“Your friend is the one on the left,” Cabrera said, standing at the foot of the bed on the right. “We have registered this one as White-B. We assume he was a soldier from the way he dressed; we’ve made the report, but we haven’t yet received notification from the police. He didn’t bring IDs with him either; it’s not hard to assume there’s a relationship between the two of them, though; don’t you think?”
Sarah’s eyes darted from one to the other, and Cabrera realized that her colleague’s surprise was genuine.
“What a friend you turned out to be, Lanen! You didn’t even know this Adam guy had a brother, did you?”
“Adam and I grew up together in the same orphanage,” Sarah answered. She hated having her word questioned. “I’ve known him for as long as I can remember. If there was anyone who knew about a brother of his besides him, it would have been me!”
“Oh!” Cabrera snorted in surprise. “Didn’t know you were an orphan!”
Sarah fell silent. What a fool! She had just given Cabrera material for the hospital staff to gossip about her for a whole week.
“Yes, yes. I was lucky enough to be adopted by the Lanens, okay?” she said. “Now, can I focus on what really matters? Thanks.”
Sarah took Adam by the hand and watched him. Remember, he’s not your friend now, she thought. He is just another patient; and a patient needs a doctor, not a friend. Her emotions must not play against her medical duties. It was neither the place nor the time to act like one of those rookies who burst into tears when they had to attend to an old man in his last days, let alone when she had Cabrera by her side, attentive to her every move. She let go of Adam’s hand, and taking the crystalline tablet from the bedside, activated it with a flick. The medical report got projected in front of her, displaying a stack of holographic reports full of X-rays and all kinds of tests.
“No brain injuries, no strokes…” she said, going through each scan one by one. “Infections, tumors, blood glucose levels, toxins—” She turned off the holographic report, left the tablet in its place, and intrigued, looked at Cabrera, who in turn looked at her in the same way. “—Nothing. Everything seems fine.”
“That’s right,” Cabrera agreed, her big eyes wide open. “In theory, your friend should be awake.”
Sarah turned her attention to the other patient: the one who looked just like Adam, albeit unshaven and with short hair. She put off the luxury of marveling at this person’s existence, the luxury of continuing to be amazed at the physical similarities between him and his friend, and pushed unprofessional questions out of her mind such as, ‘Who is he and where has he been all these years? How long had Adam known about him, and why hadn’t he told her sooner?’ She took the tablet that said White-B and activated the medical report.
“This one does have trauma to his head, his legs...” Cabrera said, and uncovering White-B’s arm, she showed it to her colleague. In addition to the reddened skin, the unknown young man had a small wound visible on the inside of his wrist. “Look at this cut here,” she pointed. “There is one like it on the other arm. None of them are very deep, the skin has barely been scraped, although the tendons are damaged. Something was removed from there, shortly before paramedics arrived. Besides, he must have been wearing something here, wristbands or something; look at this erythema, on the skin. He also has a burn wound on his back. Beyond that—According to our scans, none of those injuries show significant damage to have thrown him into a coma.”
“And so?”
Cabrera uncovered White-B’s chest area this time and pointed to a spot between the nipples, just above the heart. The patient showed a tiny puncture mark surrounded by an equally tiny bruise. “It’s almost imperceptible; you see it?” she said. “Your friend Adam has it too.”
Sarah pursed her lips. “Were they—?”
Cabrera shook her head and indicated the medical tablet with her chin.
“Toxicological came out clean. No drugs in their systems—none known, at least. But something got through there, y’know? I bet if we knew, we would have the explanation behind this… phantom coma.”
Sarah reread the tests. According to that, everything was fine with them.
“How were they found?” she finally asked.
“I was told Central Monitoring reported that the park ranger android and the park’s surveillance circuit had stopped working and they sent a technician to see it,” Cabrera said. “There he found them both and notified the paramedics who were nearby, working on the accident. I heard one of them say that the area of the park was a whole dynamited field, full of holes, and that the android had blown up. Your friend and his brother had thrown a good party there.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Sarah glared at her; the last thing she wanted to hear right now was crazy theories involving her friend in acts of vandalism, much less without evidence.
Cabrera had spoken too much, she knew, so she cleared her throat. “Although I also heard something curious, y’know?” she said, trying to rectify herself.
“What?” Sarah asked.
“Roberto, the ambulance driver…” Cabrera lowered her voice as if she was ashamed to say what she was going to say. “Roberto claims to have seen a video filmed by a girl near the accident, where some guys—Well, he says that two guys were seen flying. But then he said that one of them had a red light on his face—y’know, like those Cyclopes.”
Sarah brushed the gossip off. “They may have been testing a new flying android; who cares?”
“Yeah, it’s possible,” Cabrera said. “It was just strange to me that two men were seen flying, right near where these two would later be found.”
Sarah glared at her again with those hard eyes. “Susana,” she said. “Adam doesn’t fly… and he doesn’t perform test flights for new robot models, especially on a Friday night.”
Cabrera slumped her shoulders. “Of course, of course. I was just saying that it was strange that—”
The device monitoring Adam’s progress beeped, and on the screen, his vital signs flickered, then returned to normal. They both walked away from White-B and went to see what was happening with Adam. Doubting the proper functioning of the machine, Sarah took her friend’s carotid pulse with her fingers; at first, everything seemed to be fine.
And suddenly, the alarms of the control devices went off.
As unusual as it may be, out of nowhere and without apparent causes, just like their comatose states, the twins had begun to suffer from ventricular fibrillation at the same time: chaos in their heart rhythms that would soon lead to their deaths.
Adam and Juzo were convulsing. And as if one monitor copied the other, the electrocardiograms of both became a violent rise and fall of lines.
Acting urgently, each doctor grabbed a defibrillator from the shelf. Three paramedics stormed into the room, lured by the alarm. One took the gel pot while another put on the latex gloves. Sarah spun on her heels toward Adam; defibrillator paddles raised; eyes wide behind her glasses. Another paramedic spread the gel on the paddles Cabrera had in her hands, and she placed them on White-B’s chest.
“Let’s go to 300! Clear!” she announced. The equipment whistled, and she discharged the electric shock.
The monitors showed no improvement. A continuous whistle gave the patients up for lost.
“No response!”
Sarah activated the discharge at Adam, and his body arched from the artificial impulse. The lines on the monitor were still straight. This was the scenario so feared by her. Adam was leaving them forever.
“None here, either! He’s coding! Epinephrine and jump to 360! Now!”
A female paramedic complied with the order. The woman plunged the long needle into Adam’s heart, unloaded the contents of the syringe, and withdrew it. Sarah placed the paddles. The beep sounded, and again the electric shock shook the young man.
But none of the brothers responded.
Cabrera, sweating profusely and her face tightened in a gesture of surrender, stepped back from White-B. “There’s nothing else to do.”
“You can’t leave him now!” Sarah got exasperated, and since her character as a doctor did not allow her pulse to tremble, her voice did.
The sturdy doctor pivoted toward her. The aggression of their rivalry was again on her face.
“Lanen, this is my shift! Things here are done my way, and I say we’ve done everything we can!”
“No, you didn’t!” Sarah turned to both her group and those helping White-B, and she ordered them, “Give him another epinephrine and repeat the shock!”
“You crazy?!” Cabrera got angry. The paramedics didn’t know whom to obey. “If fibrillation doesn’t cause them irreversible brain damage, you will with that!”
“So what?! They’d be dead anyway!” Sarah barked. “I’ll take full responsibility, but I won’t leave without them breathing. Do it! Epinephrine! 360! Now!”
The syringe plunged that long fang back into Adam’s heart once again. Biting her lip, Sarah tried to bring him back. The others were fighting to get his friend’s brother back, and she prayed that neither of them ended up dead. Life had to prevail; she had to impose it!
The defibrillator beeped for the last time and then the dry sound of the discharge.
But the whistling continued. The brothers were gone.
Releasing the breath that they were holding, Dr. Lanen and Dr. Cabrera took a step back and walked away from their patients. There was nothing else to do. Death had claimed the twins.
Until, just as Sarah turned to avoid seeing her friend dead, one of the equipment’s whistles turned into a beep… beep… beep…
The life signs for which they had fought so hard returned, although on a single monitor. Death had taken pity on the doctors, and as a sign of respect for their tenacity, had decided to bring back life, but only to one of the two young men.
Dr. Lanen and Dr. Cabrera exchanged glances.
Adam White was back. His twin brother did not.
Later, Sarah Lanen felt a strange sense of loss in front of the deceased young man lying on the gurney, ready to be taken to the morgue. He was so identical to her friend that she couldn’t stop wondering if it was really Adam who was sleeping in the left wing of the room and not the one who had died.
Nonsenses, she told herself.
Only when the hospital staff took away the body covered by a white sheet and a tag that said White-B hanging from the foot, she was able to look away.
A tightness in her chest and an immense desire to cry were all Sarah had. She lifted her glasses and rubbed her eyes. She deserved a rest, though she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep.
Watching Adam closely, she caressed his cheek and thought of the twin.