The Sandman Read Free Page A

was a bit of a hacker, but he was by no means the worst—it was just that everyone felt the same way. One had only so much time, stamina, and strength to waste on a gomer. Everyone knew she would be better off dead. So, given that premise,
anything
one did was sort of a bonus for her. Cross watched as the two surgeons started the Noble Plication, and he suddenly felt tears come to his eyes. God, don’t let them notice. What was happening to him? Was he having some kind of crackup? He didn’t understand it. But the moment he had seen her, something had clicked, and so now, as her body began to jerk a little from them tugging on her mesentery, he felt a cold chill come down his back.
    He reached for the curare, with its pale green label, only he didn’t pick it up. His hand reached for the neostigmine, and he had almost injected the drug into the IV when he noticed … My God, the wrong drug … or was it wrong … Lord, don’t let them see. Slowly, he put back the neostigmine, picked up the curare, and shot it into the IV. Six millimeters of it. Almost immediately Lorraine Bell began to relax. The doctors resumed stitching up the mesentery. The patient bucked, and now he felt a strange calmness descending over him. All the shakes and fears were gone.
    He felt himself pulling away from everything, and he found his hand reaching for the neostigmine, the syringe with 2.5 milligrams in it, reaching behind the curtain where no one could see him (but then they couldn’t see him anyway, for somehow they were no longer in the room, it was just he and Lorraine Bell, oh, yes, and he felt good … all of a piece, not split or unsure of himself anymore) and he stuck the 2-millimeter syringe into the IV, shooting the drug into it, then replaced it with the empty curare syringe, so if anybody looked, they would see nothing unusual, nothing unusual at all … and he heard his mother, Lila Lee, saying to him, “If I could just sleep through it … If I could only sleep through the pain … Petey … I could bear it if I could just sleep through the pain.”
    He checked her blood pressure. Christ, it was happening already. Her pulse rate had dropped off from 100 to 90 and was rapidly descending. Her blood pressure had dropped from 100 to 80 and was going down fast. Peter watched and felt the faintest sense of fear, a chill, but the chill seemed to be changed into something else, a rush of excitement, a spreading of happiness which poured through his veins.
    Suddenly, Dios spoke up sharply: “Hey, Peter, there isn’t much bleeding.”
    Peter turned and looked at the monitors (turned coolly, as if he had been preparing for this all his life).
    “My God,” he said, hearing his voice register a wonderfully accurate degree of shock and dismay. “Her blood pressure is down to sixty and her heart rate is down to fifty-five … and dropping … I don’t know what the hell is going on! Stop the operation until I can get her stable.”
    Oh, he had done it. Just the right amount of “professional” concern.
    Black’s voice was urgent: “Her heart … ventricular heartbeats … now it seems … Christ, she’s going into ventricular tachycardia … Shit … It’s happening too quick … What the hell is it … she’s going into V-fib …”
    Dios nodded and yelled. (Though Cross couldn’t hear him, he felt as if he had turned to gold. Never had there been anything like this. He had been waiting for this moment.) “All right, I’m starting external cardiac massage … Get the crash cart … We’ve got to get the pads on her.”
    Dios began to pump up and down on the heart, harder and harder, and Peter, feeling as though he were watching himself perform, began to give Lorraine 1.2 milligrams of atropine, which ordinarily would increase the heart rate, but he knew now that he had been successful. He had waited too long. The atropine would get to her too late … Oh, yes, as would the sodium bicarbonate, 50 milliequivalents worth he