Deathgrip

by Brian Hodge

  Now? Now her eyes were clearer than they had been in years. It was the twist of a cruel knife to realize that she didn’t much like what she’d seen this past week-plus. Too many priorities had turned around or been turned away from entirely.

  She wondered how long it would take until she could walk on her own, strong and unassisted. Because if some things didn’t change around here, she just might feel like doing some walking away from the whole of it.

  And Donny, may God help you if you take Paul and drag him down to the same level you’re at now.

  Worry? Yes, she would, wishing for a remote pair of eyes with which to observe the two of them together. What was said, the guidance given. Donny could no longer be trusted to give a wholly accurate account. And knowing Gabe’s loyalty, there was little use in trusting him, either. Although something deeper nagged about Gabe, amorphous and vague, like a dream submerged into the silt of the subconscious.

  In the light of the dying afternoon, Amanda let her head sag against the chair, for now as confining as a cage.

  I want to walk. I want to run. I want to play the piano. But mostly…

  I just want out.

  The walk back to the dorms was long and tiring, and that in itself ticked him off. Finish that fiasco of a run with Laurel, and before he could regain a resting heart rate, who should come along but Gabe, scooping him up and whisking him away. Not even sticking around long enough to leave him with a ride back.

  Why the rush in the first place? Amanda wasn’t going anywhere. But no, had to be Gabe’s way, according to his schedule, not even time for a shower. Then there was the other thing, too: unspoken, but he could read it between the lines of mannerisms. If Paul didn’t know better — and he wasn’t at all sure he did — he would be tempted to say Gabe had been jealous of Laurel.

  Things around here were definitely skewed.

  Like that dark smudge in the southern sky, now what the hell was that?

  When Paul got to his room, he found a note slipped beneath his door. Laurel’s handwriting, mood swing complete, all is well again. She suggested they forget about cafeteria food tonight and trek north into the city for something a little more upscale. No problem, he could go for that.

  He stowed the note in his desk — her first to him, a historic keeper — then clicked on his TV. Flipped the dial once around, see about catching some news while he readied for the showers.

  Local news, and he stood riveted, hand frozen as he started to tug off his sweatshirt. That innocent wisp in the sky took on tragic meaning. A young anchorwoman stood distant before a background conflagration, Dante’s Inferno festering up through a pustule in the earth. A caption supered across the bottom of the screen identified the location as the Alamo Gas and Oil Refinery, Barston, Oklahoma.

  “…untold scores dead and injured here at what officials are already calling the state’s worst petroleum industry disaster…”

  She was bright and perky, appropriately grave of demeanor and utterly nerveless. This was no mere blaze in the background; it was a firestorm. When they cut to shaky footage of a paramedic crew bearing a stretcher, Paul could swear it was steaming.

  He recalled informational bits and pieces gleaned from sources as diverse as Hippocrates magazine and Richard Pryor, talking about when he’d accidentally toasted himself. The tales of burn therapy were as vivid as they were varied. Paul’s skin crawled every time he contemplated it, there but for the grace of God, et cetera. Few injuries could match a severe burn’s potential for suffering.

  Scores dead and injured, the news had said, and while he could do nothing for the former, maybe he could spare a few of the latter some disfiguring agony. No way could he isolate himself through the buffer zone of television, vicarious concern: Oh look, isn’t that dreadful.

  From a dresser drawer he dug out his road atlas, unused since coming off the close of Donny’s tour. He found that Barston was a straight shot down I-35 from Oklahoma City; he could be there in under half an hour. And while he had no idea where Alamo Gas and Oil was located, once motorized, it would be no hindrance.

  Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

  He had seen nothing like it since war coverage, and nothing short of combat experience could have adequately prepared him. Smoke and fire, chaos and death. The twilight sky was eclipsed by stinking black clouds, then lit hellishly from below. And always, the roar.

  The interstate was shut down well over a mile before the nearest reaches of the refinery, with traffic backed up at least another two miles, bumper to bumper and awaiting a confused rerouting through Barston. A double-line used car lot, inching along while the voyeurs of calamity made sure they got an eyeful.

  This would take forever. Hell with it — Paul cut a sharp right onto the shoulder. He goosed the accelerator and nosed past the others waiting their turn. And was halfway to the blockade and its guardians before realizing that he’d been so intent on getting here, he hadn’t even considered that he had no authorization to get any closer. Sometimes he really took his own near-omnipotence for granted.

  Think fast, dipping into the reservoir of instinct that had allowed him to wing it on radio so many times. No turning back for battle plans now, and if the grim frustration on the state troopers’ faces ahead said anything, it was that they were in no mood to play nursemaid to some ghoul wanting a closer peek.

  A trooper who looked to have zero bullshit tolerance stepped into his path along the shoulder, one hand dropping to his hip, to the holstered pistol riding there. Paul was glad dusk had set, eliminating the need for the mirrored shades they always seemed to wear. It seemed important to see this man’s eyes. Paul slowed, coasting to a stop a dozen feet before him while the lines of motorists veered a creeping left along the barricade of state police cruisers. Five seconds later, and the trooper was fuming at his door.

  “Turn your ass around and get back in line!” The usual toneless courtesy these guys spoke with had gone up with the smoke. He was all furrowed brow and clenched teeth, tight jaws and sweat. “No one’s getting past this point, now move it.”

  Paul looked him straight in the eye, his own soft as a doe’s and aching like a martyr’s. “I’m a priest.” For the first time he was actually glad of his short haircut. “I thought I might at least administer some last rites — please?”

  The trooper’s shoulders lost some squaring. A human being now, instead of an obstacle. “You don’t … don’t look much like a priest.”

  Paul conjured the most benevolent smile he could, both hands resting calmly on the steering wheel. “We all start young,” and then he looked down at his sweats. “I was in the parish gym when I heard the news. Please?”

  The man’s head sagged, tongue wetting dry lips. He nodded with weary resignation, motioning Paul ahead with a single flick of one finger. “Just watch yourself in there, okay, Father? Don’t park too close, and for crying out loud, don’t get in anybody’s way.”

  Paul nodded solemnly and eased his foot off the brake. Once past the traffic jam and the blockade and most of the road signs, he gained an unobstructed view of the tableau ahead. Firestorm as centerpiece, solid burning pillars trying to bake the stars from the sky. Circling them was a ragtag army fighting what looked like a losing battle. Fire trucks sprayed arcs of water and chemicals. Helicopters circled overhead in hurricanes of propwash and turbines. Firefighters in shiny anodized suits ventured toward the malignant oven the refinery had become, while others without suits were as close as the heat would allow.

  He parked on the highway’s shoulder, three hundred yards from the frontage road and the parking lot it accessed. Which looked to have become a center of operations. Paul jogged the rest of the way, sweating rivers by the time he made it into the thick of things. The priestly ruse remaining on his lips in case his presence was challenged.

  He consulted a paramedic at momentary rest, gulping water and scrubbing filthy sweat from his face, and got directions to one stretch of the lot serving as a triage zone. Both s
houting at each other to be heard.

  Paul jogged over, arrived at triage in the wake of a departing ambulance, gone in a scream of siren. He stood in the middle of confusion and babble, ignored for being whole of body, and here was the only place where people were lying down on the job. For they had no choice.

  Eleven of them, at the moment, on blankets spread to cushion them on the asphalt, puny comfort. A couple of medics frantically worked on one down the line. Few of these casualties had much of their clothing left intact, and even when they did, it wasn’t always easy to distinguish burnt fabric from burnt flesh. Even gender was guesswork on some of them, ragged and blackened. A few screamed their agony toward sky and smoke, purgatorial voices whose misery Dante would have been hard pressed to convey. And yet the lives of all had been spared. Those less fortunate were farther away, crisp dark lumps beneath a tarp.

  Although once he’d gotten a better look at the living, Paul wasn’t sure they were the lucky ones after all.

  He knelt beside the nearest casualty, a man grilled from the knees up, awash in the sweet stink of an overdone steak. Burned bald, he was a breathing, moaning roast. With eyes.

  Paul lifted his hand over the man and formed the sign of the cross. In part to maintain his cover, the rest because it simply felt right to do so. Head to beltline, shoulder to shoulder, a quiet strength in the movements, comfort even in this most catastrophic of moments. A center, God’s mercy beseeched.

  Please help me keep my stomach down. He lay both hands on the blackened wasteland of flesh. So hot beneath his palms and fingers, like a raging fever. Brittle and scabrous, so unlike flesh it was almost like touching something insectile. A carapace, and he then took the flashfire of anguish as the man’s burden backwashed into him. Holding tight to his delivery, purpose…

  Hanging in through to the end, when flesh and muscle and nerve began to regenerate beneath their crusted forerunners, forming in layers from bone outward. Broiled hide, displaced by the fresh tissue beneath, flaking away with oozing white blood cells fighting massive infection. Onward, inward, outward, the restoration was total. And while the man looked no better, still grimed with soot and draped in the tatters of charred coveralls and dead skin, scrub it all away and he would be a new man. But inside his head, with whatever trauma the ordeal had branded upon him, he would surely have to fight another battle. But that would have to be with someone else’s help.

  When it was finished, Paul nearly keeled over onto his own back. Wrung out, his sweats heavy and sticky, soaked through. Brain baking within his skull, thoughts slippery as eels, his insides on slow cook. Something was different this time, as if he had dived too deep, absorbed too much.

  Paul shook his head. Swirling, kaleidoscope hell, everything in twos. Balance was shaky at best, and his head began to pound, like a spike driven through his forehead. After another moment his vision stabilized, and he cursed himself, no time to flake out now. The night’s work had just begun; these screaming voices around him, rescuers and rescued, all sounded in far too much pain. The night’s work just begun — he clung to that, no matter how covert the work may be, and he wiped greasy ashen crust from his hands onto his sweatshirt.

  In the middle of flaming chaos, lives and livelihoods reduced to smoking wreckage amid the birth of new heroes, Paul moved on. And on. And on.

  Until he could scarcely move at all.

  Chapter 31

  It was the cheapest renovation ever worked inside the Dawson house. The thought made Donny snort once with suppressed laughter. If he could still see humor, however bleak, then maybe he wasn’t too far gone. The second floor, once upon a time, had been merely that. It was so much more now, though, a neutral territory poised between the two sides of a cold war. Ground floor his own, Amanda’s domain on number three.

  He’d been up there only once today, midafternoon, sneaking over from the offices and venturing a quick peek into the therapy room. Amanda lay in the center of the sort of mat gymnasts trained on, therapist coaching her as she floundered and tried rolling from side to side. Their focus was such that neither had noticed him, and for this he was grateful. Standing there, professional charlatan, while his wife looked like a giant infant, lacking even basic motor control. He’d spun from the doorway to lean against the hallway wall, ashamed of her and ashamed of himself. Plenty to go around for everyone.

  Black Friday.

  He was putting off the inevitable, this was no secret from himself. He would have to deal with her sometime, and deeply, no superficial good cheer and confidence tacked onto his face like rigid greasepaint. He would have to really talk with her, care for her, live with her again. None of which he had to do right now. For while she’d returned to the land of the living, he was still retaining the services of the nurses for her non-therapy hours. Whatever her needs were — bathroom, mealtime, cleanup — they could handle it better than he was qualified to manage.

  Mandy blamed him, he could read it in every fiber of the woman. Her home had become her asylum, and she held him responsible. Which once he might have been able to deal with, if it had been his wife — but this woman he didn’t even know.

  Was it possible to still love a stranger?

  Donny had been thinking terrible things in unguarded moments. Like maybe it would have been better had she died in that coma, or even at the foot of the stairs. So that the memories and her persona would have been preserved, always fresh, always pleasant. There would be guilt and grief, too, of course, but these would scab over in time. They would’ve healed. But as it was, every day was an open wound. A weeping lesion.

  Such thoughts were brief, but the fact of their presence at all sent him to his knees for prayers he could not formulate.

  If only she were as easy to deal with on a personal level as she’d been on the ministerial level. Their latest story being that Amanda was back from Central America and was taking some time off to rest up from the aftermath of a tropical fever.

  I’ve got a problem — there, he’d admitted it, and given that admitting a problem was half the battle, surely that was enough for one night. He could take no more. Diversions, anything to keep his mind occupied. He had already eaten, it was too early for sleep, masturbation was shameful and too brief anyway. Looked like it was TV.

  In the TV room, Donny knelt before a cabinet adjacent to the monster Sony. He scanned videocassette titles, something was bound to seize his fancy. He had all his own Arm of the Apostle shows, of course. Biblical dramas, Disney features, some Hitchcock, more. Whatever held maximum escapist potential would be tonight’s entrée.

  He heard a faint noise, behind him, across the room, and turned. Expecting the nurse. Nearly suffering a coronary when he saw how wrong he was.

  “Paul!” he screamed. Or he thought he did, nothing was clear anymore, and it had just gotten unbelievably worse.

  Paul was shuffling in, reeking of vile smoke even at this distance. His shapeless sweatsuit was stained with ghastly handprints: blood, soot, ash, worse. He bent over, clutching his belly as if suffering severe cramps. He took one look at Donny with eyes that didn’t even seem to be focused upon this world, and promptly tumbled into the floor.

  “PAUL!” And now he was certain he called the man’s name, but no answer, Paul was obviously far beyond answering. Donny scuttled over to kneel at Paul’s side and shook him, pleading for a response. He got only gibberish, protests muttered in a dream.

  With the body in his arms, this all felt as if the hammer of déjà vu had come cracking down upon his head. He lifted the sweatshirt and determined that Paul was at least physically unharmed.

  Perhaps the greatest relief of all, Because I couldn’t do a thing about it if he was, could I? Times such as this were the very worst, when the suffering was real and personal and borne by someone with a familiar face. He couldn’t relieve it, and what cosmic jest or blunder at the dawn of the previous decade had set him to thinking he could? Why the one time, and no more?

  So think, think. Some kind of
illness? Perhaps. But this didn’t account for the state of his clothes, and the smell. Paul had clearly spent some time around mortal injuries. An accident somewhere on the compound? Not likely; word would have reached him by now.

  Somewhere else, then, and what had he done, tried to heal so much he nearly put himself in an early grave? For who was to say that the healings didn’t extract some sort of physical toll on his body after all? Some cumulative aftereffect.

  Gabe. Gabe would know what to do now, could lay his finger on exactly what —

  No, he’d not seen Gabe for hours, not since he’d left the office for his apartment. Only a few miles away, but still too far when time was crucial, and damn it, he couldn’t always be relying on Gabe when reality got hinky and the pressure redlined into the danger zone. What if there were no Gabe? It could always happen.

  He would have to do this by himself.

  Donny charged up the stairs, three at a time, and got the nurse to hurry down and monitor Paul, make sure his condition didn’t falter while he spent some phone time. The phone he had first ignored when Mandy had taken her header down the stairs. The breeze from his passage through the entry hall set the delicate crystals of the chandelier tinkling like wind chimes.

  And God smiled: Irv Preston was at home.

  A minute later, Donny scooped up Paul’s limp form and toted him out to one of the Cadillacs in the garage, then set a course for a rendezvous at the hospital…

  Which was one jumping place this Friday night. Overflow from the disaster down at Barston, and once Donny learned of what happened there, and given that oily stench of Paul’s clothing, the pieces started to fit together.

  In the emergency room, Paul was cleaned up and. over the next seventy-five minutes, given the routine checking-out that anyone in his condition would receive. Vital signs were measured, revealing a slightly elevated blood pressure and pulse rate. A panel of lab tests was ordered. A complete blood count checked for infections, low platelets, dehydration, hemoglobin abnormalities; a differential looked at drawn samples of red and white blood cells. Chemical tests measured his electrolytes to ascertain no imbalances, and a blood sugar looked for high or low glucose. It all checked out okay.