Then the door blew open like balsa wood and Boonie’s universe pivoted on its swollen axis. He fell back, creeching, as light flooded the room. Peeling back the balming darkness.
Forcing him to see.
It was little Drew: back from the dead, and oh my how he’d grown. A little bit taller. An awful lot greener. And more than twice as big around. When he waddled in—scrawny legs straining against the tonnage—it was Drew’s slick red gargantuan belly that attracted and held Boonie’s gaze.
It had a vertical full-length abdominal mouth as its centerpiece. The mouth was working. Toothy jaws of splintered rib gnashed and worried the stripped-down skull of Otis, which danced in the makeshift maw like a football helmet in a slow-motion spin cycle.
Drew was dragging big wet graymeat hunks of his uncle behind him. Bit by bit, he fed them in. Absorbing their essence.
Merging them, too, with Overmind.
Boonie retreated as Drew advanced: a psychotic pushmepullyou with no strings of tissue attached. Something about it must have looked funny as all hell, because Drew simply could not stop laughing.
Somehow, the humor eluded Boonie.
Until he saw himself in the mirror.
“Ehn,” he said, too stunned to speak, even if his face, throat, and lungs had been capable. “Eh-hen.” Goggling at the new Boonie view.
“Eh-HEH hen-hen-hen.” Actually chuckling a little, marveling at the misshapen contours, the massive tumorous topography his features had become. At least a dozen mottled golfballs of pus jutted out from his greasy post-Elvis complexion.
But it wasn’t until his tumors stared back that the full humor of his situation struck him. Dozens of tiny eyelids fluttered awake, stared with infantile alertness at the brave new world before them. Boonie’s vision went from three to fifty-three dimensions in a hallucinogenic instant. The fact that Drew refused to stop giggling only tossed phosphorus onto the fire.
“Eh-hen hon hurn hen hee-ee-ee,” Boonie persisted, astonished. Mounting. “Eh-hurn hen HEE HEE HEE…!”
Once he got started, it was impossible to stop.
And, my, how time flies when you’re having fun.
PART FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
At a quarter to two, Micki was still waiting in the Labor Hall lounge set aside for that purpose. There was an antsy young workingman plunked down on the Naugahyde sectional across from her, staring anxiously up at the low-rezz whuffling on the TV screen.
Evidently, she noted, not all men were up to their part in the birthing experience. From the look on his face, he’d much rather have been home, watching the game…
Don’t be a bitch, Bob-Ramtha chided. You know he’s probably scared to death.
“So what.” Voice barely above a whisper. “Who isn’t.”
Exactly. And look what a sister of mercy it’s made of you.
She started to counter, restrained herself. Partly because the young poppa-to-be was furtively scoping her out for brain damage; but mostly because Bobba, damn his absence of hide, was right again. And it wasn’t just for Gwen and her beautiful baby.
Micki Bridges was terrified of hospitals.
“Ouch.” She turned away from the guy, cupped one hand loose over her mouth. “I’m not dealing with this very well, am I?”
Nope.
“I’m sorry.”
Okay. Now stop it.
She cringed. “Easier said than done.”
As a child, her fear had been sheerly instinctive. The hollow, echoing corridors. The sterile, unnatural smells. The chilly aura of suffering and death that no amount of antiseptic could possibly dispel. Even then, she’d been unable to screen out its reek from her perception.
But if she needed reasons beyond that, the years had most assuredly provided them. Watching her father’s five-year losing battle with leukemia. Watching her mother’s relatively merciful (by comparison) three-day flirtation with hope, before succumbing to stroke.
And then, for the coup de grace, her own little dark descent into the bowels of the medical biz. The endless tests. The surgery. The drugsdrugsdrugs. The lonely nights spent spitting up and crying, as her hair fell out from the chemo and her skin scorched red from the radiation. The merciless assault on her body and spirit, till she wasn’t sure which side of the coin was worse: the treatment or the disease.
And then Bob-Ramtha had come, filling the chasm that her agony had eroded within her, returning the faith that she’d dropped in her terror. Most of all, urging her to listen to her body.
Don’t resist understanding, he said now. It’s the best friend you have. Your cancer’s at the heart of your fear. Go talk with it. That’s my advice.
“You gonna talk me down?”
Of course.
“And hold my hand?”
You bet.
“Okay.” The word was a whisper.
She closed her eyes.
Breathing first, he said, and she immediately applied the technique: slow, deep, and thorough breaths, massaging oxygen into tension-constricted tissue.
Identify the points of stress, he continued. Don’t proceed until you’ve worked them through. She felt herself nod, though her body was still. Felt herself from the inside.
In full body awareness.
First, the head: exploring the streamers of agitation draped across her brow, strung taut from temple to temple and around the backs of her eyes. She could visualize the musculature embracing the skull, pinpoint in minutiae the fault lines of distress. Some of them were shifting, less than temporal: neurotic phantom twinges, playing mischievous, humorless pranks.
But then there were other, more persuasive pains: sometimes encroaching, sometimes receding, but ever-persistent and consistent enough to convince her of their genuine existence. Like the dull Chiclet-sized whum of pain in her temple, for example. She’d never figured out what it meant, but she’d felt it enough to believe in it.
That’s right, he told her. Listen to your body. It will lie and confuse you as much as it can, but its job is to tell you the truth. If you probe each response, without backing away, you will find yourself there.
At the essence.
Spreading out over and in through the body, reaching through feet and hands. Reading the knots in her shoulders and back, like exotic coral reef formations. Isolating not only the stress points, but also the vast expanses of hard-won healthiness within her.
Quietly, methodically, Micki circled in.
On the source of both her life…
…and her pain…
a vision
deep at the womancore root of her being
a fertile fecund tropical rainforest of
spirit lush with diversity
poly- and pantheistic multifaceted
vision of a pagan wonderland
in which all things might grow
reinforcing encouraging enabling life
abiding all things
except there was a problem
and it was the seed
Micki breathed deeply, unconsciously pausing. She always did at this point, her awareness teetering as if at the tip of the continental shelf. She was up at the invisible line of demarcation that marked the darker side of her soul.
It was time to go over the edge.
and it was the seed
that lay dormant inside her
dormant but waiting
buried but never forgotten
no way to forget
the black undying gem
nestled in her belly
like a watermelon seed
a hard flat cutting wedge
held at bay by therapy and
sheerest force of will
driving it back
refusing it purchase
compressing its essence in self-defense
no possible compromise with the killing thing
that knows no bounds
no possible deal with the one life form
that knows not how to coexist
corrupting health debasing shape
overwhelming and devouring the garden
no deal with the cancer that poisons the well
no path but resistance containment
benign transmutation
eternal vigilance
unshakeable love
affirmation of life
complete and committed to healing
no other choice but death
and worse
no other choice
at all
The double doors whammed open, slapping Micki out of her trance. She looked up, stunned, at the entourage.
As they hustled the blue-faced woman in.
She was on a gurney, moving fast, and the orderly that pushed it looked utterly wired. He had the kind of face that looked like it didn’t wire easy, and that just made it worse.
But not as bad as the man beside them: the wet-faced, dead-eyed, blubbering man that kept pace with the gurney. He was, Micki guessed, the woman’s husband; and he looked like he’d just been served up a plate of his own intestines.
Because the woman on the gurney was death-rattling foam, glazed eyes sightless in her cyanotic face. She twitched once, twice as she passed before Micki. Involuntary spasms.
And her belly was huge.
“Oh, God,” Micki whispered as they rumbled past, near-colliding with Melissa at the nurse’s station. “Oh, God,” as a pair of nurses—now wired as well—led the charge to the nearest room. “Please don’t let Gwen hear about this.”
As the door slammed shut behind them.
The woman’s name was Pat Holtzaple. She was thirty-two years old. Her due date was the same as her birthday: November 25th. The day after tomorrow.
The first contraction had hit not more than three minutes into the Eagles game. Tim had invited a bunch of the guys over. Lucky, lucky. Instant babysitters, for the price of a case of Old Milwaukee and a couple of pepperoni pizzas. As with her last four deliveries, the contractions came on sudden and straight to the point. They were off to the hospital at once.
It was warm outside, and Pat needed the air, so she cracked her window and moaned into the slipstream. Tim was doing sixty in a residential zone.
They were on Rathton Road, less than an eighth of a mile from Labor Hall, when the wasp blew in the window crack and stung her in the shoulder.
Admissions had been insane. A lot of people were there with bizarro complaints: their bushes attacked them, or their three-headed cat. Pat’s condition, on the other hand, was clear. Even though she was utterly, uncharacteristically spaced, that could have been explained any number of ways.
And she swore up and down she wasn’t allergic to wasps.
Anaphylactic shock didn’t strike until they were in the elevator. Her skin went red and itchy and hot in the space of a single contraction. By the time the doors opened on Four, she was violently coughing, her heart rate going triple-time.
By the time they hit Maternity, she was barely breathing at all.
The RNs went into Code Blue at once: calling her doctor while they jammed tubes up her nose and injected her with atropine. No go. Her final contraction had far less to do with birth than death.
Tim had to leave the room when they cut her open to rescue the baby. He didn’t miss much. Just a little more heartbreak.
The baby was also blue.
“Goddammit!” Micki spat, slamming the receiver down. For the eighty-seventh time, the ‘PAL line was busy. The little she knew about Pat Holtzaple was enough to make her nerves tripwire.
Relax, Bob-Ramtha said.
“Yeah, right,” she hissed. “Relax, my ass.”
The situation is not yours to control.
“And that’s supposed to make me feel better? Christ, Bobba…!”
Wait, he said, and turned her around. Melissa motioned her hither, from Gwen’s doorway. The nurse’s face was calculatedly neutral.
The clock said ten after two.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The Mt. Rose Amoco Shop ‘N’ Go got its first real whiff of hell at eleven after two.
It came in the form of a tan Arrow van, with a bumper sticker that read CAUTION: IN CASE OF RAPTURE, THIS VEHICLE WILL VACATE WITHOUT WARNING. Jennie Quirez wouldn’t even have noticed it pulling into the lot, were it not for the way it wavered on its way to the gas island: wobbly as a newborn colt, unsteady on its balding whitewall tires.
Drunk driver was her first guess, though the bumper sticker would have seemed to belie that charge. (Like you couldn’t be a drunk who believed in the Rapture. Like, for example, her papa had been.) Her second guess was senior citizen. Neither one was on the mark.
Sunday afternoons at the Shop ‘N’ Go were notoriously slow, low-key affairs, but today was a notable exception. A near-continuous dribble of customers had graced her presence all day long; and she’d had to face the fact that, barring a surprise visit from Mr. Truck, they’d be out of the eighty-seven octane within the hour.
In fact, she was just writing up the little OUT OF SERVICE signs when the van pulled up at the number two pump, lurched abruptly to a halt. Its cargo area was packed to overflowing, as if it had been packed for an extremely long vacation. If so, it was certainly off to a wonderful start.
From her seat at the register, Jennie had an unobstructed view of the screaming family within: three little towheads, crying in the back; pretty young Mom in the shotgun seat, clutching a baby-sized bundle to her breast and crying, too.
Last, of course, was dear old Dad: huge, stoop-shouldered and hollering from his place behind the wheel. The sight pushed all of her damaged, dysfunctional family buttons at once. The contents of his dissertation were hidden, but the dynamics were unmistakable. What an asshole, she thought, her contempt instantaneous.
Then he threw open the door, staggered rapidly for the pump.
And her first impression radically changed.
Jesus God. Suddenly alarmed. What happened to you? Even from fifteen yards away, the unhealthy sheen of his overwhite complexion was impossible to miss. He moved painfully, like he might keel over at any second; from the hurried, hitching gait of his bearlike body to the unnatural pallor of his face, everything about him looked terribly wrong.
He wasn’t even dressed like a man on vacation. He was dressed like a guy who’d been puttering around the house: dirty jeans, an oil-stained work shirt. His pants were soggy and stained, as if he’d fallen into something vile.
Jennie thought instantly of calling 911, mentally calculated how long it might take an ambulance to get here. If he was having a heart attack or something, she didn’t know what she’d do. Her repertoire of therapeutic moves was ridiculously small. The Heimlich maneuver. A really great back rub.
At the same time, she told herself, he’s still walking around. It might be just a little bit premature to call.
Which, of course, forced her to respond to herself with a reminder of how badly he’d been driving. Which, of course, set her off on a comprehensive point/counterpoint volley inside her head. By the time she got done weighing the options, he had his gas cap off and was ready to go.
She decided to give it a minute; keep a watchful eye on him; hope for the best; and prepare herself, should the worst transpire. As it so often did.
The thought made her glance nervously at the clock.
And, for some strange reason, worry about her man.
Because Austin seemed to picture her as some kind of unflappable love-angel—the patron saint of inexhaustible good cheer—but it simply wasn’t true. If it seemed that way, it was just because he made her feel so goddam good every time he was around.
The fact was, she worried a lot. She worried about almost everything, and blamed herself constantly: Daddy’s little caretaker, still fretting over the details and putting things to rights. From middle age to the Middle East, true love to 2 Live Crew, the possibility of an afterlife to the possibility of after-dinner drinks at Austin’s place; if it could be turned into a topic of concern,
she had a fissure in her brain already reserved for the occasion.
And that was just your basic generic concern. That was when nothing was going on. That was before the guy she was falling in love with got dragged off on some secret mission that, by its very nature, could only be concerned with the disposal of extremely hazardous materials…
…that was before people started dropping dead in the middle of her shift…
The number two light on her console was blinking; he’d flicked the switch one too many times, gone from off to on and back again. It was a common enough mistake, for agitated people in particular.
“Yikes,” Jennie said: a Deitz-ism she’d absorbed through osmosis. She pressed the button, reset the pump. Now all he had to do was turn it on again.
The white-faced man had the nozzle in the tank. He leaned into the van at an awkward angle, as if it were too stressful or painful to stand up straight. For the first time, she noticed that his right hand was wrapped in a large, white, oily-looking bandage.
He clenched his teeth, squeezed the nozzle handle with his left. When nothing happened, he let out what looked like a wordless yowl of pain, then leaned forward and flicked the switch again.
Click clack. On. Off.
“Shit,” she hissed. Outside, he more violently echoed the sentiment. She tried to reset, but he had lapsed into dumbpanic mode: if it didn’t work by just flicking it once, doing it eight times really hard was bound to do the trick.
“Okay.” Fighting off the minor wave of irritation. He needed coaching; there was an intercom for that very purpose. She got off her butt and went to it at once.
“Sir?” Speaking into the booming mic. He jumped, gaze flying from the pole-mounted intercom speaker to the window she stood behind. For the first time, their eyes made contact. At this distance, his eyes just looked vacant and huge.
“HANG ON A SECOND.” She pressed reset once again, stopped the little light from blinking. “Okay. Now try it.”
Click clack. On. Off.
“ARRR…NO. DON’T DO THAT,” she scolded. He responded with an expression of misery so intense that she literally felt it, trickling cold down her spine. Oh, God, don’t die, she silently prayed, instantly overwhelmed by her guilt.
The Bridge Page 19
