Mercy 6 (14 page)

She laid out orders as she worked. “Send him up to Two right after. They can rework my suture if needed. But they'll have to measure his concussion first. He may have to go with my work. For a while.”

The last four staples were easiest, curling upward across the temple. Pao Pao's dabs fell in sync with Mendenhall's staples. She could hear the soft breath puffs inside the nurse's mask, feel her shoulder pivoting firmly against her own but never pressing, steady.

Mendenhall could brace her intricate movements there.

She imagined the scar she was creating.

She doubled back to the guard. He reclined on his gurney, already mellowed from the pill. His eyes followed her, swam toward her edges. A nurse approached, and Mendenhall nodded for her to leave, all the while focused on the guard's eyes. She took his pulse: 60. He worked out, an athlete. His uniform had a kind of piping along the pockets and cuffs, yellow.

“You're not from here,” she said.

He just looked—at her face, at her hand on his wrist, back to her face.

“When did you come in?” she asked. “When did they bring you in?”

Someone approached the gurney, a shadow over her left shoulder.

“He's DC.” It was Mullich's voice. “They sent them in with some specialists. After Meeks was found.”

She stared at the guard's shoulder, aimed. She resisted turning to Mullich.

“Them?”

“Six per floor.”

“That's an army.”

“From how you treated him,” said Mullich, “that's what they'll need.”

“Do you have secret tunnels or something?”

“I'm not the one with secrets.”

She turned to Mullich, raised herself to his chin, pulled down her mask. She pulled off his, too.

“Doctors withhold,” she told him. “It's proper medicine. We examine. We consider. We let one another do the same. We consult.

When ready. I have nothing ready for Claiborne.”

“Then for me.” His breath was clean and sharp, with tea or something, but cool. “We can go to the roof.”

“I have to tend to patients. Here. I need to get my floor back.”

“I'll be up there,” he said. “Alone.”

She broke away first, leaving him with the high and wounded.

She moved to Kae Ng's bed, the bullet wound who claimed to be twenty-three but was really fifteen. His latest readings indicated he was fine, could be released. Released into what? She pressed two fingers to his wrist. Her arrival had quickened his pulse. His hair was swept back, no longer hiding that one side of his expression.

Confidence was gone from his eyes, though they were clear. He was trying to form his usual sneer, but one corner of his mouth creased further downward.

She exposed his shoulder and removed the dressing. The bullet wound was sealed with a single staple, her own neat work, the scarring forced to the inside where it would never show. His creamy skin was hairless, the contours of his clavicle and shoulder sharp.

The final scar would look no bigger than a punctuation mark, a semicolon, no doubt a disappointment for him.

“Roll your shoulder twice.”

He hitched his shoulder. “I don't feel it.”

“I'll send you home with the X-ray.”

He nodded.

“Is it close to the heart?”

She found that strange, how he disconnected from himself.

Usually patients only did that when they were actually looking at the X-ray. “No,” she answered. “Not in medical terms. But, yes, it'll look that way.”

“Instead I'm just gonna die from that.” He nodded toward the beds that were not hers, the hystericals across the bay, sent from Thorpe. They were all in recline, nurses and techs and visitors.

She pressed his forehead. It was cool and dry.

“Don't even consider them,” she replied. “I don't.”

She would say the same thing to Mullich.

The roof door was left ajar. She would not have to punch her key.

Mullich was letting her bypass Thorpe's watch. She entered her key anyway, the red light blinking. She shut the door behind her. It was still night. The few stars had shifted, the sky deepened, the city quieted. A helicopter circled with a distant popping. The roof surface shone silvery, segmented into large rectangles. Mullich was not in his usual place by the telescope relic, his silhouette nowhere along the low wall.

“You've turned on me,” she called out. She scanned a far corner.

A red dot of light quivered on the lapel of her lab coat. She cupped it in her palm, then found him in the darkness of the opposite corner, a gray shadow in the black.

“I fear you,” he said.

She walked to the telescope, sensed the red dot on the back of her shoulder. The helicopter orbited, swung outward, its sound faint and hollow, trailing. She was startled to see the red line of Mullich's laser flash in the copter's exhaust cloud. She half expected an explosion.

“How far away are they?” she asked when he drew up beside her.

“Three kilometers.”

“What does that mean?”

“They've found something on the outside.”

“In the bodies?”

He shrugged and let the range finder hang against his chest. He brushed some entries into his tablet. Watery colors from the screen washed over his face, deepened the angles. He cut her one look.

“How can
you
fear
me
?” she asked.

“You present me with the unknown. The un-accounted-for.”

“You seem to account for everything pretty quickly. Especially with me.”

He held the tablet to her. On it was a cross-section blueprint of the hospital. The red diagonal showing the vertical path of demise slashing a straight line, following the pattern she and Silva had marked out for him.

“You already explained that. How we projected our knowledge of the bodies. How we took what we knew well and used it to describe what was new to us. I was impressed. I was decimated.”

“What if I'm wrong?”

“You're not.” She waved her hand over the screen. “That's impossible. The fact that it reflects the same angle of the occlusions—

all the occlusions—proves our mistake.”

“Why is it impossible?”

“Because there are no straight lines in ballistics, certainly not with these distances. And there is no evidence of a projectile—

outside the bodies. Outside the skin.”

“Why, then, do you keep resisting?”

“I just see what I see.”

“Out here,” he opened his arms to the nightscape, “away from the doctors, I hoped you could think. More. About what you see.”

She hooked his wrist with two fingers and brought in his outstretched arm, brought the screen to her face. With a crook of his thumb, he toggled between the blueprint of Mercy and a scan of the occlusion. The occlusion was struck through with the same red diagonal. He did this three times.

“Whose are you using?” she asked.

He toggled three more times. Hospital, occlusion. Hospital, occlusion. He blinked slowly at her between each crook of his thumb. Hospital, occlusion.

She felt used. He had her vision in control. She tore it away, looked to the stars. She answered her own question, an unexpected tremble in her words.

“All six. You're using all six.” Still looking at the sky, she felt sad for them. “Dozier,” she said. She found the Dipper, faint but there.

Named them as those stars. “Dozier, Fleming, Verdasco, Peterson, Meeks, Cabral.”

“Explain them,” he said. “Not as viral. As ballistic trauma only.

Not virus induced.”

“They'll say that's a leap.”

“Put
my
work in there. What you've learned from this building.

Consider all cases you know, any possibility, but only linked to ballistic.”

That made her look away from the constellation—to him. He was staring hard at her.

“You'd need momentum. A huge amount.”

“Kinetic energy,” he said. “One-half the mass times velocity squared.”

“We would be talking very, very small mass,” she replied. “Almost nothing. Lots of velocity. Almost all velocity. There is no such thing.” She thought. “Except in some studies. Aftermath studies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The lines from point zero—lines through the ashes of bodies and buildings—are straight lines. It was one of the first things they showed us. In lecture, in ballistic trauma. I remember. On the overhead, how they looked, white lines through gray. Thousands of them shooting outward. Etchings. Pretty. Before we realized what they were. Before they panned out and we saw.”

She looked at him and laughed. “You suggest some sort of particle. A god particle zooming its way right through everything.”

“No.” He pocketed his tablet and rested a hand on the telescope relic. “The God Particle is elegant, subatomic, constructive. This would not be that. This would be crude and molecular. Destructive.”

“Like me.” She laughed again. “Crude and molecular. ER.”

“No. But yes—molecular. One element. Near–light speed.”

“Iron,” she said. “Nickel. Flip a coin.”

“Something less transitional.”

She was in the periodic table. She was scribbling it out, scratching herself with it.

“Silicon,” she said. “Then, silicon.”

“Yes. More like that. A metalloid. The tiniest shard of glass shot through.”

“You've thought this out.” She almost reached—to shove him.

Hard, into the relic, over the wall.

“It was the fluorescents,” he said, “that got me thinking this way. Those plus my fear of you. My eyes followed yours to those shattered lights.”

She twisted her lips, skeptical. He continued.

“The odds are good. There are enough fluorescents along each ceiling to make it very probable that at least two would be struck along the same line. The one above Dozier, the one above Meeks.”

“That doesn't fit,” she said. “Your particle is becoming God again, shattering glass but nothing else. Not bone, not plaster, only what suits you.”

“The particle doesn't shatter the glass. In fact, glass is a liquid.

Technically. The particle would pass through it easily, without disruption. It's what's inside the fluorescents. You know how they work?”

“Yeah,” she said. “You throw a switch and they go on. Sometimes not so much.”

“The tiny shock of energy excites the mercury vapor and oxygen.

They move around and release photons. Light. Too much energy and they move way too fast, and the tube bursts. See?”

“But the tube above Dozier was dead. He was replacing it.”

“Dead tubes are just low on vapor. There would've still been plenty in there for this.”

She raised a hand, but he spoke before she could.

“Now, you explain.”

“Explain what?”

“What happens inside the bodies.”

“The patients,” she said. “They're more than bodies.”

“Okay,” he said.

“No.” She raised a finger between them. “It's important. Because if they were just bodies, then nothing would happen. They would just be like all the other stuff. Like the walls and ceilings. The building.”

“Yes,” he said. “Then, yes. People.”

“Persons,” she said. “With memories. Memories. Memories in nerve patterns. That trigger heartbeats and brainwaves and capillary dilation.”

“Cabral,” he said.

“What about him?”

“He's the anomaly. For me. But not for you. Not for Claiborne, either, I think. You made him fit. Fit enough for Claiborne, even.

That's what struck the most fear in me. Fear of you.”

“It's common,” she told him. “Neurogenic shock. Delayed. It's why so many people die in the morning. The early morning. They wake and they die; it all starts to finally happen. From what they should have died from earlier. What their body believed, what their body was ready to do. Sometimes they make it to ER, to me. No one wants the night shift.”

“It works,” he said. “You see it works. No more than one per floor. Demise is not just vertical—it's strictly vertical.”

She looked up at the Dipper again. He toyed with the telescope, adjusted the hollow tube, aimed it. She could name the stars. There were eight, not six. Mizar and Alcor were the twins that formed the angle of the handle. Alcor was the one often missed because it was so faint, so close to its brighter twin. It used to be prescribed as an eye test. By doctors, back when physicians used things like stars.

“It doesn't work,” she told him. “Your God Particle. Because of the velocity. There is no detonation. Nothing that creates that kind of velocity. Nothing outside Hiroshima. And we would've all felt that. The whole world.”

“But there is.” He nodded to the sky, to the stars she had named.

“The fastest possible speed for a meteor is seventy-three kilometers per second. That would require a solar orbit plus retrograde into Earth.”

“You know this? You've thought this out?”

She shook her head. “Only from reading my medical texts. There is one documented case of a meteor striking a person. Alabama, 1954. It crashed through her roof and bruised and burned her thigh. NASA has other studies. One of their biggest fears for space exploration was high-velocity micrometeors, something that would pass right through any helmet, any skull. It's still a valid fear but distant enough. We just take the risk.”

“There are other kinds,” he said. “There are faster ones. Extrasolar ones, yes? With near-infinite velocity.”

“Look, Mullich.” She took the range finder, pulled it to her eyes. It was still looped about his neck, and he had to lean in to her, shoulder to shoulder. She only used it as binoculars, to look at Mizar and Alcor. “I like this. Talking about this. Out here. It's good for me. I get what you're doing. But if you go too far, you'll become a patient.”