Hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen...
She could be hiding in the park or in the old cemetery since she knows them so well. I pull my jacket tight around me and jog through the cool mist of rain toward the park. When I reach the corner, I look left down Whitaker. What do I see approaching the next square? The pear-shaped silhouette of someone running. He or she is not running like those fools who run for the fun of it. This person has none of a marathoner’s grace. This person is running for their life.
Scarlet.
... oxygen, fluorine, neon, sodium, magnesium...
I am not a runner, but in this case, I must make an exception. I am tall and do possess the highly-prized runner’s ectomorphic physique. In fact, the track coach at good old BC tried to train me at one point, as did the basketball coach, but found me to be lazy and uncooperative. I wish now that I had been an athlete. I am barely to the end of the park and already I’m out of breath and coughing into the crook of my elbow, trying to be quiet so she doesn’t hear me. Fortunately, I’m wearing rubber-soled shoes so it’s unlikely that she hears the slapping of my feet against the pavement.
She’s quite a bit faster than I would have imagined. She may be heavy but she hauls ass. Must be the adrenaline. I don’t need her reporting me and Avery to any authorities. I must catch her. And I’m quite certain that she knows that I will lay her on the street when I do catch her. I can see it now. I will slice open her lower abdomen and pull out a long rope of intestine. I will tie it in knots and laugh as I watch the panic and shock hit her in the face. She knows that I will hurt her; she just doesn’t know how badly.
If she hadn’t broken my heart I might show the beautiful young harlot an iota of pity.
... aluminum, silicon, phosphorus, sulfur, chlorine, argon...
I have to walk a few steps as my smoker’s lungs burn with the intensity of a forest fire. We’ve run quite a distance and she shows no signs of stopping. She runs across Liberty— all four lanes— not even bothering to look for traffic. Smart. Getting hit by a car would be much less dramatic than what I have planned for her. Too bad Avery won’t be there to see it. Perhaps I’ll snap some pictures for him with my cell phone. Pictures of her ruined mouth, her shattered zygomatic arches, her concave skull, her wide and terrified polluted-sea-blue eyes.
... potassium, calcium...
Why in hell is she running toward the river? It’s a real long way there, but the fear seems to carry her just fine. Still, does she think she can swim away once she reaches the water? Does she imagine kind drunks on River Street in the dead of night can protect her from me? I thought she had more sense than to run toward a dead-end.
I follow her down an alley, across Bay Street. She stops on the sidewalk and whips her head side-to-side, perhaps locked in indecision. I lean on a lamp post outside Moon River Brewing Company. She turns to the left and runs to what I know to be the steepest staircase leading to River Street. I watch her begin her careful descent. When I can no longer see the top of her head, I run full-speed to the top of the stairs.
... scandium, titanium, vanadium...
And, in slow-motion, I watch her fall.
Chapter 33 – Caleb
Avery crouches next to her crumpled body as I reach the bottom of the stairs.
How the hell could he be there already?
How could he know?
A foul mixture of elation, victory, disbelief, and sorrow cloud my mind. An industrial vise squeezes the upper hemisphere of my head. A coppery sludge fills the back of my nasal cavity and I know my nose is bleeding.
Avery kneels and presses his fingers into the flesh of her crooked throat. I look from her glazed dirty-blue eyes to his, wiping my nose on my sleeve. He shakes his head and a smile touches his lips. “She’s not dead. Yet.” I help him lift her off the cobblestones.
“Push, damn it,” Avery says through gritted teeth. He’s lifting her shoulders, straining to keep her bloody hair out of his mouth as we wrestle her dead weight into the hearse he drove here. It’s not my fault he didn’t bring a body board.
He says she has a cut on her scalp and that her skull is cracked and open— a compound fracture. Brain injury is a certainty. Pink tissue spills out of the hole in her head. She may also have broken vertebrae in her neck and upper back.
I heave her toward the car’s back door by her considerable squishy thighs. The back of her knee catches on the door’s locking mechanism. Her flesh sticks on the latch and tears open like a sealed envelope. Her right leg folds at a newly forged joint in the tibia and fibula. Jagged points of slick red-streaked white bone poke through the mound of her flesh, reminding me of broken candy canes stuck in cookie dough.
I’m sorry for your loss.
“Would you kindly hurry up before somebody sees us?”
Not much chance of that— the tourists are long gone, asleep in their hotel beds, the bars are closed, the staff all gone home, and even the hobos are sleeping off their drunks elsewhere.
Well, the bitch did rip out my heart, taking up with Avery the way she did. She got exactly what she deserved. My only regret is that I was not the one to crack her skull open. It would have been such a satisfying climax.
At least Avery can’t have her now.
Unless he can bring her back.
“Closest hospital is Memorial. She’ll die before we get there,” I say, looking back at her limp figure. I’m scared. My eyes are bugging out of my head, trained on that fat pink worm sneaking out of her wet hair.
Avery looks in the empty rear-view. We bump along River Street and Scarlet shifts around in the back of the hearse, the worm jiggling, elongating, her head and leg staining the silky white upholstery a messy blotted crimson. “We’re not going to any damn hospital, Einstein. I mean, come on, this is our chance.” He turns to me and bugs his eyes out.
Oh, God.
Minutes later, we haul her through my lab into the tunnel. We huff and puff and bump our way into our Revival House. Avery sets Scarlet’s upper body down on the concrete floor, leaving me to hold her bloody beefy legs as he pushes a dead dog (the neighbors’ Lab) off the table. It hits the floor with a wet cracking sound. It’s the sound of a breaking heart.
I’m sad. My throat closes, my eyes mist, my head hurts. I want to cry. Not for Scarlet, but for the dog.
We hoist Scarlet up onto the table and check her vitals again. She is still not dead. She is unconscious, but a weak arrhythmia throbs in her neck.
“Are you ready?” he asks.
Am I ready? How could anyone ever be ready for this kind of event? I swallow hard and nod.
He grins at me. Leers.
Gooseflesh rises on my arms.
We cut off her clothing. Her pale flesh spreads like a lump of pizza dough on the steel stretcher. Avery stabs her with a needle, emptying a syringe full of some sedative into the back of her fat hip. I know the drug is called fentanyl, but I’m not sure what part of my brain pushes that forward.
“Okay,” Avery says preparing a lot of shiny metal clips, clamps, scalpels, and other instruments, arranging them on a paper-lined, plastic covered tray. “First things first. We need to drain her, right? Just like the dogs. You know how to place a ventricular catheter now?”
I nod my head.
Do I really know how to do that? I’m not sure. My mind is a whirl of half-grasped images and information, like maybe I learned that back in school but can’t quite remember. I keep nodding, biting the inside of my cheek, wondering at the origin of these half-memories. I feel an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. I feel as though I’d done this many times before.
Avery pulls a thin silver blanket from the freezer in the corner. He unfolds it and drapes it over Scarlet’s naked body. I pull bags and bags of cold saline from the refrigerator as he packs ice around her. We need to get her cooled down so Avery can, I don’t know, fix whatever he thinks he can fix. Does he know how? I know he was trained in the management of traumatic brain injuries at the Safa
r Center, but his projection of confidence and level of competency surprises me.
A lot about Avery surprises me.
“After we get her hooked up to the ventilator, then we need to drain her CSF.”
“What’s CSF?” I ask, even though I already know. I am lost in a daze.
“Cerebral spinal fluid, stupid,” Avery says, pulling stuff out of a cardboard box on the floor.
Did we do that with the dogs?
A long corrugated translucent hose with some kind of hollow hook at the end disappears down her throat. Avery calls this intubation and it will keep Scarlet breathing, hooking her up to an old-fashioned ventilator we found on e-bay. It reminds me of my Aunt Billie. I shudder. I am much more at ease working with those who have already undergone this type of care and failed.
Avery uses both hands to shove the two-foot trocar into Scarlet’s torso. It looks like she’s impaled on a stainless steel pipe. “You know her neck’s broken, right? She’s going to need one of those halos. Can you get one?” He flips the switch on the suction machine behind him, sucking the lifeblood out of her, into a stainless steel jar at his feet. A loud mechanical sucking noise fills the claustrophobic concrete chamber, reminding me of my last dental visit, only the suction in the dentist’s office wasn’t amplified by the unyielding surface of cement. I fire up the pounding centrifugal pump and start the flow of saline into her carotid artery. Avery works to place a ventricular catheter, which will aid in draining CSF. He also injects her with some potent barbiturate, working quickly and with great purpose.
Watching with the rapt fascination of a boy devouring his first horror film, I both enjoy and abhor Avery’s work at the same time.
“Yeah, I actually have one upstairs, from some car accident victim that they tried to save at the hospital. He died a week later and the hospital brought him here with that cage thing still on his head,” I said, remembering that particular patron through a fog.
Avery knows I still love this woman and I know damn well that she would never agree to participate in such a process, whether it is in the name of furthering our battle against the timelessness of death or not. Poor harmless PETA-loving Scarlet, wouldn’t hurt a fly. She fled here because of the dogs. Now look at her: a long tube snaking from her mouth, thin plastic lines filled with her most precious bodily fluids protruding from arteries, tape holding her eyelids shut; blind, bleeding, and being force-fed oxygen.
But, the recesses of my mind scream about the bitch not thinking twice about ripping out my own heart and shredding it to so much useless pulp.
I go upstairs and gather the metal ring we’ll screw into her head and its accompanying shoulder harness. Passing through the hallway from the embalming room to the basement staircase, I think of simply running out the front door and never coming back. I could buy a bus ticket, leave all this shit here, yeah, maybe join the circus.
It wouldn’t do any good. I’d never escape Avery.
Back in the Revival House, I watch Avery fiddle with stopcocks and secure rubber tubes with medical tape.
Then, he bends over, rummages in a box on the floor, and comes up with a drill.
“Plug this in,” he says.
“What? What’s that for?”
“Listen, the more questions you ask, the less time we have to make this work.” He grins at me. “Besides, Caleb, you know what it’s for.”
I plug in the drill as he shaves a patch of hair from the crown of her head and excises a wet piece of pink tissue from the crack in her head. I’m glad we won’t have to watch that disgusting thing flapping around anymore.
He places the airplane-shaped drill bit against her bare scalp, the tip just wider than the fissure.
“You might want to find some goggles. And I hope to Christ that’s not your favorite outfit. Things are about to get very messy.” He pulls the drill’s trigger a couple of times, making it go ‘whir, whir, whir,’ as he laughs.
The drill pierces her skin in a fraction of a second. Then the whine of the tool deepens as he penetrates her skull. Blood and a cloud of bone dust spray the entire room. Avery had had the foresight at some time— I don’t know when— to cover most of the Revival House with plastic tarps.
Standing at the top of her head, drill in hand, he is covered in red gore. He’s grinning and blood gathers in the spaces between his teeth. A fine mist of blood and bone covers his face and chest.
We should be wearing respirators. I never thought to bring any down here.
The room stinks of decaying organic matter— dog shit, mold— and electricity.
The poor dogs bark themselves hoarse inside their tarp-covered kennels. They have no idea what’s going on, only that it’s something bad. Something very bad.
“Hand me that screw thing that’s on the tray.”
I examine the tray, lift the translucent blood-splattered plastic sheet, and give Avery the gleaming piece of hardware. He fits it into the burr hole he’s just drilled into Scarlet’s skull, struggling the subarachnid bolt into the snug opening, with his red and slippery gloved fingers. Scarlet now has a glittering silver port in the top of her head.
Through a layer of murk in my own head, I know what he’s doing. He’s placing something called an intraventricular catheter into the lateral ventricle of her brain. Its purpose is to monitor her intracranial pressure. If there is bruising to the brain, it could swell, causing brain death (which we’re not quite experienced enough to deal with yet).
The catheter is also the means by which we’re hastening the draining of her cerebral spinal fluid.
She could suffer brain damage, infection, or brain herniation from this procedure itself. But those are the least of our concerns.
I watch Avery uncoil the thin plastic catheter as I breathe in the drilled bone stink and wipe the veil of blood from my goggles with my gore-splattered gloves. Everything is scarlet.
Next, we struggle her head into the middle of the metal halo. We fit the harness over her fat shoulders and secure it to the metal ring. Avery reaches through the cage, puts his bloody hands on either side of Scarlet’s face and lifts her head, tilting it a bit to the right. Bones grind as he tells me to start screwing the bolts into her cranium.
None of it seems real. It’s like watching a 3D movie through a red filter, complete with piped in odors. But lucid flashes pass through me every now and then, and I know that I’m operating on this woman, my movements controlled by an unseen puppeteer’s strings. It’s unnerving. But exciting and intoxicating. I want to run from this dungeon. Yet, there’s no place I’d rather be.
“Hey, Avery,” I say, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
He laughs.
We sit on the floor playing Uno, feeding the remaining dogs treats and sporadically cleaning up their shit, letting Scarlet chill. I run to the kitchen, bringing back Cheez-Its and Coke, stopping off at the bathroom to clean up and then at my bedroom to change my crusty brown blood-stained clothes. Back in our Revival House, Avery and I play cards some more, talk about old times we shared in Pittsburgh, doze, check Scarlet’s vital signs.
Finally, after about ten hours, Avery gets up, stretches, and takes Scarlet’s temperature. We stayed down there all that time, worried that she might die on us.
“Exactly 32 degrees centigrade.” He smiles and pulls on a fresh pair of latex gloves.
I watch him place a rectal probe inside Scarlet. It will keep her insides chilled, and later it will re-warm her. We hope.
I am skeptical, but hopeful. Hopeful that it works; hopeful that it doesn’t work.
Avery and I head upstairs to get a couple of hours of much-needed sleep, our backs and necks sore from leaning against the stone walls. Our legs cramped from sitting on the floor for so long. We’ve done all we can for now.
I crawl into my bed, feeling the cool sheets gradually warm against my skin, my mind whirling with images of Scarlet. Scarlet the ghost tour ghoul. Scarlet the innocent naïve SCAD student. Scarlet with her silly dreams of making a l
ife in Hollywood. Scarlet and her beautiful cerulean eyes and full black lips. Scarlet and her ever-changing hair.
Scarlet with the tube snaking out of her head and the corrugated plastic snake taped into her mouth. Scarlet with the metal cage screwed into her skull.
My heart aches. I can’t help it.
I wonder if Avery, the shit-heel she chose over me, feels anything at all.
Out of morbid curiosity, I slide out of bed and creep across the hall to peek into his room. It’s dark but I can make out his flattened silhouette.
He’s snoring.
Chapter 34 – Four
Hanging out at the Market just isn’t the same anymore. I guess I finally pissed off all two of my friends. Huh. Well, fuck them. I just hope Scarlet’s not hanging out with Caleb. I think he could really hurt her. I mean, we’re talking grievous bodily harm. Something isn’t right. And since when does she like this Avery dork? He’s all intellectual and shizzle. So not her type. I don’t know where Caleb gets all the fucked up stories he tells me about the guy. Avery seems harmless enough to me. But him and Scarlet? Hm...
I don’t get those two.
Whatever, dude. I’m just going to stop caring. Fucked up human drama.
Who needs it, right?
I must’ve gotten a bad pack of cigarettes— this one tastes like shit. I drop it to the bricks and grind it out with my ‘antique’ soldier boot. I have to duck into the gift shop and buy another pack. A group of elementary school kids crosses my path, every one of them staring at me. I bare my fake vampire teeth, dripping thick red corn syrup down my chin, and tiptoe down the Market after them. A number of them sneak glances at me over their shoulders. They cringe and hug each other. Their teacher, about fifty with gray-threaded hair pulled back into an old-fashioned bun, glares at me and I stop in my tracks. I’m eight years old again, afraid of being sent to the principal’s office. Old bitch. I hate teachers. I was just having a little fun with the kids, trying to make their field trip a little more interesting.
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