by Ladew, Lisa
Craig jogged towards the exit doors and West turned his attention back to Katerina. The x-ray technicians had finished with her, and now the EKG technician was attaching multiple leads to her chest, looking to see if there was anything wrong with her heart.
West leaned heavily against the doorway, his soul in the bed with Katerina, his mind dry and empty. All he could do was silently entreat God or fate or anyone who would listen to save his Katerina.
***
West watched for hours, hovering just outside the door, as Doctor Reyes called in test after test. Finally she approached him. “She’s stable, and unless you can tell us anymore about what happened to her, there’s nothing more I can do for her down here. We’re admitting her.”
West reached out and grasped her hand. “Thank you Doctor.”
He watched as the nurses got all of her equipment ready to transport her upstairs, and then unlocked the wheels at the bottom of the bed, pushing her and her bed out the door. West walked alongside and held her hand as she was pushed into the patient elevator and up to the eleventh floor. They took her to room eleven sixty-two, three floors above Blaise, to the very room.
Once the nurses had everything set up exactly the way they wanted it, they nodded to West and left the room and he was alone with a motionless, unconscious Katerina. Again. This had happened before, but he’d never felt quite so desperate as he did now. It was like a piece of him was missing and only she knew where it was. He threaded his fingers into hers and looked at her face. She looked peaceful, like maybe she was just sleeping. Was it his imagination or did her color look better?
Oh, if only he had her healing ability! He would touch her, and fix anything and everything that was wrong with her. Then he would whisk her away to a tropical island somewhere and they would pretend that none of this had ever happened.
The door to the room opened and a short, balding doctor in a pressed white coat came in. West didn’t recognize the doctor, but he apparently already knew all about West.
“Mister Shepherd,” the doctor greeted him, with a raise of his chin.
“Hi,” West said wearily. “Is she going to be OK doc? Is there anything you can tell me?”
The doctor listened to her lungs and her abdomen and checked all of her vital signs then looked through her chart. “Actually, I can’t tell you anything because you are not her husband. I hope you understand,” the doctor said, his face resigned.
West nodded sadly. He did.
“But I hope you know that we will do our very best to fully support Miss Holloway in any way that she needs,” the doctor said, then laid her chart down on a table next to the bed and turned to walk out.
“Thank you,” West said quickly, his eyes on the chart.
As soon as the doctor retreated out into the hall, West snatched up the chart and read through it. Her blood work was all consistent with someone who was undergoing metabolic stress. Her x-rays showed nothing. Most of her other tests showed absolutely no reason for her current situation. But Doctor Reyes had made a notation referencing the nonspecific coma state she had been in before and saying this one seemed similar. Perhaps it is a unique way that this subject’s body deals with stress, she concluded in her notes. West turned one more page in the chart and discovered the EKG and the cardiologist’s notes regarding it. Katerina had had a heart attack. A minor heart attack, and the doctor expected her to fully recover with rest and adequate nutrition, but it was a heart attack nonetheless. West shook his head as his own chest felt heavy and dull. Katerina was twenty-six years old! Why in the world had she had a heart attack?
He read the cardiologist’s notes three times and finally decided that the cardiologist didn’t know why. The notes kept referring to a severe hypermetabolic state and a hypotrophic heart muscle. West wondered if he was inferring that Katerina’s heart muscle seemed to have shrunk or been partially consumed as fuel for her body.
West winced and fingered the slight indentation on his chest where a gaping hole should be. Had her body consumed itself in order to provide energy for his healing?
West put the chart down and backed away from it, wishing he’d never read a word of it. He pulled a chair next to Katerina’s bed and sat, holding her hand again, his mind a blur of frantic and guilt-ridden thoughts.
He stayed that way for a long time, over two hours, glancing occasionally at her face, praying for some change in her countenance but his prayers were never answered.
He didn’t want to leave her, but there was something that he had to do. He refused to leave her alone though. His thoughts churned. Finally, he realized there was another option.
West picked up the phone and called Blaise’s room. Jordan answered, her voice low but happy.
“Jordan,” he choked out. “Something bad happened to Katerina.”
“Oh my God West, what?” Jordan cried, fear in her voice.
“Wait, Jordan. How is Blaise?”
“He’s fine, he’s great, he’s sleeping,” she said quickly. “What happened to Katerina?”
“She is in room eleven sixty-two, can you come up here?”
“Eleven sixty-two? You mean here in the hospital?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be right there,” Jordan said and the phone went dead in his hand.
West replaced the receiver gently, then returned to Katerina’s bedside. He leaned over and talked to her, hoping she could hear him. “Katerina, I have to run to the first floor for a few minutes, but I’m not leaving you. Jordan will be with you. I’ll be as quick as I can, but I have to know.”
The door opened and Jordan crept in, rushing directly to Katerina’s bedside, on the opposite side from West. She took Katerina’s hand and looked closely at her face. “She’s in a coma again?” she asked, her voice breaking.
“Yeah,” West said sadly.
“Did she fry somebody else?” Jordan said, her eyes never leaving Katerina’s face.
“Yeah,” West said. “She did.”
“Oh, Katerina. I’m so sorry,” Jordan whispered, gently brushing Katerina’s hair back from her forehead.
“Jordan, can you stay here until I get back? I Just need to run downstairs for a few moments. Hopefully no more than twenty or thirty.”
Jordan nodded, never looking at him.
“Thanks Jordan, you’re the best. Here.” He grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil out of the little drawer in the table next to the bedside and wrote down a number. “This is the hospital switchboard. Call them and tell them to page me if you need me. I will come at a run.”
Jordan took the piece of paper absently and continued to brush Katerina’s hair back.
West crept out with only one look behind him. If he wasn’t positive she’d be absolutely safe, he never would’ve left, but after what she did to that guy in the van, he knew that not only did the bad guys not have a boss anymore, they were all probably running in absolute terror.
Chapter 16
West took the stairwell back down to the emergency room. The stairs gave him time to think. Who did he know in the hospital that he could trust with a request like this? No one that had the proper authority, really. It had to be a doctor who wrote the order for him. He didn’t have any good doctor friends.
He pushed open the stairwell to the first floor and walked through the double doors into the emergency room. Most of these nurses knew him and the ones who didn’t probably figured he belonged, since he was still wearing the scrub shirt and they’d seen his face before. He found the bathroom where he had hidden his bloody shirt and walked inside, hoping it would still be under the trashcan. It was, and he picked it up, then went back out into the hallway.
Doctor Reyes walked his way, carrying a patient chart in one hand. She stopped when she saw West and raised one brow as her cool eyes appraised him.
West swallowed his nervousness. She was as good of a person to ask as any. She was already suspicious of him anyway. “Doctor Reyes, I need a favor.”
She didn�
�t say anything for a moment and West started thinking frantically of who else he could approach.
“Let’s hear it,” she finally said.
“Can you order a chest x-ray for me?”
Now both of the Doctor’s eyebrows raised and she looked pointedly at the bloody shirt in his hands.
West waited for the inevitable questions. He had no idea what he was going to say.
Instead she surprised him. “Sure, but when this is all over, I expect you to come back and tell me the truth. The whole truth.”
West breathed deeply in relief. “You won’t believe it,” he said.
“Try me,” Doctor Reyes said and continued down the hall, motioning for West to follow her. She grabbed a piece of paper from a bin against the wall and check marked a box, then scribbled her signature and handed it to West.
“Thank you Doctor, I appreciate it.”
“Just don’t forget your promise.”
West nodded and rushed towards x-ray.
When he got there, the technician, a young man of about twenty-five with long brown hair and a circular band aid on one side of his nose, was sitting behind the desk playing on his phone. West was glad things were slow. Maybe he could get in and out of here quickly. He pushed the order across the desk to the technician and breathed a sigh of relief when the technician took one look at it and motioned for him to come back through the door. The technician led him down a narrow hallway to a darkened room where a monster x-ray machine sat, with metal tentacles that could easily be moved about the room.
“OK pops, take off your shirt and put on this here gown,” the technician told him, then stood and watched him expectantly. West stripped the scrub top over his head, then put on the gown, wondering why they were even bothering with it.
The technician took a heavy drape off a hook on the wall and handed it to West. “Hold these in front of your jewels.”
West blinked at him, wondering why everybody was making him feel so old today. Then he realized what the technician wanted. He held the heavy drape in front of his body, protecting his “jewels” from the radiation.
The technician retreated to a tiny alcove set in the corner of the room and started pressing buttons. “Hold still,” he called and within a few moments it was all over. The technician came and took the drape back from him and hung it up on the wall as West saw his chest x-ray come up on the computer monitor across the room. He could see the bullet in his chest from where he stood.
The technician walked back over to the monitor and looked closely at it. “Cool pops, is that shrapnel?”
West stared at the tiny, twisted piece of metal in his chest, imagining he could feel it in there. “Yeah, from Nam,” he said distractedly.
The technician made a muted sound of approval and pressed a few buttons. “You need a hard copy?”
“Yeah,” West told him.
The technician clicked once with his mouse. “Coming right up.”
The young man laughed. “You sure were lucky, another half inch to the left and it would’ve torn a hole in your heart.”
West clutched his chest convulsively. Had it torn a hole in his heart? Is that what Katerina had needed to fix? And had she done it somehow with her own heart muscle?
“Why did they leave it in?” the kid asked.
“Because I would’ve died otherwise,” West whispered, marveling again at what Katerina had done.
When the technician finally brought him his x-rays, West took them gratefully, and carried them and his bloody shirt back up to the room. He pushed the door open and found Jordan in exactly the same position that he had left her.
Jordan looked back at him. “She hasn’t moved,” she said. “I’ve been talking to her, but she hasn’t responded at all.”
West took his items to the small alcove by the window and put them down, then returned to his spot in the chair next to Katerina. He held her hand and stroked it continuously. How had she done it?
“Thank you Jordan. We’ll be here if you want to go back to Blaise. I’ll call you if anything changes.”
Jordan nodded and West saw the indecision on her face. “Go,” he told her. “Come back in the morning, or I’ll call you, I promise.”
Jordan came around the bed and gave him a hug. “You OK?” she asked.
“No,” he answered and meant it.
As the evening shifted into deep night, West watched the clock and wondered why agent Craig Masterson had never returned to talk to him. Finally, he slept fitfully with his head on the bed rail and his fingers entwined with Katerina’s. In his sleep, he imagined that she awoke and explained everything, then healed her own heart, and then they snuck out of the hospital together, to leave Westwood Harbor and all of its problems forever.
Chapter 17
Craig Masterson looked up at the nondescript circular clock on the wall, over the medical examiner’s head. Anything to keep his eyes from looking at what the doctor was doing. It was 11:30 at night, and the autopsy had been going on for fifteen minutes already. Craig flexed his knees slightly and tried to remember how long one of these took. He hadn’t had to attend an autopsy in years.
The doctor in front of him shook his head and sucked irritatingly on his teeth. He muttered lightly to himself. “This is impossible,” is what Craig thought he said.
“What?” Craig asked.
“Look at this,” the doctor said, lifting something horrifyingly red and liquid out of the open chest before him.
Craig gritted his teeth and forced himself to look. He hated this part. He didn’t understand how doctors and paramedics did this. His own wife always said blood and body parts didn’t bother her at all. But they bothered him.
“What about it?” he asked the doctor of the unidentifiable piece of tissue he was holding his hand.
“That’s his heart,” the doctor said as if speaking to an idiot.
Craig looked closer. He was no expert, but he had a pretty good idea what a heart should look like. And it was nothing like the bloody mass of flesh in front of him.
“What happened to it?” Craig asked.
“It’s … exploded, I guess would be the best way to put it, but there is no damage to the chest or the back.”
“So how did it happen?”
The doctor shook his head. “I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense. Even if someone used some sort of a directed energy weapon, it would have affected the muscle tissue that it had to pass through, and I just don’t see any evidence of that. The only thing that seems to have been affected is the heart.”
Craig kept his mouth shut. He knew the doctor was talking about things the military was developing and testing, but he didn’t know that civilians knew about them. Microwave weapons, lasers, and pulse energy projectiles. But nobody outside of the government should have any sort of access to something like that. And certainly not here, in a major US city. Those things were being tested overseas, at war, not on the civilian population.
The doctor went on. “However, I suspect we will find something similar when we open up his head.”
“His head?” Craig said limply, his eyes on the huge bone saw on the table.
“Yes – see that fluid coming out of his ears?”
Craig saw it. He knew what it looked like. Suddenly he didn’t want to be having this conversation. “Uh, Doc, I think I better read this in the report,” he said quickly as he rushed out of the room. He thought he heard the doctor laugh lightly behind him.
Laugh all you want old man, Craig thought. I ain’t coming back.
Craig found the bathroom and splashed some water on his face, then retreated to the morgue waiting room. He was the one who had asked for this emergency autopsy. They had captured the two men who had been in the van when Kane had died and their story was too incredulous to believe. They said Katerina Holloway had killed Kurt Kane with a touch. He shook his head, trying to figure out what they thought they could gain with a story like that.
He pulled his phone out of his
pocket and sat down to wait for the doctor, calling up the police reports that he had requisitioned - he would read about Katerina Holloway’s involvement with the serial killer cases and see if they shed any light on what was going on now.
Thirty minutes later, Craig stood up and paced through the waiting room. He had read over what the police officer said Dylan Phillips had ended up like and he couldn’t believe it. Even after looking at a picture of the man, he still didn’t believe it. Melted? It was completely unbelievable. And yet, it was the only thing that explained everything.
***
At 1:30 in the morning, Craig let himself quietly into his house, took off his shoes and tiptoed to his bedroom. His wife had to work in the morning and he didn’t want to wake her. He pushed open the bedroom door and saw her strawberry blonde hair fanned out across the pillow. He smiled at the sight, then prepared for bed.
As he slipped into the bed next to Emma, she murmured sleepily and reached for his hand.
“You’re late,” she whispered.
“Sorry, babe,” he said. “It was a crazy day.” He thought for a moment and then decided he might as well tell her now. “I’ve got to fly to LA tomorrow.”
She turned over in bed and blinked at him. “Why?”
“Your paramedic? Katerina Holloway. The police report says she melted a guy. I have to see this guy for myself.”
Emma snuggled into his chest. “She was fired today.”
“Oh, crud, that sucks. She’s having a really rough time. Did you know she’s in the hospital?”
Emma sat up, her eyes wide. “No, for what?”
“I’m not sure yet. Some sort of collapse.”
Emma shook her head. “I have to go see her tomorrow,” she said. She leaned forward, pinning her husband with her stare. “You do right by her, Craig. She deserves it.”
“I hope I can, babe. I hope I can,” he said, his thoughts wondering if what was waiting for him in LA would change his mind at all. If it wasn’t already changed.