Michael Palmer - Natural Causes

"Run, Warren, run!" Rosa screamed.

Darryl turned to her and smiling in a calm, twisted way, shot her in the chest. In grotesque ballet, Rosa spun nearly full around, her arms flapping like a rag doll's, her glasses flying off. She fell heavily to the floor, not two feet from where Martha lay. Pain exploded through to her back from a spot just above her right breast. She cried out, but was not aware that she had made a sound. Drawing even a shallow breath sent daggers through her chest, and up into her shoulder and jaw.

Darryl, now ignoring her completely, had moved to the spot where Warren had fallen from the platform. He held the obscene, silenced revolver loosely as he stared out toward the water. Lying on her side, gasping for air, Rosa prayed that Fezler had overcome his cowardice and kept his head enough to try to escape.

"P-please d-don't sh-shoot," she suddenly heard him beg.

"Up," Darryl said. "Slowly now. On your feet."

Silently Rosa cursed both men. Moving through pain unlike any she had ever known, she pulled herself toward them.

"Now, Warren, this way. Come on… Come on, boy."

Rosa felt herself move, then move again, first on her belly, then on her hands and knees. Her lung had collapsed. Of that she was sure. She tasted blood and sensed it welling up from her chest. She felt dizzy. Her vision blurred. Then, as she wondered if she could move even one more foot, her hand brushed against Martha Fezler's coffee can. Hearing the soft scrape, Darryl turned. With all her strength, Rosa splashed the solvent into his face. He staggered backward, screaming, pawing frantically at his eyes with his free hand and firing the revolver wildly with the other.

A bullet tore through the flesh of Rosa's arm, but she barely noticed. She had pulled herself up by a line and stumbled over to the wall.

"Warren, help!" she cried hoarsely.

Darryl, now writhing on the floor by the tracks, fired instinctively at her voice. The bullet shattered the barnside just inches from her face.

"Please help me!"

Again a bullet slammed into the wall by her face. The blood gurgling in her throat was beginning to suffocate her. Her cough was futilely weak, her consciousness beginning to go. The room swirled mercilessly as she slipped toward the floor. Suddenly, through the unrelenting haze, she heard a crash, followed instantly by Darryl's dreadful wail. Then, just as suddenly, there was silence.

Rosa lay by the wall, conscious, but barely so. Her hand was inches from her eyes. Still, it took some time before she realized that she was clutching the safety line Martha had so loosely tied. She peered across through a deepening gloom. Twenty feet away, Blankenship's hired killer lay facedown and very still. The huge marine inboard engine rested squarely on his back.

"Warren?" Rosa whimpered, almost soundlessly. "Please come."

There was no response. Rosa battled the encroaching darkness. But slowly her eyes closed.

"Rosa?" Fezler meekly whispered her name, as he touched her shoulder. "C-can you hear me?"

Rosa nodded but could not speak. She felt blood oozing from her mouth.

"Hang on. I'll c-call an ambulance."

"Wait," she gasped.

"W-what?"

"Pad… pencil… over there."

Bewildered, Fezler retrieved the pad and then lifted her head and rested it on his lap. Painfully, slowly, she dictated a phone number to him.

"Call… now," she managed. "Explain… to… him… Sarah… is… at… M… C… B… This… man… will… help."

"I'll g-get an ambulance," Warren said. "Rosa? Dammit, Rosa, no!"

The muscles in her face relaxed. Her lips curled up in a thin smile.

"Go," she said.

October 29

Each hour of Sarah's incarceration on the locked ward of Underwood Six was more traumatic and unpleasant than the last. The staff seemed determined that she should neither expect nor get any special treatment merely because she was a physician. And some of them clearly enjoyed having power and control over an M.D. Every request she made, however minor, was prohibited or modified by some sort of unit rule. Her primary antagonists were the mental health workers-mostly recent college graduates who majored in psychology or sociology, and who all seemed to have taken the job as a stopgap while they tried to decide what to do with their lives.

"My doctor hasn't been by to see me all day. It's very important that I talk to him. Could you please call him?"

"I'm sorry. We never call doctors unless it's an emergency or a problem with medication. He'll be here later tonight or in the morning, just like all the other doctors."

"Hi, I hate to bother you, but I'd like to see the nurses' Physicians' Desk Reference, please. I'm trying to check on a drug company named Huron Pharmaceuticals."

"I'm sorry. No staff books can be lent out to patients."

"Well, could you check on Huron for me?"

"Perhaps later, after group, if there's time."

Eventually, a surprise letup in the line waiting to use the one pay phone had allowed Sarah to call a friend in the hospital pharmacy. There was, he told her, absolutely no such company as Huron Pharmaceuticals. Not local, not regional, not national, not foreign. Nowhere. That information sent Sarah marching once again into battle against the mental health workers.

"I was certain my lawyer was coming during visitors' hours. Now they're over and he hasn't shown up. Can I see him just for a minute if he comes late? It's very important."

"I'm sorry. That's not possible."

"If he happens to call the nurses' station, could you put him through to me?"

"Outside calls can only come through the patients' pay phone."

"But the pay phone was tied up all evening. And then it got shut off at ten. No one told me that was going to happen. Could I please use the nurses' station phone to try to reach him?"

"Everything will be just the same tomorrow morning, Sarah. You may not believe that, but it will. Now, why don't you take the medication Dr. Goldschmidt ordered, read for a while, and get some sleep?"

After learning that the pay phone had been shut off at ten, Sarah gave up on hearing from Matt before morning. But with each passing hour, her concern for him grew. Why would he not at least have called? She calmed herself only by reasoning that he had inadvertently missed the narrow, two-hour visitors' window and then had become the victim of a constant busy signal on the pay phone. Perhaps he had come to the ward late and had been turned away by one of the mental health workers.

The hours on Underwood Six had dragged past a minute at a time. Now it was half-past two in the morning. Sarah sat in a worn leather chair by the lounge window, grateful that no one had produced a rule prohibiting that specific behavior. The one redeeming thing about being a patient on a locked psych ward, she was realizing, was that one could act crazy and have no one take much notice.

Her throat was still raspy from the endotracheal tube, and in addition to feeling tired and weak, she had a rather nasty cough. But she also felt committed to staying up all night if necessary. If and when the Huron Pharmaceuticals truck returned to the Chilton Building, she wanted to know it. In less than seven hours, the building was going to blow. And secrets were either going to be buried beneath the rubble or were being hauled away before the blast made their removal impossible. The Huron people might have already finished their business within the condemned building. But maybe, just maybe, they hadn't. One lucky shaft of light, one good look at the driver of the truck, might pull everything together.

"How're you doing?"

Sarah, perhaps drifting off, was startled by the voice.

"Oh, hi," she said.

The man, Wes, was a mental health aide. He and an RN were the graveyard shift staff on Underwood Six. At forty or so, he was older than the day and evening shift mental health workers, but Sarah assumed that his role on the floor had more to do with security than therapy. He had the lean, muscular frame of a gymnast or weight lifter, and a tattoo of a skull and dagger on one deltoid that he seemed determined to show off. Sarah's impression was that he was quite taken with himself. She also doubted seriously that his formal education extended much beyond high school. Since his arrival at eleven, this was his third trip over to talk with her.