Pines

elevator.
    He stared up into a beautiful, familiar face, the prominent cheekbones igniting his recognition. In his current state, it took him five seconds to place her as the missing bartender from the pub.
    She pushed him into the elevator car, working to fit the gurney inside.
    She punched one of the buttons.
    Her face was drawn and pale, and she wore a navy poncho that dripped water onto the floor.
    “Come on, come on.” She kept driving her finger into the lighted B.
    “I know you,” Ethan said, but he still couldn’t recall her name.
    “Beverly.” She smiled but it was riddled with nerves. “Never got that big tip you promised. Jesus, you look terrible.”
    The doors started to close—another long, groaning screech worse than nails on a chalkboard.
    “What’s happening to me?” he asked as the pulleys strained to lower the car.
    “They’re trying to break your mind.”
    “Why?”
    She lifted the poncho and pulled a handcuff key from the back pocket of her jeans.
    Her fingers trembling.
    It took her three attempts to finally get the key into the lock.
    “Why?” Ethan asked again.
    “We’ll talk when we’re safe.”
    The bracelet popped open.
    Ethan sat up, grabbed the key out of her hand, and started on the other one.
    The elevator descended at a crawl between the fourth and third floor.
    “If it stops and someone gets on, we fight. You understand?” she asked.
    Ethan nodded.
    “No matter what happens, you cannot let them take you back into that operating room.”
    The second bracelet sprung open and Ethan climbed down off the gurney.
    Felt reasonably stable on his feet, no sign of the drug’s effect.
    “Are you gonna be OK to run?”
    “They just drugged me. I won’t be able to cover much ground.”
    “Shit.”
    A bell above the elevator doors dinged.
    Third floor.
    It kept descending.
    “When?” Beverly asked.
    “Five minutes ago. But it was a muscular injection, not intravenous.”
    “What was the drug?”
    “I don’t know, but I heard them say I’d be unconscious within ten minutes. Well...more like eight or nine now.”
    The car reached the lobby, still dropping.
    Beverly said, “When the doors open, we’re heading left, all the way down the corridor. There’s a door at the end that will put us out on the street.”
    The elevator shuddered to a stop.
    For a long moment, the doors didn’t move.
    Ethan shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet, ready to explode out into the corridor if there were people waiting for them, adrenaline flooding his system with that electrified alertness he always got just before a mission as the rotors spun up.
    The doors creaked open an inch, froze for ten seconds, and then slowly screeched open the rest of the way.
    “Wait,” Beverly whispered. She stepped over the threshold and peeked out. “Clear.”
    Ethan followed her out into a long, empty corridor.
    Checkered linoleum tile ran for at least a hundred and fifty feet to some doors at the far end, everything spotless and quietly gleaming under the harsh fluorescent light.
    A door slam in the distance stopped them in their tracks.
    Footsteps became audible, though it was impossible to determine how many people were coming.
    “They’re heading down the stairwell,” Beverly whispered. “Come on.”
    She turned and ran in the opposite direction, Ethan following, trying to dampen the slap of his bare feet on the linoleum and grunting against the jarring agony of what he could only assume were bruised ribs.
    They came to a vacant nurses’ station as a door behind them toward the far end of the corridor banged open.
    Beverly accelerated, turning and sprinting down one of the intersecting corridors, Ethan fighting to keep up, venturing a quick glance over his shoulder as he ran, but he was around the corner too soon to see anything.
    This wing was empty and shorter by half.
    Midway down, Beverly stopped and opened a door on the left-hand side.
    Tried to usher Ethan through, but he shook his head, leaned in, and whispered into Beverly’s ear instead.
    She nodded and rushed into the room, pulling the door closed after her.
    Ethan walked to the door on the opposite side of the hall.
    The handle turned. He slipped inside.
    It was empty, draped in darkness, and, by what little light streamed in from the corridor, appeared to have the same layout as the room they’d kept him in up on the fourth floor.
    He shut the door as quietly as he could manage and turned into the bathroom.
    Groped in