The Pain Nurse - [3]

It was better than thinking about Christine. Why was she even coming down here? What more was there to say?

The darkness of the corridor seemed to swallow sound. Other hallways, narrow alleys, and double doors led off at regular intervals. The doors had small, darkened windows. Old beds and laundry carts were lined along the walls and tucked into intersecting hallways. Then a metallic crash, muffled, short-lived, somewhere behind her. She jumped and looked back. Had the sound come through those two dark doors off to the left? She stood for a moment in the gathering silence. It was silly. Cheryl Beth was not the jumpy type. She liked walking the old corridors, taking shortcuts. The old building made its own sounds, never mind the reality that the basement also attracted horny staff members and the occasional transient. And for some reason, Christine had moved her office down here. In the distance, she heard an elevator bell sound, heard anonymous hums of large electric machines.

She could see warm, golden light breaking out of Christine’s office door, which was partly opened onto the corridor. Christine hated the overhead lights and often worked with only her desk lamp lit.

“Hey, it’s me.” Cheryl Beth knocked as she opened the door.

For an instant, the world seemed out of phase, not right, almost comically not right. Red spatter on the floor. Christine on the floor, undressed. Among the tide of emotions washing in was almost a millisecond of laughter: this was a practical joke. Then heavy breathing. Cheryl Beth’s own.

“Christine?” It took Cheryl Beth a moment to recognize her own voice.

Dr. Christine Lustig lay on her side, completely naked, her pale skin luminous except for the blood. Everywhere. Cuts lashed her arms, legs, side, face; in places, the skin had been viciously avulsed, like work a butcher might do. Cheryl Beth’s training effortlessly overcame the hysterical instinct boiling up in her and in two strides she was at the doctor’s side, reaching for a carotid pulse. Her fingers sank into gore. The knife had found its fatal target in Christine’s neck. Around the other side of her neck the skin was unbroken and pulseless. Her finger felt her thigh, the femoral artery; again, no pulse. She felt a ballerina’s spinning light-headedness. She felt disembodied but no, connected to another body, one that would take barely a breeze to float away. So much blood-maybe there were other victims. The average human contained 5.6 liters of blood. Then she realized how much blood she was standing in. It betrayed the unevenness of the floor, pooling here, flowing like scarlet canals between the aged tiles. It inundated her red patent leather Danskos. Suddenly she felt a touch slither against her neck.

Her disembodied hearing heard a sharp breath, a small “oh!” Her own.

Cheryl Beth pulled the stethoscope off her neck and stuffed it into her lab coat. The white coat was now streaked with Christine’s blood. Behind her was the doorway, with the empty black hallway beyond. The entire world seemed monstrously soundless, even the distant electric hum gone. Cheryl Beth sprang up, crossed the room, and closed the door, locking it. She carefully walked to the desk, her shoes now hopelessly hydroplaning on the bloody floor, and grabbed the phone receiver. Even before her ear registered the dead device she could see the cord ripped from the wall. Her own cell showed no signal.

Panic finally threatened to overwhelm her. Her breath came harder and she reached into her pocket for the small inhaler, shook it, and took a puff. She made herself breathe slowly. Buried beneath the vast hospital, the cell phone stubbornly refused to find a signal.

“Oh, shit.” She leaned against the wall and looked back at Christine. That’s when she saw the strange shape of the woman’s left hand. Christine’s ring finger was gone, leaving a dark red tangle of tissue.

Cheryl Beth walked quickly to the door, unlocked it, and ran down the hallway toward the elevator, but not before finding a disposable scalpel in the cabinets of Christine’s office, unwrapping it, and brandishing it before her like life itself.

Chapter Two

He was alive.

Later he would learn that the surgery had lasted more than ten hours, but to him it was one lost instant that began after the anesthesiologist had opened his leather case and said, “Bar’s open. What’s your pleasure, Detective Borders?” Will had laughed and called for good Kentucky bourbon and a Christian Moerlein chaser. Next he was awake on his back, looking at a lighted ceiling, and at Cindy’s face, telling her how much he loved her, how grateful he was to be alive. They could start fresh. They would have Christmas. He would live to see another Christmas. He had just been babbling, a long series of moans, but these words are what his brain so clearly heard him say.

Can you wiggle your toes? Can you feel this? Yes, yes!

He was alive. This elation kept him going through the hours in the ICU, when he sweet-talked the nurse into giving him more ice than she probably should have. His thirst was primal. The ice was salvation. He could feel his feet and toes, kept wiggling them anxiously. Then he had been wheeled up to a patient floor, a good sign surely, and Cindy had sat with him for a while. Then she had poured him water and left. The persistent sleep that had annihilated the past few days again took him. Everything else could wait. He was alive.