Time Clock Hero by Spikes Donovan Read Free Book Online

then back, doing a double take.  “Jerky?”  Then he remembered June Buckner, and then Dr. Albin Demachi – how they’d done the same thing and how, for whatever reason, they’d actually attacked people, or tried to attack them.  June, he remembered, had bitten four people, sending them on ambulance rides to the hospital.  Albin he’d shot.
    “How long has she … has Tracy been moving?”
    “We’re not sure.  Our monitors, you know, the video feeds – all of them went down last night sometime after midnight.”
    Phoenix slammed his hands against the elevator door in a fit of rage and sorrow.  He pulled away, putting his hands to his face, trying to hold back the tears, hoping he could get himself together before he saw Tracy. 
    Tracy had always been around for him, no matter the day, the time, the problem.  Sure, she had her moments – who didn’t?  And every now and then she’d go out with the girls because she needed to get away.  That was okay.  And he loved her – didn’t he? – more and more with every passing day.  But no – he hadn’t, not lately.  He’d forgotten her – forgotten her so he could climb into the beds of other women for the fifteen seconds of joy he was entitled to.  And he’d only done it for a few nights, maybe five or six times, hadn’t he?  And it was all sex, plain and simple – nothing committed because he’d never be able to love another woman.  Ever.  He reached into his pocket, held his inhaler between his index finger and thumb, and rubbed it gently.
    Phoenix was drawn out into the hall before the doors had completely opened.  Tracy’s room, a private one, was on this floor, and he started towards it.  There was no question he’d tell her everything, though she wouldn’t hear a word he’d say, but he’d do it anyway.  He put his head down as he walked, dreading the awful, deathly silence of the health care facility, but he looked up when he heard screams, high-pitched and terrible.  The cries took him by surprise, and he turned and looked back down the hall in the direction from which the cries had come.  He pulled out his inhaler and shot twice, holding each breath until he felt himself bursting.
    His hands fidgeting, his forehead wrinkling like the peel of a dead orange, Dr. Elkins, with a look of horror in his eyes, froze in place. 
    Phoenix grabbed the doctor’s arm and jerked him back down the hall towards the direction of the scream.  He pulled him along like a mother did a child, not stopping when the doctor’s tablet fell from his hand and shattered against the wall.
    More screams, different than the first, became louder as Phoenix and Dr. Elkins ran down the hall.  Other nurses, most of them bewildered, stepped out of their patient’s rooms and into the hall.  They had their hands on their chests, and they looked to one another for some sort of explanation.  Phoenix waved them away, telling them to stay where they were.
    “It’s coming from the bathing room,” Dr. Elkins said confidently, as he followed Phoenix.
    Phoenix hurried forward at an astonishing rate of speed, leaving Dr. Elkins behind.  As he ran, he pulled out his revolver.  Several of the nurses in the hall, frightened when they saw the weapon, began to scream; and some of them reached for their cell phones.  Two brave nurses, both with their phones held up, followed Phoenix down the hall.
    Phoenix shook his head apprehensively, fearing the worst.  For, up ahead, through an open doorway, he saw a nurse struggling to drag herself out into the hall, and she screamed as she came.  The right sleeve of her white nurse’s uniform, just like Dr. Albin Demachi’s an hour earlier, was soaked in blood. 
    The woman’s cries ended just as Phoenix reached the door. He grabbed the back of the woman’s lab coat and, using all of his strength, dragged her across the hall where he set her up against the wall.  Her right leg, limp and bloodied below the knee, had the