MORTALITY

Chapter 2

Present Day

Scott pressed both hands into Charlotte’s blood-soaked clothes as the Jeep hammered over uneven ground. He had no idea whether he was helping or making it worse. Warmth kept spilling through his fingers anyway, thick and slick and relentless, and every fresh jolt of the vehicle seemed to force more of it out of her.
Xavier barked orders from the front.
Maxine threw the Jeep left, then right, muscling it through the sleeping city. The lights thinned fast. Dense streets gave way to wider roads, then open stretches of blacktop bordered by empty lots and shuttered buildings. Signs flashed past too quickly for Scott to read. He had no idea where they were going. Only that they were fleeing somewhere civilized and heading toward somewhere hidden.
Charlotte convulsed beneath his hands.
Xavier twisted in his seat and drove down harder on the wound. Blood spilled from Charlotte’s mouth in a sudden red burst and ran down her cheek. Her pupils looked wrong. Too large. Too still.
“We are losing her,” Xavier shouted.
“How much farther?” Maxine snapped.
“Next exit. Not far.” Xavier fired the words back at her. “Look for a yellow strip mall.”
Scott swallowed against the acid rising in his throat. Every breath tasted like blood and hot vinyl. He tried not to look at Charlotte’s face. Tried not to think about what his hands were touching beneath the torn fabric. Tried, for one weak second, to imagine he was anywhere else. In another car. In another life. With people whose bodies were intact and whose futures still made sense.
Headlights strobed through the cabin as Maxine thundered down the road.
“Where?” she yelled.
“Round the back,” Xavier shouted. “Green door.”
The Jeep hit the turn too hard. Tires screamed. The vehicle clipped a curb and bounced over the lip of the parking lot entrance. Scott slammed against the inside panel, then lurched back over Charlotte as Maxine drove between traffic islands and delivery lanes, following the service road behind the dark row of shops. A yellow strip mall slid past on their left, dead signage glowing weakly above black windows.
“Here!” Xavier shouted.
Maxine slammed on the brakes.
The Jeep skidded and shuddered to a stop outside a solitary green metal door under a single security light. The bulb buzzed overhead, harsh and thin, throwing the loading bay into washed-out shadows. There was no one around. No movement. No sound except the ticking engine, Charlotte’s ragged, choking breaths, and Scott’s own pulse pounding inside his skull.
“Maxine,” Xavier shouted. “Help me.”
She reached back between the front seats and took over the pressure on Charlotte’s abdomen as Xavier jumped out into the night. Scott stared after him through the open rear doors. Xavier hammered both fists against the green door hard enough to shake it on its frame.
He shouted a name Scott had never heard before.
The wait stretched.
Seconds felt obscene.
Then a light flickered on in a second-floor window.
Scott stared at it as if willing the person behind it to move faster. Charlotte made a wet sound in her throat. Maxine pushed harder. Blood kept creeping over her hands.
Hurry, Scott thought. Hurry!
Locks began to slide. Metal scraped. Something heavy turned on the other side. The door opened at last, and a short, bearded man stepped out in a dressing gown and slippers, thick glasses low on his nose, confusion all over his face.
“What?” he cried. “What is it?”
“Granthom,” Xavier said. “We need you.”
The man squinted into the darkness. “Xavier?” He frowned. “Is that you? I told you never to, never to, never to…”
“It is Charlotte,” Xavier cut in. He stepped aside. “We need you.”
Granthom peered through the rear doors of the Jeep.
He saw Scott and Maxine bent over Charlotte. Saw the blood. Saw the torn clothing. Saw enough.
The sleep left his face at once.
“What the hell happened?”
“Long story,” Xavier said. “She’s dying.”
Granthom swore under his breath, then snapped into motion. “Don’t stand there. Bring her in.”
The three of them lifted Charlotte out carefully, though there was no careful way left to do it. Scott took one side, Xavier the other, Maxine supporting what she could while still trying to keep pressure on the wound. Charlotte hung between them, limp and frighteningly light in places, dead weight in others. Her head rolled once against Scott’s arm. Her hair brushed his wrist. Her skin felt too cool.
Inside, the building smelled of chemicals, stale air, and something old beneath both. Granthom hurried ahead of them, shoving aside carts and equipment with frantic little sweeps of his arms. The room they passed through looked half storage facility, half forgotten clinic. Wire cages lined one wall. Glass-front refrigerators glowed from within, casting pale white rectangles across linoleum and onto a collection of mismatched couches and battered chairs that looked as though they had been salvaged from three different decades.
Scott barely had time to take it in.
“Through here,” Granthom said, pushing through a set of swinging double doors.
The room beyond was dark for a second, then the overhead lights snapped on in stages, each one flaring brighter than the last until the space was exposed in full. Stainless steel. Cabinets. Trays. Drains in the floor. A table in the center of the room.
“Put her down there,” Granthom ordered. “Careful. Careful.”
They lowered Charlotte onto the table.
Granthom was already moving. He fitted an oxygen mask over her face, pressed two fingers to her neck, and closed his eyes for half a second.
“Pulse,” he muttered. “Weak, but there.”
He flicked on the surgical lamp. Twin circles of white light crashed down over Charlotte’s body, turning the blood black-red in the glare.
“Let us see what we have.”
He cut away the ruined fabric with surgical scissors, peeling the soaked material back from Charlotte’s abdomen. Blood had glued the clothes to her skin in places. The smell hit Scott full in the face now. Iron. Sweat. Something deeper and worse beneath it, something wrong and alive and open.
Pads went onto her chest. A monitor crackled awake. Thin electronic beeps began to mark her heartbeat.
“Maxine,” Granthom said, pointing toward the refrigerators. “Morphine and epinephrine. Fridge, second shelf.”
Maxine was already moving.
“Xavier, gauze. Then clamps and forceps. I am going to need everything.”
Xavier crossed to the tray without hesitation.
Scott stood frozen at the edge of the light, his hands hanging useless and red.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked.
Granthom pointed at the jagged piece of metal protruding from Charlotte’s stomach.
Scott stared at it.
“Grab that,” Granthom said. “On three, you pull it out.”
Scott looked from the metal to Granthom. “What?”
“Don’t argue with me.”
“Shouldn’t you do scans or tests first? Something?”
“She will be dead by then.”
Scott’s mouth went dry. “It is just that…”
Granthom looked across at Xavier. “Does he even know yet?”
Xavier did not look up. “Long story.”
“Of course it is.” Granthom swung back to Scott. “Listen to me. If you don’t pull that out when I tell you, Charlotte dies here. Tonight. On this table. Do you understand?”
Scott stepped closer.
The piece of metal looked obscene up close, like part of the crash had decided to stay inside her. His fingers hovered over it. He did not want to touch it. Did not want to feel the shape of it, the reality of it, the way it disappeared into her body.
“Hands on it,” Granthom said.
Scott obeyed.
The metal was slick with blood and warmer than he expected.
“Xavier,” Granthom said, “be ready with the gauze. I need the area compressed the second it comes out. Maxine, get the adrenaline ready. We may need to kick-start her.”
Scott dragged in a breath that did nothing to steady him.
Everything in the room had sharpened to an impossible detail. The glare of the lights. The hiss of oxygen. The quick metallic clatter of instruments landing on a tray. Charlotte’s skin, too pale under the blood. The tremor running through his own hands.
“Straight out,” Granthom said. “Don’t twist it. Don’t angle it. Straight out. Understand?”
Scott nodded once.
Granthom counted.
At three, Scott pulled.
The metal came free with a wet resistance that turned his stomach inside out. For one absurd second, he thought it might never end, that the length of it would just keep coming and coming, dragged from some impossible depth inside her. Then it cleared her body in a rush, and blood burst from the wound in a hard, bright spray.
Xavier lunged in with the gauze and clamped both hands down.
Charlotte’s heart rate spiked across the monitor. The beeping turned frantic, shrill, too fast.
“Oh God,” Scott said, stumbling back. “I think I am going to be sick.”
“Well, don’t do it in here,” Granthom snapped. “I have enough problems.”
He leaned over Charlotte and worked fast, his gloved hands moving through blood with the detached urgency of someone who had done terrible things in bright rooms before and survived by staying useful.
“I need to get in there,” he muttered. “Need to see internal damage.”
Scott backed away until he bumped into a counter that ran the length of the wall.
The room had gone soft around the edges.
He blinked, but that only made it worse. The surgical table seemed both too close and too far away. Light smeared. Faces lost definition. The monitor kept sounding, each beep sharper than the one before, until they all seemed to join into a single painful thread needling through his skull.
“Retractor.”
“Clamp.”
“No, the other one.”
“Adrenaline,” Granthom barked suddenly. “We are losing her.”
Scott saw Maxine step in and drive a syringe into Charlotte’s leg.
Then the monitor flattened into one long tone.
The sound split the room open.
Scott turned toward the doors.
He made it one step.
Maybe two.
The swinging doors doubled, then swam. The floor rose strangely fast. The last thing he understood was that he was falling before the darkness reached him and shut everything down.