Petrified (16 page)

At first he couldn't work out what all that red shiny mess was, strewn along the blacktop. He was about to put his foot down and keep on driving when he caught sight of Jimmy's head. He pulled in to the parking area, waited for a moment, and then climbed out of his car. He walked back and took a closer look, just to make sure that it
was
a human head, and not the head of some deer or some dog that had been run over, or some store window dummy that somebody had left there for a joke. But Jimmy stared back at him with one eye, his scalp torn, his mouth bloody, and there was no doubt about it. Until very recently, this red shiny mess had been a man.

‘Oh shit,' said Stuart. He took his cellphone out of his shirt pocket and dialed 911.

‘
What's your emergency
?' the girl on the switchboard asked him.

‘I don't rightly know. It looks like some dude got himself disassembled. God alone knows how.'

‘
Disassembled
?'

‘That's the only way I know how to describe it, miss. There ain't one single part of him that's still connected to no other part.'

‘
Please wait there. We'll be dispatching an ambulance directly
.'

‘With all due respect, miss, I don't think you need to send an ambulance. All you're going to need is a bucket.'

SIXTEEN

Thursday, 7:07 a.m.

N
athan had slept only fitfully during the night and when Aarif and Kavita appeared he was dozing. Aarif stood by his bed, watching him for a while, and then he gently shook his shoulder.

‘Professor? Professor, wake up.'

Nathan opened one eye and stared up at him. ‘Aarif. What time is it?' He blinked, and then he said, ‘I can't believe it. I was dreaming that I was out in my back yard, grilling burgers.'

‘Not surprising, Professor, when you consider what you did to your hand.'

Nathan winced, and sat up. He held up his hand in its plastic glove and he could see that it was already beginning to fill with watery yellow fluid. ‘If I'd known that it was going to hurt as much as this, believe me, I would have thought of some other way of making my point.'

Aarif held up the blue canvas bag that he was carrying. ‘We have the phoenix stem cells in here, professor. You can have you first injection immediately.'

‘That's great. How did Torchy take it?'

‘He was not pleased when we anesthetized him. But he is fine.'

‘What about Ron Kasabian?'

‘I think he is still very angry with you. He has to make a report to the board about what happened, and explain why you burned yourself. But as I said yesterday, what is done is done, and cannot be changed. A shout can never be unshouted.'

‘Too right.' Nathan looked across at the digital clock on his nightstand. ‘But, hey – you'd better make it snappy. They'll be bringing me breakfast at seven thirty.'

‘Everything's ready,' said Kavita. She sat down on the side of the bed and tugged on a pair of latex gloves. Then she carefully lifted Nathan's left arm and pulled up the sleeve of his pale blue pajamas, all the way to the elbow. She wiped his forearm with antiseptic wipe and Aarif passed her a hypodermic syringe.

‘We decided that instead of injecting the stem cells into the burn itself, it would be better to inject them into the nearest large skeletal muscle, which is the extensor pollicis longus.'

‘Oh, yes?'

She smiled at him. ‘That way, we can inject you repeatedly without causing you any extra trauma or risking any additional infection. They do the same with heart patients these days, rather than inject stem cells directly into the heart muscle.'

She took the plastic cap off the syringe and held it up to make sure that there were no air bubbles in it. Then, without hesitation, she stuck the needle into Nathan's arm, and pressed the plunger. She waited for a moment, staring unblinkingly into his eyes, and then took it out.

‘Didn't feel a thing,' said Nathan. ‘You should have been a nurse.'

‘I don't know what it's going to feel like when it starts to take effect.'

‘Let's just hope that it
does
take effect. I don't think Grace is ever going to forgive me if it doesn't.'

‘I talked to Grace,' said Kavita. ‘She thinks that you are mad to do what you did. But all the same she admires your bravery, and your belief in yourself, and so do Aarif and I.'

‘We will return this evening, Professor, and give you a further injection,' said Aarif. ‘Meanwhile, all we can do is pray.'

At that moment, Doctor Berman came into the room, followed by two of his juniors – one of them a young Korean woman and the other a light-skinned black man who bore a distinct resemblance to Barack Obama.

‘Professor Underhill,' he boomed. ‘How's the hand coming along?'

Nathan held it up so that he could examine it. ‘Making progress,' said Doctor Berman. ‘It's macerating, as you'd expect, so we're getting plenty of fluid. I know it looks awful, but it's a sign that it's starting to heal. We'll change the dressing today and maybe give you a semi-permeable glove with Gore-tex in it. That should reduce the maceration.

‘The main thing is to control bacterial infection. A burn wound is dynamic and infection can convert it from partial thickness to full thickness. I want you to get the use of your hand back, Professor – at least some limited use, anyhow.'

Nathan said, ‘Thank you,' and smiled. He wasn't going to tell Doctor Berman that he was hoping for so much more than that. He looked across at Aarif and Aarif bowed his head as if to acknowledge that he understood the need for secrecy, at least for the time being. If Doctor Berman knew that Aarif and Kavita had just injected him with stem cells from a mangy-looking mythical bird, he never would have allowed them back into the hospital again.

‘We must go, Professor,' said Aarif. ‘We have a small friend to take care of.'

‘OK,' Nathan told him. ‘Be sure to give him a dead mouse from me. He deserves it.'

Doctor Berman and his juniors looked at each other and raised their eyebrows.

‘He's a bird,' Nathan explained. ‘He just did me a favor, that's all.'

‘A bird did you a favor?' asked Doctor Berman.

‘It's a long story,' Nathan told him.

‘Well . . . you must be sure to tell me sometime.'

‘Sure,' said Nathan.
Maybe sooner than you think.

Grace came to see him after breakfast, and brought him blush pears and Florida oranges. She stayed for an hour, although she had her own practice to take care of. One of her specialties was geriatric care, and she had to visit the Burmont Rest Home out at Pilgrim Gardens, where forty-three seniors needed every kind of treatment from earwax to eczema.

She was calmer today, although she didn't hide the fact that she still felt resentful.

Nathan said, ‘Kavita gave me my first injection of stem cells this morning.'

‘Oh, yes? Your hand doesn't look any better. In fact it looks
revolting
. All squishy.'

‘Come on, Grace, it may be a miracle cure but it's going to take time. I don't know how long. But I still believe that it's going to work.'

‘I hope it does. I really do. There's a little girl along the corridor who's had all of her face seriously burned in an auto accident. I feel so sorry for her. I talked to Doctor Berman about her and he said that she can never hope to look the same again.'

‘That's exactly the kind of person I'm trying to help.'

‘Great. By setting fire to yourself.'

‘Like Aarif says, honey, it's done now.'

‘Just because Aarif has an Egyptian proverb for every possible eventuality, that doesn't mean that Aarif isn't talking out of his ass. You know me. I've never been a fatalist.'

‘I'd agree with that, one hundred percent.'

She leaned over the bed and kissed him. ‘Please God I hope this works,' she told him.

He managed a light breakfast of one pancake and a cup of lemon tea. After that he watched TV for a while, but gradually fell asleep again, even though his hand was still throbbing. He didn't hear the anchorwoman on Eyewitness News say, ‘
The body was identified as that of twenty-one-year-old James Hallam Junior, a postgraduate student from the Moore College of Art and Design. Police have given no details about how he died but say that he suffered massive trauma equivalent to being struck at high speed by a very large vehicle.'

Nathan slept dreamlessly, but he was woken up less than hour later by a fiery sensation in his hand. He felt as if his flesh, already raw, were being dragged slowly through a blazing briar bush, so that it prickled and burned, both at the same time.

He pressed the button on his morphine dispenser to give himself another shot of painkiller, but even after five minutes had gone by, the burning was just as agonizing, if not worse. He tugged the cord to call for the nurse, and then lay on his side in a fetal position, his eyes squeezed tight shut, grunting with pain. He could almost
see
his pain in his mind's eye, five fingers crawling with barbed-wire flames.

Two nurses hurried in. ‘Professor Underhill? What's wrong?'

Nathan lifted his hand but his teeth were clenched so tightly together that he couldn't speak. One of the nurses took out a hypodermic syringe and gave him an extra shot of morphine, while the other gently levered his left arm down and laid his hand on a white gauze pad.

‘
Dah
– that really – careful! –
ahh
!'

‘It's all right, Professor. I'll be very gentle with you. I just have to cut off this glove and change your dressing. It looks like your hand has been weeping real bad.'

‘Please, I –
hah
!
hah
! – God almighty – it's worse than when I first burned it!'

‘It might have gotten infected. Almost all burns get colonized with bacteria in the first few days.'

‘Now I'm a colony? That's terrific –
hah
!
ahh
! That really, really hurts!'

The nurse cut away the transparent plastic with surgical scissors and drew off the remains of the glove. It was filled with watery serum, which she carefully dabbed clean with lint. Then she sprayed his hand with antiseptic, which stung even more. He closed his eyes tight and said, ‘Jesus!'

There was a long pause. Then the nurse who was treating his hand said to her companion, ‘Edie – come over here, would you? Take a look at this.'

Nathan heard her companion walk around the foot of the bed. There was another pause, and then her companion said, ‘How about that? I never saw nothing like that before. I'll go call Doctor Berman.'

Nathan opened his eyes. ‘Something wrong?' he asked, trying to lift his head up.

‘No, Professor. Nothing wrong. In fact something's a whole lot righter than it ought to be.'

Nathan looked down at his hand. The nurse had cleaned off all of the serum, and although it was still bright scarlet, his hand looked surprisingly unscathed. The skin on the back of his hand had suffered full thickness burns, and Doctor Berman had been talking about a split skin graft. The palm had been burned less severely, but it would still have needed a full thickness graft, because the inside of the hand needed to be covered with much more robust skin.

Now, however, glossy red skin had already crept back as far as his knuckles, and when he turned his hand over, he saw that his palm was healing, too. Even his life line and his fate line were reappearing, and they had been totally obliterated.

His hand wasn't simply healing; it was regenerating itself.

The phoenix
, he thought.
The dragon-worm had blazed and then reappeared as a bird in
only a matter of seconds
. His hand had taken a little longer, but it was still astoundingly fast by human standards. A hand that had been burned as badly as his would normally have taken months to heal, and he would have needed numerous skin grafts and months of therapy even to be able to pick up a pencil.

‘It's working,' he croaked. It still hurt like hell, although the extra shot of morphine was beginning to take effect. But who cared if it hurt like hell if it was actually returning to normal, and with such rapidity? Maybe the regrowth of a few square inches of burned human skin barely even counted as a miracle when he compared it with the phoenix itself, which could reconstitute itself from nothing but a heap of ashes. But it would dramatically change the lives of millions of badly-scarred people.

Doctor Berman came in. The nurse must have interrupted his lunch, because he was still wiping his beard with a paper napkin.

‘Professor Underhill?' he said. ‘Nurse Johnson here tells me that something remarkable has happened.'

Nathan held up his hand, and turned it from side to side. It was still red, but it was healing almost visibly by the minute. The nurse handed Doctor Berman a pair of latex gloves and he put them on, frowning at Nathan's hand as he did so. Then he sat down on the side of the bed and examined his hand intently – first the dorsum, then the palm, then each individual finger. The renewed skin was smooth and dry. There was no bacterial infection, no further maceration, and no obvious contracture of the tendons.

Doctor Berman looked Nathan straight in the eye. ‘You know that this is impossible, don't you, Professor?'

‘What can I say?' Nathan told him, with a shrug.

‘This is utterly and completely impossible. I have never in my entire thirty-eight-year career seen a full-thickness burn heal so quickly and so comprehensively. Never.'

‘I don't know what to tell you,' said Nathan, although he would have given anything to be able to tell Doctor Berman right here and now about the phoenix project. He
would
tell him, before he left the burns unit, because if he could persuade Temple University Hospital to endorse what he had achieved, Schiller might change their minds and agree to fund the remainder of his research. First of all, however, he wanted to make sure that his hand regenerated itself until it was exactly as it had been before he had set fire to it.