DAVE RILEY HAD worked the E.R. at Immaculate Heart for a less than a year, and had seen enough to make him wonder if he could pull off this doctor bit for another thirty or forty. For the most part Riley could take the stabbings, the shootings, the overdoses and assaults. He was even getting good at turning his emotions off when the ambulance jockeys wheeled in a child without a limb or missing part of his or her face, screaming and oozing.
There was a trick to it. He just didn’t give a fuck. He thought of them as machines, because all he really was in the end was a mechanic for bodies. Riley had pretty much dumped the last of his doubts about his longevity in the field of medicine. He could handle it. Just turn off the emotions and try not to let his drinking get too bad. And then, the street boy came in.
Apparently, the kid had expired before the wagon even got there. Instead of tagging and bagging the little punk right there, one of the paramedics (brand new of-fucking-course) had decided to yank the bum-boy back from the brink.
The surgery had gone rather well. The wound had been a neat hole. The ice pick had angled through the sternum, pierced the left lung and collapsed it. It had been a simple matter of reinflating the lung and sewing up the puncture, just like a child’s inner tube.
Riley stood over his fresh repair work, tugging the last sutures taught. He wondered about brain damage. He threw red-rimmed eyes at the gas-passer. “We know how long he was flat-lined before they got him here?”
The anesthesiologist peered over her mask. She had long eyelashes. “EMT said just a couple of minutes.”
“Good,” Riley nodded. “I wouldn’t want to go to all this trouble just to save a cabbage.” He stepped away from the operating table and stripped his gloves. Turning his back, Riley tossed them into the biohazard bin. The anesthesiologist also turned away to check a monitor displaying the vital signs of her comatose patient. No one noticed as Johnny’s hand flashed out at the instrument tray and back to his side.
Riley was just about to make a joke about how bad the kid smelled when the anesthesiologist gasped, “Oh, my god.”
Riley spun around. “The hell?”
His patient was sitting up on the table, oxygen intubation hanging from his mouth. The boy grabbed the tubing and yanked, retching and throwing raw, wet coughs until he expelled the apparatus. It only took a second and there he was, one moment swimming in an artificially induced drug coma, the next sitting up and staring at Riley with something like amusement. The blue surgical covers fell away from the street urchin’s chest, exposing his white rib cage and the iodine smear around the freshly stitched wound.
The anesthesiologist stepped forward, her voice calm. She’d never seen this level of cognizance, but sometimes patients did come around early. “Stop,” she soothed, “ you have to lay—”
Without taking his eyes off Riley, Johnny whipped backward with his left hand. The anesthesiologist wailed and fell over backward, her upper lip slashed most of the way off. A scrub nurse stepped up and tried to grab Johnny’s arm. Still staring at Riley, smiling now, Johnny grabbed her around the neck in a one-armed headlock like they were barroom chums in a tussle. Her eyes bloomed as Johnny bit the tip of her ear off and shoved her away. She cymbal-crashed through the instrument tray and balled up in the corner, holding her head. The blood seeped through her fingers, bright and electric on the white surgical gloves. The room swam in shrieks.
Johnny sliced into the soft the pad of his index finger and offered it to Riley. A voice that had not spoken in a thousand-thousand years rasped over abused vocal chords, thick and delighted. “Would you care to be blood brothers, Doctor?”