The sprinklers don’t work. There’s no way to fight the fire or even slow it down. The people in here have only one chance — they have to get out and they have to get out now!”
The first nurse frowned at him. “What department do you work in? Who are you?”
“Get moving or you’re all going to burn to death!” Alex yelled.
His tone of voice changed their attitude and sent them scrambling into action, rushing to the locked doors to each side. One of the nurses ran for the stairway Alex and Jax had come down. As two of the other nurses pulled keys from their pockets and unlocked the doors, Alex spotted a purse on the lower working counter behind the higher public counter.
He grabbed the purse and dumped the contents out onto the desk. A cell phone slid across the counter. Alex snatched it up. As soon as he had the power on, he punched the buttons.
“Nine one one. What’s the nature of your emergency?”
“Mother of Roses Psychiatric Hospital is on fire.”
“What address?”
“It’s the old hospital on Thirteenth Street.” Alex pressed his fingertips to his forehead, trying to think. “I don’t know the exact address.”
“Can you see flames, or smoke?”
“I’m inside the building. The fire is on the top floor.”
“How extensive is the fire?”
“The entire top floor is ablaze. The fire alarms don’t work. The sprinklers and the fire hoses don’t work. Get the fire department here now!”
“They’re on their way, sir. Please stay on the line. What is your name?”
Alex ignored the question. “I have to help the staff get people out of here! Hurry — get the fire trucks here!”
He tossed the phone on the counter without hanging up. He saw the nurses out in the wards rousing the patients. He headed for the stairs in the back to go down to the next floor. Jax was right behind him. At the doorway into the stairwell he met one of the nurses coming back down. Her face was nearly as white as her dress.
“It’s a solid wall of flame up there!”
“A building this old is going to go up in a hurry,” he told her. “Help get everyone out. There’s not much time. I’m going to warn the floors below.”
She nodded. “All right.”
Alex pointed toward the front counter. “Nine one one is on the cell phone. Tell them your name and that you work here. Confirm what I told them about the fire being out of control. Keep the phone with you, keep them on the line, but help everyone get out the fire escape and then follow them out and help the people from the ninth floor already down there.”
The woman scooped up the phone and with barely contained panic in her voice started telling the operator about the fire and how many hundreds of people were in danger. She told the operator to send ambulances as there were bound to be casualties. Alex didn’t wait to hear the rest of it. He raced for the stairs, pulling Jax along behind.
As they burst through the stairway door, a red-faced orderly, nearly out of breath, was just arriving at the top step. Alex skidded to a halt and drew back as the man slashed wildly with a knife.
Alex seized the knife hand and twisted the man’s arm at the same time as he spun him around, then shoved him face-first down the stairs. The tumbling man stopped at the middle landing between floors, smacking into the far wall. Jax bounded down the steps after him and rammed her knife into his back half a dozen times before he had a chance to get up. As soon as she had dispatched the orderly, the two of them raced down the last half of the stairs to the next floor.
On the seventh floor the nurses were equally surprised, but perhaps because people in their ward weren’t locked down, they were more easily convinced. At seeing that the alarm, phones, and extinguisher didn’t work, they wasted no time springing into action. One of the nurses started calling 911 on her cell phone as the others enlisted a staff of orderlies and aides to help them clear the wards.
Unlike the top two floors, the doors weren’t locked. The wards on the seventh floor were also much larger, extending out past the footprint of the eighth and ninth floors into the rest of the old hospital complex. The staff was also larger.
“The fire department is on its way,” the nurse on the phone reported.
“Do you know people in other parts of the hospital?” Alex asked. She nodded that she did. “Call them. Get anyone with a cell phone to call people as well. With the alarm not working people in the rest of the hospital need to be alerted. Call everyone you can and tell them to get the patients out.”
Before she had a chance to ask any questions, Alex headed back to the stairs. He and Jax slid to a halt at the top step. He could hear, just out of sight around the turn of the landing, what sounded like a lot of men racing up the stairs. By the things they were saying Alex instantly recognized that the men were looking for him and Jax. One of the men called them “Vendis’s prisoners.”
Without pause Alex spun Jax around and pushed her out ahead of him, back the way they had come. Once out of the nurses’ station, he took her hand and ran with her down the dimly lit corridor. She was having trouble keeping up. Her legs weren’t working in a coordinated manner. He knew that her muscles were so spent that they were failing.
“Hold on, not much longer,” he said, trying to encourage her and keep her moving.
As they raced down the corridor, he glanced back over his shoulder and saw men spilling out into the hallway, but they were too far away and it was too dark to make out their faces. Alex knew by their numbers, though, that they had to be orderlies he hadn’t met before. That confirmed his suspicion that there were more people involved than just those he had seen working on the ninth floor.
Alex slowed a little to try to make it look like they were urgently helping people and less like they were running. He was counting on the white coats they were wearing to help throw the people hunting them off track.
He and Jax helped the nurses by rushing into rooms and pulling people out of their beds, then guiding them to the fire escape. Jax was swift and decisive in getting people moving, while managing to also be compassionate and supportive. It was all the more impressive to him because he could see by the look in her eyes that she was fighting the effect of the drugs in her system. He knew all too well what that was like; he was having to work past them as well.
The people followed directions as Alex calmly but forcefully urged them to hurry. These patients were far more alert and coherent than the people up on the ninth floor had been. He guided the growing throng to the fire escape, letting himself and Jax become lost in the mass of frightened people. He saw the men coming down the hall, searching in each room along the way.
Out on the fire escape they were greeted by cool night air. Fresh air had never felt so good. Alex was a little surprised to find himself giddy with relief to be out of the place. For a long time he had feared that he would never again be free. He wished that his mother could have tasted freedom with him.
Jax leaned closer to him so she could whisper as they made their way down the metal steps along with what seemed like hundreds of other people. “When we get to the ground we need to run before those men can find us. I don’t think that I have enough strength left to fight them.”
They slowed at a landing, inching ahead, waiting for the congested line of people to start moving more quickly again. “I need the keys to the truck,” he reminded her.
“But the keys are inside.” She knew what he was thinking and clearly didn’t like the idea. “We’d have to go back in. Now that we’re out, when we get to the ground, let’s just run.”
“You can hardly stand anymore. How far do you think you can run? Where will we go on foot? How can we get away? We can’t hide — they’ll be looking everywhere for us. We need the truck to get away — as far away as possible.”
As the line started shuffling ahead a little faster, Alex heard glass breaking. He glanced up and saw flames roar out of the windows on the top floor. Thick smoke swirled out into the darkness.
He also saw two men dressed in white pushing past people to get down the stairs faster.
“We need to get down, now,” he whispered to Jax.
