Death Watch

by Elizabeth Forrest

  A white-hot beacon pierced his thoughts. Dudley jumped.

  “Something wrong, buddy?”

  He blinked into the glare, momentarily blinded, but he knew the style of voice and rolled down the window. “No, officer. Just driving home. The air-conditioning got overheated, so I pulled over. Didn’t want to stop traffic on the freeway.”

  “Everything under control?”

  “Oh, yes.” He leaned over, reaching for the glove compartment. “Do you want the registration?”

  The flashlight wavered. Then the featureless voice behind it said, “No. That’s all right. Better get a move on, though, you’re still at the edge of the ramp.”

  Dudley looked about, as if seeing his surroundings for the first time. “I’m sorry, Officer.” He started the car. He pulled away slowly, to take the cloverleaf back on, doubling back toward the San Bernardino Mountains, not wanting to let the patrolman know his true destination. He would get off and back on again down the road. In the mirror, he could see the officer now, faintly visible in the glow of a streetlight, standing in uniform beside his bike, watching Dudley pull away.

  He’d never even heard the motorcycle. The patrolman had either approached him coasting, or he’d been lost in thought so deep—

  Never mind. No harm, no foul. Dudley cleared his throat. The profuse sweating had dried, leaving his face and torso feeling flaky and crusty. He looked for the nearest exit, so that he could swing about and head home.

  No. Not home. He wanted to look at something beautiful.

  Deathwatch He headed toward Mount Mercy Hospital.

  “Are you an angel?”

  Dudley stood over the shrunken form in the bed, and smiled. “Why, yes, ma’am. You’ve been calling for me, haven’t you?”

  The kindly face looking back at him reminded him of an apple doll from a country fair, an apple doll who’d lost her blushed cheeks to the gray of pain and death. The faded blue eyes were nearly lost in the withering of her skin. “I have,” the old woman said, breathily, haltingly. “They won’t let me go, you know. My cats are home. My plants. No one to take care of them the way they should be. No one who cares the way I do. And my arms—” She tried to hold up her arms, where bruises testified to the difficulty of keeping a good vein for the IV, but she’d been tied with soft rags to keep her from pulling out the shunt yet another time. “They hurt. And I’m so tired.”

  Dudley put his hand on a monitor. “You need to rest first,” he told her. “And then you can go home.”

  “Rest?”

  “Yes, rest.” He watched her as her eyes dutifully fluttered shut. Then he put a pillow over her face and held it down until the feeble struggles ceased.

  She was not quite dead when he removed the pillow. Dudley turned the oxygen off. He wiped his palm print from the monitor as it began to spike and beep softly in alarm.

  Using the tail of the sheet, he pulled the shunt from her arm. Something wet spilled on the mattress. He left swiftly as steps down the hall told him the nurses had reacted to the frantic alarm of the machinery.

  The grease pencil schedule board by the station was not more legible than usual, but a quick scan told him the patient he wanted had moved on. The curve of his smile deepened. He was an angel, he told himself, as he followed the trail. The angel of mercy.

  Behind him, the intercom bleated, “Code Blue, room 307, stat .”

  He found her with little trouble, edging the door open. Light from the corridor fell across her sleeping face like sunbeams from heaven, illuminating the rises and hollows of her features. Her hair caressed the pillow slip, a halo about her face. She’d cleansed her hair. It framed her face in tiny, soft, and unruly fringes, the longer tresses in waves that made him ache to run his hands through them. The bruises had already begun to fade, and he was a little relieved to see he had not left severe ones on her slender throat. She was beautiful, in a unique way, if marred, and he was glad he was not responsible for the marring. He stood and watched her, drinking her in like a feverish man gulps cool water, for a very long time.

  McKenzie woke, a splinter of harsh light from the hallway prying at her eyelids. Someone was watching. Her door lay pushed slightly open and she blinked at the intrusion, her mind fogged by sedatives which had finally taken hold. The quivery feeling of dread had begun to build in the pit of her stomach again, but it had dulled this time. Though her senses seemed blunted, they were still functioning. Someone was in the room with her, just inside the doorway where the night lay pooled in shadow. She heard the breathing.

  “Who is it? Who’s there?” She shaded her eyes against the beacon.

  “Me.”

  She looked to the flow of shadows along the wall. “Who’s me?”

  The answer made no immediate sense to her. “You’re real.”

  A boyish voice. Not Jack’s. Tension flowed out of her body.

  She felt real. Like the Velveteen Rabbit, torn and worn hairless and bruised. Mac pulled herself up in the bed. “I think so. Are you?”

  “Damn right.” The young voice, though strained, sounded definite.

  Mac reached back to the light switch on the wall. It clicked on, flooding the room with its glow.

  A boy sat on the floor by the front door. He wore hospital pajamas, pullover top and drawstring bottoms, his hair tousled. He had the coltish look of a boy about to pass that threshold into adolescence, still innocent, but not very. He blinked furiously against the illumination, put a foot out and closed the door to the room, shutting himself in with her.

  “They’ll see that!”

  “Well at least I can see you. What are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to look at you.” His nose wrinkled, and he did not quit squinting even as her eyes adjusted to the light. He must need to wear glasses. “I waited until they all left. They put the temps in here, you know.”

  “Temps?”

  He must be all of, what, eleven or twelve? His chin nodded emphatically. “Temps. The ones who never stay. Sometimes they die in here. Sometimes they just get taken away in the morning.” He cocked his head. “You’re pretty banged up. What did you do—use the car to try it?”

  Mac asked back, baffled, “Try what?”

  He held up his arms. The hospital top sleeves slid down a little, revealing bandages wrapped about each wrist. There were seeping rusty stains on his left arm.

  Her stomach clenched as she realized he was talking suicide. She did not want to offend him, and swallowed down her reaction. “Not ... quite like that.”

  He lowered his hands. “So, do you think you’re crazy?”

  “Do you?”

  His face twitched. “I dunno. I guess so.” He got to his feet, back braced against the wall, sliding upward, a game of youthful agility. “I just came to warn you.”

  “Warn me?”

  “Yeah. Don’t let her touch you.” Did he mean Susan Craig? Or were there women techs on the floor? What did he mean? Was her last refuge unsafe, after all? “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t either.” He scuffed a bare foot on the linoleum. “Just don’t let her touch you.”

  “Dr. Craig? She hasn’t ... molested you, has she?”

  His preadolescent face reddened. “Naw! Nothing like that.”

  “Then what do you mean?”

  He looked back up. “I told you, I don’t know. If I did, I’d—” he looked away, across the room. “I’d tell somebody. If they’d let me. Mom or somebody.”

  “You can’t talk to your family?”

  He scratched now, behind his ear, like a gangly puppy. “Not yet. Dr. Whatley says it’s too upsetting for me ... and them. I’d tell Whatley if I could, but he’s gone on a seminar. The only one left is her.”

  “Them?” McKenzie repeated.

  “My mom. M’stepdad. The others.” His eyes met hers, flicked away again. “They don’t want to hear about it.”

  The lump she felt for him settled in her throat. “It must be tough.”

  He crosse
d his arms across his chest. “It’s not so bad. I get ice cream when I want it. It’s just that—it’s just there’s nobody to talk to. Everybody in here is crazy.”

  She thought she knew what he meant. Not crazy, perhaps, but crazed. Frantic behaviors and thoughts. No one for an eleven-year-old to talk to. How could she be much better? “There’s the telephone. You have buddies ...”

  “I don’t have one,” he interrupted. “Neither do you.”

  She thought for a moment he meant friends, and prepared to argue bitterly with him, then realized what he referred to. Mac ran her hand across the inside of the railing, along the console board. No phone was tucked into its niche. Hers lay empty, too. Panic managed to pierce her benumbed thoughts. No way to reach Joyce. Or Carter. Or anyone else.

  “So,” the kid continued. “Do you think you’re going to stick around?”

  “I don’t know. I have ... some things to work out.”

  He nodded wisely. He started edging toward the door.

  “Leaving?”

  “I get in trouble if they catch me out of my room. Then she,” and his face creased, “finds out.”

  “But surely they just want to help you.”

  “I have nightmares,” he said abruptly. “No one can help me.” He turned, put a hand on the door. He looked back over his shoulder. “Do you have dreams?”

  She felt a sudden deep kinship with him. Visions and dreams. “Sure.”

  He shuddered.

  Suddenly afraid, McKenzie said, “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

  “Maybe.”

  “If I don’t, what’s your name? I’ll come looking for you.”

  Prompted, he stood silent for a long moment. Then, “Brandon. But I like it when every one calls me Brand.”

  “Brand?”

  “Yeah. Like in Brand X, the stuff nobody wants.”

  Before she could say anything else, he pulled the door open partway and slipped through the crack.

  McKenzie sat and watched the door to see if anything else might happen, thinking, What a strange child. Yet, she could not help but think of Cody, and what Cody would be like if he’d suddenly been made human.

  A half-grown, awkward, lonely eleven-year-old.

  Mac reached out and turned the light back off, slumping down into the bed.

  The doctor in her made Susan rub carefully, trying not to tear the delicate tissues of her face, but she couldn’t refrain from succumbing to the satisfaction of massaging her tired eyes. Elbows on the desk, she rested her head in her hands for a moment. She looked down at the printout on her desk one last time, readying for the setup in the morning. Miller could do it if he came in. She would rather do it herself, but he would think it peculiar if she assigned it to herself only, out of rotation. She did not want any flags.

  A shadow fell across the paper. She looked up. She frowned. “What are you doing here?”

  Dudley smiled. “It’s late,” he said. “I came to see you home.”

  Chapter 21

  Susan kept her voice neutral. “I’m not sure if I’m ready to go yet.”

  “You’re tired,” he answered. “You can’t do it all in one day.”

  She might need to. Dudley could not read them, but all the signs were there. She might have to close shop here and move on. Move on before anyone became truly aware of who she was and what she was doing.

  She made the decision to go with him. With brisk movements, she snapped the file back into place and left the schedule across the desk where Miller would look for it, and pulled her purse out of the desk drawer. “You’re right. I should never have come back this evening.”

  He escorted her out of the lab area and down the hall like a soft-spoken gentleman. The corridor lights were harsh on his face, showing evidence of where the neurosurgeons and plastic surgeons had put him back together, the hairline showing gray along the scarred seams, but the same scarring would barely be visible in softer daylight. The ward tech at the desk looked up, saw them approaching, and went back to her book. She knew Dudley almost as well as she knew the doctors.

  Though he looked calm and unruffled now, she could smell the sweat on him and see that his clothes were travel rumpled, and she wondered how close he was to losing it. She talked to him about Brandon, idle chatter, while reading his body language, what he wasn’t saying.

  He half-paused near the room which she had assigned to McKenzie Smith. His head partially turned as they slowed in passage, and Susan could feel her brows tighten. He knew she was in there. How? ... and why?

  Especially why ?

  He seemed to realize what he was doing, and quickened his stride, sweeping her past the tech and through the double doors of the ward.

  By the time they reached the quiet of the employee parking lot, she knew how he’d cross-connected with the girl, and why he’d come to the hospital, using Susan, using his time on and around the ward to give him access. And she knew she wanted it stopped.

  At least until she knew whether the girl was of any value or not.

  She swung around at her car door, instead of using the key.

  “Stay away from her,” she said, without preamble.

  They knew each other too well for him to pretend to misunderstand her. A frown rippled across his face. “Why?”

  “Because I told you to.”

  “And if I can’t?”

  Susan’s mouth was dry, but she managed, “Then I’ll let him loose, Dudley. I’ll let the sleeping man wake, and he’ll eat you alive. There won’t be a scrap of you left.” She watched as he paled under the garage structure’s lighting. “Do you understand?”

  Rough-voiced. “You wouldn’t—”

  “I can and I will.”

  Words failed him entirely. Dudley looked down and nodded.

  She put her hand on his shoulder. “We’ve come too far to lose what we’ve worked for. I know what you want, and what you need. I won’t let you down, either.”

  “I need ...” he began and halted.

  “I know.” She caressed the key chain in her hand. This day had not gone well for her. She faced losing Donnie, Hotchkiss, Brandon, and now the Smith girl. Even Dudley, if he could not obey her. She could recoup her losses, she’d done so before, but such a staggering blow might set her back years. She needed to salvage something from the program. Brandon had family. Donnie had only Graciela, who had strayed down the wrong path before. She found the words. “I’ve got someone else who might please you as well.”

  He looked up.

  “We’ll talk at home.”

  She knew she was dreaming. That gave Mac only a little comfort as she passed into a corridor which was eerily like and yet unlike the hospital. No cheery paint on the walls here. All was in a gray-green, a color that she thought of as “cadaver green,” and it covered the walls and ceilings as far as they stretched. She walked hesitantly through the maze, turning and occasionally trying a door, but none would open to her. She passed empty counters which might, or might not, have been nursing stations. Was she dreaming of Mount Mercy? This was more like a dungeon. She put out her hand, touched her fingertips to the wall. It was cold, as chilled as the inside of a refrigerator. Morgue, she thought, as she snatched her hand away.

  She came to a halt at the T-section, thinking she had been there before, and wondered which way to go.

  She heard him just moments before she saw him: dog claws scrabbling on the hard linoleum flooring in leaps and bounds. Cody burst around the corner, tongue lolling in a happy adolescent doggy grin, his tail waving gaily. He slid to a stop and barked and whirled around, daring her to catch him, coaxing her to follow.

  She took a step, he gaily retreated. She put her hand out, he bowed low on his front legs, rear in the air, asking her to play in dog body language. “Cody,” she called softly, to hear her voice echo in the cavernous hallways.

  His ears pricked. He whined, as though aware he was behaving badly by not coming closer. He shook himself and turned around again, pleading with her t
o follow.

  It was almost as though there were a distance between them he could not cross.