The Edge of Death: (Sequel to ADRENALINE)

by John Benedict

“I’ll drive you there.” Chip stood.

  “You mean tonight?” she asked. “What’s gotten into you?”

  “It’s really important. I think you’ll want to see these pictures.”

  “Well, I’d like to help you out, but my enlarger’s busted,” she said, sounding genuinely disappointed. “Just take them to Rite Aid.”

  “I was hoping you’d develop them. Using the Kirlian technique. I don’t think Rite Aid offers that service.”

  “No, they don’t.” She half smiled and eyed him curiously. “I guess I could. But what would be the point? I mean, who believes in Kirlian photography, anyway?”

  “I’d like to give it a—”

  “It’s a bunch of crap, right?”

  “I’m sorry I said—”

  “That’s crazy talk, right?”

  Chip groaned and held up his hands. “I know, I know. You got me.”

  “And you made a fool of me in front of Dr. Landry this morning.”

  Chip sighed and looked away. After a moment he said quietly, “I’m sorry about all that. I guess I was upset by the whole Chris thing.”

  Now it was her turn to be silent.

  “Look,” Chip said, “I know Kirlian photography is your baby. Even though I’m not sold on it, I’m trying to keep an open mind.”

  “You didn’t really give me a chance to explain, you know,” she said.

  “What? About Kirlian photography?”

  “No—the whole Chris thing, as you put it.”

  “I guess I didn’t,” Chip said.

  “Will you let me now?” The edge had disappeared from her voice.

  “Sure.” Chip sat back down.

  She met his eyes. “First off, I promise I wasn’t playing games with you.” He thought this sounded sincere. She continued. “I’ve had some bad experiences with guys—real bad. Lied to, cheated on, you name it. Guys can be real douchebags. I’m taking a break from the dating scene for a while. This little stunt—the Chris thing—proved the most effective way of keeping guys away.” She brushed her hair out of her face again. “I’m kinda in the habit of telling my little story, so when we first met, it just came out. I didn’t mean anything by it, honest.”

  “I guess that’s plausible.”

  “It’s the truth,” Kristin said. “And I’m sorry for deceiving you. No more stories, I promise.”

  “All right, thanks,” Chip said, trying hard not to stare at her nightgown, the way she filled it out and the way the low-cut neckline offered glimpses of what lay beneath. “And I promise not to doubt you.”

  “Deal,” she said and smiled broadly, her face lighting up. When she smiled, he thought, she was downright pretty. “Let me put some clothes on and I’ll go with you.”

  “Sure,” Chip said, although he was sorry that the nightgown would be going away.

  She hopped off the sofa and scampered out of the room.

  “What are your pictures of, anyway?” she called out from the bedroom. “The moon or the stars? Planets?”

  “You’ll see.”

  C H A P T E R 5 3

  Tuesday, 11:30 p.m.

  Doug stood tensely against the wall in Laura’s ICU room, trying to stay out of the way. A crowd of solemn-looking doctors, residents, and med students were gathered around her bedside.

  One of the intensivists, Dr. Bagdonavich, spoke up first. He was darkly complected and although his heavy beard was neatly trimmed, it only made his face look darker. “We have been on weaning protocol all evening,” he said in his deep and heavily accented voice. Doug figured he was of Middle Eastern descent. “This morning all parameters look good. Tidal volumes are up to five hundred ccs and NIF is minus forty-five centimeters of water. She’s down to forty percent O2 with sats. ranging above ninety-five percent. Patient is also regaining consciousness. All in all, I believe she is extubatable.”

  Dr. Leffler, the cardiologist in charge of Laura’s care, glanced over at Doug and gave him a thumbs-up along with a warm smile.

  Bagdonavich nodded to Novacinski. Novacinski suctioned Laura’s mouth out with a Yankauer plastic suction cannula, making her gag violently. He then roughly pulled the tape holding the endotracheal tube from her face and yanked the tube from her mouth in one swift motion. Laura coughed, gagged some more, and sputtered for breath. Novacinski plunked a plastic oxygen mask on her face and cinched the elastic band tightly around her head.

  Breathe, Laura, Doug thought. Breathe.

  The room fell deathly quiet, the only sound coming from Laura’s ragged efforts to breathe and the pulse oximeter, which chimed out its findings. The pulse ox tone began to fall as her saturation level dropped through the 80s. Laura coughed and took several stuttering deep breaths. Her pulse oximeter continued to fall and her lips began to shade into duskiness.

  Doug started toward the bedside in alarm—no one seemed to be moving. He felt sure they would need to assist her breathing with the Ambu bag. Finally, Laura took several deeper breaths and the pulse ox began to climb. Her sat eventually hit 98% and held steady. Doug took several breaths of his own and willed himself to calm down.

  Novacinski glanced over at him with a condescending look, one that said “Relax, old man, we got this.” The crowd, all smiles now, passed congratulatory murmurs around and then quickly dispersed.

  Doug approached the bedside and took Laura’s hand. “Feel better?”

  Laura nodded and mustered a faint smile.

  “Breathe, okay?”

  She nodded again.

  He squeezed her hand and she squeezed back.

  “You’re doing so well,” Doug assured her. “You’re getting better by leaps and bounds.”

  She looked up at him, smiling wider.

  “You should be able to talk now,” he said.

  “Be careful what you wish for,” she croaked, her voice very hoarse from the endotracheal tube.

  Doug chuckled.

  “I’m so tired, though,” she said, eyelids drooping.

  “That’s normal, honey. You’ve been through a lot.”

  “I love you,” she said, her voice barely a whisper now.

  “I love you, too,” Doug said, hearing his voice tighten with emotion. He patted her arm and watched her drift off to sleep.

  Doug eased himself into the chair in the corner of Laura’s room and felt his own fatigue taking hold. He had spent so much time in this chair over the past week that it seemed the foam rubber underneath the vinyl covering had begun to mold itself to his body. He was utterly exhausted, but had refused to give in to it, remaining vigilant for Laura’s sake. Now, with her recovery finally taking shape, he could begin to relax. He settled back, willing his aching muscles to rest. But Doug’s mind would not unwind so easily.

  He gazed over at Laura. She was sleeping peacefully. Laura was definitely on the mend and thank God, her mind also appeared to be intact, something never to be taken for granted after resuscitations and the deep coma used in Mueller’s PML. She would probably spend many hours sleeping, courtesy of the pain meds. Doug knew they had dodged a bullet—no, many bullets. He flashed back to the A-10 Warthog they had seen while on the fateful bike ride and its Vulcan machine gunfire. Weird image, he thought, and dismissed it. It seemed the nightmare was coming to an end.

  Still restless, Doug pulled a notebook from his backpack. This was the first chance he’d had to take a serious look at it. A simple two- by three-inch white label on the front of the notebook bore a handwritten title: PML#5. Large blood smears also adorned the cover.

  He had discovered Mueller’s private lab notebook in the same storage cabinet where Chandler had unceremoniously stuffed the researcher’s body. Doug reasoned there must be four other manuals locked somewhere in Mueller’s lab, which was now a crime scene. There was no doubt that Doug had stumbled upon this one because Mueller had been murdered before he had a chance to put it away. Uncharacteristically, Doug had lied to the police on this point and kept the notebook’s existence a secret. He couldn’t say why,
exactly, but he had a feeling that this notebook might shed some light on Laura’s condition. Besides, he felt he had paid a steep price for admission to this weird carnival and was therefore entitled to some special treatment. He would turn the notebook over to the authorities after he had examined it.

  Doug flipped through the pages, trying to extract some meaning, some gestalt from Mueller’s tight scrawl. The entries began one year ago. Doug had no trouble envisioning the bespectacled researcher hunched over his desk, painstakingly keeping his notes. He couldn’t help feeling a certain degree of sympathy for the man. Pathologists, in general, often occupied the bottom rung of the clinical ladder and Mueller, in particular, had been shunned by the medical community, thanks to his morbid research interests.

  But Mueller’s dogged persistence over the years had finally paid off; he had tapped into some unseen potential and his work truly represented a quantum leap forward in resuscitation science. Not to mention, his groundbreaking research was directly responsible for Laura being alive. Doug owed Dr. Mueller a lot. It was a cruel twist of fate that he had been murdered by a patient who had been saved by his research. The whole Chandler story was most unnerving. Was it just an unhappy coincidence that he was a product of Mueller’s lab?

  And what about the accounts from Chip and Kristin—could they be believed? Doug had seen Chandler’s wounds with his own eyes, had wrapped his own fingers around the raw meat that was Chandler’s neck. Surely Kristin was telling the truth about her dog saving her life. But she believed Chandler could read minds. Can he? Is that even possible? Of course, she also toyed with the idea that Chandler was a vampire. Doug drew the line here—her imagination was getting the best of her. But he had to admit, Chandler did seem to be highly intuitive. And god-awful strong. And there was no denying that those neck wounds should have been fatal. There must be some other explanation.

  This brought him full circle to the elephant in the room. What in God’s name was the connection between Chandler and his wife? Another coincidence? As many times as he had glossed over this and tried to rationalize it or ignore it, it wouldn’t go away. The question seemed crucial to his understanding of this whole bizarre circumstance. Sadly, he didn’t seem any closer to an answer.

  Doug turned back to the notebook, hopeful that he could glean some insight into Mueller’s research. Perhaps it would even hold the key to his question. He flipped through page after page of tables and graphs, tables full of every conceivable variable with corresponding graphs and figures to further illustrate the data. He viewed electron micrographs of mitochondria and lysosomes and nuclei and other structures he didn’t recognize or had never heard of. What quickly became evident was that Mueller was exceedingly thorough in his documentation of everything, to the point of overkill. No data was deemed too trivial.

  Doug sighed and ran his fingers across his stubbly chin. It would take days to pore through this notebook and he probably would never understand half of it. His initial hopes began to fade.

  Toward the back of the notebook, Doug found EEG tracings from nine subjects. Several of them showed a segment of the EEG in the high frequency range that was flatline. That seemed peculiar. In fact, Mueller had circled these regions with red highlighter and written several question marks on the traces. The text below didn’t shed any light on the tracings; it just said More clinical correlation required. Doug thought this was uncharacteristically vague for Mueller. None of the subjects were identified by name. Subject number nine was coded 35MNC. But there was also a tenth subject, 40FLL, that had no EEG trace attached.

  The final pages of the notebook were devoted to MRI images of the brain. There were photocopies of MRI scans, again with subject codes. Only four scans were present. On each scan, one particular region of the mid-brain was circled with red highlighter; there was a strange shadow here that stood out from the normal brain tissue. Then Doug noticed that the page numbers jumped from 121 to 125, and he realized that several pages must’ve been torn out. This would explain why there were only four subjects.

  At the bottom of page 121 was an obscure handwritten note, scribbled diagonally in tiny letters. It appeared to be Mueller’s script, but sloppily rendered, probably in haste—not his usual, meticulous writing. It read MRI scans /BM 10/12/ NB: amygdala/ cingular gyrus shadow?? and had a big red X through it.

  Laura began to stir, and Doug closed the notebook, noticing as he did that there was a pocket inside the back cover. In the pocket was a folded piece of paper.

  Laura opened her eyes, her expression confused and fearful. Her gaze darted about the room, undoubtedly trying to find something familiar with which to orient herself, get her bearings. Finally she locked onto his face and visibly relaxed.

  “I’m here, Laura,” Doug said, smiling at her as he fished out the paper. “Everything’s okay.” He unfolded the paper and saw that it was another EEG scan. Like some of the others, it showed the peculiar absence of signal in the higher energy spectrum. The region was again circled in red.

  “Sorry. I forgot where I was,” Laura said in a weak voice. She attempted to clear her throat. “I’ve been having the most vivid dreams.”

  Doug stood, the scan still grasped in one hand, and reached out with his other hand to stroke her forearm. “You’re safe now.”

  “What’s that?” she asked, gazing at the paper he held.

  “Just work stuff. You just concentrate on getting better, honey. We need to get you home in time for your birthday.” Laura’s forty-first birthday was coming up in two weeks. He opened the notebook to put the tracing back into the pocket, then paused. On the back of the tracing, scrawled in Mueller’s unmistakable tight script, was 40FLL. A chill went through Doug as the meaning of the code hit him.

  C H A P T E R 5 4

  Tuesday, 11:55 p.m.

  Kristin opened the door to the basement and stepped onto the wooden staircase; the crime scene tape had been removed.

  “You okay to go down there?” Chip asked, right behind her.

  “Yeah, I’ll be all right,” she said and he saw her jaw tighten.

  “Good,” Chip said, following Kristin onto the creaky stairs. Several steps down, he added, “I didn’t flunk out, just so you know.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “I got asked to leave for cheating.”

  She stopped halfway down, grasped the handrail and turned to study him.

  “I wasn’t even cheating for myself,” he said. “I gave someone a copy of a pharm test.”

  “Someone?”

  “Yeah—a nursing student.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I felt sorry for her and—” Chip stopped himself and cleared his throat. “That’s not quite right. She came on to me and I folded. I know it’s horrible.”

  Kristin didn’t say anything.

  “Don’t look at me like that—my dad looks at me like that.”

  “It’s just—it just doesn’t seem like you,” she said. “You seem like a good guy—you know, honest.”

  “I didn’t lie. When they called me in, I didn’t try to deny it. I knew it was wrong. I didn’t even turn the girl in.”

  They walked down the remainder of the staircase in silence and she led him into the darkroom. Involuntarily he cringed as he imagined meeting Chandler down here in this little room and fighting for his life.

  Several minutes later, Chip gave up on waiting for any further reaction from her. “So what do you think?” he asked. His eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the strange red light; apparently this was as bright as it would get. He wasn’t prone to claustrophobia, but the darkroom in Kristin’s basement felt very confining and the dim light wasn’t helping matters.

  “Huh?” She was busy rooting through her cabinets, looking for something.

  “Of what I just told you?”

  “I dunno. I guess we all make mistakes.” She didn’t sound overly concerned.

  “First,” she said, back to business, “we have to mix a new batch of chemical
s and let them come to room temperature.” She tore open some chemical packets one by one and poured the powdery contents into three separate plastic trays. Next, she turned on the faucet and added water to a Pyrex measuring cup, which she then meted out into the trays.

  “Here, make yourself useful,” she said, and handed him a large plastic spatula. “Stir these trays while I look for my thermometer.”

  Chip stirred the contents with the spatula, being careful not to spill any. He weighed his words for a moment before continuing. “So you really think our friend, Chandler, is a vampire?”

  “Will you guys get off it?” she shot back, turning to face him. “I never said he’s a vampire.”

  He couldn’t read her expression in the dim light, but he was pretty sure she was scowling. “Just checking,” he said, lifting his empty hand in a defensive gesture.

  “But you have to agree,” she said, toning it down, “something weird is going on with him.”

  “I agree there’s a lot of stuff we can’t explain.”

  “Like him being so strong. And healing so fast.”

  “Right,” Chip said.

  “And don’t forget the mind-reading part,” she said.

  “I’m still not convinced about that.”

  “Remember, this morning you talked about keeping an open mind.” She opened one of the drawers. “Besides, you said Dr. Landry wondered about this, too.”

  “What he said was that Chandler seemed to anticipate his moves.”

  “Ah, here it is.” She plucked a thermometer out of the drawer and placed it in one of the trays. “Oh, and another thing. Why the hell did you tell Dr. Landry that my dog’s name was Banjo?”

  Chip couldn’t help smiling. “I got it from a World War Two spy novel.”

  “Huh?” She bent down to get a look at the thermometer.

  “I’ll explain later,” he said.

  “Well, anyway, Chandler anticipated my moves, too.”

  “Right,” Chip said. “But that doesn’t necessarily imply mind-reading. And just because we can’t think of rational explanations for these things doesn’t mean there aren’t any. I’m just not ready to invoke supernatural creatures, like vampires or werewolves, to explain stuff. That’s too much.”