Chapter 13 - Cold Run on Meridian
The steam tunnel was a suffocating hell of dripping condensation, rusty pipes that hissed superheated vapor, and ankle-deep sludge.
Luke led the way, holding the aluminum bio-cooler high with one hand and a tactical flashlight with the other. I had Wyatt’s arm slung over my neck, my muscles burning with lactic acid, my shoes slick with grime as we navigated the pitch-black corridor. Behind us, the shouts of Vance’s men echoed through the iron hatch, followed by the dull, metallic ringing of a sledgehammer striking the bolt.
“They’ll be through that hatch in two minutes!” Luke shouted back, the beam of his light dancing violently against the weeping brick walls.
“Keep moving!” I yelled. “Where does this pipe lead?”
“The old utility substation on Tenth Street!” Wyatt panted beside me. Every breath he drew was a battle against pulmonary edema, but his steps were growing surer, the physical rhythm of survival taking over his limbs. “My car... isn’t in the hospital deck. I parked the old Outback... in the municipal lot behind the substation. Two weeks ago. In case... we had to run.”
“You planned this,” I said between gasps, dragging him over a massive, rusted valve pipe. “You knew this night was coming.”
“I knew Vance... would try to terminate the child’s protocol... once the German patent cleared,” Wyatt wheezed. “He couldn't afford... for an off-the-books survivor... to prove the clinical trials were faked. Julian’s existence... is Vance’s life sentence.”
We reached a vertical iron ladder bolted to the wet masonry. Above us, a rusted street-level grate filtered the orange, rain-soaked glare of Indianapolis streetlights.
“Luke, go first!” I ordered.
Luke hoisted the bio-cooler up the rungs, braced his muscular back against the iron grate, and shoved with all his strength. With a loud, grinding screech, the grate flew backward onto the wet asphalt of an alleyway.
Rain poured down into the tunnel—cold, sweet, and pure.
Luke scrambled out, then reached down into the opening. “Give me his arms, Nora! Pull, Wyatt! Use your legs!”
Wyatt seized the iron rungs. His teeth were gritted so hard I could hear them grinding together. With Luke pulling from above and me shoving his hips from below, we hauled him up through the narrow opening and tumbled onto the rain-slicked pavement of the deserted alley behind Tenth Street.
The rain was coming down in violent, sheets, washing the basement grime from our clothes and stinging our faces.
Across the narrow parking lot, sitting beneath a flickering sodium lamp, was Wyatt’s battered blue Subaru Outback.
“Keys!” Luke yelled, scanning the empty street for headlights.
Wyatt reached up under the rear wheel well, his numb fingers searching the muddy metal until he pulled loose a magnetized magnetic key box. He tossed the key to Luke.
Luke threw open the rear hatch. We lifted Wyatt inside, propping his back against the folded rear seats. Luke shoved the bio-cooler between Wyatt’s legs and leaped into the driver’s seat. I dived into the back beside Wyatt, slamming the door just as a black SUV with high-intensity roof spotlights turned violently into the mouth of the alley, its tires screaming against the wet asphalt.
“Hang on!” Luke roared.
He floored the gas. The Outback’s all-wheel drive grabbed the slick pavement with a violent jerk, rocketing us out of the alley onto Meridian Street just as the black SUV opened fire.
A sharp *crack* shattered the rear quarter-panel window, showering us with safety glass.
Wyatt threw his body over the bio-cooler and my lap, shielding us with his back. “Stay down!”
“Luke, drive!” I screamed, pressing my hands against Wyatt’s chest, feeling the terrifying, erratic hammering of his heart through his soaked shirt.
Luke swerved wildly across the four-lane boulevard, weaving through late-night traffic, running two consecutive red lights at sixty miles an hour. Behind us, the black SUV struggled to clear an articulated city bus that had pulled into the intersection, its horn blaring a continuous, angry blast that faded into the distance.
The burner phone in my pocket shrieked.
I pulled it out with trembling, bloody fingers. It was Sarah.
I hit speakerphone and jammed it between Wyatt and me.
“Sarah! We have the valve! We’re on Meridian heading south!”
Sarah’s voice broke through the speaker, choked with static and sobbing panic. *“You’re too late! You’re too late! His aortic root has completely torn through the inferior suture line! I’ve massaged his heart for twelve minutes! He’s in ventricular fibrillation! I don’t have pediatric paddles out here! If you aren’t here in fifteen minutes, you’re delivering this valve to a morgue!”*
Wyatt snatched the phone from my hand.
When he spoke, the tremor in his voice was completely gone. The hunted, broken man disappeared, replaced by the brilliant, ice-cold trauma surgeon who had commanded operating theaters for over a decade.
“Sarah, listen to me!” Wyatt barked, his voice cutting through her panic like a scalpel. “Clamp the descending thoracic aorta immediately below the left subclavian! Do not let the brain hypoperfuse! Pack the entire mediastinum with crushed ice from the cabin refrigerator! Induce total systemic hypothermia right now! It will buy his cerebral cortex forty minutes at twenty-eight degrees Celsius! Do you hear me? Ice the chest, Sarah!”
A breathless pause on the other end of the line.
*“...Crushed ice. Yes. Yes, Doctor Campbell. We’re doing it now. Hurry! Please, for God's sake, hurry!”*
The call went dead.
Wyatt dropped the phone. He reached into the surgical packet Luke had placed beside him, tore open the sterile outer wrap with his teeth, and pulled out an ampoule of clear liquid and a 20-gauge syringe.
“What is that?” I asked, my heart in my throat.
“Dexedrine and epinephrine,” Wyatt said coldly. “I need my motor pathways completely clear. I need zero tremors.”
“Wyatt, your heart is already in arrhythmia!” Luke yelled from the front seat, checking his rearview mirror as the car tore onto State Road 135 toward the dark pine forests of Brown County. “If you shoot yourself with raw amphetamine and epi, you could trigger ventricular tachycardia! You’ll stroke out on the table!”
Wyatt snapped the glass neck of the ampoule with his thumb, ignoring the blood that welled from the cut on his finger.
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“Then have the paddles ready to shock me, Luke,” Wyatt said, plunging the needle through the rubber stopper and drawing the fluid into the plastic barrel. “Because my brother’s son is not dying in the dark tonight.”
Before I could stop him, he jammed the needle straight into the muscle of his own thigh and drove the plunger home.
