It's Alive! (5 page)

Frank was by now surrounded by nurses, standing or on their knees, quaking, crying hysterically. He pushed savagely through them, fighting his way to the delivery-room doors, unable to hear Dr. Francis choke on his last words, “It’s . . . alive . . .”

“He’s dying!” a nurse sobbed behind him. “The doctor’s dying!”

Frank burst through the doors and down the short hallway to the delivery room itself.

And then he stopped, swayed, and groped for support against the door, staring in at a scene of carnage. He slid inside and along the wall of the room, shaking his head slowly in stunned disbelief.

Interns and nurses were sprawled grotesquely around the floor in pools of blood. Equipment tables were upended, surgical gear scattered around the room. In the middle of it, rising above the massacre on the silver steel bed sheathed in white, lay Lenore, her legs still in the stirrups. She was quiet and still.

“Lenore, Lenore—” Frank choked and stumbled toward her, coughing. He slipped in the blood and fell over her, clutching her, hugging her. “Lenore—”

Her eyes opened slowly. “My baby? My baby?”

“My god, Lenore, what happened? What happened, Lenore?”

“Where’s my baby?”

An intern, propped in a corner like a torn rag doll, groaned softly. His eyes opened, then closed. He raised a hand to his ripped throat, then dropped it.

Other doctors and nurses now raced into the room, stopping short just inside the door when they met the scene. Then they began scrambling over the bodies. The intern in the corner gasped and gurgled. A doctor bent over him.

“Alive . . . gone . . .” The intern raised his eyes to the ceiling, to the skylight, then fell over on his side, his head thumping onto the floor, his eyes still staring.

The doctor bending over him looked up into the skylight. A small hole had been broken through it, the jagged edges of glass tinged with blood.

“Everyone’s dead,” whimpered a nurse, who sank to her hands and knees.

“Where’s my baby . . .” Lenore murmured.

“WHERE’S OUR BABY?” Frank screamed. He reached out this way and that, clutching at the doctors and nurses who were slipping and falling in the gore to check the bodies for life. “WHERE THE HELL’S OUR BABY?”

Two sets of arms clamped him from the rear. He struggled insanely, but they pulled him away from Lenore and pinned him against the wall.

A doctor hunched over Lenore, examining her quickly. He turned to Frank, his face expressionless, his voice icily calm. “Your wife’s going to be all right. She’s not hurt. She’s all right.”

“The baby—she had the baby, didn’t she?”

“Yes. Of course. The umbilical cord has been severed.” Then, low, to one of the interns: “But not surgically. More like it’s been chewed through!” He nodded to the two interns who held Frank. “Better get him out of here.”

A nurse keeled over in a faint, and an intern toppled onto her, both becoming sick on the floor.

Frank wrestled with the arms that held him to the wall. “Where’s the
baby,
for chrissake! What the hell—in God’s name—Jesus Christ, somebody—”

The doctor motioned toward the door. “Get him outta here, dammit!”

Frank planted his elbows against the wall and clenched his fists as he strained against the grip of the interns. “You gotta tell me—”

“You better come with us,” one of them said. “I’ll get you a sedative. You can lie down. Your wife’s okay. Easy now—”

“TAKE YOUR HANDS OFF ME!” Frank lurched forward and yanked one intern around, sending him slithering to his knees. “YOU GOTTA TELL ME WHERE MY CHILD IS! GODDAM YOU! SOMEBODY’S GOTTA—”

A third intern grabbed his free arm and twisted it behind him. Frank snapped his head back in pain. They steered Frank out of the room. Tears rolled down Frank’s face as he stumbled along with them, but no more words came. He twisted his head back to see the doctor in the delivery room staring up at the hole in the skylight.

The first siren howled in the night, then another, and another, as from different points police cars converged on the small hospital.

Frank felt numb. He was lying on a bed somewhere in the hospital. Horrifying images swept past his closed eyes. The place was alive with strange sounds: feet running, beds being rolled along; voices, some calm, some crying, some pleading, some directing. “. . . Over here, officer, this one . . . Oh my god . . . It looks like it climbed up . . . Please, nurse, just do as I say . . . The skylight . . . I count five, including . . . She seems okay . . . Couldn’t have been more than two minutes . . . Nobody said anything, except that intern there . . . Maybe the wife will be able to . . . Nobody else was in here . . . No, officer, nobody knows anything . . . Headquarters is sending . . . No, the hole’s not big enough for a grown . . . I’m sorry, sergeant, but that’s all we . . . Yes, autopsies . . . Like claws, an animal . . . I don’t care what the press wants . . .”

Frank opened his eyes. “Press?”

A doctor stood over him, looking closely at a hypodermic needle as he depressed the plunger, sending out a tiny spurt of fluid. “This will calm you for a little while, relax you.”

“I don’t
want
to relax! I want to talk to my
wife.”

“Plenty of time.” He wiped Frank’s arm with alcohol and stuck the needle in. “We all want to talk to her. She’s the only one who might be able to tell us what happened.”

“But our baby, is it dead?”

“No sir, I don’t think—”

The other doctor in the room hissed.

“That’s all I can say.”

Frank felt the first waves of sleep advancing on him. He struggled to stay awake. “The press, I better talk to the press . . .
I
can handle them. I know just how to . . .”

Lenore stared up through the fog at the two heads above her. One had a doctor’s green cap on it. The other was hatless. Gray curly hair. They were not familiar.

“It hurt,” she said weakly, “it hurt very much. It was coming. The head was coming. Forceps . . . the doctor said. I must have passed out.” The faces stared at her, saying nothing. “Why . . . what’s wrong? Can I see my baby now? Will someone bring my baby?” She tried to rise, but had no strength. “Won’t somebody say something? There isn’t anything wrong with it, is there? Please answer me!”

“Just be calm, Mrs. Davis. I’m Dr. Norten. This is Detective Perkins. Just tell us whatever you remember.”

“Detective? Police? Why isn’t Frank here? My husband. He’ll tell me everything. He’ll tell
you
everything. Will someone—please get my husband?” She closed her eyes and her chest shook with sobs. “Tell me—that—my baby didn’t die! Please tell me it didn’t die!”

“Mrs. Davis.” Detective Perkins, with his sad, furrowed face, leaned over her. “We believe your baby is very much alive. We need to know what happened to cause—”

The doctor elbowed him sharply.

Lenore looked at the detective. “I don’t know. Except I had my baby. Frank will know everything. Or Dr. Francis. Why isn’t Dr. Francis here?”

The doctor gently pulled the detective away from the bed, far enough so that Lenore could no longer hear them. “I’m afraid she’s not going to be able to help, just now.”

“But somebody’s got to—”

“Lieutenant,” the doctor’s voice rasped impatiently, “we’ve got several people dead here. They are the only ones who would know what—”

“But this one’s alive, doctor—the mother. And we’ve got another one alive, one ‘something.’ Out there somewhere. I can’t help the dead. I’ve got to know what we’re after.”

“You’re after a baby, lieutenant, a baby that might have killed five people. That’s all anybody knows.”

Several confused and alarmed ambulatory patients milled around the night receptionist’s desk. She shook her head and tried to calm them. “I’m sorry. Just our rules for tonight. No one’s allowed in the maternity section. You’ll have to return to your rooms.”

Nurses had run up to the patients by now, and were leading them back to their rooms.

A uniformed policeman came through the doors that led into the hallway of the maternity ward and helped the nurses herd away the frightened patients. “Sorry for the noise, folks. There’s been a slight accident. Nothing for you to worry about . . .”

The receptionist was on the phone. “I’m sorry, but I really don’t know exactly what’s going on. I have no information . . . That’s right, they don’t answer my questions either. A scare of some kind. But I’m sure it’s just a precaution. You know how doctors get, about staph infections or such things . . . Later on today, or perhaps tomorrow . . .”

A set of flashing lights appeared on a car outside. This one was not police, however, but press. White lettering on the door said, “KBOP Radio-TV.” A reporter with a note pad got out and pawed his way against the outcoming crowd of would-be visitors. He was followed by a cameraman lugging his machinery, and a sound man with his audio equipment slung from a shoulder strap. They were stopped at the door by the police officer.

“Sorry—”

“Just let me see Ned Schultz, okay? The hospital PR. Get Ned out here, okay?”

The officer shut the door and retreated. A few moments later a dapper man in a blue blazer, with slicked-back black hair, came to the door. “You wanted me, Buzz? You can’t get in, just can’t. Everything’s havoc in here.”

The reporter beckoned him outside, and the PR man stepped out. “Buzz, there’s nothing I can say, absolutely nothing. It’s a madhouse. You’ll have to deal with the cops on
this
one.”

The reporter stuck out his hand. “You always play ball with us, Ned. And we always stick by you.”

The PR man nodded, and they shook. Schultz’s hand closed over a $20 bill. He leaned forward to speak confidentially. “Look, Buzz, I’ll do what I can, okay? But you got to protect me, right? Nothing gets traced back to me. I don’t know what I can get for you, but I’ll get something. Move your car, okay? Around the corner . . .”

Led by a police officer and a nurse, Frank approached a door on which hung a red sign: “Absolutely No Visitors.”

Another policeman standing outside the door nodded at them and pushed the door open.

Frank went immediately to Lenore’s bedside.

Two men stepped up to him. “I’m Dr. Norten,” said the man in green, “chief resident of the hospital. This is Lieutenant Perkins, a detective. She’s coming out of sedation now, Mr. Davis.”