Revival House (16 page)

“Scarlet,” I yell up the stairs. No answer.

Ladies and gentlemen, Scarlet Lawson has left the building.

And she’d better hope that I do not find her.

There is no way to unring that bell.

Chapter 31 – Scarlet

Running blind down Whitaker.

Dogs. God, what is he doing? Four. He’s right!

I’m getting a blister on my heel. Fuck. There’s nobody around.

Running, running.

A stitch burns in my fucking side, but I can’t stop. What if he comes after me? I know he’s coming. I know it.

Running across Liberty without looking both ways, without looking any way but straight ahead.

No cops? Turn down that alley up ahead.

Splashing through puddles
.

I hate all the fucking rain down here. Is he following me? Don’t look back. Don’t know if he’s behind me, if he can see me, but maybe if I turn a lot he won’t find me.

Running, blistering, damning Four for saying anything, damning him for being right.

What was he doing to that dog? That was the neighbor’s dog. Oh, my God.

Turning
.

Those little kids’ dog.

Running across Bay Street
.

Empty. What is it, like, three in the morning? Widow’s Walk. No. Grates are too noisy, plus he’d see me and it doesn’t go anywhere. Stairs. The big stairs by Chuck’s Bar!

Turning.

There they are. So steep. Oh, my God, hurry. Where am I going to go? The River’s right there, kind of a dead end. Down the first few steps. Slippery concrete.

Right toe catches left ankle, miles up from the rock pavers below.

Grab railing with left hand. No!

Feet tangled.
Hands out in front of me. Left arm hooks around railing support.

The pipe makes a hollow pong against my upper arm. Searing pain in my shoulder.

Right cheek hits the edge of a lower step. Hips propel over my head.

Snapping of bone. Neck? Skull?

Falling.

Hitting.

Bouncing.

Cracking.

Nothing.

Chapter 32 – Caleb

Which way would she go? I stand on the front porch, looking up and down Hall Street. She would probably not go home. To a friend’s house? Four and I are her only friends. Well, and Avery, of course, but I know she’s not with him. There is no way she’d be at Four’s. Remember I used to think they had a thing for each other? Well, since Avery showed up, that inkling has pretty much disappeared. I was so stupid. Then she thought Four and I had a thing for each other...

Hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen...

She could be hiding in the park or in the old cemetery since she knows them so well. I pull my jacket tight around me and jog through the cool mist of rain toward the park. When I reach the corner, I look left down Whitaker. What do I see approaching the next square? The pear-shaped silhouette of someone running. He or she is not running like those fools who run for the fun of it. This person has none of a marathoner’s grace. This person is running for their life.

Scarlet.

... oxygen, fluorine, neon, sodium, magnesium...

I am not a runner, but in this case, I must make an exception. I am tall and do possess the highly-prized runner’s ectomorphic physique. In fact, the track coach at good old BC tried to train me at one point, as did the basketball coach, but found me to be lazy and uncooperative. I wish now that I had been an athlete. I am barely to the end of the park and already I’m out of breath and coughing into the crook of my elbow, trying to be quiet so she doesn’t hear me. Fortunately, I’m wearing rubber-soled shoes so it’s unlikely that she hears the slapping of my feet against the pavement.

She’s quite a bit faster than I would have imagined. She may be heavy but she hauls ass. Must be the adrenaline. I don’t need her reporting me and Avery to any authorities. I must catch her. And I’m quite certain that she knows that I will lay her on the street when I do catch her. I can see it now. I will slice open her lower abdomen and pull out a long rope of intestine. I will tie it in knots and laugh as I watch the panic and shock hit her in the face. She knows that I will hurt her; she just doesn’t know how badly.

If she hadn’t broken my heart I might show the beautiful young harlot an iota of pity.

... aluminum, silicon, phosphorus, sulfur, chlorine, argon...

I have to walk a few steps as my smoker’s lungs burn with the intensity of a forest fire. We’ve run quite a distance and she shows no signs of stopping. She runs across Liberty— all four lanes— not even bothering to look for traffic. Smart. Getting hit by a car would be much less dramatic than what I have planned for her. Too bad Avery won’t be there to see it. Perhaps I’ll snap some pictures for him with my cell phone. Pictures of her ruined mouth, her shattered zygomatic arches, her concave skull, her wide and terrified polluted-sea-blue eyes.

... potassium, calcium...

Why in hell is she running toward the river? It’s a real long way there, but the fear seems to carry her just fine. Still, does she think she can swim away once she reaches the water? Does she imagine kind drunks on River Street in the dead of night can protect her from me? I thought she had more sense than to run toward a dead-end.

I follow her down an alley, across Bay Street. She stops on the sidewalk and whips her head side-to-side, perhaps locked in indecision. I lean on a lamp post outside Moon River Brewing Company. She turns to the left and runs to what I know to be the steepest staircase leading to River Street. I watch her begin her careful descent. When I can no longer see the top of her head, I run full-speed to the top of the stairs.

... scandium, titanium, vanadium...

And, in slow-motion, I watch her fall.

Chapter 33 – Caleb

Avery crouches next to her crumpled body as I reach the bottom of the stairs.

How the hell could he be there already?

How could he know?

A foul mixture of elation, victory, disbelief, and sorrow cloud my mind. An industrial vise squeezes the upper hemisphere of my head. A coppery sludge fills the back of my nasal cavity and I know my nose is bleeding.

Avery kneels and presses his fingers into the flesh of her crooked throat. I look from her glazed dirty-blue eyes to his, wiping my nose on my sleeve. He shakes his head and a smile touches his lips. “She’s not dead. Yet.” I help him lift her off the cobblestones.

“Push, damn it,” Avery says through gritted teeth. He’s lifting her shoulders, straining to keep her bloody hair out of his mouth as we wrestle her dead weight into the hearse he drove here. It’s not my fault he didn’t bring a body board.

He says she has a cut on her scalp and that her skull is cracked and open— a compound fracture. Brain injury is a certainty. Pink tissue spills out of the hole in her head. She may also have broken vertebrae in her neck and upper back.

I heave her toward the car’s back door by her considerable squishy thighs. The back of her knee catches on the door’s locking mechanism. Her flesh sticks on the latch and tears open like a sealed envelope. Her right leg folds at a newly forged joint in the tibia and fibula. Jagged points of slick red-streaked white bone poke through the mound of her flesh, reminding me of broken candy canes stuck in cookie dough.

I’m sorry for your loss.

“Would you kindly hurry up before somebody sees us?”

Not much chance of that— the tourists are long gone, asleep in their hotel beds, the bars are closed, the staff all gone home, and even the hobos are sleeping off their drunks elsewhere.

Well, the bitch did rip out my heart, taking up with Avery the way she did. She got exactly what she deserved. My only regret is that I was not the one to crack her skull open. It would have been such a satisfying climax.

At least Avery can’t have her now.

Unless he can bring her back.

“Closest hospital is Memorial. She’ll die before we get there,” I say, looking back at her limp figure. I’m scared. My eyes are bugging out of my head, trained on that fat pink worm sneaking out of her wet hair.

Avery looks in the empty rear-view. We bump along River Street and Scarlet shifts around in the back of the hearse, the worm jiggling, elongating, her head and leg staining the silky white upholstery a messy blotted crimson. “We’re not going to any damn hospital, Einstein. I mean, come on, this is our chance.” He turns to me and bugs his eyes out.

Oh, God.

Minutes later, we haul her through my lab into the tunnel. We huff and puff and bump our way into our Revival House. Avery sets Scarlet’s upper body down on the concrete floor, leaving me to hold her bloody beefy legs as he pushes a dead dog (the neighbors’ Lab) off the table. It hits the floor with a wet cracking sound. It’s the sound of a breaking heart.

I’m sad. My throat closes, my eyes mist, my head hurts. I want to cry. Not for Scarlet, but for the dog.

We hoist Scarlet up onto the table and check her vitals again. She is still not dead. She is unconscious, but a weak arrhythmia throbs in her neck.

“Are you ready?” he asks.

Am I ready? How could anyone ever be ready for this kind of event? I swallow hard and nod.

He grins at me. Leers.

Gooseflesh rises on my arms.

We cut off her clothing. Her pale flesh spreads like a lump of pizza dough on the steel stretcher. Avery stabs her with a needle, emptying a syringe full of some sedative into the back of her fat hip. I know the drug is called fentanyl, but I’m not sure what part of my brain pushes that forward.

“Okay,” Avery says preparing a lot of shiny metal clips, clamps, scalpels, and other instruments, arranging them on a paper-lined, plastic covered tray. “First things first. We need to drain her, right? Just like the dogs. You know how to place a ventricular catheter now?”

I nod my head.

Do I really know how to do that? I’m not sure. My mind is a whirl of half-grasped images and information, like maybe I learned that back in school but can’t quite remember. I keep nodding, biting the inside of my cheek, wondering at the origin of these half-memories. I feel an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. I feel as though I’d done this many times before.

Avery pulls a thin silver blanket from the freezer in the corner. He unfolds it and drapes it over Scarlet’s naked body. I pull bags and bags of cold saline from the refrigerator as he packs ice around her. We need to get her cooled down so Avery can, I don’t know, fix whatever he thinks he can fix. Does he know how? I know he was trained in the management of traumatic brain injuries at the Safar Center, but his projection of confidence and level of competency surprises me.

A lot about Avery surprises me.

“After we get her hooked up to the ventilator, then we need to drain her CSF.”

“What’s CSF?” I ask, even though I already know. I am lost in a daze.

“Cerebral spinal fluid, stupid,” Avery says, pulling stuff out of a cardboard box on the floor.

Did we do that with the dogs?

A long corrugated translucent hose with some kind of hollow hook at the end disappears down her throat. Avery calls this intubation and it will keep Scarlet breathing, hooking her up to an old-fashioned ventilator we found on e-bay. It reminds me of my Aunt Billie. I shudder. I am much more at ease working with those who have already undergone this type of care and failed.

Avery uses both hands to shove the two-foot trocar into Scarlet’s torso. It looks like she’s impaled on a stainless steel pipe. “You know her neck’s broken, right? She’s going to need one of those halos. Can you get one?” He flips the switch on the suction machine behind him, sucking the lifeblood out of her, into a stainless steel jar at his feet. A loud mechanical sucking noise fills the claustrophobic concrete chamber, reminding me of my last dental visit, only the suction in the dentist’s office wasn’t amplified by the unyielding surface of cement. I fire up the pounding centrifugal pump and start the flow of saline into her carotid artery. Avery works to place a ventricular catheter, which will aid in draining CSF. He also injects her with some potent barbiturate, working quickly and with great purpose.

Watching with the rapt fascination of a boy devouring his first horror film, I both enjoy and abhor Avery’s work at the same time.

“Yeah, I actually have one upstairs, from some car accident victim that they tried to save at the hospital. He died a week later and the hospital brought him here with that cage thing still on his head,” I said, remembering that particular patron through a fog.