The Day of Legion (9 page)

John felt like he was going to explode. He was stuck inside prison with a bunch of animals, no contact from Janine and no contact from his work. It was as if he had fallen off the Earth and been forgotten. He most wanted to talk to Jason.

He couldn’t do a thing about it, and no one did anything on his behalf. Out there, he was a murderer.

The clicking of the door startled him. It was too early for the guard to be collecting trays; besides, they never opened the door to do that. They always called the prisoner to the small hatch and made them pass it through, accounting for every piece.

The doors were designed so that the prisoners could see out a small square of thick Plexiglas. The rest of the door was solid metal. Whoever was opening the door was standing aside so they couldn’t be seen.

John was about to get up when the door slid open. A prisoner he hadn’t seen before was standing there. He was a big man, tall and solid. His head was shaved and scarred and he sported a chopper mustache that came down past his mouth to his neck, where it met so many tattoos they all blended together.

He was angry. His chest was expanding and contracting markedly as he breathed heavily through his mouth. He stared at John without an ounce of humanity, through small, uncaring eyes.

He was dressed in the uniform of a sentenced prisoner, not the casual clothing of remand, and John knew he wasn’t supposed to be in that part of the prison. His shirt sleeves were rolled up, exposing large, muscular forearms also covered in tattoos to his fingertips. In his right hand he held a knife fashioned crudely of plastic with one end wrapped in tape.

John jumped up and backed into the corner, stuck between the small stainless steel toilet and his bed. He was petrified. “Help! Guards, help!”

The man laughed. “No one there,” he muttered through broken, stained teeth. He lunged into the cell and punched John in the head. His assault was quick and brutal. John’s vision blurred and he heard a loud buzzing in his ears. He reached out to fend off the man, but his hands were easily knocked away. He felt a hand grasp the scruff of his sweatshirt tightly.

Through blurry vision he saw someone else come into the cell behind the prisoner. He felt relief, thinking it was a guard, but he just stood there, then leaned in and whispered something into the big man’s ear.

The prisoner pulled his right hand back, his knife poised to thrust forward. John ripped at the hand holding his shirt, clawing at it with his fingernails. He drew blood, but the hand didn’t move.

He punched at the prisoners face with his right hand and clawed at his eyes with his left. The prisoner thrust the knife forward underhand. The crude plastic blade pierced John’s abdomen. He felt the knife being twisted and pulled out again.

He screamed in agony and struck out with his fist again. This time it caught the prisoner square on the nose and John heard the cartilage break. He punched again, hitting the already broken nose, but the grip never loosened. The prisoner moved his face closer; his blood blew onto John’s face every time he exhaled.

He thrust the knife again. The pain burned through John’s torso. He pushed against the prisoner, using his feet against the wall as leverage, but to no avail. He was far too big and strong and John was losing strength rapidly.

John’s feet slipped on the smooth wall, losing traction. He managed to hook a thumb into the big man’s eye. He screamed in pain, thrust the knife with even more force into John’s stomach repeatedly, quickly.

John’s thumb slipped out of the man’s eye socket and he slid down, the wall streaked with his blood. He sat slumped against the toilet, his head forward on his chest. He wanted to fight back, to stand up and run, tried to lift his arms, but they wouldn’t move.

The prisoner pulled John’s head up by his hair and punched him in the face as hard as he could. The strike shattered his cheekbone and smashed his head into the wall. John slid down further into a lying position on his back, unable to react. He knew he was dying. He thought of Jason, his little face, bright eyes and big smile. He thought of the way Jason laughed at his silly jokes. Tears ran down his face.

He felt himself being dragged by the feet into the middle of the cell. He opened his eyes, looked up through his tears and could just make out the ceiling. The prisoner was standing above him, the other man still whispering in his ear. John blinked, trying to clear his vision.

For a brief moment he saw clearly out of one eye. The man standing over the big man was dressed in black, a wicked smile spread across his thin lips.

“Remember me?” he asked, his voice dry and ugly.

It was the man who was following Alex and his father on the day it all got turned back. All John could do was watch while he whispered into the prisoner’s ear. His tears mixed with his blood and ran down his face, dripping onto the worn and dirty floor.

The prisoner raised his foot and brought it crashing down on John’s stomach. He didn’t feel it. Feeling had gone. Pain had gone. Just fear remained. The prisoner stomped on him repeatedly, mercilessly, until John’s vision faded completely.

He felt someone hold his hand. He managed to turn his head and open his eyes. Through tears and blood he saw Christopher on his knees at his side, looking down at him. There was no need to explain. It all suddenly became clear to John and he realized this was the way it was to end for him, for it would affect the future.

Above him the big man continued to stomp on him. John could see him, but he couldn’t feel it or hear it. He felt serene and calm.

When the kicking stopped he was already dead. The prisoner searched through John’s meager possessions on the small desk and pocketed the twenty dollars he had hidden in a book. He looked through the paperwork, but decided it was all boring legal stuff, so he lay down on the bed and began thinking. He was tired now and his eye hurt, but what the hell? A missing eye would add to his reputation, but it sure did sting. He decided he’d demand a doctor when the guards came in.

He was in for life so this was nothing. What would they do? Give him more life? At least that’s how the prison guard who bribed him to do this put it. Of course, this wasn’t an act of charity. He was getting benefits. Money in his canteen account and a cell phone.

Oh, and a carton of cigarettes.

Chapter Ten

Jason woke up again and found his mother still in the room. She had a magazine open on her lap, but was staring at the floor. She smiled when she saw him looking at her and came over to sit on the bed with him.

A doctor came in and greeted them. “Hi, I’m Doctor Lester. I’m just going to check the chart and Jason, then I’ll have a chat with you afterwards.”

“Oh, okay,” she replied. “I’ll grab some coffee and leave you to it. Where’s Doctor Turner?”

“I’m assisting him today because of his workload,” the doctor said.

Janine gave Jason a kiss on his forehead and hugged him. “I’ll be back soon, honey. This doctor is just going to give you a check up and then I’ll be back.”

She left and walked out of the room toward the coffee machine. She had never felt as scared as when she saw Jason floating on the lake’s surface, face down. She thought she’d lost him. It was the worst feeling.

Alex was on the rock laughing and pointing. If it wasn’t for his father, Jason wouldn’t be alive. When they dragged him out of the water, his body was cold, lifeless and limp. He looked so small. They performed CPR on the bank, and were just barely able to bring him back.

Tom carried Jason all the way back to where the ambulance arrived at the front of the property. Alex ran off; no one had found him since. She really did feel sorry for his father. His son was troubled and had nearly taken her son’s life.

She heard an alarm go off on the ward and wondered what it was for. At first she thought it was a code alarm alerting the medical staff, but then she saw three security guards run past.

She stepped into the corridor and watched. Her heart skipped a beat, afraid something was wrong in Jason’s room, but they ran straight past his door.

She started to walk back to Jason to let him know everything was okay, when a nurse ran out of his room, frantically called the security guards back and then ran back into the room.

The guards came immediately. Janine could hear shouting. She heard Jason calling to her, panic in his voice. She dropped her coffee on the floor and ran to him. Jason’s first doctor and two of the security guards were fighting with the new ‘doctor’. The other security guard had been knocked to the floor and was unconscious. The nurse was covering Jason with her body to shield him.

“He’s not a doctor!” the nurse shouted. “He’s an impostor!”

Jason saw his mother and screamed out to her. He grabbed her as soon as she got to the bed. The four men struggled. The intruder held a syringe. One of the security guards had a firm grip on his wrist; the other security guard struggled to control the other arm, while the real doctor was trying to push him toward the door.

The intruder was strong. The others were having trouble moving him. He broke his right arm away from the guard and punched the doctor square in the face. The doctor crashed to the floor, unconscious. One of the security guards tripped on the prone body, allowing the intruder to break his other hand free. He plunged the syringe into one guard’s chest and depressed the plunger. The guard’s eyes opened wide, he staggered back a few paces and collapsed.

The intruder wrapped his arm around the last guard’s neck in a headlock. The guard struggled, but the man was just too strong. His neck broke when the intruder applied pressure.

The guard dropped to the floor and the intruder looked at the nurse, Janine and Jason. He walked calmly to Jason’s IV pole and drew another syringe from his inside pocket. The nurse moved herself between the man and Jason, but she was swatted out of the way with ease. She crashed into the wall and landed on one of the guards, stunned.

The intruder pulled the plastic cap off the needle and inserted it into the port of the IV. Janine jumped on his back and wrapped her hands around his face before he could depress the plunger.

“You’re not going to inject that into my son!” she shouted. “Help! Help! In here!”

Another nurse came running in. She turned and ran out. “Call security again!”

The man lurched back and tried to pull Janine’s hands off his face. She dug her fingernails in and squeezed as hard as she could. She was off the ground with her legs wrapped around him. Jason pulled the sheet over his head and hid. The intruder ran backwards, trying to ram her into the wall. Instead, they hit the window and fell through.

Two more security guards ran into the room, then to the window. The intruder was on the sidewalk below, blood pouring from his head. His neck was twisted at a sharp angle, obviously broken. Janine was impaled on the metal iron fence.

“What the hell went on here?” one of the guards asked, looking back into the room, then outside again.

“Search me,” the other replied. “We got five down in here, two out there and a little boy peering out of the sheets on the bed.”

Chapter Eleven

A uniformed police officer was assigned to guard the door to Jason’s room. They had no idea why the intruder wanted to kill a little boy, but with his mother dead and his father found murdered in prison, they knew they had to protect him.

A psychiatrist had been assigned to him as well. She had already interviewed him. He had no known living relatives. His admission paperwork suggested there was a grandmother and grandfather on his mother’s side in a small southern town, but all attempts to contact them failed. The local police were trying to find them.

Doctor Patricia Leland reviewed her notes in her small, dark office on the fifth floor. She had been there for two years and it didn’t look like she was getting a better office soon. The walls were a light pink color that had faded years ago. She had placed a bookcase over one particularly bad patch of wall where the pink paper had peeled.

There was one window in the southern wall that let in the greasy smell from the kitchen on the ground floor, or the pigeons from the rusted window box where they had built a nest, so she left it closed and put a fan on her desk.

There was no air conditioning and the lights were so dim she used her own desk lamp. The worst thing about the office though, was it was originally a family room, where grieving relatives came to mourn their loss. The hospital moved that to a larger room after several complaints about the size and condition of this one; it was given to her as the only space available.

She was still considered the junior doctor in her department; there had been no additional staff hired due to cost-cutting. Despite making some breakthroughs with young patients considered lost causes, she stayed under the radar of the old, white male management. It was a battle just to get resources sometimes, and promotion was unavailable regardless of her ability.

She pulled the lamp closer to her so she could read this file properly. She scanned the first couple of pages: admission forms and medical records from Jason’s family doctor. There was nothing out of the ordinary, no serious illnesses and a reasonable frequency of visits as you’d expect for a young boy.

The hospital security report was next. It made sobering reading. One security guard dead of a broken neck, one guard seriously ill after being injected with an unknown substance, a nurse with broken ribs from being slammed into the wall, a doctor with a broken nose, one security guard knocked unconscious, and both the intruder and Jason’s mother dead after falling through the window. The spiked tops of the bars went right through her chest. The intruder’s neck snapped instantly.