The Law of Nines

40

ALEX UNLOCKE THE DOOR on the eighth floor and raced past the utility room and the shelving area with the files. He didn’t see any fire. That much of it was a good sign. Several nurses turned when they heard Alex and Jax coming. One of them, frowning, stepped toward them to block their way. “Who the hell are—”

“Fire!” Alex screamed. “The top floor is on fire! It’s already spread through the ceiling. The whole upper floor is involved. We opened the fire-escape doors and got everyone we could out of the place.”

“I’d better go check it out,” one of the other nurses said.

“You need to evacuate your whole floor! Do it now!”

“There’s been no alarm,” the first nurse said. “We can’t evacuate a secure facility without an alarm — especially when we don’t know who you are.”

Alex, gritting his teeth in frustration, ran to the wall and yanked down the lever on the fire alarm. Nothing happened.

“See? The alarm doesn’t work. Hurry! The fire is spreading out of control. You need to get everyone out, now!”

One of the nurses at the counter picked up the phone. She pressed the line of buttons one at a time.

“The phone lines are dead.” She sounded stunned.

Alex snatched the fire extinguisher off the wall. He pulled the pin and squeezed the handle.

“Dead.” He held it up, squeezing the lever, demonstrating. “See? The extinguisher upstairs was dead, too. The sprinklers don’t work. There’s no way to fight the fire or even slow it down. The people in here have only one chance — they have to get out and they have to get out now!”

The first nurse frowned at him. “What department do you work in? Who are you?”

“Get moving or you’re all going to burn to death!” Alex yelled.

His tone of voice changed their attitude and sent them scrambling into action, rushing to the locked doors to each side. One of the nurses ran for the stairway Alex and Jax had come down. As two of the other nurses pulled keys from their pockets and unlocked the doors, Alex spotted a purse on the lower working counter behind the higher public counter.

He grabbed the purse and dumped the contents out onto the desk. A cell phone slid across the counter. Alex snatched it up. As soon as he had the power on, he punched the buttons.

“Nine one one. What’s the nature of your emergency?”

“Mother of Roses Psychiatric Hospital is on fire.”

“What address?”

“It’s the old hospital on Thirteenth Street.” Alex pressed his fingertips to his forehead, trying to think. “I don’t know the exact address.”

“Can you see flames, or smoke?”

“I’m inside the building. The fire is on the top floor.”

“How extensive is the fire?”

“The entire top floor is ablaze. The fire alarms don’t work. The sprinklers and the fire hoses don’t work. Get the fire department here now!”

“They’re on their way, sir. Please stay on the line. What is your name?”

Alex ignored the question. “I have to help the staff get people out of here! Hurry — get the fire trucks here!”

He tossed the phone on the counter without hanging up. He saw the nurses out in the wards rousing the patients. He headed for the stairs in the back to go down to the next floor. Jax was right behind him. At the doorway into the stairwell he met one of the nurses coming back down. Her face was nearly as white as her dress.

“It’s a solid wall of flame up there!”

“A building this old is going to go up in a hurry,” he told her. “Help get everyone out. There’s not much time. I’m going to warn the floors below.”

She nodded. “All right.”

Alex pointed toward the front counter. “Nine one one is on the cell phone. Tell them your name and that you work here. Confirm what I told them about the fire being out of control. Keep the phone with you, keep them on the line, but help everyone get out the fire escape and then follow them out and help the people from the ninth floor already down there.”

The woman scooped up the phone and with barely contained panic in her voice started telling the operator about the fire and how many hundreds of people were in danger. She told the operator to send ambulances as there were bound to be casualties. Alex didn’t wait to hear the rest of it. He raced for the stairs, pulling Jax along behind.

As they burst through the stairway door, a red-faced orderly, nearly out of breath, was just arriving at the top step. Alex skidded to a halt and drew back as the man slashed wildly with a knife.

Alex seized the knife hand and twisted the man’s arm at the same time as he spun him around, then shoved him face-first down the stairs. The tumbling man stopped at the middle landing between floors, smacking into the far wall. Jax bounded down the steps after him and rammed her knife into his back half a dozen times before he had a chance to get up. As soon as she had dispatched the orderly, the two of them raced down the last half of the stairs to the next floor.

On the seventh floor the nurses were equally surprised, but perhaps because people in their ward weren’t locked down, they were more easily convinced. At seeing that the alarm, phones, and extinguisher didn’t work, they wasted no time springing into action. One of the nurses started calling 911 on her cell phone as the others enlisted a staff of orderlies and aides to help them clear the wards.

Unlike the top two floors, the doors weren’t locked. The wards on the seventh floor were also much larger, extending out past the footprint of the eighth and ninth floors into the rest of the old hospital complex. The staff was also larger.

“The fire department is on its way,” the nurse on the phone reported.

“Do you know people in other parts of the hospital?” Alex asked. She nodded that she did. “Call them. Get anyone with a cell phone to call people as well. With the alarm not working people in the rest of the hospital need to be alerted. Call everyone you can and tell them to get the patients out.”

Before she had a chance to ask any questions, Alex headed back to the stairs. He and Jax slid to a halt at the top step. He could hear, just out of sight around the turn of the landing, what sounded like a lot of men racing up the stairs. By the things they were saying Alex instantly recognized that the men were looking for him and Jax. One of the men called them “Vendis’s prisoners.”

Without pause Alex spun Jax around and pushed her out ahead of him, back the way they had come. Once out of the nurses’ station, he took her hand and ran with her down the dimly lit corridor. She was having trouble keeping up. Her legs weren’t working in a coordinated manner. He knew that her muscles were so spent that they were failing.

“Hold on, not much longer,” he said, trying to encourage her and keep her moving.

As they raced down the corridor, he glanced back over his shoulder and saw men spilling out into the hallway, but they were too far away and it was too dark to make out their faces. Alex knew by their numbers, though, that they had to be orderlies he hadn’t met before. That confirmed his suspicion that there were more people involved than just those he had seen working on the ninth floor.

Alex slowed a little to try to make it look like they were urgently helping people and less like they were running. He was counting on the white coats they were wearing to help throw the people hunting them off track.

He and Jax helped the nurses by rushing into rooms and pulling people out of their beds, then guiding them to the fire escape. Jax was swift and decisive in getting people moving, while managing to also be compassionate and supportive. It was all the more impressive to him because he could see by the look in her eyes that she was fighting the effect of the drugs in her system. He knew all too well what that was like; he was having to work past them as well.

The people followed directions as Alex calmly but forcefully urged them to hurry. These patients were far more alert and coherent than the people up on the ninth floor had been. He guided the growing throng to the fire escape, letting himself and Jax become lost in the mass of frightened people. He saw the men coming down the hall, searching in each room along the way.

Out on the fire escape they were greeted by cool night air. Fresh air had never felt so good. Alex was a little surprised to find himself giddy with relief to be out of the place. For a long time he had feared that he would never again be free. He wished that his mother could have tasted freedom with him.

Jax leaned closer to him so she could whisper as they made their way down the metal steps along with what seemed like hundreds of other people. “When we get to the ground we need to run before those men can find us. I don’t think that I have enough strength left to fight them.”

They slowed at a landing, inching ahead, waiting for the congested line of people to start moving more quickly again. “I need the keys to the truck,” he reminded her.

“But the keys are inside.” She knew what he was thinking and clearly didn’t like the idea. “We’d have to go back in. Now that we’re out, when we get to the ground, let’s just run.”

“You can hardly stand anymore. How far do you think you can run? Where will we go on foot? How can we get away? We can’t hide — they’ll be looking everywhere for us. We need the truck to get away — as far away as possible.”

As the line started shuffling ahead a little faster, Alex heard glass breaking. He glanced up and saw flames roar out of the windows on the top floor. Thick smoke swirled out into the darkness.

He also saw two men dressed in white pushing past people to get down the stairs faster.

“We need to get down, now,” he whispered to Jax.

She glanced up and, seeing the men coming for them, stayed close behind him as he started gently nudging people aside so that the two of them could get by. He needed to keep distance between them and the men coming after them, but at the same time he didn’t want to make it too obvious lest the men spot him and Jax running.

Alex excused himself to the people on the stairs, repeating along the way that he needed to help patients on the ground.

The descent of the seven flights of metal stairs, even pushing past people, seemed like it was taking forever. Alex kept track of the distance back to the men hunting them. The men were getting closer all the time, because they were far rougher about pushing people out of the way. At least most people, when they saw the white coats he and Jax were wearing and heard his repeated explanation, did their best to let them by.

A lot of the patients were petrified to be up on the rickety metal fire-escape stairs at night. They held on to the railing for dear life, inching along at a snail’s pace. They bottlenecked the people above them trying to get down. Jax gently but firmly lifted the hands of more than one person from the railing and with encouragement and reassurance got them moving.

From his vantage point up on the stairs among the confused people making what they considered to be a terrifying descent, he gazed out over throngs of people screaming, crying, running, wandering aimlessly, even sitting down, in the middle of a near-stampede. The thought occurred to him that he couldn’t imagine a scene any more chaotic than mental patients trying to escape a fire.

Irrational people in the hundreds were unable to cope with the necessary but simple task of getting away from a burning building. Half of them, it seemed, were crying for help and waiting for it to show up rather than escape the area.

Pushing past the frightened people on the stairs, Alex and Jax finally made it to the ground. They found themselves in the rear of the hospital among hundreds of people all rushing about in confusion. In the distance people were also pouring down emergency stairs from other areas of the institution.

There were a few orderlies and nurses trying to organize the patients and tell them where they needed to go. There were patients who were staying at the hospital for less serious conditions and some of them, too, were trying to help their fellow patients away from the burning building. There were a few people, driven by insanity, who, like salmon trying to swim upstream, were trying to push their way up the stairs against the flow of people coming down.

The lights suddenly went out as the electricity failed. The emergency generators should have kicked in. They didn’t. Two battery-backup security lights did come on, but they were far from adequate to light the whole back area of the hospital.

In the near darkness the fire looming above them seemed all the more frightening. The eighth floor was now also fully involved. Alex could see flames making their way across the roof from there to the main part of the hospital. He also saw fire on the fifth floor. He suspected that it had been set, just like the fire on the top floor had been.

Panicked people cried out and rushed faster to get away from the building as glass blown out of windows by the fire rained down on them. People on the ground were speared by shards of falling glass. Bloody people cried out for help. Some people stumbled and fell in the darkness. Alex and Jax helped a number of them to their feet so that they could get away.

All the while, they steadily and silently made their way across the flowing current of people coming off the fire escapes and running away from the building. Alex had walked over the uneven ground that rose and fell over the roots of the big old trees often enough that he could probably have done it with his eyes closed, so the near darkness wasn’t a hindrance.

Over the bobbing heads of people, he spotted a couple of the orderlies coming through the back parking lot. They pawed through the escaping people, searching, looking at everyone.

Alex rose up on his tiptoes and waved an arm to get their attention. He figured that they wouldn’t be able to recognize him in the flickering light of the flames, and they would only key in on his white coat. When they saw him, he pointed urgently away from the hospital.

“They’re over there!” he yelled. “They went that way!”

The bluff worked. The two men turned away and took off in the direction he had pointed to.

Jax arched an eyebrow at him. “That was risky.”

“Not as risky as them catching up to us.”

At the metal entrance door, he gently pulled, testing it. It was locked. He searched through the keys, trying each in turn, not knowing if Henry would have had a key to unlock an exterior door. The fourth key worked.

Alex paused to glance back over his shoulder at Jax.

She gave him a look. “I’m not waiting here,” she said before he could suggest it. “Hurry up. Let’s get what you need and get out of here before those men find us.”

Alex opened the door just enough for them both to slip inside. There was one emergency, battery-powered light some distance down a hall to the side. The exit sign above them over the door was lit up, casting the room in an eerie red glow that gave them at least a little light to see by. The sudden silence inside the place was unnerving.

Alex smelled gas.

He looked down the dark corridor toward where he knew the kitchens were, but he couldn’t see anything.

“They must have opened a gas line,” he whispered to Jax.

“What does that do?”

He looked at her, realizing then that she wouldn’t know, and realizing, too, how much the drugs were affecting him. He explained as he made his way through the dimly lit room toward the metal detector. “Natural gas is used in the kitchens, in the ovens and stoves, to make fire. It’s highly flammable. If it isn’t controlled, and enough of it escapes out into the air, it can easily explode.”

“Then we should get out of here, now.”

“You’re right. I just need to get the keys first.”

Jax skirted the metal detector and stood at the desk where Doreen usually sat, waiting as Alex groped around in the dark and finally located the table against the wall. He felt along the back of the tabletop and found a lone tub. He reached inside and to his relief his keys were still there along with his pocketknife.

“Got it.”

“Alex!”

He spun around to see Dwayne silhouetted against the red exit light. He came out of the dark swinging a nightstick. As Alex ducked, Jax snatched the blue pen attached to the clipboard and yanked it off, breaking the string.

Before Alex had finished ducking the swing of the nightstick, she used the pen to stab the side of the guard’s neck three times in rapid succession. He cried out. His hands flew to the puncture wounds in his throat. At the same time he turned to attack her. That was a mistake. As he lifted his nightstick Jax stabbed his eyes out with two lightning-quick jabs.

Before he could let out much of a scream, Alex had him from behind. He gripped the man’s jaw and twisted with all his might until he heard a sickening crunch of sinew and bone. He let the limp Dwayne slip to the floor.

“Why didn’t you use the knife?” he asked as she dropped the bloody pen.

She looked on the verge of frustrated tears. “My fingers are numb. They’re not working very well.” She gestured vaguely. “I must have dropped the knife out there somewhere.”

Alex put an arm around her waist when he saw her start to sink. “It’s all right. You’ll be able to rest as soon as we get to the truck. You’ll be all right after the drugs wear off and you get some sleep.”

“I’m not sure I can make it, Alex.”

“Sure you can. I’ll help you.” He tried to sound more confident than he was.

She glanced back toward the door. “I remember them saying that Dwayne was waiting to let Yuri in when he came back.”

Alex nodded. “I remember. I’ve got my keys. Let’s get out of here before Yuri gets here or the place blows up. We’ve done everything we can.”