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.
