Koontz, Dean R. - Hideaway

by Hideaway(Lit)

  ought to know what it was, but she couldn't think clearly, and in fact

  she didn't care what it was or where she was going or why.

  Ahead, a pair of double doors flew open, revealing a space warmed by

  yellow light, peopled by several silhouettes of men and women. Then

  Lindsey was rushed into the light and among the silhouettes ... a long

  hallway ... a room that smelled of alcohol and other disinfectants...

  the silhouettes becoming people with faces, then more faces appearing...

  soft but urgent voices ... hands gripping her, lifting ... her off the

  gurney, onto a bed .. tipped back a little, her head below the level of

  her body ...

  rhythmic beeps and clicks issuing from electronic equipment of some

  kind.

  She wished they would just all go away and leave her alone, in peace.

  Just go away. Turn off the lights as they went. Leave her in darkness.

  She longed for silence, stillness, peace.

  A vile odor with an edge of ammonia assaulted her. It burned her nasal

  passages, made her eyes pop open and water.

  A man in a white coat was holding something under her nose and peering

  intently into her eyes. As she began to choke and gag on the stench, he

  took the object away and handed it to a brunette in a white uniform.

  The pungent odor quickly faded.

  Lindsey was aware of movement around her, faces coming and going.

  She knew that she was the center of attention, an object of urgent

  inquiry, but she did not-could not manage tare. It was all more like a

  dream than her actual dreams had been. A soft tide of voices rose and

  fell around her, swelling rhythmically like gentle breakers whispering

  on a sandy shore: ..... marked paleness of the skin .. cyanosis of

  lips, nails, fingertips, lobes of the ears ,...weak pulse, very rapid

  ... respiration quick and shallow ... blood pressure's so damned low I

  can't get a reading "Didn't those assholes "Sure, all the way in."

  "Oxygen, CO-2 mix. And make it fast!"

  "Epinephrine?"

  "Yeah, prepare it."

  "Epinephrine? But what if she has internal injuries? You can't see a

  hemorrhage if one's there."

  "Hell, I gotta take a chance."

  Someone put a hand over her face, as if trying to smother her. Lindsey

  felt something plugging up her nostrils, and for a moment she could not

  breathe. The curious thing was that she didn't care. Then cool dry air

  hissed into her nose and seemed to force an expansion of her lungs.

  A young blonde, dressed all in white, leaned close, adjusted the

  inhalator, and smiled winningly. "There you go, honey. Are you getting

  that?"

  The woman was beautiful, ethereal, with a singularly musical voice,

  backlit by a golden glow.

  A heavenly apparition. An angel.

  Wheezing, Lindsey said, "My husband is dead."

  "It'll be okay, honey. Just relax, breathe as deeply as you can,

  everything will be all right."

  "No, he's dead," Lindsey said. "Dead and gone, gone forever. Don't you

  lie to me, angels aren't allowed to lie."

  On the other side of the bed, a man in white was swabbing the inside of

  Lindsey's left elbow with an alcohol-soaked pad. It was icy cold.

  To the angel, Lindsey said, "Dead and gone."

  Sadly, the angel nodded. Her blue eyes were filled with love, as an

  angel's eyes should be. "He's gone, honey. But maybe this time that

  isn't the end of it."

  Death was always the end. How could death not be the end?

  A needle stung Lindsey's left arm.

  "This time," the angel said softly, "there's still a chance. We've got

  a special program here, a real" Another woman burst into the room and

  interrupted excitedly: "Nyebern's in the hospital!"

  A communal sigh of relief almost a quiet cheer, swept those gathered in

  the room.

  "He was at dinner in Marina Del Rey when they reached him. He must've

  driven like a bat out of Hell to get back here this fast."

  "You see, dear?" the angel said to Lindsey. "There's a chance.

  There's still a chance. We'll be praying."

  So what? Lindsey thought bitterly. Praying never works for me.

  Expect no miracles. The dead stay dead, and the living only wait to

  join them.

  Guided by procedures outlined by Dr. Jonas Nyebern and kept on file in

  the Resuscitation Medicine project office, the Orange County General

  Hospital emergency staff had prepared an operating room to receive the

  action the moment the on-site paramedics in the San Bernardino Mountains

  had reported, by police-band radio, that the victim had drowned in

  near-freezing water but had suffered only minor injuries in the accident

  itself, which made him a perfect subject for Nyebern. By the time the

  air ambulance was touching down in the hospital parking lot, the usual

  array of operating-room instruments and devices had been augmented with

  a bypass machine and other equipment required by the resuscitation team.

  Treatment would not take place in the regular emergency room. Those

  facilities offered insufficient space to deal with Harrison in addition

  to the usual influx of patients. Though Jonas Nyebern was a

  cardiovascular surgeon and the project team was rich with surgical

  skills, resuscitation procedures seldom involved surgery. Only the

  discovery of a severe internal injury would require them to cut

  Harrison, and their use of an operating room was more a matter of

  convenience than necessity.

  When Jonas entered from the surgical hallway after preparing himself at

  the scrub sinks, his project team was waiting for him. Because fate had

  deprived him of his wife, daughter, and son, leaving him without family,

  and because an innate shyness had always inhibited him from making

  friends beyond the boundaries of his profession, these were not merely

  his colleagues but the only people in the world with whom he felt

  entirely comfortable and about whom he cared deeply.

  Helga Dorner stood by the instrument cabinets to Jonas's left, in the

  penumbra of the light that fell from the array of halogen bulbs over the

  operating table. She was a superb circulating nurse with a broad face

  and sturdy body reminiscent of any of countless steroid-saturated female

  Soviet track stars, but her eyes and hands were those of the gentlest

  Raphael Madonna. Patients initially feared her, soon respected her,

  eventually adored her.

  With solemnity that was characteristic in moments like this, Helga did

  not smile but gave Jonas a thumbs-up sign.

  Near the bypass machine stood Gina Delilo, a thirty-year-old RN and

  surgical technician who chose, for whatever reasons, to conceal her

  extraordinary competence and sense of responsibility behind a pert,

  cute, ponytailed exterior that made her seem to be an escapee from one

  of those old Gidget or beach-party movies that had been popular decades

  ago.

  Like the others, Gina was dressed in hospital greens and a string-tied

  cotton cap that concealed her blond hair, but bright-pink ankle socks

  sprouted above the elastic-edged cloth boots that covered her shoes.

  Flanking the operating table were Dr. Ken Nakamu
ra and Dr. Kari

  Dovell, two hospital-staff physicians with successful local private

  practices. Ken was a rare double threat, holding advanced degrees in

  intern medicine and neurology. Daily experience with the fragility of

  human physiology drove some doctors to drink and caused others to harden

  their hearts until they were emotionally isolated from their patients;

  Ken's healthier defense was a sense of humor that was sometimes twisted

  but always psychologically healing. Kari, a first-rate specialist in

  pediatric medicine, was four inches taller than Ken's five-feet-seven,

  reed-thin where he was slightly pudgy, but she was as quick to laugh as

  the internist.

  Sometimes, though, a profound sadness in her eyes troubled Jonas and led

  him to believe that a cyst of loneliness lay so deep within her that

  friendship could never provide a scalpel long or sharp enough to excise

  it Jonas looked at each of his four colleagues in turn, but none of them

  spoke. The windowless room was eerily quiet.

  For the most part the team had a curiously passive air, as if

  disinterested in what was about to happen. But their eyes gave them

  away, for they were the eyes of astronauts who were standing in the exit

  bay of an orbiting shuttle on the brink of a space walk: aglow with

  excitement, wonder, a sense of adventure and a little fear.

  Other hospitals had emergency-room staffs skilled enough at

  resuscitation medicine to give a patient a fighting chance at recovery,

  but Orange County General was one of only three centers in all of

  southern California that could boast a separately funded, cutting-edge

  project aimed at maximizing the success of reanimation procedures.

  Harrison was the project forty-fifth patient in the fourteen months

  since it had been established, but the manner of his death made him the

  most interesting. Drowning. Followed by rapidly induced hypothermia.

  Drowning meant relatively little physical damage, and the chill factor

  dramatically slowed the rate at which postmortem cell deterioration took

  place.

  More often than not, Jonas and his team had treated victims of

  catastrophic stroke, cardiac arrest, asphyxiation due to tracheal

  obstruction, or drug overdose. Those patients usually had suffered at

  least some irreversible brain damage prior to or at the moment of death,

  before coming under the care of the Resuscitation Project, compromising

  their chances of being brought back in perfect condition.

  And of those who had died from violent trauma of one kind or another,

  some had been too severely injured to be saved even after being

  resuscitated. Others had been resuscitated and stabilized, only to

  succumb to secondary infections that soon developed into toxic shock.

  Three had been dead so long that, once resuscitated, brain damage was

  either too severe to allow them to regain consciousness or, if they were

  conscious, too extensive to allow them to lead anything like a normal

  life.

  With sudden anguish and a twinge of guilt, Jonas thought of his

  failures, of life incompletely restored, of patients in whose eyes he

  had seen the tortured awareness of their own pathetic condition.

  "This time will be different." Kari Dovell's voice was soft, only a

  whisper, but it shattered Jonas's reverie.

  Jonas nodded. He felt considerable affection for these people. For

  their sake more than his own, he wanted the team to have a major,

  unqualified success.

  "Let's do it," he said.

  Even as he spoke, the double doors to the operating room crashed open,

  and two surgical orderlies rushed in with the dead man on a gurney.

  Swiftly and skillfully, they transferred the body onto the slightly

  tilted operating table, treating it with more care and respect than they

  might have shown a corpse in other circumstances, and then exited.

  The team went to work even as the orderlies were heading out of the

  room. With speed and economy of movement, they scissored the remaining

  clothes off the dead man, leaving him naked on his back, and attached to

  him the leads of an electrocardiograph, an electroencephalograph, and a

  skin-patch digital-readout thermometer.

  Seconds were golden. Minutes were beyond price. The longer the man

  remained dead, the less chance they had of bringing him back with any

  degree of success whatsoever.

  Kari DoveIl adjusted the controls of the EKG, sharpening the contrast.

  For the benefit of the tape recording that was being made of the entire

  procedure, she repeated what all of them could see: "Flat line. No

  heartbeat."

  "No alpha, no beta," Ken Nakamura added, confirming the absence of all

  electrical activity in the patient's brain.

  Having wrapped the pressure cuff of a sphygmomanometer around the

  patient's right arm, Helga reported the reading they expected: "No

  measurable blood pressure."

  Gina stood beside Jonas, monitoring the digital-readout thermometer.

  "Body temperature's forty-six degrees."

  "So low!" Kari said, her green eyes widening with surprise as she stared

  down at the cadaver. "And he must've warmed up at least ten degrees

  since they pulled him out of that stream. We keep it cool in here, but

  not that cool."

  The thermostat was set at sixty-four degrees to balance the comfort of

  the resuscitation team against the need to prevent the victim from

  warming too fast.

  Looking up from the dead man to Jonas, Kari said, "Cold is good, okay,

  we want him cold, but not too damned cold. What if his tissues froze

  and he sustained massive cerebral damage?"

  Examining the dead man's toes and then his fingers, Jonas was almost

  embarrassed to hear himself say, "There's no indication of vesicles-"

  "That doesn't prove anything," Kari said.

  Jonas knew that what she said was true. They all knew it. There would

  not have been time for vesicles to form in the dead flesh of

  frost-bitten fingertips and toes before the man, himself, had died.

  But, damn it, Jonas did not want to give up before they had even

  started.

  He said, "Still, there's no sign of necrotic tissue-"

  "Because the entire patient is necrotic," Kari said, unwilling to let go

  of it.

  Sometimes she seemed as ungainly as a spindly-legged bird that, although

  a master of the air, was out of its element on the land. But at of

  times, like now, she used her height to advantage, casting an

  intimidating

  shadow, looking down at an adversary with a hard gaze that seemed to say

  better-listen-to me or-I-might-peck-your-eyes-out-mister. Jonas was two

  inches taller than Kari, so she couldn't actually look down at him, but

  few women were that close to being able to give him even a level-eyed

  stare, and the effect was the same as if he had been five-feet-two.

  Jonas looked at Ken, seeking support.

  The neurologist was having none of it. "In fact the body temperature

  could have fallen below freezing after death, then warmed up on the trip

  here, and there'd be no way for us to tell. You know that, Jonas.

  The only thing we can say for su
re about this guy is that he's deader

  than Elvis has ever been."

  "If he's only forty-six degrees now Kari said.

  Every cell in the human body is composed primarily of water. The

  percentage of water differs from blood cells to bone cells, from skin

  cells to liver cells, but there is always more water than anything else.

  And when water freezes, it expands. Put a bottle of soda in the freezer

  to quick-chill it, leave it too long, and you're left with just the

  exploded contents bristling with shattered glass. Frozen water bursts

  the walls of brain cells-all body cell-in a similar fashion.

  No one on the team wanted to revive Harrison from death if they were

  assured of bringing back something dramatically less than a whole

  person.

  No good physician, regardless of his passion to heal, wanted to battle

  and defeat death only to wind up with a conscious patient suffering from

  massive brain damage or one who could be sustained "alive" only in a

  deep coma with the aid of machines.

  Jonas knew that his own greatest weakness as a physician was the

  extremity of his hatred for death. It was an anger he carried at all

  times.

  At moments like this the anger could swell into a quiet fury that

  affected his judgment. Every patient's death was a personal affront to