The Rising(24)

Dr. Payne rocked backward, his skull smacking the headrest with enough force to tip the desk chair nearly over. It jerked back forward and Alex stilled it with his hands jammed against its arms. Saw Payne’s eyes were locked open and sightless. A hole the diameter of a thick pen point—from which a trickle of blood had rolled all the way down his face—appeared to have been drilled into the center of his forehead.

Alex lurched away with a jolt, needing to remind himself to breathe.

My doctor’s been killed.

There’s someone waiting in my room downstairs.

And then Alex heard the thud of heavy footsteps coming his way.

*

Sam had taken extra-credit medical emergency classes for which she’d done several ride-alongs with local EMT rescue teams. Some of the scenes they were dispatched to were worse than she could possibly have imagined.

But not as bad as this.

The blood; oh, God, the blood.

Mr. Chin … Mrs. Chin …

Sam moved closer to see the way that An Chin was sprawled over the floor, her tiny frame so broken in the pool of blood beneath her. And Mr. Chin …

He was on the floor too.

His back was all she could see.

Then she noticed that An Chin’s arm was stretched out oddly. Her fingers were pointed toward something. Sam moved her gaze forward.

More blood. And something else.

An Chin had tried to scrawl something in her own blood, just a few words drying in splotchy fashion on the dark wood floor. Sam crouched to better read them.





ALEX


The bottom of the l and x had dripped downward, touching the top of a second word:





RUN


The second word was more scratchy than the first, the letters running close to the Oriental carpet on which the room’s furniture was set.





ALEX RUN


Sam was staring at those words written in blood when a hand latched onto her forearm and squeezed tightly. She jerked her arm away, nearly lost her balance and snapped her other hand to the floor to keep herself from falling. She felt An Chin’s blood, still warm, soak her palm and swung toward Alex’s mother, whose hand was grasping for her anew.

Mrs. Chin’s eyes were open. She pleaded silently with Sam. She was moving her lips, struggling for the breath she needed to form words.

Alex …

“It’s okay,” Sam heard herself say, in what sounded like someone else’s voice. “You’re going to be okay.” Her gaze locked on a cordless phone lying atop a nearby table. “I’ll call the police.”

But An Chin’s grasp tightened on her before Sam could move.

No police, Mrs. Chin mouthed.

Then her trembling fingers dropped down and began scrawling a final word in blood to complete the message:





GET ALEX RUN





22

ESCAPE

THE FOOTSTEPS SEEMED TO slow as they approached the door to Dr. Payne’s office, but continued on harmlessly. Alex thought fast, at least as fast as the steady dull throb in his head would allow.

Couldn’t go back to his room.

Couldn’t stay here.

Had to get out of the hospital.

Alex could have called the police on Dr. Payne’s phone now, but what was he going to tell them? That his doctor was dead and he was in some kind of crazy danger? Sounded simple enough to say. Make the call and then leave the building. Anonymous. If nothing else, he could wait for the cops to arrive in force and then use their presence as a distraction to flee. They’d know who he was. They’d protect him.

The harder he thought, the more his head throbbed. He willed himself to be calm, to think one thing at a time. The cops first.

Alex reached down for Payne’s office phone and lifted the receiver from its cradle.

Nothing. No dial tone.

He hit a bunch of keys and still got nothing but dead air for his effort. Now what?

Cell phone!

Payne must have had one somewhere, but none was in evidence on the desk. So it must be in a pocket.

Alex checked his lab coat pockets first, then held his breath while he felt around the outlines of the doctor’s other pockets in search of his smart phone’s shape. Nothing in any of those, either, but one of the pants pockets was turned inside out, as if someone had gotten there ahead of Alex with the same idea in mind.

Calling the police was no longer the goal, with no means to do so. And he couldn’t venture back out into the halls dressed in hospital garb with whoever had killed Payne and whoever was down in his room still out there.

So Alex moved to the office closet, freezing when he saw it was already open just a crack, a pair of red eyes staring at him from within it.





23

GET ALEX





GET ALEX RUN


Sam had indeed run after An Chin finished her message in blood. She burst out through the back door, dashing through a line of neighboring backyards to avoid being spotted by whoever had attacked the Chins. Those men whose voices …

… didn’t sound like voices at all.

She peeled back for the street when she hit a fence, trying to get her bearings and realizing she’d overshot the place where she’d parked. She couldn’t see the Chins’ front porch until she was almost to her car and then everything looked normal. No sign of the intruders or of anything amiss. But she didn’t let herself think what she’d just seen was the product of her imagination. It was real, and the Chins needed help. Desperately.