AN: I know, I know... I should be working on Terminally Tainted, because this one just got updated in March, and TT hasn't been updated since what... December? Unfortunately I've typed myself into an impassable hole... But hopefully now that school's out I'll be able to work my way out of it soon!
Disclaimer: The people, places, and terms in this do not belong to me, simply the order in which they appear and how I use and abuse the characters to my own ends. Those are mine.
Max's body was still limp. Lifeless. Strapped down to a bed. Again. Too many times had she woken up, immobilized as one with the bed below her. Her seizures had stopped now, simply because her body didn't have the energy, and the sector police had injected her with a sedative. So even if her muscles wanted to twitch, they couldn't, which was a pleasant change from the constant convulsions she'd been experiencing for the past two days. It allowed her eyelids to move steadily enough for her to see straight—er.
Her eyes wandered slowly around the room, her vision adding an annoying blurred edge to everything, hindering her from telling one object from another. She tried to lift her head and barely managed to identify that she was surrounded by hospital equipment, but not yet in a hospital, before her weakened muscles dropped her head back down onto the hard surface below her. Her breathing was labored, raspy, without any device to try and help it. These sector police obviously didn't care about her health that much, but more about her solitude. Solitude was all well and good, when one wasn't near-death. She mustered up all the energy in her body and soul and called out in a whisper, "Alec…" and relapsed into a panting heap on the gurney.
The sector police paramedic up front of the ambulance didn't hear her, didn't register her consciousness. He was far too caught up in his rapid conversation with some check point workers up ahead to notice. Max heard his voice but couldn't understand nor register the words coming out of his mouth. Never before had she felt so weak, not even when she lived with Lucy. These seizures had brought her down to a new level of helplessness. She felt like she was dying all over again – then what good was even escaping in the first place? As strong as her will was, her body betrayed her and lay there, limp, while small moaning noises sporadically and uncontrollably seeped from her throat.
Alec, in a separate ambulance, was in the very same predicament as Max, only he wasn't weakening. He was growing stronger as the sedative wore off and his anger and panic grew. True, he and Max barely knew each other or even got along, but that didn't mean he didn't care. He cared… at least about their transgenic blood being found out, if not for Max on a slightly deeper level. Alec's fingers frantically felt up and down the bindings holding him down, and he just willed the straps to not make too much noise. He guessed right off the bat that he was in an ambulance, but where this ambulance was heading, he didn't want to wait to find out. And more than anything he didn't want to be as helpless as he was now when they did get to their destination.
After a few minutes of struggling, combined with the bouncing he was subjected to down the decomposing road, Alec managed to loosen the straps binding his left hand down. And luckily there wasn't a second paramedic riding in the back with him like he thought one ought to do, for exactly this reason. Oh well, he figured they hadn't been prepared for such clever patients. With one conveniently free hand, he quickly released himself from the rest of his bindings and lay there, surveying his options and weapons. Moments later he was crouched near the front, near the small window, through which he could tell they were following another ambulance. He hoped Max was in that one. He noted that they were slowing down and pulling into a hospital parking lot. Good. They undoubtedly had stores of tryptophan somewhere in this building.
Without warning, the back doors to his ambulance were suddenly ripped open; he hadn't noticed the ambulance stop. Two men in full body suits were standing there, waiting to unload the gurney Alec was supposed to be tightly attached to. He had just enough time to note the surprise on each of their faces before he struck, lunging forward with large needles in each hand, as he wildly spun around. The sector paramedics ducked for safety and by the time they looked up, Alec was running at a full revved up sprint toward the ambulance in front of them, which was just unloading the gurney. Expecting to see Max laying there unconscious, he saw an old man, seizing as bad as Max had been, getting rushed into the hospital. Looking around, he realized there were at least 4 other ambulances coming in around them, and the sector paramedics were headed straight for him. He'd lost Max. Time to create a back-up plan.
Taking off after the old man's gurney, he made it inside the building at a full sprint and kept running, scaring the nurses and doctors as he went. Several panicked minutes later, he found himself in a dark storage room, four stories up, near a stairwell that he knew lead to the roof. This was not, however, the medicine storage room he'd been looking for. This was better than nothing, and he was digging through all the boxes around him with silent, agile fingers, as he struggled to keep his breathing under control and his terror out of his mind. Off in one of the back boxes, barely out of sight, he found some scrubs. Old, probably very outdated, but he bet he'd fit in enough, and they had a collar. Excellent. He also found some old pills, dusty and some brand he'd never heard of (not surprising, really, for a sheltered boy such as he), in that same box, along with an official-looking clipboard. It looked to him like a nurse had been smuggling drugs out of the hospital before. But, Alec had been raised to be suspicious of everything.
Stepping out of the room in his scrubs, old pills and clipboard in hand, he headed down the halls at a much more appropriate pace and feel. Unfortunately, this was short-lived when his panic peaked again as he ran into a nurse around his first corner, a young female one. She was short and blond, fairly attractive, and talking to him. Talking. To him. Great.
"Sorry, ma'am… miss…" he looked in at her name badge and smiled, "Adams, Miss Adams. My apologies again, I was in a hurry and I'm kind of new here. You know, brought in for the emergency and all," he said, going with things he'd heard while in that storage closet.
Miss Adams just nodded and smiled, "Don't worry sir, it's not the first time this has happened. Why don't you tell me where you're trying to go to and I can help you out?" she said politely, totally falling for his guise.
Feigning deep thought, he stared at the clipboard, not understanding any of the technical lingo on it before he looked up. "The medicine storage room. Somehow this," he said, holding up the old box of pills, "found its way into a patient's room, I was told to store it with all your excess medicines." He improvised, acting and looking very much the part of a new and confused male-nurse.
Miss Adams looked at the box for a second and shook her head, "Wow, the things people get away with these days, I haven't seen pills like that in years. Anyways, you need to go down one floor and it is going to be on the right side of this hallway, I think 3 doors down from where we are now," she said, waving her arm up and down to show him, "and all the floors look exactly the same, just like this one. You can't miss it, I guarantee you. Is there anything else you might need help with?" She asked, her eyes staring up into his, trying to find out the secret behind this charming male-nurse. Something just didn't sit right with her about him, but she didn't know what.
"Erm… yeah. I don't really know how I got up here, but I was told to report to the incoming ambulance patients, after I dealt with the pills. Do you know how I can get to the unloading dock, er… incoming sick bay?" He asked very seriously, hoping his unprofessional terminologies wouldn't ruin his act.
Miss Adams laughed, "I think you misheard. No one gets to see them, not until they've been cleared from having Seizuritis and admitted." She rolled her eyes before continuing, "Can't have contagious people getting put in rooms with everyone else, you know." She said with a slight laugh again, "Paranoid. The lot of them." She said in a very slight British accent. "But anyways, they'll be down in quarantine, same level as the ICU rooms down on ground floor, but you won't be allowed in. You could always just… watch I guess, if you're an intern or something. I'm sorry, Mister… I didn't catch your name?" she asked, noting that he didn't have a name badge on his breast. There went her attempt at returning his formalities.
Alec nodded, "Don't worry Miss Adams, I understand, work calls. Thank you very much and I'll see you around," he said, heading toward the stair case. Turning back to see her still standing there, confused and staring, he said, "Oh by the way, it's Mister Gency," and then he whispered the last bit to himself, "Emer Gency." It was bad, even by Alec's standards. He rolled his eyes at himself as he pushed the stairwell door open and, as soon as he was out of sight, flew down the stairs at dangerous speeds.
While Alec was running around feeling physically fine, trying to find the tryptophan, his head ached with worry of what would happen to Max if he didn't get to her in time. The nurse had mentioned something called Seizuritis, which is why, he deduced, that old man on the gurney was seizing like a tryptophan-deprived transgenic. To the ignorant doctors around them, Max probably looked at least as sick as that man did, if not more-so.
Speaking of, Max was lying on a much softer bed than the ambulance gurney, though still strapped down, and trying hard to remember just how she had gotten from one place to the other. Her memory was getting worse now, to match her eyesight and hearing. She knew a doctor was in a full body contaminant suit, asking her questions, but her eyelids were heavy and falling, and she just mumbled a groan and remained silent. After a few minutes of this, the doctor got fed up and left, after injecting her with something else that she supposed was designed to make her feel better. It only made her more tired, and soon everything went black again.
See? I told you I was gonna stop commenting here.
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