Mercy 6

She snapped on her penlight, a light she had fired down a thousand throats. She saw the man who had dragged himself to her on his elbows, his dead legs behind him, his eyes pleading, Don’t let me die alone, don’t leave me down here. She saw the patient who had been filed into a half body, planed over the asphalt of a night highway, brought to her. To do what? See the clean side of the brain that still remained, still pulsing and thinking, seeing? Seeing her? His half-mouth grimace failing to lip words to her. Die, she had told him. It’s okay to die. She had held his wrist, regretting her gloves, her formal tone.

Mendenhall untangled herself from the insulation that had coiled around her arm. She flapped its dust from her sleeve and doused the light as soon as she had gained her bearings. She crouched lower, fingering the concrete of the floor. Rolls formed on the surface, everything becoming too smooth, a familiar smoothness, the smoothness of skin. Enry Dozier, his beard, the sad backtilt of his head, exposing his throat for her, dead for her.

She could not make it past all six. She would not.

She dropped to her knees, palmed the floor.

“Not this.”

She reached into one zippered pocket and found a trick passed down from her mentor. A fresh-cut lime often does the trick, he had taught her, snaps you back to the moment, the moment you must be in for your patient to survive, to have a chance. There is so much precedent and history in medicine, so many cases, it’s too easy to fall into the past, to see helpless eyes, hear desperate words.

On extreme days, when she knew she was going in drained, torn open, she would carry a slice of ginger.

The lime cooled her lips, the scent sharp in her throat, her lungs.

Thoughts cleared. She moved through the darkness, stayed low and straight. When she did not reach the wall, found herself again in dark vertigo, she tucked the lime slice between her teeth and cheek, crushed and sucked. She moved forward. Would there be a floor?

Or an abyss? Who crawled behind her? All of them? Or just the last six?

Finally her hands found the wall. You’ll be fine once you palm the cinder block, he’d told her. I’m not like you, she had replied. I don’t find solace in archaeology.

The wall gave way. An impression dropped her forward, and there it was, the submarine door. It stood much shorter than she had anticipated, just above waist-high, more hatch than door. Still blind in the dark, she turned the wheel. The smooth spin calmed her. Mullich had unfrozen it, his words true.

The bomb shelter itself will be okay, he’d said. You might even like it. Again, she had said, not like you. Still, he had replied, turn on your light. You’ll need it.

The penlight showed the shelter in fragments. The room had recently been wiped down, maybe vacuumed. He had prepared the place. Shelves lined the walls, most filled with ancient rations. The refuge was square, with a Japanese feel that surprised her at first, then made spatial sense: one low table in the middle, rolled mats stacked on a low shelf, block-shaped candles, a teapot next to a mess kit, botanical prints on each wall, one shoji screen for privacy.

Mullich could live here. She considered the image, him kneeling on a mat, reading blueprints by candlelight.

Her watch read one forty-three. She found the vent, pried off the screen with the penknife, and began her ascent — a long, dark crawl that took her beneath the south parking lot toward the scrubby hillside, the sundial relic. The slope was more lateral than upward, but she sensed the rise in her effort, sweat. Remember to leave the shelter door open, he had advised. To provide you draft in the tunnel.

There was no draft. Ben-Curtis was not there. Was late. Was not coming. In full darkness, she reached the final upcurl and felt for the concave steel of the hatch. She pulled hard on the wheel and was able to squeak it free, crank it to its unlocked position. This did nothing. She had to wait for Ben-Curtis.

She fitted herself into the cusp beneath the hatch, checked her watch, rested in the darkness. Give him time, Mullich had said. He might have to wait for his chance, his opening. Or, she had replied, he might be stupid.

A rumbling passed overhead, a van somewhere on the parking lot. This discouraged her, erased all her waiting time, made it all start anew. The dark tube began to feel warm toward the top, damp and tepid toward the bottom, pulling her in two. Then something crunched overhead, traveling a line about the length of her body.

Silence followed. Her pulse kept time.

“Anna.”

It was a whisper. An only child, she used to imagine for herself a brother, sometimes younger, sometimes older. She gave him looks, a sense of humor, an interest in poetry, a voice to match. That was the voice she heard. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had called her by her first name.

“Anna,” she heard again. The voice didn’t seem to come from anywhere. It was just there in the darkness around her. “Are you in there?”

THREE