Alive on Arrival: Chapter 13

For your FREE Dick Moonlight PI Thriller go to the brand-new

WWW.VINZANDRI.COM

13

If I were to attempt heading out the front doors of the medical center, I would be stopped and detained by the security guards who man them. But here’s what I know about this hospital from experience. My son was born here twenty years ago. If the cafeteria is the same, there’s an emergency exit located in the back by the restrooms. It leads out onto an employee parking lot. It’s my only hope for making it out of here now.

The elevator arrives on the first floor. The doors open and I step out with the mobile IV unit. Even at this hour, the corridor is brightly lit with many people moving about. Nurses and doctors dressed in the usual green scrubs. Several patients wearing their hospital-issued gowns are slowly making their way from one end of the corridor to the other, all of them pushing IV units just like the one I confiscated. Civilians wearing street clothes make their way around the slow-moving patients like they’re annoyingly slow drivers on the highway. None of them look too happy, but instead, rattled with anxiety, as though all of them have something tragic in common. That is, a loved one who’s been injured in a car wreck, a shooting, a home accident, or a terminal disease. Life isn’t fair. It can also throw major surprises at you when you least expect it.

An alarm sounds. A voice bellows over the PA system.

“We have a code yellow on the sixth floor. I repeat a code yellow.”