by Schafer, Jon
DEAD AIR
By
Jon Schafer
Book One of The Dead Series
Copyright 2011 by Jon Schafer
Cover Design by Joey Demon
For my Mother Mary and my Brother Steve
Special Thanks to:
Susan Herkness for deciphering my writing and putting it in a format that you can all read and Patti Mercier for doing all the real work, I just wrote the book. If you’re looking for a good editor, you can find Susan on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/susan.herkness. Orlando Fernandez for reading through all my manuscripts and giving me his insights. Steven McIntyre and Kyle Bratcher for their typing abilities. Joey Demon for his artistic abilities and Arne Nielsen for saying, “Use the computers whenever you want, just make sure you get my work done first.”
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Visit Jon Schafer’s website at http://www.jonscatbooks.com/
or friend him on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/jon.schafer.94
Watch the promo video on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0i5CF9QbWY
Dead Air: Silence occurring during a radio or television broadcast.
CHAPTER ONE
Little Rock, Arkansas:
The EMTs wheeled the man on the stretcher through the emergency room doors at a fast trot. A waiting doctor called out for them to put him in room two before giving orders to the staff nearby to prep the injured man. The two paramedics wasted no time in transferring the patient onto the examination table and then faded back along the curtain wall to watch the E.R. workers in action.
In seconds, the nurses had the patients clothing cut off, an airway inserted and an IV started in the back of his hand. The doctor came through an opening in the drapes that closed off the examination room and grimaced at the sight of the man lying on the table.
"Car accident," One of the EMTs offered as the doctor called for X-rays and blood work before starting his visual examination.
"No seat belt," The other EMT chimed in. "We were the first on the scene. Car he was in rolled maybe three or four times before ending up nose down in a ditch." He stopped talking as he moved out of the way of an X-ray technician wheeling in his equipment.
The doctor waved one hand in an impatient 'come on' gesture as he used the other to open the eyelid of the victim to check the dilation of his pupils. Doctor Wendover was a firm believer in the practice of Impact Injury Identification and felt that a physician could better ascertain a victim's injuries if he knew more about the accident that caused them.
The EMT who had been speaking cleared his throat and continued, "Two passengers in the front seats were DOTS."
Doctor Wendover nodded at the acronym for Dead On The Spot as the paramedic motioned to his partner and said, "Jim here started doing a walk around with a Sheriff’s Deputy who showed up, and they found the victim, identified by I.D. on his person as one Darryl Turp, about twenty feet from where the car first hit when it rolled."
At this point, Jim, the other EMT, took over the narrative. "He'd been thrown clear from a position we estimated as being in the rear seat directly behind the driver. Appears he went out the back window headfirst, but that isn't what did all the cranial damage. He impacted a stone wall."
The doctor's face winced slightly as he compared the damage to his patient with the account.
To further clarify the accident, Jim said, "You know those sound barriers that they put up along Cedar Road?"
The doctor nodded.
"He went straight into one. We stabilized his head, neck and spine before transporting him here."
A nurse called out the patient’s vital signs as the X-ray technician took over. Starting with the man’s head, he worked his way down to the victim’s lower back taking twenty-seven shots in all. Twelve of them being head X-rays.
The technician had seen a lot of damage inflicted on the human body in his eight years at the hospital, and this was hardly one of the worst injuries he had ever seen, but it was definitely one of the oddest. The patient’s skull had been literally flattened at the top from its collision with the stone wall. Not crushed, or dented, as he had seen with other head wounds, but flattened so that the man looked like Herman Munster from the old television show.
"I want those stat." The doctor told the X-ray tech and then called out again for his patient’s vital signs. As a matter of treatment, he ordered steroids be injected into the IV to combat the brain swelling going on inside the victim’s skull. As the nurse called out blood pressure and pulse, Doctor Wendover nodded. The good news was that despite the head trauma, the victim of the crash was doing surprisingly well. There appeared to be no signs of bleeding inside the cranium, and despite the obvious crushed skull, the man appeared stable. The bad news was that in the long run it wouldn’t matter.
Doctor Wendover had worked as a surgeon at a forward base in Iraq during the invasion and had seen numerous head trauma cases brought in. He had learned from his experience in that desert war, that the human brain could not sustain this much damage and go on functioning at anything but a completely diminished capacity. If at all.
As if to prove this point, the EEG monitor came to life, showing a bare minimum of activity. Wendover knew there was little he could do for his patient but decided not to let his suffering be in vain. A case like this would have to be worked up anyway, and since it was somewhat unique in that the man was even alive at all, the injuries would need to be documented. While there would be no reprieve for Mister Turp, what they learned from him might help others. With these noble thoughts going through his mind, Doctor Wendover gave the orders that would have consequences felt around the world.
"Have him cleaned up and send him over for another run of X-rays, and then send him over to Neurology. Have them run him through the new deep scan MRI over there so we can get a clear picture of the damage. When they’re done, pass everything on to the neurologist."
One of the E.R. nurses, who had worked with speed and efficiency up until the EEG came back flat, acknowledged the order with the barest of nods as she went about the business of moving the brain dead lump of flesh from point A to point B.
The doctor told his staff to call him if there was any change in the man's condition, and followed by the EMT's, went out to have a quick smoke. As they exited the hospital, Jim, the Paramedic who had found the victim, spoke up. "Did I ever tell you guys about Jimmy and Suzy Carrot?"
The two other men shook their heads as they lit up cigarettes.
"Well Jimmy and Suzy Carrot were walking down the road one day when a truck comes along and BAM! Runs right over Jimmy Carrot. They rush him to the hospital where the surgeon works on him for six hours straight. When he's done, the doctor walks out into the waiting room where he finds Suzy Carrot crying her eyes out. She sees the doctor and rushes over to him asking how Jimmy is."
"The doc says, 'I've got good news and bad news.' So Suzy says, 'Give me the good news first.' The doc says, 'The good news is that Jimmy Carrot will live.' Relieved by this, Suzy Carrot asks, 'What's the bad news?' and the doc says, 'The bad news is that he'll be a vegetable for the rest of his life.'”
The three men laughed as they stood in the cooling Arkansas night.
***
Darryl Turp was hungry, but then again he was always hungry. One of those rare people who suffer from Prader-Willi syndrome, a condition caused by bacteria attacking his hypothalamus, he had an insatiable appetite. Even now, wi
th his head crushed and his mind dwelling in the twilight area of a coma between life and death, the basic instincts in what was left of his ruined brain called out for food.
Normally, Turp’s medication alleviated his compulsion to eat to some degree, but on the night of the accident he had purposely neglected to take it. He knew he was playing with fire but sometimes he just couldn't resist. He loved to eat.
Although the consequences of his disease could be harsh, cases had been reported of people eating so much that their esophagus burst, Darryl was willing to play around with his medication dosage when certain opportunities presented themselves. Like that evening for instance. It was all you can eat night at Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Finger lickin’ good.
Now, lying on a hospital gurney, Darryl had no recollection of the accident. In fact, he had no recollection of living the past twenty-eight years of his life, but he did recognize that he was starved. Although most of his brain had ceased to function, his disease still sent the signals to his body telling it that it needed nourishment. It was this compulsion that led to the car wreck in the first place.
He had been riding in the rear of his friend’s car, urging him to go faster as he pounded on the back of the driver’s seat in rhythm to his chant of 'speed for feed', when his fist went past the edge of the seat and hit his friend on the arm. The car swerved onto the soft shoulder of the road at seventy miles per hour, and when the driver overcorrected while trying to regain the asphalt it struck a discarded tire and started to roll. The front end came down first, causing all the windows to burst outward and the impact to push Darryl down in his seat before the counter force ejected him neatly out the missing rear window without his body even touching the molding around it. He was aware of the car rolling away from him as he sailed through the air. Looking down, Darryl saw deep soft grass and thought he was going to make it. Until he looked up and saw the wall rushing toward him.
What had once been Darryl Turp felt movement as the gurney he was laid out on started its trip down the long brightly lit halls of the hospital. Too many times to count, his body was transferred onto hard sterile surfaces where his head was subjected to multiple X-rays, CAT scans, MRI's, and finally a full work up by the resident Neurologist.
If Doctor Wendover had waited for Darryl’s blood work and chart before ordering this series of tests, he would never have subjected his patient to a bombardment of steroids, radiation, and magnetic resonance. He would have noted that the man suffered from Prader-Willi syndrome, and after consulting with various neurosurgeons and radiologists, would have decided it was best to leave Darryl a vegetable to wither slowly on life support. Just another Jimmy Carrot. Instead, he created a monster.
The steroids mutated the Prader-Willi bacteria that infected Darryl while the diagnostic scans and radiation then caused the disease to become more active in seeking out and opening long dormant areas of the brain while shutting others down in its quest to evolve. This new strain multiplied at a rapid rate and quickly crossed the biological barriers to infect all the body's living tissue and nervous system. Like any bacteria, this new strain was then vulnerable to infection and was attacked by a variety of the H1N1 flu that Darryl had been fighting for the past few days. This further distorted the bacteria, creating an entirely new strain. Now it had become a communicable virus, one that had never been seen before on the face of the Earth.
By the time Darryl was halfway back to the ICU unit where he would be kept for future study; his body had given over completely to the new disease, which then started shutting down all functions that sustained life so that it could complete its biological takeover. Shortly after being moved onto his new bed in intensive care, the virus caused Darryl to have a seizure and go into cardiac arrest. Within seconds his heart failed.
Since he had been the admitting physician, Doctor Wendover was called and arrived just in time to watch the ICU doctor pronounce Darryl dead. The two doctors then went to fill out the resulting paperwork, leaving an attendant to cover the deceased and move the late Mister Turp to the morgue.
The attendant, a man by the name of Jodi, removed the airway and medical monitors, tightened down a strap around the body’s chest, and arranged its hands in a reverent manner before covering the dead man’s face with a sheet. He unlocked the wheels on the bed and had just started out of the room when Darryl’s body gave a spastic jerk. From past experience, Jodi was used to different reactions from the dead so he wasn't too concerned. Some burped, farted, and he even had one sit up when he had forgotten to secure the chest strap.
He remembered that particular instance with good and bad memories. He had been wheeling the deceased past a crowd of nurses at shift change and there were about eight of them clustered in the hallway going over charts. With a blast of intestinal gas, the dead body he was transporting lurched into a sitting position as the sheet dropped away from its face. The nurses stopped what they were doing and looked at the scene with a variety of expressions ranging from disgust to amusement.
Seeing he had an audience, Jodi stepped back, raised his hands to the heavens, and in his best mad doctor voice said, "It's alive. Alive I say."
Two of the nurses laughed, one of them being a cute redhead he later talked into going out with him, and that was the upside.
The downside was that one of the other nurses present, who happened to be the head floor nurse, did not find him amusing and filled a complaint against him for unprofessional behavior. Got to take the good with the bad, Jodi thought. At least I ended up doing the redhead so it wasn't a complete loss.
As Jodi wheeled the cadaver down the hall past the nurses' station, it jerked again and then suddenly began thrashing from side to side and its hands began moving under the sheet. Stopping abruptly as he watched what was supposed to be a corpse do the herky-jerk, Jodi thought, holy shit this guy's moving too much to be dead. I think the doc screwed up and he's alive.
It was true that Darryl Turp was moving, but Jodi was wrong in thinking that he was alive. The bacteria had shut down his cardiovascular activity and brought all of his bodily functions to a halt while the new mutant parasite that infected Darryl only reactivated the lower functioning sections of his brain. The heart did not pump, nor did the lungs take in oxygen and put out carbon dioxide, but the brain’s base instincts had been awakened and the body's nervous system was now operating. The hypothalamus had taken over command of the part of the brain that drove humans to seek sustenance and it now sent an urgent message to the body.
Feed.
Jodi looked around wildly for help, only to see the last person in the world he wanted nearby at that moment. It was the same bitchy nurse with no sense of humor who had written him up for doing his mad doctor imitation. And she was watching him.
The nurse glanced at the writhing body and a scowl darkened her features before she pinned Jodi with a sharp look. She was about to open her mouth and tell him to quit fooling around or she would have him fired, when she noticed the shocked expression on his face.
Just then, the body jerked again, and this time a hand came out from under the sheet to grope around on its chest to try and find what was restraining it.
"He's-he's-he's-alive," Jodi stammered out.
The nurse flew into action. Calling on reinforcements, she ran around the desk and elbowed Jodi out of the way as she grabbed the front of the wheeled bed and started pushing the body back into the room it had come out of. When she had it inside, she pulled the sheet off the dead man. Seeing he was gnashing his teeth and whipping his head back and forth, she grabbed one of his flailing arms so she could try and get a pulse.
"Call the doctors back," she yelled to no one in particular as she finally managed to get a finger on where the patient’s radial pulse should be. Feeling nothing and assuming it must be too weak to detect, she grabbed the blood pressure cuff and wrapped it around the late Darryl Turp's arm as another nurse tried to place a respirator over his face. Darryl’s whole body had turned grayish-
blue, showing signs of what she thought was cyanosis, but what was really just the color of the dead.
Jodi was standing nearby, watching all this with amazement, when the head nurse turned to him and yelled harshly, "I told you to get those doctors back in here. Now move."
"I don’t know where they went," Jodi replied helplessly.
A page came over the public address system, calling for Doctors Rahjib and Wendover to come to the ICU on the double. Another voice called out from down the hall that the crash cart was on the way. Jodi pointed up at the ceiling from where the announcement had come over the speaker mounted there as if in answer to the nurse’s order, and stood his ground. He didn't want to miss any of this.
She shook her head and replied, "You have to go down to the doctor’s lounge on three and check. The speaker in there is busted so they won't hear the summons."
Reluctantly, Jodi trudged down the hall and went through the door that led to the stairs. He was disappointed that he would miss all the action and paused for a moment, saying, "Shit," before continuing on. He knew that any time a page went out for one of the doctors that the nurses on three sent a candy striper to the lounge with the broken P.A. system to check if the doc being paged was there. As he made his way down the stairs to the third floor, he cursed the head nurse who had sent him on this fool’s errand, not knowing that she had just saved his life.
Even as Jodi was halfway down the first flight of stairs, Doctor Wendover and Doctor Rahjib raced down the hall toward Darryl’s room from the other direction. As they entered the room, they took in the situation at a glance and moved forward to look at the now struggling patient whom they had pronounced dead only minutes before.
"Vitals," Doctor Rahjib called out.
The nurse looked down and said, "Blood pressure's-," then stopped with a confused look on her face.
