Evasion (10 page)

Enough
, Scott thought.

“I have to get this,” Scott said, angrily pulling his hand from under the client’s meaty fist and sliding his thumb across the screen to unlock it for the phone call, lifting the phone to his ear.

“You’re done. I’m done,” the client said, standing from the table, his chair scraping loudly against the floor as he rose.

“This is Scott,” he said into the phone, staring down the client.

“Scott. It’s Mom.” Her words were anxious, loaded with emotion and panic. Suddenly, the angry client receding back through the diner, and virtually everything else surrounding Scott vanished.

“What is it?”

“It’s Dad,” She said, and then tried to say something more, but she couldn’t force the words through. She started crying.

Scott dropped his phone hand down to the table and stared at the numbers, the numbers of the hospital, the ones he hadn’t recognized but figured he’d know based on the exchange.

He stared at the phone, the sounds of his mother sobbing flowing up to his ears.

His father hadn’t made it.

He glanced back at the client, watched him stomp out the front door, then looked back down at the phone.

His mother’s voice punched through the silence and the sudden ringing in his ears. “Scotty? Are you there?”

“Shit! Shit! Shit!”

Today
 

“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Scott said, pulling his hand away from the door handle he had just been reaching for, as if the handle had suddenly started glowing with a white-hot intensity.  “What the hell can I do now?”

He looked away from the twisting knob and glanced back at the unconscious and prone body of his friend Gary.  Gary was still out.

But for how long?

“Think, think, think,” Scott said, pacing back and forth in front of the door. “I haven’t had a second to think here. Can’t a guy catch a break?”

As if in response, the vent kicked in again, throwing a blast of stifling heat into his face.

Damn heat vent
, he thought. This first aid room was not climate controlled (or, at least, vent-controlled), the way that Gary’s work area had been. Something also began to itch at his mind -- Gary, the vent – his sudden change in behavior – when he took a closer look at the large opening above him

The vent!
 

It was wide enough for him to crawl into it.

A way to escape.

He could climb up and into the vent and get away.

On the other side of the door he heard a set of keys jangling.

Shit,
he thought. Of course the security guard had a set of keys to every room in this place. It was just a matter of seconds before he got the door open and it was game over for Scott.

Scott looked around the room, his eyes falling onto the couch.  A plan started to develop in his mind.

He stepped over top of Gary, grabbed his one arm and one leg and slid the prone body to the back of the room. Then he lifted the one end of the couch and dragged it in front of the door, wedging the high hard back of the couch under the door knob.  About seven feet long, it covered not only the door but about a foot and a half on both sides.

Scott then grabbed at the metal cabinet on the side of the room, and, pulling forward, managed to rock it back and forth until it tipped over and slammed down hard on the floor.  It was heavy and laid on the floor less than half an inch in front of the couch.

Stepping onto the couch, Scott was pleased with the two purposes it would serve – it, and the heavy cabinet lodged in front of it, would make it harder for Herb and the security guard to get door to open once they unlocked it; and it would also allow him the height needed to get into the vent itself.

Outside, a key slipped into the lock. There was the sound of jostling, but the door didn’t unlock.  More jangling of keys.

He hasn’t found the right key yet
, Scott marveled.

Standing on the couch, Scott quickly surveyed the vent grate. It was screwed into the ceiling with a pair of Philips head screws.  He reached up and pulled down hard on the vent grate, relaxing his legs to let his body’s full weight add to the downward force. Not designed for to withhold a man’s weight, the metal bent and one of the screws popped off.  The screw clattered to the floor.

Scott paused to look down at Gary again to see that his friend was still out of it where he had been dragged. He then stepped onto the back of the couch as he heard another key slide into the lock.  Still no luck, fortunately for Scott.

He pulled the backpack off of his right shoulder and threw it up inside the vent.  The he was able to get his right forearm inside the vent and with his left hand grasping the ceiling.  From that position, Scott was able to slowly pull himself up and partially into the vent.

His feet swung back and forth as he tried to wiggle a better sense of leverage, pull just a bit more of his upper body inside the vent.

His right shoulder and upper chest propped inside the vent, Scott’s feet kept swinging wildly as he managed to gain another inch. Then another, and another.

His mind projected images of high school gym class and the fact that he could never pull himself more than a few feet up the rope from the ever-popular sitting position. Despite the urging of the gym teacher and the fact that the entire class was watching, Scott had never been able to go up more than those first couple of feet.

Other kids in the class crawled up the rope as easily as they might ascend a set of stairs, almost like they had been bitten by radioactive spiders. But each year, when it was his turn in that gym class, Scott went up a few feet and then his body, shaking uncontrollably from the strain on his muscles, simply let go and fell back down onto the gym mat, completely defeated and winded and not caring one bit that everyone in the class was laughing at his expense.

Despite believing he had been giving it his all, that he had been putting every possible bit of effort into those gym rope climb attempts, Scott now knew better.

With the result being capture and death rather than mere teenage humiliation, additional resources of strength, power and motivation could be tapped into.

Sliding his entire body into the vent, Scott could hear the sound of yet another key sliding into the lock.

Holy shit
, Scott said.
Doesn’t the guard remember which key is which?
 

No matter, he thought. It’s a good thing for me that he’s having trouble with it.

Shoving the backpack ahead of him, Scott wormed his way further into the vent.  It was dark, dusty and extremely hot.  He could see that the vent moved off to the left, to the right, and straight ahead.

No time to think this through, Scott thought, and immediately started crawling down the vent to the left, which would, according to his calculations, take him over top of the 2nd floor kitchen.

Behind him, he heard Herb and the security guard utter the monotonic phrase again, the jiggling of more keys. He kept crawling, seeing if he could put as much distance between himself and the vent opening before they made it into the first aid room.  Herb did, after all, have a gun.

Scrambling through the dark, Scott realized it wasn’t completely pitch dark inside the vent because of the light that shot up through various openings every few feet.  Through them, he could hear the two men continuing to slam against the door, jangle the keys, and occasionally bleating out their threatening lines.

Doing his best to make as little noise as possible while scrambling through the vent, Scott finally made it to the corner at the back of the office.  He turned right, knowing he was heading overtop of the same hallway he had first come running down.

As he turned, the sounds of Herb and the guard were harder to make out. He could detect the jangling of the keys, the repeated same four words of “you cannot evade us” sometimes peppered with “you won’t get away” and other times with “we will stop you.”

Sliding past the short branch that led to the area over Gary’s work area, Scott was again reminded of the manner by which Gary had managed to block the airflow in his area.

He was curious as to whether or not the vent had something to do with the behavior of Herb, the guard and Gary; particularly since Gary hadn’t seen to shift and morph until he was directly under the vent in the closed first aid room.

Could that be it? Scott wondered, continuing to crawl forward. It was, at least, one theory on why Gary, when he’d been sitting at his workstation, was entirely himself, entirely normal – and that it wasn’t until he had been away from the unique environment he had hacked that he slipped into that glassy-eyed state.

No
, he told himself. It might first make sense, but that couldn’t be it. “I’ve been breathing the very same air,” he whispered. “And I haven’t been affected.”

He kept crawling forward, heard a loud thump echo from somewhere behind him, figuring that the security guard had finally located the right key, had twisted the lock open and they’d slammed against the door, only to have it hit against the couch and metal cabinet.

Scott figured he had less than a minute before they were able, using their combined force, to get the door open enough to see the entire room, realize he wasn’t hiding behind the door, and spot the open vent grate and realize where he had gone.

Moving a bit faster, as quickly as he was able, Scott continued scrambling forward in the vent.

Damn, he thought, considering the fact that, running down the corridor below took a few thirty to forty seconds at best; but crawling along that same length of space seemed to take infinitely longer.

He wasn’t sure where, exactly he was heading, wondering if he’d come to another main intersection, and perhaps one that led to another floor.  He wondered if he might be able to crawl up or perhaps slide down, or whether he’d get to a branch too thin for an adult male to navigate.

When he got to what he figured was the halfway point of the long corridor, he heard the distinct sounds of footsteps coming from below. 

Damn. They must have figured it out.

Less than a foot in front of him, the vent shaft shot off to the left and the right in a two-way intersection.

A gunshot, muffled like before, the sound less of the small explosive of gunfire, and more like that metallic thwacking of a ruler on a desktop rang out.  A small bead of light from the gunshot hole appeared in the metal.

He stared at it for a second, realizing what was happening.

“Shit!” he muttered, and scrambled forward quickly, passing over the gunshot area when a second shot rang out. Something burned on the side of his left leg and he realized he must have been shot, that Herb was likely walking under the vent and taking shots at it, hoping to score a direct hit.

Scott shuffled to the intersection and headed right toward the center of the building, the burning sensation on his left leg less concerning than the thought of taking a bullet in the belly.

Another shot fired.

Scott scrambled forward, terrified that Herb would start firing further in the direction Scott was moving, and didn’t even notice the floor of the vent disappearing from below him.

Before he realized what was happening, he was tumbling head first in the dark straight down the vertical section of the vent shaft.

Four-and-a-Half Years Ago
 

“Natural causes?” Scott yelled out in such a loud voice that he even startled himself. “This is bullshit!”

The coroner, Dr. Mikhail Charuk, sat propped on a little round stool across from Scott and didn’t even blink at the harshly delivered words. They were in a small room, the same room that a patient would consult with a doctor in. And Charuk, a Sudbury coroner, ran this service out of the same office he ran his medical practice.

After years of seeing Coroners portrayed on television cop shows, Scott was a bit perturbed to find the Coroner assigned to his father’s death was not some eccentric weirdo clutching a ham sandwich in one hand while poking at the edge of a nasty raised edge of flesh on the end of a bloody wound, cracking off-color jokes and spewing out observations that both confused and turned the stomach at the same time, but rather a doctor who looked pretty much like every other doctor Scott had ever encountered.

The Coroner’s office was called in because in all cases where a patient dies in either a surgery or a recovery room, an autopsy and investigation has to be completed as part of the due diligence required by the hospital insurance board.

Charuk had just relayed his findings on the investigation into Lionel Desmond’s death. He was obviously used to delivering bad news and dealing with upset clients, because the next words he spoke were as calmly and meticulously delivered as all of his previous statements had been.

“Because treating cancer was the underlying reason for your father’s surgery,” Charuk said, “the findings have to reflect that. Under the circumstances, that is the closest, most logical of the reasons.”

“If we didn’t treat my father, if he hadn’t had the surgery, and if the cancer was allowed to grow and eventually killed him,
that
would be natural causes. I get that.

“But we didn’t do that. We sought treatment. He met with medical professionals. They operated on him, removed a kidney, and sewed him back up. Then, less than an hour later, while he was in the recovery room the clips on his renal artery came off.  Whether it was from a defect in the clips or the doctor’s incompetence, the clips came off. There’s nothing natural about that.”

“Under the circumstances…” Charuk began in that calm voice.

“I’m talking about the fucking circumstances!” Scott yelled, standing up and slamming the folder on the examining table beside him. “The fucking clips came off! He bled to death! Tell me what’s fucking natural about that!”