Last Days (14 page)

"Just a minute," she said.

He heard a low rustling on the other end of the line.

"The IV bag," she said. "It's fuller than it should be."

He thought briefly about releasing the cut end of the tubing, letting it drip into the bed. Instead, he groped for the dentist's mirror.

"Probably just a kink in the line," she said. "Hold on."

She turned back toward him, resting the telephone receiver on the bedside table. He could still hear a voice coming out of it.
Be careful
, it was saying. In the half-light she followed the tubing down from the bag, running her fingers along it until she got to the edge of the bed. With one hand, she lowered the railing. She had already pulled the blanket aside, her head down and close to him, before he realized this was finally his chance and drove the end of the stylus as hard as he could up and into her face, the pain in his eye rising immediately to such a pitch that he passed out.

He came conscious to find himself struggling for breath. The woman had fallen onto him, was lying with her shoulder pressed against his mouth. The tubing had come out of his hand and started dripping: the bed was wet on one side. It was wet around his face too, on the pillow, but warmer, and when he turned his head to try to breathe he could see the fluid was dark and from the smell guessed it must be blood.

His shoulder was beginning to throb. He wriggled a little and her shoulder slid off his face, and her neck and ear slid down to replace it. He wriggled again, and pushed with his remaining arm. The head slowly tilted, the ear rolling down his cheekbone and the skull pushing against his face through hair that swept it wetly along and past his lips. The head yawed up and in the darkness he caught the brief glint of the mirror's stylus and then the mirror itself, anchored somewhere in her face, then the rest of the body slipped off the bed and collapsed onto the floor.

He lay there, panting. Hair was caught in his lips and he tried blowing it out and then brushing it away with his hand. He lay still, catching his breath, the pillow's dampness growing tacky, sticky.

Relax
, he told himself.
Stay calm.

But lying there in the dark he kept thinking he could hear her somewhere below him, feebly moving. There was a sound like whispering or something rustling over paper. In the dark below, he couldn't help but imagine her fingers moving, her body slowly gathering itself.

Soon he came to feel it was worse lying there imagining her coming back to life than whatever getting out of bed would do to his eye. Slowly, he swung his legs off the bed and raised his body, his head throbbing. At first, he didn't realize he was standing on her body and then he almost fell trying to figure out how to step off her without slipping or falling. But then almost without knowing it he was out of bed, still conscious, steadying himself against the mattress with one hand.

Still hearing the scuttling, he straightened enough to grope for a light switch, almost falling in reaching for it.

The lights flickered a moment before coming on, sickly white. It hurt his head to look down. When he did, she was there, contorted and face down, head suspended a few inches off the floor by the dentist's mirror, face hidden by the back of her head, a swath of blood along the bed and floor to mark how she had slid. She wasn't moving at all.

It took him a moment of standing and staring to realize that the scuttling was not coming from her but from the table, from the uncradled telephone receiver. He reached out and picked it up, held it against his face.

The scuttling became a whisper, then a voice talking into his ear.
Mlinko
, it was saying.
Tell us what happened, Mlinko. Mlinko, please pick up the telephone.

He listened for a while, finally said, "This isn't Mlinko."

The whispering stopped. For a moment, he thought the line had gone dead.

When the voice came back, it was no longer a whisper, but still flat, uninflected.

"Mr. Kline," the voice said.

"Yes," said Kline.

"Would you mind putting Mlinko on?"

"Mlinko seems to be dead," said Kline.

"Appears or is?"

"Both," said Kline.

"You've caused a lot of trouble," the voice said.

"I didn't ask for any of it," he could not stop himself from saying.

"Yes," said the voice. "In that case, you must remember how the rest of the conversation goes. We're still coming for you."

V.

Later, once he made it to the loading dock, he wasn't quite sure how he had managed. Only the first part was clear. He had dropped the receiver and then tried to bend down to search Mlinko's pockets, but before he was even bending his knees, he realized that there'd be no getting up again.

He looked for something on the bedside table to use as a weapon, but there was nothing. He pushed off the bed and made slowly for the door. The pain in his eye was still there, more a constant pressure than a lacerating pain as long as he made no quick movements with his shoulder.

He shuffled toward the doorway, feeling as if he were moving underwater. Once there, he balanced against the posts and then moved through the slick of blood. Davis was lying to one side, face up, throat slit, neck cricked back. Two of his fingers had been severed and removed. The blood felt warm through Kline's socks.

He slipped and almost went down, then nearly blacked out and started to go down again. He came to himself clinging to the desk of the nurses' station, on the other side of which were a pair of nurses, both with their throats cut, hands hidden so he couldn't tell if any of their fingers had been freshly amputated. One was the nurse who had answered the telephone earlier. The other he didn't recognize.

He pushed off and started down the hall, his breath coming out in throbs, his shoulder pulsing. The knife was back in his eye, sharp and long. Things began to come in bursts. Suddenly, he was farther down the hall than he thought and he could see a door at the hall's terminus, and without opening it he was on the other side. A scattering of faces reared up around him, frozen and static, like cutouts, stricken with odd expressions, falling quickly away. Another stretch of hall, a slowly descending ramp, then a tight staircase that he tumbled down as much as walked down. Somehow he was still standing when he reached the bottom. Another stretch of hall, this one dimly lit, a series of broken beds lined along one wall, followed by a series of sealed blue plastic bins. Then a double set of swinging doors. By the time things started happening in sequence again, he was slumped over a railing, staring down at the sewer grate below, on some sort of loading dock.
Now what?
he wondered. The dock was empty, no vehicles to be seen. If he followed the railing in one direction, there was a set of stairs he could go down. He could take them down and then climb the incline of the drive out of the hospital. It wasn't too steep, but he still wasn't sure he could make it. In the other direction, the railing ended just before a large green dumpster. There might be a gap between the dumpster and the far wall. Perhaps he could squeeze in.

He was still trying to decide what to do when he realized two figures had started down the drive and were coming quickly, shadows reeling in closer behind them with each step.

He turned and shuffled toward the dumpster. He could hear the dull echo of their footsteps now.
I've been seen
, he thought, but kept moving anyway, slower and slower it felt. He could see the gap better as he came closer, but still wasn't sure if it was big enough.

When he reached it, he saw that it wasn't.

He backed into it as far as he could and waited. It was a little darker there, but not dark enough to hide him. He'd probably been seen.
Or maybe
, he told himself,
they aren't looking for me
.

They came up the loading dock stairs and right to him.

"You're Kline," one of them said, the dark-haired one. He was missing an eye and most of the fingers on one hand. The other hand had been replaced by a gun prosthetic. An ear was gone as well. The other man, blond, lagging slightly behind, seemed only to be missing a hand, his right. His other hand held a gun.

Kline nodded. The inside of his head felt bruised.

"What did you do to Mlinko?" the dark-haired man asked.

"You mean specifically?"

"I mean where is she?"

"She's not anywhere," said Kline. "She's dead."

The man lifted his gun-arm, pointed it at Kline's head. "I suppose you know we've come to kill you," he said.

"I can't say I'm surprised," said Kline.

"Any last words?" asked the blond man, lifting his gun as well.

"I don't know," said Kline.

"You don't know?" said the dark-haired man, raising his eyebrows.

The blond man, Kline realized abruptly, had taken a step back and was now well behind the dark-haired one. He was no longer pointing his gun at Kline: it seemed to be slowly drifting away. A moment more and it was aimed at the dark-haired man's head, just behind his range of vision.

"Yes," said Kline quickly. "I do have something to say."

"What is it?" said the dark-haired man.

Kline opened his mouth but didn't speak, just kept looking from one man to the other, waiting for whatever would happen next.

"Too late," said the dark-haired man. "Time to die," he said, and then he was shot in the head by the blond man. He fell, gargling and frothing until the blond man pushed the snout of his pistol against the other man's ear and shot him again.

The blond man kicked the body once and then put his pistol away. "He cometh not with an olive branch but with a sword. He smiteth," he said, then moved toward Kline, smiling.

"Mr. Kline," he said, holding out his hand. "What a pleasure it is to finally meet you."

PART TWO

He could hear the sound of cars ahead, at some distance--or perhaps only something that sounded like cars. Perhaps only the wind. It was hard to know what he was hearing and what he only hoped to hear. He limped toward the sound.

There was a brief rise and then a dip and then another rise. Something was scraping the lining of his skull. He came out of the scrub and went down into the dip and stopped in a sickly stand of cottonwood edging a dried streambed. After that, there was no cover, only sparse dry grasses and dirt.

He leaned against the tree awhile. Yes, he thought, almost certainly cars. He tried to imagine climbing the rise and seeing asphalt at the top, but he couldn't imagine it. Before he knew it, his body had slipped and he was sitting, stump throbbing. He wasn't sure he'd be able to stand up again, let alone make it up the rise.

With his remaining hand, he unwrapped his stump. Its extreme showed the dead circles from the burner, pus seeping through where he had burnt it too deeply, two lumps just below the elbow that must have been the sheared bones. He covered it up again.

The blood in his shoe had grown sticky, the outside of the shoe pasty with dust and blood. He could tell from the blood dripping down his face and onto his shoulder that his head was bleeding, but he was afraid to touch it. The only time he'd touched it, his fingers had gone in deeper than he'd thought possible.

He sat leaning against the tree, trying not to lie down. His hands felt like they were curling in on themselves and dying, even the hand that wasn't there.

After a while he managed to move his hand enough to fumble a sharp stone off the ground. He prodded the end of his stump with it. It made it feel like a knife was being pushed into his eye, but he felt almost alive again too. Yawing and drunken, he crashed up to his feet, lungs feeling like they were drawing in something other than air. He took a step and saw the ground flash toward him and then flash away, and then he was walking somehow, his vision such that he could only just distinguish between earth and sky. What had sounded like cars now sounded like rock scraping against rock, the pain slowly fading back to the same dull, shocked ache he had felt for hours now.

Gradually he made out the shape of the rise. He moved toward it and slowly started up. The sound warped, became more like cars again. He watched the ground in front of him and tried to lean toward it enough to keep moving forward, but not so far as to fall.

About halfway up, he thought he was going to fall backward and had to tack to one side. His feet kept trying to turn downslope; it was all he could do to keep crabbing uphill. His body felt like a separate animal. He could only watch it, encourage it on.

And then dust and scrub grass vanished, replaced by ash-gray gravel and, just beyond that, the asphalt of a two-lane road. Not a car to be seen in either direction. He took a step onto the gravel and then another step, and then collapsed.

I.

When he awoke, he was screaming. He was not on a roadside, he was not on a hospital loading dock; he was in a bed, but not in the bed he had been in before, not the bed he had expected to be in.

"You're awake, then," said a blond man beside him who was missing his right hand.

It was a hospital bed, Kline saw, but he wasn't in a hospital. Instead, he appeared to be in a sort of old-fashioned drawing room: thick brocaded drapes, a grand piano, herringbone parquet floors.

On the wall directly across from him were two paintings which, despite gilt frames, seemed remarkably out of place. One was a simple portrait of a man's head, except the face had been gouged out to leave a pink, cone-shaped hole. The other, all grays and browns, showed a man wearing a leather helmet, leg amputated to the middle of his thigh. One arm was mostly missing, the other arm either partly missing or wrapped up and invisible. He was either blind or his eyes had rolled back into his head. He was either singing or screaming, Kline couldn't say which. Beside him lay a woman partly swallowed by a cloth bag, lying in a puddle of blood.

The blond man, he realized, was observing him closely, almost hungrily. Kline turned his head slightly to meet his gaze. The man didn't blink.