Marked (3 page)

 “Dr. Palis, what are you doing?” a frazzled nurse says when we enter the hallway.  “We’re on lockdown.  All the patients have to stay in their rooms with the door closed.” 

“Look, we got this,” Brielle says, getting in the nurse’s face when she attempts to pull on the doctor’s lab coat.  “You have like six hundred other people to take care of.  Why don’t you go do that and not worry about us.  We’re good.  Right as rabbits.  No worries here.”  Is she on drugs?

The nurse’s face is turning bright red.  “I don’t give a damn if you’re right as a rabbit or not, whatever the hell that means.  It’s my job to make sure all of the patients on this unit are safe.  Including that one.”  She thrusts a finger in the air towards me. 

The doctor stops and turns around.  “I take full responsibility for this patient, Molly.  I’ll make sure she’s safe.”

“But…” the nurse sputters. 

She’s about to argue more when the receptionist from the desk rushes over to her.  “Mr. Oden in room two is crashing.  Can I call a code blue while we’re in lock down?”  It only takes Molly half a second to decide that me being carried away by the doctor isn’t her top priority right now.  With a last withering glare in our direction, she takes off down the hall; presumably to wherever Mr. Oden is.

“This way,” Brielle says, leading us towards the stairwell. 

The doctor looks at her as if she’s an idiot.  Which she very well may be.  “You do realize the elevators have been shut down, right?  I’m sure that whoever it is we’re running from will also be using the stairs to get up here.”

“Who said anything about the stairs?” Brielle asks, stopping just short of the stairwell door.  Instead of opening that one, she opens the door next to it and leads us into a linen room.  Moving towards the back, she moves bins and carts of clean linens here and there causing all kinds of things to fall to the floor.  Is she hoping to hide us in the piles?  When the lockdown is over, someone is going to be wishing her a slow, painful death for making such a huge mess.

“You propose we hide in a linen closet?  What are you going to do, hide us under some sheets and tell us to be quiet?” I ask her.  She doesn’t even have the decency to look back at me.

Instead, she comes to a heavy, covered cart on the far wall and stops.  She tries pushing it, but it’s too heavy for her.  After a few more tries, she gives up.  “Alright Dr. Muscles, I need you to put her down and help me move this.”

“What’s behind it?” he asks, still holding me firmly in his arms.  I’m kind of hoping he does put me down.  I’m having that sensation again where I want to be anywhere except in his arms.  A hot, muscled doctor is holding me tightly against him and I want to get away from him.  When this is over, I seriously need my head checked again.

Brielle rolls her eyes.  “Look, you can either trust me or don’t.  If you don’t, help me move this f-ing thing and then go on your way.  If you do, then quit asking me to explain everything in detail while I’m trying to save all of our asses.”

I’m confused.  “I thought it was just me they’re after.”

With another eye roll and a ‘my god you’re annoying’ look as well, she takes a deep breath and says, “That was true five minutes ago.  But now you have our scent on you.  If they catch you, they’ll know we tried to help you and then our asses are toast too.”

“I have your scent on me now?  Are we running from blood hounds?”

While I’m talking, the doctor sets me gently on the floor, propping me up against the wall. I guess he’s decided to help her move the cart.  When he turns around, I begin falling to the side and am barely able to hold myself up with my left arm.  I’ve become a living rag doll. 

Regardless of the fact that I’m going to end up doing a face plant on the dirty hospital linoleum any second now, he steps away from me and helps Brielle push the cart.  When it’s far enough for her liking, she pulls out a dagger like thing from her backpack and feels along the wall checking the wallpaper for something.  God knows what.  When she’s found whatever she’s looking for, she jabs her knife into the wall.  Is she going to dig through the wall with a dagger?  She should have brought a sledgehammer if that’s the case.  It would have been a lot faster.  But it seems there’s a point to her madness.  She cuts a door into the wallpaper and peels it back.  Behind it is a real door.  “Where does it lead?” the doctor asks her.

“Pick her up and I’ll show you.”  Brielle is on her knees now with a couple of silver instruments that she’s using to fiddle with the door lock.  It only takes her a second to get it unlocked.  Obviously she’s had practice.  Next, she pulls a large magnet from her backpack and attaches it to the door, pulling it open despite the fact that it has no door handle.  The girl comes prepared.  Wrenching the door open, she disappears, leaving us no choice but to follow her skinny little ass through it.  The doctor scoops me up again and off we go.

“Um, didn’t you hear the whole stair argument a minute ago,” I ask when I see that she has led us to a different stairwell.

She looks up at me from three steps down and grins.  “These stairs haven’t been used since the sixties.”  That would explain the insane amount of dirt and dust coating everything and filling the air.  It swirls around as the fresh air from the door hits it.  Just what my open wounds need, to be filled with dirt.  “When they remodeled the hospital, this didn’t meet code.”  She waves her hands in the air, indicating the entire stairwell.  “Instead of tearing it out, they decided to lock it up, seal it off and forget about it; all of the doors have been papered over and no one remembers they’re here.  They’re not even on the blueprints on file at the county clerk’s office.”

“Then how do you know about it?” the doctor asks as we descend.

She shrugs.  “It’s kind of a hobby of mine.”

“Your hobby is to look for hidden stairwells in hospitals?” I ask snidely.

She stops and turns to look up at me from five stairs down.  “Have I mentioned yet that I’m here to save your ass?  Mocking me is not a good motivator.  It makes me want to leave you on the steps and get the fuck out of here by myself.”

I don’t believe her.  For some reason, she’s too vested in this.  “But I have your scent all over me, remember.  How will you escape the ‘big uglies’ if they come after you?” 

I’m still having trouble with the whole reason for this mad escape from unknown predators.  I’m starting to feel like a lame gazelle being rescued from lions by a crazy Meer cat.  A red-headed Meer cat.  It just seems inevitable that the lions will win.  If the threat is even real that is.

“Ladies, could we cut the chatter and just get down the damn stairs?” 

What a dick.  We both have a new target for our growing snarkiness now.  “What’s the matter?  Is she too heavy for you muscle man?” Brielle asks but then starts moving again.

It’s been a long time since someone carried me like a baby.  As a matter of fact, I have no memory of ever being carried like a baby.  I have to say, it’s a lot more unnerving than I ever would have guessed.  One wrong step on his part and we’ll both go splat at the bottom of the stairs.  I tighten my hold on his neck and try not to look down. 

 “Choking,” he rasps.

Oops.  Maybe a bit too tight.  I loosen my grip slightly, just enough so his Adam’s apple can move up and down to ensure he can still breathe.  I’m not letting go any more than that.

I try to block out my fear of falling which leads me to start obsessing over the fact that my ass is hanging out of my hospital gown.  Whoever put it on me apparently didn’t tie the little strings in the back.  I think back to everyone we passed in the hall on my floor and the fact that every time Brielle stops and looks up, my ass is right there to say hello.  Not that I’m overly modest, but I’m not looking forward to being carried down the street like this.  I think people will get the wrong idea.  Not to mention that I’m fairly confident that my ass is cute enough to draw at least a small crowd of eager onlookers.  I think that would hamper our escape a bit.  If this all turns out to be the work of a hallucinating paranoid schizophrenic with ugly red hair, I’m going to kill Brielle with my own bare hands.

At the bottom of the stairs, Brielle gets her little dagger out again and pushes it between the door and the frame and slides it along the door in a straight line.  I can hear the wallpaper on the other side of the door rip easily.  That must be one sharp knife she has.

“What’s on the other side?” Dr. Palis asks.

Brielle finishes picking the lock on the door before answering.  When she has it unlocked, she stands up and says, “It leads to an area of the hospital that’s used primarily for storage of old, outdated equipment.  It’s where old machinery goes to die.  There’s some old ass shit in there.”

“How do you know all this?” I ask.  It seems that she’s spent a lot of time studying this hospital.  It brings me back to the whole hallucinating paranoid schizophrenic theory.  “Have you been planning this in your head for a while?  Do you hear voices when you’re alone?”

She glowers at me.  “You’re an ungrateful bitch. Did you know that?”

“So far all you’ve done is take me out of my hospital room on the theory that ‘there are people after me.’  I haven’t seen any actual proof yet.”

“You want proof?  Fine.”  Brielle puts her backpack on the floor and takes out a laptop.  Cuing it up to something, she turns it around so the doctor and I can see it.  “Is this proof enough?”

“Did you hack into the hospital security cameras?” the doctor asks her.

She shrugs.  “Another hobby of mine.”  She has a lot of weird hobbies.

My face goes pale when I look at the screen.  I see two large men walking down one of the hallways in the hospital.  These guys are huge.  Massive.  I think they’re almost as wide as they are tall.  It looks like they were born in a gym and suckled on steroids.  One has greasy brown hair and his lips are so thin he looks like a muppet.  But even on this hazy security footage, his blue eyes are dark and vibrant.  If they could be plucked out of his head and put in someone else’s they would be beautiful.  The other I can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman.  Not like it matters.  I think either one of them would be successful at killing me regardless of gender.

They are stopping and opening every door and peeking in every room, looking for someone.  Me.  Though they don’t have them in their hands, their guns are clearly visible in holsters on their sides, so no one is giving them a hard time about it. 

Brielle crosses her arms over her chest.  “Are you convinced now or should we sit here and go over more physical proof until they find us in this dingy stairwell and use our limbs to wipe their asses with?”

“That was graphic, thank you,” the doctor says drily. 

“Talking about limbs, I think I am able to support myself now.  You can probably put me down,” I say to the doctor. 

“But you’re probably not stable enough to walk out of here on your own.”

“Someone’s got a crush,” Brielle mumbles as she packs her laptop away again. 

“I am simply concerned that we will not make good time if she walks on her own.”