Wither

by J. G. Passarella

  “So, the sight of me in my birthday suit scared you off,” she said, with a bitter little laugh.

  “No! Wendy, you are a really beautiful person, a beautiful woman…” He shook his head, trying to sort out his own emotions. “I felt like I was violating you and—”

  “Good! Because that’s exactly what you did.” At least he hadn’t seen the rain spell and … what came afterward. “And even if I had left all my clothes on, you would have still been violating me, my privacy?”

  His chin was all the way down on his chest, where only minutes ago he had been contemplating the stars. “I know it,” he said. “I’m sorry?

  Wendy stood up abruptly. “Get out.”

  He looked up. “What?”

  “Just get out,” she said. “I can’t talk to you now, I can’t look at you.”

  He stood slowly, stunned. “Please, Wendy, I’ll do anything to make it up to you…”

  “Good,” she said, “then get out. That’s what you can do for me.”

  She strode back toward the house. Alex stood on the blanket, hands widespread. “Can’t we talk about this?”

  “No!” she shouted.

  He walked slowly toward the house, then stopped when she slammed the back door shut. Moments later she opened the door and tossed out his textbook, notebooks, and calculator, which broke open on the patio. “Wendy…”

  She poked her head out the door. “Sorry if I got you all hot and bothered out there in the woods. This should cool you oft?” He saw her reach for a wall switch, then dropped his head as the sprinkler heads popped up and soaked him.

  When he gathered his books—the scientific calculator was ruined—he could no longer see her through the back windows. Sopping head to toe, he trudged slowly around the house. “Well, that could have gone better,” he said.

  Wendy ran upstairs to the guest bathroom closest to her bedroom, shut the door, and sat down on the toilet seat lid. She put her face in her hands and cried silently. “I’m such a freak,” she said. “Real sideshow material. All the boys come poke their sticks at my cage.” She shuddered. Why did I ever think he might be different? Soft knock. “Wendy? Are you okay?” Wendy sat up straight, wiped her nose. “Fine, Mom.”

  “Has Alex gone?”

  “He had to leave,” Wendy said. “Track meet in the morning.”

  “Sorry I missed him,” her mother said.

  “I’m sorry too, Mom,” Wendy said.

  She sat for several long minutes, regaining her composure. She wiped her eyes and decided to check the damage in the mirror. Not too bad, she thought, little blotchy. Can barely tell I had my dignity stomped on. She looked at her fingernails, and in the fluorescent lighting, they appeared to have lightened to the dark purple shade that had preceded the black. Almost as if they approve of me dumping Alex, she thought. “What’s that all about?” She looked back in the mirror. And she screamed.

  For a moment her face had been replaced by a hideous visage, an oversize, black leathery head, with wisps of hair and incredibly long teeth. But it had been the yellow, wolflike eyes that had scared her the most. They had been feral yet cunning, and they had looked right through her, right into the depths of her soul, and they had seemed to know her, to claim her. Those eyes seemed like the last thing she would ever see.

  Her mother didn’t bother to knock this time. She just opened the door, pure maternal fear clouding her face. “Wendy, my God, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, Mom,” Wendy said. “It was nothing.”

  “I know nothing when I hear it,” her mother said. “And that is definitely something.”

  “Just a spider,” Wendy said. “A jumbo, piston-legged beast in the ik.”

  “A spider?”

  Wendy nodded. “I was washing my face and there it was…” Her mother looked skeptically at the spotless sink. “I, uh, I washed it down the drain.”

  “You’re sure you’re okay, dear?”

  She hugged her mother. “I’m really okay, Mom. I just need some sleep.” Long, dreamless sleep…

  CHAPTER SIX

  * * *

  Alexander lan Dunkirk decided he needed to think outside the box, and he did his best thinking on the run, which meant jogging. He usually jogged the night before an exam, right before he began a cramming session, but now he had a different dilemma to resolve. Wendy. And after a restless night, he decided to hit the streets of Windale, leaving the familiar campus far behind.

  Once he had jogged beyond the campus buildings into the heart of the town, he began to see its age. Windale was a town over three hundred years old, and it showed its age in more ways than the number of historical monument plaques. The town had died a little death with the collapse of the textile industry. It had revived the town’s history of witchcraft in hopes of generating tourist dollars, but the truth was that Windale’s potential as a tourist stop was severely overestimated by the chamber of commerce, despite the proliferation of quaint street names.

  His weak economic prognosis for the town was getting him nowhere. And, he suspected, was merely a way of helping him avoid the issue.

  Alex had screwed up with Wendy. And maybe there wasn’t anything he could do to make things right again. Sometimes mistakes are unintentional, only obvious with the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight. His mistakes had been obvious every step of the way. He should have known better from the start. Wendy had smashed his attempted “clean slate” across her knees and sent him packing. So what next?

  The main problem wasn’t even her sense of modesty. At first he thought that embarrassment might be the source of her anger but soon realized it was more than that. She had opened up to him, brought him into her emotional circle, so to speak. And by spying on her, he had shown himself unworthy of her trust. It didn’t really matter what she had done in private or how she had been dressed or undressed while doing it. The sticking point was that it had been a private thing. You can’t unring a bell, he thought. Maybe time was the only thing that would help her get past his betrayal, if she ever did. If not, Wendy Ward would likely be one of the great regrets in his life. And that was something that really made his insides ache. I can’t give up on this, he decided. She’s not ditching me that easily.

  He slipped on something slick in the road. For an instant he hung poised on the treacherous line between maintaining his balance and the fall. Then he pitched backward, arms swinging in slapstick circles. He knew before he hit that he was going to be hurt. When the pain came it seemed to be registered by a different sense, a texture and a thudding pressure, a rusty color, a sound like a mallet striking a faraway drum. Then it hurt.

  He landed on his ass in the sticky slick mess that had caused him to slip, his head whipping back a split second later, smacking the blacktop. After a dazed moment, he rolled up onto his hands and knees, the dark mess squeezing between his fingers. As he tried to push himself up, his palms shot out in front of him, and he fell face first, his nostrils filled with the nauseating stench.

  An explosion of gore, covering the entire width of the road. It smeared his clothing, had soaked through his sweatpants, plastering a clammy swatch against his thighs. He felt it drying on his face. He wanted to scream, but the running and the sudden fall had startled any sound out of him. A dozen feet away the carnage seemed heaviest, a dark heap. He saw bits of spotted hide, shreds the size of washrags, a jagged fence of splintered ribs. A long skull trailed vertebrae and ruptured muscles, the snout crushed in bluntly. A lolling tongue—

  A cow, Alex thought, part of his mind still screaming irrationally that he’d wandered into the human wreckage of an automobile accident. But no, a cow…it was just a cow. He wiped the gory mess from his hands on the cement road, leaving long crimson smears. Bad luck and some ridiculous need for self-flagellation had caused him to stumble right into this…granddaddy of all roadkill.

  The cow must have wandered free of its pasture, been hit by…what? Nothing short of a Mack truck could have done this much damage to an animal,
and a large truck seemed unlikely on this small road. Maybe another prank by some of the more inventive frat members. Tired of simply tipping or spray painting the cows, they had decided to use them as four-legged tenpins. But where was the car? Where was the fucking wreck? They would have totaled the car after striking a heifer that violently. The cow had literally exploded. Alex wondered, belatedly, if some explosive device had been concocted in Danfield’s chemistry lab. But that, too, seemed far-fetched. What the hell had happened to this cow?

  It wasn’t until twenty minutes later—the sleepy police on the scene and Alex’s bloody clothes stinking in the early morning sunlight—that Alex thought of another possibility. He climbed a short distance up a hillside and looked down at what seemed like an evenly distributed blast radius… He tipped his head back and watched a carrion bird wheeling slow figure eights high above. The cow hadn’t been struck, it had been dropped.

  Over breakfast in the physicians’ cafeteria, Dr. Jim Phelan called up to the eighth floor on his cell phone, and spoke to theposting clerk:

  & ldquo;Id like to schedule an add-on surgery for today. Patient is named Leeson, Arthur A. Phelan said, “Born 12/14/59, room 712. I need to get him on a table this morning.”

  “So he’s Class Two?” the clerk asked, and when Phelan confirmed the priority status, said, “What’s the procedure?”

  Phelan dictated slowly. He knew the clerk was writing it down. “Excision of necrotic right eye, with exploration and debridement of rectus and oblique muscles, optic nerve, retinal artery, and vein. Got that?” The clerk grunted. Phelan added, “Oh, and Dr. Gangemi will be assisting.”

  The clerk said, “Well page you when we’ve scheduled an OR.”

  Phelan closed the cell phone just as three of his colleagues entered the doctors’ cafeteria deep in solemn consultation. Howard Sanders and Richard Green were well-respected oncologists; Keya Khayatian was the hospital’s chief pediatric resident. Phelan picked up his Styrofoam cup of coffee and approached the men. He knew Khayatian was attending on Abby MacNeil.

  “How’s your girl?” he asked.

  Khayatian was postcall, and his bloodshot eyes showed it. “Not good. She tried to crump on us last night, spiked a high fever around midnight, and followed it with a nice febrile seizure.”

  “Christ.”

  “Tell me about it. We finally got her defervesced by one, but it was scary there for a while.” He yawned, shuddering with exhaustion.

  “Any luck identifying the infectious agent yet?”

  Khayatian tipped his head toward the oncologists. “We were just talking. We’re pushing all kinds of antibiotics, but she’s not responding. So we’re looking at some other possibilities.”

  “Like…?”

  Richard Green answered for the resident. “Her CBC this morning shows pancytopenia and lymphoblasts, so we’re scheduling a bone marrow biopsy”

  “You think she has leukemia?” Phelan said with surprise.

  Green shrugged. “We’re throwing darts at this point. There’s something radical going on inside this poor kid.” Sanders sipped his coffee, judged it too hot, and asked, “How about your guy?”

  “I’m going back in today to remove the eye. I’m treating the infection as if it’s orbital cellulitis. I’ve got to get it before it infects the brain.”

  Phelaris pager went off, and he checked its readout. “That’s the OR. Gotta run.” He finished the dregs of his coffee and dropped the cup in the trash on his way out.

  “Jimmy,” Howie Sanders called after Phelan, “Do me a favor while you’ve got your guy under general.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Give him a double orchiectomy for me.”

  Phelan nodded, flashed a tired smile, and left.

  Ovchiectomy. From the Greek root word for testicle.

  While Abby was undergoing a bone marrow biopsy—a painful procedure that in the little girl’s sad condition could be performed without lidocaine—Art was waiting for surgery.

  Sheriff Bill Nottingham had paid another unwelcome visit only moments before, informing Art that he would be transported to the Gander Hill Adult Correctional Facility as soon as his doctors deemed him fit enough to travel—and assuming Art hadn’t by that time managed to post the $250,000 bail set by Essex County Judge William “Big Mac” McLaughlin. (A former beat cop from Boston’s Combat Zone, McLaughlin was notorious for expediting criminal cases in his courtroom, and handing down severe “McSentences” faster than a drive-thru window.)

  “A quarter of a million dollars!” Art said, despite the preop sedative an RN had just injected into his IV As the drug began to ripple over him, he watched himself as if from a great distance reach out to clutch the sheriff’s coat sleeve. “Please, Bill, you’ve gotta stop this,” he said. “I didn’t touch her!” It occurred to Art, even through his druggy fog, that it was in the extremes of experience that melodrama lived, and that arriving there, unrehearsed and frightened, we had only cliches to grasp. (I’m innocent! You’ve got the wrong guy!)

  The sheriff had forcibly removed Art’s clutching hand from his sleeve and was about to cuff him to the bed rail when he was scolded by a passing RN.

  “Do you honestly think this patient is in any shape to be a threat to someone?” The sheriff frowned, and returned the handcuffs to their place on his belt.

  Now, twenty minutes later, Art was shifted onto a gurney and wheeled down the long corridors toward the waiting elevators that would transport him to the OR on the eighth floor. He felt a flutter of panic awaken deep beneath the sedation, like something small struggling for breath. My eye, he thought, giving into that panic; They’re going to take my eye! (He’d signed the consent forms, but it hadn’t seemed as real and final then as it did now.) And after they took his eye they were going to send him to prison, where the real sexual predators would cruise the shallows that, for Art, had been forever reduced to two dimensions.

  By the time they reached the eighth floor, Art’s panic had slipped the velvet restraints of sedation. The orderly left Art momentarily on his gurney in the corridor while he went in search of the nurse manager in charge of Prep and Holding. Art scanned the corridor, saw stainless steel refrigerators labeled pathology samples, a waiting crash cart, a tall shelving rack stocked with surgical scrubs…

  Small, Medium, Large, X-Large.

  He rolled off the gurney, winced as he tugged the IV out of his arm. He didn’t yet have a plan, but he was in motion. He snatched medium scrubs from the shelves. And began running…

  In the stairwell he slipped out of his hospital gown and stood naked for several tense moments as he struggled to fit his clumsy limbs into the blue scrubs. Then he began descending quickly, the concrete fire stairs chilly beneath his paper booties. He’d just made it to the sixth-floor landing when he heard the overhead page echo through the stairwell.

  “Security to the eighth floor, stat. Code Orange…”

  Sheriff Nottingham was on his way out of the building through the ER when he heard security paged overhead and saw two guards run past him toward the elevators.

  Eighth floor. Surgery…

  He stopped at an admitting desk, asked the triage nurse, “What’s a Code Orange?”

  “Lost patient,” the nurse said. “Means someone who shouldn’t has just went ambulatory”

  The sheriff began running in the direction of the west stairwell.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Art paused on the fourth-floor landing, saying aloud what the little voice of reason had been shouting at him since the moment he’d gotten off the gurney. He wasn’t sure why he was running, or where he intended to go, but he knew he had to get out of this hospital and off of this runaway train headed toward prison and disfigurement. Fourth floor…

  They’d mobilized security pretty quickly, so he knew there I would be guards covering the main exits from the building—he’d have to find an alternate route out. Fourth floor…

  He hesitated on the landing, staring at the numb
er stenciled on the steel fire door. His pulse throbbed in his ruined eye behind the bandages.

  Fourth floor…

  And then a piece of memory fell on him: the Pediatric Intensive Care. Abby’s floor…

  Shit, no time. And yet he knew he had to take this detour to see her. Without knowing what exactly he intended to say when he found the little girl, he pulled open the fire door and dashed onto the PICU. He hoped his surgical scrubs would buy him a few moments unnoticed among the staff—

  Whoa. The bandages. With his head still swaddled in gauze he might as well be wearing a sign that read baby rapist. He ducked into a men’s room and began tearing the bandages free, bracing himself for the horror he expected to see in the mirror. He was surprised to find most of the bruising had faded, and the minor lacerations on his cheeks, healed. If he kept his head down and moved quickly, he might slip by.

  He exited the rest room and walked headlong into a security guard.

  “Watch it!” the guard said, and pushed Art aside brusquely as he headed toward the stairwell.

  Art hugged the wall, told himself to breathe again. He began walking briskly along the carpeted corridor, headed for the PICU. There was only one RN at the nurses’ station, and she was too busy trying to clear a paper jam in the printer to notice Art.

  Room 411… 412… 413—

  Abby.

  The sheriff burst through the fire door on Eight to find a half-dozen security guards surrounding an empty gurney. “Get downstairs—cover the exits!”

  “Sir?” the nearest guard said. The sheriff didn’t bother repeating the instructions, only snatched the man’s walkie-talkie from his hip and barked into it: “I need someone watching every exit, Main, ER, Outpatient Clinic…”

  He threw the walkie-talkie back to the guard, thrust a finger at two of the men. “You and you—with me. We’ll sweep one floor at a time. The rest of you get downstairs and lock this place down.”