Mercy 6

“You’ve gone myopic, Dr. Mendenhall. You’ve lost the big picture. You want to argue— to Thorpe—that maybe a microscopic blade lanced a janitor while he was on a ladder? Or that an intense burst of air went off inside his neck? And what about the others?”

He motioned to the other bodies. “A serial killer with a light saber is loose in the hospital?”

Mendenhall passed the scope to the tech. She sighed and pressed the back of her sleeve to her brow. She badly wanted to rub her eyes with her fingers.

“The, what did you call it? Posturing?” said Mullich, his mask thickening his accent. “She saw that.” He pointed back to the lighted displays.

Mendenhall looked down at her gloved hands, empty. She didn’t know what she was doing. She couldn’t really say that she had seen posturing in Dozier. We see what we are. She saw what she was.

She was a dream-deprived trauma specialist, one who had never escaped the ER, forever moonlighting to pay off loans that no longer existed. She didn’t even want to go home. She wanted the hospital to open, to let in more, to let in the outside.

“Can infection cause posturing?” asked Mullich. He was looking at the tech. She answered only with lifted eyes. Her eyes held still, almost black above the dark blue mask.

“Maybe a sudden bloom against the brain stem,” Claiborne answered. “Something like that, I could imagine.”

“Imagine?” Mullich pulled his mask down.

“Better than I can imagine a Jedi in a hospital.”

Mendenhall was still bowed. “I’ll go rest,” she told Claiborne.

“I’ll come back down if you want.”

Claiborne let his mask fall away with a simple stroke behind his neck. His expression opened to her. “If I do a bunch of digital scans before Thorpe’s work, he’ll send people down. I like it down here like this. Quiet.” He pointed back to the displays. “You led me to that. We have that to show Thorpe. To put him on his heels a bit.”

He waved toward the other bodies and the empty bed. “You gave me something to look for in them. Later. Soon, but later.”

7

Mendenhall returned to her cubicle. She fussed with papers and journals, squared them, then struck them all, swiping outward with both hands. Atop the resulting mess lay the most recent issues of Tennis Magazine and Golf Digest. She recognized the tennis player but not the golfer. She wouldn’t have guessed that he was an athlete. Despite the airbrushing, she noticed a basal cell on the edge of his left temple. He should come see her. The subscriptions were gifts from her mentor, who knew well enough to have them mailed to the ER, where they would have some chance of being noticed.

She had played tennis in college. Maybe the golf was supposed to be her future — her present.

She put the magazines on a stack of previous issues on the floor, all unread save for the letters-to-the-editor sections. She hunched into her space. The cafeteria had been too crowded, people gathering and lingering there during containment. She swiveled her chair to assess the bay. Pao Pao stood in the center, directing the EMTs on where to push the remaining gurneys, where to set up any new patients coming from within Mercy.

A young woman with straight black hair interrupted the nurse.

She wore a lab coat. Even from this distance Mendenhall could see that she was extremely pretty, exotic. The EMTs peeked back at her. She must have said something important to Pao Pao because the nurse gave her immediate attention, no back, no resistance, no hesitation in her sturdy shoulders. The woman was even shorter than Pao Pao. She tapped notes into a hand tablet. When she finished with Pao Pao she came directly to Mendenhall.

She wore a name tag on her lab coat. The tag was porcelain with engraved black letters: Silva. She was the tech from Pathology, the tag a gift. It felt good to look at her face, oval now without the mask and cap. To look at her hands without the gloves, fingers balancing the tablet. Her expression appeared haughty, which also soothed Mendenhall. The tech was bracing herself.

“Forget something?”

“Dr. Claiborne sent me to gather info on the patients. Their situations.”

“When they fell?”

Silva nodded, chin remaining upturned. “And how they were found. And where exactly.”

“Exactly?”

“That was Mullich. He asked for that.” Silva cocked her head.

“And Dr. Claiborne okayed.”

“Doesn’t he need your help down there?”

“This will make things faster, give him clues as he examines.

I send him the info as I go along.” She raised the tablet. “Body to body.”

“You and Dr. Claiborne should work with live people, Silva.

Whole people. Up here. All that efficiency is lost on the dead and waiting.”

Silva ignored this, looking flatly at Mendenhall.

“I can’t tell you anything more than Pao Pao could.”

“I didn’t know you said it that way,” Silva replied.

“Yes. ‘Pow pow.’ Like a gun.”

“A toy gun, you mean.” Silva straightened her gaze. “I didn’t come here to ask you about the subjects.”

“What, then?”

“Never mind,” said Silva. “I should continue.” She turned.

“No,” said Mendenhall. “Tell me.”