Plague

Chapter 14 Day 2 4:40 AM

Chapter 14
Day 2
4:40 AM


They eventually made their way to the back elevators and went up to the third floor. Jacob told Stephan to get Joan so she could help coordinate what he wanted to do. Stephan went off, after watching Jake steal into the nearest linen closet and close the door behind him.
Jacob settled down on the floor and within seconds, felt himself nodding off.
He awoke instantly when the door opened and light spilled into the closet. Joan and Stephan squeezed into the little room, leaving the door open a bit for some light.
Concerned, Joan looked at him and said, “Jacob, are you all right? Stephan told me what happened.” She came closer to Jacob, which wasn’t difficult in that closet, and stared at him. “This is really silly, you know, getting together in a closet.”
“Yes, Joan, we have to stop meeting like this,” Jacob said. He heard a groan from Stephan as he tried to push himself further back into a corner. “I’m a lot less likely to be seen in here than walking into your office. Even at this time of day. Or night”
Jacob told her what he wanted to do: search the closets and rooms in the corridor leading to the elevators. The hall where Cloris Sedgwick was last seen stumbling fearfully to the elevators. The same hall Hudson was in when Jacob met him at the elevator.
Jacob suggested Joan could get the floor nurses out of the way by assigning them to do anything that would keep them away from the hallway.
“What about the housekeepers and other doctors who may just pop into the hall or come up on the elevator?” Stephan asked.
“Let’s hope we’ll be lucky. Joan, you have five minutes. Then we start searching,” Jacob said.
She left and the two men eyed the luminous hands on Jacob’s watch as they slowly spun around the dial. Jacob was also conscious of the fact that someone could enter the ER room he was supposed to be in at any time. For all he knew, the police could have already arrived and were searching the hospital for him.
He hoped not. Among other things, Stephan would be in deep trouble, too.
Finally, it was time. Jacob and Stephan left the closet and met Joan just beyond the doors to the Pediatric Ward, facing down the hallway towards the elevators. There were five doors on the right side of the hall and eight on the left.
Jacob told Stephan and Joan to take the left and he began on the first door on the right side.
He had no real idea of what he was looking for. Jacob just hoped he’d know it when he saw it.
Stephan and Joan were already up to the second door on their side. Jacob took a deep breath and jerked open the first door on the right. He heard something sliding along the wall and jumped back, slamming the door on a wooden handle. He opened the door again and found the handle was connected to a mop. He was looking into a small broom closet with a dirty sink along the far wall and assorted cleaning utensils and disinfectants along the walls on the sides. There was no place for anyone or anything to hide. Jacob closed the door, chiding himself for being too jumpy.
The next door led Jacob to a linen closet. The shelves on the walls were filled with clean bed sheets and blankets. He half-heartedly poked around, even though he knew there was nothing there to find.
Jacob was approaching the next door when he heard Joan call out. He hurried over to where his friends were standing outside the fifth door on their side.
“What did you find,” Jacob asked, hating himself for the faint quiver in his voice.
“I’m not sure,” Stephan said. “It’s a linen closet, but everything is all torn apart. There are blankets and sheets all over the floor.”
He stood aside so that Jacob could enter the small room. There were at least a half dozen blankets piled over in one corner of the room, and sheets were scattered across the floor. Jacob rummaged through the linen still on the shelves. Running his hands over some sheets on the bottom shelf, he felt something hard.
Before he could reach for it the door to the closet slammed shut. He jumped back, confused and disoriented, enveloped by darkness. He started to bang on the door when he heard Stephan’s voice, speaking louder than usual.
“Yes, Sgt. Michaels, everything is perfectly fine up here. Dr. Armitridge and I were just talking over a couple of difficult cases she’s encountered.”
“Well, that’s real fine, yes it is. What with all the ruckus tonight, and a doctor murdering an honest to God police lieutenant, I really have to check around, yes I do.”
“You don’t really think Dr. Wright killed that policeman, do you?” Joan asked. “I mean, things aren’t always what they seem. Maybe it was self-defense or something. You never know.”
“No, you don’t never know,” Michaels said. “But I saw what I saw. There was just that doctor and the lieutenant in that elevator and it was real easy to see that they had been fighting, yes it was.
“But I don’t want you to worry, I’m going to see that nothing else funny happens around here. Just call me if you want. I’m going to bunk down in the hospital tonight. I’m still expecting them homicide cops to talk to your doctor friend.
“He surely has some trouble, yes he does. Them cops look after their own.” He paused for a second, as if he was thinking. “Good night now and don’t you worry about nothing.”
Jacob heard footsteps walking away from the closet door. He remembered to breathe again and was making up for lost time when the door opened and Stephan stuck his head in.
“Everything okay?”
“Except for incipient heart failure, yeah, everything is fine,” Jacob told him. “I think I found something under these sheets!”
The door opened wider and, sticking his hand under some sheets, Jacob came up with a half finished pint of vodka.
“Well, I guess this is the secret of Mulvihill’s funny gait,” he said.
Joan looked up at Jacob. “Is that what you were looking for?”
“Damned if I know,” Jacob told her. We better finish what we started so I can get back downstairs before the city cops get here.”
Jacob tucked the vodka bottle back under the sheets, after he had wiped his fingerprints off of it.
Stephan saw him and asked, “What did you do that for?”
“I guess I’m just getting a bit paranoid. The cops might find it and add drinking on hospital property to my list of offenses,” Jacob said.
Joan had finished perusing the next room and she and Stephan were approaching the seventh door on their side. Jake walked across the hall and quickly opened the next door on his assigned side of the hall.
It looked deeper and darker than the other rooms, so Jacob ran his hand over the wall trying to find the light switch. Just as he felt the switch, he felt the hair on the back of his neck rising. A feeling of fear mushroomed in his subconscious. He pulled his hand back and closed the door, calling for Joan and Stephan to join him.
“Did you find anything?” Joan asked.
Jacob shrugged, fighting the fear beating at him, and opened the door. Stephan stepped in and flicked on the light. Joan and Jake entered behind him and closed the door.
Joan seemed to sniff the air and looked at the two men.
“Do you smell something funny?”
“Yeah,” Stephan said, “It smells like blood in here. And decaying tissue.”
They were standing in a drug closet, where intravenous fluids and floor stock drugs were stored. There were four or five rows of high metal shelves, about ten feet long, filling the room.
“Joan,” Jacob asked, “Shouldn’t the door have been locked?”
“Yes, it should have been. I’ll raise some hell about this, I guarantee you that.”
Jacob wasn’t listening. He was walking to the end of the first row of shelves, slowly, his fear clamoring to be heard; he was ready to jump out of his skin at the slightest provocation.
He reached the far wall. He had seen nothing out of the ordinary, but the smell intensified. Jacob called to Stephan to walk along with room parallel to him. They both walked tentatively, unsure of what they would find.
As Jacob approached the last set of shelves, he noticed a stain on the floor. It was reddish-brown and flaked off of the floor onto his hand when he rubbed it. He was still crouched down when Joan’s scream tore through the air.
Jacob rounded the corner of the last shelves, slipped on the sticky floor and slid along the floor like a baseball player sliding into home plate. Arms first, he slid right into something lying on the floor.
Nurse Mulvihill’s body.
Jacob looked into what had been Mulvihill’s face and then up at Stephan, who was holding Joan’s arm as they both looked at the dead nurse, looking pale and sick. Jacob looked again at Mulvihill’s body and staggered to his feet in time to heave his guts out over the far wall.
Jacob has seen death in many forms, all of them terrible. Nothing, however, compared to the horror that was the remains of Nurse Mulvihill.
There was blood covering both ears; her nose was ripped along the bottom and sides of her nostrils, giving it a winged appearance. The left eye was dangling by a thread of optic nerve, seemingly pushed out from the inside of her head. There was no right eye, just a bloody socket through which the optic canal could be clearly seen. Her mouth was hanging open with a puddle of coagulated blood gluing her tongue to the floor of her mouth. The blouse of her nurse’s uniform hung open; beneath the caked blood were holes seeming to open from the inside of her neck out.
Jacob stared into Mulvihill’s dead face and began to hyperventilate. His pupils dilated and he fell to the floor on his back, his head striking the floor hard enough to bounce upwards before coming to rest. His body began to shake, his arms and legs gyrating in fast tonic-clonic movements.
Joan and Stephan moved to his aid, Joan kneeling by his head, holding it so that he didn’t strike it against the floor again. Both she and Stephan knew enough not to try to put their hands anywhere near Jacob’s mouth as he seized.
White foam erupted from the corners of his mouth. After about 30 seconds his body relaxed. There were no further seizure type movements. His mouth fell open and he greedily sucked in the air, ignoring the smells of putrification emanating from Mulvihill’s decaying body.
Joan and Stephan looked helplessly at each other. Stephan looked at Mulvihill’s body, then at Jacob, while Joan kept her eyes on Jacob’s face.
Seconds later Jacob opened his eyes. He moved his arms under his body and began to push himself into a sitting position. Joan and Stephan helped support him. Then they took his arms and used them to drag Jacob away from the dead woman, leaning his body up against the wall.
Jacob sat still, his hands at his sides, on the floor. He looked around the room.
“Jacob, do you know where you are?” Joan asked him.
“Yeah, Joan, I do,” Jacob said.
He looked sheepishly around the room, glad to not see Mulvihill’s body and finally allowed himself to look at Stephan and Joan.
“Do you know what happened?” Stephan asked him.
“I think I do. I’m sorry,” Jacob told them.
“Sorry?” Joan asked. “After seeing the mess that used to be Mulvihill, you almost finished scaring me to death!”
“I said I’m sorry, Joan, and I meant it,” Jacob told her.
“Would you help me stand up? I think I can walk now,” Jacob told them.
Stephan looked at Jacob, his eyes creased with concern, but he chose not to say anything. At least not then.
With their help, Jacob got up and then walked to the door of the drug room and threw it open, gasping for clean air, even welcoming the slight smell of disinfectant.
He turned, after a moment, and looked back into the room. Finally, he allowed his two friends to help him out into the hall. Once outside they went back to the rear elevators.
“Are you all right, Jacob?” Joan asked him.
“Yes, I’m fine now. Let’s drop the subject,” Jacob told her, his eyes on the floor in front of him.
“Fine,” Joan said. “Do you know what happened to Mulvihill, Stephan? Jacob? I’ve never seen anything like it; it was horrible!”
Jacob said nothing. He just kept walking towards the elevators.
Finally they arrived at the elevators and Jacob turned to Stephan and asked, “What do you think?”
“You wouldn’t believe what I think, Jacob. I’ve got to get the body and do a post mortem. If I’m correct, it may help to clear you of this Hudson thing. That’s all I want to say now.”
Jacob looked at him and asked, “It was a nest, wasn’t it? A place for replication in the right medium.”
Stephan’s eyebrows rose, grudgingly. “I’ll tell you what I find after I do the autopsy. You better get back downstairs before they find you’ve gone. That is, if they haven’t already.” He turned and walked back down the hall to the main elevators.
Joan was standing quietly, her arm still around Jacob’s shoulders.
“Do you know what’s happening, Jacob? What did you mean about a nest?
“Please tell me!”
“Look, Joan, until I know for sure, I don’t want to say anything. So don’t push, please,” Jake said. “As soon as I know, I’ll tell you.”
Sensing his reticence to talk, Joan let go of his arm.
“All right,” she said, “If you don’t want to talk about it, then fine.
“You know, you scared me more than Mulvihill’s mutilated body did.”
Jacob stared at the elevator door, unable to meet her gaze. Finally he reached out and hit the elevator call button.
Seeing that, Joan turned and walked away.
Jacob took the elevator back to the first floor and slowly navigated his way through the maze of rooms to the one he was supposed to be in. It took him a while. His body was sore all over. The stench from Mulivihill’s body stayed in his nose.
He finally arrived back at the room he had escaped from earlier. He lay down on the exam table and tried to relax.
The clock on the wall showed it to be five in the morning. He turned a few times, trying to get the picture of Mulvihill’s body out of his mind.
If he was right, well, he didn’t want to think about it.
He had embarrassed himself in front of Joan. He didn’t want to think about that either.
He didn’t want to fall asleep, but finally, giving in to his body’s exhaustion, he did.