Mercy 6

“His name is Lual. Lual Meeks.” Mendenhall stared intently at Mullich’s blueprints. “The ones you have, then.”

Silva looked over her shoulder with a worried expression, then worked the laptop. The hollow figures shifted in quick increments, clicked into positions: Dozier on his invisible ladder, Fleming with her invisible cup of tea, Verdasco remaining at rest, Peterson and her cigarette.

Mullich probably saw it before Mendenhall did. The bodies coiled into their various ready positions, all different postures. But the tornadic patterns. Those. They went parallel to one another, all five, perfectly parallel.

Mullich looked at the body screens. Mendenhall looked at the building screens. She focused on the one showing the cross-section of the hospital.

“Draw it,” she said. “You see it. I smell it on you. Draw it.”

But he didn’t have to draw it. The diagonal formed by the red discovery points reflected the diagonals on the bodies. Paralleled them. Mullich then connected them with a green line from Seven to the subbasement, from Dozier to Meeks, passing through Fleming, Verdasco, and Peterson.

Silva was now seeing it, gazing from her wall to Mullich’s, then back.

“That’s not possible. That’s absurd.” Silva checked her laptop, redid the contortions. The line through the building remained parallel to the line through each of the bodies. She finally looked at Mendenhall. “There are no straight lines in medicine.”

“We all noticed,” said Mendenhall. “Without prompting. We all see it.”

The green diagonal passing through the blueprint was duplicated four times by the tornadic patterns through the bodies on the adjacent wall. That was what showed.

Mullich appeared fascinated. He gazed back and forth from the bodies to the building.

“The explanation is simple,” he said. “Amazing — but simple. The two of you marked the calibrations on each floor. But you carried with you impressions of the bodies you had examined. Your floor marks were influenced by your knowledge of the bodies.”

She hated Mullich. She hated when doctors were like this, so quick with their expertise. Let the patients have their moments, her mentor had told her, their moments of recognition. Let them be right. Learn. Learn with them.

25

Silva touched the tablet beside the laptop, a graceful tap with middle finger. Her look excluded Mullich. Her eyes were stark, black as her lashes and hair. “Dr. Claiborne’s on his way down.”

She configured the hollow bodies back into their sublimate positions, all parallels gone. The diagonal through Mullich’s blueprint now seemed aimless, out of place in a medical lab. There were no straight lines in trauma, either, especially not in ballistics.

“Thank you,” Mendenhall said to Silva. “I’ll go. I’ll take the stairs.”

“He takes the stairs. When he can’t get in his run.”

“Okay. The elevator.” Mendenhall addressed Mullich, pointed to the green line. “Take that away.”

She felt Silva’s gaze, a wanting of exchange with her. We see what we are. They were two very different people yet had seen the same thing, constructed the pattern together, even argued a bit while doing this. As Mendenhall closed her eyes — she knew Silva was watching — she saw the diagonal, the slash of demise, through the building and the bodies, green turned to its negative, red.

With her card, she commandeered the elevator to the top floor, closed her eyes and imagined it shooting through the lid of Mercy General, a passage from a childhood book. She imagined, too, the iron tamping rod shot through the brain of Phineas Gage, recalled the photos from her medical texts, the bust of his head, the portrait of him holding the rod, the rod he had carried with him as a cane for the rest of his life. She imagined it erasing his thoughts. She thought of Phineas Gage relearning himself.

At the door to the roof she punched in her card. The red light blinked. She counted to ten and punched again, was refused. She repeated this four times, her forehead pressed to the door, her eyes closed. Beneath, the momentum of the building continued to slide away from her.

Ten more hystericals had come in after the discovery of Meeks.

Pao Pao messaged her not to come; the ID people were there. Pao Pao had termed them hysterical, was still on her side. That was good.

She punched the card key again. She wasn’t sure why or whom she was conjuring. Mullich could come, let her onto the roof.

Thorpe’s people could arrive, take her to quarantine. Maybe she was testing her value.

No one came. She returned to the ER.

The ten new arrivals were fully curtained. This was a mistake.

They had to be obvious hystericals. Thorpe would have taken anyone of interest. Closing the curtains fully around the patients would only increase their anxiety, heighten symptoms. Symptoms — even false ones — could injure and kill.

Her mentor had made her study psych wards. Among the

catatonic and the wild, the doctors and nurses moved with rehearsed precision, every gesture a revelation. They did what they could do.