But then there was Sam. Dear, faithful Sam, like a mutt who remains with a cruel master in spite of the whippings and the withheld feedings. Like the proverbial bad penny, Sam kept turning up. Some days he just sat there in the freighted silence of that room, waiting for Peter to say something. . . and Peter never did. Other days he served as a willing punching bag; still others he blotted his brother's tears. But he always came back.
He was the one. The only one.
Not even Kelly had bothered to return. Some great-fucking-love. In some dim way he remembered having told her to leave, having ordered her to. . . but if the shoe had been on the other foot, he would at least have tried to come back. Truth was, the bitch had been glad. Glad to be rid of him, just like all the rest. All his sweet memories of Kelly were spoiled in the endless blank of that room, like picked fruit left exposed to a sweltering sun. She must have taken lessons from his mom. Parasites, that's what women were, bloodsucking parasites whose only intention was to gaff you by the heart and then slowly suck you dry.
But for all his ill-thinking of Kelly, the plain truth was that he couldn't shake her out of his heart. In the night's dark eye, after the worst of the pus had been lanced, Peter longed for Kelly Wheeler in a way that was perhaps more punishing than his desire for a return to wholeness. In turning her away, another, terrified voice reproached him, he had acted rashly. Maybe they could have worked things out between them. There were specialized apartments in the city, with government-employed caretakers whose job it was to assist their handicapped tenants in every way possible. Kelly could have gotten her teaching degree, gone to her job in the daytime, and then looked after him at night.
Right, asshole. And how long before she got sick and tired of changing your diapers and picking up after you and having nothing to look forward to but more of the same? How long before she started making up thin-sounding excuses for coming home late while in reality she was getting the long lean hard one from one of her colleagues or from some grinning dipshit she picked up in a singles bar? How long before she just pointed at the shrunken scrap of flesh between your legs and fell to the rug in hysterics?
The images that came on these nights were as brutal as they were cruelly vivid. He imagined her with another man—but was another a fair distinction? Didn't that presuppose that he, Peter, was also a man?—the two of them sipping wine and giggling, their harmless touching turning quickly into groping, hard-core foreplay. Despite his frantic efforts to obliterate these images, he saw Kelly open her mouth to receive the bastard's tongue, heard her moan with a passion the heat of which he had never come close to kindling. And he imagined her thinking of him as this heart thief stripped off her clothes, laughing inside, freed at last of the childish notion that her love for him had been real. Only puppy love, he heard her taunt in a dreadful singsong voice. And then he saw the real man's tongue work its way down the curve of her belly and bury itself in that place she had promised was only for him. In tacky, blue-movie close-ups, he saw the man work her with a cock the size of his forearm, saw him ram her and jam her and heard her scream in raptures unimagined. . .
Of it all, this drove him closest to madness.
He still loved her. He would always love her. And trying to kill that love was like trying to kill something that had no life. It simply could not be done.
Months stretched into years.
Sam came.
Night came.
The dream came.
Peter's rage and resentment flourished inside him until it blazed like the coiled filament of some huge, unimaginable searchlight, burning brighter and brighter until one starlit night it simply winked out, taking the last of his sanity with it. For a period of time that was black and homogenous, he lay in a state of emotionless incubation, surfacing only long enough to acknowledge his brother's visits and to see that nothing had changed.
Until death came, and that changed everything.
TWO
AIRBORNE
TWELVE
September 23, 1989
It was coming out of the ditch, as it had each nightmare-ridden night for the past six years, slowly ascending the heat-baked slope to the road.
But tonight everything was different.
The sun was a bruise in the sky, its light a ghastly purple. The air was not air at all but a steaming, pine-scented soup through which the bike moved sluggishly. And the porcupine was no porcupine; it was a. . . thing, with a humpbacked body of flesh turned inside out and the bristled limbs of an insect. It had a bat's parchment ears and a jackal's cunning glare—and when it rolled its eyes to face him, it grinned, grinned with a demon's yellow teeth, the spaces impacted with gore.
It grinned and he knew it was death.
The deep-throated bray of the air horn punched through the back of his helmet. He could feel Kelly's hands on his hips, knew she had screamed, but the sound was eaten by the air horn, that awful clarion, shrieking slaughter from the guts of a rolling chrome juggernaut. Brutal summer heat shimmered over everything, seeping inside, dulling nerves that should have been ready, slackening muscles that should have been primed.
The back wheel bucked hard—and suddenly Kelly was airborne, swimming in the lavender air. Now the world was filled with that hideous animal bray, over-spreading everything in an atmosphere of solid, bellowing noise.
And when he turned, he faced the juggernaut, chrome teeth bared and glinting sunlight, hot breath reeking of road grease. Its jaws fell open and a sticky tarmac tongue drew him in, past rolling rubber hinges into a dark and profane clockwork, where the rattle of an eight-chambered heart joined the mind-splitting howl of the clarion. Here he was fractured and chewed, and his blood was tasted.
And when the thing shat him out, there was no pain at all.
Only nothing. . . nothing. . . nothing. . .
Peter opened his eyes, the horror of the dream exploding in the vise of suffocation. The wreath lay on his chest like a cinder block—but there was no wreath. The weight was death, that grotesque, raw-fleshed creature from the roadside. It straddled his chest, grinning as it sucked out his air.
He was dying.
In the drunkenness of asphyxia the room listed like a storm-lashed ship. His chin switch was there; he glimpsed its faint shine in the cold autumn moonlight. A touch, and help would be there. . . but he couldn't lift his head. It was an immovable weight with a hole in the middle, his futilely gasping mouth.
He couldn't breathe.
Peter's mind fell into a flat spin as panic tore through him. An invisible hand had him by the windpipe, leaving barely a pinhole through which to drag air. He tried to give voice to his plight, to scream through the sleeping corridors, but the effort only doubled the load on his chest.
The night-dark room grew darker still, death's shadow seeping in at its edges. . . and Peter thought of his mother. He wanted her here. The bitter contempt he'd nurtured for five long years lifted like a sprung blind, and now more than anything else he wanted her with him. She would save him. She had once before, when the croup got him so bad he nearly died. It had been exactly like this, except that then he'd been able to move, to stagger clasping his shut-down throat to her room to waken her. She'd scooped him up and lugged him into the bathroom, where she cranked on the hot water taps and flooded the room with steam.
There, honey. Breathe easy. Breathe easy, now.
"Mom?" Peter husked. "Mom, please. . .”
The panic was massive, outstripping the capacity of his mind to contain it. It widened like a tornado's dark eye. And as his head thrashed to and fro and his neck swelled with air hunger, a crude stake of truth sledged its way down through his heart.
These were his last moments.
And he would spend them in horror.
Sam's face floated up in his mind, full of admiration and love. And Kelly's, rapt in the almost painful ecstasy of their union.
And his mother's. . .
A sound like a rusty hinge reached Peter's ears. My last gasp, he realized. And even as the darkness yawned open and the panic soared, an intense feeling of peace suffused him. It began in the center of his chest and spread like a gentle fireglow. Warm and renewing, he embraced it, welcomed it. . .
And finally he begged it to bear him away.
Merciful blackness entombed him.
No thought. No panic. No fear.
Consciousness faded—then abruptly returned, with all the rudeness of a dipperful of water slung squarely in his face.
Suddenly his mind was alert, his awareness crystalline. . .
Then a strange sensation (I can feel I can feel it!
)
mantled his frame, a kind of. . . tug, as if his whole body had been mummy-wrapped in Scotch tape and the tape stripped away, all in a single brisk pull, producing a sensation more startling than painful.
It lightened him somehow, freed him. . .
There were footfalls in the hallway now, urgent, thudding footfalls, and a rolling clatter of equipment. They were coming to save him, Peter realized, and he delighted in the knowledge that they were too late. He wasn't breathing, wasn't even trying to breathe.
I'm dead you dumb bastards, you won't be turning my crushed-insect body five times a day or stuffing your fingers up my senseless ass anymore, 'cause I'm dead, dead, dead—
But if he was dead, why could he still see? And why was his mind more keenly alert than ever before, even when he'd enjoyed the peak of his health?
And why was the ceiling getting closer?
Floating? Am I floating?
The crash cart preceded a nurse and two interns into the room, all of them shouting commands. "Call a Code Blue. And find an anesthetist, stat!
Somebody ventilate this guy. Holy shit, I think we're too late."
Damn straight you're too late, Peter thought with morbid glee. No research, no miracle was ever going to make him feel again, walk again, live again.
This was it. His only way out.
He watched them assemble beneath him, scrambling about his bed like children who'd just dropped their mother's favorite vase and were now caught up in the foolish hope that they could Krazy Glue it back together again. He watched them down there, amused and a little annoyed, wishing they'd just leave him alone.
One of the interns knelt on the bed and began to administer closed-chest massage. The other thrust a curved green airway into Peter's mouth, then began to squeeze oxygen into his lungs with an ambu bag. Now another nurse appeared, red-faced from running upstairs, and started fishing around in the crash cart, pulling open drawers, scrabbling for the utensils of rescue.
Then someone jerked the covers off Peter's body, and he saw himself, really saw himself, for the first time since he'd been able to just amble over to a mirror and check himself out at his leisure.
It was only then that the full impact of what was happening struck Peter Gardner. He was observing all of this from above, from the ceiling. He was floating, but not in his body, that misshapen mantis on the bed below. No. He was outside of his body now, just his mind, floating free. . .
And those bastards were trying to drag him back in.
No! he cried. But his mouth didn't open—couldn't open, with an airway jammed into it and an oxygen mask sealing it shut—and no sound issued forth. For a moment, this muteness brought back the old and bitter impotence of paralysis, only worse, because now he couldn't even speak.
Then he understood.
They couldn't hear him in this. . . state of being. They weren't even aware of his presence. He was a spirit now, a ghost. All of that Separate School catechismal mumbo jumbo had been true. He was dead and free of his body, and his would-be rescuers didn't know it yet.
Peter watched, awed at the clarity of detail.
Now the anesthetist darted into the room, slit-eyed and scowling, and Dr. Lowe thumped in behind him.
"How aggressive do you want to he?" the anesthetist said as he took over ventilating Peter's body.
"Bring him back," Lowe said implacably. "I want him back."
Some old quarrel passed between the two men like flint sparks in their eyes. Then the anesthetist removed the airway from Peter's mouth and slipped a laryngoscope blade into his throat. With the deftness of years he inserted an endotracheal tube, inflated its air-sealing cuff, then attached it to the ambu bag in lieu of the mask. With quick, even strokes he inflated Peter's lungs.
And for an instant, Peter heard the man's thoughts—
You're a fucker, Lowe.
Peter saw him glance up at Lowe—who, while injecting drugs into Peter's I.V., was busily studying the oscilloscope tracing of his almost flat-line heartbeat—and saw the physical expression of that sentiment on his face. But his mouth had not moved, though the voice Peter heard had been as plain as if the words had been spoken aloud.
Now it came again.
Why don't you let the kid go?
"Adrenaline," Lowe commanded, his outthrust hand twitching impatiently. Then: Come on, Peter heard him say in another, more hollow voice. Hurry up, bitch!
Give me the shit!
And something else? Had he heard something else? An echo of a distant, more urgent thought, weakly superimposed?
(Oh, Christ, I need a—)
But now the syringe of adrenaline was in Lowe's hand, the fine needle longer than any Peter had ever seen, and Lowe was aiming it at Peter's chest, puncturing the skin between his ribs, sucking back a crimson eruption of heart's blood before plungering the entire payload into his ventricle.
"We've got a rhythm," the anesthetist said, the flatness of his tone barely disguising his disappointment.
Way to go, Lowe. Another vegetable for your patch.
Peter felt another tug now, this one more abrupt than the first one had been, a hair-pulling, scalping kind of tug that jerked him forcefully downward.
Did that mean he was leaving this life?
Or coming back in to it. . . ?
That long-ago dream of plummeting to earth from the stratosphere recurred as his essence dropped suddenly downward. He resisted that pull with the entire force of his will. . . but the effort was useless. He met his body with the distorting force of a cannon blast. His last conscious perception was a voice.