Strawman Made Steel

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Connect
with the Author

Discover
other Titles by Brett Adams

— 1 —

I
fell through a mirror into the women’s restroom on the third floor
of Lennox Hill Hospital, Manhattan, at 10:59 on a Sunday night.

I slapped onto a steel bench like a side of
beef, tumbled and fell, knocking a glass from the sink as I went. The glass
beat me to the floor, struck the tiles and shattered. I landed spread-eagle on
a welcome mat of glass splinters.

My arms screamed about the splinters, but I
lay still, straining to hear over the noise of my lungs if anyone had noticed
me arrive.

A cistern dripped into the silence, and
overhead a florescent tube flickered spastically, washing cubicles in two-tone
light. Behind me the mirror’s surface was unbroken and still stained by the
trip-slick―a patch like oil on water, as if Reality had hemorrhaged. The stain
shrank and disappeared in the time it took me to stand and dust myself down.

It was a mess, and I hate to leave a mess.
But two thoughts were rolling around my head like amorous marbles:

One ― From now on, a good client was a guy
who
only
had skeletons in his closet, and

Two ― If I just stood there, I’d be dead in
eight minutes.

I was in the Golden Hour, the window of
time following traumatic injury when prompt treatment can prevent death.

I needed an X-ray. But I couldn’t waltz
downstairs to the ER and ask for one. I’d be dead before I’d signed the waiver,
and if by some miracle I wasn’t, when they found what was
in
me, I’d be
top of the CIA’s interesting people’s list for the term of my natural
life—which is to say,
dead
.

I exited the restroom into a dim corridor.
The day-lights were doused, and only pale little orbs glowed in a line
overhead. A surge of vertigo struck me, and for a moment I was a plane and they
were telling me to land.

Not a soul stirred in the gloom.

My body hurt. Landing on the sink like that
had torqued my clavicle. My forearm felt wet. My flank ached. But it was all
background noise.

I reached a T-junction. A sign pointed
right: Radiology.

I turned left.

An orderly emerged from an elevator
wheeling a bed, and turned down another corridor without sparing me a glance.
Down that way were fusing bones and clotted bowels; down that way were new
mothers and diapers the size of postage stamps. The corridor might as well have
been a telescope, and the ward Mars.

Seventeen steps and I turned again.

I wanted an X-ray, but Radiology would be
buzzing, even at this time of night. I needed a quiet place to gauge my body.
Another twelve steps―I noticed them now, like each breath―and I reached a solid
white door. It had a number on it, 312, and a name, Diagnostics. Helpfully
vague.

It was a good thing I’d been on the other
side of that door before. On my first visit, I’d been carrying a bullet wound,
and after much searching had stumbled across Room 312. But that visit I’d had
plenty of time to stumble.

I leaned on the handle, but it didn’t
budge. I think I swore.

I fumbled in a pocket of my coat for a tension
rod and a pick, a size 3―not too heavy, not too light. The lock was a Kingston.
That was no problem, only it would eat another twenty seconds of my life.

While I worked the lock, another fear
sprang up. The door’s being locked was a bad sign.

I sprung the mechanism, leaned on the
handle, and pushed the door open with my good shoulder. I shut it behind me,
and sniffed the pitch-black air. Stale but only just.

My hand groped over the wall and found the
light switch. I pressed it, and banks of fluorescent tubes clattered to life,
making me squint.

They revealed a rectangular room, tiled
floor, and walls painted a surgical green. Sitting squat in the middle was a
cantankerous analog X-ray machine, an old Centrix. At the sight of it, I
breathed again, and realized I hadn’t since I’d found the door locked.

The machine had once served an adjoining
medical clinic until the clinic had been co-opted for beds. Since then it had
handled overflow from the four digital machines downstairs. But its days had to
be numbered.

It was still here.

I guessed I had six minutes.

I ducked through a curtain into a partition
that ran the length of one wall. It looked out on the machine through a leaded
portal, and served as control center and darkroom.

Film. That was the next hazard.

I killed the darkroom light and fired the
safety. It filled the cramped space with a red glow. I tugged the top drawer of
the film bin open―empty. The second drawer held two unopened boxes of film. I
ripped one open and removed a sheet.

On top of the film bin was a cassette for
the Centrix. I sprung its hinge and sat the film flush in the guides, then
snapped it shut and went back through the curtain.

Five minutes.

The X-ray machine was a flatbed. I yanked
the bucky out of the bed, inserted the loaded cassette, and pinched my finger
slotting the bucky home. I felt the blood blister fill in seconds.

Then comes the part where the patient lies
down to be needled with cosmic rays. The only problem was that usually there is
someone sitting in the control room telling you to lie still
and―importantly―pushing the buttons.

Back through the curtain.

On a control panel that looked like it had
been pulled from the bridge of the original Starship Enterprise, I found the
AUX button and pushed it for five seconds. A warm-up indicator blinked orange.
Forty more seconds for that.

For a hospital, it was doing a good job of
killing me.

The orange light stopped blinking and told
me the X-ray tube was warm. I twisted a knob and ramped the kilovolts to eighty
for maximum penetration. I might fry, but didn’t want to get the film back and
find I’d left the lens cover on.

I patted my pockets, hunting a lump that
would be a ball of string. I pulled it free and found an end. In its short life
it had been used to dry socks, train beans, and persuade a grifter. Tonight it
would save my life.

That was my intention, anyway.

I looped its frayed end around the switch
on the control panel that triggers an exposure. The switch was a post-type,
poking a half-inch out of the panel surface. My fingers had a tremor, but I
fumbled a knot. It wasn’t pretty, but it only had to hold once. Then I spooled
the string around a cabinet handle above the switch, so that it was
counter-slung, pulley-wise. The switch needed to snap
up
.

I backed out of the control room slow as a
dynamiter laying a fuse. By the time I reached the X-ray machine, the string
snaked across the tiles in lazy loops and disappeared beneath the curtain.

I lay down on the flatbed, and
hand-over-hand drew the string taut. I fought the tremors beginning to rock my
body and lay still. I closed my eyes. Somewhere, someone was crying. I debated
pulling the string.

The debate went pro-string, two to one.

I pulled.

The string jerked an eighth of an inch, a
fish nibble. My heart skipped a beat. I kept pulling, and it jerked again, a
deliberate bite. My fish was hooked.

I heard the switch in the control room snap
up, and...

Nothing.

No X-ray.

I had four minutes to live.

Sweat beaded on my forehead while I racked
my brain for the missing piece of the puzzle.

And then I remembered: beneath the panel
was a footwell, and in it, on the floor, was a deadman’s switch, an interlock.
If it wasn’t depressed, no X-ray. Trap for beginners. Design courtesy of
Paranoid Fitters Inc.

Back through the curtain, careful to skirt
the string, but running now.

From a shelf I grabbed the heaviest book I
could find―Grey’s Anatomy―and lumped it on the interlock. I reset the exposure
switch.

I dove through the curtain and threw myself
back onto the flatbed, drew up the string slack, and pulled.

I heard the switch snap up again.

Then, with a faint click, the X-ray
aperture opened. A billion photons beat my image onto the film, and then the
aperture clicked shut. The exposure was done.