And then he saw the blood.
Blood grew on his gown, six inches above his left knee. The wound there didn’t even hurt yet, but he knew the pain would come soon enough.
He looked at the knife and saw it was the kind often used for hunting or even self-defense, andnotsome piece of medical equipment.
Quickly he struggled to shimmy the lower portion of his body out of the machine. A gunshot cracked behind him right as he rolled off the table and down to the floor to the far side of the patient table, and only then did he truly understand he was under attack.
There was only the one shot, and just as he chanced a look over the table to see where his attack was coming from, he saw a black semiautomatic pistol fly across the room, slam into the side of the MRI tube, then bounce around the inside, like a wild bird in a cage, fighting to get out.
After a few loud strikes the polymer grip of the weapon shattered, the magazine exploded, and cartridges bounced all around, whipping this way and that.
Zack went flat on the floor now, still unsure how badly he’d been hurt, feeling only the effects of fresh adrenaline.
Chancing another quick look back over the table, he saw the technician in the operator’s window; she was being held at gunpoint by a man with a surgical mask, and the man stared at him through the operator’s window from inside the control room.
A second man stood at the open door; he was apparently the one who’d lost both his gun and his knife in the last few seconds. Now he screamed at the woman to turn the magnet off.
Apparently Zack knew something this would-be assassin did not. An MRI machine’s magnet could not be turned on and off with a press of a button. It remained on—Zack had noticed numerous warning signs to this effect in the control room—but apparently the idiots trying to kill him right now weren’t big readers.
The man who held a gun to the technician now shouted, “Turn it off!” over the PA system that broadcast into the room. Zack looked at the machine,saw the red emergency button close to where he crouched, but he knew the button just stopped the scan; it didn’t remove the magnetic charge from the massive device.
“You can’t turn it off!” the woman shouted back at the man holding the gun to her head.
She tried explaining to the man that MRI machines’ magnetic fields are always generating, and this particular machine was a powerful 3 Tesla model, so any magnetic metal in the room, even at the open door, would come sailing towards the scanner at high speed.
Zack knew that the room he was in now was encased in copper shielding, and the window itself contained a fine copper screen, and the glass would be more than thick enough to stop any bullets fired from the men’s pistols.
There were metal tools, instruments, and other items here in this room, but they were all made of material that would not be attracted to the magnet.
The open door with the unarmed man at it was twenty-five feet from him; he began running for it, immediately felt the sting of a long cut on his leg, felt blood running down his shin, but he just ran faster, his blue gown flailing with the motion.
The man at the door held it open, but when he saw the man nearing him, he shut it.
An open toolbox sat on a table next to a computer monitor. Zack assumed the tools were made of titanium or some other non-ferromagnetic metal, and he grabbed a wrench from the box, kicked open the door from the inside using the emergency handle, then threw the instrument overhanded, hitting the unarmed baldheaded man with the mask in the chin at ten feet.
The man fell back into the room by the door to Zone 2.
The armed man by the control booth spun in Zack’s direction and aimed at him, but Zack made it back into the door of the scan room before the man holding the tech could get a shot off.
Over the speakers in the scan room, Zack heard the man with the gun shout at him again. “Come out, or I shoot this bitch!”
Zack chose another weapon. It was a long screwdriver, and again, it was titanium, so it was not pulled into the machine like the knife or thegun. He turned and ran back towards the MRI machine. He said, “Unless your bosses are paying you to shoot an MRI technician, you aren’t going to achieve anything by killing her. You’re going to have to come in here.”
“I’ll fucking do it! I’ll—”
“I don’t even know her, asshole.”
Zack used the screwdriver to try to pry the knife off the MRI scanner, but it wouldn’t budge. Giving up, he turned to head back to the door, and he saw a trail of bloody footprints.
Shit.
He looked through the window and saw the armed man hit the technician over the head with his pistol.
Tossing the gun on the control panel table, he turned away for a moment, and when he turned back, the masked attacker himself held a titanium hammer in his hand.
His comrade had stood back up; his face was bloody where Zack had hit it, but he wasn’t down for the count.
He armed himself with the titanium wrench Zack had thrown at him, and the two men rushed to the door.
