Fantasy & Science Fiction Mar-Apr 2013 (25 page)

Ein krankegeisten.…

He was halfway across the parking lot before he saw it, parked with spaces on either side, as if the other rigs were only too happy to accommodate its privacy.

It was the start of another long, slow summer evening in Los Angeles, and Jack thought that, in the sanguine hydrocarbon light, the vehicle before him looked almost as if it had been painted with blood. Its true color, he would learn later, was a soft eggshell, but that wasn't how it appeared at first sight. It had a long, sleek chassis with scalloped fenders and the flowing lines of classic Art Deco. The hood ornament, tilted at about thirty degrees, was a Rod of Asclepius: a snake twined about a staff. One of the first things he had learned in medical school was that this, not the caduceus, was the universal symbol of medicine.

"Wow," he said, stopping to admire it.

"Meet the new rig," Claire said. A Santa Ana, the dry desert wind responsible for most of the city's destructive fires, began to blow softly, rustling palm fronds far overhead. "Definitely
not
the same as the old rig."

"Helluva lot older than the wagon we had," Jack said. It was, he guessed, easily ten years older than the Fairlane that had done its best to obliterate Jack's previous rig, along with Jack.

"Like it?" There was a sly undertone to Claire's voice that should've warned him.

"Yeah." Jack strolled around it, admiring it. There were three red Grecian crosses painted on it; one on the rear door, which opened like a hatch; one on the top, between the light rack and the growler; and one on the spacious hood. Beneath this last one was the word AMBULANCE painted in mirror-reversed text.

Nowhere could he find any indication of the make or model, or even the year. The engine under the hood was undoubtedly a V8, and he noticed that seat belts had been bolted to the leathern front seats, no doubt as part of the vehicle's restoration. Jack had to suppress a snort of laughter when he saw the electric coil lighter and ashtray, which were part of the console just beneath the CB radio. He noticed no cab bags, or indeed any sort of trauma-response equipment, not even a doctor's "black bag." In the glove box, perhaps, or under the dash.

Jack went around to the back and peered through the rear window. He was surprised at how relatively spartan the interior was. On the left side were two cot platforms to which stretchers could be affixed; on the right side was a fold-up bench with restraints. On the floor next to the right wheelwell were two small wooden rectangles with leather straps. Their purpose mystified him, although after a few moments he tentatively assigned them the role of wheel blocks.

On the forward wall, just above the door to the driver's compartment, was a clock face with large Arabic numerals. Below that was a small pump-action sink with a mirrored cabinet above it. Clamped to another cabinet beneath the sink was an antiquated blood-pressure cuff and bladder, a stethoscope, and a headstrap reflector.

"Jesus," he murmured. "Where are the leeches and the miasma sticks?"

"Don't worry. We've only had it for a day. We'll get it stocked up as much as possible before we roll with it."

Jack turned and looked at her. "I cannot help but notice an inappropriate pronoun in those statements."

"'Inappropriate'?
I'm
not the one who got a practically brand-new truck turned into modern art."

"Oh, and this be my punishment? I'm cursed to ferry sick ghosts across the Styx in this motorized skiff?"

Claire looked thoughtful. "Interesting image," she said. "But, as usual, it's all about you. What about your partner, who's being dragged along in your wake? It's two to a rig, remember? That's why they're called—"

"
Pair
-a-medics." Jack finished the hoary old joke in unison with her. Neither of them laughed.

"Tell me you're kidding," he said. He waved a hand at the ancient vehicle. "Even if you could bring it up to code, there's no way we could stock it well enough to—"

"Okay, I'm kidding."

"—meet even basic—" he stopped. "Wait, what?"

"Kidding. It's part of an exhibit on the history of medicine. When I saw it parked here, I couldn't resist." She peered closely at him. "What, did you really think they'd put us on the streets in a rig like this? It's one step up from a horse and buggy."

Jack eyed her suspiciously; before he could pass judgment on her sincerity, however, he noticed Claire was suddenly paling. Her hair, a ginger-burgundy, became even more vivid in contrast with her white cheeks. She staggered, then sat down on the curbstone, putting her head between her legs.

"Claire? Hey, are you all—"

He didn't get to finish the sentence. His own vision collapsed into a black hole. Time slowed and stretched, and sounds Dopplered down to match. He was vaguely aware of having fallen to his hands and knees beside Claire, asphalt warm and sticky beneath his hands, but before he could try to speak, the tiny black-and-white image at the bottom of the well in his head shrank still more and then winked out completely. Jack started to wonder if Claire had blacked out as well, but before he could even finish formulating the thought the blackness around him was complete.

 
AS CONSCIOUSNESS slowly returned, Jack found himself thinking of one of the orderlies, an Hispanic in his early fifties named Jesús Alvarez. He'd been employed by the hospital for nearly seventeen years when, late one night while emptying the trash, he'd quietly dropped dead of a myocardial infarction.

He couldn't have chosen a better place to have a heart attack—literally just outside the doors of the cardio unit. Less than three minutes after an intern watched him fall and called Code Blue, a doctor was putting the paddles on Alvarez and cranking him up again. They'd kept him overnight for observation and had found no irregularity. He'd asked to be discharged; as he was walking out of the ICU he keeled over again. Again they shocked him back to the land of the living; this time he made it all the way to the parking lot before dying a third time.

That had been the last one. Alvarez's heart, jolted back to functionality once more, had kept beating for the last three years. He'd been told to cut out his two-pack-a-day habit, and his wife's beef taquitos fried in lard, among other dietary insults, and it had been strongly suggested that he walk the eight blocks to work rather than drive his old VW. He had followed none of these suggestions, and his EKGs and MRIs had shown no change. Members of the staff looked at him, scratched their heads, and smiled uncomfortably the few times he made eye contact.

The only other difference, of course, was that he was no longer addressed by the staff as "Jesús." The Hispanic pronunciation had been changed to the Anglicized form of "Jesus." It didn't matter to Alvarez; he answered to either pronunciation.

Jack was back in Recovery, lying on a gurney, a glucose-saline drip stuck in his arm, and outside of a dull headache he felt pretty much as he had before he'd passed out. His neck was relaxed, his head lolling somewhat to the left, so that when he opened his eyes he was looking at the wall. It was bare save for a grounded wall socket. Jack stared at it, noticing abstractly that, like all three-prong outlets in hospitals, it had been installed upside-down so that the grounding-bar receptacle was on the top and the two parallel slits for the polarized poles were underneath. He'd asked, back when he'd first gotten the job, why this was apparently
de rigueur
not just in this hospital, but every one he'd ever been in. An orderly had explained that it was done due to the admittedly remote possibility that a scalpel or some other metallic bit from a surgeon's tray, or any facile conductor, might fall and land on the plug in such a way as to bridge the poles and so short out the circuit.

Jack had not known, initially, whether to be impressed or amused at this extreme evidence of bureaucratic tunnel vision. Later that same day, however, when he brought the rig back from his latest call, he very nearly ran over an old woman lying in a crumpled heap on the blacktop about thirty feet from an old beat-up Nissan, the front bumper of which was wrapped around a lamppost. The car was still running and the driver's door was open.

She'd thrown a brain embolism while driving past the hospital. She'd managed to steer most of the way through the parking lot before hitting the lamppost, after which she got out and crawled. She'd died less than twenty feet from the ER entrance. No one, evidently, had heard the crash or seen the old woman trying to crawl to the doors until she'd stopped moving. More precious moments were wasted arguing the legal ramifications of carrying her through the doors, since no one was there to speak for her. During the argument, she had died.

She was eighty-two years old.

The old saying "penny-wise and pound-foolish" did tend to spring to mind.…

"Hey…partner."

Claire smiled somewhat wanly up at Jack. "Hey," she whispered in reply. She poked one hand out from beneath the blankets and he caught her fingers in his.

"How are you?" he asked.

She shrugged. "Me? Fine…except for this pesky problem of passing out whenever I try to stand. Not sure what's up with that."

Jack nodded. Nobody else was sure either; she checked out fine in every other way, but she kept going orthostatic when she raised her head higher than her heart. As long as she stayed prone with her feet elevated an inch or so, she was fine, her BP solidly within normal limits. The minute she started any aspirations toward the third dimension, however, it was like someone opening a petcock in her occipital area and draining the blood from her head. Her MRI showed no signs of a fistula, TIA, or other trauma.

"Maybe you pissed off the rig by calling it a horse and buggy," he suggested, with an uncomfortable laugh.

Claire laughed, too, but hers was even more uncomfortable, and he could've sworn that, for a moment, a look of absolute terror crossed her face.

She pleaded exhaustion, and he apologized and left the room. When he looked back from the entrance she was already asleep.

Jack was worried about her. Her hypotension was completely idiopathic and frustrating as hell because there was nothing further anybody could
do
. Not even a surgeon, to whom every problem usually looks like a steak, waxes overly enthusiastic about unzipping someone's head without a specific reason. In Claire's case, however, there was no indication for any procedure. All they could do was let her take up bed space while they monitored her and waited for any change, either for better or worse. After a while, one began to look as good as the other.

And then she died.

It made no sense, and there was no point to it, as is usually the case with death. Jack hadn't even been there for her final moments; he'd been off-campus, choking down a Whopper at Burger King. When he'd returned, one of the candy stripers at the nurses' station told him that "Carrie" had flatlined forty minutes ago, and they'd been unable to resuscitate. She'd named him as next of kin, he was told, the worker's breezy tone punctuated by a startlingly loud crack of the gum she was chewing with bovine enthusiasm, so would he mind signing for her?

Jack scribbled his name on the forms, his mind utterly stunned, like a poleaxed steer at the slaughterhouse. They asked if he wanted to see her, and he shook his head. He wandered the corridors for a while, noticing at one point that he was at the Oncology station, and then, after what felt like only a couple of steps, standing bemusedly before the doors of the fMRI department, which was on the other side of the hospital.
There's a lot to be said for shock
, he thought.

His mind grayed out again; when he snapped back to reality once more he was near the ICU exit, and Claire was sitting in the waiting room.

She was in the front row, her legs casually crossed. Her skin was pale, slightly cyanotic on her face and upper body. Her gown had been torn open in front and he could see the conducting fluid that facilitated the defibulator's current still glistening on her flat breasts. Her legs and lower thighs were a mottled blue-black with purple highlights. She looked like she'd been brutally beaten, but Jack knew it was only lividity—the settling of blood in the body's lower extremities, gravity's triumph over a heart finally and forever stilled.

Jack simply stood there, staring at her. He noticed that she was slightly transparent, like a double-exposure effect in an old film. The example that came to mind was
Topper
, although Claire, it must be admitted, was a far cry from Constance Bennett. But as far as that went, he wasn't exactly Cary Grant either.

He suddenly realized something else unusual about her: Claire was gradually growing more solid in his vision. When he'd first noticed her he could clearly see the blue plastic of the chair beneath her thighs and the scuffed linoleum beneath her feet. It was gradually becoming more difficult to see them. As she sat there, staring at the floor, she appeared to be regaining her corporeality.

There were several other people in the waiting room, Jack noticed, as well as standing in line before the Admittance window, who were solid but who, as he watched, began to fade away. The various sounds of their speech and movement slowly grew softer, fading out along with their solidity. And there were others—quite a few, actually—fading into view from nothing at the same time. He saw the old German, the animated cadaver who'd scared the living shit out of him about a week ago, along with the old woman who'd died in the parking lot.

The German saw him as well and approached. He was still wearing the gown, but now he looked more like someone aged and pathetic than the terrifying visage Jack had seen when the curtain had been savagely pulled back.

In fact, he seemed almost humble. "My apologies," he said, his congestion and accent making the words almost as incomprehensible as his German had been. "I did not know at the time who you were."

"I don't understand," Jack said. "I'm nobody special. I—"