See Tom Run Read Online Free PDF Page A

power.
    He left the engine running and entered the huge glass
turnstile. Inside, the lobby was dimly lit and there wasn’t anyone
at the reception desk. Nor were there any people in the lobby.
    Not a good sign.
    Perhaps they were operating with a skeleton crew, he
thought, due to the power outage.
    Tom strode through the lobby until he reached the
gift shop, which was also deserted. He went inside and walked over
to the counter, aware now that he was totally famished. He grabbed
a bag of Fritos off the rack and plunked a dollar bill on the
counter. Stuffing a handful into his mouth, he exited the shop and
headed down one of the halls toward the emergency room.
    He stopped at a bank of elevators and pushed the up
button, not expecting the elevator to work. To his surprise, the
door whooshed open, startling him. Tom stepped inside and pressed
the button for the second floor.
    The door shut and the elevator began its ascent. The
interior was dimly lit but Tom was just glad it was working. When
he reached the second floor, he stepped out into another dim
hallway.
    He walked toward the nurse’s station. It was
uninhabited. He entered the area and poked around, noting that
neither the computers nor any of the other devices were on. Picking
up a phone, he heard a dead line.
    Finally, he got his nerve up and walked over to one
of the patient’s rooms. He knocked on the door, waited a moment,
turned the doorknob.
    The door was locked.
    He went over to the next door and tried it. It too
was locked.
    Tom tried another half dozen doors only to discover
that they were all locked.
    Apparently, everyone in this place had either been
evacuated or vaporized.
    Tom took the elevator to the third floor and checked
the rooms. They were all locked as well.
    Nothing shakin’ but the leaves on the trees.
    Heaving a distraught sigh, Tom had to concede that
the hospital was a bust. Like the police station, another vital
community service center that one would expect to be active in an
emergency was DOA.
    Screw this.
    He wolfed down the rest of his Fritos and washed them
down with a slug of the lukewarm bottled water he’d snatched from a
fridge in the nurse’s supply room. Then he boarded the elevator
back down to the main floor.
    Tom exited through the turnstile and turned to his
right, then did a double take—
    The Jeep was gone!
     
     

CHAPTER 3
     
     
    Tom quickly glanced around the parking lot and along
North Broadway, hoping to catch sight of his Jeep. He saw nothing
moving at all. He ran over to where it had been parked and could
see the tire tracks clearly in the deep snow where the thief had
backed out before moving south toward the exit road from the
hospital.
    So, he was not alone after all!
    His immediate impulse was to find a vehicle he could
borrow so he could chase after the driver of his Jeep. There were
quite a few cars in the parking lot, every one buried under six or
seven inches of snow. He ran over to the first four-wheel drive car
he could find, a Subaru Forester, briskly cleared the snow off the
door handle and tried it. It was locked. He moved along the row of
cars for a few minutes until he finally found a Honda CR-V that was
unlocked. He jumped inside and was thrilled to find that the keys
were still in the ignition.
    The engine was excruciatingly slow in turning over
but finally fired up. He jumped out and cleared off the windshield
and windows as best as he could then got back in, put it into drive
and headed for the exit.
    He noticed with relief that the snowstorm had tapered
off somewhat as he neared the exit, hoping to ascertain which
direction the Jeep tracks led. In the virgin snow, it was clear to
see that they headed west toward Upper Arlington. Tom gave the
little four cylinder SUV the gas and hung a right in hot
pursuit.
    As he followed the tracks to Fishinger Road, Tom
wondered who had stolen his Jeep and why. The first question was
impossible to answer but the second was easy: the guy saw a