Second Sight

by George D. Shuman

  “Miss Moore?” The trooper approached the blind woman in the terminal tentatively.

  Sherry turned toward the voice and nodded. Stuck out her hand.

  “Trooper Marsh, Jane Marsh. Let me get your bag,” the trooper gave her a firm handshake and grabbed the overnight bag from her hand. Sherry was sure the temperature outside was well above a hundred, and the trooper’s hand felt as if she’d pulled it from an oven.

  “Thank you,” Sherry said to the young woman.

  “Car’s on the curb, ma’am, right this way.”

  This is where people had difficulty figuring out how to handle a blind woman, Sherry knew. Wondering if she should take Sherry’s arm or if she was only supposed to lead the way.

  “Go ahead,” Sherry told the trooper pleasantly, “I can follow your footsteps.”

  Sherry used her walking stick to follow the trooper across the terminal floor, and when the automatic doors whooshed open they hit a wall of arid heat.

  The police cruiser smelled of must and a familiar women’s deodorant. Marsh set Sherry’s bag in the backseat and got behind the wheel. Then she turned up the air conditioner and cursed, scratching her hand against the seat fabric. “Damned red ants must have got me.” She wheeled the car into traffic. “Sure is hot around here, huh?”

  “I don’t mind,” Sherry said. “I’m kind of a heat person myself.”

  “Well, I’ve been living here five years and this is the first time my shirt was ever wringing wet. Hottest day I can ever remember.”

  Sherry could hear the trooper still scratching the palm of one hand.

  “I read about you in People magazine once.”

  “That was awhile back.” Sherry adjusted the air vent away from her face. “I was still in my twenties, I think.”

  “You read minds,” the trooper said.

  “Not really. It’s more about memories,” Sherry said.

  Something rolled from under the passenger seat and struck Sherry in the heel of her shoe. She leaned down and picked up a heavy metal cylinder the circumference of a thermos.

  “Sharp edges,” the trooper warned, leaning across to take it from her, then putting it under her own seat. “Darned thing sliced open my tire last night. I cut my hand on it twice.”

  “What is it?”

  “Beats the hell out of me, but it sure is pretty. One end has this thick periscope-like glass on it, and the inside glows fluorescent blue like you’ve never seen. You know, the color of those tropical fish in the Caribbean.”

  Sherry smiled and shrugged. “Not really.”

  “Ah, I’m sorry,” the trooper said. “I forgot. Anyhow, it’s just this amazing color of blue. My husband keeps a metal lathe in our garage. He’s a genius when it comes to metal. I want him to make a bracelet out of it for me. Maybe a ring for our daughter.”

  The trooper adjusted her own air vents with her free hand. “Don’t mean to be nosy, but are you going to look at all them bodies?”

  “If I can.”

  “Yeah, that’s what they said.” She checked and adjusted one of the side mirrors. “Rumors fly around headquarters so fast they could knock your eye out. They’ve all been quarantined now, the bodies, you know,” the trooper said. “Whatever it is, it must be highly contagious.”

  “I knew there was talk about a virus,” Sherry said.

  The trooper put her turn signal on and edged into the passing lane.

  “The woman who died on the road, Victoria Spencer, was a junkie from Colorado. Her old man owns the ranch I was sitting on last night near Sheep Springs. We can’t find the parents to notify them about their daughter and now we found out that a little girl found north in the Four Corners was a DNA match to Victoria. No one knew she had a daughter until now, but that’s two Spencers with the virus. We’re thinking maybe the parents were exposed too. Maybe even dead inside their trailer.”

  “Can’t you break in to check on their welfare?”

  “Our captain’s talking with the Health Department now, trying to assess the risks once we’re in.”

  “How about the house in Colorado?” Sherry asked.

  “Troopers up there went in and no one was home. Victoria hadn’t been living there for weeks according to her neighbors.”

  Suddenly the car began to slow. “I’m just going to stop up here at the gas station and hit the ladies’ room. Maybe you want to stretch your legs or get something inside?”

  The car wheeled off the side of the road. Sherry could hear the noise of gas pumps and a baby crying, a pneumatic wheel wrench in the background.

  “I must be coming down with the flu or something,” the trooper said, rolling to a stop. “My gut feels like I ate a bag of worms.”

  The Albuquerque Presbyterian Hospital administrator, Dr. Gladys Lynn, introduced herself when Sherry arrived and apologized for the confusion. “I’m really sorry, but I don’t quite understand why you were sent to me.”

  Sherry explained who she was and said that the New Mexico Department of Health and Human Services had asked her to come at the behest of a mutual acquaintance. “I would have called first, but I thought you were expecting me,” she’d said, explaining what she hoped to accomplish for the administrator.

  Sherry waited through a minute of tense silence for a response.

  But Dr. Lynn picked up the phone instead and got her assistant on the line and told him she wanted to conference with the health director. After two long minutes it was clear he wasn’t available. When she replaced the receiver on her desk, she folded her hands and set her jaw. Sherry could feel tension in the air.

  “Miss Moore, I don’t know why the director thought it prudent to bring you here, but no one is going into that quarantine downstairs unless they are a physician and I mean one who is essential in identifying or treating this disease. I am certainly not letting any entertainers into that room.”

  Dr. Lynn bit her upper lip, shaking her head in wonder. “Miss Moore, I don’t know what to do with you and I really have more important things to do. Please forgive me,” she said, rising to her feet, “but…”

  “Doctor,” Sherry said softly. “You can either let me see your victims, or take me back to the airport. I can’t help you without actually touching the girl’s hand and I certainly don’t want to be in your way.”

  Lynn hit the intercom. “Jeffrey,” she said. “See that Miss Moore gets back to the airport and help her with any special arrangements she needs.”

  The door opened, her assistant entered, and Dr. Lynn slammed it on her way out.

  “Sorry, but it’s a little tense around here at the moment,” the assistant explained.

  Sherry wondered for the thousandth time if being blind worked for or against her. You couldn’t help but think you were getting sympathy points from people at times, but then you were also quite easy to ignore. Sherry had perceived at quite a young age that there was power in being able to look into the other person’s eyes. Not to mention the stigma that went along with being disadvantaged. The reality was that many people thought physical challenges made you less qualified to make decisions.

  Blind or not, Sherry was conveying memories of the dead. Memories she retrieved through the deceased person’s skin cell receptors. But if you couldn’t accept the premise that Sherry was somehow tapping into human memory, there was but one other conclusion—glove, no glove, she wasn’t going to produce what the administrator wanted to know.

  She didn’t blame Dr. Lynn. It would hardly be professional to let a civilian get involved in a potential epidemic. And for that matter, if the administrator didn’t know what kind of disease they were dealing with in quarantine, why should she be so willing to stick her hand in the hornet’s nest?

  The assistant led her to his outer office. “I’ll start working on a flight for you,” he said. “May I get you water or coffee?”

  “I’m fine,” Sherry said softly. “But please try to get me back to Philadelphia this evening?” she said. “I really don’t want to spen
d the night here if I don’t have to.”

  “I’ll do everything possible, Miss Moore.”

  Sherry waited, thinking things happened for a reason. Brigham had told her often enough to be careful what she wished for. And now with Brian in her life, she had another reason to be concerned for her safety. Maybe she’d been too quick to take on new risks, with a potential partner in her life. Maybe she’d let her defensiveness override a real concern for her safety.

  The phone rang and the assistant put the caller on hold.

  Thirteen stories below, the corpse of a child lay in a sublevel cold storage facility. The body of the child’s mother was on its way from the coroner’s office in Shiprock, which by now had also been quarantined.

  The cold storage facility in the hospital’s basement was currently being used by the city’s Office of Emergency Preparedness to preserve food and medical stores. Now a biohaz remediation team had been sent in to convert it into a temporary morgue.

  The location had been chosen because it was already slated for demolition. In three months’ time it would become the footprint of a new seven-story hospital wing. The only preparations it needed now were plastic sheeting on the walls and floors to segregate it from the remainder of the hospital. The room was large enough to accommodate fifty bodies should the unthinkable occur. Once the emergency was over they could simply demolish it and haul it away, rubble—walls, dirt, and all.

  Sherry was halfway through a cup of coffee when she heard heels striking tile and approaching the executive suite. The door opened quickly and closed behind Dr. Lynn’s distinctive perfume.

  “Would you please rejoin me in my office?” the woman said.

  Sherry had the feeling Dr. Lynn was making some kind of nonverbal gestures to her assistant as she walked.

  “Miss Moore,” the doctor said, closing her door. She hesitated until they were both sitting, shifted her weight in the seat, and sighed. She seemed uncomfortable with what she was about to say, Sherry thought. It was something she was in conflict with.

  “I must apologize,” the doctor started saying abruptly. “I know you came a long way. I know you didn’t ask to be here.”

  Sherry could feel the tingle of nerve endings the length of her spine. The doctor hadn’t needed to bring her back into her office to make an apology. She could just as easily have let the assistant express any regret. Which meant the administrator had talked to someone and that she or someone higher had changed her mind. Sherry was going to be allowed to enter that room downstairs and all of a sudden she wasn’t sure she wanted to.

  “I’m afraid I’m a rather uninformed woman. I don’t read much about the outside world”—she must have made a hand gesture, Sherry thought, during the interruption—“unless it’s a trade journal,” the doctor said. “Work is my life and my specialty is cardiology, not neurology. I have to say I’ve never heard of you or your rather unique abilities before. The health director and I spoke. I discovered, like him, that you have a rather esteemed following in our profession. I still can’t say I’m happy with my decision, but I will grant you access to the child in our morgue. The mother’s corpse is still in transit, so perhaps we can wait until tonight or tomorrow before you see her, and then only if need be.” She sighed again. “So tell me. What will you need to do with the girl’s body?”

  Sherry rubbed the palms of her hands together, nodding in a moment of silence. She thought about Brian again and mused cynically that she didn’t deserve to have a normal relationship. Of course he should have been worried about her. She was already blind, for Christ’s sake. Did she expect him to take on someone with even bigger challenges than being blind? She had to accept that there were mutual interests at stake in a relationship. It was a responsibility to minimize the odds that anything bad would happen to her, and she was sure that Brian would do the same when the opportunity presented itself. In fact, he had been talking about taking an instructor’s assignment once he finished his tour overseas.

  Suddenly she felt guilty, as if she should be making a phone call and telling him about the risk she was about to take here.

  But she didn’t. She only needed to get through this one more time. She only needed to get home safely.

  “I just need to hold her hand,” Sherry said. “Just for a few seconds.”

  The administrator lifted the phone from the receiver. She placed a call and issued directions. Then she replaced it and stood.

  “Someone will be in the room, Miss Moore, both to guide you to the body and to see that you enter and exit as efficiently as possible. I do not want you in that room long.”

  Sherry nodded.

  “If you are limited to last memories, Miss Moore, I would be interested in bedding. Where did the child lie at night? What did the home look like, or, if it wasn’t a home, was there a vehicle, a cave, a commercial building? Neither of the known victims had bites on their bodies, so they had to have breathed in the spores of the mice feces. Ventilation ducts from a basement or crawl space under a house. Insulation in furniture or vehicles, anywhere mice could nest.”

  “When can I get to her?”

  “The room will be ready within the hour. They’re rigging a kind of airlock chamber of polyethylene skin between the entrance and interior. We’ve secured it like a decontamination tent. It’s hardly a real containment lab, but it will do. Use the restroom or the phone if you like. I’ll have my assistant bring you down when they’re ready.”

  Sherry nodded.

  The floors were cold beneath her stocking feet. The suit felt heavy and awkward, hooded mask pressing against her shoulders. The technicians had improvised one arm by removing the glove and duct-taping the material as securely to the arm as possible at the wrist. Sherry would have five minutes in the room with the girl. The administrator reassured her that the real risk of hantavirus was airborne ingestion. If you weren’t bitten or breathed it into the lungs, you weren’t likely to become infected. Not as long as you avoided bodily fluids and the victim’s clothing, which had already been removed.

  That in itself was a relief, Sherry thought.

  Her feet were getting colder for lack of circulation or maybe the floor was just cold. Sherry waited by the door, shifting weight from one leg to the other. She could hear the rush of fresh filtered oxygen as she breathed.

  A minute with the child was more than enough time, she knew. She only needed a minute if things went as planned.

  Then the door opened and suddenly she was taken by the arm and walked into the airlock, where she was helped into boots that were sealed tightly around her calves. Someone else wearing plastic gloves took her forearm and with a rush of cold air they stepped through the heavy sheets of plastic into the makeshift morgue and a moment later through a third. Sherry subconsciously counted thirteen steps before a tug on her arm brought her to a halt. The gloved hand lifted hers and placed a small bare hand in it.

  Sherry took a breath. Cool oxygen rushed noisily into her mask…there was a man, unshaven, thirty or forty years old, he was shirtless and fat and he was standing in a cramped bathroom with his back to a sink. She was looking at him sideways, her head lying perpendicular on a kind of a bed. He was staring back at her, rocking drunkenly on his heels, trying to control a stream of urine splashing into a toilet; she saw a ring of orange embers pulsing under the ashes of a campfire, a red gas can next to the tire of a truck, a woman’s purple backpack, a cracked red wallet on the ground, a key chain on a wine cork, a yellow T-shirt with stick people drawn on it. There was a black lump in the coals of the fire and a yellowed bone protruding through; she was holding a stick and using it to push a toy boat through a rut of muddy water; the boat was pink and there was a one-armed naked Barbie in it. Barbie was leaning sideways on the seat, a penny and a beer bottle cap in the stern. She saw an enormous woman jammed into an old fabric recliner; the side was torn and hanging like an elephant’s ear over a filthy green carpet.

  The skinhead boy was pointing to something big and metal in
the back of his pickup truck, a machine of some kind, or so it seemed. It was turquoise and as large as a refrigerator. It had a long pink plastic cushion on top as if it was meant to be lain on. There were dials and levers on the side and near the bottom at the wheels. There was an arm like a crane that reached over the cushions and from the end of the arm a black metal cylinder with a sealed glass end.

  There was a large brown-and-black dog with one bent ear; it had a wide pale scar where fur refused to grow across one of its haunches; the dog had a collar with spikes sticking out and it came to the bed and licked her hand. The large woman again, still sitting in the recliner; she was biting down on an end of rubber strap, straining against the other that was cutting into the flesh around her bicep. The skinhead was kneeling next to her, wearing a sleeveless white T-shirt. He had swastika tattoos on both arms and was pushing the plunger of a syringe that was sticking out of the woman’s forearm.

  In the same narrow room the bald teen and the fat man were sitting opposite two long-haired men at a kitchen table. Cigarette smoke formed a gray halo over their heads. The men wore buckled boots and leather vests. They had prominent cheekbones and smooth dark skin; one had beads threaded into his black hair.

  The kitchen table again, the men were laughing, the teenage boy was showing them the inside of the black cylinder she had seen in the back of the truck. One end was ragged as if it had been sawed from the machine. The other glowed electric blue, its light flickering eerily over their sweat-soaked faces.

  The boy reached into the cylinder and withdrew his finger covered with the luminescent blue light and he drew an X on his forearm and the X glowed blue as he raised it over his head.

  A young woman with brown hair; she was in her thirties, maybe forties, wearing blue jeans and a dirty blue bra. She was sunburnt and she was kneeling between the bumpers of two mangled cars, puking into the sand.

  The little girl was lying on the mattress, staring at the empty bathroom. Flies were lighting on her nose, walking across a sticky spot of vomit by her face. The fat man was reaching for her, picking her up in his arms, and he carried her outside and put her into the back of the truck. Then something covered her and it was dark.