The Skunge (9 page)

"Alllll
Chen." Rudy Bickler clapped Chen on the back as he waddled into the room. Bickler weighed around three hundred pounds even though his job, as a porter, kept him on his feet and moving all shift. Chen marveled that even walking upwards of twenty miles a day, as porters did, Bickler hadn't managed to lose a single pound. "You lucky son of a bitch. I hear this medical marvel belongs to you."

"That's right. And keep your voice down, please. He's awake."

"Oh, so sorry,
Doctor
Chen." Chen could hear Bickler breathing: it was heavy, moist, and obscurely revolting. He could also smell cigarettes on him, and there was a tell-tale bulge in the breast pocket of his scrubs.

"You've been talked to about carrying your cigarettes in your scrubs. The patients don't need to see that. There are people dying of lung cancer here, do you think they want to see that?"

"Yeah, I've been talked to about a lot of things." Bickler bustled around the room, checking equipment, cords, and lines, all the while with one eyed cocked toward Neumann, who writhed and gasped. "But I won't tell if you don't, Chen." Bickler winked and popped a stick of gum into his mouth.

"For Christ's sake, you're working the ICU, Bickler," Chen said. He felt his exasperation getting away from him and bit it back. Bickler was an asshole, but he was well liked by everyone else in the hospital, from the Materials and Logistics troglodytes in the basement to the fuscia-scrub wearing Porter army, who could turn any ordinary day into a quiet sort of hell: dragging their heels on patient moves, taking their time with plasma bags, all the snide comments and asides about Chen in front of the patients. That particular brand of shit he did not need. Not today, with a potentially career-making patient in bed shaking himself to pieces like a dog with a bellyful of razor blades. And, of course, Mr. John Bickler Sr., Rudy's father, who sat atop the almighty Board of Directors.

"OK, just hurry up and move along please, Bickler. I have a lot of work to do."

"Work, right. All that
work
standing around drinking coffee with the other em-
dees
, shooting the shit. I've seen you working." Bickler's fat chops jiggled as he tapped Neumann's chart tablet. He left greasy smudges on the tablet's surface, and Chen's mind chattered about MRSA infection rates and HAI numbers. He lost his patience.

"Damn it Bickler, just get out of here and let me work." He hissed.

"I would watch your mouth if I was you," Bickler said, his face pale and serious. Chen ignored his baleful stare. "My father isn't crazy about all you mud-people running around here in the first place. He wouldn't think twice about showing you the door. Think about that for a minute, Mr. Hot-shit em-
dee
."

Chen said nothing, feeling his gut twist. Bickler gave him a look of almost cat-like dislike, then stomped out of the room without another word. But the way he walked told all the tale that needed telling. The next few days were going to be rough.

The worst part was that Bickler had proved before that he had juice here at Hollywood Presbyterian: two years earlier, during Chen's internship, one of his classmates had made some comments about Bickler, after they had watched him crash an entire rolling cart of patient meals into a closed door. The interns and residents had been treated to an extended viewing of Bickler's ass-crack. A week later the guy who had made the jokes was gone. Gone from the program, and blacklisted from every other facility in the county. Last Chen had heard, the guy was slaving away in Detroit, stitching up GSW'ed gang-bangers and hating life.

He shook off thoughts of Bickler and turned back to the chart, after giving it a good going over with antibacterial wipes. An infection, under Chen's care, was
not
going to happen.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Palmetto bugs--known in California as cockroaches—live and thrive below humanity's sight-line. They eat and breed in the underneath and in-between, in the dark spaces we rarely see and don't like to look at. They survive off scraps left by other, larger animals. But no one ever said that they aren't successful—it all depends on how you define success.

Dr Palmetto, it was rumored, was a disgraced Floridian OB/GYN that had killed a patient, along with her unborn child, while high off his own supply of medical narcotics. Others said he lost his license selling scrip pads to make up gambling debts. Hooked through the bag on his own dope. Busted for human trafficking. The rumors were legion—but for the actors of porn in LA, he was a phone call away, cheap, and he didn't bother with such niceties as insurance: in return for services rendered, he asked only for one his three favorite things: cash, pussy, or drugs. Best of all, he made housecalls.

No matter when you talked to Palmetto, he sounded like he had just woken up from a nap. But this time of night was his prime-time; when he finally answered his phone, Sugar could hear clinking, restaurant sounds and a big group of people whooping and laughing and having a hell of a time.

"Mm,
yello
?" Palmetto's voice, buttery with Scotch and Pall Malls.

"Dr. Palmetto, I need your help."

"And this is?" Sugar pictured him: what was left of his hair in disarray, his old-style glasses crooked on his face, the bemused grin, the tumbler of Chivas.

"My name is Sugar. We met on the set of—"

"I remember you, dear." He slurped from his drink. "The little blond with the big—"

"And I remember you, Dr. Palmetto. You said anytime I needed anything, to give you a call."

"And now you need something—anything—and here we be." He slurped at his drink and smacked his lips.

"Yes. Can you come now?" He said nothing, but she heard the clink of a lighter. "I have money." Still no answer, and she felt a trickle of cold fear. Not just for Jynx—but a sneaking, wormy fear for herself. She didn't exactly have Blue Cross, and from what she'd seen from Jynx, it was going to get worse before it got better. Much worse. There were a few other doctors friendly to industry people, but Palmetto was something they were not: discreet. Other doctors and their staff would talk. Word would get out. The terror of her body undergoing these changes was dim in comparison to the fear of embarrassment she would face when this got out. And, of course, she would be done in the business; any hint of disease like this would mean instant and complete banishment from all film sets. She took a deep mental breath. "And maybe if you treat me—us—right, we can talk about other forms of payment."

Palmetto made another wet smacking noise over his drink, and her stomach curdled. "Us, you say? You, and another girl?" He dragged it out, the ice clinking in his glass. "What's the address?"

He arrived an hour later, reeking of booze. Any cop pulling him over on the expressway could have just stuck a breathalyzer into the car and gotten a reading off the charts. There was dirt under his fingernails.

After insisting on another drink, Palmetto told Jynx to strip. His salacious manner disappeared as soon as he got his first look.

"And
how
long has this been…growing?" A cigarette smoldered between his fingers, forgotten, while he tilted his head back to peer through his bifocals. He lowered a reading lamp until it almost touched Jynx's skin. "It looks like some kind of plant fiber." He brushed at it with a pencil, and Jynx winced. "I've heard of fungal infections that can grow on skin. Hell, one time up in Canada, a colleague of mine saw a lumberjack come in with a nasty cough, x-rays showing a black spot, all signs the guy was developing a big old juicy case of carcinoma. The surgeons opened him up to have a peek and they found a goddamn pine tree sprouting in the lobe of his right lung. A Douglas fir, as I recall. He'd breathed in some kind of spore, and the thing just took root and commenced a-growing. But this; this is something else." He rolled a bit of it up with the pencil and tugged. Jynx whimpered. "Tied right in there with the old nervous system. That's a new one on me. Could be a new one to medical science, unless I miss my guess."

"Well, we don't really care about getting our names in
The Lancet
, to be honest. We just want to get rid of it."

He peered up at Sugar. "Not too many girls in the business follow the MD rags. Pre-med?"

"I thought about it. Too many student loans."

"A shame, you'd probably make a good sawbones." He turned back to Jynx, moving the lamp this way and that to get a better view. "The way you two contracted it pegs it as an STD—though not one I've ever heard of. And I," he peered over his glasses at the girls, "have seen some shit." He sipped from his drink, almost burning himself with his cigarette, his eyes on the growths in Jynx's skin.

"Well, what can we do about it?" Sugar asked. She hated the careening, unmoored sense of fate no longer in her hands. She curled and uncurled her hands, trying to ignore the subcutaneous itching. How much worse was it going to get? And under that, an echoing thought: how much could she stand?

He sighed and stretched, grimacing at the minute crackling from his spine. The light made him look the dark side of sixty, instead of on the uphill climb to fifty-five. "To be honest, I don't have the slightest goddamned clue. My advice? Go see a doctor. A real doctor."

"Look, you know we can't afford it. They don't exactly hand out health benefits in our line of work. I'm trying to save up enough to get out of the business some day. We go into the hospital now, and not only do we lose any future gigs, so does everyone else we've worked with since. We won't just be out of a job, people will be out for our blood."

"You can't afford to just wait and see either."

"No, we can't."

"Then I think you're gonna have a bad time of it."

Jynx sank cross-legged to the floor and began to sob. Palmetto looked at her, and Sugar could see something that might have been sympathy play across his features.

"I'll do anything if you help us."

Palmetto looked at her, saw the naked challenge in her eyes, and smiled. "
Anything
is normally my favorite word. In this case, though; whatever you girls have, I'm not up for it." He sighed, and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. "I have an idea. But you're not going to like it. Now, what else do you have for liquor in this place? I'm thirsty as hell."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Rudy Bickler padded down the hallway, alert for any sign of the night duty nurse. Gottselig was on tonight, according to the roster pinned to the break-room board, and she was the worst of that whole damn tribe of withered old bitches. Gottselig was the nurse's Union rep, and had no fear of Rudy's father, much less Rudy himself. She seemed to delight in getting on Rudy's case about the slightest infraction, and the sharp side of her tongue stung indeed. He crept along in his crepe-sole shoes, patting the right front pocket of his scrubs for the hundredth time, making sure he had his phone.

He peeked around the corner. The hallway in front of Neumann's room was empty, but with the air of having just been vacated. He cats-pawed down, wincing at a sudden squeak from his shoe on the lino. Nothing stirred, so he carried on to Neumann's room. The bright pink 'Infection Control' card was tucked into the chart pocket on the door, and baskets holding sterile gowns and booties sat to either side. The blinds were open a couple of inches at the bottom, for night-time checks, Nothing was stirring inside. He cracked the door and backed through—if anyone was inside, he would claim he was in the wrong room, and to anyone in the hall, it would look like he was on his way out.

Nothing but the creeping, undersea sound of a hospital room at night—the gentle click of machines, an occasional soft ping from a monitor. Neumann lay still, the only movement the steady pulses of light emitted by the machines.

I hope they have this asshole doped to the eyeballs, he is one scary motherfucker. Good Christ, but he stinks.

He crept to the side of the bed and peered down at the patient. Disgusting. Rudy liked to brag about the revolting shit he saw daily in the hospital, from the maggoty wounds of sidewalk junkies, to the seven-hundred pound sit-in the EMTs had hauled in one hot day in June. Along with half a dozen porters, they got his fat ass out of the truck and onto a special-made gurney, ready to take him upstairs for emergency surgery—just before his intestines ruptured and came farting out of his asshole, spraying blood and pus and shit literally everywhere. The smell was strong enough to knock a brass eagle off a shit-pile. It had been enough to put Rudy off his kibble for a week.

But this was worse, in some indefinable way: it was a perversion of the human body, that precious machine. Rudy was a self-professed fat slob and proud of it, but he believed sincerely in the power of the mental over the physical, and that the mind manifested itself directly in the body. He felt a wave of revulsion like a cold chill as he gazed down at the infection raving through Neumann.

The stuff had crawled its way up his neck, over the lower parts of his face like a beard, and had extended grimy fingers upward toward his eyes. The bottom half of him had been consumed almost completely. In the dim of the room, the lights from the machines pricked up sparks of color from the stuff: poison green, noxious yellow, cyanide blue. Each color glittered like sprinkled broken glass.