Rabid (40 page)
Authors: T K Kenyon
The priest whirled into the kitchen and stared at her perching over Conroy, sucking air, crunching over, and spewing it into Conroy’s mouth.
The kitchen faded.
Breathe, fold over, blow.
She turned and hacked a deep smoker’s cough and gasped, “Help me!”
The Monsignor fell to his knees beside her and inspected the knife. “Stop for moment.”
Leila sat back and panted, and the world expanded again in her vision.
The priest searched under Conroy’s jawline and listened at his chest. Conroy sucked in a rattling breath under the priest’s dark head. The priest said, “He is breathing.”
“But it’s not enough,” Leila said. “He needs more air. He’s suffocating.”
“I can feel a pulse.”
“But he can’t breathe!”
Conroy rattled another breath.
The priest said, “He is breathing.”
“He’s not breathing enough! Do you want him to die? Don’t you care he’s dying?” Leila sucked in a great draught of air and blew it into Conroy’s mouth. His neon blue irises glinted under the gray lashes of his slit-open eyes.
The priest laid his hand on her shoulder as if to pull her away and she swung her fist through the air, punching him in the jaw, knuckle-bone to mandible. “Get away from him! He needs more air!” She gulped in air and blew into Conroy’s mouth again.
A siren whined outside and wound down. Beverly Sloan yelled for them to hurry.
~~~~~
Conroy drifted off the floor, floating. His body shuttled blood away from his extremities to keep his brain alive, so his limbs became numb and, with no input from the floor under them or the pressure of gravity, his brain interpreted that as floating.
That was a bad sign.
Nausea, motion sickness, a roller coaster had caught hold of him, and he closed his eyes.
Motion sickness is due to the clash of competing sensations; here, the lack of feedback from his skin felt like floating but the steady visual input from his eyes maintained that he was lying on the floor, so he closed his eyes.
He floated, and his stomach settled.
Wind blew over him, another sense stimulus from his brain unable to interpret a lack of sensation from the body. Light reddened his eyelids, and bright corneal scars pocked his visual field: floaters, often mistaken for ghosts.
A weak voice, screaming through the hurricane wind, said that the paramedics were coming, and that was a nice thought.
The typhoon-force wind brightened, and sunlight blasted him, as if he had floated so far up that the solar wind streaming with photons and subatomic particles and cosmic radiation and neutrinos had caught him, and now he was falling into the sun, spread-eagle, like a parachutist slowing his descent by air friction.
The light couldn’t be that bright. He was in the kitchen, it was night, and the fluorescent fixture overhead emitted flickery photons from electricity-excited neon noble gas.
Ah, his other senses must be shutting down, and his brain was filling in the details as the whole world became a blind spot.
The body’s view of the world is like living in a darkened room and looking though a window at the bright sunshine-reflected landscape outside. The light reflects off of the oak tree and the swingset and Beverly’s face, and the reflected photons transmit through the clear cornea of the eye, enter the vitreous humor, and excite cones and rods in the eyes’ retinas. The photosensitive cells transmit electrical excitations corresponding to the light’s color-imbued wavelengths to the optic nerve that innervates the retina, and the optic nerve carries the electrochemical potentials along its axons to dendrites that release neurotransmitters, and these stimulate action potentials of other neurons, and eventually the pattern of neuron firings builds a mental image of sunlight and the green-grassed yard and Beverly pushing the girls on the swingset.
And now, the rods and cones in his eyes must be shutting down, ceasing to receive light and signals from the outside world, like the sun outside the window going out.
Standing inside a lit room and staring at a dark window, reflections inside the room look like they are outside.
Because all the images Conroy had ever seen were merely excitations and patterns and runs and clumps within his pack of neurons, there was no difference to him between the time when his neurons were stimulated by light-excited rods and cones in his eyes and now, with his neurons sparking inside his head, and Conroy’s father walked out of the sun and shook his hand. His smooth palm was warm and somehow huge.
Conroy had no externally derived evidence to refute his father’s existence. His father, auburn-haired and green-eyed and gold-tanned skin, the colors and musky scent of early autumn, was preserved, formaldehyde and mummy-wise, in his late thirties.
Conroy studied the brilliant, whirling nimbus and said to his father, “I went to medical school. I’m a doctor now.”
Conroy’s father, his red-gold hair glowing around his head in the slanting gold sunlight, a reflection on the glass of Conroy’s frontal lobe, smiled.
Conroy’s brain filled in the sensory void with an image of his father, as the brain uses color or continuous detail to fill in the empty spot in the visual field where the optic nerve infiltrates the retina, but it was pleasant to see his father again, even if it was only for a moment, and even if it was only an illusion in this calm space they floated in.
Conroy said, “You have two granddaughters, Christine and Dinah.”
His father nodded, still smiling blankly.
“I’m doing some interesting experiments, right now. I’m using recombinant rabies virus to trace the neuronal pathways of infection in the brain. Well, mice brains.”
His father nodded again.
Wild, shimmering light bulleted silently past them, like standing unperturbed between the tracks of two opposing, rushing trains. Painless light like laser ablation began to eat through the midsection of his father and himself.
“Damn, huh Dad?” Conroy asked and watched his legs decompose.
His father nodded, sadly this time.
“Well, good-bye, then.”
Neurotransmitters shuttled between his crackling neurons while Conroy stood beside his smiling, eroding father, occasionally venturing a comment about his life and his research, and then fewer of the protein-loaded bubbles floated in the interneural areas of his brain, and then the light and his father and Conroy dimmed and sputtered, and apoptosis began its work on his neurons in the dark.
~~~~~
Carl and Menz, the paramedics, bagged the knife-pinned man lying in the kitchen and pumped air into him with a hand-held balloon while the priest and the two women stood around them in a silent triangle. Brown-lined, scarlet blood stained the guy’s shirt around the knife handle.
Carl spoke into his shoulder-mounted microphone. “We’ve got a white male, fifties, with an apparent knife wound to the chest.” Carl squeezed the bag, and the guy’s chest lifted. Air did not rush around the knife as his lungs inflated. “Not a sucking chest wound.”
Menz recognized the patient and nudged Carl. “It’s Dr. Sloan. He’s an attending in neurology.”
Carl said into his shoulder mike, “Page Dr. Lakshmi Kumar for surgery.” Kumar was the best. If this guy was one of their own, there was no way that Carl was going to let some scalpel-happy resident practice his skills. If anybody could put this egg back together, Kumar could.
Menz found no pulse at Sloan’s throat and listened to his silent chest. He frowned at Carl, indicating his unwillingness to pull the knife, press his chest around it, or zap him with the defibrillator. “Let’s transport him.”
Carl nodded. The hospital was only a block away.
They lifted him onto the gurney, wheeled him past the priest and the women, and settled him in the ambulance. After a lurch and a jostle, the ambulance screamed into the cold night.
In the ambulance, leaning against a tight right turn, Carl checked Dr. Sloan, who was unconscious and barely breathing, and asked Menz, “Which of them do you think did it?”
Menz shrugged. “They all had blood on them. Twenty on the girl in black, if you’ll give me three-to-one odds, and if she’s not his wife.”
Carl shook his head. “I could give you three-to-one on the priest, but two-to-one is the best I can do for the girl.”
~~~~~
Bev watched the paramedics wheel Conroy out of the kitchen and rubbed the trickle of blood off her arm with a paper towel. The drying blood left a crust in the crease of her hand. She was too drunk to freak out about the blood.
As more alcohol seeped into her blood, the kitchen wavered.
Bev said to Dante, “He hasn’t had Last Rites.”
Dante’s hand was tangled in his black hair. “It was just a small knife.”
Leila sank to the floor and held her head in her hands.
Bev said, “He has to have Last Rites.”
Leila said, “He had that death rattle.” She covered her face, and her hair drooped forward. With the smooth mask of her fingers behind the black fall of her hair and black clothes, she looked faceless. “And then he stopped breathing.”
Dante shook his head. “His breathing was irregular, but that can be due to cardiac tamponade, pressure from blood pooling inside his chest.”
The countertop beside Bev rose, towered over her, and she sat on the floor. Dante had jumped the space between them, the white floor marred by a comet-shaped smear of darkening blood. “Bev?”
“We need to go to the hospital,” Bev said.
Leila was still a blank-faced, black-ragged lump on the floor.
Dante lifted her by her right arm and she gathered her feet under her. His hand whipped and pushed up her sleeve on her left arm. “My God, Bev. What has happened?”
“I don’t know.” A livid red bruise swelled under her skin around her left wrist and up to her elbow. Her arm began to throb, dully, then more sharply, and then pain ripped into her arm.
Cold grabbed her like frost had sublimed on her skin.
Spinning, and Bev flew through the air. Dante’s chest was beside her, and the apartment rushed by and cold air shocked her.
He said, “We will be at the hospital soon.”
A car engine roared, and Bev flopped and tried to hold her arm against her, and it hurt more and more, grinding pain, spiking pain, and then Dante hoisted her in his arms again and sprinted into manic lights.
His yelling for help was a distant wind rush when the pain cracked her swelling, distended arm and the white lights on the ceiling sprouted black, consuming holes that drank the light out of the room.
She lay back and her legs rose without her volition.
Cradling surrounded her, as if the Virgin Mary’s arms wrapped her, and the Virgin Mary’s black robes swept around her and blotted out the light.
