The Timer Game (42 page)

Mommy.
Was that her voice?

The room was dark with eerie cubes of light, Plexiglas cases, cubes of lightweight polymers, a high-tech art museum. His throat closed. A high-tech horror show.

Lights pulsed and in the flickering strobe, he saw twisted coils of neon, lighting exhibits. He took an involuntary step back. Ahead of him spread a huge wall of glass.

He limped closer and looked down.

Chapter 49

She could use the gurney as a shield, a metal lean-to protecting them, providing she could lift Katie safely to the ground. She wheeled the gurney close to the wall where the vent machine was plugged in, and slid her arms under her daughter’s body. Katie seemed so much lighter than she’d remembered, and she wondered if they’d fed her anything while they were keeping her body alive. No, they had to be giving her fluids, her veins were good, and they wouldn’t want to risk sending her heart into cardiac arrest because of potassium deficiencies.

She had to believe Katie was okay, the way she had to believe she could save them.

“Okay, sweetie, I’m going to lift you and put you on the ground. I’ll try to be careful but it’s going to feel hard, the ground, but I won’t leave you there long.” She was talking out loud to comfort herself, a whistling past the darkest graveyard she could ever imagine.

She lifted Katie free and shoved the gurney out of the way, awkwardly settling her daughter on the floor next to the vent machine. Katie looked even more defenseless lying on the ground without the trappings of the gurney. At least a gurney gave the appearance that all was well, that something clinical and organized was about to happen; here, on the floor, with her small white face and her still small arms, Katie looked like inert, a fallen angel.

Grace stole a fast look at the pager. Less than two minutes left. She grabbed the gurney and pushed it toward the scrub room and banged it onto its side. It took precious seconds to figure out how to get the legs to fold up, and then she hoisted the gurney against the scrub room wall and raced back to Katie.

She wheeled the vent machine as far as the cord would allow. This was the tricky part. The scary part. She was going to have to yank the cord on purpose, detach Katie from the ventilator and seamlessly vent her manually as she pushed the vent machine and carried her daughter to safety.

And she couldn’t let herself be terrified by the sound of the shrill alarm the vent machine would register as she pulled the plug. Alarm bells had shrilled in Guatemala, as everything fell apart.

“Okay, sweetie, here we go.” She was going to yank the plug and start venting by hand at the same time. Venting by hand involved squeezing a bulb and she could do this. It would only be thirty seconds or so until she could reattach the outlet to the red socket in the scrub room, and she could do this. The last time she’d vented someone by hand, after Sister Mary Clare physically could not continue, the patient had died.

Her mouth was dry. She crouched down and scooped up her daughter, carrying her to the vent machine and locating the bulb she’d use to manually inflate her lungs. About every five seconds, she needed to squeeze it. That would be twelve breaths a minute. With her other hand, she reached for the cord and yanked it hard.

A warning alarm cut the silence, coming out of the vent machine.

“It’s just an alarm, nothing big,”she muttered. Five seconds. She counted them out and squeezed the bulb and heard the sound of air rushing into her daughter’s chest, so she was doing okay. She was carrying her daughter, counting and squeezing the bulb, half pushing the vent machine forward with her knee. It was on rollers and that was good.

She half hobbled through the scrub door—
breathe, Katie, breathe—
and laid her daughter down onto the pallet of towels, and then she had the vent machine close enough to plug it in. She heard the reassuring sound of air rasping through the machine again.

She’d kept back a couple of towels and she used those now to stuff between Katie and the cement wall, a flimsy cushion against compression and death.

Her ears, she thought. They’d lose their hearing, it would blow their eardrums out. They were going to die and she was worried about ears.

She found the gauze roll and lay down next to Katie and tilted the gurney over them. Her fingers wouldn’t work and she fumbled with the gauze, nicking it with her teeth, ripping off a chunk, a second strip, two more. She balled one strip and stuffed it into Katie’s ear, then tipped her daughter’s head and inserted the second gauze strip, and then she was out of time, her fingers
icy God icy cold trembling.
Her fingers were shaking badly as she ripped a strip with her teeth and inserted it in an ear.

Grace knew, then, what happened when the first hunter lay bleeding and trampled by mastodons; what happened when fighter jets corkscrewed out of a crackling sky with pilots cranking useless controls; the dull surprise on the face of a kid dogging a ball into the street and looking up startled and facing two thousand pounds of steel; the secret thing shared by all, every last one: the AIDS patient gargling in hospice, the construction worker thinking about lunch as the bus roared out of nowhere, the ninety-year-old great-great grandmother dreaming of the boy in the white linen suit who said the sweetest things.

I want to live.

Grace pulled the metal gurney down and angled it over them.

“Katie!” It was a wail straight from the gut.

Mac’s voice. It was coming from the other room. He must have found the secret room and was looking down right now on the empty OR.

He was going to die if she didn’t warn him.

She would die if she did.

In OR, the pager started beeping.

__

Mac pressed his hands against the glass. He’d seen too many OR’s not to recognize it. Even though there wasn’t a tray of surgical tools or a Stryker saw, the lights were OR kliegs and a heart and lung machine stood at the ready. Toward the rear, there appeared a separate cement room that had to be a scrub room. Was he too late? Where had they taken his daughter? Something was beeping and it was coming from that room.

He ran the length of the window, searching for a way in, and found the steel door with the keypad code. There was no way in.

He ran back to the window and smashed it with his fist. The glass held, not even a spider crack.

“Katie!” He screamed her name.

Grace staggered from the scrub room, face smudged, stripped to her tank top. She looked as if she’d survived a nuclear blast. She raised her head, eyes unfocused, her gaze traveling in the direction of his voice, her face white, shocked.

“Mac?” Her voice rang with exhaustion and panic.

“Up here. How do I get in?”

“There’s a bomb. Run.”

Her face was blank and then she saw him, and she went bright with a look he hadn’t seen since they’d been together in Guatemala. It was the pure, transforming look of love. He understood, then, what this warning had cost.

“Save her!” he cried.

And Grace ran.

She ran in despair and terror back into the cement scrub room and squirmed in next to her daughter, wrapping her arms around Katie and pulling the metal gurney over them. A tremor of heat streaked up the gurney and Grace closed her eyes. The room exploded in crackling light and a blast of thunder.

Chapter 50

The volley of heat shot up the wall and the floor shook. Something metallic and huge cracked and smashed to the ground. The sink. Grace cried out. The temperature in the tiny, enclosed space spiked into a broil and subsided, and Grace feared the tubes keeping Katie hooked to the vent machine would melt. Grinding noise. Pain sliced her ears. She braced herself and held on. Rain fell. Hot rain. Scalding rain. The sprinklers. She’d been caught in earthquakes before; everybody in San Diego lived with the tremblers, the sudden rocking, pictures cracking off walls, dishes hurtling off shelves, but not this.

This shivered along some invisible fault-line like an electric snake. A beam crashed against the gurney and slid and Grace could feel the shock bang up her back. She pressed herself against the small, still body of her daughter and held on as the floor heaved and bucked.

It stopped. Pitch black silence.

Rain fell, warm pelting rain mixed with choking dust and grit. She squeezed an arm up and pulled the gauze from her one ear and rubbed her unprotected ear, rotating her jaw, trying to get hearing back.

She carefully moved her hands along her daughter’s body, searching in the braille of love for any damage and finding none. She tentatively tried pushing against the shield with her back to see if she could get more room for them. It wouldn’t give and she realized they were enclosed in a small prison now, wedged against the wall by the same gurney that had shielded them from the blast.

In the dark close by, a warning beep sounded. It was coming from the direction of the vent machine just outside the gurney. There hadn’t been room to protect the machine under the gurney and now she panicked, worried that it would shut down and that Katie would die after all.

She had to find the hand pump. She was certain she’d taken it in with her but now she wondered if maybe she’d left it on the cement floor next to the vent machine when she’d gotten it running again. She patted Katie’s body and her own, a sense of urgency welling up that was hard to control. She couldn’t find the pump.

She took a slow breath and this time moved a single hand over her feet and carefully up her body. She found it wedged under her left leg and she just had to figure out how to get it attached to Katie’s vent line. She would get it ready now, so when she needed to make the actual shift she’d be able to do it smoothly. Her daughter needed air whooshing in every five seconds. Oxygenate that sweet brain.

The beeping stopped.

Katie’s life support was gone and she had five seconds to save her.

Five.

Her hands were shaking badly as she touched Katie’s face in the dark and found the trach tube. They were curled spoon fashion and she was going to have to reattach the pump from behind her.

Four.

She located the trach tube and pulled it out of the useless machine.

Three.

She shifted Katie slightly and moved her fingers over the pump, locating the hole where the tube would be inserted.

Two.

Her first try missed.

One.

She found the hole again and shoved the tube in hard.

Zero.

Squeezing it.

The merciful sound of air rasped through the tube and filled her daughter’s slack lungs, air oxygenating her brain, air singing through her body.

Grace exhaled, her face damp, and realized she’d been crying.

When does a person give up all hope?

How long does it take?

She wouldn’t allow herself to ponder that. She had to keep Katie alive and that meant squeezing the bulb every five seconds from now through eternity.

The thought of that filled her with fear followed by a sense of detached floating calm. No, she couldn’t be calm, couldn’t allow herself. Being calm probably meant deep shock and if she was in shock, she’d forget to—

Squeeze.

She started counting again. She cradled Katie’s head in the bulb-holding arm and wiped off her face with her other hand. Katie’s skin was moist and clammy. She shifted the bulb to her free hand.

The sprinklers were easing off. Debris sifted like damp snow. Far away, an alarm sounded. No voices. The floor groaned and shifted imperceptibly, and Grace wondered how long it would hold or if there were aftershocks that would crumple the floor like a—

Squeeze.

Tin can. Cold air was coming from somewhere. A chunk of something—a beam? the floor? —banged nearby, the sound reverberating, crashing against canyon walls, ricocheting off heavy metal, the noise fading into, s
queeze,
silence.

She smelled something burning and, almost as frightening, the sudden raw smell of seaweed and salt water. Would the building collapse into some secret sea fissure? Or would they burn in fire?

She wondered if Mac was dead. He had to be. There was no way he could have

survived a direct hit.

She was going to have to shift things around because the arm under Katie’s head was already going to sleep. It just meant putting Katie flat again and maybe,
squeeze,
rolling next to her so that her arm could still reach the bulb. She shifted Katie down and nestled next to her.

She couldn’t afford to let her eyes close. If they closed, Katie would die. It was as simple as that.

Did anybody even know she was here? She thought about that.

Oh, God,
squeeze,
nobody even knew the room was there. But Mac had found it.

Something deep in the bowels of the building twisted and cracked and Grace stirred next to Katie, worried about what would come next.

How long would it take somebody to get to her?

She tried to calculate that and couldn’t. She was getting into a rhythm,
squeeze,
now with the bulb, squeezing and resting, squeezing and resting, her thoughts skittering. She checked her watch face, the small glowing numbers a comfort in the dark. An hour had slid by since the explosion.

Somewhere far away there was a sound she hadn’t heard before and couldn’t place. She shifted her body. She was going to have to see if she could squeeze in against the wall and work on the other side of Katie. That way she could use her other hand.

She cautiously rolled a knee over the top of Katie,
squeeze,
and shifted her body until she was on the other side. The bulb came loose in her hand.

She let out a small cry and patted for the trach tube, finding it, hurriedly fitting the pieces together, despair and relief catching in her throat,
squeeze squeeze
. Air whooshed through the tube again.

“It’s okay, honey, it’s okay, I’ve got you right here.”

She was going to have to let go now. She was getting tired. She bent down and carefully laid her head next to Katie. She found her small hand and kissed the palm.