Echoes of Darkness Read online

  “We’ll keep working her until you call it, Doc,” said the man compressing her chest. “You guys do what you have to do.”

  “Options?” Ben was looking at Dr. Maxwell, automatically deferring to the more experienced man.

  “I have an idea,” Maxwell said, turning from the dying woman and opening one of the many drawers in the ER. He withdrew a syringe, then reached into one of the voluminous pockets in his lab coat and drew forth a container of a familiar milky liquid.

  “What are you doing?” Ben’s voice was a shocked hiss.

  “Whatever I can,” Maxwell said, unscrewing the lid from the jar and thrusting both into Ben’s hands. “Hold this.”

  “What? No!” Ben glanced at the center of the room where the team still worked.

  Maxwell stripped the sterile cover from the syringe. “It’s perfect! According to the note, this stuff is amazing for the heart.”

  “We don’t know what that note says, remember? We don’t even know what this is, never mind dosages, possible drug interactions—”

  Maxwell thrust the tip of the syringe into the fluid and pulled back on the plunger, drawing some into the barrel. The smell of the stuff rose up to fill Ben’s nostrils. It smelled like old gym socks tinged with meat gone bad and . . . something else. It smelled somehow warm, although that thought made no sense to Ben. Warm, and organic, and he turned his face away before he gagged. The old doctor gave no sign the smell even registered as he continued speaking in hushed tones.

  “Ben, this came from a country where they still slaughter chickens to ward off bad juju. I don’t think they’re too concerned with precise dosages. As for everything else, well, look at it this way: she’s dying. I can’t make her any worse.”

  He raised the syringe and gave it a flick and squirt to get rid of any air bubbles trapped in the barrel. Their eyes locked, and Ben saw determination coupled with excitement in the old doc’s eyes.

  “Cap that,” Maxwell said, pointing at the jar with his chin, “and keep it out of sight. If anything goes wrong, I’ll keep you out of it.”

  Without hesitation he turned and stepped to the gurney, swabbed his spot, and plunged the needle into the patient’s arm. Ben screwed the cap on the jar, then put it in his pocket as they waited.

  “Stop compressions,” Maxwell commanded after thirty seconds. The paramedic stared at him for a moment, then leaned back and gave his arms a rest, shaking out his hands. Maxwell looked only at the EKG readout. The woman’s heart beat twice, nice and strong, then jittered. The beat became irregular, the heart racing.

  “Tachycardia,” reported the nurse.

  “I can see that,” snapped Maxwell. “Just wait.”

  The haywire rhythm continued for a few seconds, then leveled suddenly into one long flat note.

  “She’s crashing!” said the paramedic, already positioning his hands to resume CPR. The watching doctor barked an order.

  “Wait!”

  “But she’s—”

  “Just wait.”

  Maxwell sounded commanding, his stance rigid and authoritative. Ben was the only one in the room who could see his hands locked behind his back, fingers twiddling nervously. As the seconds ticked by, Ben moved up to stand next to Dr. Maxwell. Though his eyes were on the girl who was gradually turning a lovely shade of blue, his ears caught the muttered words from the doctor next to him.

  “Come on . . . come on . . .”

  A nurse turned to Dr. Maxwell. “Are you going to call time of death, Doctor?” Her voice was flat.

  “I—” Maxwell began, but was interrupted by the EKG bursting into a rhythm again. No stuttering transition, no slow build; one moment that horrible flatline, the next a nice, steady beat.

  “Yes!” Maxwell gave a small, controlled fist pump of victory. The nurse got busy checking vitals as the EMT stepped down. They all watched the EKG bounce across the screen for almost a minute, waiting for it to falter again, but the beat remained strong and steady.

  “Wow, Doc,” said the paramedic. “Good call. I’ve never seen anything like that before. I thought she was gone.”

  The man gave an impressed snort, collected his partner, and walked out. Another nurse entered with an orderly in tow, the two of them preparing to move the patient to recovery, should she prove stable enough.

  She did.

  Maxwell ordered a battery of tests. To everyone else in the room he may have seemed merely thorough, but Ben knew what Maxwell was doing: searching for possible effects from the unknown drug with which he had injected the girl.

  When Maxwell left ER-1, Ben followed, putting a hand on the older man’s arm.

  “That was risky as hell,” he said. “What were you thinking, using that stuff?” He looked up and down the hall, making sure they were not overheard.

  “Did you see that?” Maxwell’s voice was filled with wonder.

  “Yes,” Ben said, “I saw it. I saw you using a drug that hasn’t been tested or approved. Hell, we don’t even know what it is!”

  “But it worked!” Maxwell’s eyes grew bright, almost manic. “It worked like a charm! Did you hear that man? ‘Never seen anything like that before’!”

  “Yes, I heard—” Ben began.

  “This is just what we were looking for! It’s . . . it’s just what the doctor ordered!”

  He grinned, oblivious to Ben’s concern. He held out a hand. “Give me the jar.”

  “What? No!” Ben was surprised, having forgotten he now carried the jar in his pocket.

  Maxwell straightened, his voice commanding again, though he still spoke in low tones.

  “Yes. Give it here. I need to draw up a few syringes so next time I won’t be fumbling at the back of the room. That was almost a disaster.”

  “You can’t keep using this stuff,” Ben hissed. “It’s not safe!”

  Maxwell was calm. “I can keep using it, and I’ll be on my own hook if I get caught.”

  His stare became icy, and Ben wondered who this was, this hard uncaring man who, just an hour earlier, had been his gentle mentor in this place.

  “I’ll be on my own then, but right now I have an accomplice.”

  Ben’s own heart stuttered. “What?”

  “You knew what I was doing in there. You even helped fill the syringe, so you can’t say you had no idea what was going on.”

  “But—”

  “You knew—that makes you complicit. But I’m sure the disciplinary board will be lenient.” Sarcasm filled his voice. “They are so known for leniency. And this is exactly the kind of thing a young doctor wants marking his career—supposing they even let you have a career, after all this!”

  Ben’s head was whirling with horror, and he felt nauseated. Maxwell smiled and extended his hand.

  “Or, you can just hand me that jar right now and keep your mouth shut. It’s really up to you, Ben. Your whole future is in your hands.” The grin dropped from his face. “Well? What’s it going to be?”

  Ben placed the jar in the waiting hand. Maxwell looked at the vessel on his palm, his fingers curled around it, caressing the glass. He looked up at Ben, and his smile returned.

  “Thanks, Ben. Toddle off now, and keep your mouth shut. Let me be all I can be!”

  He strode off in the direction of his office, no doubt going to measure out doses of his miracle cure. Ben watched until he turned a corner, then made his way back toward the center of the ER. He was moving slowly, in a daze.

  He still felt like he was going to throw up.

  Ben avoided Dr. Maxwell for most of their shift—quite a feat, considering he worked directly under the man. He kept his distance and tried to spot the old doctor using his miracle cure, but Maxwell was being cautious. Though he didn’t catch him, Ben heard the glowing reports about Maxwell that night. Everywhere he went, patients stabilized, even patients the other doctors labeled as lost causes. And not just cardiac cases. Maxwell’s shining moment came when they got word of a fifteen-car pileup on the freeway. The casualties we
re being brought to the closest trauma center: Springdale General. They didn’t have long to prepare for the influx of cases, and Ben had to admit that Maxwell did an admirable job preparing the ER for a wave of nearly thirty new patients, all arriving within the span of a few minutes. He organized people and materials, implemented their Mass Casualty Triage Plan . . . then disappeared into his office for the last minute or so. Ben assumed he was filling more syringes from his little jar of miracles, and any admiration he’d felt for Maxwell dissolved like a puff of bitter smoke.

  Maxwell’s plan worked just as he’d hoped; by the end of the shift he was walking around the ER as the hotshot doc. People were saying he’d saved at least half the patients from the pileup himself. On his way out at the end of his twelve-hour shift, Maxwell stopped by the nurses’ station where Ben was using the phone to check on a patient who’d already been moved upstairs to recovery. Maxwell didn’t say anything, just gave a wink and tipped his hat as he strolled toward the exit. Ben, working a double shift, barely spared him a glance as he pressed the receiver to his ear, trying to hear over the noise of the ER. He was checking on Rebecca Stillwell.

  Rebecca Stillwell was their heart patient, the first to get a dose of what he’d begun to think of as Maxwell’s Miracle. The patient he himself had helped to inject with an unknown substance.

  While Maxwell had run off to fill those first syringes, Ben had gone to the admissions desk to collect Rebecca’s information. Maxwell was listed as the attending physician, and Ben made certain it stayed that way. He signed nothing, just found out where Rebecca was being sent for recovery and started calling the nurse’s station there. Self-preservation kept him officially out of it, but his feelings of concern and guilt had him calling for status reports. The ER was busy, but he somehow managed a call every thirty to forty-five minutes. Four hours into the recovery, she was conscious. Six hours and she was up and about. He started to relax then, and slowed his calls to once an hour or so—good thing, too, since that was when they received the call about the freeway accident. Things got pretty busy after that.

  Now, though, as Maxwell was skipping out the door, a nurse was telling Ben about Rebecca’s sudden fever. There was no sign of infection, nothing that would have caused something like this. The increase in temperature registered only about fifteen minutes before Ben’s call, but had climbed from 100 to 102 in that time. The patient was in bed with a saline drip while they ran tests. Ben went cold, wondering just what the hell they had done to the girl. He asked to be kept apprised of her situation, then rang off to run beside another gurney, listening to an EMT reeling off patient information. He immersed himself in the new case, focusing on the task at hand in an attempt to avoid wondering what he was going to do.

  Unfortunately, fifteen minutes later he was walking out of ER-2 with nothing to think about but his predicament.

  Maxwell used that stuff on quite a few patients without my aid; hell, without my presence. He’s on the hook alone for all those . . . but I was there for Rebecca. I did hold the damn jar for him. It wasn’t my fault, but Maxwell’s been around forever. He knows people. He won’t go down alone for this, I’m sure he’ll take me—

  “Dr. Binder?”

  Ben looked toward the nurses’ station.

  “Line one’s for you. She has some patient info for you.”

  Ben scuttled over and grabbed the phone.

  “Yes?”

  “Dr. Binder? I’m calling about Rebecca Stillwell.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry, Doctor. Her temp spiked to one-oh-six, so we started her in a cool bath. She coded while in the bath. The resuscitation team was called, but couldn’t get her back. I’m sorry, Doctor, but she’s already en route to the basement.”

  “What?” Ben checked the clock. “It hasn’t even been twenty minutes since you told me about the fever starting!”

  “I can’t explain it. Pathology will investigate, but at the moment we have no idea what went wrong.”

  I have an idea.

  Ben hung up the phone.

  All shift long Ben fielded calls for Dr. Maxwell. Wherever his patients had been sent for recovery or tests, people were calling for him, wanting to know if there was anything they should know. Most of Maxwell’s patients were exhibiting sudden and apparently sourceless fevers. These fevers spiked, and no matter what measures were taken, resulted in cardiac arrest. Halfway through his shift these fevers exploded across the recovery ward, every one a victim of that freeway pileup. That’s when the math became simple.

  Twelve hours! Ben thought. Twelve hours after he injects them with that stuff, they’re dead. It’s the same every time!

  He phoned Maxwell again and again, but got no answer. He only hoped someone else in the hospital had better luck than he was having.

  At last his second shift ended. There had been an hour before dawn when everything seemed to quiet down, and it gave Ben time to think about Rebecca Stillwell, to wonder exactly what the hell had happened to her; to all of them. He felt guilt, but also, he had to admit, fear. Were they going to find out about Maxwell’s potion? Chances were good. Would Maxwell absorb the blame and go down quietly, leaving Ben out of it as he’d said?

  Not bloody likely.

  He took his name off the On Shift board and hustled out of the ER. He was the picture of a man in a hurry to go home and get some sleep.

  But he was going to the basement. To the morgue.

  He knew he wasn’t thinking straight. He’d been up for more than twenty-four hours; that was enough to make anyone a little fuzzy around the edges. He couldn’t get the girl out of his mind—and he had held the jar . . .

  He stumbled off the elevator into the visitor/viewing room, with the window where people came to identify the faces of loved ones. There, in the viewing room, was a woman.

  He heard her before he saw her, sobbing registering on his consciousness just before he associated the sound with the figure huddled in the chair next to the door leading into the morgue itself.

  “Miss? Miss, are you all right?”

  Oh, that’s a bright question to ask her here! She must have just identified—

  “Rebecca,” the woman sobbed into her hands. “Rebecca’s dead?”

  The tone was disbelieving and mournful, and the words hit him like a slap.

  “Rebecca? You mean Rebecca Stillwell?”

  She looked at him though the mask of her fingers. “Rebecca’s dead.”

  “I know, I . . . we, uh—look, just wait here, I’ll get Dr. Jonah, okay? Please.”

  He burst through the door into the morgue proper, mind whirling. “Dr. Jonah? Hello, Dr. Jonah?”

  There were rows of refrigerated storage drawers, stainless steel handles gleaming under the cold fluorescents. There were gurneys, the door into the autopsy room, a desk and filing cabinet, but no sign of the pathologist. The door hissed behind him and Ben spun around, but instead of Dr. Jonah he found the woman following him. Standing, her face uncovered, she bore a striking resemblance to the girl Maxwell had injected with his potion almost a full day ago.

  A sister?

  “Miss? I’m sorry, but you shouldn’t be in here.”

  As he moved to guide her back to her seat she reached toward him, and the grief etching her face nearly broke his heart.

  “Rebecca’s dead,” she said again. “Help me, please?”

  He caught her as she fell against him. Her dress was sleeveless, and as he touched her skin he was surprised at how cold she felt.

  She must be in shock, he thought. I’ll have to get her to lie down. There must be a blanket somewhere—then I can call for assistance.

  “Come with me, all right? Sit down, please.”

  He put an arm about her shoulders to guide her, but she folded into his chest, her arms about him.

  “Please, help me.” Her words were muffled by his shirt, the scrubs so thin he could feel the chill of her cheek through the material. Ben moved them toward the closest seat, a nearb
y gurney, in a sort of shuffling dance.

  “Let’s sit you down for a minute, okay? Get you a blanket, all right?”

  Her arms tightened about him, fingers splayed and caressing.

  “Warm,” she said, as if he had not spoken. “You’re so warm. Oh my God. Help me.”

  “Now, I’m trying to—”

  She kissed his neck.

  He drew in a breath, shocked, but she didn’t stop there. She continued to kiss down the side of his neck as her hands caressed his back. She murmured into the hollow of his throat, her voice tickling his skin in a manner that had him standing on his toes.

  “You’re so warm, please help me . . . Rebecca’s dead, and you’re so warm . . .”

  Oh my God, this is just like that Forum in Penthouse last month, the one titled “The Doctor is In”! I thought those stories were all bullshit! No! Wait—I have to get control of this; I can’t do this!

  “Now, wait! Miss? No, I—look, we can’t—”

  But she was all over him, kissing and caressing, somehow peeling his scrub tunic upward to expose his skin, feeling his stomach, moaning about how warm he was, and how she needed his help. Her roving hand found the bulge at the front of his scrubs, squeezing and stroking, and Ben was lost. A minute later he was up on the gurney, flat on his back with his pants about his ankles as, dress pushed up to her hips, she swayed and bucked above him.

  She rose and fell on him, around him, crushing him deeper into herself with every thrust, so hard it bordered on pain. Ben just tried to ride it out, to last long enough and not get hurt. Though she had started with kisses, all softness was gone from her. Her face was twisted into a rictus of lust that was almost savage, and Ben realized he was not making love with a partner: he was being used to service her immediate need. Though that realization hurt a little, there was still a small part of him that thought I have to write this down and send it in to Forum!

  He climaxed. There was nothing he could do to stop it, not thinking of baseball, going to his happy place, nothing. It didn’t slow her down in the least—he wasn’t sure she even noticed. She pounded on him with increasing ferocity, her internal friction keeping him erect and functioning. He felt teeth nipping and biting at his shoulders and throat. The combination of sharp little pains and her own frantic pleasure drove him over the edge again: his first ever double orgasm. She stiffened, hands gripping the edges of the gurney to provide leverage, bearing down with more than just her weight as she ground herself onto him, harder and harder until he felt a final crushing squeeze deep within her, her release so strong it hurt—hurt a lot. The battering he’d just taken coupled with his twenty-four-hour workday, and as he screamed at this sudden and unexpected pain, darkness closed over him.