The Journal: Crimson Skies: (The Journal Book 3) (10 page)

“Where is Kathy really?” I asked.

“She’s in the hospital under a false
name.”

“Can I see her?”

“Perhaps tomorrow,” he said as he walked out
the door.

~~~

Mark changed my bandages before we settled in
for the night. The bleeding had stopped, and my upper arm was
swollen and ungodly sore. I just wanted to sleep.

August 20

We rode the elevator to the eighth floor of
the hospital and stepped out into silence. The overhead lights
flickered in the ever-present dimness.

“No one knows Kathy’s here, and no one except
Andrews knows
we’re
here. I think I’m safe,” I said to Mark.
“Andrews said he’d meet us in the waiting room. Why don’t you find
him, while I sit with Kath a bit? See you in a few minutes.”

I gave Mark a quick kiss and a reassuring
smile and slipped into Kathy’s private room, where she was lying
quietly in her bed. I started over to her when something made
contact with the back of my head and everything faded.

When I came to, my arms were held fast to the
arms of a chair with surgical tape and Dr. Denise Streiner was
throwing water in my face.

“Oh, come on, I didn’t hit you that hard.
Wake up!” she snarled at me.

I opened my eyes and saw the scalpel in her
hand. She gave me a vicious grin when I recognized my peril.

“That’s better,” she said, pacing nervously
around the room. “And don’t bother yelling, no one will hear you
anyway.”

“How did you know Kathy was here? No one was
supposed to have that information except the colonel.” I noted Dr.
Streiner’s rumpled smock and disheveled blonde hair.

“Don’t be silly, I work here.
All
information about
all
patients is mine for the asking,” she
stated as though I was stupid. “I popped in to say hello to the new
patient and guess what? It was Kathy, hiding out. She thought I was
in on the deception.”

“What do you want from me, Denise?”

She laughed. “Your husband of course. With
you out of the way, he will be free to come to me.”

“You kill me and he will hate you forever,” I
spat.

“Oh,
I’m
not going to kill you,
General Marlow will do that. I might hurt you a little though. See,
he wants Kathy out of the picture and I want you out. Of course, he
wants you dead too, for what you did to his brother, and we’re
helping each other here.” Her explanation made little sense.

“But you
saved
Kathy,” I said,
watching her circle my chair.

“Yeah, I did, but I took it back. Ever do
that as a kid? Take back something once you realized you shouldn’t
have done it?” Her voice rose and fell in the cadence of a mad
person.

“What do you mean?” I looked over at
Kathy.

“Don’t worry, it was painless. I gave her a
little overdose of morphine, that’s all. She slipped away quietly,”
Denise said, shrugging her shoulders.

“You killed her?” I gasped, a sob escaping
from my throat.

“I had to! She was the last one who could
expose Marlow.” She sat down on the end of the bed, shifting the
scalpel from one hand to the other. “See, Hank Marlow isn’t really
a general. He’s just a bottom-rung sergeant, but when his unit was
wiped out from the flu and he lived, he promoted himself. No one
knew the difference. No one except Bob and Kathy. Bob used to do
Hank’s taxes, so it was only a matter of time that he would be
found out.” She smiled happily, insanely. “That’s all taken care of
now. Of course, now you know too, and that won’t matter once Hank
gets here.”

“I know why you want me dead, Denise, but why
does Marlow?” I didn’t know if keeping her talking would make any
difference, but I had to try. “If I’m going to die, at least tell
me why.”

She jumped down from the bed in anger, her
knuckles going white as she gripped the knife tightly. “Why?? You
killed his brother, that’s why! After all the trouble he went
through to get his brother on that prison work crew last winter,
you killed him. He’s really pissed at you for that, you know. His
brother was supposed to slip away and stay hidden for a few days,
and he went on that little escapade instead,” Dr. Streiner growled
at me. “I wonder what’s keeping him?”

“
Little escapade
? Those men killed and
brutalized dozens of people! Including
my
own brother!” I
threw back at her.

“Whatever.” She walked over to me and looked
at the bandages on my arm. “Aw, does that hurt?” She squeezed my
arm.

“AHHH!” I moaned out loud and she walked
away, ignoring me.

“Where
is
he? I can’t wait around all
day! I have surgery in a half hour!” She looked at her watch. “I
guess I’ll have to kill you myself.”

“You’re insane; you know that, don’t
you?”

“Maybe a little, but some comfort from that
hunky husband of yours and I’ll be just fine! Maybe I’ll mess up
that nice skin of yours first. Mark won’t like you all scarred up.”
She nicked my left cheek with the tip of the blade and I felt the
blood run. She came at me again and drew a line down my jaw with
surgical precision. I could feel the blood start to drip. I moaned
from the pain, then I kicked at her with my foot, and scooted the
chair backwards.

“Ouch! Now stop that!” she screamed at
me.

The door burst open. “Thank you for the
confession, Dr. Streiner,” Colonel Andrews said, his gun aimed at
her. “Marlow is already in custody and now that little speech of
yours ties up all my loose ends perfectly.”

Denise rushed him with the razor sharp knife.
He side stepped her easily, grabbed her wrist, and disarmed
her.

Mark was right behind the colonel and fell to
his knees to cover me with his own body. He quickly cut the tape to
free me and I sank into his embrace, my face bleeding all over his
pale blue shirt.

“She’s insane! She killed Kathy with an
overdose of morphine!” I sobbed into Mark’s chest.

“You’re bleeding again,” Mark observed. The
gauze covering my new stitches was turning a bright red to match my
blouse where I was dripping more crimson blood.

“She squeezed my arm, and then cut me!”

“What a bitch,” Mark glared at Dr. Streiner,
who was now handcuffed to a very burly MP. “Come with me to the
nurse’s station and I’ll fix it, and then we’re going home.”

At the nurse’s station, Mark washed my cuts
with chilled saline, and then butterflied the one on my cheek
closed.

“The one on your chin I’m afraid will take
some stitches.”

He had such sadness in his eyes I thought
Streiner might be right, and the scars would offend him. He asked
the nurse to get him a hypo to numb the skin and a number 00
dissolving suture.

“I’m going to put in a sub-dermal woven
stitch. The scar will never show.” And he kissed the other side of
my mouth. I realized that Streiner was wrong, very wrong, and so
was I. Mark was not the kind of man that would let a scar detract
from his feelings.

August 22

“Ms. Smeth, I’m sorry it’s taken so long to
get back to you,” Colonel Andrews apologized. “The city is in chaos
with a new outbreak of this deadly flu, and I’ve been busier than a
one armed paper hanger. However, we do need to finish up some loose
ends. Kathy’s body will be released from the morgue this afternoon,
and I’m assuming you would like to take care of the burial.”

“Yes, of course.” I let out a long,
controlled breath. “I’ll have Jason dig another grave with the
township backhoe.”

“Better make that two,” he said gently.
“Yesterday we found Pastor Carolyn sleeping on a park bench. The
coroner said she died peacefully.”

A quiet sob slipped out from me.

“I will bring them to you myself,” he
offered.

~~~

It was a short funeral, as Kathy would have
preferred, and I know Carolyn was with her God now and didn’t care.
Carolyn was buried with her congregation and Kathy was laid to rest
next to her husband in the new cemetery that was once the township
baseball field. Eric said the Lord’s Prayer while leaning heavily
on his walking staff, and I found that in spite of all the misery
and heartache I’ve had to deal with, I still had more tears to
shed.

~~~

“I didn’t know your friends very well,
Allexa, but I did admire their spunk, both of them. Because I feel
a great deal of responsibility for these deaths, I took the liberty
of providing for a modest wake,” Colonel Andrews said, leaning
against the hearse he drove that was now parked in front of my
house. “Plus, I’d like to bring you up to date on all the
events.”

From the front seat he retrieved a large,
heavy cardboard box and handed it to Jason, while he carried a
pizza warming box into the house. The colonel and the ten members
of our little settlement gathered around the kitchen table and
nibbled away at the four extra-large pizzas. To my surprise, the
heavy brown box contained several bottles of liquor and wine.

“I wasn’t sure what everyone preferred so I
opted for a variety,” he said, setting a bottle of Jack Daniels on
the table, then a bottle of Gray Goose, Captain Morgan Private
Stock and Famous Grouse, along with two bottles of red wine and two
of white.

Karen was quick to get the glasses down off
the rack and poured herself two fingers of the whiskey. I handed
her the bowl of ice cubes, and she plunked one into her glass and
sighed.

“First, let me say I share your grief. You
lost some good people.” Colonel Andrews took a sip of his vodka on
the rocks. “I move around a lot and consequently don’t get to make
many friends.” He looked over at me and Mark. “I feel that you’ve
become my friends, and I hope in time you will feel the same.”

“I will admit, Colonel, I was unsure of you
to begin with, but yes, I think we can be friends,” I said.

“Thank you, and please, call me Jim,” he
said, settling into one of the wooden chairs. “Now I can tell you
that I had my suspicions about Streiner and had bugged the hospital
room, and if I had any idea that she was homicidal, I would never
have left her alone in that room with Kathy. I definitely
underestimated how unbalanced she was. Please forgive me.”

“What’s to become of her?” Mark asked,
tightening his arm around me.

“She’s made it easy for us. She had a second
hypodermic hidden in her smock that was perhaps meant for you,
Allexa.” I shivered, remembering the scalpel. “While she was
handcuffed to a chair waiting for transport to the jail, she
injected herself with enough morphine to kill
two
people. By
keeping her hand concealed in her pocket, no one knew what she was
doing until it was too late. It must have taken her a lot to force
that needle through several layers of clothing and into her
thigh.”

“Dr. Streiner is
dead
?” Mark gasped.
“What a waste. She was an excellent surgeon.”

“Mark,” I asked gently, hoping he would
understand why I needed to know, “you worked closely with her, did
you have any idea that Dr. Streiner was insane?”

“Insane? No. But I did see right off that she
was unbalanced. There is something you need to understand about
doctors in general, myself included. We all have egos that surpass
the average person. I would say that comes from the education we’ve
gained and the knowledge of what we are capable of doing. That ego,
though, varies greatly in each physician, depending on their own
background and self-image. Personally, my medical ego has been
humbled enough that I have a decent grasp on reality; at least I’d
like to think so. Plus I had loving parents that raised me well,
and I’ve always had a firm confidence in my sexuality. Denise
Streiner, on the other hand, had a very poor self-image of herself
as a woman, so her whole being became focused as a doctor which
resulted in her personality being… top heavy, so to speak. She used
that side of herself to get whatever she wanted, and when she
couldn’t get it, or rather couldn’t get
me
, her reality
started to slip. It was only a matter of time until her shell
cracked, and that happened when she was faced with prison and her
license being stripped from her. Her entire identity was being a
doctor. With that gone, she was nothing,” Mark replied, settling
back with a glass of scotch on the rocks.

“What other news do you have you can share,
Jim?” I prodded, wanting to get my thoughts away from that insane
doctor, while absently fingering the itchy stiches where she had
cut me. “Anything on the relocation center?”

“Ah, yes. I fired everyone and re-staffed it
with military personnel. At the same time, we moved all the
unattached men to a different location, the single women to
another, and the families stayed at the arena. I think things will
run much smoother now, and I am keeping a close eye on it. The
military really is here to help. Rape and abuse is not part of our
agenda.” He took another sip of Gray Goose. “Oh, and you will be
pleased to know that Tom White is now back in his office. He’s
really quite efficient.”

“That’s great. I’ll have to give him a call.
Thank you, Jim, it seems you are getting things turned back
around,” I said.

“Mr. White also asked me to deliver a message
to you. He said the offer still stands. Does that mean anything to
you, Allexa?”

“Yes, it does,” I laughed. “He offered me a
job as his assistant. Each time he asks, I turn him down,” I added
when I felt Mark tense beside me.

“I see. Well, even without you, I’ve no doubt
Tom will get that office running smoothly again. Now if we can just
get a handle on this new virus. It keeps cropping up every four or
five months, and the medical examiner’s office is so short staffed
they can’t get ahead. It’s the same one that’s been around, with
slight mutations each time. It’s still attacking the very young,
the very old or those with suppressed immune systems, which seems
to be a growing sector from the limited diets lately.”