by Ted Dekker
The car door swung open and the screech of tires announced the ambulance’s arrival. A paramedic dressed in a white shirt shoved the officer aside. Eyes on Daniel’s lifeless form. He glanced back at his partner, who was wheeling a clattering stretcher on the run.
“Help me with him,” Lori said, breathless from her constant pumping.
They slid him out and, with the second paramedic’s help, heaved his dead weight onto the gurney. Then ran it back toward the ambulance.
Blue and white strobes from the emergency lights flashed on their faces. The rear of the ambulance was spread wide, and a large black case rested on the floor, already open. An automated electronic defibrillator, or portable juicer, as some liked to call it.
“You’re the doctor?” the first paramedic said.
“Forensic pathologist. You have a cardiac monitor on that AED?” she asked. “A manual override?”
“Both,” the first paramedic said. “I’m Dave, he’s José. The wound on his head looks pretty bad.”
She knew what he meant. You don’t just bring back the dead after—what?—thirteen minutes? Particularly those who have taken a direct gunshot wound to the head.
“The bullet didn’t penetrate his skull. With any luck we have pulseless V-fib caused by shock. Keep that wound pressurized, give me your AED, and put him on a peripheral IV, wide open. D5-W, we’re going to need high-dose epi.”
“Almost fifteen minutes?” the one named José asked. They slid to a stop and together the paramedics released the scissoring gurney legs and lowered it to the ground.
Lori dropped to her knees, grabbed Daniel’s black T-shirt, and ripped it open with a grunt. “Just hook him up. This isn’t over until I say it’s over. Either of you do ACLS before?”
“We’ve been around, Doctor,” Dave said.
Not around this, she thought.
“Get an IV into him now. Have the epinephrine ready.”
José already had the AED on the ground, gelled the paddles. Dave was working the bag valve mask on Daniel’s face. The two paramedics had done this enough to develop seamless efficiency, but she couldn’t find any comfort in the fact. Daniel was way beyond the benefits of methodical efficiency. With drugs, electricity, and raw luck, maybe they could beat his body back to life. Like a kick to the jukebox.
“It’s ready.”
She took the paddles and shoved them into the anterior-apex positions—the anterior electrode on the right, below the clavicle, and the apex electrode on his left, just below and to the left of the pectoral muscle.
“Hold on.” Dave was fixing three self-adhesive electrodes to Daniel’s torso to measure cardiac activity. He reached across the body and flipped a switch. The nine-inch screen on the AED popped to life. Dark gray lines ran across the lighter gray background. It wasn’t V-fib, and her heart sank. Asystole, a flatline.
Okay, it could still work. She looked back at her hands. “Clear.”
“We have cardiac activity,” Dave said.
She spun her head to the AED screen. The flat line sporadically jerked. The ventricle in Daniel’s heart was twitching unevenly, refusing to contract. But the muscles were trying.
Except for in movies, defibrillation was rarely used on patients with a flatline. Recovery was virtually impossible.
“Clear!” she shouted.
“Clear.”
José thumbed a switch, and 200 joules of electrical current coursed through Daniel’s chest. His muscles quivered as expected. No arching of the back or violent jump. But plenty of juice for the heart to respond to if it was capable of doing so.
The monitor showed one small blip of increased activity from the sinoatrial node, then returned to the scribbled line.
“Again, clear.”
“Clear.”
José waited another three seconds as the AED recharged, then hit the switch again.
Daniel’s muscles reacted again. This time no reaction from the heart monitor.
“Give him the epinephrine!”
Dave already had the syringe hooked up to the IV line. He shoved the plunger to its hilt, flooding Daniel’s vein with the clear drug. “Hit him again.”
The cardiac monitor blipped once, twice, then returned to a straight gray line.
“Check the contacts,” Lori breathed. “Check them!”
Dave did. The lines remained flat.
She glanced at her watch.
Nineteen minutes!
“Clear!”
“Clear.”
Another surge of electricity. Another small jerk as the muscles responded.
This time there was no reaction from the monitor. Only a high-pitched tone that signaled no activity. Continued asystole.
Dave was still diligently working the respirator, pumping oxygen into Daniel’s lungs. José was still readying the AED for another surge of current. Lori was still leaning over the dead body, knuckles white on the paddle handles.
But something changed in Lori’s mind then. The forces of inevitability pulled the plug, draining the last reserves of hope from her.
“Clear,” she said. Then whispering, begging, “Come on, Daniel. Please. Don’t do this to me.”
“Clear.”
The body jerked a little. Then lay still.
The line on the monitor ran thread-thin.
Silence settled around them. Lori looked to one side and saw that the officer was watching her. As were the two paramedics.
Dave broke the stillness. “I think . . .”
“Give him more epinephrine,” she said.
“Any more could kill him.”
“He’s dead!” she screamed, slamming both paddles on his chest. “You can’t kill him! He’s dead already. Give him more!”
Dave exchanged a glance with his partner, pulled out a second syringe, and emptied its contents into the IV.
“Clear.” Quieter this time.
“Clear.” The rote reply of someone checking off a list he had checked off a hundred times before.
This time Lori didn’t bother looking at the monitor. She just listened for a change in the tone. Only when there was none after five seconds did she glance over.
No change.
“Clear.”
Her mind was spinning with vague thoughts. It was all a mistake. Daniel wasn’t supposed to die tonight. She’d been so sure, so intoxicated by the prospect of what lay ahead.
They hadn’t responded.
“Clear.”
“Doctor, he’s . . . flat. He’s fixed and dilated—certifiably dead. His nodes are totally depolari—”
“Juice him!” she screamed. “I know he’s dead! Now juice him!”
“Clear,” José said.
When the body jerked this time, Lori knew it was over.
He lay on the white mattress, dead. Dead for twenty-one full minutes.
The medical record was spotted with rare cases of resuscitation after long periods of death, the longest being forty-nine minutes in Tyler, Texas, eight years ago. A man struck by lightning had come back to life on his own after being transported to the morgue.
He’d lived for another four days in a coma, then died.
There were several cases of people who’d been brought back after thirty minutes, including one in Poland in which the victim had gone on to live a relatively normal life despite the paralysis of his left leg.
And many thousands of cases in which people had been resuscitated after several minutes. Millions of cases involving some form of near-death experience. But Lori knew all too well that the chances of anyone coming back to life in any kind of normal state after being dead twenty-one minutes were rare enough to be considered impossible.
The still form in front of her confirmed that impossibility.
She settled to her haunches, still clenching the paddles in each hand. She released her grip and heard them clatter to the asphalt. Mind numb, she lifted her hands to her head, covered her face, and tried to think.
Her fingers were shaking, and
her breathing was hot in her face. For several long seconds, darkness swallowed her.
Lori lowered her hands and stared at the lifeless form that had been Daniel Clark. Then she touched his bare belly. Pressed her palm against his clammy flesh.
She leaned forward slowly, reaching her other hand out and touching his chest. What happened next was a product of her basest desire and instincts, not borne of any premeditation or conscious thought.
She lunged forward, shoving the paramedic aside, flung the respirator from Daniel’s face, tilted his head back, and shoved her mouth against his.
She filled his lungs with the contents of hers.
“Breathe.” It came out as part sob, part whisper.
Another deep breath, closing off his nostrils as she had in the car for the ten minutes before they’d met the ambulance.
“Breathe, Daniel.” She blew deep past his cold lips.
Her hand slipped off his chin and his jaw clamped shut on her lip. She grabbed his chin and yanked, sickened by her own desperation.
His mouth flew wide of its own, and a scream filled her mouth.
For a split moment she wasn’t sure if it was her scream or his. Then he sucked deep and screamed again.
Lori jerked back.
Daniel’s jaw stretched open in a scream that rocked both paramedics back on their heels.
His eyes remained clenched and his face contorted with pain. His jaw snapped shut, and then he began to cry. He was breathing. With quick, short breaths through his nostrils.
The monitor beside her was beeping. Fast. Ventricular tachycardia. He was thumping like a freight train. His eyes dilated, his face flung sweat, his lungs hoarded the oxygen. No longer deprived of pulse and breath, he was suddenly animated, frantic and convulsive, an all-inclusive resurrection of life and energy.
Daniel was alive.
MAN OF SORROW:
JOURNEY INTO DARKNESS
by Anne Rudolph
Crime Today magazine is pleased to present the second installment of Anne Rudolph’s narrative account of the killer now known as Alex Price, presented in nine monthly installments.
1983
THE DETAILS of what happened to Alex and Jessica after they were forcibly taken from their small home in Arkansas are not easily reconstructed. The memories of those involved have been whitewashed by pain.
The account you are now reading was carefully constructed during several long interviews with Jessica in a quiet corner of the faculty lounge at UCLA, where Jessica now teaches. Dr. Karen Bates, an expert frequently consulted by the FBI on behavioral psychology matters, and I conducted the interviews with the FBI’s full support, as part of the criminal investigation directed at Alex and Jessica’s abductors. Jessica’s emotional stability was always our priority.
Alex and Jessica’s thirteen-year captivity is perhaps best understood by the influence it had on their lives following their escape from the backwoods of Oklahoma.
The exact date of their flight cannot be determined, but it was in late October, 1981. At seventeen and sixteen years old, Alex and Jessica knew only a fraction of what most teenagers know at their age. They knew how to read the Bible. They knew how to survive one more day. They knew pain. They knew that even a mistimed glance at either Mother God or Father, Alice and Cyril, could end in pain. They knew that Eve, the evil spirit that Alice conjured each new moon, watched them constantly and repeatedly vowed to kill them if they ever crossed him.
And they knew that twice a day, once midafternoon and once in the dead of night, a train rumbled through the forest south of the shack they all slept in.
They had always been vigorously discouraged from asking questions of any kind, otherwise they surely would have known about trains much earlier. But the curiosity that leads to most children’s discovery of the world was squashed from the outset.
Alex was fifteen before he worked up the courage to ask Cyril about the distant sound one afternoon as it passed. “Train,” Cyril said.
“What’s a train?” Alex asked.
“It’s none of your business, that’s what it is,” Cyril said. Then after a moment he added, “Takes bulls to the slaughterhouse.”
A full year passed before Alex told Jessica about the exchange. Although she couldn’t bring herself to talk about the details of what happened that day—or perhaps she could not remember them—Jessica claimed it was a very bad day. Alice punished her, and Alex stepped in to take that punishment, which was allowed under Alice’s rules.
Later that night, when the rest of the house was asleep, the faint rumbling of the passing train reached their room. They each had a mattress, placed roughly six feet apart, and late at night, while they lay still on their backs as was required of them, Alex would sometimes whisper some of his hidden thoughts to her.
That night, Alex told Jessica that he had been thinking about the train. He thought it might go somewhere. When she asked him where, he lay silent for a long time before answering, “Away from here.”
At first Jessica thought he must have lost his mind to talk that way. There was no place but here. And even if there was, it was none of their business. She refused to talk about it and eventually fell asleep.
Still, Alex’s comment lingered in her mind, and she brought it up again several months later when they were scooping water into a bucket for Alice’s weekly bath.
This time he told her to shut up.
There was no train and she had no business thinking about where the train might go, even if there were a train.
She thought he was upset because the next night was the new moon. The new moon, when the sky was blackest, was always a difficult time. So she decided to put the train out of her mind. In their fractured state, neither could grasp the hope that the train might one day offer them. And if they did grasp it, they dealt as quickly with that hope as Mother would deal with any of their indiscretions.
Six months later, Alex brought up the train again. That week, Alice and Cyril had a fierce fight over a woman they’d recently brought home. Both Mother and Father came out of the house soaked in blood as Alex and Jessica looked on.
“Have you seen Alice’s whore?”
Alex asked Jessica two days later, speaking of the woman. “No,” she told him. The far-off rumble of the train reached them. Alex showed no reaction to the possibility of Alice’s whore being gone, but the sound of the train brought a rare glint to his eyes.
Then he asked if she would trust him. At the time, she didn’t know what he was truly asking, but she knew that her life depended on him. She would have died long before without Alex’s protection. She told him she would always trust him and then thought nothing more about it.
Jessica’s memory of the night before the next new moon was as vivid as any she had. Sometime past midnight, she guessed, they were both awake, lying as instructed, staring at the ceiling. The window was dark without a moon to light it.
Jessica heard Alex stir and looked over to see that he was slipping out from under the sheet each of them was permitted during colder months. She watched, amazed, as he pulled on his dilapidated work boots and crawled over to her mattress.
He whispered for her to get dressed and follow him as quietly as possible. She started to ask him why, but he silenced her by putting his hand over her mouth. “Trust me,” he whispered. Although terrified of what might happen to them if they were discovered, she did as he said for the simple reason that she had always trusted Alex.
They dressed in the brown slacks and white shirts they wore daily, grabbed up the sheets to keep themselves warm, and climbed out the window. The fear of Alice’s reprisal forced Jessica to a standstill, shivering under the thin sheet outside. What had gotten into Alex? Didn’t they have a warm bed to sleep in and good food to eat, as Cyril always said? “Downright lucky,” he used to scream. It was an absurd thought indicative of Jessica’s frame of mind.
But Alex tugged at her sheet and Jessica followed him across the yard and into the forest, where h
e started to run. She would have called out for him to stop if she didn’t think she would be heard, caught, and punished. By now Mother had surely checked the room and found it empty. Unable to think of facing Mother God in a rage, Jessica ran after Alex, farther into the woods.
They came to the fence that marked their boundary. Neither of them had ever stepped beyond that fence. But then they were past it and running down a long slope, through trees, up a hill and farther, until Jessica was sure that they were completely lost. But she was still afraid to speak out. Alice’s ears were everywhere.
Jessica couldn’t remember how long they ran, only that she felt more fear while racing behind Alex than she recalled feeling before that moment. Although she’d suffered years of abuse at Alice’s hand, fleeing Alice was what Jessica feared the most. She had no recollection of her birth parents or her first three years. Everything she knew about life and how it was meant to be lived, she’d learned from Alice. She had little information about the outside world and how other families lived.
Fleeing her home of thirteen years felt like a plunge into a terrible evil.
But they’d already committed the sin, and within minutes they stumbled across two long tracks that split the forest. Thinking it was now safe to speak, Jessica demanded to know if Alex was trying to get them killed. They both knew that they wouldn’t be the first victims.
Alex ignored her and started walking down the tracks. Once again she followed, ignoring the inner voices that insisted she leave him and run back to face whatever consequences awaited.
Again, time was lost on Jessica, but when the huge, thundering train finally came up behind them, she and Alex ran for the trees. Crouched in safety, her fear of Alice was replaced by an awe that such a long, powerful thing had passed by the house for so many years, and she cautiously emerged to watch.
For the first time in her life, Jessica’s desire to know what life might be like without Alice overtook the fear of failing her. And when Alex yelled at her to follow him and ran straight for the train, she realized that her fear of losing him to that train was also greater than her fear of Alice.
The train that Alex and Jessica managed to jump in late October, 1981, was the westbound Union Pacific 98, a freight train that hauled mostly wheat, oil, and cattle. The long train frequently pulled more than a hundred cars through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and into Southern California. Any shorter and they may not have made the jump.
