Dear God, I Don't Believe In You: Ch 15

[verbal_kint]

Chapter 15: Searching For Sherlock

 

Becca was the first one to start crying.

Flynn wasn’t far behind, and by the time they’d passed the first bend in the road, Becca was sobbing, her hands brushing against the wheel limply as her body shook and tears clouded her vision.

Flynn looked around wildly, her puffy eyes darting out the window as if scared of every surge in wind speed.

“We gotta call the police,” she said.

The irony of that statement was not lost on Dee, who sat in the back and watched Becca intensely. She remained quiet until Becca started to swerve.

“Hey Bec, maybe I should drive. Just for a while, until you calm down.”

This was not what Becca wanted to hear.

“Oh great,” she said, her words choked on angry sobs, “let’s pull over and switch places so the fucking murderer can hitch a ride.”

Dee softened her tone and said, “Becca, he’s long gone. We’re safe now, and it’ll only take a minute. Come on, I’ll drive and you two can call the police, tell them there’s a creep on the loose.”

“But,” sniffed Becca, “what if he catches up to us?”

Dee snorted, “Seriously? The guy could barely…stand.”

Something lurched deep within Dee’s stomach, as if her words carried a consequence she wasn’t ready to deal with. She was getting nervous.

“It was all probably an act,” said Flynn, “He’s probably some world class athlete or something.”

Dee glared at Flynn to point out that her insight wasn’t helping. It was a good point though, there were some good actors out—

His shoes.

Dee remembered his shoes. His left shoe was worn almost completely through the sole, and yet his right shoe was in fairly good condition. His right shoe looked as though it couldn’t have been more than two months old. Or maybe it was old, it just didn’t get as much wear as the left because… He grimaced every time he took a step, but it wasn’t with his lips. It was with his eyes.

Her stomach lurched again, the way it does on a rollercoaster or right before you’re found in hide-and-go-seek. It lurched the way it does when you realize you’ve made a mistake.

And yet, she couldn’t bring herself to say it out loud. To say it out loud would be to make it true. She wasn’t ready for that kind of guilt.

And so instead, Dee poked her head up over the armrest and said, “Even a world class athlete couldn’t run this fast. Pull over, Becca. You look like shit.”

And Becca did what she was told, finding a place where the road jutted out towards another hill and skittishly turning the wheel. She parked the car, but didn’t take off her seatbelt, choosing instead to sit there with her head against the wheel while the events of the last five minutes flowed out of her system through her tear ducts.

They sat there for five minutes, too scared to move, too scared to turn around, too scared to even talk, when there was a knock at the back window.

All three of them screamed. It was something primal and guttural, less pretty than the average teenage scream. More surprising than this, however, was the fact that their assailant screamed, too.

As the girls carried on like lemurs in peril, the second scream was shortened to a kind of yelp—a surprised noise that sounded trivial when compared with the terrified wailing of Flynn, Dee, and Becca.

“Hey hey hey!” yelled the stranger, “It’s okay!”

The stranger repeated herself twice more once the screaming died down a bit, although such reassurance did little for the girls’ state of mind.

The stranger walked slowly towards the front of the car and held up a nametag to the window.

It read:

Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital

547 Fornes Ave, Princeton, New Jersey 08542

Dr. Lisa Cuddy, M.D.

Hospital Administrator

ID # 4880

Becca strained to read it through the blur of the snow. Cuddy gave her a reassuring smile and said, “My name’s Lisa. I’m a doctor.”

“My name’s Greg House. I’m a doctor.”

Dee felt like she was going to be sick.

Cuddy continued speaking through the glass while Becca struggled to roll down the window.

“There’s been a really bad car accident just down this ravine and a few people are hurt. Is there any way I could borrow a cell phone from one of you and call for an ambulance?”

It was a question that wasn’t a question. Cuddy had perfected this art of speech long ago, when it became apparent that her leadership skills were not simply a trait, but a way of life.

“W-who’s hurt?” asked Flynn. The gravity of the situation began weighing her down as well. Little knots of regret or guilt or some chilly lovechild of the two wound their way around her stomach and up into her throat. She found she could no longer swallow. She found she could no longer do anything but ask questions and stare.

She spoke briskly, almost business-like. Her tone rudely contrasted the mascara smears upon her face and the moisture in her eyes. “Three of my friends. They’re doctors, too. Please, may I use a phone?”

Becca rolled down the window just enough to stick her hand through, as if the flight/fight reaction had permanently branded her for mistrust of mankind. She freed a cell phone from the confines of her purse and slipped it through to Cuddy, who palmed it greedily and began dialing.

She was almost surprised when someone picked up.

“Hello, this is Dr. Lisa Cuddy. I’m Hospital Administrator at Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. I need a MEDVAC up near White Haven, uh, about 7 miles away from the ski resort, o-on the main road.”

The operator started asking questions, and Cuddy’s voice began to tremble. She felt like all those mothers, calling 911 about her sick boys, unable to keep it together despite nearly 20 years of medical training and a comforting voice on the other end of the line.

“There’s been a car accident, a roll-over. The vehicle fell down about 300 or 350 yards with all occupants inside. Um…” She took a breath, allowing her thoughts to catch up to her words as they spilled into the receiver. “Injuries include a torn ACL, dislocated shoulder, multiple lacerations…”

She paused when her voice started to break. She swallowed, trying to calm herself down while the 911 operator repeated, “Ma’am?” into the speaker.

“Uh, t-two of the occupants are missing, but neither one was critically injured to my knowledge. They were last seen heading…um…west, on a little pathway. That—that’s why we really need the MEDVAC fast, two, if another’s free to find them, help them. Please, hurry.”

She felt constricted by the helplessness of those words, and of the helplessness that the operator represented. She needed to hang up the phone.

She did, but not without assuring the helicopter knew where to fly. She relayed Becca’s number back to the operator after having Becca whisper it to her through the crack in the window. She took the phone away from her ear and pressed “END.”

She handed the phone back to Becca, as if she didn’t want to be the one holding it when the operator called back to tell them that the helicopters were out of fuel, or that they got lost, or that nobody cared about the four doctors who went missing in the Poconos.

Years from now, this would all just be a myth—some creepy story told in passing to a bunch of curious history students. At least, that’s what it felt like to Cuddy.

In some ways, she was right.

Dee spoke for the first time since convincing Becca to pull over. “Miss?” she said, the word obviously foreign on her tongue.

Cuddy’s eyes left the ground to meet Dee’s. “Yes?” she said.

“Your friends, was one of them named Greg?”

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Twelve minutes later, Chase heard the faint putters of a helicopter blade. He smiled.

Up above, Cuddy waved fervently at the MEDVAC, pointing down below when she’d assured the pilot’s attention. He gave her a nod, and whisked away towards the Land Rover with Superman-like grace.

The gust from the blades rocked the trees back and forth, as if to show that they were still fallible, that they did more besides wreck cars and beat up people and hide the evidence.

Cuddy watched the helicopter land next to Chase and the car. She looked down at Chase for the first time since climbing the hill, and however unlikely it seemed, she swore they made eye contact—two specks on a big mountain that happened to look each others’ way at the same time.

Chase had a sort of naïve chivalry about being treated, which was hard to place unless you’d been around him for a long time. To the EMTs, it was just impatience. Really, Chase just wanted to make sure Cuddy was okay.

“Doctor, can you flex your leg at all?” said Ned, EMT #1. The name was somehow fitting.

“Nope, too swollen now anyways. If you could just splint in up with something other than duct tape, I’ll be fine until surgery.”

“Okay,” said Ned. Ned had an unintentional cheerfulness about him that made everything he said sound like the speech of a small girl on a trampoline. He wasn’t stupid so much as he tended to dispense with propriety in the presence of medical practitioners. Still, at times it was hard to tell. “That’s an awesome accent,” he said. “You from England or something?”

“Australia,” said Chase, “wanker.”

He said that last part a bit quieter.

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“I’m Jared. I understand I’ll be saving your life today?”

EMT #2 was slightly harder to read. He’d make statements like these more often than not—the kind of comments that leave you wondering whether he’s trying to be comforting by cracking a joke or two, or whether he’s just an ass with better things to do.

Cuddy stared at Jared with the suspicious eyes that accompanied such thoughts before informing him that it was not her life that needed saving, but rather the lives of House and Wilson.

Jared gave her a smile. “We got the second chopper coming in as we speak, He’s circling around a little west of here, looking for them.” He held up the radio. “If he finds anything, we’ll be the first to know.”

Jared began to walk away when he saw Cuddy’s eyes get glossy. He turned back, gave her shoulder a squeeze and said, “I wouldn’t worry, ma’am. We got the best of the best out there looking for them.”

She returned his smile as her tears dried back into her eyes. Jared was definitely not an ass.

With this, she walked over to Dee, who was perched unobtrusively on the hood of the car, trying to avoid anything and everything concerning this situation.

“You’ve seen Greg?” said Cuddy. Anticipation spilled over her words like an exploding soft drink.

“About a mile back. On the road,” said Dee.

“Take me there.”

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Ned went with them, much to the chagrin of, well, everyone. But an obnoxious, dorky EMT is still an EMT.

And, as it turns out, not so obnoxious and dorky when he had literally nothing to talk about.

Faint voices crackled over the radio on his belt buckle, none of which were directed at him. He turned it down a little, if only to draw attention to the stunned silence that doused the vehicle as it wove back towards the last known position of Gregory House. Ned sat in the back by himself, while Dee drove and Cuddy sat anxiously in the passenger’s seat.

Dee stopped the car at a place where the trees thinned out, right before a mighty skid mark on the road. “I think this is it,” she said.

Cuddy bounded out of the car like a fleeing puppy and ran to the trees nearest the mountainside. She lost count of how many times she called his name.

“I thought you said he was here,” said Ned, who then radioed in their location to Jared and the other helicopter pilot.

Dee frowned and shook her head confusedly. “He was. I mean, we all saw him.”

“You sure we’re at the right place?” asked Ned.

“I’m sure.”

Cuddy walked back to them with flames in her eyes.

“You said he was here! You said you saw him!”

And the tears flowed freely down her cheeks, as if they’d been brewing there all along, and only then managed to break free from the dam that was her composure.

She didn’t bother hiding them or the sobs that followed, because there was nobody there to scorn her for doing so. There was nobody there to tell her to stay objective. There was nobody there to convince her it’d be okay. And if that person were there, she wouldn’t need the convincing, and she wouldn’t need the tears, because everything really would be okay.

Instead, she yelled.

“Why didn’t you help him? Why didn’t you give him a phone or a flare or a goddamn flashlight?!”

Dee flinched at the words as if it physically hurt her to here them. “I—We had no idea about any of this. We thought he was a scam artist, a fucking rapist or something! So we drove away. We drove and we prayed he wouldn’t catch us.”

“You thought,” said Cuddy, as if actually considering the possibility, “that a man who can’t walk to his bathroom without his damn cane…would catch up with you.”

“We thought—“

“No, you didn’t think!”

“I’m sorry,” said Dee, shaking her head, “I’m so, so sorry.”

Cuddy nodded briskly and turned away before things escalated, knowing later she’d see some sense in Dee’s decision. Now, however ironically, she just wanted to be alone.

She walked closer to the edge of the road, halfheartedly searching for a sign that he’d been there. Now the snow fell a little faster, as if sensing its cue to fuck something else up, like footprints in the snow.

Cuddy stared straight ahead, taking a few breaths while she looked out over the rest of the mountain range. The peaks weren’t the lulling hills and sled-able banks she’d seen on the way up, not anymore. Now they served as caution tape at a crime scene, high, treacherous sheets of ice and snow that kept everyone out but the victims. Now the detectives had arrived with no Sherlock to guide them.

What bothered her most was that she knew House couldn’t have gotten far. What bothered her more was that neither Dee, nor any of the other girls had mentioned Wilson. It made Cuddy consider that the girls hadn’t seen House at all, merely some passerby who gave the name of Greg and scared them to death.

She inched a bit closer to the edge of the road, laughing at herself through the tears. Something, she didn’t know what, made her want to go down this ravine, too. She supposed it was her need to check every possible source of error making a reappearance from her days in Chemistry class, but there was more to it than that. She felt compelled to walk closer, lean a little farther—to go down that hill. And she felt an urgency to do so that she’d not previously experienced.

It was an instinctually flavored requirement, and Cuddy was going to fulfill it.

She’d not yet set her foot to the pavement when Ned’s voice rang out behind her.

“Dr. Cuddy, I just got a call from the other chopper. He said there’s a wrecked Honda Civic about a mile from here. Also said he found…” Ned looked nervously at Dee, as if her fragile state couldn’t take the news he was about to report.

He looked back at Cuddy, nodding slightly. “Could you come with me, Dr. Cuddy?”

Next Chapter

Comments

[verbal-kint10.livejournal.com]

Thanks, and sorry for the cliffhanger. I'm really glad you like take-charge Cuddy. I was really nervous that I'd get her too much in the realm of hysteria, like in "Airborne" and "Finding Judas" (I know her behavior in those eps annoyed a lot of people), so I was scared I'd cross that line in this chapter.

[menolly-au.livejournal.com]

Well I think considering, you know, car crash, injuries, dealing with House, night in the snow, long hard climb up a cliff, she was doing pretty well:) Chase on the other hand seems pretty useless - maybe he's practising to be Foreman!

[verbal-kint10.livejournal.com]

Yeah...I feel bad for the Chase-lovers who fell victim to my false advertising, he's totally useless in this fic, lol. But in my defense, when I first got the idea for this I figured I needed somebody else to shake things up a bit. In that case, he serves his purpose I guess.