Chapter Two - A Bed for One

Jonah wakes to find himself a prisoner. How will he escape?

The air was cold and stale. The tang of industrial cleaner hung in the air. Jonah felt the inside of his mouth with his tongue. It was dry. He blinked his eyes a few times until his vision began to clear. His head throbbed and his body felt heavy. He had been very heavily sedated. The room around him seemed to list left then right, as though he were on a small yacht on the ocean. As the room slowly settled and came into focus, he found that he was in a hospital ward, but not like any he had seen before. Through eyes rimmed in a grey blur, Jonah inspected the room. Above the bed the curtain rail hung without a curtain, the emergency buzzer had been removed and on the far wall was a placard with an emergence evacuation procedure printed on it. The room was dully lit by a single functioning fluorescent tube and there were no windows. The door had a small reinforced glass window in it through which he could see the dull grey walls and the faces flicking by. There was no handle on the door, but there was a black square of glass on the wall beside it. Most likely a palm scanner. 

He shifted himself and found that beneath the bedding he could feel that he was now wearing a gurney, and his wrists were cuffed to the bedrails. This hospital, it seemed, was not your run-of-the-mill, everyday facility. By all counts it was most likely a prison hospital.

“Charming place. But I really must get going now.” He said as he tried to sit up. His effort was suddenly hampered by a deep throbbing sensation that pulsed through his body. The throb was accompanied by a wild dizziness and blurred vision. As he collapsed backwards on to the bed, the door opened and a tall male nurse entered carrying a clipboard under his arm. The man stood at the foot of the bed a moment and stared at the medical charts, then he moved to the side of the bed where he stood a moment. Jonah looked up at him, feeling pretty helpless. 

“Could you raise this thing please, I am having trouble sitting up.” Jonah asked, half whimpering.

“Sure thing.” The nurse said in a gentle voice and reached for the button just beneath the bed and pushed a button. The head of the bed raised slowly until Jonah was close to an upright sitting position. “Better?” the nurse asked.

“Yes, much better. Thank you.” Jonah dared not lift his head again as he spoke. He watched the man busy about checking his restraints, and the rail and whatever else he could check. “Where am I?” Jonah asked finally. 

“Oh, I am afraid I can’t tell you that.” The man replied with a smile. By his accent and demeanour, Jonah was pretty sure that he was still in South Africa.

“Secret?” Jonah asked, eyeing the fire hydrant on the opposite wall. 

“Something like that.” The man smiled again.  The Nurse was finally satisfied that everything was in order and headed for the door. 

“Why am I here?” It seemed like a pointless question once the words had left his mouth. The guy wasn’t going to tell him where he was, so it seemed just as unlikely that he would divulge the reasons why Jonah was wherever the hell he was. 

The nurse stood for a moment, sigh and turned back to him. “Because he wants you to get better.” No smile this time. He pressed a buzzer on the door and the door opened, letting in the harsh light from the corridor. “So we best not disappoint him.” Then he left.

“Who is he?” Jonah mumbled to himself as he shifted in the bed, sending a throb down his spine. He froze and forced his muscles to relax. Slowly the pain subsided. As he lay in the dullness of the ward, Jonah recalled the incident at the diner. He could only manage to gather fragments of what had happened. He remembered Emily. Her eyes were as clear then as they had been in the diner. He could still see her staring at him and hear her voice in his head. There were flashes of sky and road, some screaming and then nothing at all. 

When the nurse had left the room, Jonah had caught a glimpse of a soldier outside the door holding an R4 Assault rifle. The man was tall and well built and would not be easy to over power. That would be a problem to be solved later. The first order of business was to find a way out. Jonah would have to get the guards attention, which would prove a challenge, given the absence of the help button. After some thought, he reasoned that if he was to escape with minimal trouble, he would have to wait for the shift change and hope that the next guard was a bit smaller. 

He tried again to lift his head and managed to move it this time. The pain had dissipated somewhat but not entirely. He moved his arms about, and then lifted his legs one at a time. When he was satisfied that he was still fully functional, Jonah waited.

After what seemed an eternity, the guard change eventually came as he had hoped. The new guard was somewhat smaller than the first. The first nodded to the second and left. The second man turned and entered the ward. He stepped into the room, and stood staring at his prisoner a moment too long.

“Hi.” Jonah said with a broad smile, waving his hand like a coy tourist. The man did not respond. “Any chance of a trip to the loo?” 

He left the room again without as much as a sound. It seemed that the plan had failed, and Jonah would be forced to take much more drastic measures. He lifted himself off the back rest to sit fully upright and remained in that position until the throb subsided. The cold metal of the cuffs reminded him of his predicament. He would have to break those if he intended to escape. As he braced himself to break the cuffs, the door opened again and a stout woman stepped in. 

She was much smaller than the guard but looked much nastier. She was evil.

“Ernst tells me you want take a piss.” She said in a thick Russian accent, disdain dripping from every word. Jonah nodded coyly and she pulled out a set of keys from her jacket pocket. He watched as she selected the key and undid the cuffs. It occurred to Jonah that he could have dropped her in an instant, but thought better of it.

“Take him to the bathrooms, and do not let him out of your sight. We cannot afford to have him running amok.” She turned and stepped out into the corridor. “If you screw up, it’s your a*s on the line, and I am not explaining to Him, how his quarry escaped.” Then she was gone. 

Ernst turned to Jonah. “Come.” He said and motioned for Jonah to leave the room. Jonah did as he was commanded and stepped out into the dull grey corridor. As he followed the man down the corridor he took in the surroundings. The corridor was lined with dozens of heavy metal doors, much like that of his ward. In each door was a small window of reinforced glass set at eye level. The doorwells of these doors were set oddly deep however. At least a foot. At a brief glance it seemed that the rooms were sparsely furnished with just a single bed on the far end.

They had passed about four doors when they came to a door that was open. Inside were three men, all dressed in cleaners uniforms. They were mopping up what looked like copious amounts of blood. On the floor beside them was a steel container filled with mangled body parts. What the hell was is this place.

“Stop.” The guard halted at another relatively nondescript door. “Inside.” It had occurred to Jonah that this man was of few words. Either that or his dictionary was missing a few dozen pages. The room was kitted with all the standards, toilets, urinals and basins. Plus a rather large window above the urinals. This seemed a bit odd, given the high security in other parts of the establishment. That would be his avenue of escape. He stepped up to the urinal and induced a pee. As he peed he studied the window. There were no bars, and though it was misted glass, it was no more than five or six millimetres thick. There was the blurred shape of a window sill which would make life a little easier. 

He finished and turned to wash his hands in the basin. As he turned on the tap he saw that the guard had decided to take a leak himself, and his back was now towards Jonah. Now was the time to strike. Jonah curled his hand up into a solid fist and leapt at the man. He lashed out so viciously at the man that his fist crushed the back of his skull, snapped his neck and propelled him face first into the glass. The window shattered with the impact and the man crumpled to the floor. The impact sent a massive pulse of excruciating pain throughout Jonah’s body. He collapsed to the ground as his legs folded beneath him. He sat against the wall dazed for a moment as his nerves recovered. His body felt as though it were floating just above the surface of the floor, his skin felt numb, yet his heart raced and his nerves pounded with mind numbing pain. What the hell had they done to him?

Jonah steeled his mind and slowly got up to his feet and rose to his haunches. He stayed like that a moment before rifling through the pockets of the fallen man. He found a wallet and fished out the cash that was in it and stuffed the wallet back into the man’s pocket. Next he grabbed the R4 and moved over to the window. He stepped up onto the urinal and climbed out of the window onto the sill. He was on the first floor, but still a good five meter drop to the ground. As he squatted silently, a guard passed by beneath him. In the silence, Jonah heard the crack as the guard stood on the broken glass on the ground. 

The man knelt down and picked up a shard. His last act on this earth.

The man’s body folded beneath Jonah’s weight. He winced as he heard the crack of snapping bone and the feint pop of the man’s internal organs. Once again he was racked with the pain, though this time it was much less severe. A quick look around told him nobody had noticed the sound. The building was surrounded by a vast parking lot, lit up by spotlights. Judging by the dampness in the air, it was the early hours of the morning. The rumbling of thunder in the distance meant it was about to rain. Jonah pulled the body into the shadow of a Humvee that stood nearby. The man seemed to have been about his size, so he pulled off the man’s clothing and dressed himself as fast as he could. He slung the R4 over his shoulder and clipped on the ammo belt. When his boots were tied he stuck his head out and saw that there had been no alarm sounded. He dropped back to his haunches and focused his attention to the fencing in the distance. The perimeter fencing was a little over eighty meters away and vigilant spotlights sway back and forth across the empty blackness. He only had a few seconds, when they were only far enough apart that their ambient glow lit the space between the beams. That was his gap. It would not be easy to get out. The spotlights moved with extreme precision that could only mean that they were automated. That would play in his favour. As wonderful as the tech was, there was always a need for man to be present on the field of war, so it was a natural assumption that in the guard towers far above there would be armed guards. The R4 had a slot for a telescopic sight, so Jonah rifled through the pockets on his gear to find it. Hopefully he had not crushed it. 

Found it.

It was not crushed, thank goodness. Along with the sight he found another useful item. A silencer with a flash inhibiter. That would be really handy. Jonah clipped the sight into place and screwed on the silencer. Through the sight, he could see two men on each station. Four dull thuds later and all four were dead. He wasted no time looking about again and made a run for it. He would only have a few seconds to slip out. The beams parted and he passed between them. And slammed into a barrier he had not seen. There was a second line of fencing, painted black to be invisible at night. He struck the fencing hard, and was thrown back a good few feet. Jonah leapt to his feet as he heard the sirens sound. It would be a matter of time before the area was swamped with armed men.