Wake for Me (Life or Death Series) (8 page)

Something has changed, and not for the better.

A bright bolt of yellow lightening hits the ground, inches from me. I sit up with a start, gasping for breath, and the scent of scorched air burns my lungs.

Or is it something else? Trees, I think. Burning trees. Cedar. Cigars. I know that smell.

Another bolt of lightning hits the trees off in the distance. Sycamores, now burning.

Suddenly, I know where I am. I’m asleep. None of this is real. Or is it?

I close my eyes, blocking out the confusing landscape around me. Instead, I focus everything I have on the familiar smell, on the faint sound of someone breathing. He’s found me. But that isn’t right, is it? He never left me. He’s always been there, watching quietly. Waiting for this chance.

My eyes feel so heavy. They won’t obey my command to open. I try to sit up, try to move my arms and legs or open my mouth and scream for help. But I can’t. I’m paralyzed, helpless.

Someone is in my room.

I try to calm my racing heart, try to breathe more silently so I can mark where he is. He circles me, breathing loudly. In the sudden stillness, it sounds like dry leaves rustling in the wind. There’s a dragging sound, then a heavy thud. I can feel heat on my face as he leans closer. The smell grows stronger. Nauseating. Unbearable.

Cigars, burned cedar. Something sour and stale. I know that smell.

There’s not much I’m sure of anymore, but one thing I know with an absolute certainty. He’s going to kill me. I’m going to die.

 Fabric rubs together, and a hand touches my neck. I recoil inside my mind, but my body doesn’t flinch. I scream, but my throat smothers the sound before it begins.

The hand moves across my face, gently, like a lover’s caress. Or the cool touch of a mother’s hand to a sick child’s forehead. But it might as well be the scales of a snake sliding over my skin, for all that it comforts me.

Suddenly, something worse than death occurs to my panicked mind.
No. Don’t touch me,
I scream inside my head.
Don’t you dare touch me.

But his hand doesn’t trail any lower. He stops at my lips. His fingers are all that I smell as he tightens his hand over my mouth and nose. The smell is stringent, like rubbing alcohol.

I can’t breathe. This isn’t a dream. I’m dying, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

The thought fills me with a burning, blinding rage.

For the first time, my body starts to move. My fingers clutch at nothing, scrabbling for purchase but too weak to take hold of anything substantial. My legs kick feebly. My lungs burn.

Please, God, don’t let me die. Not like this. Oh, God. Sam, where are you? Save me.

The smell begins to fade. The sounds, too. The whole world fades into darkness. I’m being sucked under the water all over again, drowning all over again.

My arms and legs tire and go still. The thunder crashes through me. Once, twice, three times. The echo of it pounds in my ears, and I finally recognize it for what it is: the last few beats of my heart. I can feel myself letting go, resigning myself to oblivion. But not without saying goodbye.

With my dying breath, I whisper, “Sam.”

CHAPTER TEN

“Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.” –Sigmund Freud

“Oh my God, I can’t believe your dad is Dr. Bel-Air!”

Sam rolled his eyes and took another swig of his beer. If he’d been counting—and he hadn’t—this probably would’ve been about the ninetieth time he’d heard that exact phrase tonight. Number one had been right after the first girl of the evening had confessed to being an actress, and Brady had oh-so-modestly replied, ‘Really? That’s cool. I was on camera a lot, growing up. My dad is on this TV show, back in LA.”

“Oh my God, I can’t believe your dad is Dr. Bel-Air! I have to call my friend Anastasia. She absolutely loves that show!”

That’s how the bar crawl had started. Brady’s new actress friend had dragged them across town to see her friend Anastasia, who was a cage dancer at some club in the Meatpacking District. Then she called one of their other friends, whose name Sam couldn’t remember, but who knew of a party in the Garment District. After Brady had pissed off the actress, he’d followed a different girl and her friends to this random bar in SOHO with a very puzzling Bluegrass meets Irish pub theme.

And thus, the New York City Saturday night mating ritual began anew.

At midnight, Sam found himself parked at the far end of the bar, nursing a steady supply of domestic beers handed to him by the sympathetic—and kind of cute—bartender, as Brady paraded a series of likely bedtime playmates in front of him, one after the other. Each time, Sam found a reason to pass. And every twenty minutes or so, the bartender would wink and give him a countdown of how many hours she had left on her shift.

“This is my colleague, Sam.” Brady headed toward him again, herding a short—very short—blonde with a hairdo that provided another three or four inches. With the glowing spray tan she was rocking, Sam thought she looked like the paler twin of that girl from Jersey Shore: Skanky, or whatever her name was.

“Oh, is he a doctor, too?”

Sam bit down on a tortured sigh. If he was being honest with himself, the bartender’s implied offer was getting more and more attractive with every vapid party girl Brady brought over. If for no other reason, it would give him a solid excuse to leave—but only to get laid, which apparently in Brady’s mind, was the only way Sam was walking out of this bar alive.

“This guy,” Brady said loudly, draping his arm around the latest candidate, “This guy is the reason I made it through med school. Dude had the highest GPA in our class. Go ahead. Ask him to calculate your blood alcohol level. He can do that shit in his head. Go ahead, it’s awesome.”

Sam smiled obediently, and asked the girl how much she weighed. As usual, the girl looked startled and mildly offended by the question. Then she blurted out a number that was more than likely about 15 pounds off. Then, Sam asked her what she’d been drinking, and how much.

“Um, I don’t know…like, three Cosmopolitans?”

Closing his eyes, Sam ran through the Widmark formula—ounces of alcohol ingested times 5.14, divided by the girl’s weight times 0.66, minus 0.015 times how many hours it had been since the girl had started drinking—to calculate the girl’s BAC, or blood alcohol content.

When he told her the number, the busty blonde looked impressed. But not ‘I want to sleep with you’ impressed. More like, ‘I want you to take the SATs for me’ impressed.

For some reason, though, this wildly geektastic party trick had been a huge hit during their med school years, and it remained one of Brady’s favorite segues into buying said girl another drink.

“Your level is obviously too low,” he said, as he ushered his latest victim to the bar. “We need to remedy that, STAT.”

Now that he thought about it, Sam heard that term most often outside of the hospital setting; usually either on TV or inside a bar. It was one of those phrases that attracted the wrong kind of attention, from all the wrong kinds of people.

“So,” he turned back to Johanna the bartender, as Brady left the blonde in Sam’s line of sight—in case he changed his mind, or got drunk enough to settle, more likely—and waded out in search of a bigger fish. “You were saying that you’re thinking of going to law school? That’s really cool. What kind of law would you practice?”

“I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully, as she polished a glass.“Maybe family law. Or mediation. I like the thought of bringing people together, you know? Instead of putting people away or tearing them apart.”

Johanna’s best quality so far was that she was nothing like Viola. She had bright red hair and way too much makeup, but seemed genuine in all the ways that really counted. It wasn’t enough, though. In the back of his mind, the thought of his Sleeping Beauty lurked like a ghost.

“I kind of know what you mean,” Sam said. That was one of the reasons he’d chosen internal medicine as his specialty, instead of the more glamorous fields of surgery or neurology. He’d been interested in both, and his grades had been good enough, but there was something about those fields that made his palms sweaty. Too many things could go wrong at a moment’s notice. “I think being comfortable with what you do, morally speaking, is really underrated.”

“Like working in a bar, for example,” she said, with a laugh. “Thank God I’m a huge believer in the power of the holy spirits. Our Father of Captain Morgan, may he grant us an everlasting buzz and a ready excuse for bad behavior.”

Sam laughed genuinely, for what felt like the first time all night. He was really starting to like Johanna. She seemed like one of those people who felt completely comfortable in her own skin, which was something Sam had only ever aspired to.

“You must see a lot of crazy things in this job, though.”

“Oh, I’ve seen my fair share of hasty hook ups and staggering douche bags, if that’s what you mean. Matter of fact, your friend over there barely rates a five on the scale.”

As he glanced over at Brady, who was regaling a group of older women with a story, something caught his eye. For a brief second, he could’ve sworn he saw her, sitting alone at a corner table. But it was just an empty table, with an unattended wine glass.

Something prickled at the back of Sam’s neck, a deeply-rooted instinct. He rolled his shoulders, trying to get rid of the sensation. But it wouldn’t go away.

“Johanna, can I ask you a question?”

“Sure, Sam.”

“Do you believe in love at first sight? Or, I don’t know, fate?”

She raised a pierced eyebrow. “I hope that’s not a line, because if it is, I really think I’ve misjudged your sincerity.”

“No, it’s not,” he said, unable to tear his eyes away from that wine glass for some reason. “I just mean, as a bartender, you must see a lot of people meeting for the first time. Right?”

“I guess so. I’m not going to say it hasn’t happened, but not to me.” She laughed. “At least, not yet.”

When Sam swiveled back to face her, all thoughts of hooking up with someone that night—Johanna or anyone else, for that matter—had left his mind completely.

“I need to ask you for a really weird favor.”

“Okay, shoot.”

Ten minutes later, Sam left the bar through the back door, with Johanna’s arm draped around his waist.

He hung out in the alleyway for a few minutes, while the bartender grabbed a smoke and Sam fought the urge to lecture her on the statistics of lung cancer. When he got the ‘Way to Go’ text message from Brady, he thanked Johanna for her escape assist, promised to call her if he ever found himself in a less complicated romantic situation, and hailed a cab to take him to his apartment.

As the cab drove, Sam slumped down in the seat and rubbed his eyes. He needed sleep. He needed time and distance from Viola, from the entire situation. But there was one thing he did not need, and that was to get involved with someone romantically while he was battling with whatever personal issues were causing him to fantasize about a comatose girl.

Maybe he’d take a few sick days, and drive up to Syracuse for the weekend. Ben’s anniversary was coming up, and his mom shouldn’t be left alone to deal with that. Especially not with his dad gone now, too.

But when the cab pulled to a stop, and Sam opened his eyes, he was shocked to see rows upon rows of bright hospital windows staring down at him.

“Uh, sorry I think there’s been some kind of mistake,” he said through the partition.

“No mistake sir,” the cab driver said. “This is the address you gave me.”

“Son of a bitch,” Sam muttered. Then, “Sorry, not you.”

Talk about proving Brady right. When Sam had jumped in a cab and thought of home, his mind had automatically filled in the blank with his job, and he hadn’t even noticed. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of cash. Well, hell. Since he was already here, and his car was here, and his apartment was another forty-dollar cab ride away, he might as well stay, regardless of how much crap he would hear if Brady or any of his fellow interns found out about it.

Stepping out of the cab, he went in through the front entrance, keeping his head down and making a beeline for the third floor locker room. Since it was smack in the middle of the night shift, no one was around. He showered and changed into clean scrubs—which were all he had access to at the moment, and largely pajama-like anyway—and sought out the nearest empty on-call room. Since his next scheduled shift wasn’t until Monday, he figured he’d sleep off the beer and then drive himself home first thing in the morning. It was a solid plan.

Except, Sam’s brain didn’t want him to sleep.

Every time he closed his eyes, his brain raced and his thoughts turned dark. Every fear he’d ever had manifested itself behind his eyelids in full, Technicolor glory. It was like having a nightmare while being fully awake. On top of that, his stomach was roiling, making him feel both ravenous and nauseated at the same time.

After about half an hour, Sam couldn’t take any more. He stood up and slipped on his shoes, then left the on-call room and started wandering the hallways. His head felt immediately better, but his stomach was still tied up in knots. Without his white coat, most people he passed probably assumed he was a tech from another floor, and no one bothered him.

But inevitably, his feet started to follow the familiar path to the seventh floor. Sam passed the registration desk, which was empty, and kept walking. When he stopped in front of room 714, the door was closed. There was probably a nurse in there, checking in on Viola. That’s the only reason he could think of for the door to be closed at that hour.

He stood for a moment, swaying lightly on his feet, debating whether or not to go in and make sure she was okay. He wasn’t very drunk, but he had been drinking. If he was caught practicing medicine of any kind while under the influence—even checking a patient chart—he could lose his license. Before he’d ever gotten a chance to use it. Which would be bad.

Reluctantly, he backed away and wandered toward the other end of the hallway. When he passed the nurse’s station, he nodded politely at all four nurses who were sitting there. They were night shift nurses, and he usually worked days, so he didn’t know any of them all that well. But he did know that there were only four of them on shift at any given time.