Hellbent

Candy McClure sat on the carpet of her empty safe house, knees drawn to her chest. Past the tips of her bare feet, her phone rested on the floor. It was after midnight, and yet she’d felt no need to turn on the lights.

She had no idea how long she’d been sitting like this. Her hamstrings and calves ached. Even her Achilles tendons throbbed.

She was having what more poetic types might call a crisis of conscience.

The Samsung might ring.

Or it might never ring again.

If it did, she had no idea what she’d do.

It was one of those wait-and-see things, and she wasn’t really a wait-and-see girl. Or at least she didn’t used to be.

What was she now?

The phone vibrated against the carpet, uplighting her face with a bluish glow. The Signal application, presenting her with a two-word code.

It was Van Sciver.

Somehow alive.

She found herself not answering.

An unanswered phone seems to ring forever.

At last it stopped rattling against the floorboards.

She picked it up.

She keyed in a different phone number.

1-855-2-NOWHERE.

She stared at the phone, the empty house seeming to curl around her like the rib cage of some long-dead beast.

She hung up before the call could ring through.

She pressed the Samsung to her lips and thought for a time. Then she set it on the floor, rose, and walked out.

She took nothing. She didn’t bother to lock the door behind her.

She wouldn’t be coming back.

76 Something Flat and Unchanging

Van Sciver reclined on his bed in the ICU, his face washed of color. A gray sweat layered his flesh as he dozed, his eyelids flickering. A urinary catheter threaded between his legs. A monitor read his heart rate, oxygen saturation, respiratory rate, blood pressure, and half a dozen other vitals. A central line on the left side of his chest fed in nutrition and vitamins from a bright yellow bag of TPN.

It was a private room, the curtains pulled around to shield his bed from the glass walls and door.

In one hand he clutched his Samsung.

It chimed, awakening him.

The Signal application. Was it Candy, finally back in contact?

Weakly, he raised the phone to his unshaven cheek. “Code,” he said.

Orphan X’s voice said, “Behind you.”

The words came at Van Sciver in stereo. Through the phone, yes. But also from inside the room.

Evan stepped into view, let the Samsung slide from his hand onto the sheets. Van Sciver stared at him, mouth open, jaw slightly askew.

Evan lifted Van Sciver’s personal Samsung from his frail clutch.

Finding him hadn’t been easy. But it hadn’t been hard either.

Without immediate surgical intervention and repair, an injury to the superior mesenteric artery compromised blood flow, which in turn meant that the patient usually lost most of the small bowel to necrosis.

Small-bowel transplants were rare and donors rarer yet, but given Van Sciver’s resources, he’d know how to get himself to the top of the list. Due to the severity of the injury, he would not have been able to travel far. The UCLA Medical Center was the only adult small-bowel transplant center in the Greater Los Angeles Area.

Without Joey around to help, it had taken some doing for Evan to hack into UCLA’s Epic medical-records system, but when he had, he’d found an anonymous patient admitted on December 4, two weeks back, who showed no health-care history.

Evan eased forward so Van Sciver could see him without straining.

“I did go back for Joey,” Evan said. “And that does make us different. You know what else makes us different? You’re in that bed now. And I’m standing.” He held up an empty syringe. “With this.”

Van Sciver peered up helplessly. His hand fished in the rumpled sheets and emerged with the call button. His thumb clicked it a few times.

“I disconnected it,” Evan told him. “Then I watched you sleep for a while.”

Through gaps in the curtain, they could see doctors and nurses passing by, their faces lowered to charts. Evan knew that Van Sciver wouldn’t cry out for help. Help would come too late, and he had too much pride for that anyway.

Van Sciver’s features grew lax, defeated. A milky starburst showed in that blown pupil, floating like a distant galaxy.

Evan reached over and crimped the tube feeding the central line, stopping the flow of fluorescent yellow nutrition into Van Sciver’s chest.

“You killed Jack to get to me,” Evan said. “Congratulations. You got your wish.”

He slid the needle into the tube above the crimp, closer to Van Sciver’s body.

Together they watched the air bubble creep along the line, nearing Van Sciver’s chest. It would ride his central vein into his heart, causing an embolism. The dot of air inched along, ever closer.

Van Sciver’s face settled with resignation. He said, “It is what it is and that’s all that it is.”

“No,” Evan said, “it’s more than that.”

The air bubble slipped through the line into Van Sciver’s chest.

A moment later he shuddered.

His left eye dilated, at last matching the right.

The symphony of beeps and hums from the monitor changed their melody into something flat and unchanging.