I saw the school entrance again. I stood there onscreen with my stiffened back toward the camera as I shouted like an irate baboon; next to me, the mortally wounded principal sat pawing my leg. It was amateur footage – the shaking camera lurched over to pan on the shattered cop car for an instant, then jerked back to zoom in on my back as the door crashed open, and Slash and Wayne rolled out leering like clockwork monsters.
I watched the grainy film of Slash raising his pistol, heard a muted bang from the TV as I watched parts of me splash onto the wall next to that poor one-eyed schmuck trapped forever inside the video loop. My doppelganger turned to look at what dripped down.
I shut my eye as even more noises emitted from the TV’s speakers. “Turn it off please, Dorcas.”
She did so, and when I opened my eye she was blinking back tears. She went to the window and opened the drapes. Sunlight flooded the room, and I squinted as I rose up on one elbow to peer outside.
Stagger Bay Hospital was built in the shape of a big square C, and I was on the second floor of one of the arms. I could see the main entrance to the hospital, as well as the parking lot with its medevac Flight of Life helipad off to the side.
It was a three ring media circus out there. The parking lot was crammed with dozens of news vans, almost all with satellite antenna masts and dishes deployed like electronic trees. Most had major network logos plastered on them; some of the news service names were in foreign languages and alphabets.
Newscasters made antic gesticulations for their camera crews, or were being made up in preparation to do so. Hundreds of non-local people, most of them well dressed, milled around talking to one another. Every person who entered or exited the hospital, whether civilian visitor or medical staff, ran a gauntlet of microphones.
Paparazzi were stationed in ambush at the main door of the hospital, but they didn’t click away at everyone entering or exiting. They were saving their film for bigger fish. Maybe for a one-eyed old ex-con.
“Jeez Louise,” I said again.
Dorcas nodded with her pale lips crimped together. “I’m sorry, Markus. They’ve been trying to get up here this whole time, but we’ve managed to hold them off so far. None of us want this for you. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said, lying back to stare at the ceiling as Dorcas closed the curtains and left to continue her busy rounds. “It’s all good.”
Chapter 16
Dorcas went off shift and the night crew took over. I didn’t know them, having been unconscious during their previous ministrations. I closed my eye and pretended to be asleep when any of them came into my room.
As if I hadn’t felt trapped enough by my injuries and the cops’ attentions, now the media folk made me understand how any mouse felt with a hungry cat licking its dainty chops outside that rodent’s hole. I couldn’t stay at this hospital; I had to get away. Technically it was the medical equivalent of dining and dashing, but I was sure the hospital administrators would be warmly sympathetic to my plight.
I waited ‘til after midnight to make my move, when things had quieted down. It took some effort to wrestle myself vertical, but I finally managed to sit upright on the edge of the bed.
I pulled the IV catheter out my arm and stood, tottering. The linoleum floor felt arctic against the soles of my bare feet.
I shambled like a reanimated corpse to the closet, looking for something to wear, and was surprised to find my prison release clothes, still stained and tattered from the school. By all rights they should have been disposed of as biohazard, or put in the SBPD evidence locker.
But Stagger Bay was a small town – I counted my blessings and put them on. The dried blood made them stiff.
I peeked out the door: No one in sight. From the right came the murmuring unhurried activity typical of any nursing station in the wee hours.
I headed left. At the end of the corridor was a lit exit sign and I clung to it like a beacon, aiming my body at it in a slow decrepit stroll, leaning my shoulder against the wall and sliding along.
Every second I expected hospital staff to call out ‘stop;’ every room I passed, I expected paparazzi to leap out with cameras blazing. But I reached the exit door without event and pushed it open to see a flight of stairs wending downward.
It would have been entertaining for a second party to watch my progress down to the first floor, but for me it wasn’t quite so amusing. I got a death grip on the railing and leaned my forehead against it with my eye closed. It was a drunken, slow-motion scramble, often head first, with only my sliding grip on the rail preventing a total nose dive down the stairwell.
I was proud of how neatly I negotiated the reverse at the landing; felt like I was doing some complicated gymnastics move. I followed the next rail to the bottom, then straightened up, opened my eye, and reeled across to the exit.
I opened the door a crack. I was at the corner of one arm of the hospital. The parking lot was to my right, well lit despite the hour; to my left was a barrier of blackberry thickets.
The news trucks still dominated the parking lot. If anything, there were more of them than before. Satellite antennas aimed at the sky, pumping live broadcasts to viewers around the globe. Newshounds stood around in clumps, sucking on coffee and staring at the front of the hospital like a dog pack eying treed prey. Freelance photographers prowled the outskirts, scavengers awaiting the crumbs dropped by their betters in this digital Serengeti.
I slunk away to the blackberry thicket, squeezed through an opening and through the clawed, grasping branches until I reached a wide open space on the far side. The edge of a marsh was at my feet.
I knew this spot well from before prison. A large creek came down from the foothills and delta-ed into this marsh before finally draining to the southern wetlands of the Bay. It was a soggy low-lying area dotted with raised tussocks of mud, swamp grass, assorted shrubbery, and carnivorous plants. The air was moist and pungent with the smells of life and decay; the only native sounds were those of birds and frogs, insects and slow-moving water.
When Sam was a boy we’d ridden our bikes here for nature hikes on numberless occasions. There were tadpoles in season, and the big predatory water beetles they called electric light bugs, because of their habit of flopping across the ground toward any source of artificial illumination. The beetles were huge things that looked like they’d be better suited to co-starring in a Japanese horror movie than haunting a backwoods swamp.
There were crows and snakes and possums here too, as well as skunks and lots of mud. It was a little boy’s paradise and Sam always loved it. Tell the truth, I hadn’t minded it too much myself, being a big-city boy who’d never come closer to Wild Kingdom than on the picture tube of my TV.
Frogs throbbed out their mating song, the shrill chorus seeming to mock me and my current situation. Once, with Sam, this had been one of my favorite places on earth. Now it seemed eldritch and menacing in the moonlight.
Weakness overcame me and I sank to lie on my side in the mud at the edge of the water, staring into the dimness of that inhuman swamp. I closed my eye and fell asleep to the frogs’ malevolent piping and the rustlings of all the little swamp creatures going about their nocturnal business.
Chapter 17
I woke at dawn and the air was clammy; I was engulfed by a white fog that had risen off the swamp to hide the world in a numb blank swath. Despite the chill I was sweating.
I was on fire; I had a fever, bad. To add to the fun the dope they’d been pumping into me at the hospital had worn off, and my missing eye was really kicking up a fuss; the pain was the worst I’d felt since it had been blown out my skull.