Eternity Row (40 page)

“You can do it in the operating room.”

“So this is really a hospital? What’s wrong with these people?” When he didn’t answer me, I strode to the nearest bed, on which lay an odd-shaped bundle of linens over a huddled body. Squilyp did the same thing on the other side of the room. I tried to pull the linens back, but the person beneath them wouldn’t let go. “Dhreen, what is going on here?”

A glance over my shoulder revealed that our abductor still stood by the doorway. He had gone a sickly color of yellow, and his weapon hung loosely by his side. “I can’t. I can’t look at them again.”

“Cherijo.” Squilyp stood over the other bed across from me. “You’d better take a look at this one.”

I debated on whether to wrestle the gun from Dhreen or sedate him, then found I couldn’t do it and went to join my boss. “What have you got”-my eyes widened-“here… ?”

The patient on this bed was very still, and did not protest as Squilyp drew the linens back. Mostly because the patient didn’t have a head, or arms, or legs. Even more bizarre, some form of skinseal had been applied to the points of amputation.

This wasn’t a hospital. It was some kind of a
morgue
.

“Why hasn’t this body been attended to?” I looked around. “Where are the people who work here?”

Squilyp lifted his membrane and touched the chest. “The derma is still warm.” He jerked back, then reached down and splayed his membrane flat against the patient’s chest. “Gods. I can feel a heartbeat.”

I had to feel that for myself. Sure enough, I felt the strong, steady pulse of life beating within the dismembered torso.

“Are they keeping it alive?” I looked for infuser lines, something to explain how the body was being sustained.

There was nothing but the bed and the linens.

“No.” I went to the next bed, pulled back the linens, and stared at the form under them. This woman had a head, and arms, but nothing else from the lower chest cavity down. Skinseal gleamed over exposed edges of organs. I stumbled back when the patient opened her eyes. “Oh, God.”

“Please,” she said, her voice so hoarse it barely rose above a gasp. “Make it stop. Please.”

“Dhreen!” I turned and ran to the door, and grabbed his tunic with my fists. “What have you done to these people?”

“Nothing, nothing.” His eyes avoided mine, and he was nearly hyperventilating. “Our doctors couldn’t help them. They tried-they tried everything-”

“Let him go.” Squilyp came over and took my hands away. “You’d better see the others.”

After making sure Qonja was stable enough to spare us, we made rounds of the hospital ward. Every bed contained a patient who had been horribly mutilated or injured in some way. Missing limbs, heads, huge gaping wounds in their torsos. Burn victims with no features left, and only charred, withered appendages. All of them were Oenrallian. Men, women, and children.

Worse, every single one of them was still alive, with normal body temperatures and strong, vital heart rates.

The only treatment given evidently was sealant to whatever portion of their anatomy that had been amputated or wounded. By the time I made it to the end of the ward, tears were running down my face. The ones who could talk pleaded and begged for us to help them. To end their pain. To stop whatever was happening to them.

The ones I couldn’t bear were the bodies without heads. The ones who could never plead or beg for anything again. And yet somehow they knew we were there. Their torsos moved. If they had hands, they clutched at us.

“It’s medically impossible for every person here to be alive,” I said to Squilyp as we made our way back toward the entrance. Our Oenrallian pal was slumped down on the floor, his face buried against his arms. I took the weapon out of his limp hand. “Get up, Dhreen. Get up and explain this to me, right now.”

He raised his face, which was wet with tears. “You’re the doctor. You tell me.”

“These people should be dead. Why are they still alive?”

“They won’t die.”

I yanked him up on his feet and snarled, “Why won’t they die? What did your doctors do to them?”

“Nothing. They put something on them to stop them from bleeding. That’s all.” He swallowed, and wiped his face on his sleeve. “They never die.”

“You are not being clear,” Squilyp said. “They have to die. These people cannot survive these injuries.”

“They want to die.” Dhreen’s voice went soft. “We want them to die, but they don’t. They live. They live if they’re chopped into pieces or burned or lose their heads. They never stop living, no matter what happens to them.”

I let go of him as if I’d been scalded. “That’s why you call it this Eternity Row.”

He nodded. “We don’t die anymore, Doc. No one has died in over a hundred years. My people have become immortal.”

The operating room hadn’t been used in at least a hundred years, and prepping it to accommodate Qonja took time. Dhreen had retreated into silence, staring out at the ward, so Squilyp and I did the work.

“I don’t like the look of the exit wound.” The Omorr checked our sojourn packs, pulling out what we needed. “We must return to the ship.”

“We don’t have time to wait for another launch,” I said. “Even if we can find a way to signal them.”

Once we had established a reasonably sterile field and the instruments we needed for surgery, we transferred Qonja from the gurney to the procedure table. Squilyp scrubbed while I prepped the resident.

“Your pardon for this, Healer.” Qonja made a wry gesture. “I did not intend to make more work for you.”

“Thank you for shielding me from that blast.”

He reached up suddenly and seized my wrist. “The Captain is my Speaker. When he tells you-”

“Not going to happen. You just concentrate on staying alive.” I adjusted his infuser line, then initiated the anesthesia. “Go to sleep, pal.”

His hand went limp and slid away from my arm as Squilyp changed places with me. While I scrubbed, I wondered just what the Captain would say, if Qonja died on our table.

He’s not going to die.

Dhreen refused to leave, so I made him scrub and gown. After discovering the surgical unit’s power cells had died sometime in the last decade, I made do with the suture laser from my pack and some antiquated scalpels.

“You’re very good with those,” Squilyp commented.

“I had to use them on Terra.” I examined the instrument with mild disgust. “Give me a good laser rig any day.”

Once we opened his chest, things went from bad to worse. His liver, unlike Dhreen’s, had not survived the blast. Jorenian physiology ensured he’d live for another twenty-four hours, but beyond that was doubtful.

Playtime was over. “Dhreen, I have to get this man up to the ship. As soon as we close.”

“There is no way to leave now.”

I left the table and went at him, my gloves up, covered with Qonja’s blood. “He needs a liver transplant. And I can’t do that here. Signal the goddamn ship!”

“You can use this.” He produced a familiar container.

It was the Jorenian liver we’d brought down. He must have retrieved it from Mtulla’s vehicle.

“I’m not putting that into this patient!” I yanked down my mask. “It’s part of an experiment, not a viable transplant organ!”

“You’re not going back to the ship,” he said. “If anyone in the city finds you, they’ll turn you over to Mtulla or the Bartermen.”

“Dhreen, he’s going to
die
.”

“Then you’d better hurry up and use it.” He shoved the container in my hands.

Squilyp vetoed my idea of using our scalpels on Dhreen, and quietly performed a tissue match. Incredibly, the experimental liver was an acceptable replacement for Qonja’s ruined organ.

“He’ll need some antirejection therapy until we can clone another liver from his own cells, but it shouldn’t present a treatment problem.” The Omorr prepped the liver, then noticed my preoccupation. “What is it?”

“This.” I turned Qonja’s head to one side, and re-vealed what his hair had covered. A small HouseClan symbol, one shaped like a dagger.

“It is one of their birthmarks, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh. But look.” I pointed to the mark on my own neck, which was shaped like the upswept wings of a bird. “This is the Torin symbol.”

“Well,
that
isn’t.” Squilyp shook his head. “Why would the crew pretend Qonja was a member of their HouseClan?”

“To cover up what he really is.” I checked the transplant site and changed my gloves. “Are we ready?”

“Yes.” He brought over the basin containing the liver. “Cherijo, whatever is happening, you can depend on me.”

“Good. Because I don’t know who else to trust.”

PART FOUR Solutions

CHAPTER SIXTEEN A Price for Everything

Some six hours after we entered Eternity Row, I closed Qonja’s chest with the last in a long vee of sutures, and stepped back from the table. “We’ll need to run a blood series every fifteen minutes, and watch for signs of rejection.” I saw Dhreen still standing against the entrance panel, watching us. “We’re done here. I need an isolated berth for him.”

“There are none. Leave him here.”

I stripped out of my gown and went to cleanse. “Fine. I want to see the other patients being kept here. Squilyp will stay with him.”

Dhreen took me through the first ten wards on Eternity Row. Every ward was interconnected and crammed with Oenrallians who should have died of their injuries, but evidently couldn’t.

“How many more of them are there?” I asked, my voice tight after we’d walked through the fourth.

“I don’t know. There were hundreds of wards when I left. Now there may be thousands.”

As I continued my nightmare rounds, I saw living bodies in conditions that defied description. One ward had been stocked with rows and rows of open specimen containers, which held a gruesome collection of severed limbs and detached heads. Since they were no longer connected to their bodies, they couldn’t function, but the limbs reacted reflexively to any touch, and the decapitated heads watched us, their eyes following our every movement, their mouths forming soundless pleas.

Along the way, Dhreen kept his eyes averted from the inhabitants of the wards, and described what had happened a century before. “The first to come here were multiple amputees, involved in a transport crash-miracles, we thought-until it became apparent no one would ever die, no matter what happened to them.”

“The decapitations would have done it.” I felt a deep, aching sorrow creeping over me.

“When our doctors realized the head and body still functioned apart from each other, then we knew.” He cleared his throat. “Something terrible has happened to our people.”

“Why did you put them all here?”

He looked slightly defensive for a moment, then his shoulders slumped. “First they were given the finest care. When there was still hope. Years passed. They didn’t die. They didn’t even age-none of us do. No cure, no hope of finding one. There were so many of them, you see.”

“So you made this Eternity Row.”

“Our doctors gave up. Families couldn’t bear to see those they loved existing like this. Now no one comes here, unless it is to bring someone to stay.”

I looked through the door panel viewer, and saw the next crowded ward waiting on the other side. “How many buildings are there?”

“Mtulla told me they cover three domains now.”

“How many people?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe ten thousand.”

With a population of two billion, more than that should have died in any given revolution. “And in the other cities? Is it the same? Are they warehousing the bodies, too?”

“It is the same everywhere on the planet.”

I did the math. If forty to eighty thousand people could have been expected to die each year, then the number reached into the millions.

“You’ve just been stacking them up here, year after year. This isn’t eternity, Dhreen. It’s Hell.”