Coma

by Robin Cook

  Susan herself was amazed at the effect and stepped into the amphitheater, watching D’Ambrosio’s fall. She stood there for an instant, thinking that D’Ambrosio must be unconscious. But the man drew his knees up and pulled himself into a kneeling position. He looked up at Susan and managed a smile despite the intense pain of his broken rib.

  “I like ’em . . . when they fight back,” he grunted between clenched teeth.

  Susan picked up the fire extinguisher and threw it as hard as she could at the kneeling figure. D’Ambrosio tried to move, but the heavy metal cylinder struck his left shoulder, knocking him down again, and forcing the upper part of his body to fall over the backs of the seats of the next row down. The fire extinguisher bounced down four or five more rows with a terrific clatter, coming to rest in the eighth row.

  Slamming the door to the amphitheater shut on her pursuer, Susan stood panting. My God, was he superhuman? She had to find a way to detain him. She knew that she had been unbelievably lucky in injuring him, but plainly he was not out of the picture. Susan thought of the large deep-freeze in the anatomy room.

  The hall was dark except for the window at the far end, which provided a paltry amount of pale light. The entrance to the anatomy room was at the very end of the hall near to the window. Susan ran for the door. As she reached it, she heard the door from the amphitheater open.

  D’Ambrosio was hurt but not badly. It was painful to cough or take a deep breath, but it was bearable. His left shoulder was bruised but functioning. More than anything else, he was mad. The fact that this screwy chick had managed to get the best of him even for a few moments pissed him off. Now he’d kill her first and fuck her later. He had his Beretta in his right hand, its silver silencer screwed in place. As he stepped from the amphitheater, he just caught sight of Susan entering the anatomy hall. He fired without really aiming and the bullet missed Susan several inches, slamming into the edge of the doorframe and throwing splinters of wood into the air.

  The sound of the gun was like that of a rug beater. Susan had no idea what it was until the noise and effect of the slug entering the woodwork made it clear to her that it was a gun, a gun with a silencer.

  “All right, you bitch, the game’s over,” shouted D’Ambrosio, coming down the hall at a walk. He knew he had her cornered and that it would hurt to run.

  Inside the anatomy hall, Susan paused for a moment, trying to recall the layout in the faint light. Then she bolted the door behind her. The first-year class at that time of the year was in the middle of their anatomy course. The dissecting tables in the room were covered with green plastic sheets. In the dim light they appeared light gray. Susan ran between the shrouded tables to the freezer door at the far end of the room. There was a large stainless pin through the latch. She pulled the pin free and let it hang by its chain, releasing the latch. With some effort Susan opened the heavy insulated door and squeezed through. She pulled the door shut behind her and heard the heavy click. She groped for a light beside the door and switched it on.

  The freezer was at least ten feet wide and thirty feet deep. Susan remembered all too clearly the first day she had seen it. The diener loved to show it to the students, one at a time, and he particularly liked female students for some unknown but undoubtedly perverse reason. He had charge of the cadavers stored here for dissection. After embalming, they were hung up with tongs hooked into the external ear canals. The tongs were connected to roller bearings on tracks in the ceiling, to facilitate movement. The bodies were stiff, naked, misshapen; most were the color of pale marble. The females were mixed with the males, the Catholics with the Jews, the whites with the blacks in the equality of death. The faces were frozen into a wide variety of distorted grimaces. Most of the eyes were closed but here and there was an open one, blankly staring into infinity. The first time Susan had seen these four rows of frozen cadavers hanging up like unwanted clothes in a closet of ice, she had felt sick. She had vowed never to return. And until that night she had avoided the “fridge,” as it was affectionately called by the diener. But now it was different.

  The anatomy hall had been dark. The inside of the freezer was lit by a single hundred-watt bulb from the rear of the compartment, casting horrid shadows on the ceiling and floor. Susan tried not to look directly at the grotesque bodies. She shivered from the cold and frantically tried to think. There were only a few moments. Her pulse was racing. She knew that D’Ambrosio would be coming into the freezer within minutes. She had to have a plan but she didn’t have much time.

  Smiling, D’Ambrosio stepped back and kicked the locked door of the anatomy hall, but it held firm. He kicked out a pane of frosted glass, pulled out a few of the splintered pieces, and reached in, opening the door. He looked around the room, not comprehending what it was.

  As a precaution against his prey bolting, he closed the door and moved a nearby table in front of it. The room was large, some sixty feet by one hundred feet, with five rows of seven shrouded tables each. D’Ambrosio went up to the nearest table and whipped off the plastic drape.

  D’Ambrosio gasped, not even feeling the pain from his broken rib. He was staring at a cadaver. The head was dissected free of skin, the teeth and the eyes were bared. The hair had been undermined and folded back like a pelt. The front of the chest was gone, as was the front of the abdomen. The organs, which had been removed, were piled back into the opened body haphazardly.

  D’Ambrosio walked back to the door and thought about turning on the lights. Then he decided against it because of the large windows and the fear of alerting the security police. Not that he didn’t feel confident about handling a couple of inexperienced guards, but he wanted to get Susan without any interference.

  Systematically D’Ambrosio removed all the shrouds from all the cadavers in the room. He tried not to look at the dissected bodies. He just wanted to make sure that Susan was not among them.

  D’Ambrosio looked around the room. On the right side of the hall several skeletons hung on chains, turning slowly in the air stirred by the opening and closing of the door. Behind the skeletons was a huge cabinet containing numerous specimen jars. At the end of the room were three desks and two doors. One of the doors looked like a freezer door, the other a closet. The closet was empty. Then D’Ambrosio noted the stainless steel pin hanging from the latch on the freezer door. The light smile returned, and he transferred the gun to his left hand. He opened the freezer door and again fell back in horror. The hanging bodies appeared like an army of ghouls.

  D’Ambrosio was shaken by the appearance of the bodies and his eyes darted from one to another. Reluctantly he stepped over the threshold of the freezer, feeling the sudden chill.

  “I know you’re in here, cunt. Why not come out so we can have another talk?” D’Ambrosio’s voice trailed off. The close quarters in the freezer and the appearance of the stiffs made him nervous, more nervous than he ever remembered being.

  He looked down between the first two rows of frozen corpses. Warily he took two steps to the right and looked down the middle row. He could see the bare lightbulb in the rear of the compartment. Glancing back at the door, he took several more steps to the right so he could look down the last corridor.

  Susan’s fingers were losing their grip around the overhead track in the back of the second row of corpses. She did not know D’Ambrosio’s position, not until he called the second time.

  “Come on, sweetheart. Don’t make me search this place.”

  Susan was sure that D’Ambrosio was at the head of the last row. She knew it was now or never. With all the force she could muster, she pushed with her legs against the back of the wizened female cadaver in front of her. By holding onto the track above, Susan had lifted her legs up and coiled them against the old woman’s back. Her own back was pressed against the rock-hard chest of the last cadaver in the row, a two-hundred-pound black male.

  Almost imperceptibly at first, the entire second row of frozen corpses began to move forward. Once the initial inertia was ove
rcome, Susan was able to lunge with her feet, imparting a terrific thrust. Like a row of dominoes the entire group of bodies slid forward on their ball bearings.

  D’Ambrosio’s ears picked up the sound of the movement. He held himself still for a fraction of a second, trying to locate the weird sound. With the swiftness of a cat, he whirled and retreated toward the door. Not fast enough. As he stepped past the third row, he saw the movement. Instinctively he raised his gun and fired. But his attacker was already dead.

  Coming at D’Ambrosio with surprising speed was a ghostly white male whose lips were frozen in a horrid half-smile. Two hundred pounds of frozen human meat slammed into the hit man, sending him crashing into the side of the freezer. In rapid succession the other corpses tumbled after the first, several falling from their hooks, creating a huddle of corpses, a tangle of frozen extremities.

  Susan let go of the track, dropping to the floor. Then she ran for the open door. D’Ambrosio was trying to pull the bodies off himself. But he was in pain and had little leverage. The reek of embalming fluid was choking him. As Susan passed he tried to grab her. He struggled to free his gun and aim but it caught in the gnarled hand of a corpse.

  “Fuck!” shouted D’Ambrosio as he used all of his might against oppressive weight of dead flesh.

  But Susan was through the door.

  D’Ambrosio was upright now. Pushing the toppled bodies right and left, he flung himself at the closing door. But outside it Susan was pushing with all her might, and the momentum of the insulated door carried it home. The latch clicked. Susan fumbled with the stainless steel pin. Inside, D’Ambrosio was grabbing for the latch release. Susan beat him by a fraction of a second as the pin dropped home.

  Susan backed up, her heart pounding. She heard a muffled cry. Then there was a thud. D’Ambrosio was shooting into the door. But it was twelve inches thick. There were several more ineffectual thuds.

  Susan turned and ran. She finally understood the reality of the danger she had been in. Trembling uncontrollably, she fought back tears. She had to find help, real help.

  Thursday

  February 26

  2:11 A.M.

  Beacon Hill was definitely asleep. As the cab turned off Charles Street onto Mount Vernon and drove up into the residential area, there were no people, no cars, not even any dogs. The lights in the windows were few; only the gas lamps suggested that the area was populated, not deserted. Susan paid the cab driver, then looked up and down the street to see if anyone was following her.

  After escaping from D’Ambrosio in the freezer, Susan was terrified and decided not to return to her room. She had no idea if D’Ambrosio was working alone or with an accomplice, but she was in no mood to find out. She had run out of the Anatomy Building, crossed in front of the Administration Building and had reached Huntington Avenue by passing the School of Public Health. At that hour it had taken fifteen minutes to find a cab.

  Bellows. Susan thought that he was the only person she could turn to at two A.M. who would understand her present plight. But she was worried about being followed, and she did not want to involve Bellows in any danger. So as she entered the foyer of Bellows’s building she determined to wait five minutes before ringing his apartment, to be certain she had not been followed.

  The foyer was not heated and Susan ran in place for a few minutes to keep warm. Becoming rational again after the experience with D’Ambrosio, she tried to understand why D’Ambrosio had returned so quickly. As far as she knew, no one had followed her when she went back to the Memorial to get the charts and explore the ORs. No one even knew that she was there.

  She stopped running and looked out at Mount Vernon Street through the glass door. Bellows! He had seen her in the lounge. He was the only one who knew that she had not given up her search. She had shown him the charts. She started running in place again, cursing her own paranoia. Then she stopped as she remembered about Bellows being involved with the drugs that were found in the locker room, about Bellows being the one who found Walters, after Walters had committed suicide.

  Susan turned her head and looked through the glass of the locked inner door. The stairway rose upward, its steps covered with a red runner. Could Bellows be involved? The possibility penetrated Susan’s overworked brain and fatigued body. She was beginning to suspect everyone. She shook her head and laughed; the paranoia was too obvious. Yet it started her thinking, and the thoughts troubled her.

  Her watch, said two-seventeen. Bellows was going to be in for a surprise, having a caller at such an hour. At least Susan thought he’d be surprised. What if he were surprised only because he expected her to be quite occupied elsewhere—that he knew all about D’Ambrosio. Susan decided impulsively that was nonsense. She pushed the buzzer with determination. She had to push it again and hold it before Bellows responded.

  Susan started up the stairs. She was midway up the second flight when Bellows appeared above in his bathrobe.

  “I might have known. Susan, it’s after two A.M.”

  “You asked me if I wanted a drink. I’ve changed my mind. I want one.”

  “But that was at eleven.” Bellows disappeared into his apartment, leaving the door ajar.

  Susan reached Bellows’s floor and entered his apartment. He was nowhere to be seen. She closed the door and locked it, throwing both bolts. She found Bellows already back in bed, the covers up under his chin, his eyes closed.

  “Some hospitality,” said Susan sitting on the edge of the bed. She looked at Bellows. God, she was glad to see him. She wanted to throw herself onto him, feel his arms around her. She wanted to tell him about D’Ambrosio, about the freezer. She wanted to scream; she wanted to cry. But instead she did nothing. She sat there just looking at Bellows, her mind vacillating.

  Bellows didn’t budge, not at first. Finally the right eye opened, then the left. Then he sat up. “Damn, I can’t sleep with you sitting here.”

  “How about that drink, then? I need it!” Susan forced herself to be calm, analytical. But it was hard. Her pulse was still over one hundred fifty per minute.

  Bellows eyed Susan. “You’re really too much!” He got up and put his robe back on. “OK, what will you have?”

  “Bourbon, if you have it. Bourbon and soda, light on the soda.” Susan looked forward to the fiery fluid. Her hands were still visibly trembling. She followed Bellows into the kitchen.

  “I had to come over, Mark. I was attacked again.” Susan’s voice reflected her forced calmness. She watched Bellows’s reaction to the information. He stopped with his hands in the freezer, taking out an ice tray.

  “Are you serious?”

  “I’ve never been more serious.”

  “Same person?”

  “Same person.”

  Bellows went back to the ice tray, chipping at it with a fork. Finally it came away. Susan felt that he was surprised at the news but not overly surprised, and not terribly concerned. Susan felt uneasy.

  She tried another tack.

  “I found something else out when I visited the OR. Something very interesting.” She waited for a response.

  Bellows poured the bourbon, then opened a bottle of soda and poured it over the ice. The ice snapped in the glass. “OK, I believe you. Are you going to tell me or not?” Bellows handed Susan her drink. She took a slug.

  “I traced the oxygen line from room No. 8 up in the ceiling space. Just before it turns down the main chase there is a valve in it.”

  Bellows took a sip from his drink, motioning for them to return to the living room. The clock over the fireplace chimed. It was two-thirty.

  “Gas lines have valves,” said Bellows at length.

  “The others didn’t have them.”

  “You mean a type of valve which would allow gas to be introduced into the line?”

  “I think so. I don’t know much about valves and the like.”

  “Did you trace the others to each room to be sure?”

  “No, but room eight was the only line with a valve
at the main chase.”

  “Simply having a valve doesn’t surprise me. Maybe they all have one someplace in their lines. I wouldn’t use that valve to draw my conclusions, at least not until I had traced all the lines.”

  “It’s too much of a coincidence, Mark. All these cases apparently happened in room No. 8, and room No. 8 has an oxygen line that has a valve in it at a funny place, rather well concealed.”

  “Susan, look. You’re forgetting that some twenty-five percent of your supposed victims weren’t even near the OR, much less room No. 8. Now, even under the best of circumstances, I find your crusade ridiculous and threatening. And when I’m exhausted, I find it numbing. Can’t we talk about something soothing, like socialized medicine?”

  “Mark, I’m sure about this.” Susan could sense the exasperation in Bellows’s voice.

  “I’m sure you’re sure, but I’m also sure I’m unsure.”

  “Mark, the man who attacked me this afternoon warned me, and then he returned tonight, and I don’t think he wanted to talk. I think he wanted to kill me. In fact, he tried to kill me. He shot at me!”

  Bellows rubbed his eyes, then the sides of his head. “Susan, I don’t know what to even think about that, much less have something intelligent to say. Why don’t you go to the police if you’re so sure?”

  Susan did not hear Bellows’s last comment; her mind was racing ahead. She started to speak out loud. “It has to be from lack of oxygen. If they were given too much succinylcholine or curare, just enough so that the people would have a hypoxic episode . . .” Susan trailed off, thinking. “That could be why respiratory arrest occurred. The one they autopsied, Crawford.” Susan took out her notebook. Bellows took another drink. “Here it is, Crawford. He had severe glaucoma in one eye and was on phospholine iodide. That’s an anticholinesterase and that means that his ability to break down the succinylcholine would have been impaired and a sublethal dose could be lethal.”