Projection (16 page)

"Unlock the door," I argued.  "Let the patients and staff go."

"We already have a place to go," Lucas said.  "Satan won't find a single soul to steal when his army arrives."  He walked out of the room.

*            *            *

Zweig began herding patients toward the Day Room.  Vernon escorted me there.  Some of the patients knelt and began chanting, others paced, still others milled aimlessly about.  A few, including the former socialite, Cecelia Gladstone, wept uncontrollably.  Carla Vawn was still bound into her seat at the nursing station, breathing but seemingly unconscious.

Kaminsky marched three women and a man into the room.  The four of them wore only hospital gowns.  Their identification badges were clipped to the skin at their throats.  I knew that one of the social workers taken hostage on the unit was a man.  I assumed that was him.  The women, I reasoned, were the dietician and the two nurses who worked with Vawn.

Kaminsky directed everyone to from a single line facing the windows, stretching across the room.  The last of a winter sunset cast its orange glow over them.

Lucas was nowhere to be found.

I heard the helicopter engine start.  The blades began to whir.  Patterson's voice blasted through the PA system again.  "This is Lieutenant Patterson of the Massachusetts State Police.  I am instructing everyone in the locked unit to lie on the floor, face down, hands crossed behind your backs."

The patients began chanting in unison.  Zweig and Kaminsky joined the line.

I turned to Vernon.  "We only have about thirty seconds.  Everyone needs to get down on the floor.  The police are going to fire through the windows at anyone left standing."

He squinted at me doubtfully.  "Dr. Lucas gives the orders."

I grabbed each of his forearms.  "You don't need orders from anyone to do the right thing.  You know no one's going to be saved by getting cut up by Dr. Lucas or cut down by machine guns."

He didn't move.

I heard the chopper take off.  I knew that SWAT teams were poised to invade the building just after the waves of bullets.  I left Vernon where he stood and walked over to the row of patients and hostages.  I tried desperately to pull them down, one by one, sometimes falling with them.  None of them resisted me, but the patients stood back up as soon as I moved on to the next person.  I could tell from the movements of their lips that they were still chanting despite the thunder of the assault helicopter rising toward us.  Zweig was next in line.  I tried to drag him down but he slashed my arms with his knife and threw me to the ground.  I grabbed his pant leg and tripped him up.  He fell to one knee, dropping the knife.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Gabriel Vernon had begun frantically sweeping people off their feet.  He tackled half a dozen or more of them before the sun disappeared and the assault helicopter filled the wall of windows.  I heard the first bullets crash through the panes of glass.  If I had been thinking I would have stayed on the floor and buried my head in my hands, but I stopped thinking and started feeling the full horror of the state annihilating patients — even these patients.  Every man is a story, and mine was about to be defined by a dizzying paroxysm of bloodletting I had helped set in motion.  I had to defy it, even if that meant being consumed by it.  I stood up and ran to the wall of windows, pressing myself against the glass, arms spread wide.  The helicopter hovered directly in front of me.  My ears ached from the roar of its engine, the beating of its blades against the sky.  I could see the face of the pilot.  And I could see Jack Rice seated next to him.  Our eyes locked on one another's.  I flashed back to his telling me that once I was inside the unit there was nothing he could do to help me.  I closed my eyes and waited for the blaze of pain from a bullet, waited for the rest of my life to flash before me.  It never did.  The chopper hovered several seconds.  I opened my eyes in time to see it swing right and left in the sky like a giant hornet before dropping out of view.  The blades slowed, then stopped, the silence broken only by the continued chanting of the patients scattered around the room.

*            *            *

I spun around to gauge the toll of the assault.  Most of the patients were standing or getting up, adding their voices to those still chanting.  Others huddled in the corners of the room.  The male social worker was on the ground, clutching a wound in his leg.  There was glass everywhere.  The plaster walls were marred by craters where bullets had landed.  Kashoor, the huge man Lucas had kept from attacking me, was slumped against the wall nearest the door, shot in the head.  I looked for Gabriel Vernon and spotted him face-down, spread-eagled in a pool of blood.  I ran to him and used all my strength to turn him onto his back.  His head flopped to one side.  I saw that he had been struck twice in the chest.  I called out for help.  "C’mon, Gabriel," I muttered.  "Don't die."  I tilted his head back and listened for breathing.  I ripped his shirt open and watched his chest for movement.  There was nothing.  I checked his pulse.  His heart had stopped.  I knelt by his side and tried to deliver CPR, but I heard the fractured pieces of his sternum crack against one another with each of my compressions.  My breaths bubbled through the holes in his chest.  I knotted his white orderly's top and jammed it into the wound, but air still escaped through the fabric.  I yelled for help again.  No one responded.  Half a minute later he hadn't drawn a breath of his own, and I was gasping for air myself.  I brushed my hand over his eyes to close his lids.

I looked up and saw Kaminsky and Zweig huddled together, whispering.  They began reorganizing a row of patients across the center of the room, seeming prepared to face a second assault.  They separated the hostages into their own row, backs against the shattered windows, facing the others.  I worried they might be planning to execute them.  I struggled to my feet and ran into the hallway, looking for Lucas.  I believed what he had told me.  He was the keystone in the arch that kept the unit from collapsing into a wholesale carnage.  There were still lives to be saved — more than a dozen patients and six hostages.

I raced to check each room on the left and the right, revisiting the horror of Laura Elmonte's ‘surgery’ and Richard Tisdale's planned neurosurgery.  I fell back against Tisdale's doorjamb, exhausted.  I was most of the way toward collapse.  I gathered the last bit of my cocaine-fueled fortitude and headed back up the hall.  I stopped at the medication room door, knocked, but got no response.  I put my ear to the cold metal surface.  Someone was moving around inside.  "Trevor?" I yelled.  "Are you in there?"  I was answered by silence.  I pounded on the door.  "Trevor!"

"Get away," he snarled.

"Open the door."

He cried out in pain.

"Let me in!"

"I can't!" he screamed.  His voice descended to despair.  "My arm."

"What about your arm?"

There was silence again.

"What happened to your arm?"

"Lucifer has it."  He let loose a deep groan.  "His claws are ripping me apart."

I looked at the lock on the door.  "Tell me the combination."  I got no response.  I was about to run back to the Day Room to try to get the sequence from one of the nurses when Lucas finally answered.

"3-1-1-5."

I punched in the digits, opened the door and stepped into the medication room, closing the door behind me.  I turned and looked at Lucas.  My heart nearly stopped.  He was crouched in the far corner of the tiny room, one leg thrown over his forearm.  His hand was contorted into a deformed fist with the fingers bent grotesquely over one another.  His face was twisted with panic.  Deep scratches ran from his right eye down the corner of his mouth.  A bloody clump of his salt-and-pepper hair lay next to him, the wound on his scalp still oozing.  Brown shards of glass from a large bottle covered the stainless steel countertop and the floor.  A half-filled 50-cc hypodermic syringe was lying near his hand.

"Cut it off," Lucas said.  "It attacked me."

I knew what he meant, but couldn't get my mind to accept it.  "Cut... what?"

"His hand."  Lucas’ arm strained to break free from under his thigh.  He pressed harder to keep it from moving.

I picked up the largest piece of brown glass, complete with most of the label from the bottle.  The bottle had held succinylcholine, a chemical compound used to paralyze surgical patients who are intubated and must not fight the rhythm of their respirators.  Without a machine to take over breathing, anyone injected with the medication would soon suffocate.

Lucas was watching me.  "We can't leave any souls for Satan," he said.

I saw that he had intended to orchestrate a mass suicide.  Maybe I had been wrong to think he would help stop Kaminsky and Zweig.  But I had nowhere else to turn.  I shook my head at that.

"Help me," Lucas said.  He was breathing in gusts.

The man I hated most in the world sat before me, an eager victim if I cared to slice off his remaining hand.  Yet I felt no impulse to harm him.  Maybe that shouldn’t have surprised me.  Matt Hollander had been right.  Every murder, every evil, every act of terror and horror in our world is a projection of the perpetrator's self-hatred.  Like a virus, that hatred seeks to infect anyone it can.  But with Lucas’ psyche visibly bent on his destruction, doing its own ugly work of vengeance, I was free to see him for who he was — a shattered man.  Being locked up in prison had driven him over the edge, from sociopathy to psychosis. I had done that to him.  And I had to help him find his way back.

"The devil you're fighting is some part of your
self
that you refuse to look at," I told him.  "You can hack your whole body to pieces, cut up every staff member and patient on this godforsaken unit, and you still won't have found it."

"Then you find it!" he barked.  He closed his eyes.  "Why not, Frank?  Maybe you'll find out something about yourself."

My heart leaped.  Was Lucas really ready to let me try to heal him and redeem myself?  "I'm sorry I let you stay locked up."  I waited.

"You lost something you loved.  I took it.  And that made you want to destroy me.  We're even."

"No, we're not.  Not until you let me help you."  Because until that happens I can't love myself.  "Tell me."

"I can't remember... anything.  I don't know what opened the door to Satan."

I couldn’t be sure whether Lucas was referring to the recent or distant past.  Did he not remember what had happened to him in prison or in his childhood?  "What's the first thing you do remember?"

He looked up at me like a terrified child.  "Being alone."

I was taken aback by the starkness of the statement.  "Alone," I repeated, hoping to sustain the momentum of his revelation without interfering with it, the way a parent will use the lightest touch to guide a boy almost able to ride a bike.

"I was on a plane.  I was going to live with my father, may his soul rest in peace."

"Where were you headed?" I asked quietly.

His eyes never left mine.  "We lived in Minnesota."

"Where had you been staying before that?" I asked.

"Baltimore."  He shook his head.

I wanted to ask about his mother again, but I suspected that might close Lucas down.  And I might not get a second chance to reach him.  Zweig and Kaminsky could strike out at any time.  I crouched and leaned against the opposite wall, making sure to give Lucas as much space as possible.

Lucas’ jaws clenched and his breathing became erratic as his arm nearly wriggled free.  He trapped it between his leg and the wall.  Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead.  "None of this matters.  It's too late for me."

"Only if you decide it is."

He hung his head, staring at his hand.

I thought I was losing him.  "Only if you give up."

He took a deep breath and swallowed hard, then looked back at me.  "You ask for the courage of Job," he said with a strained smile.  Several seconds passed.  Pain took over his features again.  "If you could figure out how the dark one chose me, how he got a foothold in my body...  You could give me back my life.  You could help me rid this place of Satan."

We were closer to common ground.  Lucas was still speaking the language of demonic possession and exorcism, but he was allowing that his life history might have ripened him for it.  "I will," I said.  I let the promise linger in the silence.  "First we have to stop Kaminsky and Zweig," I went on.  "They've lined up the hostages.  I think they may kill them."

"It's not up to them to choose who shall live and who shall die.  They don't know how to win this battle," he fumed.  He tried to calm himself.  "Take me to the Day Room.  Take hold of my hand."  He nodded at it.  "Keep the beast from me."

I walked closer to him.  I remembered the seemingly innocent invitation he had issued to Lawrence Winston. 
Come talk with me
.  A small part of me still wondered if Lucas was baiting me for the kill.  The hypodermic syringe lay within his reach, half-filled with succinylcholine.  But my gut told me Lucas’ rage and hatred had indeed turned in on themselves, as rage and hatred always do, given time.  Projection is only a temporary defense, a flame thrower atop a crumbling wall.  Lucas was no different at that moment than Hitler in the bunker or Goering at Nuremberg.  He called his self-loathing by the name Satan.  Hitler and Goering called it the Jews.  Serial killers see it in every one of their victims.  John Wayne Gacy entombed thirty-three young boys in the crawl space under his home, but never succeeded in burying the tortured boy inside him.

I knelt down my Lucas and picked up the syringe.  I laid it on the countertop.  Then I slowly, firmly gripped his wrist.  I helped him to his feet, careful to keep his hand safely down at his side.

"There's Xylocaine in the cabinet," he said.  "Block the enervation to the arm."

As much as I believed that Lucas’ renegade arm was fueled by his own psyche, not the devil, a nerve block with the local anesthetic Xylocaine seemed like a quick, albeit temporary fix; it would immobilize his arm a few hours at most.  I held Lucas’ wrist away from him as I reached into the cabinet.  I used my free hand and my teeth to register 10 cc of Xylocaine in a syringe.  I remembered from my surgical rotations in medical school and internship that the roots of the median, radial and ulnar nerves all course through the same region under the clavicle, just above the second rib.  Pulling Lucas closer to me I buried the needle beside the collar of his scrub shirt, injecting the whole 10-cc dose.