Echoes of Darkness (12 page)

“You knew—that makes you complicit. But I’m sure the disciplinary board will be lenient.” Sarcasm filled his voice. “They are
so
known for leniency. And this is
exactly
the kind of thing a young doctor wants marking his career—supposing they even let you
have
a career, after all this!”

Ben’s head was whirling with horror, and he felt nauseated. Maxwell smiled and extended his hand.

“Or, you can just hand me that jar right now and keep your mouth shut. It’s really up to you, Ben. Your whole future is in your hands.” The grin dropped from his face. “Well? What’s it going to be?”

Ben placed the jar in the waiting hand. Maxwell looked at the vessel on his palm, his fingers curled around it, caressing the glass. He looked up at Ben, and his smile returned.

“Thanks, Ben. Toddle off now, and keep your mouth shut. Let me be all I can be!”

He strode off in the direction of his office, no doubt going to measure out doses of his miracle cure. Ben watched until he turned a corner, then made his way back toward the center of the ER. He was moving slowly, in a daze.

He still felt like he was going to throw up.

Ben avoided Dr. Maxwell for most of their shift—quite a feat, considering he worked directly under the man. He kept his distance and tried to spot the old doctor using his miracle cure, but Maxwell was being cautious. Though he didn’t catch him, Ben heard the glowing reports about Maxwell that night. Everywhere he went, patients stabilized, even patients the other doctors labeled as lost causes. And not just cardiac cases. Maxwell’s shining moment came when they got word of a fifteen-car pileup on the freeway. The casualties were being brought to the closest trauma center: Springdale General. They didn’t have long to prepare for the influx of cases, and Ben had to admit that Maxwell did an admirable job preparing the ER for a wave of nearly thirty new patients, all arriving within the span of a few minutes. He organized people and materials, implemented their Mass Casualty Triage Plan . . . then disappeared into his office for the last minute or so. Ben assumed he was filling more syringes from his little jar of miracles, and any admiration he’d felt for Maxwell dissolved like a puff of bitter smoke.

Maxwell’s plan worked just as he’d hoped; by the end of the shift he was
walking around the ER as the hotshot doc. People were saying he’d saved at least half the patients from the pileup himself. On his way out at the end of his twelve-hour shift, Maxwell stopped by the nurses’ station where Ben was using the phone to check on a patient who’d already been moved upstairs to recovery. Maxwell didn’t say anything, just gave a wink and tipped his hat as he strolled toward the exit. Ben, working a double shift, barely spared him a glance as he pressed the receiver to his ear, trying to hear over the noise of the ER. He was checking on Rebecca Stillwell.

Rebecca Stillwell was their heart patient, the first to get a dose of what he’d begun to think of as Maxwell’s Miracle. The patient he himself had helped to inject with an unknown substance.

While Maxwell had run off to fill those first syringes, Ben had gone to the admissions desk to collect Rebecca’s information. Maxwell was listed as the attending physician, and Ben made certain it stayed that way. He signed nothing, just found out where Rebecca was being sent for recovery and started calling the nurse’s station there. Self-preservation kept him
officially
out of it, but his feelings of concern and guilt had him calling for status reports. The ER was busy, but he somehow managed a call every thirty to forty-five minutes. Four hours into the recovery, she was conscious. Six hours and she was up and about. He started to relax then, and slowed his calls to once an hour or so—good thing, too, since that was when they received the call about the freeway accident. Things got pretty busy after that.

Now, though, as Maxwell was skipping out the door, a nurse was telling Ben about Rebecca’s sudden fever. There was no sign of infection, nothing that would have caused something like this. The increase in temperature registered only about fifteen minutes before Ben’s call, but had climbed from 100 to 102 in that time. The patient was in bed with a saline drip while they ran tests. Ben went cold, wondering just what the hell they had done to the girl. He asked to be kept apprised of her situation, then rang off to run beside another gurney, listening to an EMT reeling off patient information. He immersed himself in the new case, focusing on the task at hand in an attempt to avoid wondering what he was going to do.

Unfortunately, fifteen minutes later he was walking out of ER-2 with nothing to think about but his predicament.

Maxwell used that stuff on quite a few patients without my aid; hell, without my
presence
. He’s on the hook alone for all those . . . but I was there for Rebecca. I
did
hold the damn jar for him. It wasn’t my fault, but Maxwell’s been around forever. He knows people. He won’t go down alone for this, I’m
sure
he’ll take me—

“Dr. Binder?”

Ben looked toward the nurses’ station.

“Line one’s for you. She has some patient info for you.”

Ben scuttled over and grabbed the phone.

“Yes?”

“Dr. Binder? I’m calling about Rebecca Stillwell.”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry, Doctor. Her temp spiked to one-oh-six, so we started her in a cool bath. She coded while in the bath. The resuscitation team was called, but couldn’t get her back. I’m sorry, Doctor, but she’s already en route to the basement.”

“What?” Ben checked the clock. “It hasn’t even been twenty minutes since you told me about the fever
starting
!”

“I can’t explain it. Pathology will investigate, but at the moment we have no idea what went wrong.”

I have an idea.

Ben hung up the phone.

All shift long Ben fielded calls for Dr. Maxwell. Wherever his patients had been sent for recovery or tests, people were calling for him, wanting to know if there was anything they should know. Most of Maxwell’s patients were exhibiting sudden and apparently sourceless fevers. These fevers spiked, and no matter what measures were taken, resulted in cardiac arrest. Halfway through his shift these fevers exploded across the recovery ward, every one a victim of that freeway pileup. That’s when the math became simple.

Twelve hours!
Ben thought.
Twelve hours after he injects them with that stuff, they’re dead. It’s the same every time!

He phoned Maxwell again and again, but got no answer. He only hoped someone else in the hospital had better luck than he was having.

At last his second shift ended. There had been an hour before dawn when everything seemed to quiet down, and it gave Ben time to think about Rebecca Stillwell, to wonder exactly what the hell had happened to her; to all of them. He felt guilt, but also, he had to admit, fear. Were they going to find out about Maxwell’s potion? Chances were good. Would Maxwell absorb the blame and go down quietly, leaving Ben out of it as he’d said?

Not bloody likely.

He took his name off the On Shift board and hustled out of the ER. He was the picture of a man in a hurry to go home and get some sleep.

But he was going to the basement. To the morgue.

He knew he wasn’t thinking straight. He’d been up for more than twenty-four hours; that was enough to make anyone a little fuzzy around the edges. He couldn’t get the girl out of his mind—and he
had
held the jar . . .

He stumbled off the elevator into the visitor/viewing room, with the window where people came to identify the faces of loved ones. There, in the viewing room, was a woman.

He heard her before he saw her, sobbing registering on his consciousness just before he associated the sound with the figure huddled in the chair next to the door leading into the morgue
itself.

“Miss? Miss, are you all right?”

Oh,
that’s
a bright question to ask her
here
! She must have just identified
—

“Rebecca,” the woman sobbed into her hands. “Rebecca’s dead?”

The tone was disbelieving and mournful, and the words hit him like a slap.

“Rebecca? You mean Rebecca Stillwell?”

She looked at him though the mask of her fingers. “Rebecca’s dead.”

“I know, I . . . we, uh—look, just wait here, I’ll get Dr. Jonah, okay? Please.”

He burst through the door into the morgue proper, mind whirling. “Dr. Jonah? Hello, Dr. Jonah?”

There were rows of refrigerated storage drawers, stainless steel handles gleaming under the cold fluorescents. There were gurneys, the door into the autopsy room, a desk and filing cabinet, but no sign of the pathologist. The door hissed behind him and Ben spun around, but instead of Dr. Jonah he found the woman following him. Standing, her face uncovered, she bore a striking resemblance to the girl Maxwell had injected with his potion almost a full day ago.

A sister?

“Miss? I’m sorry, but you shouldn’t be in here.”

As he moved to guide her back to her seat she reached toward him, and the grief etching her face nearly broke his heart.

“Rebecca’s dead,” she said again. “Help me, please?”

He caught her as she fell against him. Her dress was sleeveless, and as he touched her skin he was surprised at how cold she felt.

She must be in shock,
he thought.
I’ll have to get her to lie down. There must be a blanket somewhere—then I can call for assistance.

“Come with me, all right? Sit down, please.”

He put an arm about her shoulders to guide her, but she folded into his chest, her arms about him.

“Please, help me.” Her words were muffled by his shirt, the scrubs so thin he could feel the chill of her cheek through the material. Ben moved them toward the closest seat, a nearby gurney, in a sort of shuffling dance.

“Let’s sit you down for a minute, okay? Get you a blanket, all right?”

Her arms tightened about him, fingers splayed and caressing.

“Warm,” she said, as if he had not spoken. “You’re so warm. Oh my God. Help me.”

“Now, I’m trying to—”

She kissed his neck.

He drew in a breath, shocked, but she didn’t stop there. She continued to kiss down the side of his neck as her hands caressed his back. She murmured into the hollow of his throat, her voice tickling his skin in a manner that had him standing on his toes.

“You’re so warm, please help me . . . Rebecca’s dead, and you’re so warm . . .”

Oh my God, this is just like that Forum in
Penthouse
last month, the one titled “The Doctor is In”! I thought those stories were all bullshit! No! Wait—I have to get control of this; I can’t
do
this!

“Now, wait! Miss? No, I—look, we can’t—”

But she was all over him, kissing and caressing, somehow peeling his scrub tunic upward to expose his skin, feeling his stomach, moaning about how warm he was, and how she needed his help. Her roving hand found the bulge at the front of his scrubs, squeezing and stroking, and Ben was lost. A minute later he was up on the gurney, flat on his back with his pants about his ankles as, dress pushed up to her hips, she swayed and bucked above him.