Family Ties

He sighed and shifted his weight on the creaky hospital bed. As he found a comfortable position, Ken Kesey looked at the tiny clock on top of his steel bedpan. One forty-seven in the morning. His tiny room at the ancient, understaffed Arthur J. Fitzgerald public hospital seemed ominously dark, and he pulled the sheets up clumsily with his bandaged hands. He tried not to think about it too much anymore. Almost a month back, he had been attacked by a man who had robbed a convenience store where Ken used to work. Ken had seen the guy’s face, so he came back to eliminate the witness. Fortunately, Ken survived, but not before his attacker had shot both his hands. Now lying restless in his cot, Ken’s only consolation was that Gill Turpin was dead. He had read in the paper about the memorial service a few days ago, attended only by Turpin’s older brother and his drug-addict mother, whose pictures had appeared beside the write-up.

He needed the bathroom. Pushing the covers off his body, he slowly raised himself to his feet. He still ached in several places. In addition to his hands, his left kneecap had been fractured from a six-storey drop. Ken held the room key between his hands and fitted it into the door. Slipping it into the only pocket on his starched pale green gown, he walked weakly through the dimly lit, empty hallway towards the restroom. His padded footsteps and his laboured breathing were the only sounds in the ward. The smell of disinfectant had just reached his nose when he thought he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned around. Nothing. And then, squinting in the darkness, Ken spotted a shadowy shape moving slowly in the direction of his room. He froze. The man seemed not to have noticed Ken, and kept proceeding stealthily. As he approached the door, the thin strip of light from the room fell on something shiny in the man’s hand. The man flung open the door and a bullet lodged in the mattress with a muffled thud. Ken realized he had precious few moments before the man saw him, and hardly daring to breathe, stepped towards the bathroom. His foot hit the door, and to Ken he might as well have banged two bedpans together. The man spun around, and aimed a silenced .380 Carpati pistol at Ken.

In a split second Ken realized that if he went into the bathroom, he was as good as dead. He kicked the restroom door open, but instead of going in, he sprinted up the passageway. As expected, he heard two shots hit the door behind him, and looked up. His trick had worked, but now he was running out of ideas and energy. He zigzagged as he ran and felt a bullet whiz past his neck. Ken turned the corner and saw his lifesaver; the staff elevator. Feverishly he jammed his finger on the up button as the heavy footsteps grew louder. C’mon, open! he thought. He had nowhere to run, nothing to hide behind. He was a sitting duck, and the fox was closing in for the kill. He saw the leather boot at the same time as the metal doors slid open, and Ken jumped bodily into the elevator. A bullet ricocheted off the back of the lift, and then the doors were closing. The man took a few steps, stopped and fired once. As the two halves clicked, Ken felt a jolt in his right shoulder and saw a growing stain on his gown.

Ken slumped against the side of the elevator and gulped air as he tried to figure out what to do next. He needed to find people, a crowd, anything that would discourage his antagonist from shooting. He touched his shoulder and grimaced. How the same shit could happen to the same person twice baffled him. Suddenly it occurred to him that he had not told the elevator where to go. He hoped his destination was well populated. To his dismay, the elevator opened on another empty hallway. However, there were two important differences. A security guard was sleeping approximately a hundred feet away. And beyond that, a pair of fibreglass doors led to the outside world. Ken ran out of the elevator, one hand gripping his now blood-soaked shoulder. He gritted his teeth as flashes of pain raced up and down his arm. When he had covered half the distance separating himself and the guard, Ken felt his strength waning. He called out to the guard, but his throat would not cooperate and no sound came from his mouth. Ken was by this time no more than fifteen feet away. He was about to try again when the guard’s forehead abruptly burst open in front of Ken, splattering the surrounding area with blood.

A second shot shattered one of the fibreglass doors. Ken did not look back, he just leapt through the door frame and landed facedown on the asphalt, crunching glass underneath him. The night air wrapped around him like an icy cloak. His cheek stung. The threadbare gown was not much protection against the hard tar, and Ken could feel that both his legs were bruised. Slowly he climbed to his feet, knowing that any moment his mystery assailant would reappear. Only a few feet from where he stood was a parked open-back truck. In it were several long oxygen tanks tied down with strong cable, used to feed pure O2 to patients with respiratory problems. He staggered behind the truck, panting. A moment later, the recognizable leather boots came into view, as Ken peered from under the truck. The old rusty key slid out of his pocket and clanged on the side of the truck. As Ken desperately swiped it back up, the man wheeled on his heel and fired in his direction. The cable strapping down the tanks snapped in two, and the other cable creaked under the added pressure. Ken had no time to escape what he knew was about to happen.

The other cable broke, and two tons of compressed oxygen slid off the truck heading straight for Ken. Thinking quickly, he rolled behind a nearby Buick sedan. A moment later one of the tanks landed on the exact spot where he had been. Another bounced off the asphalt and crashed straight through the windshield and the side window of the Buick, coming to a halt inches from Ken’s head and showering him with glass. Most of the tanks ended up against the cement wall surrounding the lot, clanging against each other. Crouched low, Ken kept the maximum possible distance between himself and his antagonist by moving around the Buick. He had no weapons, no tools except…

Ken’s hand was still gripped tightly around the room key. Hiding behind one of the tires, he waited. The man thought he had been crushed by the tanks and was looking in that direction. Quickly Ken lunged at the man, plunging the sharp end of the key into his neck. The gun clattered to the ground as the man howled in agony and clasped his neck. He flung Ken off his back and with one hand still on his neck tried to grab the gun, but Ken kicked it away. The man dragged Ken down to the ground and the pair wrestled, tumbling over to where the tanks lay in a pile. Suddenly Ken broke free, and kicked the man in the face. Ever so painfully, Ken turned around to reach for the gun, which had lodged itself by the Buick. Awkwardly, he picked it up and aimed at the man’s bloody face, and was about to fire when, for the first time, he recognized who it was. Seizing the moment of hesitation, the man started to move, and Ken’s shot hit the one weak spot on the tank: the valve.

There was a furious hiss as the oxygen rushed to escape, and then a mighty explosion ripped through the parking lot, catapulting Ken backwards. The shrapnel and the force of the first blast damaged the other tanks, and several successive explosions followed, turning the Buick onto its side and protecting Ken. When the furor subsided, there was nothing left of the man except for a few scraps of cloth. Ken collapsed as the nightshift nurses ran outside, thinking that at least the drug-addict mother wouldn’t put him through this.