Getting Out Part 2

Instead of immediately splatting on the concrete below my flailing hands managed to grab the banister one floor down, although doing so almost dislocated my shoulders and freezer burnt my hands. For a few seconds I just hung there, seeing little black and white dots. Then there was the noise of quick footsteps from above. There was no way I was going to be able to pull myself up with my arms doing jelly impressions, so I swung back and forth until I could land on the stairs below my feet. This time, I managed to stick the landing, and took off at a sprint.

Things went on in a similar manner. They were better navigators, but I was faster and managed to build up a head start. The chase came to its end when I kicked open a door that said MRI Scan Room, having previously hidden my necklace, the laptop and its charger in the room next door and flung the axe, the torch and anything else metallic on me out of a nearby window; even when not switched on, an MRI is still magnetic and when on this beast of a machine is capable of accelerating paperclips to 60kph… and larger objects even faster, counterintuitively. It’s a good thing the place was mostly empty, because otherwise there’d be no way I’d have been allowed to get my hands on the operator’s table. I sticky taped paper over the ELECTRONIC STOP and QUENCH buttons in the scanning room (thank you, secretary’s desk!) and wrote on them “Out of order, do not perform scan” in vivid. Then I stuck my head around the door, looking for the rapidly approaching Black. When I was sure he’d spotted me, I hit the button to start scanning, ran out of the scanning room, shut its door, ran into the operations room and crossed my fingers.

Crossed fingers evidently are lucky, because he came straight into the operations room rather than see what I’d been up to in the scanning room. The sleepily stirring machine wrenched the sword out of his hands in a ‘give me that’ manner, and it stuck fast onto the humming casing. In the moment of confusion this caused I kicked at his knee with every ounce of strength I could muster. There was a satisfying ‘crack’. He gave a shout of anger and pain and made a grab for me, but with all his weight on one leg now I had a greater chance of succeeding in tackling him, whereas previously that chance had been near zero. Instead of trying to dodge his swing I rammed all my weight into him, sending him crashing backwards onto the operating table.

We kicked and struggled, me doing my best to pin him down with the world swimming in and out of clarity, and him doing his best to get me off of him despite his injured knee. Neither of us played fair, and at first I was sure he was going to win since he had the physical advantage. The MRI began making loud knocking noises, and for every second that passed his struggles grew more and more frantic. Then he started screaming and thrashing, no longer with any kind of obvious goal.

I shoved his head into the center of the MRI, straight into the heart of the 3 Tesla magnetic field, 60000 times background level. The room now sounded as though a jet plane was taking off in the middle of it, and one of my eardrums burst, sending a trickle of blood down my neck. Even outside of the eye of the storm, holding Black in it, my entire body prickled with pins and needles and my limbs would twitch involuntarily. Bits of me started to heat up like someone had embedded heating coils at random points in my flesh. Red blood and black azoth began to coat the insides of the tunnel.

Things got even weirder then. I backed away from the still twitching, frothing, struggling Black and the machine, and instead moved to the right. I panicked, tried to turn towards the door, and instead moved up, then left, and then I slammed into a wall. If there’s ever been a video game glitch where the movement keys suddenly up and decided that they’d be whichever direction they happened to want to be at whim, then it was like that. It was also like being a person who’d lived on a previously flat sheet of paper experiencing it being screwed up into a little ball while they were still on it. My inner ear was going haywire, telling me gravity was all over the place, and sometimes operating in two or more directions at once. Prioproreception was having similar problems with the question of exactly where my limbs were. And I had to shut my eye when things started distorting like an Escher painting. I threw up on the MRI machine. Classy, Med.

The operating room’s ELECTRONIC STOP button was my only hope to stop the madness. Never has a journey of a few steps taken so long and been so harrowing, in my opinion. I managed to hit it with my arm. There was the ‘cikh’ of suddenly disabled electronics, and the whole world went quiet. I threw up again, to the consternation of the people in the room.

Yes, there were people in the room. I opened my eye to find a whole lot of guys in white coats looking at me like I’d just appeared from nowhere, which I suppose I technically had.

To cut a long story slightly less long, while everyone was frozen I grabbed the unconscious but surprisingly still alive Black by an arm, hoisted him onto the nearest thing with wheels and was out of there like the worst rescue ever, pausing only to swipe the laptop bag from the room where I stashed it and it thankfully somehow still was. The stairs were a bit tricky, I was shedding layers of now useless blankets on the way and I swear I heard someone shout “WHAT THE HELL!?” as I raced past them. My thoughts exactly, strange guy who I will never know.

Sadly what would have been an awesome end to this entire debacle was cut short by security. I was confined to the hospital while I was questioned and searched. I gave my best ‘I have no idea what happened either, sir’ and while they were still suspicious the search came up clean. Then they went out of the room for a bit, came in and… let me go. I’m not sure exactly why, still. If I were a security officer at a hospital, I for one would have loved to know how a katana ended up stuck to the MRI machine.

My wounds were sterilized and stitched and I am currently scheduled for a repair to my left eardrum

(They’re going to replace the old busted one with some skin taken from behind my ear, apparently.) in a week, but I’m no longer inside the hospital.  I told those who similarly treated him and whoever else asked that Black was my brother, and while he’s still dead to the world he doesn’t need life support so I was allowed to take him home after signing a veritable mountain of papers and a knee brace was put on him. He’s currently locked in the spare room, handcuffed to the bed, so if B does take up my offer it appears I’m going to be a couch sleeper for the forseeable future.

…I need a new iPhone.