Get Katja (19 page)

It feels like a bomb has gone off in his stomach, not unlike the pain he had suffered during one previous withdrawal bout, but condensed to a few moments rather than the couple of weeks. He tries to pull himself upright a few times before finally managing it through a fog of sparkling lights that blossom and bloom in his vision. When he looks up, there’s a man there holding a gun over him and Nik recognises him as the one who grabbed Katja in the elevator.

“Don’t move,” the man tells him shakily, as if it were even possible for Nikolai to do so in that moment.

And it’s not just the pain and disorientation which roots him to the spot, which paralyses him—it’s the sight of both Katja gagged and bound to the bed with cable ties, and the man in the disability chair next to her. Nikolai had almost managed to convince himself that it was a mistake or a coincidence, Vladimir Kohl’s name on the boards outside, or perhaps a relative out for revenge, or even someone who had assumed the man’s identity.

But despite the cocoon of electronics and support devices that encompass the man there is no doubt in Nikolai’s mind of who it really is. Kohl tells the nurse to go and the man does so, leaving Nikolai alone in the room with Katja and the body of Lady D. And Kohl.

His limbs are strapped to the chair with thick black rubber straps and they each have a wasted quality to them, the hospital-issue pyjamas hanging from them. A neck brace holds his head upright, squeezing his cheeks up towards his eyeballs. The only thing that moves is one finger, tap-tapping on the little plastic shelf it rests on, all of his tics condensed into one. In his hand is something small and dark.

“So what did you think you were going to achieve coming here exactly, Nikolai?” Kohl asks. “Was that supposed to be your big moment? Rush in here and rescue her? Don’t be fucking ridiculous.”

Nikolai pushes himself a little more upright, looking at Katja for a sign of what he should do but she just looks back, shakes her head.

“If you’re thinking of trying anything then don’t bother,” Kohl says. “You see that IV line in her arm? It’s connected to this little device in my hand which in turn is connected to that machine over there. I press this button and it delivers a little cocktail of drugs straight into her. Do you want to know how I know this, Nikolai? Tell me you want to know.”

Nikolai says nothing.

“I know because I was hooked up to it for the first few months I was here. I was in such agony after what you did to me that they had to connect me so that I could deliver my own pain relief as and when I needed it. The machine has safeguards, of course, otherwise patients like me might just keep clicking until the drug has pushed out what little life is left in them. But the safeguards can be switched off.”

Kohl’s eyes glisten, the faintest smile on his face. His finger stops
tap-tapping.
He presses the button on the device in his hand and there’s a whirr then a beep. On the bed Katja stiffens and a few moments later her back arches. She hisses, struggling against the cable ties.

“It’s okay, Nikolai. I don’t hold you responsible like I do her. You’re too much of a fuck-up to have had any real involvement aren’t you? Just dragged along for the ride?”

He clicks the button again, whirr-beep, and Nikolai starts towards Katja but Kohl shouts at him to stop. Katja grunts through the tape.

“Don’t worry,” Kohl says. “It isn’t going to be over with quickly. Relatively speaking.”

Next to Nikolai, Lady D stirs. She groans, unfolds herself slowly. Blood drips from a gash across one side of her shaven head and her eye is starting to swell. She sits upright, blinking as she takes in the room around her—Nikolai frozen to the spot beside her, the punk girl strapped to the bed and hooked up to an IV drip and the guy in the chair half-consumed by machinery with some sort of trigger device in one hand. She touches the side of her head, examines the blood left behind on her palm and fingers from doing so, looks at the fire extinguisher lying on the floor.

She gets to her feet, using the adjacent wall to steady herself.

Nikolai feels a momentary hope, realising that Kohl is probably now regretting being so quick to get rid of Moonbeam so that he could get down to enjoying himself in private

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Kohl says warily. His finger flexes over the button on the top of the trigger device. “This doesn’t concern you.”

“Where’s my money?” is all she asks. And Nikolai’s hope sinks.

“It just walked out of here,” Kohl tells her.

The debt collector looks at the door, a line of smeared blood leading out into the corridor beyond. Her blood. Nikolai catches her eye, silently imploring her to stay and help, but she turns away.

“Thank you,” she says to Kohl, then closes the door behind her and leaves the rest of them to it.

Nikolai stares at the door long after the locking mech-anism has clicked shut and the shadow of the debt collector has gone from the window.

“That’s better, a little privacy for us to share this special moment,” Kohl says, the momentary fear that Lady D was going to interfere with his plans now gone. “Poor thing. I think she needs another hit.”

He clicks the delivery mechanism and a dose slides up the IV and into Katja. She jerks against the cable ties, her head lolling to one side so that she looks straight at Nikolai.

“Stop it,” Nikolai says, crouching with his palms planted on the ground.

“
Stop it?
” Kohl mocks. “No. I don’t think I will.”

It’s as he clicks the mechanism again that Nikolai leaps up, charging at the bed to which Katja is strapped. He he stumbles and collides with an instrument trolley, both he and it slamming into the gurney, the trolley spilling its contents across the bed and onto the floor. Nikolai tumbles over it and onto the bed, onto Katja, then slides off again and crashes to the ground.

And all the while Kohl clicks the feed line, clicks it.

Kohl laughs, tells Nikolai to back away from her once more.

“Was that it? That’s the best you’ve got? That was the most pathetic attempt at heroism I’ve ever seen,” he says. “You are, and always will be, nothing but a useless
fucking
junkie, Nikolai—do you understand that? Tell me you understand that.”

Nikolai nods, removing himself from the mess he has created.

“Say it.”

Nikolai looks at Katja, her eyes heavy and having difficulty focusing.

“
Say it.
”

“I’m nothing but a useless fucking junkie,” he says.

And Kohl smiles—then delivers another dose.

After leaving the room, Lady D looks down the corridor to her left towards the entry doors. They’re still barricaded shut but they’re being pounded upon, muffled voices and crackling radio-speak audible from beyond. He can’t have gone that way. To her right the corridor leads past several doors to a dead end, a small wall decorated with emergency procedure posters and pamphlets for counselling services.

She walks quietly away from the main doors, listening for sounds other than those of life support equipment coming from the rooms beyond then notices one door which is slightly open. It looks like some sort of storage closet, nestled between two of the ward rooms, the scent of disinfectant emerging from within. She slows, listens, then hears a noise coming from inside.

A sudden crash comes from Kohl’s room and something which could have passed for guilt momentarily crosses her but she swats it away to focus on the task at hand. Her head throbs, her entire body aches, and that shower is further away than ever—but she still has a job to do.

She quietly opens the door of the closet and finds the nurse bent over before her, clawing at the ground. He’s facing away from her, having pushed aside some cardboard boxes and a stack of mops to expose the floorboards beneath, one of them pulled up and a dim light emanating from the gap which has opened.

The gun sticks out of his trousers. Her gun.

The money is stuffed into his uniform’s small pockets. Her money.

She snatches the weapon from him before he even realizes she is there. He spins around and it only takes him a split second to realize how much shit he is in. His hands go up in submission, the gun now pointed at him.

“W-w-wait,” he pleads, shuffling on his knees to face her. “I didn’t . . . isn’t my fault—”

“My money,” she says simply.

The thudding against the ward’s entrance grows louder and there are electronic beeps, perhaps security is now trying to bypass the door locks.

“Listen, this is the only way out of here,” the nurse says, nodding at the gap in the flooring. “There used to be an old stairwell here but it was blocked off years ago. They built these storage closets in the space that was left behind, one on each level but you can still . . . if you lift the boards you can get down into the closet on the level below. We could split the money and . . .”

Lady D levels the gun at his head.

There’s a crash and Lady D affords a brief glance back down the corridor. Something is being slammed against the doors and a crack appears across one of them. The chairs hold but she doesn’t know for how much longer.

“Okay, okay,” the nurse says, frantically pulling the notes from his pockets and spilling them onto the floor before him. “The Universe brought the money to me back there and I thought maybe it was just a reward for . . . for what I’d done but obviously it wants you to have it now but that’s okay because, you know, these things are planned, we’re just cogs, beautiful little cogs but there’s a plan, man, I mean ma’am, and it’s all . . . it’s all just laid out you know?”

Lady D says nothing, keeps the gun trained on him.

“Go on, take it, I didn’t really want it anyway,” he says to her, shoving the notes towards her but still she doesn’t move. She looks at them as if it were his own feces the man was offering her. “Go on, it’s what you wanted isn’t it? It’s what you came for? Ma’am? Look, I j-just want you to know that none of this was my fault. Everything is just a series of events chained together by the Universe, you know?”

Lady D nods. “It’s all about the Universe,” she says.

“Right!” the nurse says, relaxing slightly now that she understands.

“Yeah,” Lady D says. “Which is funny because you know what?”

The nurse shakes his head.

“I’ve got a black hole for you right here.”

And she pulls the trigger.

For a long time she just stares at the body.

Blood spreads out from the wound in the man’s forehead, rolling towards the crack in the floorboards which he had started to open up. It sinks into the grain, leaving a glistening sheen. Lady D pushes the nurse to one side with her foot and he slumps onto his back, his eyes open and the goofy, spaced-out look now there in perpetuity.

The money he’d been offering her,
her
money, the money she has been chasing all day and all night lies scattered on the floor next to him. Wet with fresh blood. She crouches down and picks it up, sorts through the notes, separates them where they have clotted together. Her fingers are sticky now too and when she looks at them, it’s as if they belong to someone else.

Is this what it comes to?
she asks herself.
Scavenging bloody notes like a junkie slurping up the remainder of everyone else’s coke?

There’s another
thud
on the ward doors, another
crack
. Someone shouting through the gap which must have opened up.
The Policie are on their way
, they say. And from Vladimir Kohl’s room, the whirr-beep of the IV delivery mechanism as the man, presumably, brings the punk closer to her own death.

Kneeling in the puddle of blood, Lady D lets out a long, deep breath.

Her tiredness is a blanket that has been thrown over her, something weaved from the heaviest material known to man, pressing down on her, crushing her. Her head throbs from where she had been struck by the fire extinguisher, her vision blurry. Her arms ache, her feet ache, her back aches.

She has the money and she has her escape route but she just can’t bring herself to move.

“
Stop!
” Nikolai shouts, rooted to the spot a couple of feet from Katja’s bed and the toppled instrument trolley, as if there were an invisible wall stopping him from getting any closer.

“Or what?” Kohl asks, triggering the IV line for the fourth or fifth time since Lady D left the room. Katja’s breathing is laboured, her writhing sluggish and constant, interrupted only by the sudden massive twitches which wrack her body with each dose pumped into her.

Nikolai steps around the end of the bed towards Kohl on the other side but the man calls for him to come no farther, clicks again and again. Katja’s making choking sounds now. Her eyes roll back into her head.

“If I jumped you there’s nothing you could do,” Nikolai says but his words lack intent.

“Of course there is,” Kohl tells him, fingering the trigger.

“That’s security,” Nikolai says when muffled shouts come from the corridor is outside. “The duty nurse managed to trigger an alarm when the debt collector and I broke in. They’ll be here any minute.”

“You think I care about that?” Kohl says. “You think I care about anything else other than making this bitch suffer? Well I don’t, Nikolai. I don’t.”

“I don’t believe you. I think you’ve been dreaming of getting out of here for months and you’re not going to give that up just so you can get your revenge on her.”

“You’re wrong—that was the only thing I wanted out
for
,” Kohl says and, as if to prove his point, clicks the trigger again.

Whirr-beep
. Katja’s body spasms. Her struggles are lessening, her breathing growing more and more shallow.

Nikolai takes another step closer.

“Stay where you are. I mean it.”

“The thing is, you’re wrong too, Kohl.”

“How’s that?”

“You think that she really matters to me? She’s the one that got me in this mess in the first place. She dragged me to the mainland then dropped me when I was no longer of any use to her and then just when I thought I was sorting things out she comes crashing back in again. What the fuck do I care what happens to her?”

“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.