Jimmy lifted his feet one at a time and put them on the matching orange ottoman. It took only a few minutes upright to send the blood hard south and inflame his broken toes with pain. Now they cooled. He read the magazine titles. He looked down at the driveway. He dozed. A big silver tour bus lumbered onto the drive from Second Avenue. It was covered with bright pictures of red hibiscus flowers and dancers in colorful dress and a jumping marlin and a beach at sunset. Holdstock knew that Buenavista was an alternate border crossing to busy Tijuana but he’d never figured Imperial Mercy Hospital as a point of interest. The tour buses always passed through but never stopped. Maybe doctors, he thought, part of a convention or professional program of some kind. He thought he was dreaming, but his eyes were open.
The bus pulled up to the curb just short of the overhang and it parked. He could barely make out the letters on the side: AMERIGO. The graphics were bright and clear in the driveway lights, and the windows were darkened for privacy and cool. Holdstock saw the tall door buckle open and watched men bristling with armament pour from the vehicle and flow thick-booted and single file across the concrete toward the hospital lobby one after another, man upon man, ordered and many.
“Zetas,” he said.
Holdstock lurched up, his feet hitting the floor with shocks of pain, hoisted himself onto the crutches, and nearly lost his balance as he made the difficult pivot. He strained forward recklessly but managed to look back out the window at the line of men still trotting into the lobby. He took the floor in big crutchfuls. There were no patient rooms along this section of hallway, and Jimmy had no cell phone, and there were no pay phones or house phones or fire alarms and no doctors or nurses or patients or janitors, not even Frank, here at this hour, only the wide empty hallway and the shining floor before him. He saw the open double doors and the children’s art exhibit far ahead and he committed himself to this distance just as he had done as a Badger tight end running a downfield pattern. The aluminum crutches creaked and rattled as he whapped them to the floor and he was thankful for the rubber grips.
He lunged past the art. Looking down to his left he could see the back end of the bus but he couldn’t see the door, so he turned his attention back to the hallway and stretched out his stride, reaching far ahead with the crutches and holding them down true with his big strong arms while he swung his legs between them like a pendulum, landing on his heels and rolling forward upon his toes, ignoring the pain, then butterflying the crutches through the air to begin again.
He made the turn at the elevator bank. He pushed the DOWN buttons on all four cars, but this took time. He heard automatic gunfire below. Coming back to the hall, he could see the nurses’ station far away, but he saw no nurses. At the first patient room he came to, Jimmy swung in, yelling at the man in the bed to call security. The man raised his head and when he saw Jimmy, he scrunched back on his elbows in surprise and he reached for the phone on the stand beside the bed but knocked it to the floor. Jimmy couldn’t grasp it with his bandaged hands, and the man said he couldn’t leave his bed, just a day out of surgery, and Holdstock could hear the dial tone humming up at him, but there was no way he could punch a number, so he heaved back out into the hallway. He heard gunfire again, much closer now, probably on the sixth floor. Lourdes ran toward him with a cell phone to her ear and the sheriff’s deputy from outside his room followed her, broad-shouldered, his hands held out from his sides like a gunfighter and Holdstock could tell from his posture that the man had no idea what to do.
When Lourdes got closer, he heard her say “Frank where are you we hear guns,” then the deputy was upon them, guiding them into the nearest patient room, where a woman with a tube in each nostril stared at them while her young roomie announced that she had 911. Lourdes and the deputy lowered Jimmy into one of the visitors’ chairs, then the deputy pulled it to the far wall between the beds, facing the door. He commanded Lourdes to lie down behind the same bed, then he drew his sidearm and stepped out of the room and shut the door. There was another volley of automatic fire, jagged and brief. It came from the far side of the sixth floor. Then more shots. Holdstock realized they’d found his room empty and were now going room to room down the hallway, looking for him. The fire alarm shrieked to life and the patient told the 911 operator that Imperial Mercy was under attack and slammed down the phone. The woman lay back and stared at the ceiling and prayed out loud.
“They want me,” said Holdstock.
“They’ll kill you,” said the young woman.
“… into the valley of the shadow of death,” said the older one.
Jimmy climbed up onto his crutches and lurched across the room, banging hard into a steel bed stand and clanging into a wastebasket. He couldn’t open the door, but the young woman got it for him, and when Jimmy had cleared the threshold, she closed it hard.
He stood still in the hallway while people ran past him, going both directions, some screaming and some grimly silent and some with cell phones pressed to their ears and some pushing drip trolleys before them like stubborn children, but all with their hair wild and their eyes wide and their gowns flapping. Another burst of automatic fire rattled from around the corner. People reversed direction at the sound and surged back toward Jimmy, knocking him to the floor and stampeding by. Getting back onto the crutches was one of the hardest things he’d ever done in his life, with his ruined hands and throbbing toes and his heart pounding and the treachery of the aluminum crutches as they shirked his weight and skittered out from under him. A woman helped him and finally he was up and wavering. He clambered forward into the storm. Three Zetas rounded the corner, then three more. They wore camouflage fatigues and military-style boots and black handkerchiefs over their mouths, and Jimmy could tell by the sudden cocking of his head that the lead man recognized him, and Holdstock swung faster toward the man, thinking they can kill me but they can’t stop me, and he roared forward on the crutches ready to die. The Zetas knocked him down again and swarmed him and they held his arms and legs and head and they carried him to the stairway and into the stairwell, then down the steps. Their boot echoes were faint as they rapidly descended, swiveling him on the landing and descending again and rotating him again on the next landing, down and down, until Jimmy looked up to see the high ceiling and the dramatic lobby lights above him and he realized now that they were taking him again and that the death he had just accepted would have been a far better thing than the days of life to come.