They climb out.  Quietly.  Sneak down the hallway...

And there's Kidman.

He shouts, and there's the sound of people rushing to him - Val yells to run and bolts back the way they came; Elena and Markus follow suit.  Before they make it around the first corner, he's almost stunned by a very loud noise and a sprinkling of pain across his back, arm, neck.

...Oh.

This would almost certainly be survivable, under better circumstances - they just saved that guy with the shotgun wounds, maybe from this exact gun, and they did it without any stabilizer - Markus vividly imagines collapsing after running for another minute, then Val and Elena huddling over him.  Maybe Val'd use her healing touch, keep him alive through sheer force of will, without any supplies - and then they'd be caught up to.  And all three of them would be killed.

So, he tries to look fine, for the glances back in his direction, and when there's next a fork in the pathways, he lets himself fall behind and goes the other way.

He finds - is that the room they were being kept in?  They were blindfolded coming out of it but that sure looks like it could be the other side of the heavy door he's been staring at for weeks - he walks to it, not yet to the point of staggering but certainly working to keep his steps even - it hurts, a lot - but if he can make it inside -

He does.  If he sits down he's not sure he's going to be able to get back up, but if he doesn't sit down he's going to collapse.  He aims to at least do it next to the supplies.

His right arm is pretty useless, so he has to draw the stabilizer with his off hand.  He jabs it inelegantly into his leg.  It doesn't fix anything but he does immediately feel a fair bit better.  He goes for a second injection, and a third - the needle bends inside him when he flinches from the not-that-distant sound of more gunshots -

There's nothing he can do about that from here.  All he can do is - not use his own healing touch; he's pretty sure that trying would cause him to lose consciousness on the spot - he can fumble for the antibiotic gel, and look for places to slather it with shaking hands, any wounds small enough to heal instantly and without metal in the way.  And he can be grateful that he told them, yesterday, Val and Elena, that even if he dies or they do, that at least they knew what he'd done -

He's successfully undone his tie and the first two buttons on his shirt, giving him enough room to reach under his collar and get at some of the smaller wounds in his shoulder, when he hears a, "There he is!" and a couple of Kidman's goons spill into the room, followed by the pink-wigged man himself.  They taunt him, mock him - a 'physician, heal thyself' joke, really - and discuss in a way that's both not really directed at him and yet is clearly for his benefit whether they should keep him alive.  It's obvious that they're still trying to get him to beg for his life, to wring a last bit of entertainment out of him in addition to everything else.  He won't.  And not just because it's getting harder and harder to breathe.

He can't afford to keep trying to fix the actual problem; he reaches up to the box where fresh syringes are kept and takes a few tries to get it out of the packaging, let alone do anything with the actual needle.  Maybe he should use the healing touch here, or at least the self-control which is its prerequisite, but it's a little hard to remain centered, breathe, focus under the circumstances.

Kidman raises the idea that maybe they could use him as bait, ransom to get the other two back, but dismisses it.  It would take too long, and by then they'd have already told Caduceus everything they know about this organization.  Markus has managed to screw a needle onto the syringe; he sticks his finger in aiming for the bottle of stabilizer.  The pain doesn't really rate, compared to the sickening feeling of trying to breathe around this much liquid, but...

......even if he manages to get another several rounds of stabilizer into himself, it's delaying the inevitable, he thinks.  Then again... it sounds like the other shots he heard were at least not as productive as the one that hit him.  So maybe he's buying them time, the longer he stays alive.

He succeeds in injecting another dose of stabilizer, which sufficiently abates the shaking in his hands and the graying in his vision that he can think to swipe his fingerprick against some of the gel stuck to the fabric of his shirt and get back to work.  One of Kidman's lackeys notices that he's making progress but not, apparently, that there's no way it's going to be successful progress, and levels the gun at him.  Kidman sneers at him again for still trying, asks why he doesn't give up; Markus coughs out a "Go to hell," sticky and mumbled.

And he dies.