Mercy 6

In Reykjavik, a young man strolling with a group of friends fell dead on the sidewalk. The forum noted that he had been in perfect health, had been a soccer star for his work team. His friends thought he was joking when he fell; he always liked to scare them with little pranks like that, they said. They said he hadn’t taken any drugs. They had all been drinking, but not a lot. They were in between clubs, strolling and laughing as they walked from one to the other. The night was unseasonably warm, and they had all loosened their scarves. He had fallen just after three a.m., Reykjavik time. The ER there had registered him at 0312, unresponsive.

Three twelve. About two hours after Mendenhall’s cases—

the Mercy Six. His case had only come up on the forum after the others in his group had been checked for drugs and alcohol.

All of his friends described his fall in the same way: from life to death, from laughing and buoyant to collapse, no gasp or seizure or disorientation or stumble. From alive to dead. Brain scans showed very faint, very mild incipient hemorrhaging in the frontal lobes, nothing near fatal. Pathology still thought it was drugs, was waiting on toxicology.

But Mendenhall’s cases, there in the forum, had Reykjavik looking at Mercy General. They had Pathology on alert, and they had the friends come back to the hospital for observation in containment. Mendenhall could have sent three guesses to Pathology there, three suggested scans. She was afraid one would be right. She sent nothing.

She fought off images of a group of young friends on a night sidewalk, laughing and turning to one another beneath a Nordic sky, steam and false dawn on the horizon. She saw one fall, the tallest and most gangly of the group, the handsome clown. Struck through. Where? Left lung? Kidney? Perhaps across the torso? Was another in the group, a girl with a secret crush strolling close, struck through in the same diagonal at the same microsecond? Through the thigh or calf or foot? Like Cabral, her sudden quiet attributed to circumstance rather than physiology?

Don’t let her sleep, Mendenhall wanted to write. Don’t let any of them fall asleep. But she knew it was already too late for that by the time she heard.

In her cubicle she bypassed the forum and contacted the Reykjavik ER directly. She received an autoreply, bland, suggesting minor technical difficulties. She recalled the flight of the helicopter from last night, Mullich’s laser cutting through the exhaust. And she knew the Reykjavik hospital, a third of the way across the world, was in containment, had two deaths. Hours apart. But not hours apart if they knew what she knew, had seen what she had seen, had someone like Mullich and someone like Claiborne and someone like Silva. If they had all that, they would know that both deaths had happened at once, out on that sidewalk, under that sky.

Delivered from that sky.

41

She began. She replied to Ben-Curtis. She knew others would read it before he did: As a doctor I cannot divulge case information.

I can only carefully offer you a sense of what it’s like in here, what it was like when all this began to unfold. But I can only bring you so far.

Metaphorically, only as far as, say, the little patch of ruin just beyond south parking. That odd stone you once asked about.

Metaphor had its place after all. She pushed send. Later she planned to just send him a time, somehow frame it in something that looked fractured, incomplete, and accidentally forwarded.

All else she trusted to her skill as a doctor, her understanding of persons. Maybe that would leave her trapped at the dark end of a sealed tunnel.

She went down to Claiborne’s lab and asked to speak to Silva alone.

Silva and Claiborne were together at Claiborne’s stand-up desk.

They were patterning the capillary impacts of each case, composing comparative charts. All six body scans were on the overhead screens, sublimate.

Mendenhall was ready with some lies. But Claiborne didn’t ask why, didn’t ask anything.

“Her eyes could use a break,” he said. He looked at Mendenhall with concern, lingered. Then he returned to the overhead scans.

Mendenhall felt relief. She was ready with the lies. But they were weighted with intense betrayal, personal and professional betrayal of this doctor who believed in her in spite of himself and his expertise. The closest thing she had to a friend in this hospital.

A guy who could chide her with that loop of Cannonball Man, pass her with disregard on the running trail.

She led Silva to the small lab where earlier she had found her napping. They left the light off and stood under the green dimness of the exit sign.

“I want you to come with me,” said Mendenhall.