AN: Thans a lot for the reviews :) They make my day. Virtual cookies all around!
Now on with the story:
"Panic plays no part in the training of a nurse."
Elizabeth Kenny
Chapter 2
I closed the examination door behind him, my heart hammering in my ears. I cast a glance around the hallway, which was packed. There he was, standing near the exit. His right hand was in his front pocket and he looked at me, the warning evident in his eyes.
There was a mother and a kid sitting in front of him, right there.
My hands shook as I dropped them by my side. Not wanting to attract any unwanted attention, I looked down at my feet and made my way towards the exit.
"JD!"
Oh god, Elliot. I ignored my name.
"JD!"
Suddenly her hands were on me, stopping me from going any further. Finally I halted, my heart hammering so loudly I was surprised nobody else could hear it.
"Where are you going?" Elliot asked, confused. I gave her a pained expression as my gaze quickly fell on the gun man again. The man looked thunderous and gave a quick jerk with his right hand inside his pocket.
If you try to talk to anyone, I'm going to start shooting people.
I swallowed.
If you run I'm going to start shooting people.
"JD?" Elliot looked at me quizzically.
"I'm just going to get some air!" I finally answered, a lot louder than necessary so the man could actually hear what I was saying. I gave Elliot a look, though, trying to convey telepathically what I was thinking.
God, Elliot. There's a crazy man with a gun trying to kidnap me and if I don't go with him he's going to go and kill people. You have tell someone. Look at me! Do I look like I actually need some air? It's a lame excuse!
I mentally screamed at her.
Elliot looked at me, confused when she noticed that I didn't have a jacket. She probably also noticed I was sweating slightly, and that I was currently giving her one heck of a crazy stare.
"Oh…okay." She said, wondering what the hell had gotten into me. "You… you look like you could use some air."
I rolled my eyes safely inside the depths of my mind and then pushed past her quickly when I noticed the gun man stepping forward slightly.
I had to get out, now.
I got out of the exit and stepped outside. Immediately the icy wind, which had picked up speed during the day, whipped at my scrubs and attacked my face and ears with stabs of coldness. When I noticed the man had gotten out of the hospital behind me, I slowly headed up the snowy parking lot, shivering uncontrollably as the snow got into my sneakers, soaking my socks.
The man walked closer now and nodded for me to keep walking. After passing several cars, suddenly the man grabbed my arm and opened the door of a black Toyota.
"Get in!"
I half fell, half crawled inside the back of the car. Although the situation was to bizarre and terrifying to even begin to assess, I felt strangely calm now. It seemed as though with the adrenaline from earlier, some sort of emotion sedative was coursing through my body and I couldn't allow myself the time to think about the situation and panic.
Frankly, I was just glad we had gotten out of there without anyone getting hurt.
"Where are we-" I began, but before I could finish the sentence, the man whipped around and hit me in the face with the back of his gun, making me fall back onto my side. Pain exploded inside my head like fireworks, and I gasped for air, surprised I didn't just black out. When the world swam back into focus I gingerly reached up towards my temple and hissed when I touched the sore spot. Nausea swept over me in waves.
"No talking!" The man demanded, and I was back to looking up into the barrel of the gun. I slowly nodded to show I understood, although I immediately regretted the action when another bout of dizziness and pain made my outlook on today go even more bleak and pessimistic.
--
"Where the hell is Martha?" Dr. Cox asked no one in particular, clearly switching away from Disney names because he decided he didn't want to give anyone the idea he actually watched any of the movies. He glanced at the pile of untouched patient charts, and also noticed Carla was busy with something else and wasn't paying him any attention. He whistled sharply. Carla's head shot up and she glared at him.
"If you are going to use that whistle one more time on me, Dr. Cox, I'm going to start ignoring you all together. I'm not a puppy." She said, one hand on her hips.
Dr. Cox shrugged non-committedly.
"Where's Newbie?"
Carla frowned slightly.
"I don't know, I haven't seen him since he went downstairs."
Dr. Cox glanced at the clock. He had made sure he had taken a long, nice break. He knew if anything was going to go wrong, he was going to get paged anyway. Since no one had, he had just watched a marathon of soaps on TV in the doctors lounge.
It was 4 o'clock. Newbie should have gotten back at least an hour ago.
"You mean to tell me he hasn't been taking care of his patients, at all?" Dr. Cox asked, angrily. Carla shot him a look that clearly said something about what she thought about his own commitment to his patients.
"Oh, I'm so going to love it when I get my hands on him." Dr. Cox said through gritted teeth, ignoring the look. He took his pager from his belt and paged newbie.
--
We had stopped at a petrol station.
After departing from Sacred Heart, the security guard not even noticing me in the back seat, the man had taken so many turns I had quickly given up trying to figure out where we were going; I had been silently lying in the back seat, pretending to have blacked out from that second blow to the head I received in response of some sort of comment I had made about something or other. The general tiredness and after-adrenaline low might have caused me to really nod off for a bit, but after every bump I was awake and alert, my heart doing overtime and my head throbbing so much I felt like throwing up.
Taken this rare opportunity of not-hitting-me-in-the-head, the man had inserted a tape deck. It was probably to calm his own nerves, but it played some of the most godawful songs I ever had to listen to. I had tried to get some blood flowing in my hands and feet, which the man had securely tied with PlastiCuffs. The bastard.
Now the man gingerly opened the driver's door at the petro station. The harsh wind immediately got hold of it, pushing it open even further and causing snowflakes to be blown into the car. From my cramped and awkward position in the back I could briefly see some of the petrol station's banners, almost being torn from their positions by the cold stormy weather
Slushies half price. Super Saturday Special. Collectible points for more gas.
This was all awfully familiar. I knew those banners. I knew this petrol station.
If I knew the petrol station I knew on which highway we were.
I guess that was at least something, although it did little to console me.
The petrol station was fully automated, so any change of attracting attention from other drivers when the man needed to go and pay was out of the question. Damnit.
I briefly wondered if anyone at the hospital had noticed I had gone missing yet. Probably not. Some days I got the impression everybody was just annoyed by my presence, and today especially had left that idea in my head.
I sighed.
The door opened again when the man clambered back in the car, and I played 'dead'. The man briefly grunted when he noticed I was supposedly still out cold, and then started up the car again.
We only made it a few hundred meters before the man got off of the highway at a junction. I knew the highway well enough to know it was likely this was the first junction after the petrol station, though I had no idea where it led.
Soon enough the shaking and bouncing of the car told me though that it was probably some sort of long country road, making me extremely nauseous after a while. It seemed to go on for several miles and I was feeling extremely sorry for myself. Well, at least the tape had stopped playing.
My pager went off.
My eyes flew open in shock. I had totally forgotten about my pager. Not that I could have reached it from my awkward position now.
The man looked behind him in alarm, and seeing me awake immediately stopped the car and whirled around again, gun in hand. My hands shot up in self-protection.
"Please don't hit me!" I squeaked. God, Dr. Cox would have a field day ridiculing my girly behavior.
The man grabbed me at the front of my scrubs and hauled me in some sort of sitting position, making my head swim with the sudden movement.
"What the hell is that! I thought you didn't have a cell phone on you!" The man demanded, pressing his gun in my neck.
"I…I don't!" I blabbered in fear, my voice at least an octave higher as I felt the cold front of the gun pressing down hard on my bare skin, probably leaving some kind of bruise. It was true enough, I had left my cell phone in my locker.
"You liar!" The man raised his gun to hit me again.
"It's my pager!" I half-screamed, arms raised and face turned away as I waited for the gun to hit me again. However, instead I was grabbed forcefully again and I shrunk back from his touch as he searched for my pager. He found it soon enough.
"What the hell?" He said, examining the little black thing in his hands. He looked confused for a moment.
"Fucking useless." And with that little statement he lowered his window and threw it outside, soon leaving it behind us as he continued down the snowy country road.
I sat in complete silence, still shaking from the sudden activity.
At least now I could see where we were going. We seemed to be heading towards some kind of small forest along a small snowy road. On both sides of the car there were long fields of blinding white snow, which pierced my eyes and did nothing good for my throbbing head. There wasn't a house in sight and the highway was long behind us. The trees in the distance had all lost most of their leaves, but they were still packed together enough that, in combination with the snowy wind, you could see at most 10 meters or so into the woods.
I tried suppress the feeling deep down in my stomach that had been present ever since I first stepped into that examination room. If you learn one thing from med school, it's that blind panic really isn't good choice for your emotional state to be in.
But terror. Now terror was something different. It really seemed to focus you certain details.
I let terror run free for a while.
---
We had stopped in a small clearing in the forest. It had stopped snowing for now, and everything looked so white and crisp around us.
Why had we stopped here? There was nothing here.
For a very long time the man just sat there, staring ahead. His expression was hidden from me as I sat behind him, which made me extremely nervous.
Then, finally his hand turned the ignition keys and the engine was cut off. Silence settled over us and I almost dared not breathe, afraid to disturb it.
"He commit suicide you know." The man said matter-of-factly , his voice as cold as the air outside and I froze.
"He always was mother's favorite. Always better at everything, always two steps ahead." Then a laugh escaped him, sounding eerily out of place. I just stared at his silhouette against the white light from outside with some kind of fearful fascination.
"My little brother. He had a perfect family, perfect job... Unlike me. I always messed up, but he looked after me even though it was supposed to be the other way around. He looked after me after our parents died." His shoulders straightened as he looked up into the rearview mirror, catching my fearful eyes. I dared not look away.
"He looked after me after I got out of prison as well." His eyes bore into mine.
"He had a perfect fucking life. You took that away from him."
He opened the cardoor, slowly. Casting a look over his shoulder, I saw his expression.
"And you took him away from me."
Why had we stopped here? There was nothing here.
There was nobody here.
Cold realization swept over me as the man stepped into the inch deep snow outside the car.
Oh god, was that knife in his hands?
The man opened the backseat car door and I scrambled to get out of his reach, finally letting at least some panic dictate my actions
"No!"
I struggled as he grabbed me by my feet and physically hauled me out of the backseat. I landed on the snow, hard. Immediately I tried to crawl away from his reach, but he was on top of me. He was twice my size, and much stronger.
I stopped moving as I felt my head being pulled back by my hair and the blade against my throat. I was pulled in some kind of standing position, the knife not moving an inch. He grinned in my ear, his soar breathe in my face as he hissed his words.
"They were innocent. But thanks to you screwing up your job, she died." The knife left my throat, and I let out the breath I had been holding, fearing I cut myself if I dared exhale.
"Innocent people die when you fuck up, but you don't fucking care, do you." The knife traveled across my chest. I was painfully aware of it going lower and lower, slowly finding its way towards my abdomen.
"Guilty as fucking charged." With a swift movement, the man cut my hand restraints and pushed me forward, making me fall into the snow. I barely had time to register the fact that he hadn't actually cut me and that I had cushioned my fall with my now free hands, as fear had completely taken over my brain.
"I have no mercy with guilty people like you that don't even have the guts to do something about their faults. Hell, God knows I did some awful stuff, but I went to prison for it. Never complained once." He rolled me over with his boot, kicking me in the side. I looked up at him towering over me, too terrified to move.
"I wanna see you acknowledge your error and then we'll see what your punishment will be, eh? I wanna see you beg before the end." The man grinned.
I suddenly knew that if I did as he said, that would be it. The end.
I had to stall.
"It wasn't me!"
"You fucking liar!"
"No! I'm…I'm not Dr. Cox!" He grabbed me again by my hair, my head swam with dizziness and I grabbed his arms from choking me. I was on my knees now.
"Admit what you did!"
I ignored him. "I'm Dr. Dorian! John Michael Dorian! I'm a-"
Blinding hot pain. I gasped in shock.
"Don't you fucking abuse someone's fucking innocent name!"
I fell silent, blinking away tears.
"My brother mentioned Dr. Dorian. Don't try to drag his good name through the mud of your errors, you bastard." His eyes were thunderous.
"So now you're going to admit what you did or the next cut is going to be a little more harmful." He hissed in my ear.
Seconds passed. The knife was at my throat again, drawing a small thin line of blood.
The man's eyes narrowed. The knife twitched as he pulled it back slightly.
"Fine-"
Well hello there, blind panic. I missed you.
The man never got a change to finish his sentence as I took advantage of the little extra space to move my head forward and then head butted the man in his face with the back of my head. He let me go with a howl of anger. I fell to the ground, blinking away the throbbing pain. I felt like my head was going to split in two and a small moan escaped my lips.
I heard the string of muttered curses and saw through unfocused eyes as the man staggered backwards, blood spurting from his nose.
Then I noticed the small object on the ground.
The knife.
I lunged for it and felt a small twang of reassurance when my hand closed around it's handle. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the man stagger back towards the car, towards the gun.
No time.
As quickly as my trembling hands allowed it, I brought the knife back to my leg restraints, cutting them.
I was free!
I tried to get up unsteadily, my head swimming from all the blows it had received in the last hour. Then my vision cleared slightly. I scrambled into a standing position and ran for it. Ran like I'd never run before, skidding and sliding across the snowy ground, too afraid to look behind me. If I could only reach the trees…
A clear shot rang out, echoing through the wood.
TBC
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