DAY 5
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Jess Kaylin was at it again, only this time, there wasn’t any smug satisfaction in it for her.
“People are gonna die on you, and it’s going to be fucking hell. You’ll want to bleed for them, but there’s nothing you can do.”
That’s how she liked to put it.
Nurses were to medicine what sewers were to civilization: they took care of shit.
But in life, sometimes shit happened. And when people’s lives were on the line, that meant some people were gonna fail.
Jess felt like a balloon with the air let out of it. Her skin was clammy and her back hurt, and the damn rebreather she wore beneath her visor in place of a mask was digging into her cheeks. Jess had seen more than her fair share of death, but this one…
It was a goddamn tragedy. Not to mention, it was the fourth in the last hour. That detail alone was enough to put white in your hair.
Joe-Bob O’Houlighan was dying, and it was his fault.
Jess snorted.
Then why do I feel so fucking guilty!?
As a rule, no one was allowed to have leverage on her, which made this asshat’s grip on her psyche that much more intolerable. Jess knew Joe-Bob’s type. She’d grown up around it—in spite of it—and had managed to crawl her way out of that toxic ooze on her hands and knees with a scholarship in one hand, sheer grit in the other, and a mountain range of coffee grinds simmering in her belly.
Joe-Bob’s type was more bark than bite, except his type’s bark was a kind of bite all its own. Nurses, like teachers, had earned the right to be judgmental, and there was plenty here to judge. Jess was confident this was the kind of man who spent every family dinner berating his children about how “real men” like him had “real jobs” out in the “real world”, while spending his own days sucking off the teat of government disability payments he didn’t deserve, had cheated to get, and which he believed no one deserved except for himself. His kind were self-fulfilling prophecies; his lazy-ass booze-guzzling couch-potato existence led to fat-fuck diabetes, heart failure at the age of thirty-five, and a body that couldn’t walk a mile if his life depended on it.
Last time on Jess vs. the Racist, Ultracrepidarian Son-Of-A-Bitch, Mr. O’Houlighan’s had gone on about a hotshot lawyer brother-in-law of his. Nurse Kaylin believed in fair play, so she was the first one to admit that, for once, the bite had measured up to the bark. Yesterday, after hog-tying the fat fuck the day before, Jess and her mates had gotten orders from up top—from no less than Harold Hobwell himself—that Mr. O’Houlighan’s case had been put under the jurisdiction of a pediatric oncologist by the name of Lester Moonpulp. In Dr. Moonpulp’s esteemed shit-for-brains opinion, Ward E’s nurses had wronged Joe-Bob by refusing to give him heelibectin. Dr. Moonpulp had then prescribed a full regimen of heelibectin to be administered to Mr. O’Houlighan ASAP.
That had happened last night.
Jess spoke on behalf of all the healthcare professionals in Ward E, telling Dr. Moonpulp that if he wanted to shoot Joe-Bob O’Houlighan up with a medication that would stop his immune system from trying to keep him alive, then ol’ Lester was going to have to do it himself. And he had. The oncologist was so confident in his non-treatment that even prescribed the stuff for himself.
The results spoke for themselves. Dr. Moonpulp stopped working two hours after his first dose, was in the ICU three hours after that, and was dead by morning. No one would miss him. Jess’ only regret was that she’d given in to the better side of her nature and refrained from making a time-lapse photography project out of the whole thing.
As for Joe-Bob, he wilted like an uprooted dandelion. He visibly shriveled. NFP-20 sucked the life—and the fat—right out of him.
And now…
Nurse Kaylin stood in Joe-Bob’s room, with Nurse Nagoya in tow. The wide-screen console mounted on the wall opposite the bed had been divvied up between several video feeds. The clan had gathered. The rending of garments and gnashing of teeth would probably follow in short order.
Each section of the screen was a videophone call to a family member: to Mr. O’Houlighan’s wife, Betsy-Lynn, and the kids, huddled up at home; to Joe-Bob’s fancy-pants brother-in-law lawyer, hunkered down in his law office downtown; the lawyer’s wife, in their chrome-slicked apartment—the woman had boob implants the size of sourdough loaves they sold at Benji’s Delicatessen; and of course, Joe-Bob’s decrepit mother, with her pruned skins, a voice like a lawn mower and awful teeth, too, the product of years of tobacco both smoked and chewed.
Supposedly, during the First Crusades, back when heathens still had the upper hand, the matriarchs of Trueshore clans gathered amongst the ancient barrow-mounds in a witches’ coven, to invoke the old gods and bring curses and wrath to all who opposed them. The same rites still played out across the East coast, more or less, except with gossip and hair salons instead of animal sacrifices and naked dancing.
But, looking at Joe-Bob, Jess almost thought the stories might have been true. The once-portly man seemed to be turning into a fish. Or maybe it was the curse of a sea-witch who lived out in the marshes that fringed Elpeck Bay, where the will-o-wisps gathered and the birds roosted among the reeds.
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Whatever it was, it was spooky as all fuck.
Joe-Bob gasped for breath. His eyes had gone the way of his sister’s gimcrack rack; they bugged out from inside his sockets, cresting jiggly over his ulcerated, fungus-ravaged skin. Dark filaments crawled up his corneas like ivy on jello salad.
“Joe-Bob, honey,” Betsy-Lynn said, “you gotta fight it!” She wept openly, waving arms capped in extended nails closed in tight fists. “We’re prayin’ for you! You’ve got the Angel’s power!” She sobbed. “He’s… he’s gonna lift you up!”
First comes Denial.
Joe-Bob’s efforts pushed to the limit. His shoulders shook and as his belly heaved. Every single breath was a ragged, dirty battle for survival—the frantic, feeble flails of a panicked swimmer as he drowned. Joe-Bob tried to reach the surface—it seemed so close—but he never reached it. He sank. Fluid inundated his lungs. It weighed him down, body and soul.
Black ooze curdled at the edges of the pressurized gas mask stuck to his face. It burbled into the gas line that fed the mask. The goop was speckled with green powder so fine, it seemed more like vapor than something solid.
The lawyer brother-in-law spoke up, shredded by disbelief. “I thought I told that Hobwell of yours to give the man the damn heelibectin.” There was anger in his words, but there was nothing righteous about it.
Nurse Kaylin glared at the lawyer. “And Dr. Moonpulp did just that.“
“Well then, where the hell is he?!” the lawyer roared.
Getting out her console, Jess pulled up the picture she’d taken of Lester in his first moments of death and showed it to the clan O’Houlighan.
“He’s dead,” Jess said.
The lawyer sputtered. “That picture could be a picture of anybody!”
Jess closed her eyes and snorted—which was difficult, what with the rebreather on her face.
“I know,” she said, “and that’s the whole goddamn problem.”
Nurse Nagoya spoke up before the lawyer could interrogate Nurse Kaylin any further.
“Jess,” she said, “his SpO2 is dropping like a rock.” Hachiko stared wide-eyed at the monitor beside Joe-Bob’s bed. “It’s below 70%, and falling fast!”
Grunts and gags wracked Joe-Bob’s body as he struggled to breathe.
“What’s that mean?” Joe-Bob’s mother sputtered, only to pause to cough. “Betsy-Lynn, what’s that mean?”
The two nurses exchanged grim glances. The certainty Nurse Kaylin saw in Hachiko’s eyes nearly broke her heart. Nagoya was still a newbie. She wasn’t ready for this kind of despair.
No one was.
Jess wanted to answer the old woman’s question, but she didn’t dare open her mouth. Jess was a woman of many talents. Sugar-coating was not one of them. She knew what she’d say if she opened her mouth.
There’s no turning back. You don’t fucking recover from this. The infection has won. It’s cut holes in his lungs in the shape of gingerbread men. It’s turned his blood into poison, his organs are rotting inside of him, and he’ll be dead in the time it takes you to make a fuckin’ grilled cheese sandwich.
Hachiko turned to the distraught yokels. She bit her lip, but then spoke anyway. “Ma’am, it means his lungs are damaged beyond the point of repair. They can’t provide his body with the oxygen it needs to function, so… his body is shutting down.”
Nurse Kaylin cleared her throat, though it was more like a growl than anything else. “He’s dying.”
Joe-Bob’s sister spoke, though it was pretty hard to tell what she was saying, what with her endless hysterics, constant coughs, and disastrous cleavage, Nurse Kaylin could barely make out the words.
“Why… why not… Joe-Bob… assholes… ventilator!” Then the woman shrieked, and all was crystal clear. “You’re killing him!”
Jess surmised the bitch wanted to know why they hadn’t put her godforsaken brother on a ventilator.
“No!” Betsy-Lynn spat. “No ventilator! Haven’t you heard? Once you go on it, you don’t come off. It’s a death machine!”
One of the kids in her arms cried out: “Don’t let ‘em kill Daddy!”
Jess swallowed hard. Ventilators were not death machines, they were goddamn lifesavers. And yet… Jess had to once again give the clan O’Houlighan some credit. Betsy-Lynn had gotten one thing right: so far, no one had come off the ventilators. They’d all died.
Jess knew there had to be survivors somewhere. NFP couldn’t kill everybody. It…—that was fucking unthinkable.
Hachiko took charge of the situation. “I’m sorry, Mrs. O’Houlighan.” The newbie nurse made her mentor proud as she launched into a flawless explanation of why there was no point in putting Joe-Bob on a ventilator.
The damage had been done. There was no coming back from this. The ventilator would simply prolong his suffering, and deepen it, too.
Thattagirl, Jess thought. A tear trickled down her cheek.
“There has to be something you can do!” Betsy-Lynn yelled. The two little girls flanking her wept openly. “Daddy! No! Daddy!”
“It doesn’t matter,” Jess muttered. “He’s so weak, even a cure would kill him.”
Then things got fucking dark.
Next came Anger.
The clan scrambled. They screamed at one another. No one could get Joe-Bob’s two adult children on the line. Joe-Bob’s sister trembled like a reed in the wind, vacillating between prayer and pep-talk. Betsy-Lynn cursed out her absent children’s absence, saying she was right to have disowned them.
“It’ll be alright!” the sister sobbed, “everything’s gonna be peachy, Joe-Bob. You’ll get through this!”
“We gotta pray!” Joe-Bob’s mother said. “The Angel will save him!”
They Bargained.
Unfortunately, truth was a potent acid. It was eating its way through. Jess could hear it slowly trickling into the O’Houlighans’ words. Steadily, their tone changed. One moment, the brother-in-law was trying to goad Joe-Bob into laughing with him about the stupid egg-head doctors who couldn’t recognize the cure to common cold even if it bit them on the nose.
The next, the O’Houlighans were all encouraging words.
“You’re as tough as the Beast Himself,” Betsy-Lynn said. “You’re a fighter, Joe-Bob! You won’t get knocked down. It’s not the final round!”
The family collapsed in tandem with their dying loved one. Reassurances melted into entreatments. They begged, they wailed, they cried. Joe-Bob was a husband. A father of four. A home-owner. A Churched man, Angelical right down to his bones.
“Wake up, Joey!” his mother cried. “Grab hold of life. Don’t let go! Stay alive.”
Sorrow, only, here, there was no acceptance. Acceptance might have kept Mr. O’Houlighan alive a little longer. But what point did counterfactuals have for people who didn’t care about facts in the first place?
The clan’s pleas turned violent. They cursed him out. They threatened him with Night’s frozen doom. They said they’d never forgive him unless he lived. By this point, the O’Houlighans needed the anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds more than the fading husk of a man on the hospital bed.
Amidst the tumult, Joe-Bob’s body sputtered one last time as his eyes rolled back in his head. And then he was gone.