Chapter 20
Recap: So, after escaping the country, and Alex meets up with James in France, Alex gets captured in a petrol station shop and knocked unconscious. When he wakes up, he's inside some sort of cell/basement area. There, Captor and Doc make their introductions, and in the last chapter, Alex's food has been poisoned with something – something that is deadly. Doc manages to keep him alive... for now.
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"Just make sure that he survives, Doc," Captor said, before marching up the stairs and leaving.
For now, Alex was safe. But if he didn't survive the next twenty-four hours, James wouldn't be pleased, and Captor would need to go and find another Chair for the job.
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Alex was mainly unconscious throughout the first forty-eight hours of being under the puffer poisoning.
James was glad that the boy pulled through the first twenty-four of those hours, as very few children, he'd found, rarely did. The kid would permanently be within a zombie state until they gave him an unprecedented antidote – and, like the poison, wasn't guaranteed to actually work. The Doc had come up with the antidote himself, and as there were so very few children who survived, there wasn't that many to test it on.
Alex would be the third, if he managed to pull through the following journey he would be going on.
After Doc assured him that Alex had an 80% chance of living through the rest of the week – albeit with many machines doing the work his body should be doing itself, and even more tubes putting the essential nutrients he needed, as well as tubes removing certain bodily fluids – James had the boy put into the hospital Doc worked for.
They'd made sure that it would seem like a natural poisoning – they'd pinpricked the boys right foot over and over and over, then dunked it in water taken from the ocean itself, all to ensure that it seemed like he'd been playing in the sea and had unfortunately stumbled and stood on the poisonous fish.
Of course, puffer fish weren't known to swim so close to land, not least anywhere near France, but with whales swimming up the Thames river in London, and other such natural unnaturalness happening all of the time over the world, it would just be deemed another wondrous, but possibly fatal, occasion.
The French hospital they had sent him to wasn't one that was equipped to handle such a poison, as the child would be "comatose perhaps permanently" as one doctor had warned James, Alex's supposed distraught father. James didn't know Alex's real name, and instead had asked Doc to come up with fake documents proving their relationship. James' son was called Anton, fourteen years old and who had been born and raised in France.
Doc took over the case, as planned, as he was one of the best doctors in the hospital.
Doc advised for "Anton" to be transferred to a larger hospital, one who specialised in poisons, diseases and comatose/ handicapped patients.
One in another country altogether.
James played his role well; when Doc suggested in front of a large audience in the hospital that it was his son's only hope, he screamed, yelling that there was no way his son was leaving for another country. Doc told him, calmly, it was his only way. And when Doc stated that there would be no room in the helicopter, and that he would have to make his own way there, he stormed around for a few hours before relenting, begging the doctors to "take care of my boy."
So, it was three days later, after the hospital had 'stabilised' Anton, and prepared him to be air-lifted and transported, that Alex was transported to the helicopter via a wheelchair, before being laid down inside of it on a stretcher. The wheelchair was kept inside of the helicopter, folded up so as to fill up as little space as possible.
If the medic team travelling with him, besides Doc, had any complaints and confusion over it, they didn't voice their opinion.
Alex woke slightly when the rotor blades sliced through the air, creating a massive booming sound as they built up enough speed to lift off and was loud enough, as they say, to wake the dead... or in Alex's case, enough to wake his mind from it's zombie-like state. He found that he couldn't move, and thinking was almost impossible, but he recognised some sounds around him.
His mind wasn't conscious for long – not long enough for the air ambulance crew or the Doc to realise it – and when his ears popped as they quickly flew into the air, his mind went silent once again, and he didn't think for a further fifteen hours.
It took six hours with two stops to refuel before the helicopter was grounded for the final time of the trip.
Disease control centre: Solna, Sweden. European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
Or so it was meant to be.
Neither the co-pilot or the ambulance crew had ever been to the Swedish disease control centre – hadn't even seen pictures of it, so it was really quite easy for Doc, the pilot and everyone else in on the whole operation to fake the building; all they merely had to do was put a sign stating what the building was on the building itself, and inside they only needed one room to look like the stereotypical disease controlled areas in any hospital: see-through and cloudy sheets making sterilised rooms for diseased patients, only the bare essentials within them – one bed and a metal tray. Sometimes not even that. Monitors both inside and outside of the room, monitoring air levels and the patients various levels – blood pressure, oxygenated blood, heart rate, and so many other things.
As soon as the ambulance crew carefully carried Alex on the stretcher off the helicopter, there was personnel from the building rushing out to meet them.
This personnel took over from the ambulance crew, carrying Alex into the building.
The ambulance crew were quickly dismissed – and not even this raised questions. One of the personnel shouted back to them that the building and themselves were fully sterilised, but the ambulance crew weren't, and it could be critical to the patients they house.
"It's a risk for the patients to even bring in Doctor Abadie into the hospital. Who knows how many germs there are in that thing!" He said, pointing at the helicopter.
Doc – Doctor Abadie – followed the personnel into the six story tall building, rolling the wheelchair along with him, all the while telling them Alex's stats and recapping over what had happened to put the boy into this state.
He was to stay a day with the boy, looking over him and making sure that the new staff knew everything about him, before flying back to France the following day.
The air-ambulance crew lifted off the ground ten minutes later, after Alex was situated in a new bed.
Whilst Doc would be flying back to France tomorrow, Alex would be flying to a whole new location – one of his roles had been completed.
In the wheelchair, many kilos of a brand new drug had been transported to Sweden through the many spokes in the wheels, the metal pieces holding the chair together, and there was even some lining the chairs' plastic seat and back.
Most of it, though, was in the blue and yellow pack that was situated over the back of the chair; inside was supposed to be a blanket to cover Alex in case he got cold. Instead, that had been replaced with bags and bags of the new drug – a potentially lethal but very addictive solution that took you to the most happy of places. Doc hadn't tried it himself, but they had given it to many homeless people... and well, they certainly seemed to enjoy it, as when they went back the following night he had been begged to give out more.
These drugs would be distributed among the Swedish population, as they were amongst the French, and as they would soon be given to US, where part two of the Chair's role would be accomplished.
As Alex was 'stabilised' in his new home for the moment, the chair was excavated of it's cargo.
He had a moment of lucidity wherein he heard the Doc's and the nurses – or supposed nurses, he should think – conversation.
"So everything is set for tomorrow?" Doc asked.
"Yes. So long as patient number three carries on living, then he'll be meeting up with the other patients very soon and be undertaking stage two."
"Excellent. What time is his flight?" Their voices were getting quieter to Alex's ears, and he guessed that they were moving away from him.
"Four in the morning. James is hoping that at such an early time security may be lax, and it'll help patients three exit of Sweden and entry of Costa Rica."
"Well, let's just hope that James' luck carries with us for patient three. I'm not sure how many more children we can send in this condition without drawing too much attention to ourselves."
They'd wandered off by the last sentence, but Alex caught the gist of it.
His mind wandered again, and soon everything went dark.
His last coherent thought was, what the hell is stage two?
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A/N: So, so, so sorry for the late update. I've just done my A levels, so I was focusing on revising for those, and now that it's the summer holidays before my first year of uni, all of my friends are going away, so I'll more than likely not see them again for a very very very long time, so we're spending a lot of time together – hence there's very little time to write.
Anyway, I've gotten about three major action scenes – well, action scenes, anyway, planned out for this story (one taken from a film that some of you may recognise). Another is something to do with the drugs, and the third one is a different stage. As in, something like stage four or five of "the plan", which I've taken from a TV show I watched a week or so ago (you see – even though I may not have been writing, I was still thinking about the story!)
This stage will be more like what you see in AH's writing – something on a global scale... and I must admit it's kinda like Snakehead, only not with the whole "I want to drown part of Australia" thing.
Don't actually think Australia will be mentioned, come to think of it.