Head Full of Ghosts

Chapter 18 - Paging Dr. Plainfield

Echoing Eli's own movements only a minute before, the man began looking around, giving Eli the first good look at him he'd had. He had the hair cap and safety goggles off now, and his surgical mask pulled down so that his full face was revealed. He had short, sandy brown hair and unremarkable features. Eli wasn't entirely sure what he'd been expecting, but the "anybody, anywhere" look definitely wasn't it.

Horror movies told him that he should be looking at somebody horribly deformed, or wearing the skin of another person, or with a head full of small, scary spikes. Something. This guy could have been his doctor in the days before and Eli would've thought nothing of it. This man could've walked up to the gates of Joe's little bunker community and they would've let him in and never thought twice about it.

It was terrifying to contemplate.

"Hello?" the man called, and just the sound of that simple word, muted and muffled as it was coming through the wall, turned Eli's blood to ice.

The stranger started to turn away from the room, but then something made him stop and turn back.

"Are you there?" the man continued calling out as he surveyed the room through the window with what looked like, at least in Eli's opinion, a sadistic grin. "That wasn't what it looked like. I was trying to help that man."

Yeah, real convincing, thought Eli, but he remained silent as he crawled to a new position slightly more concealed.

"I can help you, too," the man went on as he opened the door to the room and stepped inside. "And you could help me. We could help each other."

A slicing, metallic hiss filled the air as the man suddenly pulled aside the curtain blocking the entryway to the first of the private rooms lining the walls. All he found was any empty room, but that didn't stop him.

"My name is Dr. Malcolm Bennett," the man continued, starting forward toward the next room. Eli listened to him walk, realizing the man must have been wearing unusual shoes, probably some kind of dress shoe, judging from the sound of his footsteps. Every step let out a click as if from a steel toe or the metal on the heel of a tap shoe, and then a loud "thunk" as the rest of the foot touched down.

"I'm a respected professor of surgical studies at the local university." As he spoke, there came two more click-thunks, and then his sentence was punctuated by another hiss as a second curtain was withdrawn on a second empty room. "You can look me up. I mean, you could go to the university and look me up. There's a plaque on the wall with my name and picture. A dedication to my hard work and service."

Click thunk. Click thunk. Hiss.

A moment of silence. And then, "I mean you no harm. I promise. I swore an oath. The Hippocratic oath. Do no harm. I only want to help."

Click thunk. Click thunk.

Eli waited for the next hiss, but it didn't come.

Click thunk. Click thunk.

The clicks and the thunks were getting louder now. Closer. He was moving away from the private rooms and toward the big nursing station desk.

"Let me help you," the doctor continued.

"Help yourself," shouted Eli, as he popped around the side of the desk, shoving an upturned pole into the doctor's legs.

It was a pole intended to hold multiple saline bags, and so had multiple points at the far end, with more than one of those points finding a home in the doctor's shins.

The doctor cried out in pain and slammed face first into the ground. Eli hopped to his feet and raised a second pole above his head with both hands, ready to bring it down on the dangerous doctor. But suddenly Bennet was rolling, his arm slashing a wide arc through the air, and Eli could feel a blast of air as the sharp edge of a surgical knife cut a path only inches from his exposed chest.