EMERGENCY
990 Words
The ICU waiting room was a cathedral of fluorescent hell.
White walls. White floor. White lies whispered by nurses who wouldn’t meet his eyes.
Jason sat in the corner farthest from the door, elbows on his knees, head bowed so low his forehead almost touched the blood dried black on his knuckles. The Brioni shirt (once midnight navy) was now a crime-scene exhibit: Lily’s blood, his blood, someone else’s blood from when he’d carried her out of the ambulance bay himself because no one moved fast enough.
He had not changed.
He had not eaten.
He had not closed his eyes for thirty-one hours.
The only sound was the ventilator cycling through the wall, a mechanical tide keeping his sister breathing while she lay twenty feet away, chest cracked open and sewn back together like a broken doll.
Jason Blackwell did not pray.
He had buried God the same night he buried his parents.
But now, in the sterile silence, he tried.
He pressed his blood-crusted hands together so hard the scabs split open again.
He stared at the crucifix someone had hung over the vending machine (cheap plastic, made in China, probably glowed in the dark) and forced the words out through teeth clenched so tight his jaw ached.
“If you exist…
If you ever existed…
Take whatever you want from me.
Take the money. Take the years. Take my f*****g soul.
Just don’t take her.
She’s fifteen. She still believes in you.
She still says grace before dessert.
So if you want a Blackwell, take me.
I’m already damned.
She isn’t.”
His voice cracked on the last word.
A single drop of something that was not blood fell from his lashes onto the tile.
He hated himself for it.
His phone vibrated against his thigh (encrypted satellite line, the one that only rang when the world was ending).
He almost ignored it.
Then he saw the country code: +49.
Germany.
He answered without speaking.
A voice he hadn’t heard in eight years, filtered through seven layers of encryption and raw panic.
“Jason. It’s Lukas.”
His father’s brother.
The one who had vanished into the Black Forest after the crash, supposedly to “grieve.”
The one Jason had written off as dead or traitor years ago.
“They found me,” Lukas rasped. “The same people who killed your parents. They have the ledger. The real one. Names, dates, bank routes. Everything we thought burned in Prague. They’re moving it tonight. If it disappears into the system, we’ll never prove who ordered the jet. We’ll never know who shot Lily.”
Jason’s spine turned to ice.
“How long?” he asked, voice flat, lethal.
“Four hours until the handoff. Private airstrip outside Stuttgart. After that, it’s gone forever.”
Four hours.
A seven-hour flight on the fastest jet he owned.
He looked through the glass at Lily.
She was so pale the ventilator tape looked like bruises on her cheeks.
Her small fingers curled around nothing.
He stood up so fast the plastic chair flipped backward and shattered.
“I’m coming,” he told Lukas. “If this is a trap, I will skin you alive and hang what’s left from the Brandenburg Gate.”
“It’s not a trap,” Lukas whispered. “It’s a noose. And it’s tightening around her neck while she sleeps.”
Jason killed the call.
He stared at Lily for ten endless seconds.
Then he did the hardest thing he had ever done in his life.
He walked away.
But first, he made another call.
The number rang once.
“Uncle Luka,” he said when the line connected (he hadn’t used the childhood name since he was nine). “I need you in New York. Now. Cornell Trauma ICU. Room 412. You sit outside her door with the team I send. You do not move. You do not sleep. You do not let anyone in that room except Dr. Park and the nurses I’ve already cleared. If anyone tries, you put them in the ground. Do you understand me?”
A pause. Then the old man’s voice, thick with something that might have been tears.
“I’m already in the air, jongen. Your jet left Zurich forty minutes ago. I’ll be there in five hours.”
Jason closed his eyes.
“Good. When you land, you tell her… tell her I had to go finish what Dad started. Tell her I’m coming back. Tell her I love her.”
He hung up before the last word broke him.
He strode through the hospital corridors like a hurricane in human form.
Doctors parted.
Security looked away.
No one dared speak.
On the rooftop, the same AgustaWestland that had brought him here was already spooling up again.
The pilot didn’t ask questions when Jason climbed aboard covered in blood and murder.
“Stuttgart,” Jason said. “Maximum speed. File the flight plan as Medevac Black. If anyone tries to stop us, shoot them down.”
The helicopter lifted into the storm.
As Manhattan fell away beneath him, Jason looked back once.
Through the swirling snow, he could still see the hospital lights, a tiny constellation of hope in a city that had never shown him mercy.
He pressed his bloodstained palm to the window.
“I’m sorry, little star,” he whispered to the night. “I have to go kill the people who hurt you.
Wait for me.
Just… wait.”
The helicopter banked hard into the darkness, engines screaming toward an ocean and a reckoning.
Jason Blackwell closed his eyes and began to pray again, this time not for mercy.
This time for blood.
Behind him, seven thousand miles of night waited.
And somewhere in the Black Forest, the man who had ordered his parents’ death was about to discover what happened when you finally cornered a wolf with nothing left to lose.
- Writer
