Robin Cook - Coma

With no particular plan in mind, Susan rushed up to one of the wide but low doors leading into the first amphitheater. It was the door through which patients were wheeled for demonstrations. As Susan closed the door she heard running footsteps on the marble hall behind her. She moved away from the low door into the center of the amphitheater. The banks of seats rose in regular tiers until they were lost in darkness. She mounted the steps leading up one aisle from the pit.

The footsteps got louder and Susan hurried upward, afraid to look back. The footsteps passed and became less audible. Then they stopped altogether. Susan moved higher and higher. Behind her the pit of the amphitheater became more and more difficult to distinguish. Susan reached the upper tier of seats and moved laterally along it. She heard the footsteps on the marble again. She had a few moments to think. She knew there was no way she could cope with this man directly; she had to lose him or hide long enough so that he would give up and leave. She thought about the tunnel to the Administration Building. But she wasn’t one hundred percent sure that it would be open. Occasionally it had been locked when she tried to take that route home from the library in the evening.

She froze as she heard the door open into the pit of the amphitheater. The shadowy figure of a man entered. She could barely see him. But she was dressed in the white nurse’s uniform and she feared that she was more easily visible. She slowly crouched down behind a row of seats, but the backs of the chairs only rose eight to twelve inches above the level she was on. The man stopped and did not move. Susan guessed that he was trying to scan the room. She carefully lay down on the floor. She could see between the backs of two of the seats. The man walked over to the podium and seemed to be searching. Of course. He was searching for the lights! Susan felt panic again take control. Ahead of her, about twenty feet away, was a door to the hall on the second floor. Susan prayed that the door would be open and not locked. If it were locked she would have to try to make it to the door on the opposite side of the amphitheater. That would take about as long as it would take D’Ambrosio to get from the pit up to her level. If the door ahead of her was locked, she was lost.

There was a snap of a light switch and the lamp on the podium went on. Suddenly and eerily D’Ambrosio’s horrid pockmarked face was illuminated from below, casting grotesque shadows and making his eye sockets appear like burnt holes in a ghoulish mask. His hands groped along the side of the podium, and the sound of a second switch reverberated in Susan’s ears. A strong ray of light sprang from the darkened ceiling, illuminating the pit in a brilliant beam. Now Susan could see D’Ambrosio clearly.

She crawled forward as rapidly as she could toward the door. Another light switch snapped and a bank of lights lit up the blackboard behind D’Ambrosio. At that point D’Ambrosio noted the switches for the room lights to the left of the blackboard. As he walked over to the switches, Susan got up and broke for the door. She turned the knob as the lights went on in the room. Locked!

Susan stared down into the pit. D’Ambrosio saw her and a smile of anticipation came to his thin, scarred lips. Then he ran for the stairs, taking them in twos and threes.

Susan shook the door in despair. Then she noted that it was bolted from within. She threw the bolt and the door opened. She flung herself through it and slammed the door behind her. She could hear D’Ambrosio’s deep breaths as he neared the top row of seats.

Directly across from the second-floor amphitheater door was a CO 2fire extinguisher. Susan ripped it from the wall and turned it upside down. She spun around, hearing the metallic click of D’Ambrosio’s shoes coming closer and closer, and got set just as the knob turned and the door swung open.

At that instant, Susan depressed the button on the fire extinguisher. The sudden phase change and expansion of the gas caused an explosive noise that shrieked and echoed in the silence of the empty building as the spray of dry ice caught D’Ambrosio full in the face. He reeled backward and tripped over the upper row of seats, his big body teetering, then crashing sideways onto the second and third rows. A seat back dug deeply into his side, snapping his left eleventh rib. His arms flew out to protect himself, grabbing at the seat backs as his feet continued over his head. He fell lengthwise facedown into the fourth row, stunned.

Susan herself was amazed at the effect and stepped into the amphitheater, watching D’Ambrosio’s fall. She stood there for an instant, thinking that D’Ambrosio must be unconscious. But the man drew his knees up and pulled himself into a kneeling position. He looked up at Susan and managed a smile despite the intense pain of his broken rib.

“I like ’em… when they fight back,” he grunted between clenched teeth.

Susan picked up the fire extinguisher and threw it as hard as she could at the kneeling figure. D’Ambrosio tried to move, but the heavy metal cylinder struck his left shoulder, knocking him down again, and forcing the upper part of his body to fall over the backs of the seats of the next row down. The fire extinguisher bounced down four or five more rows with a terrific clatter, coming to rest in the eighth row.

Slamming the door to the amphitheater shut on her pursuer, Susan stood panting. My God, was he superhuman? She had to find a way to detain him. She knew that she had been unbelievably lucky in injuring him, but plainly he was not out of the picture. Susan thought of the large deep-freeze in the anatomy room.

The hall was dark except for the window at the far end, which provided a paltry amount of pale light. The entrance to the anatomy room was at the very end of the hall near to the window. Susan ran for the door. As she reached it, she heard the door from the amphitheater open.

D’Ambrosio was hurt but not badly. It was painful to cough or take a deep breath, but it was bearable. His left shoulder was bruised but functioning. More than anything else, he was mad. The fact that this screwy chick had managed to get the best of him even for a few moments pissed him off. Now he’d kill her first and fuck her later. He had his Beretta in his right hand, its silver silencer screwed in place. As he stepped from the amphitheater, he just caught sight of Susan entering the anatomy hall. He fired without really aiming and the bullet missed Susan several inches, slamming into the edge of the door frame and throwing splinters of wood into the air.

The sound of the gun was like that of a rug beater. Susan had no idea what it was until the noise and effect of the slug entering the woodwork made it clear to her that it was a gun, a gun with a silencer.

“All right, you bitch, the game’s over,” shouted D’Ambrosio, coming down the hall at a walk. He knew he had her cornered and that it would hurt to run.

Inside the anatomy hall, Susan paused for a moment, trying to recall the layout in the faint light. Then she bolted the door behind her. The first-year class at that time of the year was in the middle of their anatomy course. The dissecting tables in the room were covered with green plastic sheets. In the dim light they appeared light gray. Susan ran between the shrouded tables to the freezer door at the far end of the room. There was a large stainless pin through the latch. She pulled the pin free and let it hang by its chain, releasing the latch. With some effort Susan opened the heavy insulated door and squeezed through. She pulled the door shut behind her and heard the heavy click. She groped for a light beside the door and switched it on.

The freezer was at least ten feet wide and thirty feet deep. Susan remembered all too clearly the first day she had seen it. The diener loved to show it to the students, one at a time, and he particularly liked female students for some unknown but undoubtedly perverse reason. He had charge of the cadavers stored here for dissection. After embalming, they were hung up with tongs hooked into the external ear canals. The tongs were connected to roller bearings on tracks in the ceiling, to facilitate movement. The bodies were stiff, naked, misshapen; most were the color of pale marble. The females were mixed with the males, the Catholics with the Jews, the whites with the blacks in the equality of death. The faces were frozen into a wide variety of distorted grimaces. Most of the eyes were closed but here and there was an open one, blankly staring into infinity. The first time Susan had seen these four rows of frozen cadavers hanging up like unwanted clothes in a closet of ice, she had felt sick. She had vowed never to return. And until that night she had avoided the “fridge,” as it was affectionately called by the diener. But now it was different.