They would be completely fine.

As long as they didn’t panic.

Chapter 63

Got to get out, got to get out…

Please, please, please, please, please.

The orderly was paralyzed with terror. Emergency lights had come on—the car was brightly lit—and it didn’t seem to be in danger of falling. But the sense of confinement had its muscular tentacles around him, choking, choking…

“Help us!” an older woman was crying.

Three or four people were pounding on the doors. Like ritual drums, sacrificial drums.

“You smell that?” somebody called. “Smoke.”

“Christ. There’s a fire.”

The orderly gasped. We’re going to burn to death. But he considered this possibility in a curiously detached way. A searing, painful death was horrific but not as bad as the clutching, the confinement.

Tears filled his eyes. He hadn’t known you could cry from fear.

“Is anybody there?” a woman nurse, in limp green scrubs, was shouting into the intercom. There’d been no message from security through the speaker.

“It’s hot, it’s hot!” A woman’s voice. “The flames’re right under us. Help!”

“I can’t breathe.”

“I’ve got to get out!”

The pregnant woman was crying. “My baby, my baby.”

The orderly ripped his shirt open, lifted his head and tried to find some better air. But he could only fill his lungs with stinking, moist, used breath.

In one corner, a woman vomited.

“Oh, Jesus, lady, all over me.” The man beside her, forties, in shorts and a T-shirt, tried to leap back, to escape the mess. But there was no place to go and the man behind him shoved back.

“Hey, watch what you’re doing.”

The smell of vomit overwhelmed the orderly and it was all he could do to control his own gut.

Not so lucky with the woman beside him. She too was sick.

Phone calls:

“Yes, nine-one-one, we’re trapped in an elevator and nobody’s doing anything.”

“We’re in a car, an elevator in Monterey hospital. East Wing. We can’t breathe.”

Somebody shouted: “Don’t both call at once! Are you fucking crazy? You’ll block the circuits!”

“What, were you born in the fifties? They can handle more than—”

Then an otherworldly scream filled the car; the biker had lost control, lost it completely. Screaming, he grabbed the shoulders of the elderly woman in front of him and boosted himself up onto her.

The orderly heard a snap as the woman’s clavicle broke and she screamed and fainted. The biker didn’t even notice; he scrabbled forward atop the shoulders and necks and heads of the others and slammed into the elevator door, breaking nails as he tried to pull the panels open. He was screaming and sobbing. Tears and sweat flowed like water from a broken pipe.

A slim African American woman—an aide, what used to be called candy stripers, in colorful scrubs with teddy bears on them—muscled her way forward and gripped him by the leather collar. “We’ll be okay. It’ll be all right.”

Another scream from the huge man, the sound piercing.