This wasn’t going to end well. Not for her.
Exposing misconduct usually leads to backlash and obscurity, not kudos and reward.
No good deed…
“S—!”
Her heart stopped when she snagged the strap of the laptop bag on the closing office door. She braced and snuck a look down the dim corridor. No after-hours stragglers. She took a breath. At least her presence had raised no alarms. She forced herself down the abandoned hallway.
What am I doing?
The sensible thing would be to mind her own business and let someone else deal with it. Shoddy research would eventually be discovered and discredited—AI scans, peer replication, some other inevitable mistake. Unless the data fabrication wasn’t so obvious.
The rest of the study team seemed to have missed it.
Was she an idiot? A traitor? A masochist? A threat?
She steamed down the hospital concourse, past the dawdling crowd at the elevators. The laptop case flapped wildly at her hip with each stride. Her heels clacked too loudly, impatiently, on the polished marble tile. She charged past the path of windows overlooking a parking lot and the vintage neighbourhood street, ignoring the glow of streetlights flickering through windswept maples. She needed to get home. The real evidence was there. She had the study data on the laptop, and had managed to retrieve a few pieces of the original documentation.
Would it be enough? Had anyone noticed?
Her shoulders tightened into a steel coil.
She sighed.
Enough.
The misconduct was one thing. But this had gone past falsified data, past professional implosion, past anything she could pretend was someone else’s problem. It was time to talk to the police before someone else died.
Her hand jammed down on the handle to the emergency stairs as she shouldered open its weighty metal door. Though her heels always echoed loudly in the deserted stairwell, it was faster than waiting for the aged elevator. The yawning doors. Its lumbering ride. The inevitable dribble of visitor traffic, shuffling on and off, choosing the wrong floors. She should be more patient. Another day.
The cool, dank air jarred her—as always. This part of the building had all the late-modern practicality of the eighties. Pure function. No charm, down to its cinder-block walls painted an insipid greige. The concrete steps edged with mandatory abrasive black anti-slip treads, twinkling in the stark LED lighting. She only bothered with the handrail when zipping around at the bottom of a flight of stairs.
PING
She paused as she stood in the doorway of the upper landing. Hissing a curse, she patted her pockets, trying to locate and silence the phone.
A quiet footfall.
The metal door whooshed closed behind her.
THWACK!
Before she could pivot, the staggering blow to the back of the head dropped her to her knees. Darts of pain shot behind her eyes. The savage strike pitched her forward. She teetered on the edge of the landing.
Blinking and dazed, she discovered she had no fight instincts.
The laptop bag was snatched from her shoulder, further throwing her off-kilter. A final shove sent her plummeting down the sharp stone steps.
It was impossible to steady herself. She desperately grasped for the glossy handrail, painted to the point of slick. Spilling headlong into a wall before tumbling down the stairwell like a stone in free-fall, she bumped cement edges at every opportunity. Her left arm snagged a vertical railing, bending impossibly. She flipped hard onto her back. The sickening sounds of snapping and cracking rang in her ears.
Now battered on the lower landing, her eyes burned with heavy tears. Her legs were draining of any sensation, and the dizzying throbbing in her head intensified.
She did not call out for help or reach for her phone. She did not attempt to crawl or otherwise test her body. She was unable and uninterested.
Crumpled and tangled like a heap of dirty laundry, she could sense the life draining out of her. She thought of her stupidity. Her naivety. Her utter failure. She wasn't angry or desperate or even fearful. She just wanted to go home.
The panic from the attack, from the fall, had subsided. Now, an oozing wave of fuzzy nausea washed over her—a strange mix of spinning and tingling coalesced into thick numbness.
Was that shuffling?
The stairwell door had clanged shut, then nothing. Now there was only the dead quiet of the concrete cave. Her stinging eyes wanted to close. No one was coming. No one would find her here.
I should have taken the elevator. No. I shouldn’t have been here at all.
But there was no anger. Not for whoever had shoved her—whoever had killed her.
Only pain, ratcheting up. Now even her groans hurt. Her legs were leaden and numb, only able to follow the bidding of her torso. Her left hand was unusable, but the fingers of the right still responded to command. Thinking of her mother, she wriggled out her phone. The screen was cracked but not smashed. On the fumes of her adrenaline, she tapped Emergency on the keypad.
Saved!
She sighed and let the phone slip to the ground.
"You have reached emergency services. Do not hang up. Your call will be answered in the order it was received.”
Oh... My... God. On hold for 911? Is that even a thing? Can this be happening?
She lay there in silence, in agony, bewildered. Wondering how she would describe this scenario to whoever finally answered. I’m in hospital, in the stairs. She couldn’t even ask for an ambulance. The dizziness. The nausea. The pain. She waited. She had no choice.
She shifted away from the cinder-block wall in an attempt to relieve some pressure from the swelling lump on her head. A firestorm ripped through her body, scorching every last nerve. Now immobilized, she took short, shallow breaths to try to mitigate the pain. She focused on the flickering of the nearby emergency light to blot out the situation. The cool cement under her bruised and broken limbs was welcome.
"Emergency Services. Do you need police, fire or ambulance?" A raspy female voice crackled from her phone.
"Ambulance, I—I'm hurt." She did not recognize her own garbled and distorted voice.
“Hold the line. I’m transferring you to Ambulance.”
There was an endless pause and a click.
“Ambulance. What is the address of the emergency?”
“I—I don’t know. Halstone.” She squeaked like a child. “I’m hurt.”
"How are you hurt, ma'am?"
"I—I can't move my legs. My arm’s broken. My head—hurts."
"Did you hit your head, ma'am?"
"Yes," she whispered.
"Are you feeling dizzy or nauseous?"
"Yes." She moaned as she shifted, cursing herself.
"Are you by yourself? Can you describe where you are, ma'am?"
"I—In the stairs." Oh. God. I can't do this.
The operator paused.
"At Halstone Hospital? Did you fall down the stairs, ma'am?"
"Yes—no—I was pushed." She slurred.
"Can you tell me which stairwell?”
“Help me, please.” It was just garbled and muffled.
“Okay. Try to stay still, ma'am, and stay calm. Emergency services will find you. They will be there soon."
She indulged in unconsciousness. There didn’t seem to be any advantage to writhing on the concrete alert, anticipating the arrival of her rescuers. Whether they found her dead or comatose made no difference to her at that point. Her pain receptors needed a break.
She awoke to find her hair, cheek, and collar matted with congealed blood. The sharp throbbing in her head was relentless, her arm a contorted, bruised mess. Her legs were stubbornly uncooperative. She was still alone at the bottom of the cement well. She checked her phone. Eleven minutes.
How long does it take to find someone dying in the hospital's emergency stairs? It's not that complicated, people.
The same thoughts circled.
Why had she gotten involved? Why should she be the one to expose the fabricated data? Who would listen? She had no seniority. Those that did would bury her. It wasn’t worth it. Not her life.
Then clanging. Footsteps. She opened an eye a sliver in response.
"There!"
Two blurry figures approached at a deliberate pace. The stout one leaned into her face.
"Can you tell us what happened? What's your name?"
No answer.
Her bleary eye yielded to blackness.
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