Mercy 6

by David Bajo

  “You’re gonna have to turn around and head back.” He waved toward the hospital. “It’s restricted up there.”

  She put her hand to her mouth and ducked. “It’s that hospital?”

  He rubbed his nose. “It’s safe out here. But no closer.”

  She offered a salute with sweep to it. The broad gestures seemed to work. She thought of the purple dinosaur of her youth. The driver’s attention again went toward the back of the van, then he looked at her anew. The van pitched, weight shifting to the rear. The driver’s door clicked. His shoulders braced for an outward shove, his jaw clenching, eyes lulling.

  She looked to the hospital roof. No Mullich. He couldn’t risk that. To show any inkling of interest in her would be stupid. Still, she couldn’t accept that it was over this soon. She hadn’t even warmed up in her run. She was about to ask for at least that. Before they took her.

  But something changed within the van. The overhead sound ladle redirected its aim. The driver relaxed his shoulders and turned swiftly toward the wheel. The van’s weight shifted again, and Mendenhall stumbled back as the van sped away, the driver still craning his neck toward the other side, over the shoulder, arms rolling the wheel.

  She felt abandoned, took a breath, turned, and ran along the trail to begin her descent. To look back, to show any interest, would have been fatal to this diagnosis. But this was not coincidence.

  Coincidence has no place in the ER. When her mentor had told her this they had been examining an X-ray, a .22-caliber bullet inside a lung tumor.

  Maybe Mullich had provided distraction. Others were trying what she was trying, had been almost from the start. But that would be coincidence, someone breaking through just now. Mendenhall increased her pace, gauging the downward slope. The sting of sunlight on her nape pushed her into the canyon while tire scuffs and dull shouts slowed her, lured her, almost spun her, just to look and see.

  49.

  Near the base of the canyon the asphalt trail became dust.

  Mendenhall picked up a follower, heard the pop of running shoes behind her shift from hard to soft. Maybe it was just another runner using her for pace, getting set for a kick. They were on a lower ridge overlooking a housing tract. She risked one over-the-shoulder glance, a racer’s peek. Her trailer was smooth, swift, elusive, tracking her blind spot, sliding behind as though part of her shadow.

  They dropped into the alluvial fan marking the trailhead. The switchbacks allowed her more glimpses, but she gathered nothing further. She didn’t turn and stop because she wanted this run to last as long as it possibly could, again feeling caught, finished. Would they use a net?

  She took no rest and loped across the cul-de-sac. The tract was old enough to have grown trees, but its roads were wide and bowed and smooth, the roofs all black, the corners crisp, sidewalks fitted and even. The follower vanished. Immersed in this neighborhood, Mendenhall ran alone. But felt no relief.

  In the ER, though predawn always brought the worst cases, each time of day held its own particular dread. Midafternoon was the most tragic, young deaths and self-inflictions from after-school malaise, the sorrowful domestic wounds, when those who don’t live alone feel most alone.

  She rarely saw this light, only ran it on the hospital trails. The quiet houses and empty streets seemed to move while she ran in place, all coming to her. God, she thought. How have I become so crazy?

  The homes, they could be tombs. She imagined a counterpart for herself in Reykjavik running toward a midnight sun. But that didn’t work. She was still the last person on Earth.

  50.

  The bus proved a bad idea. Mendenhall realized this after the third stop. She could see downtown, the gray haze of the ocean beyond. The distant foothills opposite appeared to hover in the smog. Somewhere in that vague gray-and-white triangle the university nestled. After more than ten years, she knew the city only in relation to County and Mercy. The university sprawled behind County. The bus rumbled and stopped in increments, seemed to gain no distance, nothing more than walking speed. She had never ridden the bus. Her patients rode the bus.

  Only five passengers rode with her. The driver’s elbows were locked, his head angled, jaw chewing nothing. Mendenhall figured his next dose of meth would have to be in less than one hour. She noted his sunglasses case clipped above the side window—his stash.

  The passenger across from her was passed out, his head against the window, lips squished open and drooling. His ear was yellow, and a tremor quivered the lobe. He would be dead within the year. She might see him die.

  The thickset woman with the housecleaner’s basket was pregnant, maybe knew this, probably didn’t. Mendenhall thought to go sit next to her and tell her, ask her how it felt. The woman’s black hair was luxurious, curling with life. Her set jaw and swallow reflex fought tears. Maybe she was sitting there realizing her condition for the first time.

  Nearby, an ambulance siren blared and drew closer. The bus lurched to the right and halted. From someplace farther, another ambulance siren began. This one sounded from all directions. Its blue and red reflections caught against a high glass building. The first ambulance passed the bus. Its speed indicated urgency, not a drunk with the DTs, not an invalid with low BP, not anything precautionary. The engine had that high grind of overdrive, chassis in full tilt. She wanted to go with it, to quit what she was trying to do and relieve herself with work.

  Another siren called, far ahead, along the bus route, maybe coming from County. One of the three reached its destination, the siren making that final whoop. She always heard it as a question.

  Mendenhall hurried to the front of the bus.

  “Not a stop,” said the driver. “Go back.” He started spinning the wheel, ready to swing the bus into traffic.

  She nodded to his stash, eyed it, eyed him.

  He cranked open the door. She exited with the sound of the brake release, the driver’s stare hard between her shoulders. She jogged to the center of the sidewalk, avoided looking back when she heard the driver yell, “Hey!”

  Only seconds later did she think his call could be meant for someone else, someone dismounting after her, someone following her. She turned and scanned the sidewalk for anyone who could’ve been one of the other passengers, one in back she hadn’t seen or recorded. The people seemed oddly static, not pedestrians, a mix of loitering and exchange. It all felt pooled, as in a marketplace.

  Swaths of the city proper were like this, she knew, where most of the population waited. For nothing possible, really, except death. Not for someone, not a lottery ticket, not opportunity, not life. Sunny parts shown in movies and TV, stuck in the minds of travelers and cynics, were insignificant slivers within the morass.

  She got the morass. That was what came to her. That was what she found without trying, jumping on a bus with a certain number and location on it. She hated most movies, most TV, most books.

  She hated what she’d become—a person who loved an awful job, a hideous job. A person who worked as a voyeur, who was paid to peer and invade, see the undignified ways people die. Mendenhall never cured them or even really treated them. The doctors—and nurses—beyond her did that, the noble stuff.

  Even now, she thought, look what I’m doing.

  The ambulances went silent. The mingling crowd along the sidewalks gave no sense of event, no direction toward any of the emergencies. Mendenhall felt aimless, useless; she longed for the ER. People sang so many bad songs about this city, so many misconceptions and preconceptions. But she knew one good song about it. One that measured the hardness of dreams, dead grass, and concrete spaces, cut the ideals, and then gave the refrain “Don’t you wish you could be here, too? Don’t you wish you could be here, too?”

  She regained focus and decided to use Mullich’s money for cabs.

  The boulevard was jammed. She grew heated just looking at the traffic, saw no cabs. Did this city even have cabs? No one around her had ever hailed a taxi. That she could see.

  Mendenh
all counted her money on the elevator to the fifth floor of Physical Sciences. She didn’t have nearly enough to make it back to Mercy General. One professor and two lab techs rode up with her. The techs wore lab coats. The prof wore a tracksuit, not unlike Mendenhall’s. He looked at Mendenhall, his eyes lingering on her ball cap.

  “I’m going to see Dr. Covey,” she explained.

  “Are you one of Covey’s collectors?”

  “Yes.” She lied for strength and conviction. She needed both in order to continue.

  “Which post?”

  Mendenhall blushed, then understood what he was asking.

  From Covey’s website, she recalled the different collecting stations from around the world. “Molokai,” she replied.

  “You look so pale. I would have guessed the Oslo one.”

  The elevator stopped at the fifth floor.

  “I’m indoors all day.” Mendenhall held the door so that she could finish her lie. “I only go out at night.”

  She could tell from the anxious bend in his brow, his tender fist gripping, that he was about to ask her out for a coffee. Had he been better-looking, not dressed in a tracksuit, a bit more clever, maybe she would have held the door longer, upped the proposal to a drink, seduced the professor to the very brink of this lie.

  51.

  Covey was not in his office, though the door was open. A tech stood just inside, her lab coat nicely tailored, flattering her thin waist and graceful hips. The young woman seemed aware of this, the way she stood, as though about to dance. She was counting gel samples lined along a bookshelf, using the eraser end of a pencil.

  She flashed Mendenhall a look and, unimpressed, returned to her task.

  Mendenhall leaned into the doorway, checked the office. She was hoping for some volunteer information. The tech ignored her.

  Mendenhall thought she might be humming, though it could’ve just been her look.

  Covey had a sign-up pad pinned to the door’s bulletin board.

  The cork surface appeared quaint, filled with postcards from various collecting posts. A bumper sticker in the lower left corner: “Matter Sizes.”

  Mendenhall signed in, startled to find that the pen and pad were digital, her signature and time no doubt forwarded to Covey—

  wherever he was. She wandered back toward the elevator, that student she once was, frustrated because professors never kept their office hours, always had something else more important to do, to ponder.

  A student in a hoodie slipped out of the elevator, headed away from Mendenhall. She couldn’t tell if the figure, flinty inside loose clothes, was a man or woman, the hood pulled down by hands jammed into the kangaroo pocket. Earbud wires, one green, one red, looped and flopped atop each shoulder.

  “Excuse me,” Mendenhall called. She was going to ask about Covey, how maybe to find him. The figure continued walking straight away, not hearing or not caring. In the ER she would have released the hounds. Here she was just that student again, insecure, lost, second-guessing every decision in her life, certainly whatever set of them had brought her to this hall.

  She realized one thing, then the other, one in the focal point, the other peripheral. The person ahead of her moved in a familiar manner, a reminding tilt in the walk and carriage. And the woman in the tailored lab coat was Covey. She moved, as usual, to the peripheral.

  Jude Covey.

  Mendenhall returned to the doorway. The woman with the pencil ignored her, tap-counted three more gels. Mendenhall leaned against the jamb.

  “You’re Jude Covey. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Covey paused and considered her. “You figure it out. Or you don’t.”

  “I knew someone who always said that.”

  “Knew or still know? It’s a big thing to stop knowing somebody.”

  “Know. Still know. My mentor.”

  “Did he—or she—show you how to dress?” Covey looked her over again. “Your soulmate is two floors up, by the way.”

  “We met.”

  “Schrader. How long before he hit on you?”

  “I escaped the elevator just in time.”

  Covey squinted, drew the eraser along Mendenhall’s striped sleeve. “You two might hit it off.”

  Mendenhall removed the ball cap, shook her hair. “I’m Dr.

  Mendenhall. I’m from the ER at Mercy General.” She let this register.

  “You figure it out. Or you don’t.”

  Covey’s other lab was in a basement. Part storage room, it held dozens of mechanical microscopes, aligned neatly enough to make them appear alive, stabled. A cement lab table fitted with unconnected plumbing and capped Bunsen burners was covered with five bowls, as big as birdbaths. On closer inspection Mendenhall saw that they were glass-lined—empty collecting pools for Covey’s research. Each pool was labeled with its point of origin: Oslo, Reykjavik, Melbourne, Las Vegas, Jakarta. Three had at least one pit mark; two had several. The pit marks ran in a straight line, or close to it.

  The desk area Covey had fashioned in the center of the room had nothing quaint about it. The table was titanium with built-in power supplies. The PC had two large side-by-side screens, with one laptop on either side. A green exercise ball made for a movable seat.

  Covey eased herself onto it, bounced a little, straightened her back. The pleated tails of her lab coat draped over the back of the ball. Mendenhall thought of the black cocktail dress hanging in her locker back at Mercy, the one she kept for overlooked fund-raisers and retirement parties.

  “Have you scanned those pit marks?”

  Covey answered by filling the two main screens with side and overview resonance images, or whatever was the astrochemist equivalent. They were not pit marks. Instead they were drop formations, tiny fountains in freeze-frame, liquid heaved up, a single ripple.

  “Why are they like that?”

  “The glass is very soft—the softest we can make. Almost water.”

  “Do all the particles do this?”

  “Only one in two hundred seventy-five million. The others remain suspended in the water.”

  “Where are those particles?” Mendenhall nodded to the images.

  “The ones that do that.”

  Covey shrugged. The ball bounced. “Somewhere in the mantle.”

  “The Earth’s mantle?”

  “Yes. That huge green mass of perodite.”

  “They make it that far in?”

  “They’re heading somewhere else. We’re just an acceleration, a vector that helps form a crush line.”

  Mendenhall felt her own earlobes, forgetting. “What is a crush line?”

  Covey answered this by putting up a stop-action version of a line of objects hitting Jupiter as it spun. “This is the 1994 Shoemaker-Levy impact. The comet was crushed by the sun and Jupiter’s gravity; then the resultant smaller masses were pulled into a line.

  Twenty-one visible objects. Probably millions of microparticles. All in a line, under a sewing machine.”

  Mendenhall bit her lip, almost cringed.

  “I gave up that fight long ago,” Covey said. “Regular people find metaphors smart. Smart people find them amusing, sexy, even. It’s a skill with a big payoff.”

  Mendenhall started to argue, but Covey turned away from her and drew her finger across the screen, across Jupiter. “See, what’s interesting is how the crush line creates its own latitude as the sphere spins. It doesn’t bend to the equator. It forms a trajectory that extends beyond the planet. To here.”

  “That’s going on? Here?” She pointed to the floor, felt silly

  “In a way. There are seven groups in our study.” Covey nodded to her collecting bowls. “We’re trying to put it together.”

  “When did this bombardment start?” Mendenhall fell into ER

  mode. “And how long will it last?”

  Covey shrugged. “That’s what we’re trying to find out, Dr.

  Mendenhall. It’s difficult to gauge origin and duration. I’m a small part of a study
that began forty years ago. Now that they’re here . . .

  this city is a crowded place.”

  “Why aren’t you telling people? Us?” Mendenhall clutched herself.

  Covey nodded to the images on her screen. “We are. All the time. But . . . they estimate that Jupiter caught the Shoemaker-Levy comet thirty years before crush and impact. For thirty years it was simply that which will be. Unchangeable.” She shrugged. “It’s the same here.”

  Mendenhall blinked, looked at the ceiling.

  Covey jabbed Mendenhall’s shoulder.

  “Look, as soon as I and others published our first findings—in just tiny interdisciplinary papers—we were contacted by the NSA.

  They wanted whatever we had and cautioned—warned—us about releasing it. Assured us they would do it the right way. A safe way.”

  “You trusted that?”

  “I love my work. We love our work. They would have stopped me. That was made clear. I assume you’re getting a taste of that now.” She nodded to Mendenhall’s disguise, the fallen cap.

  “To say the least.”

  “You,” said Covey.

  Mendenhall gave her a confused look.

  “You must know what it’s like,” explained Covey. “My colleagues around the world take my work seriously, use my field data. All I need to do is offer what I find. No conjecture. Way too early for predictions.”

  “But what about people?” Mendenhall dipped in frustration, opened her hands. “ Didn’t you—any of you—think of that?

  Study that? ”

  “The particles pass through everything. The ones we’re talking about. They’re too small and too fast to really do anything.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “It’s a virus,” replied Covey. “I should put on a mask and turn you in.”

  “I don’t think it’s coincidence,” replied Mendenhall, “that you’re here. That I’m here. Someone like you should have contacted someone like me years ago.”