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  She hadn't been used much before we'd gotten her because she didn't exhibit any of the usual symptoms of deterioration. They start with the twitches and then graduate to the shakes and finally they end up clasping their heads between their hands, as if trying to fight a crushing headache.

  After that, they're not much good to anybody.

  And after that . . .

  I didn't see much of Polly for the next few weeks. Not that I didn't go up to her room. Two or three times a day, I went up to her room. But she was always busy with the kid. Bathing the kid. Fixing the kid's hair in some new pretty way. Singing to the kid. Reading to the kid . . .

  A few times I tried it real late at night, hoping that she'd want to lean against the wall with me the way she sometimes did.

  But she always said the same thing. "I wouldn't feel right about it, Congreve. You know, with Sarah in the room and all." I just kept thinking of what had happened to me with the kid before this one . . .

  How fast you can get attached . . .

  I felt responsible for Polly: I never should have taken her along to Hoolihan's . . .

  "Pelham says we can have a holiday party."

  "Good old Pelham," I said. "What a great guy."

  "You don't give him his due, Congreve. Maybe you'd be more like him if you were responsible for this whole hospital."

  "Maybe I would."

  She stood in my doorway, natty as always in her nurse whites. "You know why I brought up the holiday?" she said.

  "Huh-uh."

  "Because we need a Santa."

  "Aw, shit."

  "Somebody found an old costume up on the sixth floor."

  "Aw, shit."

  "You said that."

  "I don't want to play Santa."

  ''That nice little beer belly of yours, you'd be perfect."

  "You haven't seen me naked lately; my little beer belly is even littler now."

  I said it in a kidding fashion but I think she knew that there was some loneliness, and maybe even a bit of anger in it, too.

  In the three months since Sarah had been here, I'd seen increasingly little of Polly.

  No more standing-up lovemaking.

  Not even the occasional hugs we used to give each other. Sarah was her priority now.

  "I'm sorry we haven't gotten together lately, Congreve."

  "It's all right."

  "No it isn't and you know it. It's just that between my two shifts and taking care of Sarah-"

  "I understand."

  "I know you think I'm foolish. About her, I mean."

  I shrugged. "You do what you think's best."

  "You think I'll get too attached to her, don't you?"

  I looked at her. "You know how much you can handle."

  "She's not going to be like the others."

  "She's not?"

  "No." She shook her coppery hair. I wanted to put my hands in it. "I think I've figured out a way to let her rest up between the visits she makes. I think that's what happened to the others."

  "That doesn't sound real scientific."

  "Simple observation. I saw how she was when Pelham was scheduling her. She started to twitch and shake and do all the things the others did. But two weeks ago I convinced Pelham to let me make up her schedule-and you wouldn't believe the difference."

  I saw how excited and happy she looked. She was one damn dear woman, I'll tell you. "I'm happy for you, Polly. I hope this works out for you."

  "She isn't going to end up like the others. That I can promise you."

  I stood up and went over to her. I wanted to make it friendly and not sexual at all but I guess I couldn't help it. I slid my arm around her shoulder and held her to me and felt her warm tears on my face. "You'll do just fine with her, Polly. You really will."

  We stood like that for a time, kind of swaying back and forth with some animal rhythm coupling us fast, and then she said, sort of laughing, "You know, we never have tried it lying down the way most people do, have we?"

  "You know," I said. "I think you're right." And so we tried it and I have to admit I liked it fine, just fine.

  Chapter 6

  A few days after all this, I saw a miracle take place: I was walking down a dusty hall, half the wall hove in from a Christian-Fascist bomb, when I saw Young Doctor Pelham break a smile.

  Now understand, this was not a toothpaste commercial smile. Nor was it a smile that was going to blind anybody.

  But it was a) a real smile and b) it was being smiled by Young Doctor Pelham.

  He was talking to Nurse Ellen, on whom I'd suspected he'd long had some designs, and when he saw me the smile vanished, as if I'd caught him at something dirty.

  By the time I reached the nurse, Pelham was gone.

  "I think I just had a hallucination."

  "Pelham smiling?"

  "Yeah,"

  "You should have been here a minute earlier. He slid his arm around my waist and invited me up to his room tonight. It's the kid."

  ''The kid?"

  She nodded her short-cropped blonde head. ''The Paineater."

  "Oh."

  "She's the best one we've ever had."

  "Really?"

  "Absolutely. She did three patients last night in less than two hours. Then she went into surgery with them this morning." She angled her tiny wrist for a glimpse of her watch. "In fact, that's where I'm headed now. Somebody got caught by some Dobermans. He's a mess. I'm not sure we can save him. They've been prepping him for the last ten minutes,"

  ''The kid going to be in there?"

  "Sure. She's already in there. Trying to calm him down,"

  "Guess I'll go take a look at her." I started to turn away but she grabbed my arm. "I want to say something to you, Congreve, and I'm going to say it in terms you'll understand."

  "All right."

  "You're full of shit about Doctor Pelham."

  "You're right. Those are terms I can understand."

  "He works his ass off here. He's the only surgeon in the whole Fortress. He suffers from depression because he loses so many and when he can't sleep he spends time with all the wounded and injured. That's why he needs the Paineaters, Congreve. Because he doesn't have anybody else to help him and because he's so damned worried about his patients." She was quickly getting angry. "So I want you to knock off the bullshit with him, all right? The only reason he was mad about what you did was because of the bind you left him in with the patients. Or can't you understand that?"

  The funny thing was, I did understand it and for the first time, what Young Doctor Pelham was all about. I guess I considered him cold and arrogant but what I missed seeing was that he was just a very vulnerable and overworked guy doing an almost impossible job. And it took Nurse Ellen to make me see it.

  "He isn't so bad, is he?" I said.

  "No, he isn't."

  "And he isn't just using those Paineaters because he likes to see them suffer, is he?"

  "No, he's not."

  "Maybe he feels sorrier for them than I do."

  "You're a stupid fucker, Congreve. You know the first three of them we ever had in here?"

  "Yeah."

  "When they-Well, after they died, he took each one of them out and buried her."

  There wasn't much I could say.

  "So knock off the 'Young Doctor Pelham' bullshit, all right?"

  "All right."

  "And one more thing."

  "What's that?"

  Now she gave me a great big smile of her own. "He's not so bad in the sack, either."

  On my way back down the hall, I saw Dr. Sullivan and one of the nurses laughing in a secretive sort of way. They were probably telling jokes about Sullivan's boss, Pelham. It almost made me feel sorry for him.

  I borrowed a book from Pelham's library once on the history of surgery. Pretty interesting, especially when you consider that the first operations were done as far back as the Stone Age. Using a piece of stone, the first surgeons cut holes in the skulls of their patients so t
hat they could release evil spirits thought to cause headaches and other ailments.

  But over the centuries, doctors had gotten used to slightly more sophisticated methods and equipment, X-rays and CAT scans and scalpels and clamps and retractors and sutures and hemostats and sponges and inverts among them.

  And anesthesia.

  Before 1842, when anesthesia came into use, all doctors could give patients was whiskey or compounds heavy with opium. And then the operations couldn't last too long, the sedative effects of the booze and opium wearing off pretty fast.

  These days, Pelham and all the other doctors in all the other Fortresses faced some of the old problems. Anesthesia was hard to come by.

  A few years back, a sociologist named Allan Berkowitz was out making note of all the mutated species he found in the various zones, when he was shot in the arm by a Zoner who robbed him and ran away.

  Berkowitz figured he was pretty much dead. The blood loss would kill him if he didn't get to a doc. And the pain was quickly becoming intolerable. The blood loss had also disoriented him slightly. He spent a full half day wandering around in a very small circle.

  He collapsed next to a polluted creek, figuring he might as well partake of some polluted waters, when he noticed a strange looking little girl standing above him. His first thought, given the size and shape of her head, was that she was just another helpless mutant turned away by her parents. You found a lot of freaks in the Zone, just waiting for roaming packs of Dobermans or genetics to take them from their misery.

  This little girl made strange sad sounds in her throat. She seemed to be looking at Berkowitz and yet seeing beyond him, too. The effect was unsettling, like staring at someone you suddenly suspect is blind.

  He dragged himself over to her. A fine and decent man, Berkowitz decided to forget his own miseries for the time and concentrate on hers. Maybe there was something he could do for her.

  He took her little hand and said, "Hi, honey, do you have a name?" And realized again that somehow she saw him yet didn't see him. The autism analogy came to mind.

  And realized, also, that she couldn't talk. The strange sad noises in her throat seemed to be the extent of her vocabulary.

  He wasn't strong enough to stand, so he gently pulled her down next to him, all the time keeping hold of her hand.

  And then he started to feel it. The cessation of his pain, of his fear, even of a generalized anxiety he'd known all his life.

  His first reaction was that this was some physiological trick associated with heavy loss of blood. Maybe the same kind of well-being people noted in near-death experiences, the body releasing certain protective chemicals that instill a sense of well-being.

  But he was wrong.

  He sat next to the girl for more than three hours and in the course of it, they made a telepathic link and she purged him of all his grief and terror.

  He knew this was real because each time he opened his eyes from his reverie state, he saw animals nearby doing their ordinary animal things-a squirrel furiously digging a buried acorn from the grass; a meek little mutt peeing against a tree; a raccoon lying on his back and eating a piece of bread he'd scrounged from some human encampment.

  The wound didn't go away-she didn't heal him, but he felt so pacified, so whole and complete and good unto himself, that his spiritual strength gave him physical strength, and allowed him to find his way out of the Zone and back to his Fortress in Glencoe.

  He brought the girl with him.

  He took her straight to the doctor at the hospital and told the doctor what had happened and, skeptical as the doctor was, the little girl was allowed to audition, as it were.

  They put her in the ER with a man whose arm had been tom off. You could hear his screams as far up as the sixth floor. They were prepping him for surgery.

  The girl sat down and took the man's lone good hand. He was in so much pain, he didn't even seem to. notice her at first.

  Nothing happened right away.

  The strapped-down man went on writhing and screaming.

  But then the writhing lessened.

  And then the screaming softened.

  And the doctor watched the rest of it, bedazzled.

  Berkowitz's discovery made it possible for hospitals to keep on functioning. All they had to do was hire Outriders, men and women willing to take the chance of searching the Zones for more youngsters who looked and acted like this one. And while they were out there, like the Outriders of old, they could also note any gangs of people who seemed headed for the Fortress to inflict great bodily harm.

  To date, these were a few observed truths about the Paineaters as they'd come to be called:

  Generally between the ages of 3-6.

  Generally put out to die by their families because of their mutation.

  Unable to speak or see (as we understand seeing).

  Generally useful for only a three-to-four month period.

  Afterward, must be sent to Zone 4 for further study. At this stage, dementia has usually set in.

  They could be used up, like a disposable cigarette lighter. They could absorb only so much of other people's pain and then that was it. A form of dementia set in. Fortress Northwestern had a group of doctors studying the used-up ones. By doing so, they hoped to increase the chances for longer use. There was a finite number of these children and they were extremely important to the survival of all Fortress hospitals. There were two other observations I should note:

  Extended proximity to these children has been known to make human beings overly protective of them, leading to difficulties with hospital efficiencies.

  Extended proximity to these children has led to difficulties with normal human relationships.

  I thought of all this as I stood in the observation. . . balcony and watched the operation proceed. The man who'd been attacked by the Dobermans was a mess, a meaty, bloody, flesh-ripped mess. There would have to be a lot of plastic surgery afterward and even then, he would always be rather ghastly looking, a D-movie version of Frankenstein.

  There were six people, including Pelham, on the surgery team. Even though he didn't have the equipment he needed-or in truth, the ability to completely sterilize the equipment he did have-Pelham tried to make this as much like his old surgery days as possible. There was the large table for instruments; the small table for instruments; and the operating table itself.

  Above the line of her surgical mask, I could see Dr. Sullivan's beautiful eyes. Disapproving eyes. She obviously felt she should be in charge here, not Pelham.

  They started cleansing the man's wounds, the surgical team, with Pelham pitching in. Surgeons were no longer stars. They had to do the same kind of work as nurses now.

  The kid sat in a chair next to the operating table, holding the hand of the patient. He was utterly tranquil, the man.

  The kid had been working with him for some time now. The kid and the patient faced me, as did the surgery team.

  I spotted Polly right away, behind her green surgical mask. She was supposed to be helping with the cleansing but she spent most of her time glancing at the kid.

  You really do get hooked into them, some kind of dependence that you ultimately come to regret.

  But then she was snapped back to the reality of the operating table when another nurse nudged her roughly and nodded to the patient.

  Polly needed to clean a shoulder wound.

  She set to work.

  And just as she pulled her attention away, I saw the kid do it. Go into a spasm, a violent shudder ugly to see. And then I knew how foolish all Polly's talk had been about resting the kid so she didn't ever get used up the way all the other ones did.

  I got out of there.

  I didn't want to be there when Polly noticed the kid go into a spasm, and realize that all her hopes had come to nothing.

  Chapter 7

  The argument came three days later. Even two floors up, you could hear it.

  I was walking up the stairs to my own room when I he
ard the yelling and then heard a door slamming shut.

  Eighth floor, two down; eighth floor being Polly's. I decided I needed to check it out.

  Pelham was in front of Polly's door. So was Nurse Ellen. They were speaking in low voices so nobody except Polly could hear them. Then Dr. Sullivan appeared, swank even in her dusty medical smock.

  "What's going on?" I said.

  Pelham frowned and shook his head. Of late I'd been nicer to him and was surprised to find that he'd been nicer to me, too.

  He walked me down the hall, away from the door, to where a small mountain of rubble lay beneath the smashed-out windows.

  Dr. Sullivan and Nurse Ellen stayed by Polly's door. "Have you talked to her lately?"

  "Not for a couple of days. She keeps pretty much to herself."

  ''That's the trouble. Herself-and the kid."

  "I know."

  "The same way you got, Congreve." For once there was sympathy in his voice, not condemnation. "Have you seen the little room she fixed up for the kid?"

  "Huh-uh."

  "It'll break your heart. Polly's convinced herself that she's the kid's mother."

  "What's wrong with that? We're all pretty lonely here." The frown again. But the dark eyes were sad, understanding. "She won't let us use the kid."

  "Oh, man. Then she really is gone on her."

  "Far gone. Maybe you can help."

  "Not if she's this far along. You get hooked in."

  ''The same way you did."

  I nodded. ''The same way I did."

  Nurse Ellen was getting mad. Raising her voice.

  "Polly, we've got a ten-year-old boy down there who was shot by some Zoner. We have to operate right away. We need her, Polly. Desperately. Can't you understand that?"

  "Let us in," Dr. Sullivan said in a voice that implied she expected to be obeyed immediately.

  But the door didn't open.

  And Polly didn't respond in any way at all.

  "She said the kid has started twitching," Pelham said. "You know what that means." By now, Nurse Ellen was shrieking. "Polly, we have to have the kid and we have to have her now!"