The Law of Nines

41

SIRENS WAILED IN THE NIGHT as Alex hurried Jax along the sidewalk. It seemed like dozens of emergency vehicles were converging on Mother of Roses. Reddish orange light from the blaze reflected off the low overcast. Through the trees Alex could see crackling streamers of hot yellow sparks ascending through billowing black smoke. From time to time great gouts of flame lashed up toward the clouds.

The noise of all the sirens had sleepy people emerging from their houses to see what was going on. Leaves were lit by red, blue, and yellow strobes of emergency vehicles racing toward Mother of Roses. People stood in their nightclothes on front porches watching in shock.

Many more people, patients in pajamas and nightgowns, ran down the street past Alex and Jax. Police cars rushing in toward the hospital had to slow in places for the throngs to part. He didn’t know where all the people were running. They probably didn’t, either. They were simply filled with fear and wanted to get away. Their terror over being awakened by fire and the uncertainty of what would happen to them now had many sobbing as they wandered aimlessly.

Alex kept a constant lookout over his shoulder to see if anyone followed them. So far he hadn’t seen anyone who looked overtly suspicious. It was dark, though, and there were a lot of people flooding through the streets. He hoped that in the throng of people escaping the hospital they had lost the men chasing them, but he had no way to tell if any of the people in the darkness were from another world.

Alex turned down a smaller side street as he made his way toward where his truck was parked. He didn’t know if they would be safer out on the streets with all the people, or if it would be better to cut through alleys and backyards.

Once they were off the streets, they wouldn’t know their way. That would slow them down. Worse, they might find themselves trapped in a box canyon of fences when the men chasing them caught up. And cutting through yards would draw attention.

In the end, he decided to stay on the streets.

As they made their way along the broken sidewalk, Jax was becoming dead weight. Her legs kept giving out. Fortunately, they weren’t far from his Cherokee.

Alex was having difficulties of his own. It took a great effort to focus enough to work past the drugs the nurse had gotten into him. His vision was blurred. He hoped he could see well enough to drive. He didn’t know if his racing heart would ever calm down.

With everything that had happened he didn’t think that he would have to worry about falling asleep — at least for the time being. But he did need to find them a safe place where they could both get much-needed rest.

If he felt dulled by the drugs, Jax was laboring under an even heavier dose. She hadn’t been able to stop taking the Thorazine and pills the way he had; they had only reduced her dose enough so that she could feel pain and terror, yet not fight back. After her ordeal of hanging in the shower for over twenty-four hours, he was amazed that she could move at all.

“It’s just down the block. We’re almost there. Hold on.”

She nodded. “I’m fine.”

“Yeah, right.”

She smiled a little. Her right foot was dragging. He wasn’t sure she was even aware of it. He was holding most of her weight so she could keep going.

Alex kept thinking about his mother being burned up in the fire. Ben had burned up in a fire, and now his mother had as well. He couldn’t stop wondering what would have happened if he’d gotten her out. He wondered if when the drugs wore off she’d have been able to communicate with him, talk about everything that had happened in her life, in his, or if her mind was long gone. Now he would never know.

At least she’d had the presence of mind to stop the nurse. In the end, she had fought back against her captors. In the end she’d won a battle against them. That was something.

“Here,” Alex said. “We’re here. Hold on. I’ll have you inside in a minute and you can relax.”

Jax forced herself to stand straighter as he unlocked the passenger door. “Don’t let yourself get complacent, Alexander,” she reminded him. “Carelessness with these people will get you killed.”

That was why she refused to give up, why she forced herself to stay as alert as she possibly could. To relax was to die.

Alex helped her step up into the passenger seat. He folded her right leg up into the truck.

“Once we’re away from the hospital, you could get some sleep.”

“My knives. Please, I want my knives.”

As Alex reached under the seat and pulled the bundle out, a horrific explosion shook the night. The sky lit with the orange and yellow fireball.

As Alex turned to the explosion, he saw an orderly dressed in white barreling at him out of the darkness. The man was huge, and he had a knife.

Without even thinking, Alex grabbed a handle of one of the knives in the bundle and pulled it out. Despite the adrenaline rush of his sudden alarm, the balance of the knife, the feel, made an impression somewhere in the recesses of his mind.

As the man charged toward him, with no time to do anything more than simply react, Alex thrust the knife straight into the man’s center mass.

It didn’t stop him. The big man crashed into him at full speed, knocking Alex back.

As Alex rebounded off the side of the truck, the man swung his own knife. Alex ducked, seized the arm, and took it with him as he circled around the orderly. Once behind him he rammed his blade into the man’s lower back several times in rapid succession. He didn’t hit anything immediately vital, and his stabbing only made the man angrier.

The man twisted around, driving Alex back with his feet as well as his fists. More than one connected, staggering Alex back. The man was a fury of nonstop lunges and slashes. With the drugs, Alex had difficulty focusing.

The man was a good head taller than Alex and must have been sixty or seventy pounds heavier. Despite his size, he was quick. Not only was he hard to handle, but his size seemed to help keep the knife wounds from slowing him.

Alex made another attack. The man threw him back. As he rebounded, Alex ducked under a swing, threw a shoulder block into the man, and at the same time grabbed a leg. He pulled with all his strength, upending the orderly. The man landed flat on his back, but bounded back up as if on springs.

His arms seemed to be everywhere at once. Alex was having trouble keeping track of the furious attacks. He picked his openings and cut whenever he had the chance. One slashing cut across the man’s thigh halved the muscle, making him stumble.

Alex used the opening to dive in to try to finish the fight. He seized the man’s knife-wielding arm and stabbed again, but the man was strong enough to push him back. Alex felt like a child trying to fight a grown man.

When the man spun around, pulling out of Alex’s grip, his arms were spread in an angry fighting stance. He looked like a bear on its hind legs about to charge. Seeing the opening, Alex used all his strength to drive his knife like a punch straight into the middle of the orderly’s throat.

He felt the blade sink in and hit bone.

The furious fight seemed to freeze in place.

Then the man started to corkscrew toward the ground. As he collapsed, his weight pulled him off the blade.

Panting, catching his breath, his exhausted arms hanging, Alex tried to gather his wits. He was so drained, so bone-tired from the fight, that he was ready to drop.

Jax was suddenly there beside him, putting her arm around him, holding him up.

“Almost there,” she reminded him. “Hold on.”

He smiled at her words, words he had used to encourage her not to give up.

Alex felt like he was watching himself in a dream. He realized then, by the way Jax was bent over, that he was on his knees. He didn’t remember going to his knees.

“Stay still,” she said.

Jax turned away to the open door of the truck for a moment. She was frantically doing something. He couldn’t figure it out. It finally dawned on him that she was ripping cloth. It was the rag the knives had been in. She was tearing off a long strip.

She put the strip around his upper left arm, wrapping it tightly around several times. She used her teeth to split the end and then tied a knot. She made another knot and drew it tight.

“What are you doing?”

“He cut you. I’m tying a bandage around your arm to keep the wound closed. I need to stop the bleeding.”

Alex only then realized that blood was dripping off his fingers. He wondered how bad it was. He didn’t really feel any pain, but at feeling a warm, wet sheath of blood running down his arm he suddenly began feeling sick.

“It’s all right,” she assured him. “You’ll be fine.”

By the way her voice sounded, though, he didn’t know if he believed her.

“How bad is it?”

“It’s dark. I can’t tell,” she admitted. “But I don’t think it’s too bad. Can you move your fingers?”

Alex tried. “Yes.”

“Then you’re fine. As long as your arm still works, it can’t be too bad.”

“Thank you,” he said in a numb voice. “I don’t understand why he was trying to kill me. If I’m dead they can’t get the information they need.”

“He wasn’t trying to kill you. He was trying to capture you. If he had wanted to kill you I think he could have.”

“Well, from my side of it it sure felt like he was trying to kill me.”

She only smiled as she adjusted the bandage on his arm. Alex liked the feeling of her taking care of him. It made him feel calm, feel like everything would be all right.

She gently took the knife out of his hand. “I don’t ever let anyone use my knife. Not this one.”

Alex saw in the dim illumination of the dome light in the Jeep that it was the knife with all the elaborate engraving on the silver handle. Now it was covered in blood as well.

“It seemed rather important at the time,” Alex said. “Do you think you could make an exception to your rule this one time?”

“Well,” she said, glancing down at the dead man, “I guess that, in this case, I could.”

With a concerned, gentle look, she smoothed the hair back off his forehead. Her face warmed with the special smile she gave only him. Her hand cupping the side of his face made everything better.

“Considering who used that knife,” she said in an intimate voice, “I guess it’s all right. You’re welcome to use it anytime you’d like.”

Alex swayed on his knees. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

“Do it in that direction, will you? I need to send him back to my world.”

Alex was going to tell her not to bother, that they could just drive away and leave him. But as his mind started working again he realized what a bad idea it would be to leave a body lying in the street. With so many people around, the man would be discovered in short order. Alex could see people off in the darkness. Fortunately they didn’t see what was going on.

The dead people they had left in Mother of Roses would be burned up. There would be little evidence of what had really happened. But if they left this man’s body out on the street it would look like murder and raise a lot of questions.

By the time he had come to the conclusion that Jax was right, the man had already vanished. Her knife was shiny and clean.

Jax put a hand under his good arm to help him up. “Come on. Let’s get away from here before any of his friends show up.”

Alex was regaining his senses. He helped boost Jax up into the truck. The adrenaline of the situation seemed to have given them both a shot of strength. He didn’t know how long it would last. He ran around to the other side and hopped in.

When he turned the key in the ignition and the truck didn’t start, he wasn’t the least bit surprised. Trying the key had been nothing more than a token gesture. He had expected it not to start. That was just the way the world worked. For some reason it seemed that things tended not to work when you needed them the most.

Fortunately, he had planned for the eventuality. He’d parked on a hill, and he’d parked at the end of the block so that no one could park in front of him and block him in.

He turned the wheels away from the curb as he put in the clutch. The Cherokee started rolling, gathering speed. When it was going downhill at a good clip he let the clutch out. The engine turned over and caught. With a minimum of fuss, he had the truck running, but he was more determined than ever to get it fixed as soon as they got the chance.

Alex drove slowly down the hill through the residential neighborhood. There were no cars, but there were people wandering all over the place. Here and there a person in pajamas or a robe would walk out into the street without looking. In the darkness it was difficult to see them all. Alex kept a sharp lookout for any of the staff who might be hunting them.

When he turned right onto Sixteenth Street, traffic was moving slowly, pulling over at intervals for emergency vehicles. Fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars raced through the night toward the hospital.

Alex stayed in the right lane, pulling to the curb and stopping for every one of them. He didn’t want to be stopped by police and have to answer any questions. At that moment, he couldn’t imagine what he would tell them about what he was doing there at that time of night. He couldn’t say he was visiting his mother, not at night.

He was too tired to think. Best to avoid the problem altogether.

When the traffic cleared, he stayed close to the speed limit of forty-five as he headed toward the interstate. The interstate would be the fastest way to put some distance between them and anyone who might be looking for them. The older part of town was quiet that late at night. He kept an eye on the rearview mirror, checking to make sure that they weren’t being followed. The road behind was empty. Most of the people out that late were interested in seeing the fire.

Alex was sure that the fire department had shut off the gas to the hospital and that had minimized the explosion. It had been bad enough, but not anything like it could have been. He hoped everyone had gotten out safely. He guessed he knew that not everyone had.

Jax was slumped in her seat, leaning against the door, her hand resting on her leg. He reached over and squeezed the hand.

“We’re safe now. If you want you can crawl in the back seat to lie down and go to sleep.”

She pulled her hair back off her face and hooked it behind an ear. “Where are we going?”

“I want to find us a motel or something, some place we can rent a room for the night. We’re near the interstate highway. It shouldn’t take long to get safely away from here before we stop. We both need rest and time to let these drugs wear off.”

“I’ll wait, then,” she said. “Before we sleep, though, I’m going to need a needle and thread.”

“What for?”

“To stitch up that gash on your arm. It needs to be closed up.”

Alex nodded, but he didn’t like the thought of having her sew on his arm, at least not without some kind of local anesthesia. He didn’t want to stop in at an emergency room, though. They would have questions. He wasn’t in the mood to think up answers to questions.

He tested his injured left arm a little. It was beginning to ache in earnest. The pain throbbed with each beat of his heart. He couldn’t hold the wheel with his left hand alone. The pressure needed to turn the wheel hurt.

He glanced in the rearview mirror to look back at the fire.

Just as he did, there was a soft thud to the air that Alex felt as a thump deep in his chest. He’d felt that thump before.

In the mirror he saw a dark smudge swirl in the air behind them in the back seat. As soon as he saw it, the indistinct, dark swirl of night changed into a vortex of vapor.

The vapor condensed into a shape.

A man in a dark leather vest and no shirt lunged at them from out of the back seat, from out of another world.