No Escape (3 page)

The weird thing was that he seemed to be the only patient, or test subject, or whatever. Alex had expected a hospital, but the building that matched the address was just a random office in the middle of a city block; there wasn’t even a sign on the door. At first he’d thought he had the wrong place—most of the other shops had
FOR RENT
signs in the windows, and the street was deserted. But when he rang the bell, they buzzed him right in and were expecting him. He’d asked about the money right away, and the Chinese lady had smiled and said it would all be taken care of.

Alex crossed his hands behind his head. They hadn’t answered many of his questions so far, but maybe that was part of whatever they were doing. His stomach growled, and he frowned. Maybe they’d feed him, too? He’d ask the nurse lady when she got back.

The door suddenly opened, and a guy came in wearing green scrubs with a lab coat over them. He had a paper mask on his face and stringy blond hair beneath a surgical cap. “Alex Herbruck?” he asked, his voice muffled.

“Yeah?” Alex sat up, suddenly feeling nervous. No one had said anything about getting operated on. He flashed back to that weird noise the clinic doctor had made when Alex asked if they’d take his kidney. It had been a laugh, right?

“Sorry.” The doctor pulled his mask down and grinned wolfishly at him. “I’m so used to wearing it, sometimes I forget it’s still on.”

“Oh,” Alex said. The guy’s smile didn’t reach all the way to his eyes, and he looked tired. Maybe he was doing this in his spare time, like the other doctor. “How much longer am I going to be here? I’m kind of hungry.”

“Of course,” the doctor said briskly. “Sorry about that. Unfortunately we can’t feed you yet, but you’ll be given a full meal before you leave.”

“Awesome,” Alex said gratefully. He relaxed a bit. This was too good to be true—they were paying him, washing his clothes, and feeding him? He wondered if they’d bring him a Big Mac and large fries.

“Now then, let’s get started.” The doctor plunked down on a rolling stool and slid across the room on it, stopping right in front of the bed. He looked Alex over appraisingly. “Doctor Jeffries said you were having some trouble breathing.”

Alex shrugged. “Yeah, a little.”

“Smoker?”

“Yes.” Alex braced himself for another round of recriminations.

But the doctor actually seemed pleased. “Good. We haven’t had a smoker yet. And you’re fifteen years old?”

“Sixteen. Well, in a month,” Alex said reflexively.

The doctor laughed and shook his head. “Just wait until you’re my age, Alex. You’ll start rounding down instead of up. Nurse!”

The door opened and the Chinese nurse came in. She was also wearing a surgical mask and cap now, and had latex gloves on her hands. In one of them she held a needle. Alex eyed it suspiciously. He’d had blood drawn before, and this looked different.

“Is that a shot?”

“It is,” the doctor said, sounding impressed. “We’re not going to be able to pull any wool over this one’s eyes, Annette!”

The nurse didn’t answer. Her eyes never left the floor as she approached the bed.

“Now Alex, I’m guessing you’ve had shots before, yes?”

“Yeah,” Alex said. “Of course.” That was one thing about social workers; even if they screwed everything else up, they made damn sure you got poked with needles every year on your birthday.

“So you know the drill. And I’m telling you, Annette is the very best. You’ll barely feel this, I promise.” The blond doctor grinned again, then nodded at Annette.

She put her small hands on Alex’s right arm, drawing it toward her. Her thumb pressed the soft skin on the inside of his elbow, feeling among the freckles for something. Then, without warning, she jabbed him with the needle.

“Ow!” Alex said, nearly snapping his arm back.

But her grip had tightened, surprisingly strong as she depressed the plunger. When it was empty, she pulled out the needle and pressed a piece of gauze to the injection spot, then taped a Band-Aid over it.

“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” the doctor asked. He had a weird gleam in his eyes, like he’d enjoyed seeing Alex in pain.

“If she’s the best, I’d hate to see the worst,” Alex muttered, rubbing his arm. It felt weird, tingly. A growing numbness spread quickly out from the spot until he could feel it in his fingers. It gradually extended up his arm to his shoulder, then his chest. “I think she might’ve messed up,” he said, panicked. “My arm—”

“You’re fine, Alex,” the doctor said. But his face was funny now, bending and warping. His voice became all weird and echoey as he continued, “Just try to relax.”

But my arm
, Alex said, or tried to say. His tongue felt thick and cottony, expanding and swelling into a giant, ungainly thing. He felt his eyelids droop closed, and he fought the sensation, trying to force them wide-open. No matter how hard he resisted, though, the lids grew heavier and heavier until he simply didn’t have the strength to keep them open anymore.

I’ll just close them for a second
, he thought.
Then I’m outta here....

Something was seriously wrong. Alex’s whole body ached, and he was freezing. It felt like he was lying on a block of ice. Had someone stolen his sleeping bag again? It was probably that bastard JJ. The kid was always stealing his crap. He’d make him pay for it this time, though....

Alex blinked his eyes, expecting to see the filthy walls of the abandoned building where he and Jenny had been squatting with a couple of kids, including JJ. He winced—there was a light directly above him, as bright as the sun; the glare forced his pupils to contract.
What the hell?
His head felt foggy, like he was hungover, but worse.

Drugs? Had he gotten high? That didn’t feel right, either. Maybe he’d been jumped again? The last time his head hurt this much was when he’d run afoul of a local gang by walking down the wrong side of the street and they beat the crap out of him.

What was that light, though?

And suddenly it all came back: the doctors, the weird medical office, Nurse Annette and her needle. The bastards had drugged him. And done other things, too; he had fuzzy memories of more needles, of people hovering over the bed, of feeling pain everywhere. As he remembered more, rage tore through him, whipping away the last bit of heaviness in his limbs. Alex lifted his head.

He was in a different room now. White curtains surrounded the bed—the kind on rolling beads, like they used in hospitals. And there were machines all around him. A transparent cord ran down from one of them and into his elbow: an IV.
Oh crap
, he thought.
They did take my kidney
.

The realization seriously ticked him off. Alex was angry with himself for believing that those doctors had been trying to help him, and that they’d pay him for doing practically nothing. He was an idiot.

Tentatively he reached a hand down, groping under the hospital gown he still wore. No bandages on his back, he discovered with relief. Or his front. So maybe it wasn’t too late.

Alex yanked out the IV and pushed the overhead lamp away as he eased up to a sitting position. He strained his ears, trying to sense anyone outside the curtain. Were they off somewhere getting ready to slice him open? Well, they’d have another thing coming. Alex was going to make them pay for assuming he was just another dumb kid. He’d start with that grinning blond jerkoff and Nurse Annette, then he’d go back and rip the hair out of the clinic doctor’s ears. In the end, they’d all be sorry they messed with him.

Setting his jaw, Alex eased off the bed. His legs felt wobbly, and his left calf still throbbed. Looking down, he saw that the hematoma was gone, replaced by a giant purple bruise. He frowned. It usually took him a few days to develop bruises, but this one had come on fast. That car must’ve hit him even harder than he’d thought.

He moved as quietly as he could toward the gap in the curtains and peeked through, then frowned. He’d been expecting a hospital room, but it turned out he was inside some sort of enormous glass box, roughly fifteen by fifteen feet. The curtains ran around tracks set in the center of the room, with nothing but a few feet of empty space on all sides. He wondered why they’d bothered installing them, since you couldn’t see out the frosted-glass walls anyway.

The door set in the wall closest to him was shut. He looked around, hoping to find his clothes, but no luck there.

Alex held his gown closed and limped over to the door. He turned the knob: locked. “Damn,” he swore under his breath, then bent down to examine the latch. Nothing fancy, just a standard dead bolt. He smiled, then hobbled back inside the curtain to retrieve a couple of different-sized scalpels from a wheeling table. At the door he sank to his right knee, wincing at the pain in his other leg. He tried to push it away as he focused on the lock.

Less than a minute later, there was a click. Alex eased the door open, keeping a scalpel gripped in his hand.

As he walked out of the box, he stopped short. “What the hell,” he muttered. This was definitely not a hospital. He was in some sort of huge warehouse, with boxes stacked in every direction. The lighting was dim, the passageways clotted with shadows. A tremor worked its way up his spine. He fought it back, trying to focus on his rage, not his fear. He was all right. They hadn’t done anything to him yet—at least, nothing permanent.

He spun in a slow circle, trying to decide which way to go. Had the doctor just left him here? It seemed weird, but the door had been locked, and they had no way of knowing he could open it.
Morons
, he thought, repressing a surge of satisfaction. They were going to regret trying to take advantage of Alex Herbruck.

He silently made his way down the nearest aisle, the concrete floor cold under his feet. Stacks of cardboard boxes formed a sort of canyon around him.
What the hell was this place?
The passage dead-ended on another narrow lane just like it; this one extended off to the left and right. Alex hesitated, then turned left. After fifty feet, he encountered yet another passageway; this time he took a right. Up ahead, he could see the boxes starting to peter out. Relieved, he picked up the pace. The box towers finally just cleared his head, then reached his shoulders.

He broke free of the maze. The walls of the warehouse soared overhead, massive steel beams extending up into the shadows of the rafters. The far end of the building was smooth metal. There was a door set in the wall about a hundred feet away. At the sight of it, Alex nearly released a whoop of joy.

With renewed determination he limped forward, a scalpel still clutched in his right hand.

“So close, and yet so far, isn’t it, Alex?”

He sucked in a breath and froze, recognizing the voice. Alex turned slowly. The blond doctor was leaning casually against a stack of boxes at the end of an aisle adjacent to the one he’d just emerged from.

He was still dressed in scrubs, but now they were stained with dark splotches.
Is that blood?
Alex wondered. Not his, if it was. “Now, now, Alex,” he chided. “You don’t expect us to pay you if you leave, do you?”

“You were never going to pay me,” Alex retorted.

“Not true.” The doctor took a step forward, making Alex tighten his grip on the scalpel. “Of course we intend to pay you. Didn’t you read those forms we had you sign?”

His voice was calm, reassuring. In spite of himself, Alex felt lulled by it. “Bullshit,” he managed to say. “You’re lying.”

“Not at all. We haven’t harmed you. In fact, we treated your pneumonia. Aren’t you breathing better?”

It hadn’t occurred to him until just now, but it was true—his lungs moved easily in his chest, and the rasp was gone.

Emboldened by this, the doctor took another step forward. “Just put down the scalpel, Alex.” He barked another laugh as he added, “Unless you plan on operating on me?”

“Not until you tell me what you did to me.”

“I already told you,” the doctor said, sounding pained. “We pumped you full of some strong antibiotics. The fever finally broke this morning. It took a few days for the medicine to make headway against it.”

Days?
Alex stared back at him in shock. Had he really been here for days? The guy might be telling the truth—the clinic doc had seemed worried about his lungs....
No
, Alex told himself. There was something about the way the guy was studying him, a faint smile quirking his lips, that he didn’t trust. He narrowed his eyes. “Yeah? Then why’d you move me here?”

The doctor shrugged. “This space isn’t ideal, I’ll grant you that, but it’s more than sufficient for our needs. And we had the right equipment here to treat you. I apologize if you were startled when you woke up, but I assure you, you’re completely safe.”