Chapter 13
They deposited the SUV in the parking structure and checked in at the front desk.
It was just as old-fashioned and sterile inside, the waiting room empty but for a couple of patients squeezed into too-small seats: a woman eating fried chicken straight from the bucket, a man staring at the wall, tongue circling his red chapped mouth.
Cracked, mottled purple skin stretched like scales over the sacs of fluid hanging off their enormous legs.
After a few minutes a nurse emerged. Youngish. Pretty. “Emmett Truesdale? We’re ready for you now.”
He and Lizette rose. “I’ll be waiting right here.” She hugged him hard, her breasts like lead weights against his. “Everything will be fine—”
“You have to leave,” said the nurse.
“What? I can’t just sit here?” Lizette said.
“I thought my emergency contact was allowed—” Emmett began.
“The treatment is proprietary. We’ll call you when the patient is ready to be picked up.” The nurse’s stare was glassy and intense, her lips glossy and very slightly red. “Emmett Truesdale?” she repeated. “We’re ready for you now.”
“I’m right here.”
“I don’t like this,” Lizette said.
“It’s fine. Just go home, I’ll be fine.”
“I’ll find somewhere nearby. I want to stay close until I know you’re okay.” She gave him another hug, one eye still trained on the nurse. “Love you.”
“Love you.”
As she finally escaped through the sliding doors, Emmett felt a sudden urge to run after her.
His heartbeat quickened. All the nervousness he’d pushed off until this moment rolled back now like an ocean swell, submerging him in dark, rushing terror.
The only way out was to submit to it, let it chew him up and spit him out.
He turned to the nurse.
Her smile was fixed, anemic. “Emmett Truesdale? We’re ready for you now.”
In the exam room, the pre-op preparations had the rushed, destabilizing feeling of being shunted through airport security. Brusque instructions. Grim expressions. Authority he dared not question.
Take your clothes off. Put this on. Sit down. Give me your arm. No one paused to explain what was happening, no one cared if he understood.
The nurse checked his blood pressure, his heart rate, the stethoscope biting cold against his chest. What’s going to happen?
What’s that needle for? No answer. The Black, modelesque anesthesiologist—Emmett knew this only by the title listed on her name badge—took his arm and laid it flat.
A jab—no warning, no apology. He cried out, clenching the edge of the hospital bed, then drifted.
The drugs were already working through him, drip-dripping through the IV, coating his anxiety in sweet, syrupy fatigue. He blinked in and out of consciousness.
Next thing he knew, someone was pushing his hospital bed out of the room. Where were they going? Was it already time? Emmett couldn’t speak, incapacitated but awake. Shouldn’t he be asleep by now?
They barreled down a hall of open doorways, a scene of horror through each one. A patient screaming and ripping an IV out of her arm (sharp turn). A man biting a nurse’s shoulder as she restrained him, drawing blood (sharp turn).
Imagining it. He had to be. His perception addled by the drugs.
An elevator swallowed them, then bore them up.
The temperature rose, as if they weren’t rising but plummeting beyond the basement level, down toward the earth’s molten core. Sweat dribbled from Emmett’s temples, drenched his armpits. The word infernal flashed dully across his mind.
The doors slid open.
The room before them was dark, cave-like, windows blacked out. Silent.
Slowly the nurse pushed forward, wheels stuttering out a high-pitched squeal.
She delivered him to a spotlit operating table surrounded by a masked surgical team. His nightmare willed into stark, gut-churning reality. He tried to object as they transferred him to the table, but he couldn’t form words.
“The patient’s still awake,” said the male surgeon to the anesthesiologist. “How many times have I told you, these big ones need more juice.”
“I’ll take him back—”
“Forget it. Gas and local are good enough. They never remember much anyway.”
A plastic mask like on Emmett’s CPAP closed over his nose, pumping the sedative straight to his brain. The fog around him thickened. Hands rolled him onto his side.
The prick of the needle was a dim, faraway concern. A warm throb bloomed across his hip.
“Scalpel.”
The instrument glinted in the surgical light as the surgeon took it.
“Making incision above posterior iliac crest.”
Emmett didn’t feel it or what their fingers were doing inside the opening, only heard it: the scream of the power drill, the gnashing of metal on bone.
A large needle and syringe passed over him. “Beginning extraction.”
This Emmett felt: a sharp sting of pressure penetrating deep into his hip bone. A probing, scraping, sucking violation. He’d read about this. They had to collect stem cells from his marrow to create the vector. The extracted material, bloody and thick, dribbled into a plastic bag.
Fading in and out, Emmett couldn’t keep hold of time. It passed, maybe minutes or hours or days. Then someone was applying gauze, another hooking the bag on an IV pole.
It swung, puckered and gelatinous, like a sack of raspberry jam. Two tubes trailed from it, one smaller, one thick.
“Virus.”
A fresh syringe passed over Emmett’s head, a little one filled with clear blue liquid. The surgeon fitted the tip into the end of the smaller tube and smashed the plunger.
The blue liquid blackened as it infused the bloody soup of stem cells. Emmett panicked, moaned in fear, or tried to. For a second he believed they’d heard him. They were removing his mask to hear him better.
The nurse squeezed his cheeks together like an adoring auntie, then shoved something roughly into his mouth. It was bendy, sterile tasting. A ribbed plastic tube. Emmett gagged as she thrust it deeper. It scraped down his throat.
He retched, unable to breathe. His eyes streamed, his vision bleary and starred.
Emmett always knew he’d die young, but not here. Not like this.
“Administering nutritive formula.”
The nurse turned the lever on a tank of brownish-green sludge. It began to gurgle and empty. The noxious smoothie chugged through the plastic tube, wending toward him like a headless snake.
Then the snake was shoving itself down his throat.
Its heaviness filled him like concrete: a sensation his body remembered with a spasm of inner violence, a reflexive response stifled by the deadening effect of the sedative.
A voice cut through the mire of black gelatin surrounding his mind: Got room for a little more, sport?
His body twitched inertly on the table. He couldn’t scream or even cry for help. A needle glinted thickly like a six-inch metal straw. The nurse inserted it into the bag’s larger tube, sucking the syringe full of tar-like vector.
Still choking back formula, Emmett blinked up at the surgeon above. His head blocked the surgical light, reflecting Emmett’s pathetic face in his goggles. He held out a hand for the syringe. “Prepare the injection site.”
Hands rolled Emmett onto his back with a stab of pain in his wound. They cut a hole in his hospital gown and tore it open from the middle, exposing the downy, stretch-marked belly beneath.
The surgeon laced his gloved hands around the syringe, his thumb poised on the plunger. Black fluid pooled at the beveled tip. A drop unlatched and splashed against Emmett’s skin.
The surgeon’s fists jerked upward, then slammed the needle down, burying it up to the hub with a pinprick of excruciating pain.
Emmett’s back arched, hands clawing the table, throat contracting into the shape of a scream.
The vector spread through him, ravenous as lava, rewriting his DNA with a pen of fire.
His old mantra returned to him unbidden: Feel the burn.
Then the darkness opened its mouth and swallowed him whole.