The Heart Does Not Grow Back: A Novel (30 page)

“How long?” I asked.

“Not long. Fifteen minutes?” The driver didn’t miss a beat. He was lying.

“Where the fuck are we?” No answer. He jerked the wheel, peeling us off the freeway and into a rundown neighborhood with tiny, fenced-in houses with brown lawns and ramshackle porches. Soon, we turned onto an access road with far less traffic, careening through the empty streets until we found ourselves puttering down a shitty two-laner, joining the rat race to get a spot on the freeway.

I tried the door. It was locked.

“Now, settle down,” the passenger said. “This will be a lot easier if you just remain calm.”

I looked at Mack.

“What is this?” But I didn’t need to ask. I knew that Hayes was doubling down on his effort to keep me from going through with my sacrificial surgery. He didn’t trust Venhaus, so he appealed to Mack. I could hear him smugly bargaining with my friend:
Are you really going to let your friend die?

“We’re just trying—” the passenger started.

“Shut the fuck up! What is this?” I repeated.

“These are the big dogs, Sampsonite. Best deal I could cut for us, man.”

“All-expenses-paid trip to the Research Triangle on the East Coast?”

“Better than dying.”

“That’s not your call to make,” I said. “You can’t do this to me. You can’t stick me with this bullshit forever.”

I knew Hayes and the government interests he represented coveted my life, and that there was obvious value to studying my gift, but I never thought to probe for details. Who exactly benefited from their research? Government agencies, private universities, biotech startups? My death was unacceptable to the scores of researchers who jerked off over my tissue in some sterile lab somewhere, rehearsing their Nobel Prize speech.

“Turn the car around,” I said.

Silence. Stares.

“Turn the fuck around!” I screamed, and started yanking at the door. I punched the glass once, but it didn’t break. My finger did, though—a pop sounded in my hand, and my knuckle started to swell. A boxer’s break. No matter. Not today, anyway.

I looked up into the barrel of a gun.

“Stay calm and I won’t have to see if your head grows back,” the passenger said.

“Fuck you,” I said. “You’re really going to try to kill me when you’re obviously here to preserve me?”

He fired a slug into the top of my leg.

“Christ!” the driver screamed, the shot rattling him into a sudden swerve. “What the fuck you doing?”

“Relax, that shit’ll be healed before we get to the airport,” Passenger said, laughing. “At least he can’t run now, huh?”

Blood bubbled from the wound, hot and familiar. I leaned back hard into my seat, and concentrated on my breathing. Oxygen always helped blunt the pain—that and pressing on it real good while closing my eyes so tight fluid leaked from the corners.

Mack was not pleased with this particular development. Through my agony, I heard the long-dormant sound of him flexing his hate gland, screaming at my captors, but at the time it was all just white noise. Then everything was quiet, as if the captain had flipped on a No Talking sign. I looked over at Mack.

For one of the few times in his life, he was raw. Stripped down to the wires and studs: confused, wanting desperately to keep me alive, but realizing that a life of being harvested for samples wasn’t quite
living
. Too bad for us both he hadn’t realized sooner.

“Well, it sounded like a good deal at the time, the way that dickhole put it,” he said.

His fists were clenched. Veins protruded everywhere, dark-blue ropes snaking across the striated muscles in his neck and forearms. I saw the dent in his lower jaw where he was sucking his lip in, biting it, his eyes glossy with the threat of tears, and I knew what he was going to do.

“Swing for the fences, right?” he rasped. “You better not miss.” He smiled. I followed Mack’s eyes to the front seat. He nodded once, and I understood.

Passenger continued to point the gun squarely into the backseat.

“You two just need to shut the—”

Mack moved with a fast-twitch burst I hadn’t seen since high school, deflecting the gun up into the roof with one hand as the other grabbed the strap of seat belt above Passenger’s shoulder. With one quick jerk, Mack had the belt around the man’s neck, ratcheting his throat so tight I heard a pop. Passenger fired blindly into the backseat, but missed us both—barely. My eardrums erupted with the bass of the shots. The driver didn’t know what to do, but he instinctively slowed—which was exactly what I was hoping for.

I leaned back and pistoned my feet through the window glass. The whole pane broke off in one spiderwebbed piece and skidded onto the road. I reached through and opened the door from the outside, intent on jumping out on the fly. As the door swung open, another shot rang. I saw a mist of red splatter against the driver’s side window as the driver’s ruptured skull lolled to the side. From the corner of my eye, Mack and Passenger were struggling, four hands on the gun now, its barrel waving back and forth between them, a barometer of who was winning. Glancing back at the inert form in the driver’s seat, it was clear who that round went to. The bullet had tunneled into his temple neatly on one side, leaving a soup-can-sized hole on the other.

With a carcass now behind the wheel, the car began gradually veering off the road. Glancing over to Mack, still grappling wildly with Passenger, I leapt out and rolled onto the concrete, flailing crash-dummy style, leaving behind layers of epidermis and dislocating my shoulder. I don’t know if my hand got caught in the car’s frame or if I landed on it, but when I came to rest in the hot and itchy grass on the other side of the roadway, I noticed three fingers were gone and all I had left was a mangled stump. I looked up right as the Lincoln eased into the drainage ditch across the road, toppling over onto its side. I listened to the crunch and squeal of metal as it gained momentum down the slope and continued flipping.

My right hand was nothing but splinters of shiny bone. I had road rash everywhere, blood slowly blooming through my shredded clothing.

I stared into the sky, a dusty blue, the clouds half dissolved by the sun’s rising momentum. I could have stayed put and slept forever. But Mack was still in the ditch, in the mangled wreckage of the Lincoln, the victor of his skirmish with Passenger unknown. Assuming either of them had survived the crash in the first place. I found the strength to stand and ignored the frantic bystanders who were urging me to lie down and wait for help.

*   *   *

Unrelenting heat. No wind. The smell of gasoline and scorched rubber and the shavings of burned metal. Cars stopped. People were on their cell phones. Everyone telling me to sit, everyone a Samaritan.

My movements were frenzied and out-of-body. I stumbled along on my shot leg and I could see how bad I looked in the twisted faces of others. The smell of blood was in my throat and nose. Droplets hit the pavement as I staggered toward the drainage ditch, turning black when they struck stone.

Pain everywhere. Pain in my dragging leg, my sagging pieces of torn flesh. The back of my head, my right kneecap, my hand stump shorn down to the bone, white and slick, the only painless areas since the nerves had been scrubbed clean out.

The Lincoln was tucked into the ditch on its side almost neatly, as if carefully placed. The windshield was gone. The guts of the car hissed and ticked. I spotted Mack on his stomach about twenty feet from the wreckage, facedown. Not one droplet of blood, not a scratch on him, but no movement. I didn’t see Passenger anywhere—most likely entombed in the remains of the car.

Mack didn’t respond to my voice. “He’s hurt bad, mister,” a man said, crouched down beside us. If Mack had been thrown that far during the wreck, bad was an understatement. I knew I wasn’t supposed to move him, but I touched his shoulder. He flopped onto his back, still limp, and I saw the stain of blood on his midsection. The wound was too long and messy to be a gunshot. He was more likely gouged and torn from the shrapnel catching him as he was tossed from the rolling car. Again, the mutter of bystanders, warnings, advice, all of which I ignored, lifting his shirt up and seeing a puncture wound, his innards pushing through the injury, purplish and glossy, hanging from his belly. His eyes were open, the pupils black and round, eclipsing his eye sockets.

I cradled his head and started sobbing, a cry that no bite could control, the kind of blazing sorrow that squeezes your lungs. It sucks away your breath, floods your head with snot and demolishes your will. I said his name and whispered, “Wake up, man. Get tough, you pussy,” but I couldn’t provoke him to say a word.

The sound of approaching sirens blotted out the chatter. I leaned in close, meaning to tell him good-bye, and felt the humid warmth of his breath against my forearm.

With that I started to scream “Help!” over and over and over until finally a uniformed EMT pried him away from me. They worked him, strapping him to a backboard, a pit-crew of EMTs testing and prodding and deliberating. I followed them as they shuttled him into the back of the ambulance. A thick-armed EMT held me back as they shut the doors.

I relinquished myself to my own ambulance, thinking it would get me to Mack’s bedside faster. But the EMT who was now standing directly over me—Chris, by his name tag—looked at me and said, “Jesus Christ, this is Dale Sampson. The Samaritan.”

According to Chris, Mack was going to White Memorial Medical Center. “Keck’s a mess today, thanks to you,” he said, chuckling.

I thought of letting the ambulance take me to Mack, but if I did that, what would he have swung for the fences for? What would his sacrifice have meant? Miracles start with tragedy—a person dies and his family signs a piece of paper, and their loved one’s organs get harvested and sent out into the world like ashes in the wind. Meanwhile, somewhere a pager goes off and a dying man with a failing liver or kidney or heart says that he’s not getting his hopes up, not yet, and as he drives to the hospital he can’t help but get his hopes up.

Mack’s injuries were the first domino. I would not let it fall without striking against something else.

“Take me to the UCLA Medical Center,” I said. “I’m already late. And take Mack, too. I don’t care if he’s a mess. I can save him.”

“Holy shit. Keck Hospital was a smoke screen?” Chris said.

I nodded.

“You’re in no shape for surgery, kid. I think we’ll take you both to White Memorial. It’s close.”

“You’re killing Mack if you don’t take us both to UCLA. Him and another guy, whose chest is probably getting cracked open while we chitchat.”

“I’m not so sure your superpower, or whatever it is, can help your friend. Needing an organ is one thing, massive internal bleeding is a catastrophic injury, a whole other ball game. Try prayers instead. As for the transplant, a chest can be closed. They can reschedule.”

“Why do you think I’m out here? You’re hardly the only one who wants me to reschedule and reconsider. If you don’t get me into UCLA, that man dies.”

“If I take you there,” he said, “you die.”

“If you don’t,” I said, “I will fail the one person I cannot fail, and I’ll have to be the Samaritan forever.”

Chris understood trauma. He had seen the inside of people laid bare, the hysterics of family members wailing over a loved one’s ruined form. Here was a man without a white coat, a man in the trenches who wanted to save lives instead of being published in medical journals.

He turned to the driver. “UCLA Medical Center.” He radioed the other ambulance and despite their objections, they followed suit. He was careful not to expose us, and didn’t use my name. “If I had a right hand,” I said, “I’d shake yours right now.”

He held out his left hand, and I shook it.

TWENTY-FOUR

En route to the hospital, I was stable and the pain had dulled to a slow throb, the lasers of hurt activating with each beat of my heart.

“You’ve lost some blood,” Chris said. “I would normally say operating is out of the question, but if you’re really going out in a blaze of glory I guess it makes no difference if you’re a cadaver or not.” I felt the hum of the drive with the occasional bump, the feel of turns, Chris’s hand supportive on my shoulder.

“One request before we roll you in,” Chris said. “Sign this?” He gave me a medical chart. My chart. I signed it, “To Chris and my rescuers … You are the Good Samaritans.” I signed it Dale Sampson, the print barely legible, my dominant hand having been blown to bits. I stamped a thumbprint of blood underneath it.

“Turn your head to the side and keep your eyes closed.” He placed some gauze on my face, disguising me. “Whatever you did to cover your ass, it worked. This joint is even less busy than usual.”

“I still appreciate the discretion,” I said, as he pressed another piece on my forehead. “Tell Dr. Banks I’m here.” Banks was Venhaus’s ace in the hole, a top-tier cardio specialist who had also been one of Venhaus’s med school friends.

“You got it,” he said. I rolled into the hospital, just another guy fucked up from yet another car accident. Nothing to see here. I never stopped moving, the squeak of the wheels drowning out Chris’s words as we moved through the hospital. Eventually, I felt the gurney come to a stop and heard Chris’s voice in the distance shouting, “Good luck, Mr. Carlson!”

Movement again, then a familiar voice. “I got you,” Doc Venhaus said. “Just be still.”

“Mack,” I said, turning to face Venhaus, the bloody gauze falling away. “You gotta save him first. Take everything out of me, I don’t give a shit.”

“You have many gifts, but stabilizing a trauma victim isn’t one of them. I can check in on him, but from what that EMT told me, you can’t help your friend,” Doc said. “He’s in the hands of God and doctors, Dale.”

“Bullshit. He’s got fucked-up organs, so give him some organs.”

“It’s not as simple as just swapping organs with him, Dale. In fact, I’m calling the surgery off altogether,” he said.

“Fuck that,” I said.

“This isn’t what you planned or wanted—scars from the road rash and your right hand gone for good. It would not be right to operate on you in this condition. And did someone
shoot
you?”