So he probably wasn't dying. Good to know .
Claire, his partner, was sitting beside the gurney. She smiled at him. "Ironic," she said.
Jack shook his head—or tried to. That was when he learned he was wearing a whiplash collar. "No," he said. His voice sounded far away and echoing to him, and his mouth felt stuffed with cotton. He looked quizzically at Claire. "You gave me morphine?"
She snorted. "Right. I'm gonna dose you Sked One after a suspected TBI. Dream on—or rather, don't."
"I never went under, though I was swirly for a couple of minutes." But his arguments were pointless, and he knew it. No EMP-T with the sense to spell "malpractice" was going to give a possible concussed patient any chem that would potentially put him or her out, because from there it could be just a short stretch down the track to comaville.
Claire leaned in close; he could smell the tart sweetness of the gum on her breath and felt another surprisingly strong surge of nausea. "Listen close, Mobley—you will not fucking die on me. Understood?"
"Yes, ma'am." He didn't know what else to say. He had to drop something into the intensifying silence, however. "Anyway, like I said—it's not ironic."
Claire looked puzzled. Her improbably red hair shimmered as she cocked her head quizzically, unwrapped a second stick of gum, and slipped it into her mouth. Then she meticulously folded the foil and tucked it into the watch pocket of her black 501s. "You're an ambulance driver whose rig was totaled by a DUI. I'd call that—"
"Ironic. I know you would. But it's not." He forgot his circumstances again, tried to sit up, fell back with a groan. "'Irony' conveys a concept that's the exact opposite of whatever you'd expect," he told her. He searched his aching head for an example and, not surprisingly, couldn't think of one. He tried anyway: "Like if I said, 'Yesterday I rolled on a fifty-one-fifty,' and you said—"
"'You're an asshole,'" she finished. "Would that be ironic?"
Jack smiled sheepishly. "No, that would be the truth."
The two of them had started together; Jack Mobley and the rig. Jack couldn't be sure that it had rolled off the assembly line the same time he had completed 1-Basic, but he liked to think so. It was oddly comforting.
He remembered seeing it for the first time in the ER lot, gleaming bright and otherworldly in the halogen glare. The paint job was crisp and clean, the company logo almost three-dimensional; the chrome grips and stanchions unblemished by fingerprints and smudges; the aluminum diamond plate innocent of so much as a single molecule of blood, vomitus, urine, or serous fluid. Even the tread on the tires was brand new.
This pristine condition hadn't lasted long, of course.
Claire Jefferies was already an experienced EMT-D when she'd been assigned to the new truck. The idea of riding a wagon that still had—however briefly—that showroom smell had appealed mightily to her, but the rookie who came with it, not so much. It wasn't that she disliked Jack personally—it was simply the same impatience and vague contempt the seasoned pro always feels for the amateur. Once she felt confident that Jack had fully assimilated what she called "The Awful Truth"—that their job had little, if anything, to do with saving peoples' lives—then she knew that the two of them could face together the ninety-eight-point-six percent bullshit that EMTs had to wade through every day. So that was all right.
The first few calls had been fairly routine, albeit with their share of stomach-churning moments for the new guy. Jack quickly learned about such things as the unofficial but all-too-descriptive Code Yellow and Code Brown, and the importance of seatbelts—graphically illustrated one night by the convertible full of drunken teens that had hit a tree at seventy-five. When they'd arrived on scene there were only two bodies in the car—the other three were impaled on the branches overhead like macabre fruit. One of the boys had been flayed of his pants by the impact and subsequent impalement, and his bowels had let go as part of the universal atavistic fight or flight response. His underwear, stained and still dripping, hung from his shoe. "Hey, look at that," Claire had deadpanned. "Fruit of the Limb underwear."
The choice between losing his lunch and laughing in shocked astonishment had been surprisingly hard. But he'd made the right decision.
You had to laugh.
Then there were the absurdly grotesque cases, such as the man who'd hired a prostitute to blow him while he was riding in a limo. Things were going pretty much okay until the lady of the evening, for the first time in her life, had a grand mal seizure and clamped down, her jaws locking in a convulsive spasm that probably clocked in at over 300 psi. The limo driver, distracted by the client's sudden blood-curdling screams, drove off the road, down an embankment, and into an oncoming lane, where the limo was hit three times and rolled 200 feet. The driver was killed, the prostitute miraculously uninjured, although thoroughly traumatized, and the client suffered considerable injuries from ricocheting around the compartments; not the least of which was an almost-severed penis.
You had to laugh.
You had to laugh because it was either grow a shell thicker than the carapace of a hundred-year-old sea turtle or go fucking insane. Those were the choices, and there wasn't a lot of room for nuance. The door stayed shut or swung wide. It was either TV or real, and, not surprisingly, most of those who lasted opted for the former. EMTs, doctors, firefighters, police, morticians, and all the other professions that dealt with the dead on a quotidian basis…they all had one thing in common: an irreverence for those cooling pieces of meat that had once been animated by personalities, souls, or whatever you wanted to label them. Their humor was mordant, tasteless, shocking…and, ultimately, their salvation.
The situations weren't always that bizarre, of course, but what they did have in common, pretty much all of them, was a life-or-death urgency. It was called by various names: the Golden Hour, the Sunset Hour, or, perhaps most tellingly, the Magic Hour; whatever the nomenclature, they all meant the same thing. If the patient could be stabilized and "lifted" (the term used to apply to medevac helos on a war line; now it simply meant getting the Dump to the ER STAT) to treatment within an hour of First Response, his or her chances were about as good as could be expected for survival. The survival probability dropped precipitously after that first sixty minutes; Jack had seen patients go from "Stable" or "Fair" to "Critical" in less than five minutes. They'd once brought in a knife victim who'd had his femoral artery cut. They'd got him stable (they'd thought), but had neglected to notice a very slight nick in the brachial artery from the same blade. The latter had popped during offload; the guy was dead before an intern had noticed the rapidly spreading red stain beneath the shock blanket and the corresponding BP drop from the bleeder.
"Look at it this way," Claire said. "We did our job."
Jack stared at her. "How so?"
She shrugged. "We delivered a stable patient to the ER."
Jack shook his head in disbelief. But in a manner of speaking, it was true: you couldn't get more stable than dead.
Like they said in ICU: "Bleeding Always Stops."
2
CLAIRE WAS GOOD at her work, and apparently enjoyed it. She seemed never, or at least hardly ever, at a loss for what to do in an emergency situation. Once, when they were both 10-10 and had no equipment, Jack saw her save the life of an assault vic with a crushed windpipe by using a rusty razor blade to give the guy a voodoo tracheotomy and the hollow barrel of a ballpoint pen to hold the ragged incision open until the responders arrived. The more dire the situation, the calmer and more collected she was. Jack thought she had a great potential career in Emergency Medicine, and told her so once.
She'd agreed, but not with the enthusiasm he might have expected. "Money's not bad, God knows," she'd answered, "and there's job security."
"Plus you'd be helping people—always good for karma," he'd responded.
Claire had looked at him for so long he'd started to wonder if she'd had a microstroke or a TIA. Then, in a voice as dry as cremated ashes, she'd said, "Karma. Right."
They never spoke of her career again.
They didn't speak of Jack's, either, because they both knew that he didn't really have one. He was cool in a crisis and he could pilot the rig well enough. He was a decent paramedic who could, as one of the nurses once said, tell a spleen from a bladder without having to refer to a diagram scribbled on his palm, but that was about the extent of it. Everyone knew that Claire had the spark. Jack was just the driver.
Or so it was until that day when the drunk in the classic Fairlane came from out of nowhere while they were Code 3 through an intersection and sprayed styrettes, ampoules, bandages and meds—not to mention a copious amount of Jack's blood—all over the glistening black asphalt at three P.M. on a scorching summer day.…
It's pretty much an uncontested truism that doctors, nurses, et al., make the worst patients, and Jack Mobley did nothing to subvert that particular paradigm. He was a pain in the ass about taking his meds. He kibitzed whatever they injected into his shunt. He bitched about the food, the temperature, the bathing.
He had a broken leg, a punctured lung secondary to a shattered rib, and a concussion. "And you're lucky that's all you have," Claire told him. "He hit you dead bang at nearly thirty-five. So stop being such a prick to everyone and be glad you're alive."
Claire herself had suffered nothing more than a mild concussion and a Technicolor ear; she'd been riding in back with the victim, getting his vitals. That poor bastard, splinted and strapped to the gurney and bound for the ICU for nothing worse than a dislocated patella, had come out by far the worst; he wound up a quad, with his spine severed in four places. The drunk driver in the Fairlane survived with hardly a scratch, due to two reasons. The first was that he was drunk, which, as everyone from the twenty-year department head down to the rankest intern knows, often lets you squirt and slither like Plastic Man through accidents that could put a sober man in a cast from his toenails to his hairline. The second reason was that he was driving a 1954 piece of Detroit iron that could take on a German Tiger tank without breaking a metaphorical sweat.
Jack was, he knew, indeed lucky.
He didn't feel lucky, though. He just felt scared, because he shared one more prejudice in common with just about everyone in the various fields of the medical profession: that hospitals were the last places on the planet one should be if sick.
3
In the last forty-eight hours before he was discharged, Jack was upgraded to "stable." This meant several things, the most important of which was that, by the strange logic of the ICU, he was no longer accorded the comparative luxury of a room to himself. The official designation of his new room was "semiprivate," which meant there was room for one other patient.
When they'd gurneyed Jack in, the privacy curtain was open and the other bed empty. He hoped it would stay that way until he was discharged, but no such luck. He was awakened just after midnight by a hoarse whisper coming from the other bed. The curtains were closed now and the lights dimmed. But someone was obviously occupying the bed, and judging from the stentorian rasp of his voice, he was much older than Jack.
"Do you see them?"
His new neighbor's voice had the phlegmy congestion of one who spent a good deal of his life prone. There was another accent as well, which Jack couldn't place, one which clipped the consonants and the ends of sentences sharply and precisely, like neatly trimmed fingernails.
There wasn't even a question of Jack responding. The last thing he wanted to do was open himself up to an endless dialogue in the midnight hour with some old fart who was at least semidelusional, judging by his opening conversational gambit. Something told Jack that the old man was a "frequent flyer"—a term applied by staffers to those who checked in with imaginary illnesses because they craved the attention. Jack had hauled a fair number of such folk in the rig to the ER over the past few months. What they did with them afterward wasn't his problem. But it was beginning to look increasingly like this one was.
"Do you see them?" The voice was louder, the tone more preemptory. Jack reluctantly realized that it was no good pretending he was asleep. The old guy was on to him.
"See who?" he asked.
"Ein krankegeisten."
The foreign words crystallized the accent for him: German. He didn't recognize the subject of the sentence, however, his experience with the language being limited to a semester in college three years ago. Curious in spite of himself, Jack made a vaguely interrogative grunt.
" Bitte , the…" The old voice, full of creaks and hesitations that, for some reason, made Jack think of a sun-dried piece of leather, paused, searching for the right word. "The…sick spirits…spirits, nicht wahr ?" The voice was silent for a moment; once again, Jack presumed, leafing through the pages of an unfamiliar mental dictionary. When he spoke again, his tone held an unmistakable certainty.
"Ghosts. The sick ghosts."
Jack had no idea how to reply. He supposed that if one might see sick ghosts anywhere, a hospital would be the logical place. And one thing he'd learned about psychotics was that, contrary to popular belief, their fantasies were nearly always logical— if you were willing to give them their initial delusion. David Berkowitz's compulsions to kill, for example, made a twisted sort of sense once you accepted the admittedly hard to swallow premise that his neighbor's dog was possessed by a demon who controlled him. Or take the granddaddy of all psychopaths—Charles Manson. Once you were across that particular Rubicon of irrationality that equated killing pregnant starlets and other members of the Hollywood elite with legitimate protest of the Vietnam War and the military-industrial complex, a certain bizarre logic followed—and there was probably already a bunk with your name on it at the old Spahn Ranch.
But Jack wasn't willing to take those leaps of faith, no, thank you. He'd heard of poltergeists, of course, but he suspected that krankegeisten was just some bizarre Teutonic portmanteau word that the guy'd invented.
He made no reply, and heard nothing further from his mysterious neighbor; not even the raspy breathing he'd noticed earlier. For a moment Jack felt concerned—what if the fellow had suffered an MI or something similar?
He located the station buzzer, wondering if he should page the night nurse. He looked at the wall clock and realized with a shock that it was 2:40. He'd taken a Vicodin for the leg-pain over an hour ago, and a half hour after that he'd been given a milligram of Clonazepam to help him sleep. It was as if the one-two punch had just been waiting for the realization.… Jack abruptly felt a huge load of cotton bricks hit and bury him.…
4
At the behest of his professors, in his last year of college Jack had read several novels of classic horror: The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , by Robert Louis Stevenson; and of course, Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus .
He'd enjoyed Wells's book the most. He hadn't expected to like Dracula , as he'd never been fond of epistolary storytelling, but the book had surprised him; it had an unexpected humor, and it moved along at a steady pace and kept him immersed, whether in exchanges of letters, diary entries, or whatever other medium the author had chosen.
The only one of the four that he had found incredibly, unremittingly dull was Frankenstein . Perhaps he was used to the inarticulate pathos of Karloff in the old cinematic versions of the tale; certainly Boris could convey volumes more with a poignant look, even concealed under the thick slabs of Jack Pierce's mortician's clay makeup, than the acres of exposition that Shelley had her character declaiming on every page. To make matters worse, she used pronouns that were archaic even in her day: thou, thy, thine, and so on. The result, as far as Jack was concerned, was a slow, cumbersome, and decidedly non-scary book. He remembered scenes from the other three tales quite vividly—Dracula crawling up the wall of his castle just after feeding, bloated and corpulent as a gigantic leech, for example; he'd even had nightmares once or twice as a result. But the only things he recalled from Shelley's magnum opus were th
e ending in the Arctic and the scene where a weary Dr. Frankenstein is awakened abruptly by the sight of his hideous creation standing at his bedside, silently appraising him. That was powerful stuff, he'd thought.
And so he was understandably upset to find himself suddenly awakened in a replay of that scene, with himself as Frankenstein.
It was a sudden jangling sound that jerked him from his drug-induced sleep, and the jolt of adrenaline that immediately followed nearly put him into cardiac overdrive. The rattling that had awakened him had been the metal hooks on the curtain's runner being suddenly and violently yanked aside to reveal the creature that now loomed over him, glaring. In appearance it did somewhat resemble Frankenstein's fictional creation: the corpse-like pallor, the emaciated limbs, the long, patchy hair. An oversized gown hung from the skeletal frame like a houserobe on a drying rack. After an eternal moment of blood-freezing terror, Jack realized that this apparition had to be the old man from the neighboring bed, who had evidently grown tired of waiting for an answer.
"Ein krankegeisten!" the revenant hissed at him.
Although he'd figured out who it was (any lingering doubts were dispelled by a quick sidelong glance at the room's other bay; the curtain had been pulled back there as well and the bed was empty), the knowledge did little to reassure Jack of his immediate safety. Even though the old man looked like he weighed about ninety-five pounds and his age could match his weight, still, the incredible malevolence in his face sent Jack scrambling back the length of the hospital bed. Instinctively he groped for some kind of weapon or alarm and his fingers found the station buzzer. His brain screaming like a smoke alarm, Jack closed his eyes and pushed the button.
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