Chapter 8 - The Cornered Monster
Inside the dimly lit room, a figure stood over Sarah’s bed, clad in dark blue surgical scrubs and a matching paper hairnet.
Through the clear panel of the door, I saw Marlene Whitaker.
She had discarded her designer cardigan and pearls for hospital garb, but her cold, unblinking eyes were unmistakable. In her gloved right hand, she held a large plastic syringe filled with a clear liquid—pure, undiluted potassium chloride. An injection of concentrated potassium into an IV line would trigger an immediate, untraceable cardiac arrest that would look entirely like a secondary complication from her morning arrhythmia.
"Marlene!" I threw my weight against the glass door.
It didn't budge.
She had engaged the manual emergency lockdown latch from the inside—a feature designed to isolate infectious patients during containment protocols.
Marlene didn't even look startled. She turned her head slowly, looking at me through the reinforced glass, her expression utterly detached from reality. She lifted her left hand, tapped the glass twice, and then brought the syringe toward the Y-port of Sarah’s central IV line.
"No!"
I backed up three steps into the hallway, lowered my shoulder, and charged the glass.
The impact slammed through my clavicle, sending a shockwave of agony down my arm, but the safety-reinforced glass only spiderwebbed with a dull *thwack*.
Inside, Marlene’s fingers touched the plastic port.
Down the hallway, the elevator doors pinged, and Mark Miller burst out with his service weapon drawn, followed by two tactical officers.
"Ethan, move!" Mark yelled.
I didn't move away—I grabbed the fire extinguisher mounted in the recessed wall bracket beside the door, hoisted the heavy red steel cylinder over my head, and hurled it with every ounce of strength I had straight into the center of the spiderwebbed fracture.
The glass gave way with an explosive crash.
A shower of tempered glass pellets erupted into the room. I lunged through the jagged opening, ignoring the razor edges slicing through my denim jacket and forearms.
Marlene plunged the needle into the rubber port.
I tackled her.
The momentum of two hundred pounds threw her sideways away from the bed. The syringe snapped in her hand, the clear potassium fluid spraying harmlessly across the linoleum and the metal frame of the heart monitor.
We crashed into the bedside table, sending metal trays, sterile gauze, and saline bottles clattering to the floor.
Marlene fought like a rabid animal. She didn't scream; she hissed, her fingernails clawing at my eyes, her teeth sinking into the meat of my left shoulder through my jacket. She scrambled with her right hand, digging into the pocket of her scrubs, and pulled out the snub-nosed .38 revolver Julian had warned me about.
"You ruinous piece of trash!" she snarled, pressing the cold steel barrel against my ribs.
Before she could pull the double-action trigger, I clamped my hand over the revolver’s cylinder, jamming the mechanism so it couldn't rotate, and drove my forehead down into her face.
The crunch of cartilage was sickeningly loud.
Marlene shrieked in agony as the gun clattered from her limp fingers. I rolled her over, pinned her shoulders to the floor with both knees, and grabbed her wrists, holding her flat against the glass-strewn tiles.
"Drop the weapon! Police!" Mark Miller was in the room, his Glock leveled directly between Marlene’s eyes, while two tactical officers swarmed in, their boots crunching on glass.
Marlene was sobbing, blood pouring from her broken nose, smearing across her pale, manicured face.
"Get off me!" she shrieked, writhing beneath my weight. "She was going to put me in prison! My own daughter! After everything I gave her! She owed me that money! She owed me!"
Mark stepped forward, his boot pinning the revolver away from her reach, while the two officers cuffed her wrists behind her back with heavy steel restraints.
"Marlene Whitaker," Mark recited, his voice steady, cold, and dripping with contempt. "You are under arrest for the attempted murder of Sarah Cole, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and burglary."
I didn't listen to the rest of the Miranda warning.
I crawled to the edge of the bed, my hands shaking, my breath coming in ragged gasps.
Sarah lay there, untouched by the poison. The monitor kept up its steady, rhythmic pulse:
*Beep... beep... beep...*
And then, amid the chaos of police radios, shouting officers, and the blaring sirens of arriving backup outside the hospital, I felt a faint, weak pressure against my thumb.
I looked down.
Sarah’s eyes were open.
Dazed, clouded with the heavy fog of paralytics and anesthesia, but undeniably, brilliantly blue.
Her dry lips parted beneath the plastic oxygen mask, whispering a sound only I could hear over the sirens:
May you like
"Ethan..."
***
