Chapter 11
Three men rolled a gurney into Donna’s room and forced her down onto it. She thrashed. She spat on one of them. She kicked
another in the thigh and made him grunt. Didn’t matter. They were all big, implacable men, twice her size. They wore khakis
and polo shirts, as if they were planning on an afternoon of golf. After they had pushed her flat on the gurney, one of them—Mr.
Salem, his close-cropped black hair always gleaming as if he had just come from the shower—pressed a clear plastic mask down
over her face, hard enough to squash her nose. She threw her head from side to side, tried to keep him from buckling it into
place, and he grabbed her hair close to the scalp to hold her still. She wanted to bite him. She wanted to scream. She couldn’t
do the first and wouldn’t allow herself to do the second.
They rolled her along wide white hallways, beneath fluorescent lights, and she tried not to think about gang rape. On a rational
level, she did not think she would be raped beneath clinical fluorescent lights, in a facility with as many women as men.
But rational thought didn’t reach to her racing heart.
No one even copped a feel. Instead, she was wheeled into a white room with a great, luminescent ring in the wall. A hole in
the center of the ring looked into a chamber filled with an aquatic, rippling green light. She was not reassured by the sight
of it.
“What’s that?”
“It’s an MRI, girlfriend,” said Mr. Valentine, coming forward out of a dark corner with a clipboard in one hand. Her heart
began to do a ragged, uncertain trot in her chest.
“I’m not your fucking girlfriend,” she told him.
His right hand drifted absently up to touch the ear that had been crookedly stitched back into place. “No, I suppose not. More like your idea of lunch.” And he smiled his old, innocent child’s smile.
“Why do I need an MRI? Do you think I have cancer?”
“I think you are one,” he said. “Put her in.”
Salem moved to the bottom of the gurney. More than anything, she didn’t want to be pushed into that little hole in the wall,
so like the drawer in which they placed corpses in a morgue.
“Where’s Mr. Francis?” Donna said. “I want to speak to Mr. Francis.”
“Away for the afternoon, I’m afraid.”
“I don’t need an MRI,” she said. Salem began to push her into that narrow glass tube. “I can’t get enough air in this mask.”
“You seem to be getting enough air to bitch at us,” Valentine said.
“I don’t like small spaces,” she said.
“This will be over soon,” Valentine told her. “Forty-five minutes at most.”
She was thrust deep into the tunnel, wrists locked to the hard plastic bars on either side of her gurney. The lights went
off. It was like being zipped into a body bag. The world around her began to whir and slam and thrum. She couldn’t seem to
draw enough breath, no matter how desperately she gasped for air. She counted to sixty. One minute. She counted to sixty again.
She counted to sixty over a hundred times before she began to scream. She couldn’t help herself. It was like being buried
alive, being under a thousand pounds of dirt. She screamed until her throat was sore and her voice mostly gone. The pounding
sounds continued, inside her own head, long after the machine stopped.
Then, abruptly, the aquamarine light fluttered back on around her. She was eased out.
Joe Valentine stood by her gurney, loomed over her. They were alone in the little room, although Nurse Dover and Salem stood
together on the other side of a glass window, at a control panel.
“Did I say you were only going to be in there for forty-five minutes? Sorry, I lost track of time. That was almost two hours,” he said. “I guess it’s pretty scary in there for someone who suffers from acute claustrophobia? That’s in your file—the claustrophobic fear.”
“You don’t know anything about fear. But you will.” She hated that she could feel tears drying on her face, hated that he
knew she had been crying.
He stepped away to a wide flat-panel screen displaying a scan of her chest. It was like looking at a work of ghost photography,
her lungs and spine etched in light against the glassy, obsidian darkness behind. She had to look twice before she saw the
wyrm: a serpent coiling twice around her chest and resting its spade-shaped head on her heart. It was a different shade from
her bones and organs. The arched chambers of her rib cage were traced in brilliance, while the snake worming through her chest
was the hazy color of a poison gas.
“There it is,” he said. “Turns out he’s something of a cancer after all, isn’t he?”
“He?”
“King Sorrow.”
Her arms prickled with gooseflesh. “Van told you his name.”
“He told us more than that.”
She felt a brief spasm of resentment—that little pussy, of course he told—but couldn’t hang on to it. Very likely he had thought
by cooperating, he could protect her in some way, could prevent them from doing the sort of thing they had just done. She
flashed to a sudden memory of sitting in Arthur Oakes’s bedroom, after Jayne Nighswander and Ronnie Volpe had kicked the stuffing
out of them, remembered Colin saying they should just pay them off. You can’t horse-trade with these people, Gwen had warned them. You could no more strike a bargain with them than Cady Lewis could’ve struck a bargain with the men
who kidnapped and assaulted her. They would take what they wanted and anything you gave them was just extra, a little sauce
for the goose.
Valentine was looking at that glowing serpent painted across her ribs again. “And all you have to do is touch it and—then
what?”
“Take these gloves off and I’ll show you.”
He turned back to her—as he pivoted, she had a good look at his mangled ear, the awful stretched white scarring where it had been stitched together—and showed her his angelic smile.
He came to her side and she thought if he touched her tit she would begin to scream again, she would scream until what was left of her voice was gone.
He didn’t fondle her, though. Instead he tapped one finger, hard, against the plastic mask over her face. Each time he tapped, she flinched.
“You should know I put in a formal request to amputate your hands,” he said, “as a simple safety measure. I was voted down.
But you know the great thing about democracy, Donna? There’s always another vote.”