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  "C'mon, Congreve," Pelham said. ''Try your luck. Please."

  ''Then you three go back downstairs."

  "We don't have long. The boy's lost a lot of blood."

  "I'll do what I can as soon as you two leave." He wasted no time. He collected Ellen and Dr. Sullivan, went to the EXIT door and disappeared.

  ''They're gone, Polly."

  "You can't talk me into it, Congreve."

  "Polly, you're not being rational."

  "And you are?"

  ''There's a little boy downstairs dying."

  "Well, there's a little girl in here who's dying, too, and nobody seems to give a shit about that."

  "She won't die. She's got a long way to go."

  "You know better than that. You know how they are after they start twitching. And getting headaches."

  "She'll be all right."

  "I can't believe you're talking like this, Congreve. After what you did and all."

  "They don't have any choice, Polly. They'll come and take her from you."

  "I've got a gun in here."

  "Polly, please, please start thinking clearly, will you?"

  Three of them came through the EXIT door now, two men and a woman. The men were nurses. The woman was an intern. They all carried shotguns.

  They were in a hurry. They swept up to me and forced me to stand aside. They meant to get Polly's attention and they did. No warning. No words at all.

  Two of them just opened fire. Pumped several noisy echoing powder-smelling rounds into the door. Polly screamed. The kid was making frantic animal noises. "You going to bring her out?" one of the male nurses shouted.

  "No!" Polly shouted back. This time they must have pumped twenty rounds in there. They beat up the door pretty good.

  "We're coming in, Polly!" the second nurse shouted. Pretty obviously, she didn't have a gun. Or she would have used it.

  Because now they went in. Booted in the door. Dove inside the room. Trained all three shotguns right on her.

  She had pushed herself back against the comer in the precious pink room that she had turned into a wonderful bedroom for a little girl.

  The girl was in her arms, holding tight, all the gunfire and shouting having terrified her.

  Polly was sobbing. "Please, don't take her. Please don't take her."

  She said it over and over.

  But take her they did, and without any grace, either. The moment Polly showed the slightest resistance, held the kid tight so they couldn't snatch her-one of the nurses chunked Polly on the side of his head with the butt of his rifle.

  I grabbed him, spun him around, put a fist deep into his solar plexus.

  Not that it mattered.

  While I was playing macho, the other two grabbed the kid and ran out of the room with her. I dragged the lone nurse to the door and threw him down the hall. Then I went back and sat on the small pink single bed where Polly was sprawled now, sobbing.

  I sat on the bed and let her hold on to me as if I were her Daddy and knew all the answers to all the grief of the world.

  I was sitting up in my room, cleaning and oiling all the weapons, when Pelham showed up, knocked courteously-I told you we were trying to be nice to each other these days, Nurse Ellen's irate words taking their toll on me-and said, "Polly took the kid in the middle of the night and left."

  This was two days after the incident at Polly's door.

  "Maybe they just went out for a while."

  "She took food, two guns and some cash."

  "Shit."

  "I've got a woman downstairs who won't see tonight if I don't get that kid back."

  "Damn."

  "I know how much you like Polly, Congreve. I like her, too. But I have to-"

  "-think of the patients."

  "I'm sorry if you get tired of hearing it."

  I sighed and stood up. "I'll go get her."

  "She tried to start the skymobile. Smashed in the window and then tried to hotwire it."

  "She isn't real mechanical. On foot, she won't be hard to find. Unless something's happened to her already."

  I tried not to think about that.

  "You have to hurry, Congreve. Please."

  Took me two hours.

  She was up near the wall in what had formerly been a public rest stop. There were three semis turned on their sides in the drive, the result of the initial bombing, and they looked like big sad clumsy animals that couldn't get to their feet again.

  Apparently, the rest stop had been pretty busy at the time of the bombing because from up here you could see the skeletons of maybe a dozen people, including that of a family-mother, father, two kids.

  When I first spotted her, she was sitting on a hill, resting, with the kid sitting next to her.

  She heard me about the same time as I saw her.

  She stood up, wiped off her bottom from the grass, picked up the kid like a football and started running.

  There was a deep stand of scrub pines but they weren't deep enough to hide her for long. I waited 'til she came running out of the trees and then I put the skymobile down not far away and started running after her.

  She was in much better shape than I was. Even holding the kid, she was able to stay ahead of me for a good half mile. I stumbled twice. She didn't stumble at all.

  We were working up the side of a grassy hill when her legs and her wind gave out.

  She just dropped straight down, as if she'd been shot in the head, straight down with the kid still tucked in her arms, straight down and sobbing wildly.

  I stood several feet away and said nothing. There wasn't anything to say, anyway.

  Pelham took the kid away from her and then put Polly up in one of the observation rooms in a straitjacket. He wouldn't let me see her for a couple of days.

  By the time I got up there, she was a mess. She had a black eye from me having to wrestle her into the skymobile, and her coppery hair was shot through with twigs and dead flowers and her face was streaked with dirt. It was as if she'd been buried alive.

  I took a straight-backed chair and sat next to her.

  "You fucker."

  "I'm sorry, Polly."

  "You fucker."

  But there was no power in her voice. She was just mouthing words.

  "I'm sorry I got you involved in this. I never should have taken you along to Hoolihan's that day. I was being selfish."

  "I don't want to live without her."

  "You have to stop thinking that way, Polly. Pelham doesn't have any choice. He has to use Sarah for the sake of the patients."

  "She's near the end."

  "You need to get on with your life."

  At one time, this room had been small and white and bright. Now it was small and dirty. The only brightness came from the kerosene lantern I carried, its flame throwing flickering shadows across Polly's face, making her look even more insane.

  "Pelham's a fucker and Ellen's a fucker and you're a fucker. You're killing that little girl and none of you give a damn."

  A knock. Just once. Curt. The door opened and Pelham came in. He walked noisily across the glass-littered floor. He stood next to me and looked at Polly in her chair and her straitjacket. "You're doing better today, Polly. You're verbalizing much more."

  "You're killing that little girl, doesn't that matter to you?" This time her voice was heartbreaking. No curses. No anger. Just a terrible pleading.

  "Another few days and maybe we'll be able to take off the straitjacket."

  He was breaking her, the way cowboys used to break horses. By keeping her in this room long enough, in the straitjacket long enough, alone long enough, she would eventually become more compliant. She would never again be the fiery Polly of yore. But she would be a Polly who was no longer a threat to the hospital.

  At least that was Pelham's hope.

  "Would you like some Jello, Polly?"

  But her head was down.

  She was no longer willing to verbalize, to use Pelham's five-dollar word. He nodded
for me to follow him out.

  "You get some sleep, Polly," Pelham said. "Sleep is your friend."

  I took a last look at her.

  No matter how long Pelham kept her in here, she would never forgive me and I wasn't sure I blamed her. I followed him out.

  Chapter 9

  That afternoon, over coffee, Pelham made me talk about it again and I resented it but I also understood that he was simply trying to help Polly and I was the nearest equivalent to Polly in the hospital.

  Eight months ago, the hospital in need of another Paineater, I'd taken the skymobile over to Hoolihan's and bought myself a kid.

  I got hooked. I wasn't even aware of it at first. The simplest explanation is that the kid became a substitute for my daughters. When she'd get back from downstairs, from consuming the pain of the patients that day, I'd find myself rocking her to sleep with tears in my eyes.

  Soon enough, I saw her start to twitch. And then the headaches came. And night after night she made those same muffled screaming noises in her throat.

  And Pelham, it seemed, was always at the door, always saying, "We need her again. I'm sorry."

  And all I could do was watch her deteriorate.

  "I know you hated me," Pelham said. "And I'm sorry"

  I nodded. "You didn't have much choice." He sipped his coffee. "So what finally made you decide to do it?"

  "I guess when you started talking about her future and everything. How she'd be studied and tested so that we could get a better grasp on how to make the future ones last longer. 'New, Improved' models I guess you'd call them."

  "Unless things change a whole hell of a lot, Congreve, we're going to need even more Paineaters in the future. And better ones."

  "I guess that's what I was against. I don't think we have the right to use anybody that way. We get so fucking callous we forget they're human beings, and incredibly vulnerable ones."

  "So you killed her."

  "So I killed her."

  That's what the nightmares were all about. Seeing little Michelle sleeping in my bed and creeping up to her and putting the gun to her chest and pulling the trigger and. . .

  "I loved her," I said. "I felt it was the right thing. At least at the time. Now, I guess, I can see both sides."

  "I really am going to let Polly go free in the next week or so. I just hope she's as rational as you are."

  I sighed. "I hope so, too. For everybody's sake."

  "We're doing the right thing, Congreve. The goddamned Christians took out half of Russia and China. We have to rebuild the species, what with all the mutation taking place. We normals have to survive. I don't like what we're doing with Paineaters but we don't have any choice. It's just survival is all."

  He clapped me on the shoulder and went back to work. He looked exhausted but then he always looked exhausted.

  Chapter 10

  She didn't get out in one week or two weeks or three weeks. It took four weeks before Pelham thought she was ready.

  Mostly, she stayed in her room. They brought her food because she didn't go down to the mess. She was not allowed to see Sarah.

  I stopped by several times and knocked. I always identified myself and always heard her moving about in there. But she would not acknowledge me in any way.

  One day I waited three hours at the opposite end of the hall. I knew she had to come out eventually. But she didn't.

  Another day I found her room empty. She was down the hall in the bathroom, apparently.

  I hid in her room.

  When she came back, I surprised her. Her face showed no response whatsoever. But her hand did. From a small holster attached to the back of her belt, she pulled out a small .45 and pointed it at me. I left.

  A week after this she went berserk. This happened down in the mess. She was walking by and saw people staring at her and she went in and starting upending tables and hurling glasses and plates against the walls. She wasn't very big and she wasn't very mighty but she scared people. She wandered, sobbing and cursing, from the mess and went back upstairs to her room. After a while, Pelham went up to see her. He decided against confining her again.

  Chapter 11

  "She's near the end. The spasms-I can barely stand to look at her. She won't last past another couple patients."

  This was Pelham in his office two weeks after the incident with Polly in the mess. Dr. Sullivan, lean, hungry and gorgeous as ever, sat to the left of Pelham, watching.

  "Can you get ahold of Hoolihan?"

  "Sure. Why?"

  "Get another one lined up."

  "She's that close to burning out, huh?"

  Dr. Sullivan said, "Dr. Pelham is right. A few more patients at most. Sarah takes on trauma and grief and despair and frenzy as her own. She is a very small vessel. She can't hold much more. The situation is actually much more urgent than Dr. Pelham is letting on."

  A deep, bellowing horn-like alarm that signals Pelham that ER has a patient very near death rumbled through the ground floor of the hospital.

  Pelham and Sullivan were off running even before I got out of my chair. I followed.

  "Used some kind of power saw on him," one of the techs said as the three of us reached the ER area.

  Indeed. His neck, chest and arms showed deep ruts where some kind of saw had ripped through his flesh right to the bone. He wasn't screaming. He was unconscious.

  "Get surgery set up!" Pelham shouted after one quick look at the man on the gurney.

  "Things are just about ready to go," the tech said.

  "We need the Paineater, then," Pelham said.

  "She's in there, too," the tech said, "but she's not doing real well. You know how they get near the end-all the shaking and shit."

  Five minutes later, we were all in surgery. One of the techs was sick today and I was asked to assist, as I did on occasion.

  Operating table and instruments and staff were prepared as well as could be expected under these frantic conditions.

  And Sarah was in place.

  She sat, staring off at nothing, holding the bloody hand of the man on the table. Her entire body shook and trembled-and then went into violent seizures that would lift her out of her chair.

  The screams in her throat kept dying. "Your job is to watch her, make sure she stays linked to the patient," Pelham told me.

  I went over and sat next to her. Just as she held the patient's hand, I held her free one. I kept cooing her name, trying to keep her calm.

  She'd peed allover herself. The deep sobbing continued.

  The operation started.

  The patient was totally satisfied. You could see the pleasure on his face. Sarah was cleansing him not only of his physical pain but of all the grief and anxiety of his entire life. No wonder he looked beatific, like one of those old paintings that depicted mortal men looking on the face of an angel.

  One thing you had to say for them, Pelham and Sullivan worked well together-quickly, efficiently, artfully. You'd never know they hated each other.

  They had started doing the heavy-duty stitching when the rear door of the operating room 'slammed open.

  I looked up and saw her there. Polly. With an autorifle. Face crazed and streaked with tears. "You're killing her and you don't even care!" she screamed.

  She worked left to right, which meant that Pelham was the first to die and then all the staffers standing next to him. This gave Sullivan and a few others the chance to hide behind the far side of the operating table.

  By now I had my gun out and was crouched behind a small cabinet. She kept on firing, trying to hit Sullivan and the others where they were hiding.

  "Polly! Please drop your gun!"

  If she heard me, she didn't let on. She just kept pumping rounds at the operating table, hoping to hit at least a few of them.

  I started to stand up from my crouch.

  She must have caught this peripherally because she suddenly turned in my direction, still firing, as one with her weapon.

  "Polly!" I screamed.
"Put it down!"

  But she didn't put it down, of course, and then I had no choice. I put a bullet into the middle of her forehead.

  She managed to squeeze off a few more shots but then her gun clattered to the floor, and soon enough she followed it.

  Silence. And then Sarah was up and tottering over to Polly's fallen body.

  Sarah knelt next to her and made the awful mewling noises in her throat-the saddest sound in her entire repertoire-and then she was touching Polly's face reverently with her tiny white hands.

  We all stood around and watched because we had never seen this before. Paineaters took on all the physical and psychic pain of others. Here was a Paineater who had to take on her own pain.

  After a time, Sarah still kneeling there rocking back and forth and twitching so violently I was afraid she might start breaking her own bones, I went over and picked her up and carried her out of the room.

  Chapter 12

  There was a funeral for Polly the next day. Some fine, sincere and very moving things were said.

  Nurse Ellen announced that Dr. Sullivan would now be in charge of the hospital and that people should now come to her with any questions they had.

  Afterward, I put Sarah in the skymobile and got ready to take off.

  Dr. Sullivan came over to say goodbye. "The doctors at the school will be very interested in this one especially. Studying the effects of her own trauma. With Polly."

  Sarah had made no sound since I'd carried her from the operating room yesterday. She just sat there in the throes of her shaking and jerking and trembling.

  "I appreciate you doing this," Dr. Sullivan said. "I know you don't think we should prolong their lives or their suffering. But it's necessary if we're to survive."

  ''That's what Pelham said."

  She smiled her beautiful icy smile. "Well, at least he was right about something."

  It took three hours to find the school, a rugged stone castle-like building that had once been a monastery sitting in the middle of deep woods.

  "This is going to be your home for a while, Sarah," I said. I'd tried not to look at her. The spasms were really getting to me.