Chapter 15

Hank Patrick strode down a hall in the hospital toward Nurse Leah Mullen's psych ward. The rapist had been identified, and even with DNA proof, Patrick didn't expect Mullen to believe him. Lieutenant Longacre with the Scottsdale Police Department had called him with the news, and had asked Patrick in his capacity as head of security to move the rapist to the secured area of the hospital where prisoners were held until some officers arrived to read the man his rights, arrest him, and transport him for booking.

"How crazy is he?" Longacre had asked.

"I don't remember him. Give me a sec to pull up his file on my computer," Patrick said. When a dialogue box came up, Patrick typed the patient's name, hit enter, and the file scrolled onto the screen. "Aaron R. MacDonald has been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Hmm, let's see. Here, this is interesting. He was struck by lightning, and when he came out of the coma following the event, he claimed to be someone other than MacDonald, declaring that the doctors had moved his mind to a different body. Initially, he reacted violently, struck a nurse, breaking her nose. That's when he was transferred to the psych ward. Dr. Percy Stein, a psychiatrist who does rounds in the psychiatric ward of the hospital, recommended MacDonald for transfer to the Arizona State Hospital. It looks like the transfer was delayed for some reason, probably because ASH didn't have a bed. That happens a lot. Then MacDonald calmed down, and Stein rescinded the order to ship him off to ASH because MacDonald stopped being violent."

Patrick didn't tell the SPD lieutenant that he suspected hospital administration was milking MacDonald's health insurance until the benefits ran out.

"Mr. Patrick, is MacDonald mentally competent to stand trial?" Longacre said.

Patrick laughed and said, "Not in a million years. He believes the staff members of the hospital are aliens, believes the hospital is on a planet other than earth, that he was taken from earth by us aliens, and that aliens are using him as an ingredient in weird experiments. He thinks the other patients in the psych ward are experiments gone awry, like him, and in fact, refers to them as experiments. He also has hallucinations of putrid smells coming from dead experiments the aliens refuse bury. The imaginary odors make him throw up."

Longacre sighed. "Okay. He's a rapist. Is he violent or not?"

"Not since he was first admitted."

"Okay. I'll send some officers to the hospital and transport him for booking, and then we'll probably send him back to you. We're busy this morning, so it might be two or three hours before we can pick him up. In the meantime, put him in a secure area of the hospital."

"Will do, Lieutenant," Patrick had said.

John Windom sat fighting waves of nausea. The stink was worse that morning. The dead bodies of experiments gone bad were piling up. No one sat near him. He didn't blame them. No one liked vomit spewing over their laps and legs and feet.

He was losing weight, he knew. The scrawny body the PPs had given him was wasting away to skin and bones. If he didn't stop throwing up his food, he'd die, and he didn't want to die. He didn't want to be thrown atop the pile of dead experiments to rot away under an alien sun.

Tears stung his eyes. He didn't want to die; he wanted to go home; he wanted his body back.

Someone stopped in front of him, a PP, he deduced from the white shoes with heavy crepe soles. He kept his head down. He didn't want the sick fucks who had stolen his body to see his tears.

"Look at me, Aaron," a voice screamed.

Alarmed, he looked up and saw the PP named Leah standing in front of him. She'd let the mask she wore slip. Instead of the kind but no-nonsense expression usually present on her alien face, she looked furious.

And then it happened. Leah struck him, slapped his face with the power of a large man. The blow combined with the shock that a PP was capable of such violence stunned him momentarily.

"You rapist!" she screamed. "You raped Grace!" Then she slapped him again, delivering a blow that spun him off the chair to the floor. "Get him out of here! Get him out of my ward!"

"Some good things have happened, Coach," Larry Foreman said to me. He occupied the passenger seat in my pickup truck. We were en route to Elizabeth's office to hear and record Tiny Gorman's apology. At the memorial service luncheon, I'd told Elizabeth about my deal with the sheriff regarding Tiny. After she finished laughing her head off, figuratively, of course, she tracked down the sheriff and Tiny and set up the apology for Tuesday during my lunch hour. My lunch hour for Monday was committed to switching banks. I'd pulled Larry out of a class to go with me.

"What good things?" I said.

"My mom started to go to AA meetings again. She's been sober since the night of the party when Tiny hit me. I told her what had happened, what I did, what you did, and how you and Ms. Clark are helping me go to the community college. 'If good people like that will help you, I'll help, too, ' she said. I'm not saying this dry spell will last, Coach, but I sense she's more serious about trying this time. A friend at AA got her a job bagging groceries at Anderson's Foodtown, which is close enough to our house that she can walk to work."

"That's good news, Larry, very good news," I said.

"The other good news involves Cal's father. Cal told me that the sheriff read his dad the riot act. The sheriff told him that if he hit Cal again that he'd sic Tiny on him. The sheriff said that Tiny would catch him alone without witnesses around and pretend that he was a heavy bag in a boxing gym. Then the sheriff ordered Cal's dad to sign up for anger-management therapy at the Ely Mental Health Center. Cal couldn't believe it, but his dad actually signed up for some group sessions."

Lightning flashed and thunder rocked the pickup. The sky opened up, and rain came down so hard and heavy I thought I'd driven under a waterfall.

"Whew, that was close," Larry said. "Are you afraid of lightning now?"

I said nothing. I had to concentrate on the road.

He chuckled and answered his own question. "Probably not. I mean the odds are a million to one, aren't they? The odds of getting hit by lightning twice in a lifetime have to be a billion to one."

With the windshield wipers going full blast and the gusting wind and rain calming slightly, I was able to respond. "After a bolt of lightning found the goalposts I was standing under, I was curious about the actual odds, Larry. They are much smaller than I thought. The odds in the United States are about 244,000 to one. It's by far more likely that a person will get hit by lightning than the person will win a lottery. About Cal's dad, I'm happy the sheriff intervened. The more I know Sheriff Ken the more I admire him. He's a good man."

The telephone call from the sheriff last evening is an example, I thought. He didn't need to give me partial credit for the break in the investigation that had led to the identification and subsequent arrest of the meth cooker in the county, and it pleased me that he agreed that any credit I was due would remain between the sheriff and me. Yep, Sheriff Kenneth Hansen is a good man.

Larry nodded. "Yes, I think he is," he said quietly. "It's confusing. Outward appearances mean nothing, or very little. It's what's inside a person that really counts, and I think everyone sorta hides the real person inside."

"Appearances mean little, but behavior means a lot, and behavior can't be hidden, not indefinitely. Judge folks not by who they are or what they look like, Larry, but rather by how they act, and you won't be as confused."

Lightning lit up the sky again, and then thunder cracked and rumbled almost immediately.

"Another close one," Larry said.

I chuckled. "I thought it snowed this time of year around here. Are thunderstorms normal in Ely in late November?"

"More normal that snow, Coach. The snowstorms we've had were early storms. But a thunderstorm as violent as this one usually happens during the summer months."

John Windom was in serious trouble now. PPs stuck needles in recalcitrant experiments. They didn't hit them. Especially female PPs. Two or more male PPs held violent experiments down and another took them out with needles. That's how it was done on this planet.

But a PP had struck him, a female PP, and she'd screamed at him, called him a rapist, said that he'd raped Grace. He didn't rape Grace. Grace didn't say no. She didn't tell him to stop. You can't rape the willing.

The PPs wouldn't understand, though. Their minds were made up. He was an experiment. He wouldn't get his day in court, not on this planet. Experiments had no rights. He'd be punished. They'd kill him. He knew that they'd kill him. Kill him and throw the dead, scrawny body that they'd given him on the heap of rotting human flesh where they discarded dead experiments. His stench would add to the putrid odors that filled the air on this planet.

Could he escape? Humans and PPs look similar, while clothed at least. PPs probably looked different naked. He'd never seen a naked PP. He tried to imagine some of the possible differences in PP anatomy and the anatomy of human beings. No nipples, he decided. They're pollinated. They'd have no need for nipples. Or sex organs. No, that wasn't true. Plants had sex organs. He tried to remember what he'd been taught in biology about the sex organs of plants. He recalled male and female sex germs, and something called the stigma.

Fuck it. The configuration of PP sex organs didn't matter. As long as he wore clothes, he could pass for a PP. Escape was the only chance he had. Otherwise he was a dead man walking.

PPs wore white jackets or green cotton-like wraps similar to the clothing nurses and doctors wore in hospitals on earth. If he could steal a white jacket or a green wrap, he could walk out of the alien prison where he was incarcerated.

He wanted to ask the large, male PP who held his arm where he was being taken, but he'd learned not to ask questions. PPs didn't like their experiments to ask questions. Questions produced needles, and considering how much trouble he was in, the last thing he wanted was a needle jabbed into his flesh. If they took him out with a needle, he knew he wouldn't wake up—ever.

The large PP guiding him through the building turned left. The new corridor had a glass wall on the right. Lightning flashed, lighting up the corridor as if a thousand light bulbs had gone off at the same time. Then thunder cracked and rumbled, shaking the building. Rain pelted the glass wall. The rain turned into hail, small ice pellets at first, but then became a little larger, about the size of frozen peas. The pellets bounced off the glass and off the green grass outside the wall as if the grass was a trampoline.

The alien planet has violent storms, John Windom thought.

Through the driving rain, I noticed a car at the side of the road. A woman was behind the car bent over looking at something. As my pickup approached the car, I recognized Gloria Sanger. She looked like a drowned rat. Her car had a flat tire, the rear passenger-side.

I pulled my pickup off the road behind Gloria's car.

"Stay in the pickup, Larry," I said. "No need for both of us to get soaked."

I hopped out of the pickup and sloshed over to Gloria. The cold rain soaked me to the skin before I took two steps. "Gotta problem, Gloria?" I said.

"Coach! Am I glad to see you! I've got a flat tire, must have picked up a nail, or something."

"Do you have a spare?" I said.

"Yes, but..."

"I'll change the tire, Gloria. Open the trunk, and then jump in my pickup to keep Larry Foreman company. It would be silly for you to stand out in this gusher to watch me change the tire."

"Okay, and thanks, Coach. I owe you," she said as she unlocked the trunk.

"Yep," I said, grinning, "and someday when you least expect it, I'll collect. Now get."

The spare was a donut that car manufactures put in cars in lieu of a full-size tire. I released the device that held it in place, and pulled it out. Then I studied the jack. I'd used one like it before. I was loosening the lug nuts on the rim with the flat tire when lightning flashed again. The thunder that followed shook the ground. I looked up through the limbs of a tree whose canopy covered about half the width of Gloria's car. The tree provided a little protection from the driving rain, but it could also attract lightning. With a sense of foreboding, I hurried to loosen the lug nuts, and the tire iron slipped off one of the bolts. I cursed and told myself that Larry had been right. The odds of getting struck by lightning twice in my lifetime had to be a billion to one.

Suddenly, a white light more brilliant than the inside of a star surrounded me.

As John Windom walked down the corridor, he noticed a console table in an offset in the wall to his left. A large vase sat on the table, but John Windom didn't see a vase. He saw a weapon, and not just one weapon. The vase could be used to eliminate the PP escorting him. The table could break through the wall of glass to give him an escape path from the alien prison.

He worried though. Was he strong enough in his emaciated condition to pick up the large vase and wield it like a club? Was the vase heavy enough to knock the PP unconscious? Would the glass wall be impervious to a table striking it with force?

He could think of no alternative that would allow him to escape, though. He had no choice. He'd die if he didn't try. The PP was probably escorting him to his death. And he did have something going for him. He was walking along the solid wall, not the wall of glass, so he was on the correct side of the PP to use the vase as a weapon.

Do it! It's your only chance.

Moving as quickly as he could, he spun to the left, picked up the heavy vase, and kept spinning as the vase rose over his head with his spin concluding as the vase struck the startled PP in the face. The vase broke and fell in pieces to the floor along with the unconscious PP.

He grabbed the console table, and then groaned with dismay. It was too heavy to pick up and throw. But maybe...

Yes! He could push it! He could slide it across the smooth floor in the corridor, but the corridor probably wasn't wide enough for him to build up the table's speed enough to break through the glass wall. But, if he pushed the table at an oblique angle instead of at a right angle toward the wall, perhaps he could gain the distance needed to build up the table's velocity to achieve his purpose. Do it! You have no choice, he entreated silently.

"Break through, goddamnit!" he growled out loud at the table just before it struck the glass.

"Yes!" he shouted when the large pane of glass the table hit shattered into a million small pieces, not large, jagged pieces. Tempered glass, he figured as he leaped through the opening behind the table. The table hit the sodden ground before he did, and he nearly fell on the slippery, green grass. He recovered his balance and ran. Looking back over his shoulder and seeing no one in pursuit didn't slow him down. He was running for his life.

The rain quickly soaked though his prison garments. His lungs labored to give him enough oxygen to keep running, and spots appeared in front of his eyes. He'd seen the spots before, though, so they didn't bother him.

Gasping for breath, he ran through a parking lot. He saw no one. Looking back he saw no pursuit, but he ran on. He ran until he couldn't run anymore, until his scrawny body had nothing left to give him, and then he collapsed. He looked up at the sky, the first time he'd looked directly up to an open sky since the aliens had abducted him. He was halfway under a tree, a large alien tree that stretched to the heavens. At least the canopy of the tree offers some protection from the rain, he thought as he continued to suck fresh oxygen into his overworked lungs. Suddenly a white light more brilliant than the inside of a star surrounded him.

"Jesus!" Gloria exclaimed.

"Not again!" Larry shouted and jumped from the pickup. He ran through the rain to Coach, who was lying unconscious face up under the tree. The tree was on fire, but the driving rain was quickly extinguishing the flames.

Larry slid to a stop, almost losing his balance, knelt and placed his fingers along Coach's neck. He saw Mrs. Sanger come to a stop beside him. "No pulse," he said. "Do you know CPR? I don't."

"Yes," she said. "Get out of the way. Call an ambulance."

"No phone," he said as she opened Coach's mouth to start CPR.

"In my purse in the front seat of my car," Mrs. Sanger said.

Leaning into the car, Larry found the purse and opened it. He groaned. The purse was full of junk, and he couldn't see a cell phone. He dumped the contents of the purse on the front seat of the car, spreading the mess until he spotted the cell phone. He opened it, turned it on and dialed 911. When the phone started to ring, he looked toward Coach and Mrs. Sanger. She was pressing his chest hard with both hands, pushing with rhythmic movements.

"Is he breathing yet?" Larry yelled.

"No, call an ambulance."

The 911 operator came on the line, and Larry quickly told her what had happened and the approximate location of the emergency.

"Again? Coach was struck by lightning again?" the operator said.

"Yes. He's not breathing. No pulse. Get an ambulance here now!"

"Calm down, young man. I have the EMTs on line now."

Larry clicked off the call and walked to Coach and Mrs. Sanger.

"The ambulance is on the way," he said, feeling impotent. He made a personal vow to learn how to perform CPR and other emergency procedures.

Another vehicle stopped behind the pickup, and a man Larry didn't know ran toward them.

Mrs. Sanger knew him. "Bob, do you know CPR?" she said as she continued pushing her clasped hands into Coach's chest.

"Yes," the man called Bob said.

"I need a break," she said.

Bob knelt on the opposite side of Coach from Mrs. Sanger, and they counted together until Bob had the rhythm, and Bob took over. Mrs. Sanger sagged back, looking exhausted.

"Is he going to be all right?" Larry said to her.

She just looked at him and said nothing, but her look said it all.

Larry's sudden tears merged with the rain on his face.

I woke up once again lying on wet grass, but Orville wasn't leaning over me. A large dog was licking my face. Leaves on the limbs of a large cottonwood tree partially protected me from the rain. The tree was on fire, but the heavy rain was quickly extinguishing the flames.

Dog? Cottonwood tree? I wasn't under a cottonwood tree when...

Shit! Lightning! Lightning hit that tree!

I tried to sit up. When the attempt failed, I pulled my hand in front of my eyes. It wasn't John Windom's hand. It wasn't Aaron MacDonald's hand either. It was a woman's hand!

I closed my eyes, bit the side of my mouth until I could taste blood, and opened my eyes again. I wasn't hallucinating. The hand in front of my face belonged to a woman.

With effort, I sat up. Checking out the rest of my new body told me the woman was young, in her late teens or early twenties, I guessed, and overweight.