The Survivor Read online

  Nate set his pills next to his coffee mug in a neat line. The antibiotics again, another five-hundred-milligram surge to ravage his stomach further, and good old reliably ineffective riluzole. The Lovin’ Spoonful caroled from the vintage-style jukebox: Be-lieve in the magic that kin set you freee. Would that he could.

  Cielle looked across at Nate. “Why are you so quiet?”

  “Don’t mean to be.” Troublingly, his voice was weak; he couldn’t get any power behind it. With shaking hands he reached for the pills. It took some concentration to bring them to his mouth. He washed them down with a sip of decaf.

  “He’s fine,” Janie said, too quickly. “Just exhausted like the rest of us.”

  The coffee’s bitter aftertaste lingered, and instinctively he reached for the sugar packs. It wasn’t until he had one in his weak, trembling grasp that he realized the challenge before him—of tearing it open, pouring the crystals, stirring. He flapped the pack against his knuckles, trying for casual, but Cielle’s brown eyes remained on him, not buying the routine. He let the sugar fall, and her stare dropped to his shaking fingers. Too obvious now to take his hands off the table. He strained, willing them to be still, but was rescued by Janie, who reached over and clasped them as if romantically, firming them and hiding the tremor.

  Thankfully, Jason’s obliviousness could be counted on. “I still can’t believe that chick—the dude’s daughter—offed herself.”

  Behind the counter, sausage links landed on the grill with a sizzle and a puff of steam. “She was just seventeen,” Nate said.

  Cielle said, “She was a drunk-driving psychopath.”

  “She was still a kid,” Nate said. “Like both of you.”

  Cielle looked away sharply.

  Freeing his hands from Janie’s, Nate reached for his coffee again but only succeeded in slopping some over the rim. He dried his hands on a napkin, all too aware of his daughter across from him. He did not want to look up, but finally he did. Sure enough, she was lasered in on his hands.

  “There’s this experimental therapy.” She jerked in a breath. “In Switzerland.”

  “Oh, honey,” he said. “No.”

  But she drove on. “I looked it up on the Internet.”

  “No, Cielle. There’s nothing that’ll—”

  “No? Just no? If we live through this, you can’t fucking try it?”

  “Watch your language,” Janie said.

  Cielle glared at Nate. “God, you wonder why I hate you.” She banged her fist on the table, making the plates and cups jump. A spoon bounced off into Jason’s lap. The diner silenced, the patrons’ collective focus pulling toward the corner booth, and then Cielle stormed out, leaving the door jingling cheerily. Nate tracked her through the window. Casper awaited her in the Jeep, tail knocking the headrests.

  “At least she hates you,” Jason said quietly.

  Nate said, numbly, “Huh?”

  Jason tugged his collar down in the front to reveal a necklace tattoo formed of words and letters: OLD BASTARD 1.23.70—5.10.2010. “Cirrhosis,” he said. “Dying just made him meaner. I told myself I hated him, but I really wanted him just to fucking recognize, you know, something in me.…” He shook his head. “Never mind. I’m just saying. Hate’s an emotion, you know?”

  He scooted out and went after her.

  Nate drank a sip of water. His face was twitching, and it took a moment for him to realize that it was not from being upset.

  Janie’s voice, as if from a deep well: “—okay?”

  Hand pressed to his cheek, he nodded. He could feel the muscle jumping beneath his palm. Fasciculation, the doctors called it. He had been warned.

  “Just need … bathroom.” His voice, even weaker than before.

  He weaved a bit on his feet but managed a course for the men’s room, closing the door behind him with his hip. The room was dank, swirling with black flies. He regarded his face in the rust-flecked mirror, the twitch just below his right eye. He squinted, trying to make it stop, but still the skin rippled. A swell of light-headedness came on, static dotting his view along with the flies, and he staggered, banging into the hand-towel dispenser. The room blurred.

  Fresh air. He needed fresh air.

  Shoving through the bathroom door, he took a hard right and moved swiftly through the kitchen, nearly knocking the rear screen from its hinges. The smell from the Dumpster swarmed him, and he took a knee next to crates stuffed with rotting heads of cabbage. He tried to rise, but nausea kept him down. Refuse crowded in on him, his view swirling drunkenly, and then the ground came up hard against his cheek.

  His blinks grew longer. Each breath rocked the crumpled napkin an inch from his mouth. A masculine figure approached, off kilter and blurry, hoisting up his jeans like a cowboy. Blood pattered the ground before his combat boots. He had a hole straight through the middle of him, intestines dangling like marionette strings, the sun shining right through him. When he crouched, the hole disappeared and a shadow fell across Nate, the shadow of death. He looked up and saw Charles’s face peering down, a hint of sorrow hiding behind the wise-ass scowl.

  “See ya soon, podnah.” Charles reached out and thumbed Nate’s eyelids closed.

  Chapter 48

  “No hospital,” Nate murmured, slumped in the passenger seat, the window cool against his cheek. The view outside scrolled by, a blur.

  Janie honked and stomped on the gas pedal, veering around a Mercedes. “You lost your say in the matter when you passed out in an alley.”

  Cielle’s voice, high and tremulous, came from the backseat. “Are you okay, Dad? Is he gonna be okay?”

  “I’m … fine, honey,” Nate said.

  Jason: “He doesn’t sound fine.”

  The noise of Cielle smacking him. “Shut the fuck up, Jason.”

  “… where…?” Nate managed between swells of nausea.

  “We’re going to my hospital,” Janie said, “if this asshole in an Audi in front of us ever learns to drive.”

  “No … first place they’ll look.…”

  “I know the doctors, the intake nurses. I can get you in without putting you in the system. You’ll be John Doe. It’s our best bet.”

  Already they were redlining up smog-drenched Van Nuys Boulevard. Sure enough, the long white block of the Sherman Oaks Hospital zoomed past. Despite its unpromising location, the community hospital had top-notch staff who serviced a full gamut of the injured and the ailing. Meeting Janie here for lunch early in their marriage, Nate was as likely to stumble across a gardener cradling a severed, hankie-wrapped finger as a celebrity walking her kid out of the world-class burn unit.

  “… Cielle shouldn’t … with us…”

  “She can wait in the park up the street.”

  “I can drive,” Jason said brightly.

  “Fine.” Janie tugged a wad of hundreds from her pocket and tossed it back at Cielle. “Take the Jeep and the dog. I’ll call you every hour.”

  Nate tried to shape his mouth into another complaint but had to focus on breathing so as not to throw up. The Jeep lurched to a stop in front of the emergency-room doors, and then Casper was barking as Jason clambered forward into the driver’s seat. Janie appeared through Nate’s window, her fingers at the handle, and then he was tumbling out into her arms.

  They headed in, Janie bearing half his weight, the glass doors yawning open before them.

  * * *

  “Antibiotics?” Dr. Griffin flipped the chart. “Who the hell put him on antibiotics?”

  Janie looked across at Nate, who rustled on the stiff white sheets of the hospital bed and said, weakly, “She was … ER doc.”

  “ER doc. Terrific. With his condition she didn’t think it necessary to pick up the phone to his treating physician? Or at least to consult Epocrates on her iPhone? What’s he taking?”

  “Keflex,” Janie said. “Five hundred mg’s qid.”

  “What for?”

  “I keep getting stabbed,” Nate said.

  Dr. Gr
iffin shot him a look over the top of his perpetually slipping tortoiseshell glasses. His brown eyes, nearly as dark as his skin, held a pinpoint focus that didn’t match the saggy mien, the professorial potbelly, or the day-old scruff.

  “We have an interaction?” Janie asked, getting the doctor back on task. Though Nate wasn’t familiar with Dr. Griffin, Janie’s working rapport with him was evident.

  “Antibiotics raise the level of riluzole in the blood,” the doctor said. “Not only do the liver enzymes spike—which can cause liver failure—but they increase the likelihood and severity of side effects. Which are—”

  Janie cut in: “Weakness, fatigue, nausea, headaches, abdominal pain, dizziness—”

  “—which in turn can exacerbate ALS symptoms.”

  Nate rolled his head on the pillow, keeping pace with the Ping-Pong match. An IV line pushed fluids steadily into his arm; already he was feeling a bit more clearheaded. As he untangled the medicalspeak, he felt a faint pulse of hope. “So it’ll get better?” he asked. “The muscle weakness?”

  “It should subside, yes, along with the dizziness and nausea once your blood levels drop.”

  Nate took a few cautious sips of air, relieved. “How long will that take?” he asked. His voice box felt feeble, no weight behind the words.

  “Six to eight hours for Keflex to leave the bloodstream,” Janie said. “Another six or so for the riluzole levels to back down to normal.”

  “But that’s not the point.” Dr. Griffin tugged at his jowls, which had surprising give. “You need supportive care. Fluids, rest—”

  “Rest,” Nate protested.

  “You are sick, Mr. Overbay. I don’t have to tell you that ALS is serious business. What you’re doing to yourself—it’s not tenable. You are dehydrated, hypoglycemic, suffering from lack of sleep. You can’t do this given your condition.” Dr. Griffin dropped the chart on the end of Nate’s bed and turned to Janie. “Give your John Doe here another liter of saline and see if you can talk some sense into him.”

  Janie crossed her arms, shot a breath at the ceiling. “I’ve been trying for years.”

  * * *

  The needle’s pressure in his arm stayed constant, even when Nate dozed off. He surfaced from a brief sleep, blinking to consciousness, and focused on the tiny form at the foot of his bed. At first he thought it was a dream image hanging on, a vision from the spirit world. A painfully thin Hispanic boy, maybe six, with a bald, leukemic head that in combination with oversize eyes made him look vaguely alien. He wore black pajamas decorated with white bones—a skeleton costume—and clutched a starched pillowcase.

  “Trick or treat,” he said.

  Nate sat up quickly. Charles he was used to, but this? He managed to say, “Uh…”

  The boy shook the pillowcase imploringly. “It’s Halloween.”

  Was it? Nate rewound the days, reorienting himself. It was. And the boy was real, or at least he appeared to be. The ceiling-hung dividing curtain had been partly drawn back so that Nate could see, above the unoccupied bed, dusk darkening the windows. Trick-or-treat time.

  He glanced across at his food tray. “I have Jell-O.”

  “No. There.” The boy pointed to a cup that had appeared on Nate’s nightstand. “They leave you candy for us. See? So we can have Halloween even though we’re stuck in here.”

  Nate reached into the cup, pulled out a mini–Three Musketeers, and with a trembling hand dropped it into the boy’s pillowcase. “Want more?”

  “You hafta save it for the others.”

  “Others?”

  But the boy was already at the door, heading to his next benefactor. “My bones glow in the dark,” he announced. His little hand clicked the light switch. Sure enough, there it was, a cartoonish skeleton with a faint green tinge. The light came back on, Nate making sure to wipe the astonished expression off his face.

  A little girl entered next with fuzzy angel wings and a burn savaging her chin and throat. Fighting the knot forming in his throat, Nate produced a gentle grin for her and a bite-size Butterfinger. Next, a preteen pulling her own IV pole. They kept trickling in, one after the other, with their tiny voices and heartrending costumes.

  After the last child departed, Nate carefully extracted his IV line and stepped into the hall. There they all were in the corridor, a ragged parade, standing in rough assembly under the benign direction of an immense, soft-featured orderly. Nate’s hand quaked and his ankle had again gone numb, yet he refused to tear his eyes from the spectacle and withdraw to his bed. With their glow-in-the-dark bones and angel wings, the children seemed to point the way to where he was headed. Pixie faces lit with delight, they showed off their costumes and compared their hauls. All that hope and promise, uneroded even here in a hospital ward on Halloween.

  From the nurses’ station at the far end of the hall, Janie looked on, too. Nate managed a nod, and she gave a smile and a little wave.

  “Come on, now,” the orderly called out to her brood, “time to hit the next floor up.”

  They followed her to the stairs like a row of ducklings, a diminutive Darth Vader wrestling off his mask and taking a few genuine asthmatic wheezes as he passed from sight.

  The tender display unlocked something inside Nate’s chest, and all the anguish of the past week and a half rushed out, overwhelming him. Sagging against the wall, he pressed his thumb and forefinger to his eyes. But it was no use. The emotion came, swelling over him, and he hunched into himself, drawing halting breaths, struggling not to cry.

  Janie was at his side, rubbing his back, somehow grasping the unexplainable, and, doubled over, he gripped her forearm. His mind spun, throwing out sense memories: his mother wasting away on that hospice bed in the dim air of the living room. The smell of decay on her breath. Abibas shading his eyes, staring back from the top of that dune. McGuire staring at his severed leg uncomprehendingly. Don’t leave me don’t leave me don’t you leave me. Little girl with a burned face and angel wings.

  For a time Nate and Janie held each other and breathed together, taking in the sounds and smells of the bustling medical ward in motion. A waft of iodine. Wobbly wheels on a gurney. A yielding cough, muffled by a closed door.

  A set of clogs tapped through Nate’s field of vision, a nurse calling out, “Good to see you again, girl. You been on vacation?”

  “Sort of,” Janie said. “Good to see you, too, Renee.”

  “Oh, I logged you in.”

  Janie stiffened in Nate’s arms. “Wait. You what?”

  “You forgot to sign in. Can’t get paid if you don’t—”

  “When? When?”

  “Relax, girl. When I was coming back from my coffee run, I saw you in here with Dr. Suspenders. What’s that—forty minutes ago?”

  At the end of the crowded corridor, the elevator dinged. A flush of heat rolled through Nate’s face, the premonition of something dire to come. He straightened up, lifting his head to see the lit circle announcing the car’s arrival, flicking in and out of view between patients and doctors.

  The doors peeled open, and Misha stepped out.

  Chapter 49

  The security guard overflowing the folding chair next to the elevator glanced up from the L.A. Times, then returned his gaze to the print. Misha glided to the nurses’ station at which Janie had been standing moments before.

  “I am looking for Nurse Jane Overbay.”

  “I’m sorry, she’s not working today.”

  Misha walked past the nurses’ station, heading down the crowded hall. Still he didn’t spot Janie and Nate, frozen in the bustling corridor.

  “Sir, where’s your visitor pass? I’m sorry, you can’t go in here without a visitor pass. Sir!”

  Without breaking stride Misha drew a handgun from inside his jacket, aiming over the counter as he passed, and shot the nurse through the hip point-blank. The force blew her straight off the chair onto the floor, where she began convulsing. Behind him the security guard could barely wobble to his feet before Misha
pulled a second gun with his free hand and fired twice, streaking the wall behind the man. A newspaper section fluttered down atop his body, soaking up blood.

  A beat of stunned silence.

  And then the medical ward erupted. Patients shouting, wheelchairs overturning, bodies stampeding for the stairs. As Misha powered down the hall, kicking aside gurneys and toppling IV poles, Janie shoved Nate through the doorway into his room. He scrambled across the bed and grabbed his jacket, flipping it around, looking for the pocket, willing his weak hands to work faster.

  Footsteps. Screams. Another gunshot, followed by a primal howl.

  “He’s just shooting people,” Janie said.

  Nate had the gun out finally, in his trembling grasp. He pushed Janie behind the dividing curtain and tugged it. In the ceiling track, the nylon wheels gave a screech, the sound lost beneath the crash of a cart overturning in the hall and more shouts of panic.

  The boom of a door being kicked in up the hall. A startled shriek. Then a matching screech of a curtain being raked back.

  Seconds later another boom. Another screech.

  Janie’s panicked breaths against Nate’s ear. “He’s going room to room.”

  They waited, the scrubs-green sheet rippling before their faces. With an unsteady thumb, Nate pushed the safety off his Beretta.

  Heavy footsteps—probably boots. The complaint of a desiccated voice, a crash, then a faint moan. Boom. Screech.

  Dr. Griffin’s voice, right outside in the corridor. “Don’t, just don’t—”

  Gunshot.

  Janie gave out a faint cry, pressed both hands across her mouth. They could hear Dr. Griffin’s wet, labored breaths.

  Now right next door. Boom. Screech.

  Janie’s whisper came again, a rush of hot air. “We should run.”