At least before tomorrow morning. Hopefully long gone by tomorrow morning.
Again, though: what could he do?
He took another look around the room. The many computers and instruments hooked up to him wouldn’t all alert anyone if he started fiddling with them. The ones that would, he could only guess. Then he saw one of the computers connected to one of his fingers. It was on a rolling cart, and he couldn’t see it plugged into anything.
He hobbled over to it, using the bedrail as a support. Sure enough, it was a standalone machine. Battery powered.
He looked at the screen. It looked like a heart rate monitor, from what he could tell. There were numbers flashing on every inch of the screen, but the majority of it was a continuous graph, with peak appearing every second on the right side.
Well, what do I have to lose?
He started taking the rest of the trackers and monitor tubes off his body. Disgusting.
Next were the needles poking through his chest, arms, and legs. Finally, the clip-like things that were connected to his fingers.
All except the heart-rate monitor.
He hoped that was the only one that would alert his captors. Why wouldn’t it be? They expected him to be completely comatose, after all, not an alert, mobile prisoner.
He checked the wheels on the cart and began pushing it toward the door. Malcolm checked the handle, found it unlocked, and pushed the door open. He hobbled behind the cart, careful to not let the tube fall to the floor for him to trip on.
It looked like a hospital wing, except one with no one else in it. It was a little creepy, actually, he realized. Not a soul was anywhere to be seen, and the only lights that were on were the emergency lights that ran up and down the hall between the brighter fluorescents.
He wheeled the cart to the end of the hallway. Unlike what he’d expected of a “real” hospital, there was no T-intersection here. The hallway ended in what seemed like a janitor’s closet in front of him. He checked the door. Locked.
He needed a plan, and fast. He couldn’t exactly wheel the heart monitor computer out and down the front steps, but he had no idea how to disable it without sounding an alarm somewhere. If he shut it off, he was almost positive an alarm somewhere in the building — no doubt where the nightshift was still working — would sound, and his gig would be up.
Unless…
He thought for a moment. It might work…
But where?
He hobbled along, faster now, turning the cart around and pointing it back the way he came. He pushed past his old room, noticed the door open, and pulled it closed. Can’t be too careful.
He continued to the center of the hallway and found his T-intersection. He was in the top of the “T,” and this stretch of hallway in front of him was short — likely just a bridge or covered walkway to another section of the hospital. He entered it, noticing the floor curve up in a gentle arc.
He walked slightly uphill until he reached the center of the bridge, then stopped in front of a door. Electrical 2-A.
He was on the second floor, and this was the electrical closet for building A, which was either the one he’d just come from or the one he was about to enter. He hoped he’d chosen correctly as he tried the door. This one was unlocked, and he pushed the cart inside.
A light switch on the wall next to the door flicked on a single overhead bulb, enough to light the space in a dim yellow bath of light. He looked around, finding nothing at first besides a few mop buckets, some brooms and dust pans, and a shelf of cleaning supplies.
It appears that their janitors have commandeered this closet as well.
On the right-hand wall, however, he found what he was looking for. An electrical panel, the kind that housed the fuses and breakers, stared back at him. It was easily as tall as he was.
Okay, he thought. Let’s get to work. Whatever he tried, he couldn’t disable the monitor from signaling that he’d been tampering with it. But he could, however, try to disable the system on the other end, so that it wouldn’t receive the signal.
He opened the panel and looked inside. Standard stuff — each of the breakers was labeled with cryptic text that would only make sense to the electrician who’d installed them.
67A.
46-49B + J34.
It was a good thing he didn’t need to understand any of it. Was there a master anywhere?
There. At the very top of the panel, right at eye level, was a large breaker that reached almost across the entire width of the panel. He reached for it and pulled it as hard as he could. He felt the pop as the breaker handle hit the other side of the panel, and he thought he could hear a deeper pop from somewhere outside the room.
The light in the closet stayed on.
He looked around nervously. What if it didn’t work?
He made up his mind. He reached up and started flipping off each of the individual breakers, one at a time, as fast as he could. If the master hadn’t actually turned anything off, this certainly would.
He reached the bottom of the left side and started in on the right, this time working bottom to top. He got faster as he went, now using the palm of his right hand to flick sections off all at once. Somewhere in the middle, he hit the power breaker for the closet he was in, and darkness fell around him. He waited for his eyes to adjust, but they didn’t. It was dark. Even the greenish glow of the heart rate monitor was useless.
Malcolm reached out again and felt for the rest of the breakers, using his left hand as a guide until he’d turned off the remainder of the switches. Satisfied, he looked down at the monitor waiting patiently next to him, like a pet. He ripped the clip from his finger, and a beeping sound immediately echoed from the machine. He spun the cart around, looking for a power switch.
There, on the top of the back panel, he found it. A standard I/O computer button. He pressed it, letting out a deep breath as the machine died. For good measure, he tried to hide it behind the mops and buckets that stood in a corner. It wasn’t spy-worthy, but it at least wouldn’t be immediately noticeable.
Now, he had to get out of the building. He assumed some doctors and other night staff would be around soon, checking in on him until the backup generators turned on. He guessed he had less than a minute to get out.
Voices called out in the hallway.
“Yeah, I’ll check it out. Probably a brownout or something.”
“Okay, holler if you need anything.”
Malcolm waited until footsteps raced past the closed closet door. Just as they receded up and over the bridge-like walkway, he opened the door and looked out. A balding man was jogging down the other side, into the hallway he had been sleeping in for the past six months. The man was only seconds away from realizing that his patient was no longer there.
Malcolm stepped out into the hallway and started to run, then stopped and stepped back into the closet to grab a mob. He again ran out the door, trying to disconnect the mop head from its handle. As he reached the entrance to the other building, the mop head fell off.
He ran through the open doors, only pausing to get his bearings. The electricity was out here, too — a good sign, at least until the generators kicked on.
“Anything?” he heard another man ask. The sound came from just ahead, around the corner.
Malcolm heard the clicking sound of a walkie-talkie, then the notoriously poor sound quality of another voice from the other end.
“Nothing. Lights off down here, too.” A pause, then heavy breathing. “Checking in on 0-10-7… what the…” The voice continued breathing, then it shouted. “He’s not here! 0-10-7-5-4 is gone! I repeat —”