Lily
I have never felt like an intruder in the hospital. If anything, this place is my home, where I spend most of my time. I always feel comfortable here, even when I feel uncomfortable. If I’ve just been splattered by a particularly nasty wound, at least it happened in my hospital, and I know the quickest route to the nearest store cupboard, and there are friends and colleagues around me to console me. Now, as I lead Roman down the hallways, I feel like I’ve just broken in. Roman walks a few steps behind me, so it doesn’t look like we’re together. There’s nothing stopping me from just running to the nearest nurse or doctor and explaining what’s happening.
So why don’t I? Between the store cupboard and Les’ room, we pass three nurses I am relatively close to. It would be no great effort to quickly run over to one of them and tell them everything, point at Roman, and then call security. I am being kidnapped. Roman may not have his hands on me, or rope, or a binding of any kind, but I am technically being kidnapped. But that is naïve, and I know it. There’s something else to Roman, something that has nothing to do with being a madman in stolen scrubs. When he looked at me with those wolf-blue eyes and told me I could save people, I believed him. God help me, I really believed him. Maybe I’m going mad.
When we get to Les’ room, the hallway is deserted. Even the desk is deserted. It’s like a fire alarm has cleared everybody out of the building, but I didn’t hear any alarm. I turn to Roman. His face is knitted as he glances up and down the hallway. “Something isn’t right—” His eyes go wide, looking at something over my shoulder, and then he grabs me and rushes me into Les’ room. The windows are shut, the smell of a sleeping, sweating man potent in the air. Roman’s hands are firm on my shoulders. I am reminded, absurdly, of how firm they were that night over a month ago. I force that away, as he forces me into the adjoining bathroom to Les’ hospital suite.
“What are you doing?” I hiss.
“The police were sent after me,” Roman says, pulling the door almost completely shut, but leaving it open a sliver, “and now the same man who sent the blue fuckers after me has cleared this wing and sent some more fuckers after me—or Les.”
“Jesus Christ,” I say. I bring my hand to my chest, feel as my heart beats in a series of convulsions, which get quicker when I hear the footsteps: heavy footsteps, boot footsteps, just outside the room. “How did he clear the wing?” I mutter, mouth suddenly dry. My belly is a tight knot. I swallow down sick, try not to look at the toilet. If I’m sick, whoever is outside that door might hear me, and then . . . I swallow again.
“Be quiet,” Roman whispers.
I join him at the crack in the door. He is tall, so I have no problem finding a place. Through the crack, I can see Les’ bed and not much else, as though this is a movie and the director has framed the bed alone, highlighted it for effect. But what effect? I wonder. What possible effect could be produced from this? The footsteps get louder, and then the door creaks open, a long whine, a reminder that this hospital desperately needs new doors. The whine lengthens, so surely somebody will hear, surely somebody will come and stop this, whatever is about to happen. But if anybody hears, they do not come. The man enters the room and shuts the door behind him. He is not rushing by the sounds of it. That is the scariest thing. He is taking his sweet time.
Les is sleeping calmly in the bed, a vulnerable-looking ginger-haired man sweating through his gown with thin sheets draped over him and tubes sticking out of him, his heart monitor going beep-beep-beep, a sound so familiar to me I barely notice it until the possibility of this stranger ending it enters my mind. The stranger is still out of frame, but his footsteps are so loud now, so confident, that I barely hear the pounding of my heart: even if the pounding has reached my head now.
When the man finally comes into view, I mistake him for a machine. I am tired after a long shift, after a day and a night of madness, the pregnancy, seeing Roman passed out with a gunshot wound. And so my tired, tired mind cannot accept that a man would be covered in so much metal. I see him, and immediately reconfigure him into some massive, heaving robot. This lasts for around ten seconds, as the man stands before us, facing Les, back to the bathroom door. Then I squint through my fear. I see that the metal is not the cogs of machinery, but a ridiculous number of firearms: two shotguns laid crossways across his back, two pistols tucked between the shotguns, a small machinegun at the back of his hip, two long pistols strapped to the back of his thighs, and two small sawn-off shotguns strapped to the back of his calves. It would be laughable, if it wasn’t so terrifying.
I want to run, just duck and run past him and out the door. Being this close to something that looks built for death is too much, but I know that if I run, it will be no difficult task for this man to select one of his many guns and blow me to nothingness. Where is everyone? Where are the police? Where is security? This man—or whoever this man works for—must have some serious connections to be able to completely clear a hospital wing on a weekday morning like this.
I feel Roman tense. I am standing in front of him, tucked into his massive body, and as he tenses I feel his muscle tight against my back. I lean into it, thankful for the firmness, telling myself that this is safety. Which is a stupid lie. Roman, big and muscular as he is, dangerous as he might be, would stand no chance against a fully-armed man.
“My boss sends his regards,” the man says, voice deep.
The man walks around the bed. That’s when I see that he is wearing a mask, a black, plain mask pulled tightly around his head, with two eyes poking out between the holes. The front of his body is as absurdly armed as his back. I want to laugh, I am laughing; no, no, I am crying. Tears are streaming down my cheeks. I am sobbing. I can’t watch—a man being killed—killed in front of me. All my life, trying to help people, and now a man being killed in front of me . . .
The masked man brings his hands to Les’ face, two big paws, and with one paw squeezes the sleeping man’s nose and with the other covers his mouth. I am weeping openly now, but somehow silently. Roman brings his hand to my face and softly covers my mouth, ceasing my small sobbing noises. He brings his other hand to my eyes, covering them, but I can see through his fingers. The man leans his entire weight into Les, his two peering eyes completely blank of emotion, and just waits until Les stops writhing. The death spasms go on for several minutes, and then the man casually stands up and wipes his hands down on his cargo pants. Tears seep between Roman’s clasping fingers. I can’t stop. Les has released himself in death: spit, blood, shit, piss, all of it making the room reek like hell.
I whimper, too loud.
Roman tightens his grip on my mouth.
The masked man pauses, out of view, making no noise but for his breathing. Roman doesn’t curse, doesn’t make any noise, but I get the sense that he wants to curse from the way he silently maneuvers me so that I am standing behind him. He gestures with his hand for me to get down. I back away, near the toilet, and slide down low. Roman takes a step back from the door and lifts his hands in a boxing gesture.
This image freezes. All I can do is sit here, watching as Roman gets ready to bare-handed fight a man covered in metal, knees to my chest, panting, weeping. I have always thought of myself as strong. When Mom died, I cried, sure, but I never crumbled. When patients are in horrible states in front of me, I feel for them, but I never crumble. But now, I feel myself crumbling, crumbling into little pieces as I watch Roman get ready to fight a machine. My eyes burn with tears, my fingernails dig into my knees, my knees press painfully into my breasts. My throat is desert-dry and my bladder feels too full. I have not let it go, yet, but I know that if the machine-man barges through the door, I will. Shameful or not, I will. I wince, flinch, as something bites into my leg. Then I realize it’s my fingernails, cutting through my scrubs and into my flesh.
The image freezes, and stretches. Time opens up like a maw.
And then, after an eternity, the footsteps leave the bathroom door, leave Les’ room, and get quieter and quieter until I can no longer hear them.
Roman comes to me, standing over me, arms at his sides and chest heaving. He may be tough, but I can tell even he was a little scared then. He offers me his hand. “We have to go,” he says. “If the bastard can clear out a wing of your hospital, he has access to some pretty fuckin’ high-up people. You can’t be here. Give me your hand, Lily. Give me your hand, now.”
I am still shaking as I reach up and place my hand in his. He heaves me to my feet. I collapse, almost collapse but then Roman is at my side, propping me up.
“What’s wrong with me?” I whisper.
“You’re in shock,” Roman says. “Happens to the best of us. Come on.”
He moves my arm to that I have it around his broad shoulders, and then helps me out of the bathroom. I look at Les, who is stone-dead—the heart monitor is a flat-line, a humming noise—and wonder why people are not rushing in here to help him. On the way out, I press down hard on the Call Nurse button. Then Roman is half-carrying me down the emergency staircase.
“Roman, I can’t—”
I swallow, but it’s no good. I can’t see; my vision is blurry. My belly is a tight knot still, but I know that in a matter of seconds the knot is going to release and I am going to vomit, violently. I feel it, the breaking of the waves, the impending explosion. I swallow again, again. But it’s no good. This past day and a half has been way, way too much, too mad, too absurd. Too surreal.
“I’m going to be sick,” I manage to say, my voice faint as I try and move my lips as little as possible. “Set me down.”
We’re on the ground floor—I can hear the street outside—when Roman sets me down on the stairs. I grip the handrails, breathing deeply, trying to breathe away the feeling of nausea. But then I keel over and vomit all over the stone stairs, belly unknotting as it hurls vomit up my throat and out of my mouth. I vomit for a long time, or what feels like a long time. The tears stopped at some point after the man killed Les, but they return now, hot tears streaming down my face as vomit streams from between my lips. Then the vomit stops, but the tears don’t.
I slump, the steps digging into the small of my back, and cry pitifully.
“Are you okay?” Roman asks uncertainly.
What a question! Okay? What is okay, after all of this?
Something about the way he’s looking at me makes me angry. Or perhaps it’s the throbbing in my head, the feeling that my brain is pressing against my skull, or the way my heart is choking my throat, or the twisting sickness returning to my belly. Or perhaps it’s that everything I thought I knew about my life—my job, my strength, my certainty, my poise—has been torn away from me in the space of less than 48 hours.
“It’s your stupid baby!” I snarl, eyelids suddenly heavy. “So it’s your stupid fault!”
And then, darkness.