Lost Souls

chapter 13

At 8:48 that Tuesday morning, the new Chief Rafael Jarmillo, in appearance indistinguishable from the former Rafael Jarmillo, stepped into the elevator with Dr. Henry Lightner, and the doors closed behind him.

With 106 beds, Rainbow Falls Memorial Hospital was primarily a short-term, acute-care facility. Once stabilized, those patients with chronic conditions or with critical acute conditions were transferred either by ambulance or by air ambulance to Great Falls -or to one of the town’s three funeral homes if the air ambulance did not arrive in a timely fashion.

As one of the town’s two general surgeons and head of staff at Memorial, Henry Lightner didn’t do heart work, but over the years he removed hundreds of diseased gallbladders, surely a thousand appendixes, uncounted benign cysts, and not a few bullets. He had saved victims of accidents, stabbings, shootings, and suicide attempts, and was well regarded by the people of Rainbow Falls for his skills as a physician, for his reassuring bedside manner, and for his civic spirit.

The current Dr. Lightner was not the real Dr. Lightner. Although he had downloaded enough of the physician’s memories to pass for the doctor, he couldn’t have performed even the most simple surgery with any expectation of success.

The Creator hadn’t yet developed a brain tap that could entirely transfer complex acquired knowledge, such as a medical education. Eventually that would happen. Given enough time, the Creator could accomplish whatever goal he set for himself.

Anyway, in seventy-two hours, by this time Friday morning, Rainbow Falls would have no need of physicians or a hospital. By then its entire population would consist of members of the Community, none of whom was vulnerable to disease or infection, and every one of whom was able to recover swiftly from all but the most grievous wounds.

“The entire day shift has arrived?” Jarmillo asked as they descended to the basement of the two-story building.

“Nursing staff, clerical, technicians, maintenance,” Lightner confirmed. “The hospital has a shift-overlap system, so they arrived at seven o’clock. They were met by replicants. Memory downloading is complete. We’ll deal with the physicians one by one as they arrive for their daily rounds.”

The elevator doors opened, and Henry Lightner led Chief Jarmillo into a corridor with pale-blue walls and a white ceramic-tile floor.

Busy day-shift clerical and maintenance personnel were using hand trucks and moving carts to empty several offices of hospital records, filing cabinets, and furniture.

“Everything is being dumped in the garage, which is on this level,” Lightner reported. “These interior rooms offer the security and the sound abatement we need for the Builders.”

“Are they noisy?”

“Not themselves so much. But maybe their materials.”

Lightner opened a door and preceded Chief Jarmillo into a twenty-foot-square room that had been emptied of its contents in order to accommodate the eighteen people imprisoned there.

“These are night-shift, been here since we took over the place almost five hours ago.”

Ten nurses and two orderlies in uniforms, one young resident physician who was on duty to deal with emergency admissions in a hospital too small to have an ER, two maintenance men, two security guards, and a building-systems engineer were in custody. Each sported a dime-sized silver hemisphere, the nailhead of a brain tap, in his or her left temple.

Members of the Community were not capable of wild flights of imagination or of hyperbole, so Chief Jarmillo reported only what was obvious to his five senses when he said, “The air seems thick with their fear.”

As instructed, seventeen of the prisoners were sitting on the floor with their backs against the walls. In some cases, their arms hung slack, hands limp on the floor, palms upturned. Others worried one white-knuckled hand with the other: wringing, pulling, clutching in quiet desperation.

Two of them were blank-eyed, as if oblivious of their situation, and one of those two drooled. Some eyes were fixed with dread, like the unwavering stares of small, tender animals in the sudden shadow of a grinning wolf. Some of the condemned glanced quickly from one fellow prisoner to another, from this wall to that, from ceiling to floor, here and there and here again, their eyes as twitchy as the eyes of dead-end alcoholics in the grip of delirium tremens, as if they were hallucinating insectile horrors everywhere they looked.

The uniform skirt worn by one of the nurses and the khaki pants of a security guard were discolored with urine. The air was likewise redolent of sour sweat.

One of the younger nurses lay flat on her back, arms at her sides, motionless. Blood pooled in her eyes.

“Hemorrhaging?” Chief Jarmillo asked.

Dr. Lightner said, “Yes.”

“A problem with the brain tap?”

“Yes. But the only one so far.”

“Is she alive?”

“She was for a while. Now she’s dead.”

“Carrion,” Jarmillo said.

Lightner nodded. “But still useful.”

“Yes. As useful as their kind has ever been.”

As they returned to the hallway, Dr. Lightner said, “The replicants of the night staff have gone home to their families. Soon they’ll oversee the replacement of their wives, husbands, children.”

“Where’s the day staff?”

Indicating the closed door to the next room along the hallway, Lightner said, “As the day staff, of course, there are more of them.”

“When will they be rendered?”

“Later this morning. The Builders arrive in about an hour.”

“How many patients currently in the hospital?”

“Eighty-nine.”

“When will you start moving them down here?”

“As they’re needed,” said Lightner, “but not before the swing shift has come to work and been replaced by replicants. Perhaps as early as five o’clock this afternoon.”

“That’s a long time.”

“But it’s per schedule.”

“What assistance do you need from me?” asked Jarmillo.

“Originally, I thought four deputies. Now, I think one will do.”

Jarmillo raised his eyebrows. “Only one?”

“Mostly as a liaison, to expedite the dispatch of other deputies if a crisis arises.”

“Evidently you don’t expect a crisis or any kind of difficulty.”

Lightner shook his head. “We’ve found them easy. Trusting. Submissive to authority even before a brain tap. Not like we thought Montanans might be.”

“We’ve found the same,” said Jarmillo. “So much for the Wild West. Everywhere now is a sheepfold.”

“We’ve started calling them two-legged lambs,” Lightner said. “We’ll easily have the whole town sheared by dawn Friday.”

With contempt as richly satisfying as his growing delight in the prospect of triumph, the chief said, “Sheared and butchered.”