Forever (77 page)

Salas de Operacoes

Salles d'operation

They were moving so fast the doors to either
side of them virtually flew past in a blur, and when they were
halfway to the operating room -

-Thunk!-

-double doors just ahead of them banged
noisily open.

Stephanie froze in her tracks, unable to
move, her body still poised in a run. Breathing had suddenly become
impossible, and everything inside her had gone numb. Her circuits
had shorted out, her systems shut down.

Then Johnny snatched her by the arm and
jerked her into the nearest shallow doorway. Once he made sure she
had flattened herself beside him inside the foot-deep niche, he
slid his head cautiously around the doorway, just enough so he
could get a glimpse of what was going on.

Three doors down the hall, rough voices
cursed and laughed as a stainless steel gurney rolled out of a
room, presumably self- propelled, its rubber wheels squeaking on
the linoleum. Just before it crashed into the opposite wall, two
burly orderlies in green scrub suits chased after it; one caught it
and spun it playfully to the right, expertly lining it up with the
operating room doors at the far end of the hall. Without the gurney
propping them open, the doors swung shut on their own, flapped
several times, and were still.

Johnny remained absolutely motionless; only
trails of perspiration, creeping down his forehead and trickling
back behind his ears, gave evidence of his tension. All of his
senses were heightened. He was aware of the cold smooth steel of
the door at his back, felt Stephanie's elbow quivering beside him,
could hear her teeth chattering, as though reciting an unsteady
mantra. Her body was shuddering with terror. Her fear moved him. He
had the urge to calm her, to murmur soothing confidences and reass-
urement - hold her hand - anything.

But now was not the time; his body and mind
had to be alert.

The burlier of the two men bellowed
something to the other, who uttered what was unmistakably a curse
in Portuguese. Johnny gnashed his teeth with frustration.

The cursing man pushed his way back inside
the swinging doors while the other looked up and down the corridor,
waiting.

There was another bang on the swinging doors
and, again, they swung partly open. It was the second guy, pulling
something heavy along behind him. The burly guy helped his partner
pick up the other end and, together, they swung it aboard the
gurney.

It was a small white coffin.

By this time, Stephanie, too, was leaning
forward to look, and the sight of the small coffin caused her body
to go rigid. With the chill of dead certainty, she knew precisely
for whom that small coffin was intended, and she could only pray
that there was still time to intervene.

Down the hall, the men whistled as they
pushed the gurney along. There was a bang as they shoved it through
the swinging doors to the operating rooms, and then the doors
flapped shut.

Once again, the hall was shrouded in
silence.

Stephanie stayed slumped in the doorway, her
mind swirling in horror. A child's coffin! Oh, God! she thought.
Back in Paediatrics, a worried mother is waiting, while on the
rumpled bedsheets lies a doll named Lourdes . . .

She pushed herself away from the sheltering
doorway and turned to Johnny.

Please, God
, she prayed.
Let us be
in time.

The Learjet was beginning its descent.
Colonel Valerio could hear the engines in the rear change pitch,
and could feel his ears begin to pop. He pulled the curtain over
his porthole open. It was dark out now; night had fallen with that
abrupt pitch darkness with which it comes in the tropics. On the
ends of the swept-back wingtips, the navigation lights blinked
steadily, and below, as far as the eye could see, the jungle was
one huge void. Except for what few scattered Indians remained, this
entire region was uninhabited by humans.

His eyes searched the darkness far to the
front of the plane, but it was still too soon. However, he knew it
would not be long before he would be able to see the haze of light
from Sitto da Veiga.

Another half-hour, and he would be
there.

This time, Stephanie led the way. Slipping
inside the O.R. door, she darted sideways and stayed in a low
crouch in order to avoid being silhouetted against the bright
hallway behind her. Then she waited, stock still and trembling,
like a sprinter waiting for the starting gun to go off, her
fingertips touching the white vinyl floor tiles.

After the bright fluorescents in the hall,
the dim light in here was eerie, threatening, preternatural. Every
nerve in her body seemed to twitch and thrum, and her heart pounded
so fiercely that she had to strain to hear anything above it.

With heightened senses, she did a slow
360-degree eye-sweep. Set into three of the walls were two doors
each, but there was neither hair nor hide to be seen of the burly
orderlies, nor of the gurney they'd wheeled in. Perhaps, she
thought, they had wheeled it into the scrub room, or one of the
ancilliary rooms between what she guessed must be three operating
rooms. But all the windows set into the six doors were dark, save
one - and coming from that one, she now thought she could hear the
steady murmur of muffled voices.

Rising from her crouch, she held the door
open for Johnny; after he slipped inside, she shut it
soundlessly.

As he glanced around, she whispered, 'This
looks like the O.R. receiving area.'

'Figures.' Johnny nodded, and looked
around.

Stephanie crossed silently to the door from
which the bright light emanated. Flattening herself against the
tiled wall beside it, she took a deep breath, assailed not so much
by a sense of danger, as by the long chain of events which had
brought her these many thousands of miles to this very spot, right
here and now.

Slowly, she inched towards the reinforced
glass and looked inside.

It was unmistakably an operating room, and
under the harsh dazzle of the lights, a surgeon, appropriately
gowned, capped, gloved, and masked, was bent over the operating
table, assisted by a single nurse.

Stephanie's eyes involuntarily rested on the
patient. Surprisingly, no part of the young girl's body was draped,
and along her sternum, from neck to groin gaped a deep
incision.

Stephanie felt a wave of dizziness and
battled against throwing up. Oh God! she thought. The undersides of
the clipped-back flaps of skin were yellowish with fat and the open
flesh itself seemed covered with an almost milky, cellophane-like
membrane. Part of it had been cut through, and what she could
glimpse beneath it looked like an abstract painting of purples and
reds and pinks and silvers and blues.

Stephanie broke out in a cold sweat and
quickly looked away. I'm going to be sick, she thought, feeling a
smothering wave of dizziness. Oh God - what a hell of a time to
throw up!

She was glad when Johnny came and stood
beside her.

'Looks normal enough,' he whispered into her
ear.

'I'm not so sure . . .' Stephanie said very
softly. Then she heard the surgeon demand in English,
'Syringe.'

The nurse slapped one into his palm and he
held it up to the light.

Stephanie gasped. It was empty, but looked
unbelievably huge. But what are they doing? she wondered. Taking
blood?

The surgeon said, 'Now for the tricky
part.'

'Don't worry,' the nurse said, her eyes,
above the mask, sliding him a sideways look. 'We've always got the
two backups.'

The surgeon laughed. 'Yeah, but it doesn't
look good if we need more than one a day.'

Stephanie couldn't believe she could be
hearing correctly. This can't be happening, she thought,
instinctively reaching for the comfort of Johnny's hand. They're
mad! Certifiably mad! She cringed as though she herself felt the
stab of pain as the needle pierced the girl's open abdomen. Then
the surgeon released a clip and tossed it into a discard pan.

Almost instantly, the syringe began to fill
with a cloudy pale fluid.

'Perfect every time!' the nurse said
admiringly. 'I don't know how you doit.'

The surgeon laughed. 'You know what they say
about practice.' The syringe kept filling. 'And didn't I tell you
she'd make a great donor? Bet the other two wouldn't have had half
the enzymes. There.' Smoothly he pulled the syringe out; almost
instantaneously, the EKG's sonarlike beeps became one long
monotonous sound and the spiky green graphs traced a flat
horizontal line.

Stephanie expected the surgeon and nurse to
spring into immediate action like a crack drill team. Instead, the
nurse reached casually back and flicked a switch, shutting the EKG
monitor off. 'Can't stand that damn noise,' she said.

What-

Time contracted into this one interminable,
horrifying moment. Her eyes darted to Johnny, searching for an
answer, but all he could do was stare helplessly back at her.

'Flasks,' the surgeon said.

The nurse got a stainless-steel holder which
kept two glass flasks secure.

And Stephanie suddenly remembered where
she'd seen flasks identical to these. That day on the
Chrysalis
, when I followed Lili, Ernesto, and Dr
Vassiltchikov to the ship's hospital, where the doctor hooked them
up to those robotic IVs.

Carefully, the surgeon squirted exactly one
hundred CCS of the fluid into each flask. On the operating table,
Stephanie could see that the little girl's colour had already
changed to greyish-blue. She thought: How quickly life becomes
death.

'Procaine.'

The nurse slapped a vial, then a syringe
into the surgeon's palm. He drew precisely eighty CCS up into the
syringe and squirted exactly forty into each flask.

'Magnesium.'

The procedure was repeated.

'Now the mutated zygote, and we're done for
the day.'

She handed him a tiny bottle, and he used an
eye dropper, adding a mere droplet into each flask. Then the nurse
sealed them. As she worked, she said, 'You know, I still keep
wondering what this stuffs for. Makes no sense to me.'

The doctor shrugged. 'All I know is, losing
our licences to practice is the best thing ever happened to us. Who
else pays five grand a day for twenty minutes'-worth of work, no
questions asked? No malpractice insurance to worry about? And
Christ, everything around here's
free!
Now hurry up and
sterilise those flasks and pack them in the carrying case so they
can get outta here. Meanwhile, I'll sew her back up.'

The nurse looked at him. 'Didn't you forget
something?'

'Like what?'

'Christ!' she hissed, rolling her eyes.
'Will you get with it? She was supposed to have undergone brain
surgery!'

'Oh, yeah.' The surgeon laughed. 'All right,
hand me a razor. All I have to do is shave the top of her head,
drill a hole in her skull, and saw part of it away with the
craniotome. Two minutes, tops.'

The nurse carried the flasks to one of the
steel tables by the back wall. On it was various equipment,
including the steriliser.

It was then that Stephanie saw it. Right
there, next to the steriliser: the by-now familiar red thermoslike
container!

The memory of Eduardo's words burst through
her mind like an electronic emission.

'On a trip through the Amazon, my mother and
father caught a very rare opportunistic infection. It is incurable
. . .'

That was what he had told her. Yes. But that
was not what was going on here!

Even before the skull drilling began,
Stephanie staggered away from the door. With a convulsive sob, she
stumbled blindly across the white floor, hit the swinging doors
running, and burst out into the hall, gasping for air. For a
moment, she slumped against the cool tile wall and wrapped her arms
around her chest, rocking backwards and forwards in a futile
attempt to control her keening.

But the oppressive, demonic weight of the
horrors she had witnessed continued to rack her.

I didn 't try to stop them!

The thought rocked through her like a bomb
blast.

I stood by and watched!

How can I ever live with myself after
allowing them to murder a child!

Hurried footsteps caught up with her.

'Stephanie?' It was Johnny.'Steph!'

At his familiar voice, her heaves died down.
She raised her head and stared at him.

'Hey,' Johnny said softly, taking her into
his arms. 'It's okay . . .'

'It's not!' she half whispered. She was
aware of her hysteria, felt smothered by helpless guilt and
mounting rage.

Those fairy godmother flights. Oh, the
obscenity! Her cheeks were streaked wih wet rivulets and she could
feel more silent tears forming, blurring her vision. Lives were not
being saved here - they were being takenl And if she knew, then
surely Eduardo knew also! He couldn't be blind to it . . . could
he? He couldn't believe that cock-and-bull story he'd dished out -
COULD HE?

Rare and incurable infection!

His words burst inside her like a hideous
pustule.

How casually he'd said them!

My lover!
she spat mentally with a
blaze of disgust and self-loathing.
How could I ever have let
him touch me? How could I have allowed him to . . . to . . . soil
me!

A fresh flood of gut-wrenching tears burned
down her face. She wanted to scream and scream and never stop
screaming.

Day in, day out, they were murdering - just
to stay young! That's what Dr Vassiltchikov formulated! Some damned
concoction which relied on enzymes from young donors to retard
ageing!

Opportunistic infection, my ass!

'Hey, Steph . . .' Johnny said softly,
gently thumbing away her tears.' . . . it's all right. We're going
to make it all right -'