Dreamspinner Press Years One & Two Greatest Hits

by J. M. Colail

  “It wasn’t for me to say,” she reminded him gently. “Julian…. He liked you, even then. I could tell. He just needed a little… push.”

  “Divine intervention, huh?” He sighed. Flora ex machina. “And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those pesky kids.”

  His mother laughed slightly, and even though he could hear the pain behind the sound, it was okay. “I love you, Mom.”

  “Oh, honey. I love you, too.”

  JACK’S EYES snapped open to the phone ringing and he blinked furiously a few times, only to realize it was dark. He’d taken to sleeping with the phone in his hand ever since his mom had been hospitalized. Groping for it one-handed, Jack struggled to sit up, heart pounding. The time on the alarm said 1:57. “Hello?”

  “Something’s wrong with Hallie.”

  Jack shook himself, looked at the phone, and kicked at the covers to free his feet. “Roy? Is that you?” He hadn’t really spoken with Roy in close to a month, though he’d continued to pick Hallie up from her various after-school programs. Since their confrontation at the hospital, their friendship had been more than a little strained.

  Or perhaps nonexistent would have been a more accurate word. Still, this wasn’t the time for grudges.

  “She’s got a fever of a hundred and four,” Roy said, sounding panicked. “She’s been up since six this morning throwing up; she can’t even keep water down. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Calling an ambulance to take her to the hospital would be a good idea,” Jack said, finally managing to stumble out of bed.

  “Look out the window.”

  Jack yanked back the curtain and squinted into the night. Shit. It had been snowing steadily since before dinner, and there were at least eighteen inches of fresh-fallen snow accumulated on the ground. There was no chance the snow plows had cleared the road from here to the hospital already. “Can she walk?”

  “She can’t even sit up. Jack, I don’t know what to do.”

  And Roy couldn’t carry her, since he’d injured his back years ago. “Okay. I’m coming over. Get her things together and wrap her in a blanket. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  Jack hung up the phone and threw it back on the bed, snagged a pair of sweatpants from the bottom drawer of the dresser and threw on a T-shirt. Yanking his cell phone from the charger, he dialed one-handed without looking while running down the stairs. He shrugged into his coat, shoved his bare feet into his boots and grabbed the keys to his truck, running outside into the driving snow.

  “Hello?” came a sleepy voice on the other end of the line.

  “Roz,” Jack said, digging bare-handed through the back of his truck for his tire chains. Fuck, they had to be in here somewhere. “Don’t hang up. It’s Jack. I need you to wake up Julian.”

  “Are you insane?” she grumbled, voice hoarse with sleep. “I’m not waking him up so you can give him some lame-ass self-flagellating apology. He’s barely slept for a month. Go to hell.”

  “It’s a medical emergency,” Jack said tightly, doing his best to ignore the sting of her words. “It’s Hallie.”

  “I’ll wake him,” Roz said immediately, sounding much more alert. “Are you at your place or Roy’s?”

  “I’ll be at Roy’s when he gets here,” Jack answered, finally clasping fingers around cold metal. He yanked until the tire chains came free. “Roz, tell him to hurry.” He knelt in the snow, beginning the buckling process, and added belatedly, “But not too much.”

  The line went dead. Jack shoved the cell phone in his pocket and concentrated on the task at hand. Three minutes later, he was pulling into Roy’s driveway. Jack threw the truck in park, but left it running, slogging through the snow to the kitchen door.

  “Roy!”

  “In here!”

  Jack followed the sound of his voice into the living room and stopped in his tracks. Hallie was lying on the couch, skin gleaming with sweat, cheeks flushed. Roy was kneeling beside her on the floor, face pale. “Shit,” Jack said, dropping down beside him. He touched her forehead for confirmation of the high fever. “Okay, talk to me.”

  “She’s been like this since this morning. It’s like every time she moves, she loses whatever she’s been able to keep down. The fever didn’t get bad until about twenty minutes ago. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Get me some ice,” Jack told him, going for the blanket. He peeled it off, noting that the little girl’s pajamas were soaked with sweat. The top was riding up a little, and he thought there was some slight discoloration on the right side. “Shit.” He touched his fingers to the area lightly and Hallie moaned and squirmed without opening her eyes. The skin felt too hot.

  Jack flipped open his phone and dialed Julian’s cell. He waited for the call to click through, but not long enough for Julian to offer a greeting. “I think it’s appendicitis,” he said. “You’d better hurry.”

  BY THE time Julian got there, Jack had applied Roy to the task of the ice compress and taken to pacing the kitchen, waiting for Julian to show up. He finally ran inside, snowflakes clinging to his hair and eyelashes, dressed in a ratty T-shirt, pajama pants, and a lab coat and carrying his bag. Jack directed him to the living room and tried to stop freaking out unproductively.

  The diagnosis only took Julian thirty seconds. Leaving Roy to look after his daughter, he met Jack in the kitchen. “I need to operate. If her appendix hasn’t burst already, it won’t be long. If I wait much longer, the septic shock might kill her.” He looked Jack in the eye for the first time in a month. “Jack, even if I operate right now, she still might die.”

  Jack’s blood went cold. “Okay,” he said, hands shaking. He shoved them into his pockets. “What do you need me to do?”

  “Call Dan,” Julian said immediately. “Find out the nearest place I can do an appendectomy and get him to meet us there. I’m going to get Hallie in your truck.”

  Jack could do that. It was only when he didn’t know what to do that he was paralyzed. Directions, that he could do. “Dr. Matheson? It’s Jack Strange. I’m sorry to wake you, but it’s an emergency.” He paused. “It’s Hallie Klein. Julian says her appendix is bursting and he needs to operate as soon as possible. He wants to know where….” Jack listened. “Where?!”

  Julian popped his head back into the kitchen and gave him a look. “Okay,” Jack said. “We’ll meet you there.”

  He grabbed the ice scraper and brushed the newly accumulated snow from the windshield and jumped back in the cab. Roy was fidgeting compulsively in the passenger seat, and Julian was in the back with Hallie. Jack handed the phone to Julian and put the truck in reverse.

  “Hi, Dan,” he heard from the backseat as he started the window wipers on high. The snow was still falling thickly, and the roads were treacherous, even with tires. “Listen, I need you to pick up some things at the clinic for me before you meet us. I need four sets of adult scrubs and one child-size if you can find them, or a hospital gown, whatever. All of the sterilization equipment, iodine, gauze, a saline drip, the consent forms for emergency procedures, child-safe painkillers and sedatives, the soap. Are there gloves already there? Yeah, all right. We’re also going to need….”

  Jack found that it was easier to concentrate on driving if he tuned out the flow of medical jargon, so he did, turning on the fog lights to help him see where he was going. The high beams were useless, just reflecting too much of the falling snow to be of help.

  “…And call the EMTs,” Julian was finishing up as Jack pulled into the parking lot. “Tell them they need to be ready to go in an hour, and call that guy who does the plowing, redirect him on a priority route. Yeah. Bye.”

  Jack had barely parked the car before Julian was up and out of it. He seemed to have no trouble lifting the sick little girl in his arms, draping her so that her body was almost flat, with her legs hanging down and her head resting against his shoulder. “Get the door, Jack. Roy, get my stuff.”

  As it turned out, Jack didn’t need
to get the door. When they approached, the door to the police station swung open, and Jack ushered in his accomplices to the complete bewilderment of the officers on duty. “Hi, Ted,” he greeted the senior officer. “Sorry to bother you, but we need to borrow the lab. It’s sort of an emergency.”

  “The lab?” Ted repeated blankly. He was staring at the four of them as if he didn’t know what to say. That was probably partially true, since none of the three men had been spotted together anywhere in the past month, and more or less everyone knew why. “The coroner’s lab?”

  “Nowhere else to do an emergency appendectomy,” Julian told him. Apparently he already knew the way, because he was off heading toward the back somewhere without so much as a by-your-leave. “I need a sterile environment, and the clinic doesn’t have what I need. Open this door, please.”

  Ted complied, eyes wide, looking about like Jack felt. “Will she be okay?”

  If she’s not, Jack thought, neither will we. “Let Dan know we’re ready for him,” he said instead, and hustled after the other two, hoping to God he’d be able to make himself useful.

  When Dan arrived two minutes later, everything broke out into chaos. Jack was dispatched with Dan’s keycard—Dan was currently acting coroner for the county—on a number of fetch-and-carry assignments while the two doctors disinfected, reorganized, and swabbed. He was just coming down the hallway with the last of the supplies when he saw Julian step sharply away from Roy as the older man slumped into Ted’s waiting arms.

  “What happened?”

  Julian held up a syringe. “Sedated. Trust me; it was necessary.”

  Jack stuck out his arm. God, anything if it would end this nightmare. “While you’re at it.”

  “Sorry. We’re going to need you.” Dan tossed him a bar of yellow soap and a plastic-wrapped set of scrubs. “Scrubs first, then wash to your elbows. Thoroughly. We’ll meet you inside.”

  When Jack entered the room again—he was trying really hard to think of it as an operating room and not an autopsy lab—Hallie was on the table in a hospital gown that was pushed up to her rib cage. A sterile sheet covered her lower half, and there was an IV in her left hand. Julian and Dr. Matheson were almost unrecognizable in all of their gear, between skull caps, face masks, gloves, and scrubs.

  Julian handed him a mask, a pair of latex gloves, and a cap to go over his hair. “Here’s the rules. I tell you to do something. You do it when I tell you to. If you are going to throw up, you need to leave the room and wash again before you come back in. Clear?”

  Jack nodded, hooking the straps to his mask over his ears.

  “Stand at her head,” Julian directed, taking his gloved hand and pointing his first two fingers. He put them on the pulse point in Hallie’s neck, then set a tiny clock beside her ear. “We don’t have any equipment here for live patients, so I need you to count the beats per minute and call them out to me. Make sure she keeps breathing. If she looks like she’s waking up, you’ll need to hold her down until Dan can administer some more sedative, because if she wakes up while I’ve got my fingers in there there’s no telling what kind of damage we’ll do.”

  No pressure or anything. Jack took a deep breath and held it for a few seconds, then nodded. The second hand on the little clock ticked past the twelve, and he started counting, watching Hallie’s steady breathing and tuning out the other sights and sounds of the room. Ten, eleven, twelve. Tick, tick, tick. Twenty-six, twenty-seven.

  “Jack.”

  He looked up, still counting, and met Dan’s eyes. Julian was standing next to him, a scalpel in hand, white as a sheet, his gaze focused somewhere on the other side of the ad hoc operating table.

  Dr. Matheson shrugged helplessly. “I’ve been trying to talk to him for thirty seconds. He hasn’t responded. You have any idea what’s going on?”

  Shaking his head, Jack continued counting. “No clue. Want to take over for a minute? We’re at eighty.”

  Dan pressed his fingers to Hallie’s pulse, and Jack touched Julian on the arm, drawing him away from the table a few paces. “What’s going on?” he said lowly, doing his best to ignore the slight current running between their bodies. This was so not the time. “Julian?”

  His arm was shaking under Jack’s fingertips. “I can’t,” he whispered, not looking at Jack.

  “Bullshit.” Jack’s grip tightened. What the hell is going on? “You’re a fucking surgeon. You’ve probably done this operation a hundred times. You talk the talk, now walk the walk.”

  Julian didn’t respond.

  “Damn it, Julian, a little girl is going to die if you can’t pull yourself together and I know you don’t want to live with that, so suck it up and save her fucking life!”

  He blinked, the color returned to his cheeks, and he ducked his head further, but the shaking stopped. “Okay.”

  Julian returned to the table. Jack resumed his task keeping track of Hallie’s vitals, and did his level best not to pay any attention to what the other two were doing. He watched her face so closely for signs that she might be waking that his eyes started to water, but he didn’t let his gaze waver. Seventy-seven. Seventy-eight.

  “Hand me those forceps,” Jack heard Julian murmur to Dan. He tightened his free hand into a fist and glanced at the clock. Keep counting. Ninety-three. Ninety-four.

  “She’s waking up.”

  The words were out of Jack’s mouth before he was even aware of what he was saying, but it was true; Hallie’s eyelids were fluttering, and her brow was wrinkling in obvious discomfort. Jack swallowed, pressing his free hand to her forehead, smoothing her brow. The fever flush had faded from her cheeks, leaving her complexion ashy gray. Her lips parted, and a slight groan escaped her.

  Julian called out a dosage of sedative and another for a painkiller, not even looking up from his task. Now that Jack was watching, he could hardly look away, as Julian’s red-stained fingers worked quickly with a series of wicked-looking and unfamiliar tools to repair the girl’s body. Jack’s stomach gave an emphatic twist, and his mouth tasted like sea salt, but he ruthlessly quelled the urge to vomit and glanced at Dan instead. The older man was already finishing administering the necessary doses to Hallie’s IV drip, and her eyelids were already drooping again, her pulse evening out and her breathing returning to normal.

  Jack would have sagged in relief, if he’d had any indication that his work was nearing completion. With no medical training, it was impossible for him to tell how far along in the process Julian was, or how long it might take for him to conclude.

  “I’m almost finished,” Julian said an interminable amount of time later.

  Jack blinked, so thrown that he missed his pulse count and had to start over. He must have zoned out watching Hallie’s face after that near disaster when he’d accidentally started watching the surgeon in action instead. Ten, eleven, twelve. Julian asked Dan to hand him some instrument or another, then looked up and locked eyes with Jack. “Get on the cell phone,” he said. “Get those EMTs in here as soon as you can.”

  JACK WATCHED the EMTs load Hallie into the back of the ambulance with a fresh cup of coffee in his hand courtesy of one of the cops he hadn’t had a chance to meet formally yet. Roy had come out of his sedation a few minutes ago angrier than a bag full of wet cats, but conveniently, no one was talking and from what Jack had picked up of his actions while Jack had been busy making himself useful, Julian and Ted had made the right call.

  Julian hopped into the ambulance in Roy’s place, the door slamming behind him, and the look on Roy’s face broke through the numbness Jack was feeling. “He’s her doctor,” Jack pointed out quietly. “If something happens on the way to the hospital, he can handle it. You can’t.”

  “If she dies in there….”

  Yeah, that was the exception. Jack sighed. “Come on; get in the truck. I’ll drive you to the hospital. Julian will call if anything….”

  He stopped, realizing what he was saying. God, would this day, night, morning—all right,
how about the whole damn winter—never end? “Let’s go.”

  It was still snowing out, and the sky was starting to lighten from midnight black to a heavy velvet blue. The roads were slick, but at least this one had been plowed in the past hour; considering how treacherous the asphalt had been a few hours earlier, Jack counted them lucky. The cab of the truck was eerily silent as they followed the ambulance, lights spinning off the snowflakes. Jack figured the weather was messing with the radio reception, and he knew better than to try to talk to Roy. He followed the ambulance into the darkness with his fingers crossed, wondering if what he was feeling was despair or hope.

  Chapter Seventeen

  JULIAN SPLASHED warm water on his face until the crusts in the corners of his eyes dissolved, then toweled off his face and sank down onto the bench in the locker room.

  “You look like you just pulled a triple,” one of the doctors commented, and he groaned.

  “I feel like I just pulled a triple,” Julian admitted. “I’m way too old to be doing this shit,” he sighed, then quirked the corner of his mouth up involuntarily. The man in the yellow scrubs couldn’t have been much younger than he was. “Out of practice.”

  “Aren’t you the guy that did that emergency appendectomy in the coroner’s lab?” The doctor shucked his scrubs and reached for a worn-looking set of sweats. “That must have been pretty intense. The kid okay?”

  “God, I forgot how gossip gets around in a place like this.” It was a good thing there was nothing for him to lean on; if there had been, Julian would have been asleep in no time. “That was me. I never want to do it again. And there weren’t any complications, aside from the fact that she should have had surgery at about four o’clock this afternoon, before the appendix ruptured. But there’s always infection.”

  The other doctor sat down across from him, slumping like he’d just pulled a thirty-six-hour shift himself. “I know what you mean. I remember when my kid brother’s appendix burst when I was in first-year university. He was in the hospital for a month with infections; looked like he’d lived through the Holocaust.”