by Ted Dekker
And his hands were on the wheel, jerking spastically as he fought off the darkness. His body began to convulse, and for a moment he thought he might actually throw up.
He spread his eyes wide and maintained vision. Unfortunately, the effort resulted in less control over his arms. The car veered to the right and plowed into a flashing barricade. Horns blared.
The fear lifted then, as the Lexus nosed for a hole in the pavement. He stood on the brakes and came to a halt three feet from the worst of the road construction.
Daniel glanced behind, saw that several cars had stopped twenty yards behind, threw the car in reverse, and backed out of the construction pit. He drove back out onto Wilshire and sped down the coned lane, leaving more than a couple of drivers gawking.
He parked in a visitor’s spot and headed straight for the basement. Only one other worker saw him—a secretary from the third floor who nodded on her way out for the night.
The viewing window in the morgue’s steel door was lit at the dark hall’s end. Daniel slowed to a walk. Like a man headed for the light in a near-death experience, he walked toward the morgue’s light. Silent except for his breathing and the padding of his feet.
He ran the last ten feet, shoved the door open, and faced Lori, who was leaning against the steel exam table, arms crossed, waiting for him.
For a moment they stared at each other, Daniel calming his breathing, Lori searching his eyes with steely inquisition. They both knew a turning point had been forced upon them, he thought. He had, at least, and he hoped she, too, would accept the truth.
“Lori.”
“Hello, Daniel.”
Beat.
“You know there’s only one way to do this, Lori.”
“Do I?”
“Something happened to me back there in Manitou Springs. I was killed. My brain was subjected to an electrochemical barrage that washed Eve’s face from my memory and short-circuited my mind. Isn’t that what happened?”
“Yes. Yes, that’s what happened.”
“I have to go back to that moment, Lori. You know that’s the only way now.”
She was silent.
“You have to kill me, Lori.”
“Don’t be a fool.”
Here it was, then. The standoff Daniel knew it would come down to.
“Eve’s taken Heather,” he said, voice strained. “I’m the only one who can help her. I know what Eve looks like; he’s locked in my mind.”
“I’m not going to kill—”
“You have to!” Daniel walked toward her, not caring that he’d yelled. “His image is locked in here.” He jabbed his head. “Nothing out there can help her, and you know that as well as I do.”
“And if I can’t resuscitate you, that image will die with you! With time, it could come out on its own.”
“We don’t have time! Eve has Heather.”
He gingerly touched his throbbing forehead, then turned away from Lori, eyes closed. He’d done the research himself over the last two days and was reasonably confident that she could pull it off. But it was madness; they both knew it.
“Look,” he said, turning back. “I know it’s crazy, but you have no idea how much pain I’m in. He’s got her, Lori. Eve has his seventeenth victim. Putting me under is risky. It may get us nowhere, but if you don’t help me, I’m going to find someone else to do it.”
“I worked so hard to keep you alive!” She lowered her arms and strode past him, jaw firm. “You have no idea what you’re asking. This isn’t some late-night movie here.”
“You’re wrong. I do know what I’m asking. And I know that we can raise the odds to over 75 percent. You’re familiar with the cases involving the Romanian heart surgeon, Dr. Cheslov? Before the advent of heart-lung technology, he experimented with alternatives to open-heart surgery by stopping and restarting the heart externally, a kind of rebooting to deal with—”
“He was an unethical quack. There’s no documentation. He experimented on enemies of the state, for heaven’s sake.”
“You’re saying it wouldn’t work? New drugs improve my chances of resuscitation. I understand why the medical community doesn’t experiment in uncontrolled environments, but this situation is already way beyond our control.” He paused. “You know how to do it, don’t you?”
She remained silent. But he’d already gotten to her, he thought. She’d been thinking along the same lines ever since the injection of DMT had failed, four nights earlier.
They were running out of time.
Daniel walked up to her and pulled her tight against his chest. Whispered softly by her ear. “Please, I need you to do this for me. Inject a peripheral vein close to the heart with a large dose of a myocardial relaxant. Force my heart into ventricular fibrillation. It’ll stop pumping blood. My brain will begin to starve of oxygen and enter sympathetic shock. That’s what I need, Lori. I need my mind to think it’s dying.”
She breathed steadily into his shoulder. He’d rehearsed the specifics a hundred times over the last two days. He drew back. Brushed a strand of hair from her forehead.
“Only then will my brain do whatever it is brains do as they die. Without adequate blood pressure, my nerves will shut down and all remaining energy will be shifted to my brain in a last-ditch effort to survive. My temporal lobe will release memories. Sensing the end, my brain will drain DMT from the pineal gland. Neurotransmitters will go into massive confusion, crossing electrochemical circuits in random order. I’ll have a near-death experience.”
“What if I can’t bring you back?” She looked into his eyes. “Seventy-five percent—”
“Is a risk I’m willing to take. You can bring me back. You’ll leave me in ventricular fibrillation for one minute and then innervate the heart muscle with massive doses of epinephrine and atropine into the same vein. A 360-joule shock will stop the heart completely, and it will restart on its own automatic contraction.”
Leaving little doubt as to what he’d been up to the last two days, he stepped back and watched her. Lori’s face had paled a few shades, but she wasn’t shutting him down.
“It would be murder, you know.”
He pulled out his wallet and withdrew the note he’d signed. “This will get you through.”
“Assisted suicide isn’t legal, under any circumstances. A note won’t keep me out of prison if you die—it’s not even a holographic will. A court won’t admit it.”
She was right, of course. The FBI would probably let her off, all things considered, but it would be their call, not hers.
“Then you’d better bring me back.”
The color slowly came back to her face.
“It’s not rocket science, Lori. We have everything we need in this room. We could be finished in half an hour.”
She turned away. “I can’t believe we’re talking like this.”
“There’s a chance it could work, isn’t there?” he asked.
“That’s not the point.”
“It’s possible I’ll see Eve and remember him this time.”
“Possible, but—”
“That this short circuit in my brain will be rewired by the shock of another death.”
“That’s not—”
“That as a result of my risk, I may learn something that will save my wife!”
Lori crossed one arm and lifted the other to rub her temple. “She’s not your wife.”
“Possible?”
“Yes! Possible! But we don’t have a clue what will really happen!”
“That’s where you’re wrong. We know that if I don’t do this, Heather will be dead in a matter of days, maybe sooner.”
Daniel walked to the stainless steel table and faced her. “I need you to kill me, Doctor, and I need you to do it now.”
AS IT TURNED OUT, plotting his death was far easier than facing it. What had started as several marathon sessions of sifting through hopes and hypotheticals had delivered Daniel to a deathbed, facing the white ceiling of a morgue.
&n
bsp; “The door is locked?” he asked again.
“No one’s coming in here, trust me. This is not only the most morally reprehensible thing I’ve done in my life; it’s also completely illegal.”
“Forget that. Just bring me back.”
“There’s no way you’re not walking out of this room on two legs tonight,” she said.
She was saying the words, Daniel thought, but he couldn’t help seeing some eagerness in her eyes. In retrospect, she had been the one to introduce the idea to him. They were similar, he and Lori.
“Turn your head toward me,” she said softly.
He turned, and she wiped the left side of his neck with a disinfectant.
“This will sting.” She inserted a long, flexible needle sheath into his neck and opened the IV as she spoke to calm him. “This is going into your internal carotid vein, about as close to the heart as I can get without going into your chest.”
She taped it off, satisfied. Three large syringes lay on a metal tray next to the bed. The drugs in each would enter his vein through the IV needle.
It occurred to him that he was due for a near-death attack.
“How much longer?”
“Don’t be in such a hurry to die. Almost there.”
She attached the adhesive patches from the electronic defibrillator to his side and chest, checked the voltage once more. The electrical impulses would countershock the heart’s sinoatrial node while he was under, sustaining ventricular fibrillation until Lori was ready to restart the heart with a 360-joule burst. It was this advance in technology that separated their attempts from others.
She lifted a bag valve mask that was connected to a small green and silver canister of oxygen and took a deep breath. “Okay, you’ll feel the air flowing, but I won’t turn on the oxygen until we restart.”
He nodded.
Lori leaned forward, kissed him lightly on the lips. “I know you have a strong heart, Daniel. Promise me you’ll come back.”
“I will. Please, before I lose my courage.”
She set the mask over his nose and mouth and cinched it tight. Then she lifted one of the syringes, cleared the needle, pressed it into the IV nipple, and filled the reservoir that fed the line.
“One hundred milligrams of benzodiazepine. Heaven help us . . .”
She released a block, and Daniel watched the amber drug swirling into the solution that snaked toward his neck. She adjusted the flow regulator to allow the full dose into his carotid vein.
It took less than ten seconds for him to feel the powerful tranquilizer’s first effect. Pressure swelled in his chest as the muscles surrounding his heart reacted to its sudden slowing.
Pain shot through his left arm, and he was suddenly sure he’d made a terrible mistake. He was going to die. For the second time in one week. How could he tempt fate twice and expect to survive?
The inevitability of death filled his mind, and he felt panic nudging close.
Pain gripped his chest and his whole body stiffened. He moaned.
“I’m sorry, Daniel. Please, I’m . . .”
He couldn’t hear the rest. Already his brain was shutting down his organs to preserve valuable oxygen for itself. He felt his lungs settle, like deflated balloons.
His eyes were closed, but his vision seemed to narrow, tunneling into a deeper darkness. Panic began to batter him. His body was shaking, he could feel it on the table, bouncing through a seizure.
Only then, as the pain of his death spread to a mental certainty, did Daniel realize his mistake.
He was going to die. Really die.
And then the pain lifted and the darkness swallowed him, and Daniel knew that he was dead.
TWENTY
DEAD BUT ALIVE, he thought. At least alive somewhere in the deepest recesses of his mind where the brain’s last gasps produced a kind of magical life.
Light exploded on the horizon of his mind. The exhilarating bursts of a DMT trip—he’d been here once. But it was larger this time. A hundred times brighter. On the table, his lungs had shut down and his blood lay still in his veins.
In his mind he was floating through enough raw energy to light up a hundred stadiums.
And then the light was gone, as if his mind had flipped a switch. Memories flooded his mind—childhood, his first date with Heather, the speaking circuit. His introduction to the Eve case. Dozens of snapshots, some of which he hadn’t thought about in a long time.
The time he’d pretended to drown a mouse his father had caught in one of those catch-them-live traps. A hidden memory brought to life now for reasons beyond him.
How many other memories did the brain store in the deep freeze, warmed to the imagination only when certain circuits fired?
Daniel became vaguely aware that he was meant to be brought back to life by Lori. In the next moment, the vagueness of the notion fell away, and he thought maybe she’d already done it because he was standing, breathing. Alive.
But this wasn’t the morgue. He stood in a cobalt black room, dressed in slacks, no shirt, no shoes, electrodes still stuck to his chest.
The room was roughly thirty feet square; all four walls and the ceiling were made of a perfectly smooth material that was so black they seemed to suck the color from him.
An excruciatingly familiar emotion eked from his bones, as if sucked out by the walls. His hands began to shake.
The fear.
He knew immediately that his mind had entered the place from which his fear originated. It had formed this image of its final gasps of life. But knowing this didn’t give him any reprieve.
This was the place in the human experience men sought to explain with terms like hell. The wailing and gnashing of teeth. A lake of fire.
Raw fear.
The floor was a checkerboard of black and white. Cool under his toes.
It was almost like he was in a kitchen, or a huge black oven with the kitchen floor rather than a rack underfoot.
He walked to the nearest wall and lifted his hand to touch the black surface. But he stopped inches away, certain that if he touched the wall something worse would happen. Much worse.
The sound of a child giggling echoed around the room. Daniel spun, but he couldn’t see anyone. There wasn’t a light source, other than the white squares on the floor, and they didn’t light the corners well. Still, in such a small room he would have seen them by now.
Maybe it was him laughing?
The giggling came again, behind him, where the cold wall was. He jerked around, alarmed to see that he was now on the opposite side of where he’d thought he was. The whole room lay in front of him. It had flipped around. Or maybe not. Each wall was identical. He had probably just gotten mixed up.
The giggle rippled again, the innocent laughter of a young child to his right.
And there, in the corner to his left, squatted a child facing the wall. He was bent over something amusing, like a boy playing with marbles in the corner.
“Hello?”
Daniel’s voice bounced off the walls. The boy caught his breath and froze. But he didn’t turn. After a moment, he resumed his playing. Then giggled again.
Daniel walked toward the room’s center, eyes fixed on the child. The boy (assuming it was indeed a boy) looked about six or seven years old, spine and ribs pressing through smooth, nearly translucent skin. Dark hair hung to his shoulders. He wore ratty tan shorts. No shoes.
“Hello? Can you hear me?”
The boy froze. But he still didn’t turn.
Daniel walked closer, edging to his left so he could see more of the boy who seemed to be intentionally ignoring him. This was him, as a child?
But nothing about the room looked like a memory or something from a distant past. It seemed as real as if Daniel were in his own apartment.
A door emerged from the shadow beyond the boy, he saw. Closed. Maybe the child had come in while his back was turned.
Daniel edged a little farther, then stopped and stared at the object that was captur
ing the boy’s attention. It was a doll. One of those fat baby dolls with blonde hair, wearing a white diaper. Something oddly familiar about the face, but he couldn’t place it.
The boy had dug the eyes out and placed them on the floor. Two black holes stared up at him. As Daniel watched, the boy stuck one finger into the doll’s eye and wiggled it deep, then pulled it out. The eye socket spread as if the doll was made of soft clay. Or wax.
The boy chuckled, mildly amused.
Daniel was about to speak again when an insect crawled from the doll’s eye. A honeybee, then another from the other eye socket.
Eve, Daniel. You have to find Eve.
The voice whispered through his mind, yanking him from his fascination with the surreal sight of the boy playing with the doll. His breathing came thick, like a diver’s breath hissing through a regulator a hundred feet under the surface. The black walls seemed to amplify all sound, even the boy’s breath. Steady, in and out, in and out.
Another giggle.
“Where’s Eve?” Daniel asked.
The boy froze, crouched over the doll. Slowly he lifted his head and stared at the door ahead of him.
“Eve’s in there,” he said.
The innocence carried by the boy’s voice eased Daniel’s tension. The child was trapped in here, too, he thought, an image of Daniel’s childhood. Although what a wax doll with bees crawling from its eyes had to do with his childhood, he had no clue.
He looked at the doll again. Even more familiar now.
And then the face became clear in his mind’s eye. It was Heather. The boy was playing with a doll that looked strikingly similar to Heather.
He took a step forward, alarmed. “What’s . . . is that . . . is that Heather?”
The boy moved his head around slowly, showing his face for the first time. Only it wasn’t the face of a boy of six or seven.
His skin was stretched tight, flattening his lips, pulling his eyelids open to bare jet-black eyes. The incongruity of such a twisted, malignant face on a child could hardly be overstated.
Every muscle in Daniel’s body contracted in repulsion. If the room held his fear, this child was fear itself, and the power of that fear hammered his mind with such intensity that he accepted the awful truth of his predicament.
