“What happened?” George asked as he approached the uniformed guard at Travis’s door.
The commotion down the hall had obviously unnerved the cop as well. “Can I help you?” he asked in a half-polite, half-surly tone.
The agent flopped open his black credentials wallet. “George Sparks, FBI.”
Recognition flashed in the cop’s face. “Oh, sure,” he said. “I know you. Bill Rubie.” He turned his gaze back down the hall. “I don’t know. Best I can tell, the kid just died. They’ve got every doctor in the state trying to bring her back.” He looked at his shoes as he sighed. “Makes you think.” When he looked up, he was past it all. “What brings you here?”
“Travis’s mother tried to hang herself in jail last night,” Sparks explained, eliciting a pained groan from Rubie. “I was downstairs when they brought her in, and she was babbling about some plot to kill her kid. I told one of your buddies I’d relay the story to you, so he could stay put with the prisoner.”
“And who’s supposed to be hatching this plot?”
Sparks started a chuckle, then stifled it as he remembered that death was nearby. “The FBI,” he said. Traces of a smile remained.
Rubie rolled his eyes. “Ah. I see. Well, the only folks who’ve been in with the kid are doctors and nurses, and they’ve been coming in by the truckload.”
Sparks reached for the doorknob. “Have you checked in on him yourself?”
The cop shrugged. “I see him when the door opens, but other than that, what’s to check?”
George considered that for a moment, then nodded. “Good point. Mind if I peek in on him?”
The cop made a face that spoke his words: “Suit yourself. There’s a doc in there right now, though. Said he wanted to have some privacy with the kid.”
Sparks paused, his hand a half inch from the knob. “I’ll wait,” he said. “I hate the body fluids business, anyway.”
Rubie laughed at the turn of phrase. “I don’t know how they do it,” he agreed.
Travis closed his eyes at the sight of the needle. This was it, fifteen seconds from now, he’d either be alive or he’d be dead, all depending on what he did next. Concentrating exclusively on his right hand, he forced his thumb as far in toward his palm as it would go. His wrist hurt as his thumb formed an X with his pinky, making his hand as small as it would ever get. He yanked once, very hard, and spun his wrist in the fleece. There was resistance for maybe half a second, and then he was free!
He moved faster than Wiggins could react. The needle was poised under Travis’s suspended IV bag, just an inch from the brown rubber injection site, when the boy made his move. With no idea what might happen, Travis grabbed a fistful of IV tubing and pulled. The swiftness of the move caused Wiggins to jump back as the tubes came free of the bag and flopped like so many clear snakes across the boy’s legs.
Furious, the killer lashed out and smacked the boy across the face. Travis felt something rattle inside his mouth, but he ignored it. Instead, he shifted his attack to the EKG monitor on his left. He needed some attention, right this very second, and this seemed like the way to get it. As Wiggins recoiled for another blow, Travis rolled to his left and smacked the side of the heart monitor as hard as he could, sending thousands of dollars of machinery crashing to the floor.
“What the hell was that?”
At the sound of the crash, Sparks and Rubie spun together and dashed through the door, into Travis’s room. Neither was prepared for what they saw. A doctor was beating his own patient!
“Hey!” Sparks yelled. “What the hell…” The instant the man turned, Sparks knew he was no doctor, and the rest of the situation crystallized. He reached for his weapon.
The attacker moved with remarkable speed, launching a vicious kick to Sparks’s hand, just as the pistol cleared its holster. The weapon skittered across the floor. A second kick-really a continuation of the first-folded Rubie’s knee backward onto itself, rendering him instantly useless.
Sparks tried to brace for a fight but, in reality, never had a chance. He saw something moving in the doctor’s hand, and then George’s whole world flashed red. His head erupted in agony as the syringe needle came around in a horizontal arc and buried itself into his right eye. He heard a snap as the point impacted bone and broke off. He screamed; an inhuman howl that rose up from a place deeper than his throat as he clutched his hands to his face and fell helplessly to the floor.
“Oh, God! My eye! My eye!”
Rubie was screaming, too, as he squeezed his ruined knee with both hands, as if he could clamp off the flow of pain. The scream ended abruptly; cut short by yet another kick that at once crushed his larynx and drove his lower jaw with jackhammer force into his upper jaw, severing his tongue in the process.
Rubie collapsed backward onto the floor. Struggling for breath, but choking on blood instead, he was dimly aware that someone had lifted him by his hair, but felt nothing as the doctor smashed his head like a melon against the hard tile floor.
Everything was moving too fast for Travis to process it all. He didn’t see it all in detail, but he saw the blood and he heard the screaming, and he found himself wishing more than anything that he could scream, too. So much noise. So many people, all running in to see what was going on.
“Oh, shit!” someone yelled. “Jesus Christ! Get us some help up here!”
God, there was so much blood! Travis was mesmerized by it all. And so were the hospital staffers, until they realized that their real patient was a naked little boy, whose color suddenly matched that of his disheveled bedclothes. All at once, they descended on him, shouting orders to each other as they reconnected his respirator, yanked out old IVs, and went about the business of establishing new ones. No one talked; everyone yelled. But for his role as a pincushion, he might as well have not been there.
Where is he? Travis’s mind screamed as he searched the assembled faces for the man who’d tried to kill him. He slapped at each of the hands that approached him, fearful that the murderer was still there. He didn’t see him, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t lurking around somewhere, waiting for his chance. He’d done it once; he could do it again.
The hands fought him back; they were all over him, pushing and prodding and poking all the places they’d pushed and prodded and poked before. Everyone talked at him, told him to relax, but no one even seemed remotely concerned about what happened to the asshole who did all of this.
They had more pressing matters to worry about: like the guy on the floor whose screams sounded more animal than human; and the other one, whose brain matter formed a slick coating under people’s feet.
Travis closed his eyes and wished for it all to go away. He wanted his mom and his dad. He wanted to go back to Farm Meadows to smell the mildew and the accumulated trash. He wanted to die-quickly and easily this time. He wanted to be anywhere but here.
Somewhere, from outside his darkness, a hand gently touched his cheek, and a voice said, “Travis, honey, are you okay?” It was his mother’s tone but someone else’s voice. He opened his eyes, and there was Jan. She gave him her warmest smile. “I only got as far as the cafeteria,” she explained softly. “I was worried about you.”
He reached up to hold her hand, but someone told him to hold still. He tried to shake his arm free, anyway, but whoever was working on him down there fought him back.
“Let them do their job, Travis, okay?” Jan soothed, stroking his shoulder. “You’re okay now. I’ll be right here. Nobody can hurt you if I’m right here, now, can they?”
He relaxed and closed his eyes again. He felt her hand in his hair, petting him gently and whispering about things that didn’t matter. Her touch reminded him of how his mom would sit with him all night long whenever he’d get sick as a kid. He thought about his dad’s laugh; how he’d always howl at the dirty jokes that his mom would pretend to be offended by.