Junior's Luck

Junior's Luck-Chapter 16

Kelsey opened his mouth to speak, but Junior beat him to it.

"I found a hole under the fence. I figured if there was a dog, there had to be a hole somewhere. It's back there."

"They're looking for us," Kelsey said.

"Yeah. Let's go. I'm freezing."

This time, Junior did not object when Kelsey touched his face. It was hot and damp with sweat.

Kelsey peddled to the hospital, standing up all the way, pumping until his legs and lungs ached and then pumping some more. Junior clung to his waist, a dead weight that made it difficult to control the bicycle. Once, they swerved into traffic. Kelsey cut the front wheel hard to avoid sideswiping a car.

They arrived at the hospital only to find the side entrances locked. Kelsey raced around to the emergency entrance, commandeered a wheelchair, and rolled Junior through the emergency room doors and past the indifferent nurses manning the admissions desk.

On the elevator, Kelsey pondered the next challenge: How to get Junior into his room on the third floor without being noticed.

Junior slumped to one side of the wheelchair, and Kelsey bent over to check on him. Junior's eyes were closed. He breathed quick, shallow breaths. Kelsey hoped his friend was sleeping, but worried he might be unconscious, unconscious and dying.

The doors rumbled open to reveal an empty nurses' station across the hall. The big, round clock on the wall read 11:05, time for the graveyard shift to come on duty. This offered an opportunity to get Junior back into his room before the new shift missed him. Kelsey whipped the wheelchair out of the elevator and around the corner, causing his passenger to slide to the other side.

"We're nearly there, old buddy," Kelsey whispered as they whizzed down the gleaming, silent hall.

A nurse stepped out of a patient's room into the path of the speeding wheelchair. Kelsey threw his weight to the right and pulled hard on the left handle. The wheelchair veered to the left, missing the startled nurse who shrieked and dropped the metal tray she carried. Kelsey lost his grip on the handles and stumbled to the floor. The wheelchair careened out of control across the hallway. Lying flat on his stomach, where he had fallen, Kelsey watched helplessly as the wheelchair crashed into an empty gurney. Junior tumbled out onto the polished tiles.

Before Kelsey could get to his feet, the nurse he nearly ran down had separated the wheelchair from the gurney and was tending to Junior, who lay motionless, his eyes still closed.

"What's he doing out of bed dressed like this?" the nurse demanded.

"He wanted to go for a walk. Will he be okay?"

Two other nurses showed up to help with Junior. Kelsey's question went unanswered. He found himself shoved to the side, forgotten for the moment. They put his friend on the gurney and wheeled him into his room. One of the nurses, a young blonde with thick glasses, emerged, whisked past Kelsey, trotted down the hall, and returned with a gray-haired man in a white coat. Kelsey assumed the man was a doctor. They hurried into Junior's room, leaving the hallway empty except for Kelsey and the wheelchair.

Kelsey cracked open the door and peered in. The three nurses and the doctor huddled around the bed, two on one side with their backs to Kelsey, one on the other side, and one on the end. Little of Junior was visible, only the ridges his legs made in the sheets. One nurse wrote on a clipboard as the doctor shouted orders. The rest of the group worked furiously on Junior.

Maybe he was already dead, Kelsey thought, and they were trying to revive him. But Kelsey didn't see any shock paddles like they used on television. No one had yelled code blue, or was it code red? Something was the matter, though. They hooked Junior up to an IV and connected him to other equipment with wires. The doctor shouted all kinds of long chemical sounding names.

The nurse at the end of the bed turned and headed toward the door. Kelsey slid to one side and backed against the wall. The nurse crashed through the door and hurried down the hallway.

After she rounded a corner, Kelsey peeked in the room again. Junior must be out of danger now, Kelsey thought, because he saw the remaining nurses and the doctor laughing about something. One nurse smiled and talked with the doctor and the other nurse. No one paid any attention to Junior.

The machines on the shelf above the bed blinked, blipped, and beeped. Kelsey got a glimpse of Junior's upper body. Tubes and wires strung him up like a marionette. An oxygen hose ran out of each nostril, around his head, and joined in the back. His chest rose and sank with a steady rhythm.

Kelsey didn't want to be discovered when the doctor and nurses came out of the room. They would ask questions about Junior's relapse. How would Kelsey explain his presence in the hospital at such a late hour? He didn't want anyone calling his parents to come pick him up. It was time to leave. Junior would be all right. Kelsey could not do anything for him, anyway.

An exit sign glowed red above a door at the end of the hall, opposite the nurses' station and the elevators. Kelsey slipped through the door, skipped down three flights of stairs and into the cool night air, unnoticed.

He and Junior had gotten away with it; they had explored the secret passages in the haunted mansion, confronted the blue ghost, witnessed a crime, and escaped without being caught. Kelsey had a right to feel triumphant. He had proved that he wasn't a nerd or a wimp. Men with machine guns had chased and shot at him, and he had survived. Mike Stephenson could brag about making out with girls and playing sports, but he couldn't top that. Kelsey should have been the happiest kid in the world when he stepped out of the hospital and looked up at the twinkling stars, but he wasn't.

Guilt had crept in and stolen the luster off of the evening's escapades. After all, Kelsey had lied to his parents and deceived Junior's mom. He bore at least partial responsibility for his friend's relapse and serious condition. But guilt feelings never ruined the fun for long. What made Kelsey so sober that night was the nagging realization that he must return to the haunted mansion. He had an obligation to expose Hartley and the Frenchman, and somehow rescue Laura before it was too late.

He arrived at home, snuck into the garage, and spent the night sleeping in the pickup truck. He explained his presence the next morning by telling his parents that Junior had begun to feel bad during the night. His parents took him to the hospital early that morning, and Kelsey rode home on Junior's bike. More lies.

Photo by Matias Ramos on Unsplash.com

Note: This is Chapter 16 of a 32 chapter novel. I will post a new chapter each week.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this chapter, please click the star.

I plan to publish this novel after it appears on Wattpad. You can help me make it better by providing feedback in the comments section: Are you invested in the plight of the main character? Does the plot hold your attention? Are you looking forward to reading the next chapter? Are there gaps or inconsistencies in character development or plot?

K.C. Knouse is the author of two published collections of short fiction: Twenty Miles West of Branch, Texas and other stories and A Short Stack of Short Fiction: Three Character-Driven Short Stories . Both are available on Amazon.com.