Not a good sign.
Perhaps they were operating with a skeleton crew, he thought, due to the power outage.
Tom strode through the lobby until he reached the gift shop, which was also deserted. He went inside and walked over to the counter, aware now that he was totally famished. He grabbed a bag of Fritos off the rack and plunked a dollar bill on the counter. Stuffing a handful into his mouth, he exited the shop and headed down one of the halls toward the emergency room.
He stopped at a bank of elevators and pushed the up button, not expecting the elevator to work. To his surprise, the door whooshed open, startling him. Tom stepped inside and pressed the button for the second floor.
The door shut and the elevator began its ascent. The interior was dimly lit but Tom was just glad it was working. When he reached the second floor, he stepped out into another dim hallway.
He walked toward the nurse’s station. It was uninhabited. He entered the area and poked around, noting that neither the computers nor any of the other devices were on. Picking up a phone, he heard a dead line.
Finally, he got his nerve up and walked over to one of the patient’s rooms. He knocked on the door, waited a moment, turned the doorknob.
The door was locked.
He went over to the next door and tried it. It too was locked.
Tom tried another half dozen doors only to discover that they were all locked.
Apparently, everyone in this place had either been evacuated or vaporized.
Tom took the elevator to the third floor and checked the rooms. They were all locked as well.
Nothing shakin’ but the leaves on the trees.
Heaving a distraught sigh, Tom had to concede that the hospital was a bust. Like the police station, another vital community service center that one would expect to be active in an emergency was DOA.
Screw this.
He wolfed down the rest of his Fritos and washed them down with a slug of the lukewarm bottled water he’d snatched from a fridge in the nurse’s supply room. Then he boarded the elevator back down to the main floor.
Tom exited through the turnstile and turned to his right, then did a double take The Jeep was gone!
CHAPTER 3
Tom quickly glanced around the parking lot and along North Broadway, hoping to catch sight of his Jeep. He saw nothing moving at all. He ran over to where it had been parked and could see the tire tracks clearly in the deep snow where the thief had backed out before moving south toward the exit road from the hospital.
So, he was not alone after all!
His immediate impulse was to find a vehicle he could borrow so he could chase after the driver of his Jeep. There were quite a few cars in the parking lot, every one buried under six or seven inches of snow. He ran over to the first four-wheel drive car he could find, a Subaru Forester, briskly cleared the snow off the door handle and tried it. It was locked. He moved along the row of cars for a few minutes until he finally found a Honda CR-V that was unlocked. He jumped inside and was thrilled to find that the keys were still in the ignition.
The engine was excruciatingly slow in turning over but finally fired up. He jumped out and cleared off the windshield and windows as best as he could then got back in, put it into drive and headed for the exit.
He noticed with relief that the snowstorm had tapered off somewhat as he neared the exit, hoping to ascertain which direction the Jeep tracks led. In the virgin snow, it was clear to see that they headed west toward Upper Arlington. Tom gave the little four cylinder SUV the gas and hung a right in hot pursuit.
As he followed the tracks to Fishinger Road, Tom wondered who had stolen his Jeep and why. The first question was impossible to answer but the second was easy: the guy saw a warm uninhabited vehicle with its engine running in a deserted parking lot so he decided to nab it. Duh…
As angry as he was that someone had brazenly ripped him off, Tom nevertheless found solace in knowing that he was not the only human being left on earth. No matter who had stolen his Jeep, that person was apparently alive and well and in the same predicament as he was. That had to be a good thing.
But another mystery was why that person had not tried to contact him. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that who ever owned the idling Jeep was inside trying to find another living soul in the godforsaken place. Why wouldn’t that person attempt to find the Jeep’s driver, instead of stealing it and driving off into the sunset?
Unless, Tom thought, that person didn’t want to be discovered by him. Which would imply that this person could be a potential foe.
Tom raced as fast as he could along Fishinger, continuing west toward Route 33. He barely took his eyes off the road to glance at the houses that were shrouded in darkness. When he reached the intersection at Route 33, the tracks proceeded west over the bridge toward Hilliard.
Although his adrenalin was pumping now, Tom also felt an overwhelming fatigue coursing throughout his body. This whole situation was so bizarre and surreal that he half expected it to end at any moment. He sure wished it would end, that was a fact.
The tire tracks continued on the same road for a few more miles until they merged onto the southbound entrance ramp to the I-270 outerbelt. Tom slowed down in order to stay on the curve in the road until he was safely on the interstate.
The highway looked like something out of a science fiction movie as he sped south on it, not a single working streetlight illuminating the way. This source of countless traffic backups, headaches and collisions was now nothing more than a pure white, uninhabited landscape. Sort of like Mars Tom suddenly saw a pair of headlights about a mile ahead in the northbound lane, coming toward him fast. He stared over at the car incredulously as it whizzed by in the opposite direction on the other side of the median.
It was his Jeep!
On impulse, he hit the brakes and began fishtailing out of control. He nearly did a three-sixty as the Honda spun around like a top. Tom let off the brake and cut the steering wheel in the same direction as he was spinning until the little SUV was finally under control. He slowed down to a complete stop near the berm heading in the opposite direction.
Tom swore under his breath, turned the car back around and proceeded south-the huge concrete divider preventing him from crossing over to the other side.
He looked out for the next exit and suddenly saw an orange sign that read Road Closed Ahead. Tom slowed down a bit until he came upon a huge construction area that encompassed the entire highway in all six lanes. He followed the detour sign to the next exit and quickly got onto the northbound entrance ramp.
As he strained his eyes to spot his Jeep ahead in the distance, Tom thought it odd that the outerbelt was completely shut down southward from this point on. He couldn’t recall ever reading anything about it.
Tom was driving as fast as he possibly could and still keep the car under control as he continued in pursuit. He hadn’t been able to see the driver when it flew by, but it was clear that whoever it was did not want him to catch up. Which made Tom think that he had best use caution if and when he finally caught up to the thief.
He slowed down at the Hilliard exit where he had first gotten onto the outerbelt and discovered that the Jeep had gone past it. As he sped up again, he noticed that the fuel gauge was near empty. If he didn’t have any luck soon, he was going to have to give up the chase before he ran out of gas. The last thing he needed was to be stranded out here on this lonesome interstate.
Tom had driven another four or five miles when he thought he spotted a pair of red taillights up ahead. He began slowing down and when he got closer, discovered that the lights were not moving at all The Jeep had run off the road!
He pulled up beside the Laredo, which was still running. It was at that moment that he realized his Jeep had run into a utility pole-just hard enough to dent in his bumper a good half inch or so. He saw no sign of the driver and wondered if he had bailed out. Then he thought he spotted the top of a head lying against the driver’s side window.