The Society

by Michael Palmer

  “I heard that rumor, too.”

  “Who would do a thing like that?”

  “I don’t know, but I am really relieved there’s an explanation for what happened. Will is a very good guy.”

  “So, you think Will and Patty?”

  “The doc and the cop. How romantic.”

  “Were you in with her just now?”

  “I was. She’s breathing easily and handling her secretions okay. Between the surgery and whatever she went through saving that guy’s life, she is really battered. Still, it’s probably just me, but I think she seems a little lighter than she did yesterday.”

  “Epidurals tend to do better than subdurals.”

  “I hope so, because I’m going to be very upset if she doesn’t wake up. She’s a hero. I want to get to know her.”

  “Come on. Let’s check her and Lila and make a final decision about who goes.”

  “Lila.”

  The two friends made their way through the ICU, looking in on each of the glass-enclosed rooms as they passed. They were both seasoned veterans of their profession and were blessed with a sixth sense that often told them a patient was about to go sour, or even sometimes that the ICU was about to be inundated. Today, short a nurse, they were both a bit edgy but comfortable knowing there wasn’t a situation that could arise where they wouldn’t know how to react.

  Patty Moriarity lay serenely still, breathing easily. Patches of gauze were taped over her eyes to protect them against dryness. The right side of her face was gentian with bruising, and in places, streaks of black and blue had made their way across the midline.

  “Patty,” Donna said, bending over the bed rail and straightening the oxygen prongs. “Patty, it’s your nurses Donna and Anne. Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.”

  “Anything?”

  “Nope.”

  “She doesn’t look as light as I thought she did.”

  “My experience with epidurals is that the coma seesaws lighter and deeper, and then most of them just wake up.”

  “Okay, that cinches it. Lila is history. She’ll do fine in the step-down unit or even on one of the floors. Listen, our resident hero here is due for a neuro check. You want to stay and do that, and I’ll get the paperwork started on Lila?”

  “Sure.”

  “But no reliving your you-know-what with you-know-who.”

  “I’m all business.”

  With pleasant thoughts of her husband hovering just below the surface, Donna removed Patty’s eye patches. Her pupils, which were initially quite dilated from having been covered, gradually became smaller and reacted to direct light by constricting even further. Good signs.

  “Patty, it’s Donna. Squeeze my hand. Please squeeze my hand.”

  Nothing.

  Donna pressed her thumbnail into Patty’s forcefully enough to cause discomfort. Ever so slightly, Patty’s thumb twitched. At least Donna thought it did. She repeated the maneuver. Nothing. And again. Same result. Shrugging, she worked each of Patty’s limbs and digits through a full range of motion. No resistance. Finally, the nurse ran her thumbnail in an arc heel-to-toe along the bottom of each of Patty’s feet. Minutely, Patty’s great toes responded with the slightest downward movement, toward the irritant sensation. The Babinski sign, a reflex upward movement of the toe, often signifying a disconnection between the brain and the extremities, was absent. It was another positive finding—or at least not a negative one. Patty’s neurologic status was no worse than it had been, and if the slight movement to a painful stimulus was real, it might even be better. Carefully, Donna pulled down Patty’s lower lids and squirted in a small amount of lubricant. Then she took new patches and taped them in place.

  Come on, baby. Time to wake up and smell the coffee.

  At the thought, Donna reflexively inhaled deeply through her nose. Then again. She looked about, quickly going to red alert. Seeing nothing, she hurried to the doorway.

  “Hey, Annie,” she called out.

  Anne Hajjar poked her head out of Lila Terry’s room.

  “Patty awake?”

  “I wish. Come down here, will you? I smell smoke or something.”

  Anne was halfway down the corridor when she smelled it—a faint, chemical odor, more acrid than simple smoke. She stopped short as Donna hurried past her to the nurses’ station and grabbed the fire extinguisher. They were moving together, trying to locate the source of the odor when, with two loud gunshotlike snaps, acrid black smoke began billowing from someplace beneath the beds in rooms 2 and 6.

  “Call a Dr. Red, Annie!” Donna shouted as she dashed into the first of the rooms, extinguisher at the ready. “Jeannie, Lesley, get ready for an evac, respirator patients first as soon as we have Ambu Bags to ventilate them and a minimum of three people per patient. Each of the other patients needs at least two with them. Put signs on their beds. Send one through four to the ER, all the rest out to Two East.”

  Donna hurried past her. Moments later, the hospital-wide page system broadcast the operator’s uncharacteristically urgent voice.

  “Dr. Red, to ICU stat. . . . Dr. Red to ICU stat. . . . Dr. Red to ICU stat.”

  Dense black smoke had now nearly filled the two patient cubicles and was drifting out into the corridor connecting all the rooms with the nurses’ station. Donna felt certain this was an electrical fire of some sort, probably within the wall. She was the charge nurse today, and until someone in authority arrived from security or the fire department, all decisions were hers.

  The acrid fumes were making it unpleasant to breathe. There were two Ambu Bags in the ICU and three portable oxygen cylinders. According to the Dr. Red protocol, the respiratory therapist should be up with as many more breathing bags as she could quickly get her hands on, followed by someone from the ER with the ones they had, and finally, just in case, a nurse with the bags from the crash carts on each floor.

  Donna pulled on a blue paper mask, handed them out to the other nurses, and then saw to it that those patients not on respirators had them in place.

  “Okay, Annie,” she called out, “let’s get portable oxygen into two and six, and move them first!”

  Before any patients could be moved, the ICU began to fill with people, and noise. Two medical students burst in along with a surgeon and several nurses. A huge uniformed security guard suddenly appeared on the scene, as well, barking out orders like General Patton at anyone who would listen and trying at the same time to convince people that he was in charge and they were to pay attention to him. The patient in cubicle 6 was removed from her ventilator by one of the nurses. A med student transferred her bags of IV fluids from poles onto her bed. Then they slowly guided her bed through the crowd and out of the unit while a tech from respiratory inflated her lungs from an Ambu Bag hooked up to one of the cylinders of oxygen. One gone.

  The number of people milling about was increasing almost as rapidly as the density of the smoke. What seemed like dozens of voices were shouting and issuing orders at once.

  “. . . Oxygen. Hook a portable tank to the bag! . . .”

  “Where are the portable tanks? . . .”

  “. . . There are none! Just go! . . .”

  “. . . You can’t move him like that. He just had a hip replaced! . . .”

  “. . . Everybody, just quiet down and listen to me! . . .”

  “. . . The IV pole! It’s falling over. Watch it! . . .”

  The ICU continued filling up with far more nurses, physicians, technicians, and security people than were needed to move the remaining patients. Everyone was talking or shouting or coughing. Certain her voice was just adding to the commotion, Donna quickly gave up trying to coordinate anything and focused instead on getting the very unstable eighty-year-old post-op cardiac patient in cubicle 2 ready for transfer. Across the bed from her, partially enveloped in smoke, rubbing at her eyes with her sleeve, Anne Hajjar did her best to keep up.

  “. . . I’ve got this!” a man was bellowing. “Let go, for chrissakes.”

/>   “No, you don’t. You don’t know what in the hell you’re doing! . . .”

  “. . . You’ve got to turn off the oxygen, dammit! Turn it off or you’ll risk blowing us all up! . . .”

  More bodies, more noise, more turmoil, more smoke. Donna, Anne, and another nurse, all of them sputtering, were maneuvering the bed with their unconscious patient toward the doors as fast as they could manage while still adequately breathing for him.

  “Adrienne,” Donna called over to one of the respiratory techs, “unhook the vent in Two and follow us.”

  “You got it.”

  “Do you have a room for this guy on your wing?” Donna asked the nurse.

  “Two-sixteen is empty. People should be there waiting for us. We have two-twelve as well if we need it.”

  “Great. Adrienne, we’re going to two-sixteen.”

  “God, that was awful in there,” Anne said when they had reached the corridor leading across the hospital to the med-surg wing.

  “You can have all the fire drills in the world, but when it isn’t a drill, all of a sudden no one remembers anything, and everyone either wants to be in charge or wants to be a hero.”

  “People just want to help.”

  “I suppose. We could have done better with the five of us who were in there when the whole thing started. Here, let me help you get Martin over to his new bed, then I’ve got to get back to the unit.”

  “What do you think happened in there?”

  “Some sort of short in the wires in the wall.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Well, hang in here with Martin, Annie. I’ll see you later.”

  Donna hurried back to the ICU. The smoke could now be smelled halfway across the length of the hospital, and she wondered if the entire building might have to be evacuated before the fire was under control. From outside, sirens were wailing. Any moment now, an army of police and firemen would be added to the hellish scene in the ICU. The hallway outside the unit was full of milling people now, many of them newly arrived and some of the others soot-covered and ordering everyone to stay out of the way.

  “. . . There are more than enough people in there! . . .”

  “. . . Stay away from the doors. Keep back. . . .”

  “The firemen’ll be here any minute. Move back down the corridor and make room for them. . . .”

  As Donna reached the glass ICU doors, they glided opened. A billowing of dark smoke preceded Lila Terry’s bed, being hauled out by two nurses and three or four others, some of whom were barely able to keep one hand in contact with the bed.

  “Katie, how many patients left in there?” Donna asked as they passed her.

  “I don’t know. Just one, I think. Better get in there and make sure no one’s gotten trampled.”

  “Good point.”

  The density of the smoke had lessened, or at least had grown no worse. The mob, perhaps finally realizing that it, like the patients, might be in some danger, had begun shoving its way back through the main doors. Donna hurried down the row of cubicles. All were empty except for room 5, and the nurse and two security men were ready to move the patient from there. Black smoke was continuing to pour from the wall sockets in rooms 2 and 6. No flames, no heat, just acrid smoke.

  Donna helped see the last patient out of the unit and had returned for a final inspection when the first four of the firemen arrived, including one who was clearly in charge. In seconds, the unit had been emptied of everyone except her. She quickly reviewed the chain of events occurring over what had seemed like hours but in truth had been only slightly more than fifteen minutes.

  “You did a great job,” she was told.

  She looked around at the bizarre scene.

  I guess I did, she was thinking.

  She left the unit and returned to the med-surg wing, where she had helped bring the patient from room 2. Anne Hajjar gave her a thumbs-up.

  “Martin’s tough,” she said. “He actually looks a little better than he did before the fire.”

  “Nice job. The fire people have taken over. I’m going to the nurses’ station to find out where all the rest of our patients and staff are.”

  Donna took over a small built-in desk and commandeered the phone. After five minutes of calls, she sat in utter dismay, staring down at a page of notes she’d taken. Then, just to be certain, she called each of the floors again. Bewildered, she was rubbing at the irritants and fatigue that were stinging her eyes when Anne hurried over from room 216.

  “Denise just came over,” she said breathlessly, referring to the nursing supervisor. “She says there was never any fire. Apparently someone set off a very elaborate radio-controlled smoke bomb. The fire people have no idea why.”

  “I think I know why,” Donna said, her face ashen.

  “What?”

  “Patty Moriarity is gone, Annie.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I mean she’s not in the hospital. I’ve called everyplace twice. From all I can tell, someone wheeled her into an ambulance and just drove away. She’s been kidnapped.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Cascading images of the twins preceded Will’s realization that he was awake—a realization that also mean he was still alive. Like coming out of deep anesthesia, one by one his senses began reporting in. The farm smell mixed with a number of other pungent odors. Once again he was naked on the fetid mattress. No one had bothered to clean the sickness off him, but to his right he could see that there was a grimy white hand towel on the floor and water in the bucket that the behemoth named Watkins had dragged in. A sledgehammer inside his skull was monitoring each heartbeat. Every muscle in his body ached, but it was his fingers where the throbbing was most acute. His fingers! The maniac Krause had done something to his fingers. Now he remembered. He remembered screaming—screaming over and over to blot out the pain.

  “No!” . . . “Fuck you!” . . . “Stop! Please stop!” . . . “Go to hell! Go to hell! Go to hell!” . . . “Let go of my hands, you bastard! Let go!” . . . “Noooo!”

  Fearing the worst, he withdrew his hands from beneath the army blanket. They were covered with brown, caked blood, but no part of any digit was missing. The source of the bleeding was three of his nail beds—the ones on each middle finger, where the nail had somehow been pried up but not completely removed, and the one on his left index finger, which was dangling obscenely by a single thread of tissue. He could only believe that he had passed out before Krause had gone after the joints themselves. That was the only explanation that made sense. It was certainly doubtful the creep had drawn the line at permanent mutilation.

  “Jesus,” he murmured. “How did this happen to me?”

  He raised his brutalized index finger to his mouth and bit through the strand of skin, releasing the nail. The air from his gentle exhale passed across the raw bed and produced the pain of an abscessed tooth. He rolled over, gasping as he lowered his hands into the cool water.

  He didn’t remember telling Krause about Lionel, but then again, there was still much he could not recall. Gingerly, he washed the gore from his hands. The pain seemed to sharpen his memory. The twins! That was it! He had battled the little monster by forcing his mind to focus on them. Dan and Jess at age one . . . at five . . . on the swing set in the backyard . . . serving clients at the Open Hearth . . . throwing snowballs at him and each other. He knew that the moment he told, the moment they had the X-rays, he was as good as dead. The moment he gave in, he would never see the twins again. As long as he held out against the pain and misery, as long as he battled his rodent-faced torturer, there was hope, however slim.

  He blotted his hands dry, then reached into the bucket again and rubbed water over his face. His senses cleared still more. Gratefully, the memory of precisely what had been done to him remained cloudy, but one thing now seemed certain. He had beaten Krause again. With the help of his kids and the determination that had pulled him through countless all-nighters in various hospitals, his jackass stubbornness had s
tood up once more to Marshall Gold’s pervert.

  As before, he located his clothes under the small table and painfully put them on, crying out every time his wounded fingernails brushed against fabric. Quickly, he learned to keep his hands up near the level of his heart as much as possible. Ignoring the pulsating pain, he crawled to the wall beneath the Plexiglas windows and forced himself to stand. For the first time he got a prolonged look outside his prison. The sky was slate gray. The light filtering through the overcast suggested morning was well along if not gone. As he had suspected, he was being held on the first floor of a large farmhouse—white with black shutters.

  From this point of view, he could see two weathered outbuildings, a large, well-used tractor, and the corner of what seemed to be a sizable barn, also white. There was a corral of some sort beyond the barn with hay, a water trough, and several cows—Jerseys, if he remembered right—with hides like tan and white jigsaw puzzles. Not far beyond the outbuildings was a vast, fenced-in field and, beyond that, forest. There was no hint as to where the farm might be located.

  Using his elbow, Will tested the window. It was, as Gold had said, thick Plexiglas, firmly bolted to the house. He wondered how many others had been imprisoned there, and why, and acknowledged that if he were ever to escape from this room, it would be through the door. At that moment, as if on cue, the lone door opened and Marshall Gold stepped inside. He was absolutely resplendent in pristine Nikes, a pair of black satin workout pants, and an unadorned gold T-shirt that accented the striking V from his shoulders to his waist. A towel was draped over his neck. It seemed clear to Will that in public, Boyd Halliday’s executive assistant went out of his way to dress in conservative styles that underemphasized his impressive physique. No sense tipping anyone off that the mild-mannered bookkeeper also just happened to be a professional killer.

  “Grant, good to see you up and about,” he said cheerily.

  “Drop dead.”

  “I can have my man Watkins bandage up those fingers if you wish. He was a corpsman in the army.”

  “That must have been before he discovered pizza.”