Chapter 2 - The Doctor Who Needed Him Dead
For three seconds, nobody moved.
The cardiac monitor clicked steadily behind Hannah.
Seventy-six beats per minute.
Seventy-eight.
Eighty-one.
Each sound announced the same impossible truth.
Adrian Vale was alive.
Dr. Shaw turned the phone facedown against his palm.
“What message?” Marcus asked.
Shaw tried to regain the cold authority he used with residents and nurses.
“It was nothing.”
Adrian’s voice emerged as a broken whisper.
“Show him.”
Shaw looked at the man he had pronounced dead.
Adrian’s eyes remained open, but pain had tightened every muscle in his face.
Blood continued to soak the sheet beneath him.
“He’s confused,” Shaw said.
Marcus pressed the pistol beneath Shaw’s ribs.
“He looked clear to me.”
Hannah moved closer to Adrian.
“His pressure is falling again. We are wasting time.”
Marcus held out his free hand.
“The phone.”
Shaw hesitated.
Then the overhead lights flickered.
Everything went dark.
The monitor alarmed.
Emergency lighting flashed red across the trauma room.
Someone had cut power to the emergency department.
Hannah heard the electronic locks release in the hallway.
Then footsteps.
Fast.
Several people.
Marcus shoved Shaw against the wall and raised his weapon toward the door.
“Hannah,” Adrian whispered.
She leaned close.
“What?”
“Get down.”
The trauma room window shattered.
Hannah dropped beside the table as two suppressed shots struck the cabinets above her.
Marcus returned fire.
A masked man entered through the doorway.
Marcus hit him hard enough to send him into the wall, then wrestled the weapon from his hand.
A second attacker appeared behind him.
Dr. Shaw ran toward the exit.
Hannah saw him move.
“Marcus!”
Marcus turned too late.
Shaw struck the emergency release beside the wall and locked the trauma room from the outside.
The second attacker raised his gun toward Adrian.
Hannah grabbed a metal instrument tray and threw it.
The tray struck the attacker’s arm.
His shot went wide, exploding a cabinet door.
Marcus tackled him.
They crashed into the supply cart.
Hannah turned back to Adrian.
His oxygen level had fallen into the seventies.
The needle in his chest had shifted during the attack.
His right lung was collapsing again.
“We have to move you.”
Adrian’s lips barely moved.
“Can you?”
“I don’t have a choice.”
Marcus drove the second attacker’s head against the floor until the man stopped fighting.
Then he ran to the trauma table.
“The hallway is compromised,” he said. “There’s a private surgical suite on the fifth floor.”
Hannah stared at him.
“How do you know the hospital layout?”
“Adrian paid for half this building.”
Another bullet struck the door.
Marcus grabbed the table.
“Move.”
The wheels caught on the power cable.
Hannah tore it free.
The monitor died, leaving only the portable battery unit attached to Adrian’s finger.
Marcus aimed at the lock and fired twice.
The door opened into smoke and darkness.
The emergency department was nearly empty.
Patients had fled or hidden.
A nurse crawled behind the registration desk.
A police officer lay unconscious near the entrance, his radio missing.
Hannah and Marcus pushed Adrian through the corridor.
A figure appeared near the elevators.
Marcus raised his weapon.
“Don’t shoot!”
The woman lifted both hands.
It was Dr. Sofia Ramirez, Mercy Harbor’s youngest cardiothoracic surgeon.
She wore blue scrubs beneath a winter coat and looked furious rather than afraid.
“Hannah called me before the power went out,” Sofia said. “Is he alive?”
“Barely,” Hannah answered.
Sofia pulled back the blood-soaked sheet and examined Adrian’s chest.
“You decompressed him?”
“Yes.”
“And drained the pericardium?”
“Yes.”
Sofia looked at Hannah with open disbelief.
“You did this alone?”
“There wasn’t time.”
A gunshot echoed at the far end of the hall.
Sofia pointed toward a service stairwell.
“My operating room has an independent generator.”
They pushed the table toward the stairs, but Adrian was too heavy to carry safely.
Marcus forced open a freight elevator.
The emergency lights inside flickered.
Hannah looked at the control panel.
“If the power fails, we’ll be trapped.”
“If we stay here, we’ll be dead,” Marcus replied.
They entered.
Sofia pressed five.
The doors closed.
Adrian’s breathing worsened almost immediately.
Hannah held the oxygen mask over his face.
His pale blue eyes remained fixed on her.
“You should have let me die,” he whispered.
“That would have made my shift easier.”
A faint expression touched his mouth.
It might have been a smile.
Then his eyes closed.
“Adrian?”
The pulse oximeter dropped.
Hannah placed her fingers against his neck.
“We’re losing him.”
Sofia tore open the emergency kit mounted inside the elevator.
“I need access to his chest.”
“There’s no room.”
“Then make room.”
Marcus braced Adrian’s shoulders while Hannah cut through the remaining fabric of his shirt.
Sofia examined the wound.
“The blood around his heart is rebuilding.”
The elevator stopped between floors.
The lights went out.
Hannah’s breath caught.
Marcus struck the control panel.
Nothing happened.
Then a voice came through the emergency speaker.
“Mr. Vale.”
Adrian did not respond.
The voice continued.
“This hospital has suffered an unfortunate systems failure. If Nurse Brooks and Dr. Ramirez step out when the doors open, they will not be harmed.”
Hannah recognized Dr. Shaw.
Marcus looked toward the speaker.
“What happens to me?”
“You made your choice years ago, Mr. Reed.”
Sofia whispered, “He doesn’t sound alone.”
Marcus checked his remaining ammunition.
“Six rounds.”
Hannah looked at Adrian.
His pulse was fading again.
“We don’t have time to negotiate.”
Sofia opened the elevator’s maintenance panel.
“There’s a manual release.”
Marcus pulled the doors apart.
A concrete wall filled most of the opening.
They were trapped between the fourth and fifth floors.
A narrow gap remained above.
Sofia pointed upward.
“The fifth-floor landing is less than three feet away.”
Marcus climbed through first.
He pulled himself onto the landing, then reached down.
Together, they raised the head of Adrian’s table.
The angle was impossible.
“We can’t lift him like this,” Hannah said.
“We have to.”
The elevator jerked.
Someone had restored power.
The car began moving downward.
Marcus grabbed the frame.
“Now!”
Sofia climbed through.
Hannah remained beside Adrian.
She could not abandon him.
The elevator descended another six inches.
The opening narrowed.
Marcus reached for Hannah.
“Give me your hand!”
“Take him first!”
Adrian’s eyes opened.
His fingers wrapped weakly around the rail.
“Hannah.”
She leaned close.
“I’m here.”
“Go.”
“No.”
The elevator dropped suddenly.
Hannah lost her balance and fell across Adrian.
Marcus reached through and caught her wrist.
Sofia grabbed Adrian’s shoulder.
For several brutal seconds, all four of them fought gravity and steel.
Then Marcus pulled Hannah through the gap.
Sofia and Marcus dragged Adrian after her just as the elevator car plunged toward the basement.
The trauma table disappeared below them.
Adrian struck the floor hard.
His monitor went silent.
Hannah crawled toward him.
“No pulse.”
Sofia checked his pupils.
“He needs his chest opened now.”
The operating suite was fifty yards away.
They carried Adrian on a discarded door ripped from a storage room.
Sofia activated the independent generator.
Lights flashed on above the surgical table.
“Marcus, lock the doors,” she ordered.
“You tell me what you need.”
“Blood. Instruments. An anesthesiologist.”
“The anesthesiologist may be one of the people trying to kill him,” Hannah said.
Sofia looked at her.
“Then you’re assisting me.”
“I’m a nurse.”
“You found a heartbeat every physician missed. Tonight, you are whatever keeps him alive.”
Marcus found two terrified surgical technicians hiding in a sterilization room.
One agreed to help after Marcus lowered his weapon.
The other discovered that every unit of Adrian’s blood type had been removed from the operating floor.
“Someone cleared the refrigerator,” the technician said.
Marcus’s face hardened.
“I’m O negative.”
Hannah stared at him.
“You don’t know if it’s safe.”
“It’s safer than letting him bleed out.”
They connected Marcus for emergency direct donation while Sofia opened Adrian’s chest.
The bullet beside his sternum had torn a small vessel near the heart.
Each time Hannah had drained the surrounding blood, more collected.
Sofia repaired the vessel while Hannah managed suction and medication.
Adrian’s pressure rose.
Then fell.
Rose again.
For two hours, the room became a world of blood, alarms, whispered numbers, and gloved hands.
Marcus remained seated beside the wall, donating until his face turned gray.
At 4:52 a.m., Sofia closed the final incision.
“He’s stable,” she said.
Hannah nearly collapsed from relief.
Marcus stood carefully.
“Move him somewhere secure.”
Sofia removed her gloves.
“He needs intensive care.”
“He needs a location Shaw cannot access.”
A voice came through the operating-room intercom.
“Marcus.”
Everyone froze.
It was Adrian.
His eyes remained closed.
A ventilator breathed for him.
Yet the sound came again.
“Marcus.”
Hannah realized Adrian had been awake beneath the light anesthesia.
Marcus approached the table.
“I’m here.”
Adrian forced out the words.
“Shaw wasn’t paid by our enemy.”
“Then who paid him?”
Adrian’s eyes opened slightly.
“Someone in my family.”
Before Marcus could ask more, the operating-room doors unlocked.
Dr. Shaw entered with six armed police officers.
He raised both hands.
“Marcus Reed, step away from the patient.”
Marcus reached toward his weapon.
Every officer aimed at him.
Shaw looked at Hannah.
“Nurse Brooks, you are under investigation for unauthorized treatment, evidence tampering, and assisting a known criminal organization.”
Hannah stared at him.
“You tried to kill a patient.”
Shaw’s expression remained calm.
“That is a serious accusation from a suspended nurse covered in the blood of a man the city already believes died at 2:31.”
One officer pulled Marcus’s gun away.
Another placed Hannah’s hands behind her back.
Sofia protested.
“She saved his life.”
Shaw glanced toward Adrian.
“Unfortunately, Dr. Ramirez, Mr. Vale never survived the original trauma.”
Hannah turned toward the monitor.
It still showed a heartbeat.
“What are you talking about?”
Shaw stepped closer and lowered his voice.
May you like
“As far as the hospital record is concerned, Adrian Vale is dead.”
Then one of the officers disconnected the monitor.
