The Survivor Read online

  Nate firmed his hands around the stock and mouthed, No time.

  The door to Nate’s room was open; they’d get no benefit of a warning. But the footsteps neared.

  Tap tap tap.

  Pause.

  Somehow, even through the opaque curtain, Nate sensed a change in the quality of the air. A presence. Misha was in the doorway. One brisk pace into the room. Another.

  Nate willed his forearms still. He took a silent step back and raised the gun. The barrel wavered ever so slightly in his weak grip.

  Janie leaned against the wall, her face tense with anticipation. Nate aimed at the curtain, chest high, ready for the burst of movement.

  A scream came from down the hall, then feminine footsteps skittering toward the stairs.

  Misha stopped.

  He must have been debating whether to continue on toward the curtain or go after the footsteps in the hall. Was he pondering whether the fleeing woman was Janie? They could hear him drawing breath. Calm and steady. The guy’s heart rate probably hadn’t ticked north of sixty.

  Nate sighted on the rubbery partition curtain, knowing that Misha was a few feet beyond but unsure where. A missed shot would be answered with a barrage.

  The woman’s footsteps in the hall grew louder.

  Misha set down his boot again, the faintest scuff against the tile. Nate shifted the gun toward the noise and felt it slip soundlessly through his weakened fingers.

  With all his focus, he willed his hands to clamp, but the muscles wouldn’t obey. The gun spun in slow-motion rotation, the checkering on the handle grazing his fingertips. And then it was free, in the air, tumbling toward the hard tile.

  He tried to suck in a breath but found his lungs already full. Bending, he lunged for the gun, missing, but then Janie’s hand shot into sight and caught it two inches off the floor. She had made not a noise.

  Crouching, they stared at each other, wide-eyed, neither daring to breathe. A squeak of Misha’s boot on the tile, just beyond the curtain.

  In the stillness they heard the woman’s footsteps veer up an adjoining corridor, the sound starting to fade. And then another noise chimed in, that of distant sirens.

  Misha retreated now, sprinting off, presumably after her.

  Nate and Janie exhaled together, an explosion of relief. Moans reached them from the hall—Dr. Griffin, in agony.

  Janie inched the curtain aside, and they peered through the still-open door. Dr. Griffin lay in the corridor, hands across his thigh, blood spurting through his fingers at heartbeat intervals and painting thin lines on the floor.

  “Arterial bleed,” Janie said, pushing the pistol into Nate’s hands. “I’ll stabilize him and be right back. A minute, tops.”

  She started up, but Nate grabbed her shoulder. “Misha’s still out there.”

  She pointed at Dr. Griffin. “He will die if I don’t go.”

  The frantic look between them couldn’t have lasted a second, but it stretched to an eternity, one objection after another shuffling through Nate’s mind. The determination on Janie’s face told him he didn’t really have a say anyway. He removed his hand from her shoulder.

  “Take the gun,” he said. “I can’t grip it.”

  Pocketing the Beretta, she was up and into the hall, a quick glimpse bringing into view only a few knocked-over patients and a resident hiding behind a gurney. No Misha.

  Tearing a manual blood-pressure cuff from a cart, she sprinted across to Dr. Griffin. The slick red of his hands was all the more pronounced against his skin, which had gone dusty gray. He applied feeble pressure, too stunned to bear down on the wound. Supplies rolled in the growing puddle; he’d knocked over a cart on his way down.

  “I think I went out from the shock,” he was mumbling. “But I’m back now.”

  Janie tugged off his loafer and worked the cuff over his sock, sliding it up along his saturated pant leg and over the gushing rupture above his knee to the proximal side of the wound. His body went rigid with pain, but she ignored his reaction. Her hand pumping furiously, she inflated the cuff to full pressure, the bleeding slowing, slowing, then stopping.

  Grabbing at the scattered supplies, she came up with a cylindrical pack, which she ripped open with her teeth. Crouching over him, she plugged the gauze into the wound, readjusting the doctor’s hands. “Not outta the woods. Tamponade the bleed. Here. Hard. Harder.” With one hand she thumbed an edge of paper tape up off a roll.

  He looked up at her, his expression of gratitude turning to alarm. She didn’t have time to turn around before a hand set down on her head, fisting her hair and ripping her straight back off her feet.

  Chapter 50

  Watching through the doorway in a state of suspended panic, Nate didn’t see Misha’s hand seize Janie’s hair so much as he anticipated it—the fear of each torturous second finally realized. Misha himself never came into view, just his arm reaching into frame, the fist clenching, the tendons of the wrist flexing powerfully.

  Janie was gone so quickly she might have been whipped off by a truck, the Beretta tumbling from her pocket to spin listlessly on the floor. He heard her make a noise like a roar—part pain, part rage—and then Misha’s voice sang out to him. “Nate Overbay. I have your wife. Come out, please.”

  His steps plodded slowly down the hall. The sirens sounded closer, but not close enough.

  Nate leaped up too fast, his weak ankle giving out. His chest no sooner slapped the tile than he was moving to rise again, shuffling forward.

  Dr. Griffin’s grunts of agony covered the noise of Nate stepping into the corridor. Facing away from Nate, Misha was literally towing Janie down the hall by her hair, dragging her slowly and calmly. She twisted and yelled, arcing with pain, the whites of her eyes impossibly big. Her hands, dark with the doctor’s blood, were fastened on Misha’s wrist, trying to relieve the pressure on her hair. In his free hand, Misha gripped one pistol; the handle of the second protruded from the back of his true-blue jeans.

  He kept on, his heavy boots taking big strides, not noticing Nate stepping into the open behind them. The sirens were louder yet.

  Ahead, an orderly opened a door, and, never slowing, Misha shot him in the shoulder. The man spun around, falling back and away, and the door wobbled closed behind him, a wet splotch marking the wood.

  The Beretta was still, improbably, spinning on the tile where it had fallen. Nate stepped in front of Dr. Griffin and picked it up, his hand complaining against the weight of it. It wobbled severely in his grasp as he raised it, the tip jogging across the scene ahead like the sights on a video game with a broken control. No way he could take a shot.

  Frustration rose inside him, driving him to a fury. He was about to cast the gun aside and limp in pursuit when something on the floor caught his eye.

  A roll of paper tape with a short sticky length lifted from the end.

  He stooped and picked it up. Digging a finger through the trigger guard, he wound tape around the pistol and his hand, fusing metal and flesh. The tape made a soft shushing sound as it peeled from the roll. He wrapped and wrapped.

  “Nate Overbay! If I get to the elevator before you come out, I will shoot her through the top of her head.”

  Nate exhaled evenly through pursed lips. Janie writhed beneath the clenched fist, sliding backward, away from Nate, the shot getting harder every second. With her eyes she implored him. The sirens screamed outside.

  Nate lifted the pistol, willing his elbow steady, willing his muscles strong. The gun wavered, the sights trembling across Janie, Misha, Janie, Misha.

  Misha reached the end of the corridor and slapped the elevator button. He started to turn.

  Nate closed his eyes. Took a single breath. Opened them.

  Misha stared down the corridor at him, across the wreckage of carts, tipped-over wheelchairs, the bodies of the wounded. A western standoff. The Ukrainian’s face was alight with surprise and something like amusement.

  Nate watched him through the three elevated dot
s of white on the steel slide—the sights, perfectly aligned.

  At Misha’s back the elevator dinged open.

  Misha started to raise his gun hand, and Nate squeezed.

  A puff of red rose from Misha’s shoulder. He released Janie, staggering back a step into the elevator, an instant of fear claiming his face before he regained his composure. He examined the tuft of raised fabric at his sleeve, flecked with blood. No more than a graze, but it had forced him to release Janie.

  The wail of the sirens was matched by the roar of multiple engines, vehicle after vehicle screeching around a turn, maybe a block away. The elevator doors began to slide closed. Janie rolled to the side, out of Misha’s vantage before he could find his focus again.

  The recoil had set Nate’s arm on fire, fatiguing the muscle; he struggled to keep the Beretta raised, but the tip lowered to aim at the floor fifteen feet in front of him.

  A smirk firmed Misha’s features, and he lifted a hand and flicked the blood from his shoulder, a fuck-you gesture of carelessness, before the doors clamped shut, wiping him from view.

  Janie scrambled up and peered over the counter to check on the nurse who’d been shot. Her face went limp—lost cause. Turning, she ran toward Nate and Dr. Griffin, stooping to swipe a bag of saline from the floor. Without slowing, she spiked the bag with a length of sterile tubing.

  The doctor’s hands were now firm around the gauze, the blood-pressure cuff holding. “I got it,” Dr. Griffin said. “Get out of here.”

  But she was on her knees, fighting a catheter needle from its packaging, thrusting it into his vein with a single swift gesture. She screwed the free end of the tubing into the IV and slapped the saline bag in the doctor’s palm. “Squeeze. Other hand stays on the wound. You understand?”

  The sirens reached an earsplitting pitch. Dr. Griffin nodded briskly. “Good. Thanks.”

  Janie ushered Nate toward the back corridor, helping shoulder some of his weight when his foot dragged. They reached the patient-transport elevator, and she swiped her ID card, then stabbed at the button repeatedly until the car arrived. As they started down to the ground floor, she dialed her cell phone.

  “Meet us in the liquor-store parking lot, two storefronts south. Now. That means now.” She looked at the screen—it had cut out. Her hand, crusted with the doctor’s blood, swung at her side.

  The elevator car whirred down with excruciating slowness. Nate used his teeth to tear at the tape around his gun hand. He ripped the Beretta loose, shoved it in the back of his jeans, then reached for her. “Your hair—”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine.” Her knee jogged up and down, a tic. “These doors open, we’re gonna go left through the cafeteria, duck through the kitchen, and then stroll right out onto the sidewalk. Got me?”

  “Yes.”

  They arrived and moved onto the well-lit floor. Not a soul in sight. Advancing briskly, they followed the prescribed route, Janie hiding her hands in her pockets before they stepped into the brisk night air.

  A continuous line of squad cars flashed past as they shuffled up the alley toward the sidewalk, Nate barely keeping his feet beneath him. Ahead, a patrolman jogged by, disappearing past the mouth of the alley, not seeming to spot them.

  Nate breathed through clenched teeth. They kept on.

  The patrolman reversed back into view, staring down the alley at them. Nate’s legs locked up. The patrolman’s hand moved to his holster.

  Janie rushed forward, stepping in front of Nate, her ID card flapping around her neck. “I’m a nurse here. Someone’s shooting up the medical ward—”

  “I know,” the cop said. “We—”

  “This is one of the patients. There are more who need help on the third floor and an injured doc.”

  “We’ve got plenty of paramedics. There’s a back entrance here? We’ll clear the building, then—”

  “Hurry. Go.”

  The man obeyed, jogging past them, talking into his radio. He didn’t give Nate a second look.

  With some effort Nate started up his legs again. He put his arm around Janie’s shoulders as they stepped out onto Van Nuys Boulevard. Just a couple out for a stroll. They put their back to the hospital. Nate could practically feel the heat from all those lights. They heard doors banging in, voices shouting, radios squawking. Janie was murmuring to herself, but Nate couldn’t make out the words.

  The liquor store was forty yards ahead and then twenty. A Jeep flew into the lot, bouncing one tire over the curb, and Nate caught a flash of Cielle’s terrified face in the passenger seat.

  He drew Janie closer, finally discerning her words: “—it’s over now it’s over it’s over—”

  It wasn’t until she’d helped him up and into the backseat that she broke down sobbing.

  Chapter 51

  Beside Nate in the back of the Jeep, Janie remained stiff, leaning forward, straight arms pushing down on her knees, the hollow of her neck pronounced. They were twenty minutes from the hospital, but she was still fleeing it. Though she was done crying, each breath ended in a slight hitch.

  Up front, Jason sang along incorrectly to the AC/DC disc he had taken from MonkeyBiz12’s Silver Lake house, keeping time on the steering wheel: “The walls was achin’, my heart was bakin’, and we were shakin’, ’cuz you—”

  “Where are we gonna go?” Janie said. “They can track everything. There’s nowhere. No one we can call.”

  “My father,” Nate said.

  In the front Cielle reached across and slapped off the radio. “Did you say your father?”

  “I’ve never even met him,” Janie said.

  “That’s exactly why we should call him,” Nate said. “He’s not on any of our emergency contact lists, phone records, nothing. No one will think to look.”

  “He still lives in your childhood house, doesn’t he? Won’t they look there?”

  “He’s got a cabin. Or at least he used to.”

  Jason took a corner too sharply, making Casper bounce to attention between the suitcases in the back. Nate put his phone in his lap and stared down at it for a moment. His skin prickled, all those memories buried in his cells. The tires thrummed across the road. Everyone stayed quiet, deliberately focused on the scrolling view past the windows, giving him space.

  His thumb traced the familiar pattern on the number pad. A ring. Then another.

  “Hello?” The voice was dryer than before, but even over the phone every subtlety of pitch and timbre found resonance.

  “It’s Nate.”

  “Who?”

  The freeway flew past. “Dad. It’s me.”

  The line crackled. Then his father, through the phone lines: “Nate.”

  The words came hard but he pushed them through. “You still got that place in Bouquet Canyon? With your friends?”

  A beat while his father tried to catch up to the hasty conversation. “Just me and Ross now. Hugh passed. But I’m pretty much the only one who ever—”

  “Is it under your name?”

  “No. Ross set up one of those whaddayacallits. A partnership. What’s this about, Nate?”

  Nate pressed his forehead to the pane. Outside, headlights and red brakes streaked together, the whole world passing them by and them it. It took him a while to find the words and even longer to say them. “I’m in trouble, Dad.”

  The pause drew out, no sound but the faint rush of his father’s breaths. Nate had no idea what was coming next.

  The old man cleared his throat, an awkward prelude. “Then I’ll be right there,” he said.

  * * *

  They followed the directions to the outskirts of Santa Clarita, the freeway yielding to a smaller freeway, which in turn gave way to a two-lane road. Houses petered out, and traffic grew sparser, though Harleys roared by with enough regularity to suggest a biker bar tucked off somewhere behind the pines. They passed the mouth of the Angeles National Forest and the reservoir itself, the road winding more aggressively as they headed up Bouquet Can
yon. Between the trees, fishermen flashed into view, their heads bent beneath khaki hats, toting poles and strings of rainbow trout that gleamed in the headlights’ glow. Roadside, families loaded coolers and grocery bags of picnic residue into tailgates, kids braying and quarreling as the fathers pulled at longnecks, one last beer before the drive.

  At the turnoff someone had jumped the gun and erected a plywood cutout of Santa on a chopper with the spray-painted rhetorical, WHAT’S YOUR WISH FOR THE NEW YEAR? Jason veered upslope, and they chased the creek, the not-quite-cabin houses spacing out more and more, and then it was all pines and oaks and the occasional tendril of smoke from a hidden chimney. That was one of the miracles of Los Angeles: less than an hour from Rodeo Drive, and you might as well have been transported to a square state. Nate felt his nerves rising with the altitude; he’d not seen his father in a decade and a half and was uncertain what he’d be confronting on just about every level.

  Offering a cheery wave, Jason steered past a few forest rangers in their trucks.

  Janie spoke for the first time in half an hour. “Thank God you have a license.”

  Through the wisps of his bangs, Jason’s eyes flicked to the rearview. “I don’t have a license. I just said I could drive.”

  A drawn-out silence. Cielle took care to stare straight ahead through the windshield. Finally Nate’s scowl lightened a bit, and then Janie tittered, and they all laughed a little, Jason the loudest.

  Jason said, “So I can keep—”

  “Pull over,” Janie said.

  She steered them the final leg and down the driveway, a dirt slope leading to a Craftsman perched a stone’s throw from a finger of the creek. A bowed footbridge arced across the ribbon of water like something from Disney. At the side of the enclosed porch, bent over the propane tank fussing with a knob, was Nate’s father.

  He straightened up, dusting his hands, and came toward the Jeep without waving.

  “Really?” Cielle said breathlessly. “That’s him?”

  He was grayer, a touch stooped, the years heavy on him, but he had good healthy color in his cheeks and his eyes were clear and sober. He wore a flannel shirt fastidiously buttoned to the throat, and it struck Nate that he had never seen the man in a T-shirt. In a flash Nate was five years old again, strapped to the foam backseat of the LeSabre convertible, his father’s elbow perched confidently on the windowsill ahead, holding the world together.