“Smell that fresh air? We’re finally back to nature, my friend.”
“I only smell burning,” I said, sniffing.
We got out, pulling our rods and tackle out of the truck. We went over to the thicket, underneath the sad singed boughs of the willow. It was like only our little spot in the forest was spared the conflagration. We cleared off debris, knocked off some branches, and hauled up the battered yellow canoe from our hiding spot. We shook out the spiders and other critters, wiping away the webs and ashes and kicking away trash, then brought it down to the water’s edge. Both of us turned our Atmans onto the alert-only setting. We loaded up and disembarked, myself up front and Lanza in the back, as always, paddling hard in the runoff from the monsoons which had washed down from the worn nubs of the Kittatinny Ridge.
“Come on, Joe. Slubby’s Hole is only a half-mile up on the far bank,” Lanza said. “The Yah-qua-whee hides there in the summer, the old fishermen tell me. We’ll be there in no time.”
“A half-mile? It seemed a lot shorter last time,” I said, my arms already aching after just a minute of paddling.
“Come on, this was easy when you were sixteen,” Lanza whispered.
“Exactly,” I said, breathing hard.
After much toil and strain, we made it to the Hole, the cove in the current’s shadow. We slipped our poles out and cast a pair of flies out into the current.
“You think we’ll see him this time?” I said.
Lanza looked at me silently, his finger raised to his lips. I scoffed at him.
“If there’s only one fish, then why are we whispering?” I whispered.
“Because the Yah-qua-whee is smart,” Lanza hissed. “I’ve seen him. And it’s not just me. At my Sunday flea market, I overheard a couple oldtimers talking about spotting him in some shallows, a big row of hooks in his lips. He’s got huge lips, and double-size fins, they say. The acidity of the Messowecan doesn’t affect him. This fish is smart enough to swim off, first thing he hears. Nothing can catch him. Except us.”
I shook my head at my friend’s irrepressible boyish wonder and watched my fly float along. I let line out, but it when it drifted close to Lanza’s, I reeled in. I cast again.
We fished for hours, occasionally snarling the line on the skeleton of the car or some other waste under the waterline. We occasionally put the poles down and dipped our paddles into the current, repositioning ourselves in the calm glassy waters of the cove. We sat in silence, the crack-gush of a new beer the only sound besides the distant whistle of two drones circling high overhead. The day was crisp, silent. The light played all around, seemingly alive on the surface. It was nothing like the deep, dark dream river of the night before. But for some reason, I felt a chill reflecting on that nightmare even in that bright light of day. I readied myself to cast for the two-hundred and sixty-sixth time—I kept count, I always kept count—when Lanza tapped me on the shoulder. I spun around. Lanza’s brow was furrowed at me.
“You alright, bro?” Lanza said. “Overcome by the baby news?”
“Something like that,” I said. I set the pole down and picked up the paddle to push us away from shore. “I’m thrilled. It’s just kind of unreal right now. After everything Mary and I went through, it’s hard to believe it actually is happening.”
I sighed, and paddled hard away from the bank, stopping the canoe in the middle of the calm water, covered with a shiny slick of industrial fluids.
“But there’s something else. A work thing—this kid who died in the hospital,” I said softly. “There’s no reason he should have died. He was in a bad car crash, but we had him on his way to recovery.”
“Joe, aren’t there always people who die for no reason?” Lanza said.
“Sure, people die,” I said, stowing the paddle beneath my feet. “But we can treat almost anything now. And if we can’t, at least we know the reason.”
“What did the medical examiner say?”
“There wasn’t one. Just the automated O.N.K. autopsy. All tests were normal—his heart just stopped beating. Cause unknown.”
“What’s telling you there’s something wrong? Did you see someone messing with his medicine or something?”
“No. But I did find out that somebody stopped by the room in the middle of the night, using a fake name.”
“Shit,” Lanza said. “Wait—was this Cruzen? The Fireball kid? The dumbshit who crashed his car and burned down half the state forest just down the road there?”
“One and the same.”
“Damn, Joe,” Lanza said. “I responded to that call. One of the other detectives processed the accident scene. We thought it was impossible for one exploding car to cause all that damage—even with the natural gas leaks. Even less likely the kid crawled out and made it all the way to the road to be rescued.”
Lanza shook his head.
“Weirdest thing, though. There was a stampede of footprints around the car,” he continued. “We marked it all down in the notes. But the prosecutors wanted to keep it simple—pressure from above and all that. So we kept it simple.”
I turned around to face him.
“Kept it simple? Pressure from above? What the hell are you saying?” I asked.
Beeping—a flittering, unnatural sound—broke the silence around us. Both of us reached for our belts. Each of us pulled out a beeping Atman. The sound of panic—the emergency page. Lanza whistled, long and mournful, like a tugboat’s horn.
“If we both got called…” he said, tiredly.
“It can’t be good,” I said. “I just hope it’s not like the last time. February.”
“The Bayonne Bloodbath,” Lanza said, shaking his head. “Goddamn, that was bad.”
Those few words conjured up the horror we had lived through just a few months before, flushing a wave of sweat across my skin. Lanza lit a cigarette, picked up his paddle, and pushed us into the current, back toward the shore.
“So…about this dead Fireball kid. Why do you care so much?” he said. “Don’t patients die all the time?”
I picked up my paddle again, pushing the canoe wide of a submerged car wreck.
“Zo, I’ve been a doctor long enough to know what I’m talking about. I’m pretty sure somebody killed this kid. For some reason I don’t know.”
Moments of silence passed as we paddled toward the shore. We hit the beach, I scampered out, picked up the tip of the canoe, and hoisted it up onto land. Lanza tossed the gear onshore.
“What makes you think that?” Lanza said.
“There was a person who went in the room. They used a fake name—the same as a military doctor who died a hundred years ago. This dead doctor walks into the kid’s room, and the patient drops dead. My nurse and my boss think I’m crazy. So does Mary. But Old Man Wetherspoon thinks there may be something to it.”
“Ah, Wetherspoon, the cranky old bastard,” Lanza said, stepping out of the canoe, flicking his cigarette into the water. “You know, I could help you take a look into it. But you have to get me some evidence first.”
Together we pulled the canoe onto shore, picked it up, and nestled it back in its spot underneath the old willow tree.
“The minute I know something, I’ll tell you,” I said. “But first let’s get to this call.”
Both of us picked up our Atmans, turned them on, and got the rundown: shooting spree, in Newark, at the Lockheed-Martin Center, hostages, undetermined casualties. We hung up at the same time.
“It’s the Bloodbath all over again,” Lanza said.
“Sounds bad,” I said.
Lanza flicked on the radio. Saxas’ voice was talking about the tragedy at a New Jersey stadium, the latest massacre, and the growing death toll. Her flat tone once again made the unreality of an unfolding nightmare completely surreal. But then her voice cut away to a nasally man talking from the scene, who was panicked, out of breath. I snapped my fingers.
“That’s Jim O’Keefe,” I said. “The same idiot from February. He’s the one who first
called it the Bayonne Bloodbath. He got the number of casualties wrong.”
“The older guy with the thick glasses—the balding one with the squeaky voice, right? What an idiot. Dude gets every story wrong.”
“The Fourth Estate ain’t what it used to be,” I said, nodding.
We sped east. When we pulled in my driveway, I jumped out, grabbed my pole, slammed the door and ran up the driveway. I waved back at Lanza, but the truck was already careening backward, then racing back toward the ultrahighway.
I dropped my pole in the entryway, went upstairs and threw my fishing togs in the hamper, then whisked on a dress shirt and slacks. I was rushing out of the bedroom when I heard retching in the bathroom again. My heart leapt. Was she still sick in there?
“Dear?” he said. “You’re still sick?”
The toilet flushed. Then I clearly heard her breathless voice through the door.
“I was fine for a couple hours. I saw the Newark thing on my Atman. I know you have to go. I’m okay. They need you at the hospital.”
I paused a moment.
“Go, Joe,” she said.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I called out, rushing out and down the stairs.
* * *
Swerving between cars and punching the gas, I made it to the hospital in thirty minutes flat. By then a ring of flashing lights had already encircled the hospital. Shouting, running, sirens, chaos all around. I side-stepped paramedics pushing a gurney toward the back entrance. I darted through a hole in the crowd to the revolving door in the front. In the lobby, I pushed through crowds of people, their wails of lamentation like some apocalyptic vision—a dozen bleeding, a few limping, others just mute and collapsed on the floor. I pushed around the crowd to the staff elevator. I got off on the third floor and jogged to my office. I donned my coat, threw on the stethoscope, then headed down the back hallway and the stairs to the emergency room.
Pandemonium. Blood smeared on the white tiles. People howling, crying, and moaning. Doctors rushed from patient to patient, stabilizing them before moving onto the next convulsing form. A man lay in his wife’s lap, spitting red globules, before he fell limp, and the woman screamed. An unmoving line wound its way to the spiderlike O.N.K. in the center of the room, everyone waiting their turn. I whisked past them toward the nurses’ station, where I found Betty Bathory screaming into her Atman, pounding her fist on a desk.
“…don’t tell me you can’t get me any more blood. We’re out of synthetic, too. We’re dealing with mass casualties. Mass casualties, you bastard!” She listened for a second. “Rufus, you damn well know you have extra O-negative somewhere in that dank cave you call a lab.” Another pause. “Whatever you say—just don’t make me come over there and extract what I need from your still-beating heart, you vampire.”
She smacked the Atman. An orderly crashed into me, toppling me forward into the nurses’ station, knocking the breath out of my chest. Betty glanced up, and a relieved look crossed her eyes. But she blinked, and it was gone again.
“Joe! Where the hell have you been? We’ve already got fifteen pronounced, forty more well on their way.”
“Fishing on my day off,” I said. “I came as quickly as I could. Where to?”
“Come with me,” she said.
We triaged. We treated. We saved. The trauma surgeons moved from room to room, and it was up to me to pick out the patients with the best promise of survival and get them prepped on the surgical tables. I had to focus, ignore the screams and the blood. We sorted some moaning patients on a crooked line for the O.N.K. exam. Some were already long gone—patients on gurneys with brains oozing out of shattered skulls, blood spurting from severed arteries. No medical advances could fix the most severe trauma, even at Saint Almachius. As I went along the rows of casualties, I cataloged the wounds and reconstructed the attack in my mind. But I focused on the evidence of what I saw—not the human tragedy playing out in front of me. I couldn’t get bogged down in all that muck. From what I saw, and my previous experience, a theory emerged: a lone lunatic with an assault rifle, a barrage of gunfire announced with a few shrapnel explosives clustered close together in the stadium. Mostly younger people—some wearing whimsical uniforms, gold and green and glittering. One guy with a broken leg wore a fake mustache and a sleeveless camouflage shirt. His getup looked familiar, somehow. The guy looked like that Steelman character from that gameshow, the one where people did degrading things for money. Without judgment, I patched the guy up, and moved on.
“Did this happen at that gameshow?” I asked Betty as we approached the nurses’ station for an updated list of the living and the dead.
“It was the tryouts for How Low Can You Go,” she said. “As far as we know, one of the people who didn’t make the cut pulled out a rifle and set off some improvised bombs at the stadium.”
“How Low Can You Go—that show with the guy who bites snakes?” I said. “That’s the one Mary watches.”
“Everyone in America watches it except you, Joe. It’s hilarious.”
“I don’t find it funny, either,” croaked a voice from behind us.
A chair swiveled, and there sat Old Man Wetherspoon, an ancient telephone wedged between his head and bony shoulder, white hair in fluffy tufts like a crown.
“Neal, what are you…”
“All hands on deck,” the Old Man said, cutting Barnes off. Lifting a glass of something brown to his face, he pointed with a finger toward the far corner of the room. “Go tend to these unfortunates. I’ll get you the synthetic blood you need—some people owe me favors.”
Betty and I looked at each other, then hurried off. As we reached the opposite end of the emergency room, we spotted a nook we hadn’t seen before. Patients were spread on the floor. The Kraken was talking to one of them, a profusely bleeding man sitting with his back to the wall. Her eyes kept darting down from her Atman to the gaping wound in his abdomen, which dripped steadily onto the floor. But then something solid and fist-size slid out of the hole and plopped onto the ground next to him. The man sprawled, atop his own innards.
The Kraken turned away, heaved, and ran for the bathroom. With each step, splashes of her vomit slopped on the floor.
“What an amateur,” Betty sneered. “Someone! Anyone! Clean up, east hallway!”
I stood there, watching the entire thing in disbelief. Even compared to the Bayonne Bloodbath, this was true horror. The man who had dropped at least half a kidney onto the floor was already dead. I made the tough call. I pointed to a little girl at the end of the room who was crying over her unconscious mother. Together we went over to the child, and I talked to her while Betty cleaned and stitched an open shrapnel gash on her leg. Orderlies hauled the mother to the front of the line for the O.N.K., where she was quickly pronounced dead, and zipped up in a clean white bag. I watched the girl be led out the door by the hand of someone from child services for a long moment. Another orphan being carried off into the foster system. I knew all too well what would come next. But I had no time to think those thoughts. So, I turned back to the line of patients.
Betty and I went from body to body for six hours. The sweat soaked through my shirt and tie, and then into my white coat. Old Man Wetherspoon worked the phones the entire time, completely ignoring the people inside the room, as he wrangled the extra blood and drugs needed from other hospitals. He succeeded in getting a truckload of O-negative natural blood shipped to Saint Almachius, and enlisted staffing reinforcements from Clara Maass Medical Center, who received only a fraction of the casualties in the incident, for some reason.
Blood, guts, agony, and suffering. It seemed like it would never end.
At last, an insidious quiet blanketed the hospital. Only the janitors’ JiffySpiffs hummed on autopilot along the halls, and the stillness was broken only by the occasional outcry of a patient briefly sobering from painkillers. A final tally was taken. Forty-eight people dead, thirteen crippled, and two dozen seriously injured with bullet or shrapnel wounds. The woun
ded lolled about in drugged stupors or lay in comas, waiting in each of their rooms on the third floor for the final verdict. But hope remained for those still living. Some might even be able to walk again someday with the stem-cell treatments. The surgeons went to the breakroom to snort energy sticks while they waited for the next stitch to break, the next hemorrhage to turn critical.
Betty and I went up a floor and separated: she to the breakroom for a pick-me-up to continue her marathon shift, and I went right for my office, where I hung up my stethoscope after an extremely busy day off and swung the lucky test tube around my neck again. I sat at my computer terminal to check the updated hospital records. The Atman rang, and I picked it up by reflex.
“Hello.”
“Yes, hello? Is this Dr. Barnes?” said a man with a wheezy tenor.
“Yes, this is Joe Barnes. Who is this?”
“Hi, Doc. It’s Jim O’Keefe, reporter with Newark FactSecond. I wanted to ask you a few questions about the terrorist attack.”
I pulled the Atman away from my head, cursed softly, then put it back to my ear.
“Terrorist attack?” I said. “Where?”
“The stadium attack. A source told me it’s the work of the Intifada in retaliation against one of the groups for the war.”
“What source? What group?” I said. “And which war?”
A silence. I could hear the reporter’s ragged breathing on the other end.
“An eyewitness told me. It doesn’t matter who my source is—that’s why I came to you,” said O’Keefe. “I need to find out what’s going on. I need to confirm the rumors. That’s my job.”
“I can appreciate you doing your job,” I said. “But you’re doing a terrible job at your job. Listen, I don’t know about what happened, who did it, or why it was done. I don’t think it was terrorism, based on the carnage. In my professional opinion it looks like the February one—the massacre down the road there in Hudson County.”
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