is saying.
The machine she is hooked up to whirr-beeps and she counts the two seconds it takes for the hit to reach her, bracing herself for its cold entry into her veins. It comes just as Nikolai shouts for Kohl to stop.
Then she’s aware of another figure, the debt collector getting to her feet, blood trickling across her head. Kohl’s saying something to her. Katja forces herself to focus, catching Nikolai’s attention. Her eyes go from him to the instrument trolley beside her, the one which has a line of instruments lined up on it—now including the bare scalpel blade the nurse had used to cut the surgical tape he applied to her mouth. She tugs on the cable tie binding the wrist nearest Nikolai, flexing her fingers to draw attention to it.
Then the debt collector is standing by the door. She makes the briefest of eye contact with Katja before leaving the room and then it’s just her, Nikolai and Kohl.
“Poor thing”, Kohl says mockingly, “I think she needs another hit.”
One second, two seconds, then another cold surge floods into Katja. Nikolai asks the man to stop, and it’s as Kohl clicks on the mechanism again that Nikolai leaps forwards, crashing into the instrument trolley and flopping onto Katja’s bed before sliding off and crumpling to the ground. Kohl is laughing, mocking Nikolai but it doesn’t matter.
She can feel the coolness of the scalpel blade beneath the tip of one finger, grabbed and dropped there by Nikolai. She looks at Kohl to make sure he hasn’t spotted the blade but the neck brace keeps his gaze fixed several inches too high. She has to stretch to reach it and for a moment thinks that it’s too far away, but she manages to use her middle and ring finger to slide it close enough to grab. She works it into a better position then curls her wrist as far as she can, and starts sawing at the plastic cable tie. She finishes the job, the cable tie snapping open. Checks again that Kohl hasn’t noticed but he’s too busy antagonising Nikolai. Nikolai notices, however, her hand slipping between the metal guard rail of the bed, leaning on the IV line momentarily so that it pops free, a little translucent snake with a single, huge fang.
“I’m nothing but a useless fucking junkie,” Nikolai is saying, his head dipped low in shame. Kohl smiling at him.
Katja, keeping her hand low and out of Kohl’s line of sight, reaches farther through the bed rail then stabs the needled end of the line deep into Kohl’s thigh. For an instant she is certain that he will cry out in pain, the extent of his condition a lie or an exaggeration, that he will leap from the chair and finish her off in a fury—but there’s no reaction. There really is no feeling for him beneath his neck.
Kohl clicks the trigger and the machine whirr-beeps again—only this time, although she finds herself bracing instinctively, the sounds aren’t followed by a flood of coldness and disorientation.
Nikolai moves around the end of her bed, towards Kohl. “If I jumped you there’s nothing you could do,” he says.
“I think you’ve been dreaming of getting out of here for months and you’re not going to give up hope on that just so that you can get your revenge on her,” he says. Keeping his attention. Riling him.
Kohl tells him he’s wrong and clicks the trigger again. Katja plays along, stiffening her body, faking spasms for good measure, making sure her arm doesn’t move far from the position in which it should be secured. Nikolai keeps getting closer and closer to Kohl, threatening him, cajoling him. Kohl clicks again. Katja fakes it again, closing her eyes now.
“Back!” Kohl shouts, panicking now, clicking the trigger over and over. The IV machine makes a grinding noise.
Katja keeps her eyes closed, letting Kohl deliver dose after dose into own bloodstream, wondering how long it will take for him to feel the effects or if the damage to his brain will prevent him even sensing anything. Then it’s quiet. She hears Kohl panting. He’s stopped clicking. She gives him a few moments of belief that he has done what he was so desperate to do before snatching it from him again when she opens her eyes and sits upright.
He keeps pressing the trigger and she lets him, then shows him what she has done—shows him the IV line spiked into his right thigh.
When his expression changes it’s like a strange flower blossoming—the shock and terror which replaces the anger and confusion emerging slowly, rather than instantaneous. And once this has happened it’s like a cascade, the drugs that he has been pumping himself full of for the last few minutes suddenly overwhelming, his hatred of her inverted and turned in upon himself, his damaged neurons firing belatedly to warn him of the danger.
His eyes go wide, his mouth opens. His finger twitches on the trigger.
It’s too late. His system is flooded and he knows it.
His breathing grows ragged.
His eyes are now wider than should be possible, swivelling around, his lids flickering over them. He tries to say something but the words won’t come out. Katja and Nikolai, they just look at him.
Then Nikolai leans in close. “Not bad for a useless fucking junkie,” he says.
>
And the muscles in Kohl’s face spasm—then everything stops.
75.
“Let’s get out of here,” Katja says, striding past Nikolai.
She rounds the bed and as she reaches for her guitar the room around her shifts and she tips forwards, crashing into the wall. Nikolai hurries across to help her up but she waves him away.
“I’m fine,” she says. She blinks, her vision swimming from the initial dose of chemicals Kohl pumped into her, focussing on the guitar. It’s charred, the neck fractured, most of the strings gone. She knows how it feels.
The strap, however, is still intact and so she slips it over her neck, pinning the instrument close to her body, more to stop it from falling to pieces than for security. She steps into the corridor outside then freezes.
“What is it?” Nikolai asks, peering over her shoulder.
Up ahead a gap has been opened between the double doors that provide the only entrance to the ward and a set of hydraulic claws, of the type used to pry a victim out of a crashed car, are currently widening it.
The two turn and head in the opposite direction sweeping past another dozen or so rooms before reaching the end of the passageway.
“There must be another way out,” Katja says, checking the doors one by one but only finding empty intensive care suites.
There’s a loud hiss then the sound of metal creaking. More thuds against the double doors.
“Shit.”
She turns back.
“Where are you going?” Nikolai asks.
“I don’t—”
And she’s stopped again.
A few metres ahead Lady D stands before them, the door to the storage closet she has just stepped out of open, her shaven head dark with blood and gun in her hand.
76.
Behind the debt collector is the body of the nurse who attacked Katja and dragged her up into Kohl’s room. He is prostrate, a bindi-style bullet wound in his forehead glistening with the blood clotting within it. Money is scattered around him and a couple of the floorboards beneath him have been pulled away to reveal a dim light below.
“Help me move him,” Lady D says.
Katja. “And I should help you, why?”
“Because I have a gun aimed at you.”
“I’m getting used to it,” Katja says, shrugging. “Anyway, where were you five minutes ago when that nutbag had me strapped to the bed?”
“I’m here now. I don’t owe you anything.”
“And now I don’t owe you anything,” Katja counters, nodding at the money.
“Fine,” the debt collector says tersely, pulling the nurse’s body up and hooking her arms under him. She drags him back into Kohl’s room, Katja watching through the open door as the body is dropped and the gun rested in its lax grip.
“They can draw their own conclusions,” Lady D says when she comes back out. She breezes past the two and back into the closet, pulling up another floorboard with her bare hands. She sits on the floor, takes off her heels, and swivels her legs through the gap.
“You coming or not?” she asks.
And Katja thinks of the other transvestite hoodlums from the gig, waiting down there for her, ready to grab her when she is in the middle of dropping herself down and unable to do anything about it.
“We’ll manage,” she says.
“Really? This is the only way out unless you think you can get past the ones currently trying to break those doors in.”
There’s a high-pitched pneumatic whine, the amplified cousin of the sound the machine that had almost killed her made, as the claw-device peels back the metal of the doors like they were a food wrapper.
“Hey!” someone shouts and a torch beam sweeps across the polished floor. “Stay where you are!”
“She’s right,” Nikolai says. “There’s no other way out.”
“And I’m not waiting for you. You do what you like,” the debt collector says, then drops through the gap she has opened up. Katja looks in to see what looks like another storage closet beneath, nobody else visible.
The sounds of metal tearing cease and the voices are louder now. Then maybe footsteps.
“Katja . . .”
“Go!” she says suddenly, pushing Nikolai towards the gap.
He lowers himself in then drops through, landing with a thud and looking up at her expectantly. She lowers her guitar down to him then follows him through while hanging by her hands, draggings the loose boards back into close to their original position. It won’t fool anyone for long, but it doesn’t have to. She lets go and drops to the ground just as the Policie burst through up above.
77.
“Where did she go?” Nikolai asks.
“I don’t see her,” Katja says as they cautiously emerge from the closet. The silent passageway extends out on either side of them then a Policie officer appears at one end and instantly they are on the run again.
He shouts after them as they disappear deeper and deeper into the hospital, finally pushing their way through a door marked Maintenance Staff Only then down a set of metal stairs, turning and turning on itself before emerging into a large, darkened room filled with boxes. There’s a light at the far side and Katja chases it down, Nikolai right behind her.
They emerge onto a loading bay, a concrete platform eight or nine feet above the ground. They drop down and pin themselves to the wall, listening for the sounds of the officer chasing them. Rain is falling heavily, crashing all around them and mixing with pools of engine oil.
Once they feel it’s safe they edge their way up the short alleyway and they’re almost at the exit when the patrol car swerves around the corner in front of them.
It revs its engine and speeds towards them.
78.
Before they can react, the car screeches to a halt a metre or so away and the door opens.
When Katja realizes that the person who steps out is Lady D she doesn’t know whether it’s better or worse than the Policie officer she expected.
“If you want to make it out of here get in the car. You’ve turned down my help once already—don’t do it again.”
“Until only a few minutes ago you were after me just like all the others.”
“I wasn’t after you, I was after my money—and now I have it. Are you getting in or not?”
This time the decision is easier to make.
Katja and Nikolai both climb in the back, finding the unconscious form of a Policie officer already there.
“You might want to dump that,” the debt collector says.
Katja reaches across and opens the other door then shoves the man out, slams the door shut again. Lady D throws the car into reverse and backs it out of the alley towards the main hospital car park.
Beyond, more patrol cars are visible, their lights flickering off the nearby buildings, some parked, others circling slowly . A row of them are blocking the main exit from the hospital grounds.
“Is his hat still there?” Lady D asks.
Katja picks it up from the back seat and hands it over. Lady D puts it on then sticks the car back into gear and slowly trundles towards the road block. One of the officers manning it looks up when they see the other vehicle approaching, squinting to identify their colleague behind the wheel, relaxed enough that he doesn’t unhook his thumbs from his belt.
Lady D keeps it slow, hits the button to roll the driver’s side window down and as they draw nearer the officer leans in to speak to them. It’s as he does this that Lady D suddenly revs the engine and the patrol car pitches forwards, slamming into two of the other cars just at the point where they meet. She keeps the revs high until it pushes through, the officer still fumbling to free his gun from its holster when then the car finally breaks free and speeds off.
79.
Katja and Nikolai do their best to stay upright in the back seat as the car swerves from side to side, threatening to to
pple over as the debt collector throws it around corners without braking. There are sirens in the near-distance and the call for help to the other patrol cars crackles through the radio mounted on the dashboard.
Lady D soars through a red light at a junction, narrowly missing a car coming in the opposite direction, before the flashing lights of another patrol car appears behind them. Its siren blares at them and it attempts to slide up beside them, but Lady D swerves away, so it swings to the other side, this time connecting its nose to their tail. Sparks from the point of contact flash against the window next to Katja, and then they are sent into a spin. The neon glare of the city whirls around them for a few moments before they come to a sudden stop, slamming into another parked car.
Katja pulls herself upright, Nikolai doing the same beside her, and she looks out to see one corner of the hood crumpled and steam slipping out from the darkness within. Lady D is slumped across the front seats, having been thrown there at the moment of final impact, groaning and clutching a fresh head wound.
“They’re coming,” Nikolai says, pointing at the headlights approaching them.
Katja jumps through into the front, shoving the debt collector into the passenger seat and restarting the stalled engine. Metal grinds against metal as she searches for a gear, throwing it into reverse and backing away from the oncoming patrol car, locking the steering to swing around in a semi-circle, the red-and-blue flashing past. She forces it into first and accelerates off before their pursuer can correct themselves.
“Two blocks north then a hard left,” Lady D says, wiping the blood from her head.
Smoke is now pouring from the front-end of the car and the engine is making a regular clunking noise but it still manages to speed away, the other car now back on their tail.
“Ready?” Lady D says, glancing over shoulder then at Katja. Her hand is wrapped around the handbrake. Nikolai grips his seat.