John Gilstrap - At all costs

Sparks tried to brace for a fight but, in reality, never had a chance. He saw something moving in the doctor’s hand, and then George’s whole world flashed red. His head erupted in agony as the syringe needle came around in a horizontal arc and buried itself into his right eye. He heard a snap as the point impacted bone and broke off. He screamed; an inhuman howl that rose up from a place deeper than his throat as he clutched his hands to his face and fell helplessly to the floor.

“Oh, God! My eye! My eye!”

Rubie was screaming, too, as he squeezed his ruined knee with both hands, as if he could clamp off the flow of pain. The scream ended abruptly; cut short by yet another kick that at once crushed his larynx and drove his lower jaw with jackhammer force into his upper jaw, severing his tongue in the process.

Rubie collapsed backward onto the floor. Struggling for breath, but choking on blood instead, he was dimly aware that someone had lifted him by his hair, but felt nothing as the doctor smashed his head like a melon against the hard tile floor.

Everything was moving too fast for Travis to process it all. He didn’t see it all in detail, but he saw the blood and he heard the screaming, and he found himself wishing more than anything that he could scream, too. So much noise. So many people, all running in to see what was going on.

“Oh, shit!” someone yelled. “Jesus Christ! Get us some help up here!”

God, there was so much blood! Travis was mesmerized by it all. And so were the hospital staffers, until they realized that their real patient was a naked little boy, whose color suddenly matched that of his disheveled bedclothes. All at once, they descended on him, shouting orders to each other as they reconnected his respirator, yanked out old IVs, and went about the business of establishing new ones. No one talked; everyone yelled. But for his role as a pincushion, he might as well have not been there.

Where is he? Travis’s mind screamed as he searched the assembled faces for the man who’d tried to kill him. He slapped at each of the hands that approached him, fearful that the murderer was still there. He didn’t see him, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t lurking around somewhere, waiting for his chance. He’d done it once; he could do it again.

The hands fought him back; they were all over him, pushing and prodding and poking all the places they’d pushed and prodded and poked before. Everyone talked at him, told him to relax, but no one even seemed remotely concerned about what happened to the asshole who did all of this.

They had more pressing matters to worry about: like the guy on the floor whose screams sounded more animal than human; and the other one, whose brain matter formed a slick coating under people’s feet.

Travis closed his eyes and wished for it all to go away. He wanted his mom and his dad. He wanted to go back to Farm Meadows to smell the mildew and the accumulated trash. He wanted to die-quickly and easily this time. He wanted to be anywhere but here.

Somewhere, from outside his darkness, a hand gently touched his cheek, and a voice said, “Travis, honey, are you okay?” It was his mother’s tone but someone else’s voice. He opened his eyes, and there was Jan. She gave him her warmest smile. “I only got as far as the cafeteria,” she explained softly. “I was worried about you.”

He reached up to hold her hand, but someone told him to hold still. He tried to shake his arm free, anyway, but whoever was working on him down there fought him back.

“Let them do their job, Travis, okay?” Jan soothed, stroking his shoulder. “You’re okay now. I’ll be right here. Nobody can hurt you if I’m right here, now, can they?”

He relaxed and closed his eyes again. He felt her hand in his hair, petting him gently and whispering about things that didn’t matter. Her touch reminded him of how his mom would sit with him all night long whenever he’d get sick as a kid. He thought about his dad’s laugh; how he’d always howl at the dirty jokes that his mom would pretend to be offended by.

He thought about all the horrible things he’d said and felt about them on their last day together, and in that moment, he knew he’d never see his parents again.

Irene made sure that her badge was showing from the waistband of her skirt as she wandered with Paul into the emergency room at St. Luke’s. From the level of activity, she expected to see the carnage of a train wreck. People ran in all directions, shouting orders, and in general creating bedlam out of disorder. She tried twice to ask a hospital staffer what was going on but was soundly ignored.

Across the way, she noted the still form of Carolyn Donovan, unguarded and likewise ignored by medical personnel as she lay on her back on a gurney, both wrists cuffed to side rails. “They just leave her there unguarded?” she asked Paul incredulously.

He answered with a question. “What the hell is going on in here?”

One thing was certain: she was going to have a long talk with the Little Rock police chief about his chain-of-custody procedures. Leaving a fugitive like Carolyn Donovan alone was inexcusable.

“Look there.” Paul pointed.

The commotion seemed centered around a bank of elevators, where Irene saw a cluster of doctors and nurses waiting for the doors to open. A cop nearby had his weapon drawn, and she suppressed the urge to draw her own. She was still twenty feet away when the doors opened, and the waiting crowd came alive. Amid the cluster of legs, she could see the wheels of a gurney being brought off the elevator, and above their heads, she could make out the characteristic slumped posture of someone in the midst of performing CPR while straddling his patient on the cot.

The knot of people moved as one down the tile floor back toward the trauma rooms, leaving a thick blood trail on the tile floor. As they passed, she thought she saw a police uniform shirt in a heap at the foot of the gurney.

The other cop-the one with his gun still drawn-looked like he needed to sit down but followed the procession, anyway. She snagged him as he passed, snapping the badge from her waistband and holding it up where he could see it. “What’s going on?” she said quickly. “And why don’t you put that weapon away?”

The cop looked scared to death. He glanced first at the badge and then to her face. Finally, his eyes fell to the gun in his hand, and he sheepishly slid the weapon back into its holster. “Somebody killed him upstairs,” he said, clearly dazed by it all. “Guarding some kid. Got one of your guys, too.” He shook himself free of her and hurried to rejoin the group.

Irene looked to Paul. “One of our guys?”

They got it at the same instant. “Sparks!”

Bleary-eyed and numb after his fitful three-hour nap, Jake had just lifted himself out of an overstuffed chair in the lavish TV room, on his way back to the kitchen for a second cup of coffee, when the Special Report graphic caught his attention. Flanked by pictures of Carolyn and Travis, the local Little Rock newscaster nodded slightly to acknowledge his cue and started right into the story.

“Police sources confirm that they foiled an attempt this morning to suffocate the teenaged son of the famed terrorists Jake and Carolyn Donovan as the boy lay in the intensivecare unit of St. Luke’s Hospital, recovering from injuries sustained yesterday as he reentered the Newark Hazardous Waste Site…”

Jake froze, his mouth agape, as he zeroed in on the announcer’s words. The station cut live to a young reporter on the scene at the hospital, who used the most graphic, sensational terms he knew to describe the details. As the reporter spoke, the screen showed closeups of blood smears on the tile floor of the Emergency Department.