Fantasy & Science Fiction Mar-Apr 2013 (24 page)

"Look at it this way," Claire said. "We did our job."

Jack stared at her. "How so?"

She shrugged. "We delivered a stable patient to the ER."

Jack shook his head in disbelief. But in a manner of speaking, it was true: you couldn't get more stable than dead.

Like they said in ICU: "Bleeding Always Stops."

 
CLAIRE WAS GOOD at her work, and apparently enjoyed it. She seemed never, or at least hardly ever, at a loss for what to do in an emergency situation. Once, when they were both 10-10 and had no equipment, Jack saw her save the life of an assault vic with a crushed windpipe by using a rusty razor blade to give the guy a voodoo tracheotomy and the hollow barrel of a ballpoint pen to hold the ragged incision open until the responders arrived. The more dire the situation, the calmer and more collected she was. Jack thought she had a great potential career in Emergency Medicine, and told her so once.

She'd agreed, but not with the enthusiasm he might have expected. "Money's not bad, God knows," she'd answered, "and there's job security."

"Plus you'd be helping people—always good for karma," he'd responded.

Claire had looked at him for so long he'd started to wonder if she'd had a microstroke or a TIA. Then, in a voice as dry as cremated ashes, she'd said, "Karma. Right."

They never spoke of her career again.

They didn't speak of Jack's, either, because they both knew that he didn't really have one. He was cool in a crisis and he could pilot the rig well enough. He was a decent paramedic who could, as one of the nurses once said, tell a spleen from a bladder without having to refer to a diagram scribbled on his palm, but that was about the extent of it. Everyone knew that Claire had the spark. Jack was just the driver.

Or so it was until that day when the drunk in the classic Fairlane came from out of nowhere while they were Code 3 through an intersection and sprayed styrettes, ampoules, bandages and meds—not to mention a copious amount of Jack's blood—all over the glistening black asphalt at three P.M. on a scorching summer day.…

It's pretty much an uncontested truism that doctors, nurses, et al., make the worst patients, and Jack Mobley did nothing to subvert that particular paradigm. He was a pain in the ass about taking his meds. He kibitzed whatever they injected into his shunt. He bitched about the food, the temperature, the bathing.

He had a broken leg, a punctured lung secondary to a shattered rib, and a concussion. "And you're lucky that's all you have," Claire told him. "He hit you dead bang at nearly thirty-five. So stop being such a prick to everyone and be glad you're alive."

Claire herself had suffered nothing more than a mild concussion and a Technicolor ear; she'd been riding in back with the victim, getting his vitals. That poor bastard, splinted and strapped to the gurney and bound for the ICU for nothing worse than a dislocated patella, had come out by far the worst; he wound up a quad, with his spine severed in four places. The drunk driver in the Fairlane survived with hardly a scratch, due to two reasons. The first was that he was drunk, which, as everyone from the twenty-year department head down to the rankest intern knows, often lets you squirt and slither like Plastic Man through accidents that could put a sober man in a cast from his toenails to his hairline. The second reason was that he was driving a 1954 piece of Detroit iron that could take on a German Tiger tank without breaking a metaphorical sweat.

Jack was, he knew, indeed lucky.

He didn't feel lucky, though. He just felt scared, because he shared one more prejudice in common with just about everyone in the various fields of the medical profession: that hospitals were the last places on the planet one should be if sick.

In the last forty-eight hours before he was discharged, Jack was upgraded to "stable." This meant several things, the most important of which was that, by the strange logic of the ICU, he was no longer accorded the comparative luxury of a room to himself. The official designation of his new room was "semiprivate," which meant there was room for one other patient.

When they'd gurneyed Jack in, the privacy curtain was open and the other bed empty. He hoped it would stay that way until he was discharged, but no such luck. He was awakened just after midnight by a hoarse whisper coming from the other bed. The curtains were closed now and the lights dimmed. But someone was obviously occupying the bed, and judging from the stentorian rasp of his voice, he was much older than Jack.

"Do you see them?"

His new neighbor's voice had the phlegmy congestion of one who spent a good deal of his life prone. There was another accent as well, which Jack couldn't place, one which clipped the consonants and the ends of sentences sharply and precisely, like neatly trimmed fingernails.

There wasn't even a question of Jack responding. The last thing he wanted to do was open himself up to an endless dialogue in the midnight hour with some old fart who was at least semidelusional, judging by his opening conversational gambit. Something told Jack that the old man was a "frequent flyer"—a term applied by staffers to those who checked in with imaginary illnesses because they craved the attention. Jack had hauled a fair number of such folk in the rig to the ER over the past few months. What they did with them afterward wasn't his problem. But it was beginning to look increasingly like this one was.

"Do you see them?" The voice was louder, the tone more preemptory. Jack reluctantly realized that it was no good pretending he was asleep. The old guy was on to him.

"See who?" he asked.

"Ein krankegeisten."

The foreign words crystallized the accent for him: German. He didn't recognize the subject of the sentence, however, his experience with the language being limited to a semester in college three years ago. Curious in spite of himself, Jack made a vaguely interrogative grunt.

"
Bitte
, the…" The old voice, full of creaks and hesitations that, for some reason, made Jack think of a sun-dried piece of leather, paused, searching for the right word. "The…sick spirits…spirits,
nicht wahr
?" The voice was silent for a moment; once again, Jack presumed, leafing through the pages of an unfamiliar mental dictionary. When he spoke again, his tone held an unmistakable certainty.

"Ghosts. The sick ghosts."

Jack had no idea how to reply. He supposed that if one might see sick ghosts anywhere, a hospital would be the logical place. And one thing he'd learned about psychotics was that, contrary to popular belief, their fantasies were nearly always logical—
if
you were willing to give them their initial delusion. David Berkowitz's compulsions to kill, for example, made a twisted sort of sense once you accepted the admittedly hard to swallow premise that his neighbor's dog was possessed by a demon who controlled him. Or take the granddaddy of all psychopaths—Charles Manson. Once you were across that particular Rubicon of irrationality that equated killing pregnant starlets and other members of the Hollywood elite with legitimate protest of the Vietnam War and the military-industrial complex, a certain bizarre logic followed—and there was probably already a bunk with your name on it at the old Spahn Ranch.

But Jack wasn't willing to take those leaps of faith, no, thank you. He'd heard of poltergeists, of course, but he suspected that
krankegeisten
was just some bizarre Teutonic portmanteau word that the guy'd invented.

He made no reply, and heard nothing further from his mysterious neighbor; not even the raspy breathing he'd noticed earlier. For a moment Jack felt concerned—what if the fellow had suffered an MI or something similar?

He located the station buzzer, wondering if he should page the night nurse. He looked at the wall clock and realized with a shock that it was 2:40. He'd taken a Vicodin for the leg-pain over an hour ago, and a half hour after that he'd been given a milligram of Clonazepam to help him sleep. It was as if the one-two punch had just been waiting for the realization.… Jack abruptly felt a huge load of cotton bricks hit and bury him.…

At the behest of his professors, in his last year of college Jack had read several novels of classic horror:
The Invisible Man
by H. G. Wells;
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, by Robert Louis Stevenson; and of course, Bram Stoker's
Dracula
and Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus
.

He'd enjoyed Wells's book the most. He hadn't expected to like
Dracula
, as he'd never been fond of epistolary storytelling, but the book had surprised him; it had an unexpected humor, and it moved along at a steady pace and kept him immersed, whether in exchanges of letters, diary entries, or whatever other medium the author had chosen.

The only one of the four that he had found incredibly, unremittingly dull was
Frankenstein
. Perhaps he was used to the inarticulate pathos of Karloff in the old cinematic versions of the tale; certainly Boris could convey volumes more with a poignant look, even concealed under the thick slabs of Jack Pierce's mortician's clay makeup, than the acres of exposition that Shelley had her character declaiming on every page. To make matters worse, she used pronouns that were archaic even in her day:
thou, thy, thine,
and so on. The result, as far as Jack was concerned, was a slow, cumbersome, and decidedly non-scary book. He remembered scenes from the other three tales quite vividly—Dracula crawling up the wall of his castle just after feeding, bloated and corpulent as a gigantic leech, for example; he'd even had nightmares once or twice as a result. But the only things he recalled from Shelley's magnum opus were the ending in the Arctic and the scene where a weary Dr. Frankenstein is awakened abruptly by the sight of his hideous creation standing at his bedside, silently appraising him. That was powerful stuff, he'd thought.

And so he was understandably upset to find himself suddenly awakened in a replay of that scene, with himself as Frankenstein.

It was a sudden jangling sound that jerked him from his drug-induced sleep, and the jolt of adrenaline that immediately followed nearly put him into cardiac overdrive. The rattling that had awakened him had been the metal hooks on the curtain's runner being suddenly and violently yanked aside to reveal the creature that now loomed over him, glaring. In appearance it did somewhat resemble Frankenstein's fictional creation: the corpse-like pallor, the emaciated limbs, the long, patchy hair. An oversized gown hung from the skeletal frame like a houserobe on a drying rack. After an eternal moment of blood-freezing terror, Jack realized that this apparition had to be the old man from the neighboring bed, who had evidently grown tired of waiting for an answer.

"Ein krankegeisten!"
the revenant hissed at him.

Although he'd figured out who it was (any lingering doubts were dispelled by a quick sidelong glance at the room's other bay; the curtain had been pulled back there as well and the bed was empty), the knowledge did little to reassure Jack of his immediate safety. Even though the old man looked like he weighed about ninety-five pounds and his age could match his weight, still, the incredible malevolence in his face sent Jack scrambling back the length of the hospital bed. Instinctively he groped for some kind of weapon or alarm and his fingers found the station buzzer. His brain screaming like a smoke alarm, Jack closed his eyes and pushed the button.

Silence.

In retrospect, he realized, everything had been pretty quiet all along; it was, after all, the graveyard shift in the Stable Care Unit. Save for the usual background noises, the almost unnoticeable hum of the ventilation system and the muted pings and beeps of monitors, it was very quiet. He remembered the nightmare of a few moments ago as loud and terrifying, but now he realized that ninety percent of that had been in his head.

Impelled by some obscure sense of renewed safety, he opened his eyes. The curtain completely shielded the bay, as it had when he'd gone to sleep earlier. The old man wasn't in sight. Even as Jack registered this, and realized also that he would surely have heard the distinctive rattle the curtain made when it was pulled closed, it was yanked open again. Jack flinched, but it was only the night nurse.

She noticed his wariness. "You okay?"

Jack nodded. He didn't trust how his voice might sound.

She looked at his clipboard. "You're due for more Clonazepam."

"Okay." His gaze involuntarily followed her as she ran the curtain back around the bay, and he noticed for the first time the old man's bed.

The curtain was wide open. The bed was made up, the sheets neat and clean.
Hospital corners
, he thought.

He realized she had said something. "What?"

"I said, 'Anything else?'"

"How 'bout some bourbon to wash it down with?"

She raised an eyebrow and snorted, then yanked the curtain the final few feet. Jack sat in an upright fetal position, resisting the surprisingly strong urge to rock back and forth. He very much did not want to see her look at him with that look that says,
Maybe this one belongs over on the Psych Ward.

When the nurse brought him the small green pill, he took it with a swallow of tap water. He nodded his thanks. He was very much afraid that if he spoke, if he said anything at all, he would find himself asking what had happened to the old man. And the possibility seemed equally real that she might ask him what he was talking about, the last patient to occupy that bed had been discharged weeks ago. And Jack didn't want to hear her say that, or anything remotely close to that. Not at all.

 
TREAT 'EM AND STREET 'EM
—that appeared to be the prevailing policy in every hospital across the land nowadays. As soon as one was adjudged to be mobile and relatively infection-free, it was, "Here's your hat, what's your hurry?" Jack was issued a pair of adjustable aluminum crutches, a booklet of exercises for his broken left tibia, and a scrip for more Vicodin (two refills). Never mind that he couldn't walk more than a city block without waves of fiery pain thundering down his leg. Never mind that if he inhaled more than moderately he felt as if someone was knifing him in his lower-right quadrant. (It wasn't like he was even allowed to breathe shallowly; to do so was to run the risk of a lung infection and possible lobar pneumonia. "You're young and in good shape; you'd probably survive," the discharge nurse had told him, but Jack couldn't help but notice the tiny spin of doubt she'd put on "probably." The unspoken codicil seemed to be, "If you're too dumb to follow directions and die as a result, don't come whining back to us.")