Their plan, Zack realized, was to burst in, two on one, and try to beat him to death.
A blaring siren went off in the medical center now; Zack didn’t know if the woman was still conscious on the floor and had reached a button, or if just the noise of the shooting and the screaming fight in the MRI suite had caused someone else to raise the alarm, but Zack ran towards the door himself, meeting the attackers just after they came in.
The first man was wearing thick rubber snow boots, and he slipped on Zack’s blood and fell onto his back, and Zack leapt over him, swinging at the uninjured man carrying the hammer. Blows were exchanged; both men managed to control the weapons in the other man’s hands, but they butted heads, sent knees toward groins, threw shoulders into each other’s chests right there in the doorway.
It was an ugly, bloody brawl between Zack and this skinhead with tattoos on his neck. Zack got the man’s medical mask pushed up over his eyes for a moment, then knocked him down to the floor, back over the threshold and into the scan room.
Once inside the copper protective barrier of the walls, the attacker climbed to his feet but then grabbed at his own neck, dropping his weapon as he did so. Zack didn’t understand what was happening at first, but his opponent stopped fighting him and began clutching his throat.
Soon the big man began backpedaling towards the MRI machine. His own feet slipped in Zack’s blood, he stumbled backwards faster, and only when the man fell back on the patient table and slid into the scanner did Zack realize the man must have had some sort of a large chain around his neck.
He was effectively being strangled inside the 3 Tesla scanner.
Zack had no metal on him at all, however, so he quickly left the room, returned to the control room, and saw the technician pulling herself back to her feet.
He shouted to her. “What’s the biggest piece of magnetic metal in this room?”
Her eyes widened, but she understood. She pointed to a single oxygen tank in the far corner from the door to Zone 4. Zack ran to it, looked through the operator’s window, and saw that the man with the chain had managed to break free before he was strangled, and the one who’d been on the floor was now back on his feet, rushing to help the other man.
Zack hefted the heavy steel tank and ran towards the open door, and before he passed the threshold, he threw it up and into the air.
The tank dropped to the floor but immediately began skidding through the scan room, faster and faster and faster, towards the two men in front of the cylindrical Tesla magnet. The tank then flew through the air, slammed into the patient table, and hit both men on its way towards the bore of the machine.
The tank struck one of the men in the face hard enough to kill him instantly, and Zack grabbed the gun off the control table, moved back to the door, and fired a single round into the scan room before the pistol was wrenched from his hand.
Looking again through the safety of the operator’s window, he saw both men dead, blood everywhere inside the scan room.
He knew that some of it was his, because even here in the control room he’d smeared the floor red.
The technician was back on her feet, but Zack turned away from her and raced back into the dressing room. He made it to his locker; the key was somewhere in the control room but he just grabbed the top of the wooden door and pulled with all his might.
The door snapped open easily, and he retrieved his clothes.
The technician entered, bringing him a pressure bandage and a roll of tape.
He spent twenty seconds bandaging himself, and then he looked up at her. “You have a side door out of here?”
“No. Just the one entrance.”
“Look. I kind of need tonotbe stopped by the police right now.”
She took one look at him, gave him a curt nod, then said, “Put your clothes on, wait in here one minute, then just go. I won’t point you out to security.”
“Thanks,” he said, and he put his injured leg into the leg of his jeans with a wince.
—
Minutes later Zack calmly unlocked his truck and climbed in. Police were everywhere, so he took a chance that if there were more attackers around watching for him, they wouldn’t act at least until he got out of the parking lot.
He drove to a nearby convenience store, climbed out of his vehicle, then dropped down to look under it. Using the light of his iPhone, he found the tracker on his car in under thirty seconds. He removed the magnetized device, walked over to a Land Rover at the gas pump, saw that the owner was inside the store, and slapped the tracker on the rear of the vehicle.
Zack was back on the road in his own truck in under a minute, and seconds after that, his phone rang.
He saw that it was Hanley, and he answered quickly. “If you’re calling to tell me I’m in danger, then you’re too late. I just got hit. Two enemy down. I’m clear. A little banged up but mobile.”
“Jesus Christ,” Hanley exclaimed. “Were these guys Gauntlet, you think?”
“Negative. Looked like a couple of skinheads. Not as professional as theGauntlet Group goons we’ve run into. Tatted necks. Muscles, though they didn’t really have the brains to know how to use them.”
