Edge of Chaos (13 page)

“Kayla!”

Kayla jumps in her
seat and looks up. Doctor Harris is standing in front of her frowning.

“Just got a call
from Summit,” he begins. “They had to turn away another trauma victim and the
medics are bringing him here. They’re four minutes out, so look alive, Kayla.”

Wearily, Kayla
forces herself up and gets ready to receive the new patient. She forgot to ask
if it was another biker.

Oh well, Doctor
Harris probably didn’t know anyway
, she thinks and walks out onto the landing to wait for the ambulance.

She sees a
scary-looking biker approaching her. He is well over six feet tall with long
raggedy greying hair and a beard several inches long. This guy looks familiar.
Kayla’s eyes fix on the only detail she is concerned with at the moment; his
patches. He is most definitely a Suicide King and…and he’s their president! Kayla
shivers in fear. Here is the man responsible for Luke’s dark side; the man who has
ruined Luke’s childhood and tries to ruin his adulthood as well. He looks like
the personification of evil to her. But if he is truly that bad, how can there
be anything good left in Luke?

“Excuse me,” he
says, as he walks up.

She has to force
herself not to step backwards when he addresses her. He is one formidable
character to say the least.

“I’m wondering if
you have seen this man,” he asks, waving a photo underneath her nose.

Kayla looks
closely. It’s not a super recent picture, but it’s definitely Luke there
sitting on a tricked-out motorcycle.

She falls back on
the standard line. “I’m sorry sir, but I cannot divulge patient information to
anyone without written permission.”

“Wait a second, I
know you. You’re that helpless doctor who didn’t even try to save Mack!”

“You failed to do
the right thing. You chickened out and didn’t get your friend here for help.
You guys are just a lot of cowards! Without written permission, I’m not giving
you any information.”

He chooses to
ignore the coward remark. “This is my son,” he replies. “Surely, you can tell
me if you have seen him. You don’t have to tell me his condition. I need to
find him and none of the other hospitals have him in their care, so that leaves
just you.”

The guy is lying.
He could not have gotten any information out of the other area hospitals either,
especially when his son would have been the victim of a crime. They would be
breaking the law and jeopardizing their patients.

“Look, I’m not
going to argue with you, sir...”

“Then maybe you
should get out of my way then,” he replies, taking a step towards Kayla.

“You picked the
wrong day to harass a hospital employee, mister,” Kayla replies, and then she
turns and yells in a loud voice, “Security!”

The man stares at
her for a moment like he can’t believe someone half his size, and female, is
actually refusing him. Of course, no way is Kayla going to tell him she slept
with his son twelve hours ago, or that he had murder in his eyes when he left
her house. He opens his mouth to say something else, but instead turns and
leaves without another word.

“You alright,
Kayla?” asks one of the newer male ER doctors. Two Oakland Police officers are
with him.

“Thanks, Doctor
Lawson; thanks, guys, but he left, so I’m fine. It was just some biker looking
for another one. No big deal.”

“Alright, but keep
your eyes open,” one of the officers says. “We may not have seen the last of
it.”

As they turn to
leave, Kayla notices a Polaroid photo lying face down on the ground. She picks
it up. It’s the picture of Luke that his father was carrying. Without knowing
quite why, she pockets it. She’s just about to go back in the ER when the
ambulance they’ve been expecting pulls up to the landing. For some reason, it
doesn’t even have its lights flashing or its siren on. When it comes to a stop,
a very harried-looking young EMT gets out of the back of the vehicle. Kayla
peers into the back, but surprisingly there’s no patient.

“Aren’t you the
guys who were turned away from Summit?” she asks.

“Yeah, funny
thing… the guy just got up and jumped out. We ran into some traffic in town and
got stopped for a few seconds. He got up from the gurney and bolted. He didn’t
even bother to disconnect his IV. He just ripped it out of him, spraying blood
all over the back.”

“Really? Was he a
biker? Like from the Suicide Kings?” Kayla asks.

“Yeah, I think he
was a biker, but I didn’t notice which club.”

Kayla pulls the
photo out of her pocket. It’s a long shot but… She shows it to the EMT.

“This looks like
him?” she asks.

The EMT takes a
good look at the photograph. “Yeah, I think so. His hair was a little longer
and he had more of a beard but yeah, I think so. You get that from the police
or something?”

“No, but some
really evil-looking guy came by looking for him. I turned him away and he
apparently dropped this.”

“What’s up with
all the cops out front?” he asks.

“Oh man…” Kayla
looks at her watch. It’s 3:45 am. “It’s been a long three hours or so. We lost
two nurses tonight, three bikers I think, and I nearly got my head blown off.
I’m going to be stuck here until my shift tomorrow, just filling out all the
reports and answering police questions.”

“Holy shit! You
guys always get the crazies. But I heard that Summit had two fatalities; all
bikers from the same club, so something really strange is going on around here.
Did you know the…the uh, nurses that got a…killed?” The EMT asks.

“Not really. The
real bitch of it is the one girl was really new. This was her first nursing job
out of school. She is a floor nurse but was filling in because we were so
slammed. The other one, a male nurse normally worked days, so I just knew him
by sight.”

“Wow…still that’s
really awful.”

“Yeah, I can’t
believe it happened. I was upstairs getting ready when the first code alert
came out over the intercom. Apparently, some guys came and dropped off a biker with
a gunshot wound, but then they ran into another group of bikers and a fight broke
out. Weird thing was that they were all from the same club.”

“Shit, that is
weird...”

“Well, I’d better
get back in. Be safe out there,” Kayla says.

“Yeah…you too.”

Kayla glances up
at the clock; it’s almost two in the afternoon and she’s just finished with the
last of her reports. She should have been in bed sleeping hours ago and she
hasn’t even had a chance to call Luke to make sure he’s alright. She knows that
he can’t be that seriously injured; otherwise, he wouldn’t have been able to
leap out of the ambulance the way he did. But she is still worried.

After the EMT had left,
the biker chaos ended. However, this is the emergency room, so she still had to
deal with all their usual cases. Yet, the whole time she was thinking about Luke.
And now she really wants to hear his voice. Rather than stay in the ER, where
she could get roped into helping out at any time, she goes up to the third
floor balcony and sits down to a steaming cup of hot coffee. She takes a deep
breath and calls Luke’s cell phone.

When he doesn’t
answer the third time she calls, she begins to get really worried. She tries
texting him, but there’s no reply. She wants to find out if he’s alright and warn
him that his father is looking for him. Of course, he may already know, but she
has to make sure herself. She leaves the hospital at once and drives to his
house. No luck there, either.

Kayla finally
concludes that she’s not going to be able to talk to him until he seeks her out
and returns to her home. She will soon be due back to work, so she has a hasty
meal before taking a well-earned rest.

Exhausted beyond
measure, Kayla collapses on her bed. She barely gets her eyes closed before
there’s a pounding on her door. She jumps up and dashes out of her room and
down the hall that separates her room from the dining room. As she skids across
the slick dining room floor in her sock feet, the person knocking begins
yelling as well.

“Kayla, it’s
me….Kayla, you in there? Open up, Kayla!”

She finally
reaches the door in record time and unlocks it. She stops for a second, takes a
deep breath and forces herself to calm down. If he is in a bad way, it won’t do
to have two panicking people. She takes another deep breath and lets it out
before opening the door.

She’s right; Luke
is in a bad way. The second the door is open, he collapses in her hallway. At
first, she’s not even sure he’s alive. She manages to turn him over on his back
and checks his carotid pulse; 98 beats per minute. It’s too fast, but not
horribly fast. She checks for a pulse on his wrist but cannot feel one in
either arm; that means his blood pressure is dangerously low. She does a quick
examination while monitoring his breathing. At first, she thinks he’s just passed
out from exhaustion when she finds a small bullet hole in the left upper leg of
his jeans. In a near panic, she unbuckles his belt, unzips his pants and begins
tearing them off. She stops when she gets them down to his knees. She locates
the bullet hole but a subsequent search does not yield an exit wound; that
means the bullet is still inside. It also means it has probably done extensive
damage as it ricocheted around in his body. To make matters worse, she finds
that his abdominal cavity, all four quadrants are rigid; a sure indication of
blood pooling in the cavity. This would account for his low blood pressure. The
remainder of her exam fails to find any other wounds, so she focuses on the
only one she can find; the leg wound.

She checks his
carotid pulse once more.

“Shit!”

She tries the
other side of his neck and then his wrists; nothing.

“Holy crap…holy
crap, holy freaking crap…”

Panic is creeping
up on her and she has to fight to keep it at bay. She checks for breathing.
Luke Donald Madsen is pulseless and apneic. He is dying. In fact, he seems already
there.

Panic explodes
over Kayla like a giant ocean wave breaking over her. When it comes crashing
down on her head, it knocks her head over heels and into the sandy floor below,
leaving her breathless and disoriented! It takes her a few seconds to get a
grip on her mind and do what’s best for Luke. She takes out her cell phone and
dials 911. She sets it on the floor and gives Luke two breaths of air. When she
begins the chest compressions, an operator answers her call.

“911, what is the
nature of your emergency?”

“I’m at 342 Pierce
Street, Berkeley and I’m doing CPR on a gunshot victim in my house.”

“Ma’am, is the
shooter present?”

Kayla gives Luke
two breaths of air.

“Ma’am?”

“Shooter’s not
here. I’m a PA at Highland Hospital ER and patient has a probable ruptured
femoral artery and extensive bleeding into the upper leg and abdominal cavity.”

She gives two more
breaths.

When Luke doesn’t
immediately respond, Kayla’s last desperate hope begins to fail. She thinks
about his father and how he robbed Luke of his childhood and now he has managed
to cheat Luke of his adulthood as well. It starts small at first. It’s just the
seed of hatred, but with every breath she breathes into Luke’s lifeless body that
seed grows into a sapling. Every chest compression causes that sapling to
flourish and grow until it becomes a tree with roots deeply burrowed into her
soul. It’ll take an act of God to remove the tree now. By the time the
ambulance gets to her house, that little seed of anger has turned into a dark
forest of blind fury!

Rage this deep
doesn’t just dissipate after a few sessions with a therapist and there are not
enough magazines and books in the world for you to tear up; you’re still left
with your feelings. No, this kind of deep, raw intensity requires direct
physical action to satisfy the anger. Kayla zones out as rescue personnel work
on Luke at a feverish pace. She will finish what Luke started and kill his
father.

“He’s gone,” a
paramedic tells her.

“What?” she asks.

She has been so
consumed with rage she has completely forgotten the drama still going on around
her, and that people are still trying to save Luke’s life. She looks around.
They have stopped their work and are printing a strip on the defibrillator to
mark when they called the code. There’s blood, bandages, and sterile wrappings
littering the floor around Luke’s body.

“I’m sorry,
ma’am…I’m sorry, ma’am…I’m sorry, ma’am…”

Kayla wakes up
with a start. At first, she’s not sure what has woken her up. She looks at her
alarm clock on the bedside table. It’s 9pm. She has to be at work in three
hours. But what woke her up so suddenly? She’s about to roll over and go back
to sleep when there’s a pounding on her door. This time she jumps up and charges
out of her bedroom. She grabs her shotgun from the hall closet and chambers a
round before she looks out the peephole in her door.

It’s Luke! He
appears to be bent over and breathing hard. Kayla fumbles with the lock and he
starts another round of knocking before she finally gets the door open. He
stumbles in and falls face first on her hall floor. A black handgun falls from
his fingers and goes clattering across her floor.

“What the hell?” she
gapes.

Though she
suspects he always had a gun on him, seeing him actually holding one now is a
little too much for her. She steps around him and shuts the door. No point in
having prying neighbors all up in her business. She kneels at Luke’s side and
automatically begins checking him for fresh wounds.

“I’m okay, I’m
okay!” he pants. “Just… have run a long way.”

“Huh? What are you
running from?” she asks, confused.

“My father,” Luke
pants, “and a couple of his guys.”

“And you came
here? Luke, I can’t have people shooting at each other here; my neighbors will
call the police…not to mention the fact that I don’t want to get shot.”

“That’s what this
is for,” he says, pointing to the gun still on the floor. “That’s yours. I have
another one,” he says, as he pulls a black Glock 19 out of his shoulder
holster.

Kayla taps the
barrel of her Mossberg. “Yeah, I don’t think I need your pea shooters. But what
am I talking about, anyway? There’s not going to be any shooting here now or
ever. I’m a respected member of the community. My neighbors all know me and
they like me. You can’t—"

“They’re probably
already here, Kayla,” Luke says.

Kayla goes over to
the living room window and looking out, she sees three bikes pull up. No doubt
one of them is Luke’s father.

“Oh my god, this
can’t be happening…this can’t be happening. What are we gonna do, Luke?”

“Stay away from
the windows and for god’s sake, turn off all the lights.”

As Kayla scrambles
around doing just that, she hears her phone ringing from the kitchen. She
sprints from her back bedroom to the kitchen in two seconds flat.

“Hello?” she pants
into the phone.

“Hey, take it easy
there, tiger. Catch your breath first, and then we can talk,” the man on the
other end of the line says.

“Who is…this?” she
pants.

“Oh, I think you
know who this is, Kayla,” the voice replies.

As Kayla’s breathing
slows and her heart settles down in her chest, she begins to go from terrified
victim to angry homeowner.

“Yeah, I think I
do know who this is. You’re the asshole nut job who does not deserve to have a
son like Luke, so why don’t you take your stinking carcass out of here before
you bite off more than you can chew!”

Kayla totally
shocks herself. She has never spoken like that to anyone, especially not to the
president of an outlaw biker gang that is surrounding her house. When the man
replies back angrily, she is not surprised.

“You listen here,
Doc! You got no idea how hard it was to raise a kid like Luke and—"

That’s all Kayla
can stand. She hangs up on him mid-sentence. When he calls back, he’s
sputtering with fury.

“Don’t you ever
hang—"

And Kayla does it
again. She pockets her phone.

“What are you
doing?” Luke asks. “You can’t piss him off like that. He’s gonna kill you.”

“Yeah, I think
he’s gonna kill me whether I try and charm him or not and it’s much more fun to
piss him off.”

Now Luke’s cell phone
starts ringing. He answers it immediately. “Hello?”

“Luke,” his father
begins. “She’s a wonderful girl. Don’t involve her in club or family business.
Just put down your guns and come out here unarmed and nobody has to get hurt.”

“Nobody except me
of course, right?”

“We’re a little
beyond talking Luke, don’t you think? If you really care for that girl, then
you need to turn yourself in and the club will decide what comes next. I
promise if you turn yourself in, the girl will not be harmed. You fail to do so
and I cannot guarantee her safety when the bullets begin to fly.”

“No deal, father.”

“I’ll give you
thirty minutes to do the right thing, Luke, and after that we’re coming in,
guns blazing.”

“Do what you have
to do, father,” Luke replies. He turns off the speaker button and ends the
call.

“What does he mean
the club will decide?”

“The officers and
senior members will decide my fate. It’ll be an easy decision. I’ll be found
guilty of sedition for trying to kill my father. The penalty will be death.”

Kayla can’t
believe it. He is the vice president. How can they treat him as a traitor? She
needs some time to think. She decides to go make some coffee and then they can
sit down and think of a plan. She is so lost in the monotony of making coffee
when she hears the metallic click of the deadbolt being drawn back on her door.
She doesn’t immediately realize what is happening. It’s not until she hears
that sucking sound of the door opening and the air pressure in the room
equalizing that she knows Luke is walking out of the house.

“No!” Kayla
screams from the kitchen.

She charges out of
the kitchen, shotgun in hand, determined to keep Luke from throwing away his
life. She has a sudden flash of herself lying spread eagle on the grass on her
front lawn. She is firing the pistol Luke had given her. The Mossberg is lying
empty next to her. Bodies pile up in front of her as she lays down a deadly
hail of bullets. But she is too late. Lying sprawled out on the grass just out
of reach from her is Luke’s lifeless body. While still firing, she glances over
at his face. Even in death he looks so much happier, so much more at peace that
it seems all this effort to keep him alive almost seems cruel.