Flight (7 page)

Rifling through memories, she
tried to come up with something that would help. Anything in her
past that might help her figure out what to do.

She thought about blasting the
door with the shotgun, but the noise it would make might attract
things. Maybe. It just scared her to make that much noise. There
had to be another way.

Her daddy made her help him move
furniture once. A large china cabinet had been too heavy for them,
and her daddy repositioned himself and they were able to move it
anyway. He had gotten low on the cabinet, using his feet to push
it. She needed to get low.

She moved the shotgun to the
ground, sat down, and put her feet on the stock. The barrel pointed
inside the hospital just in case it went off. She didn’t want to
disable her only mode of transportation by shooting the SUV in the
tires.

Pushing on her makeshift lever
with as much strength as she could muster, the door gave a little.
She smiled and pushed again. It gave a little more.

There was room now for her to
stick her foot in and she pushed that way. The door gave a couple
of inches. She pulled the shotgun out of the gap, stood, and tried
to squeeze herself through. She didn’t have enough room yet, but
now she could push on the bottom with her foot and in the middle
with her hands. The door, having yielded a few inches, seemed to
give up and keep moving. She could finally squeeze
through.

Getting Jada through might be
another issue, but she’d worry about that in a few
minutes.

Retrieving her shotgun and her
flashlight, she stood in the doorway and looked around. There were
just four chairs in a tiny waiting area, an admissions window, and
large double doors patients could be wheeled through on stretchers.
Not much to see.

Jayla pushed on the double doors
with the end of the shotgun, shining her flashlight through as soon
as the doors were open enough.

At some point in the past, chaos
had reigned in the corridor. Hospital beds stood askew, IV stands,
some upright, some tipped over, were scattered everywhere, and
paper and clipboards lay on the ground. A wheelchair blocked one of
the doors and Jayla had to shove the door to get through. The
wheelchair smacked into a wall.

She maneuvered slowly through the
abandoned equipment, much like she had through the rock debris on
the road, searching.

She didn’t really know what she
was looking for. She didn’t expect a cabinet to be labeled ‘rape
kits’, but hoped that something would tell her what she was looking
for. Some cabinets and drawers had been emptied out, the odd
package or vial left behind, like someone had scooped the contents
out into a bag or box. Other’s were fully stocked. Probably less
important supplies.

Jayla looked around until she grew
worried about Jada sitting alone in the SUV outside. She also
decided if she found a rape kit, she wouldn’t know how to use it,
wouldn’t know what to do with the results, and with everything as
bad as it now seemed, who would be around to give the results
to?

And if there were no police to
give the results to, there were probably no police to investigate
the old man in the woods. Would anyone even find him? She was
certain he had freed himself from the zip ties, but what if he
hadn’t? What would happen to him? Would he die?

If he died, that meant Jayla had
killed him. In self defense, she reminded herself, although she
remembered hitting him when he lay there, tied up.

She had been afraid. She had been
terrified of the man. He wasn’t even a man. He was a monster. He
had deserved to die, if that’s what happened.

She also imagined him getting
free, finding his car, using an extra set of keys to drive down the
mountain, and following her. If he saw her SUV in the hospital
parking lot, he would know she and her sister were there. She had
to hide it.

And if no one knew they were in
the hospital, it might be a safe place to spend the
night.

What if someone else thought the
same thing?

Jayla breathed loudly. It calmed
her a little.

Jada would be okay for a few more
minutes, she told herself, while she searched the hospital. It was
tiny and wouldn’t take long. Besides, if someone wanted to spend
the night, they’d go where Jayla would. The patient
rooms.

She burst into each room, shotgun
raised, her flashlight shining everywhere. She checked in the
closets, under the beds, and in the bathrooms. As she cleared each
room, she moved quietly to the next, listening for noises or any
indication of movement.

She tried the faucet in one of the
rooms and water flowed.

With the sixteen patient rooms and
the nurse’s station cleared, no evidence of any occupation at all,
Jayla felt comfortable. The hospital was bigger than just the
patient wing, with surgical rooms, examination rooms, and other
facilities, but no one would live in any of those. They’d be right
where she was right now.

Some of the rooms were missing
beds, as if patients had been wheeled out to the emergency room and
transferred into waiting ambulances. Which is probably exactly what
happened during the evacuation. Everything made sense and Jayla
breathed even easier. She and her sister would be alone in the big
hospital that had seemed so small from the outside.

Remembering the wheelchair, Jayla
headed out to get her sister. She pushed the wheelchair to the exit
and had to squeeze through the gap in the doors again, putting her
back on one side, her hands and feet on the other, and shoving
until it was wide enough to fit the open wheelchair
through.

She folded it up, put it in the
backseat on top of the food she had stacked there, and started the
SUV.

She drove around to the other side
of the emergency room entrance, going where she thought the
ambulances might park.

She found a loading dock and
although the SUV would be visible to someone looking around, no one
would be able to see it from the highway or even the parking lot.
Hiding it there was good enough.

She backed in, making a getaway
easier.

Jayla set up the wheelchair and
pulled her sister out of the passenger seat, dropping her heavily
into the chair. She opened up the back and filled Jada’s lap with
food and water.

She could push the wheelchair with
the flashlight in one hand, but not holding the shotgun. She
cradled it in her arm, put both hands on the wheelchair and pushed,
and dropped the weapon. She jumped and screamed a little, thinking
the shotgun would go off, but it didn’t. She picked it back
up.

Tucking the weapon behind Jada’s
back, on the side, and angling the barrel so it wasn’t pointing at
her own face, Jayla was able to get the wheelchair out of the
loading dock and head back for the emergency room doors.

Through the doors, she turned and
tried to close them. They remained as stubbornly open as they had
been closed earlier, and she gave up.

Jayla wheeled three beds into one
patient room. One for her, one for her sister, and the third to
block the doorway. She wedged it in as tightly as
possible.

With Jada still in the wheelchair,
Jayla collapsed on a bed, promising herself she’d only take a quick
break. She awoke to a dim sunrise, the sky obscured by gray
clouds.

16

Wolfgang stumbled up the side of
the hill, Leah under his arm supporting him. The mountain ahead was
too steep for them to continue this way. He knew he had to get his
feet properly under himself.

The two soldiers stopped, and
Wolfgang told himself he only had to get as far as them, he only
had to catch up. When he reached them, he let himself fall to the
ground, Leah trying to slow his descent. He looked up in gratitude
at her when he was finally sitting but didn’t say anything. The
thought of speaking was too painful.

“I think we’re far enough away,
sir,” the younger of the two officers, Captain Wlazlo
said.

“I feel bad just leaving Captain
Smith’s body in the truck,” the older one, Lieutenant Colonel
Robertson replied.

“Think of it like a Viking funeral
pyre, sir.”

Robertson sighed. “Go
ahead.”

Wlazlo readied his weapon, pointed
it back down the slope, and fired a single grenade towards the
truck. There was a loud boom followed by a puff of smoke, but the
grenade had fallen short of the upside down vehicle. He fired a
second.

The initial explosion, along with
secondary explosions from the grenades and ammunition they couldn’t
carry, lit the twilight sky like a fireworks show. Whatever their
attackers may have hoped to recover from the Army supply truck
burned up in a ball of flame and smoke.

Wolfgang, supported by Leah,
stared. There existed a certain perverse pleasure in watching the
fire, the subsequent explosions as grenades and ammunition boxes
heated up and cooked off, the colorful flames, some reaching eight
or ten meters into the sky, and the dense black smoke as the truck
and its contents died a final death.

“Let’s get out of here,” Robertson
ordered.

Leah concerned herself with him
constantly as they hiked. She complained that he needed a break and
that his bandage was soaking with blood, but Wolfgang pressed on.
He felt weak, and he didn’t want to feel weak. He wanted to
overcome his weakness, even if it took stubbornness and suffering.
He wanted to be strong again. He wanted to be the one who helped
others, who others admired as he played with children, swinging
them high in the sky, the children laughing and pleading for
more.

He wanted to be able to think
about his wife and daughter without the pain in his soul hurting
worse than the pain in his head.

There was nothing to be done but
to put one foot in front of the other, to keep climbing despite
everything his body told him it craved. Rest, sleep, food, comfort.
Those all became nothing to Wolfgang. Ascending the mountain came
to represent overcoming his pain. If he could keep moving, he might
not succumb.

If he stopped, he would simply
want to die.

Leah made him drink water, giving
it to him from her canteen. In another world he never would have
shared from the same bottle as anyone but his wife. Now he just
obeyed and took the water.

A patchwork of granite covered the
side of the mountain, but the soldiers wisely stayed under cover of
trees. The four picked their way carefully in the dark, shining red
flashlights that allowed them to see a little but not be seen from
a distance. The moon didn’t penetrate the clouds.

The two soldiers led.

Wolfgang wore a hiking pack. He
didn’t know what it contained. The Americans had insisted each of
them bring a rifle, one of the deadly MP23s, so Leah carried his
for him. She had a large pack and both rifles strapped on her back,
and still she easily outhiked him. That began to aggravate him more
than his head.

Yet when he thought to say
something to her, when he had to look at her, with her dark eyes
and light brown, curly hair, all he could see was his lost wife.
Who looked nothing like Leah.

He slowed down, sensing he and
Leah had fallen far behind the American soldiers, but he hiked on
nonetheless. He told himself he could do this. He could continue
on. He ran a hiking club. This had been his hobby and the out of
shape Americans hadn’t been able to keep up with him then. Surely
he could keep up now.

After a while, thought became too
much effort and that was better. Just step, step, step. Keep
moving. Take a drink occasionally. Step again. Focus on his feet
and nothing else. Hike your own hike. That’s what he always told
his club.

He fell heavily over a root he
missed in the dim red light. Leah rushed back to him, helping him
back to his feet, asking over and over again if he was okay. She
mixed German and English as she spoke, the worry in her voice
evident. He didn’t want a break, he told her. They had to keep
up.

She stayed closer, using her
flashlight to point out rocks and roots, and they made their way
slowly up the Southern Swiss Alps.

Hours later they heard a shout.
With no strength to rush to its location, Wolfgang urged Leah to
investigate. She refused.

They hiked on.

Eventually Captain Wlazlo
returned, waiting for them at the top of a small crest.

“You gotta get a move on, Wolfie.
We got trouble.”

“He’s doing the best he can,” Leah
argued.

“That might not be good
enough.”

Wolfgang stopped to breathe, his
eyes closed. The weakness in his body was unnatural. He wondered
how much blood he had lost.

He felt the American put a hand
under his arm, then Leah do the same on the other side, and allowed
them to propel him forward. They held him up enough that he could
keep walking, although the new exertion made his head pound and his
eyesight blur. He let them guide him.