At all costs

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Travis was tired of the pain. He was tired of being checked and poked and peeked into. Most of all, he was tired of this tube they’d shoved down his throat to help him breathe. It helped some that it didn’t hiss anymore unless he told it to; unlike before, when it made him breathe.

The hissing snake. When he was first climbing out of the deep cave of his unconsciousness, in those horrible moments when the line between reality and fear was blurred, all he could think about was the snake in his mouth. He’d panicked, clawing at the tube with both hands to pull it free. They said he was strong, too. It took two doctors and a nurse to keep his arms pinned to the bed. The struggle didn’t last long, of course. Somebody injected something into his IV line, and right away, everything changed. He wasn’t afraid of the snake anymore. In fact, he wasn’t afraid of much of anything.

Gushing apologies, and assuring him over and over again that he’d done nothing wrong, the doctors and nurses went on to put fleece-and-leather handcuffs on his wrists-they called them restraints-and tied his arms to the metal bed rails. “We can’t afford to have you pulling that tube out,” one of them explained.

He understood, but he wished there was a way to make them trust him again. Better still, that there was a way for him to rub his nose. He’d have apologized by now, but he couldn’t make a sound. Apparently, this mile-long piece of plastic went right between his vocal cords and kept them from working. They told him not to worry, though. At the rate he was going, the tube would be out in a day or two. “Remarkable progress” is what they called it.

Of course, the mere fact that he couldn’t talk didn’t stop anyone from asking him questions. Tons of them. Can you feel this? Can you hear that? Can you squeeze my hands? On and on, with his only possible reply being a nod of his head. Happily enough, as far as he could tell, he’d given nothing but right answers.

He just wished that they’d get their act together. Every new face that came to see him asked the same questions as the face that preceded it. And the winner in the category of most frequently asked question by a doctor in ugly clothes was: Does it hurt when you breathe?

Thank God the answer to that was finally a no. If he never had to endure another night like last night, he’d die happy. Now, if they could just do something about the damned monitors. Between the hissing of the respirator and the incessant bleep-bleep of the EKG, he felt like he was going nuts. Those sounds made him think too much about things you were never supposed to be aware of-things that the body was just supposed to do. He kept waiting for that time when the noise didn’t happen. He knew from television that that would be the moment when he died.

Try to block it out.

He wanted his mom. He knew it was wimpy to think such a thing, but it was the truth. She loved him more than anything, and if she were here, he could relax a little more; let her do his worrying for him. If it weren’t for the cops, he knew she’d never have left his side. She’d have just sat there, holding his hand and talking nonstop about nothing.

He worried about her. He could still see that look on her face in the car, right before his vision had begun to sparkle. He didn’t like seeing his mom wrapped that tight. It brought back memories of the awful days when she was drinking, and he berated himself for being the cause of a potential relapse.

He missed his dad, too, but in a different way. Dad could take care of himself. But Mom needed him.

A lady named Jan-she called herself a physician’s assistant, whatever that was-told him his mom and dad were both okay but that they wouldn’t be able to come by to visit. He didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but in his heart, he knew they’d come for him sooner or later. They’d have to. He’d seen the look in his dad’s eyes as he took him away from Mr. Menefee’s school. Sometimes his dad was too intense, but once he set his mind to something, there was no stopping him. Just ask the FBI. The thought made him smile.

Of all the doctors and nurses he’d met in the past few hours, Jan was far and away his favorite. Besides her quick smile and her perfect teeth, she always took the time to explain stuff to him. It was like she could read his mind, zooming right in on the questions he wanted most to ask but couldn’t. If he was alone and he had a question, all he had to do was turn his head to the right, and she’d catch his eye through the window separating his room from the nurses’ station. Seconds later she’d be right there by his side.

She was the one who told him about the heart monitor; how the shape of the little squiggles on the screen showed that his heart was working perfectly. “That’s your good-news monitor,” she said.

He’d seen those green tracings a million times on television and never even thought about them. Up close, though, it was cool. That those sticky white pads on his chest could record every contraction of his heart made him wonder at the science of it all. Maybe one day he’d become a doctor himself, he decided. Or maybe a physician’s assistant. From what he could tell, they had the best of all worlds: they got to do all the cool stuff without having to go to school forever.

“I want you to think of me as your mom away from home,” Jan told him. “If you need anything at all, just press the call button here on your controller.” She showed him a beige plastic box that was roughly the shape of a fat letter T. “I’m gonna loop it around your bed rail here so you can reach it easily. Just push the button at the bottom here.”

As she demonstrated, he thought he could hear a distant ding out in the nurses’ station. He tried it once, and it worked, but between the restraints and the IV crap dangling from his arm, it wasn’t easy.

As always, Jan interpreted his look correctly. “Maybe later this afternoon we’ll lose the restraints, okay? For right now, though, I think it’s the safest way to go.”

He nodded, but his face showed his disappointment.

She leaned in close and said in her most conspiratorial whisper, “Hospitals suck.”

That brought a smile, despite the intrusion of the tube. The buttons along the top of the controller were marked “Television,” and he tapped them with his finger.

Her expression darkened, and she broke eye contact. “Um, in your current condition, the doctor said you can’t have any television.”

Right away, he knew she was lying. Well, okay, fibbing. He liked her too much to think she’d lie.

“Tell you what, though,” she added quickly, clearly announcing the birth of a new idea. “I’m going off duty soon, but I’ll be back tonight at six. How about I bring in a VCR and a bunch of tapes so you don’t get too bored?”

He nodded again, but without much enthusiasm. Too late for that, he thought. It wasn’t possible for time to crawl by any more slowly. I just hope it’s not a lot of little-kid Disney stuff.

She patted his hand and left. That was an hour ago, probably, and nothing much had happened since.

The sound of sudden activity startled him. Normally a quiet, laid-back place, the nurses’ station exploded with activity. Through the window to his right, he saw everybody launching from their seats, tipping over chairs and coffee cups as they hurried off, out of his field of view. They looked scared, too, like maybe there was a fire or something. He tried to sit up to follow the action, but they were gone.

He lay back onto his sheets to begin the task of counting ceiling tiles when he saw a doctor peer in at him through the window. Yet another new face.

Gee, I wonder what he’s going to ask me?

The doctor moved on, and a few seconds later Travis could hear him talking to somebody outside his door. Finally, he entered and closed the door behind him. “Hello, Travis,” he said.

He wore the tie and the lab coat of several doctors he’d already seen, but this guy looked different somehow. He made Travis feel uneasy. Maybe it was the way he smiled. The lips pulled back the way they were supposed to, but there was something missing. Something important.

This guy also seemed like he had all the time in the world. Where everybody else in the hospital always seemed like they were trying to do a half hour’s work in ten minutes, this doctor moved like he was on his lunch break. And why on earth was he putting on surgical gloves? Travis watched as he twisted the miniblinds shut.

“Just want us to have a little privacy,” he said.

Now, that was really weird. So far as Travis could tell, nobody in the hospital gave a rat’s ass about privacy. So many people had seen him naked by now, it almost didn’t embarrass him anymore. So what was this guy up to? Whatever it was, it made him feel nervous as hell.

Who are you?

The doctor turned to him after darkening the room. “I talked to your mother last night…”

George Sparks went straight to St. Luke’s Hospital and was waiting in the emergency room when Carolyn’s ambulance arrived at the double doors. Little Rock was a violent town for its size, and nothing about this case caused anyone to get particularly excited. From all indications, in fact, as relayed via radio from the ambulance, this one was borderline inconsequential. An attempted suicide. Big deal.

Clearly, things had changed between the last radio transmission and the moment the gut bucket backed into its designated spot. The crew seemed agitated, hurried, as the doors flew open, and they struggled clumsily with the cot. The E.R. doc, a Generation Xer named Oscar LeGrand, saw the flurry of activity through the windows and left his current patient in midsuture to see what was going on. Sparks followed.

As the doors opened, the pulse of air brought a rush of profanities and cries for help from the patient, who obviously had found her way back to full consciousness.

“He tried to kill me!” she shouted. “And he’s going to kill my son, goddammit!”

The paramedics exchanged rolled eyes and knowing smirks. This was a live one, all right. “Okay, Carolyn,” one of them said. “We hear you, honey, but just relax, okay? I don’t see a single murderer out here.”

Dr. LeGrand met them halfway. “I thought she was unconscious.” He reached casually to Carolyn’s handcuffed wrist to take a pulse.

“Well, she was until about a minute ago,” the older of the two paramedics said. “Then she just came out of it. Bam.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that. Screaming all sorts of paranoid shit about hit men and murder plots.”

LeGrand raised an eyebrow. “How about little green men? She say anything about those?”

Everyone laughed.

When a uniformed Little Rock cop showed up in his cruiser to assume custody of the prisoner, Sparks fell back a little. He hated this medical shit, anyway, and if someone else could do the fighting while they transferred her from the ambulance cot to the gurney, that would be just fine with him. This was Irene’s case, anyway. Once she arrived, he was history. Now, he just hoped that Carolyn wouldn’t say anything worthy of paperwork.

Watching the wrestling match, he noted the strength the woman showed, kicking and yelling. She even tried to bite the cop once, at which point Sparks gained a lot of respect for the man for not coldcocking her outright. Could be on drugs? he thought. He’d heard some caches of PCP had been discovered recently among the prisoners at the lockup.

All at once, Carolyn’s eyes cleared, and she settled down, zeroing in on the cop’s badge. “Oh, my God,” she said, her voice giddy with relief. “You’re a cop! Oh, thank God. You’ve got to listen to me! You’ve got to help me.”

The uniformed officer seemed uncomfortable with the sudden attention, and he smiled sheepishly to the others around him.

“Looks like love to me, Officer,” LeGrand joked.

Carolyn shot a hateful glare at the physician and focused in again on the cop. “Please listen to me!” she pleaded. “No one will listen to me!”

“I’m right here, ma’am,” the cop said, shrugging. “Say what you need to say.”

“Let’s try five milligrams of Valium,” LeGrand said to a nurse. “Before she strokes out on us.” The nurse went to work preparing the shot.

“God, no! Don’t!” Carolyn yelled at the doctor. Then she turned quickly back to the cop. “A man came to my jail cell last night. I know this sounds crazy, but it’s true, I swear to God. He said if I wasn’t dead by morning, he’d kill my little boy. He was dressed as an FBI agent, and he said he’d kill Travis.”

The cop scowled. “Isn’t your son upstairs here? We got a guy assigned to his room.”

LeGrand accepted the syringe from a nurse and inserted the needle into an injection port in the IV line. “Everything’s going to be fine, Carolyn,” he said.

She pleaded again, “No, don’t do that! He’ll… kill… Please…”

The medical personnel nodded approvingly as the patient lost consciousness. Meanwhile, the uniformed cop looked back to Sparks, who arched his eyebrows. “What do you think?”

“Well, the FBI part is bullshit,” Sparks said quickly. “So’s the rest of it, I’m sure. But she certainly seems convinced.”

The uniform looked over at Carolyn and then back to Sparks. “Shit, I can’t leave her,” he said. “I should get word to the man on the kid’s door. I mean, what the hell?”

George agreed. What the hell, exactly. He checked his watch and sighed. “Okay, tell you what. You stay here and watch Sleeping Beauty, and I’ll go upstairs and tell your buddy.”

“If you wouldn’t mind, I’d sure appreciate it.”

“No problem.”

Travis heard his heart skip a beat on the monitor as the doctor mentioned his mother’s name. Something was terribly wrong. He could tell, just from the way the man spoke.

“She was really sad, kid. Worried as all get-out about you. She’s in jail, you know.”

No, he didn’t know! The heart monitor was beeping like crazy now, and Travis knew instinctively that this guy was trouble, with a capital T. He wished Jan were here with him. Or even another doctor. Any adult would do, just to keep him from being alone with this guy. The way he talked, the dead look in his eyes. In an instant, Travis knew that this was one of those guys whose cars he was never supposed to get into when he was a little kid.

His fingers touched the call button. If you need anything…

Wiggins caught the movement and quickly pulled the controller out of the boy’s reach. “Whoa, buddy! You’re not gonna go tattling on me, are you?” He laughed.

Travis’s eyes were wide, wild. They darted to the window for help, but all he saw was a wall of beige plastic.

“No, that’s right, Travis,” the doctor said, reading his thoughts. “It’s just you and me. Everybody else is too busy to help you.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “Seems a little kid’s heart stopped down the hall a ways. Terrible, terrible thing. Somebody pumped a whole shitload of potassium chloride into her IV line and stopped her heart dead like a slab of hamburger.” To make his point, Wiggins pulled a capped syringe out of his lab coat pocket and dropped it in the trash can at the foot of the bed. “They tell me this shit stops a heart forever.”

Travis tried to yell, tried to struggle against the restraints, but nothing would work. This guy was crazy! This guy was a murderer!

“You just keep floppin’, boy. You look like a fish in a boat.” He chuckled one more time, then struck out with a hand to squeeze the sides of Travis’s face. The force of his grip sent darts of pain through the boy’s jaw as his teeth battled with the hard plastic of the ET tube. “You just settle down now,” Wiggins commanded. “Or I’ll give you more of the same.” A second syringe appeared.

Oh, shit! Oh, God! Travis froze, his eyes darting from the needle to his attacker’s face and back again. He pleaded silently for mercy but got only an icy glare in return. The blood in his mouth tasted hot against the chalky dryness of his tongue.

Wiggins watched the terror build in the boy’s face and smiled contentedly. “Yeah, that’s right, kid. You show some respect.” After holding his grip for a few seconds more, he turned his attention to Travis’s respirator. Dropping the full syringe back into the pocket of his lab coat, Wiggins traced the connections with his finger, petting the tubes lightly as he followed them from the spot where they left the bellows, all the way up to the connection at the boy’s mouth.

He paused, and his voice softened. “Before we go on, I just wanted you to know that none of this had to happen. I told your mother specifically what she had to do to keep me from hurting you, but she just wouldn’t listen.” He made a clicking sound with his tongue as he shook his head sadly. “Does it hurt when you breathe, boy?”

Travis felt the panic build like pressure in a volcano. The heart monitor chirped too fast to count, and no matter how hard he pulled, his lungs couldn’t draw enough air through the respirator. His terror had left him deaf. He knew that the doctor had asked him a question, but he had no idea what it might have been.

“Pain’s a terrible thing,” the doctor went on. “Especially for kids. You don’t like pain, do you, Travis?”

The reference to pain-and the way it was asked-brought Travis’s ears back on-line. He shook his head vehemently. Please don’t hurt me! Please, oh please, oh please!

Wiggins winced, as if he could feel the boy’s panic in his own gut. He pointed to the heart monitor. “You’re scared, aren’t you? Yeah, look at that. A hundred and eighty-four beats per minute.” He thought about his words. “That’s good,” he mused. “It’s good I’ve scared you, ’cause that’s what I promised your mother I was gonna do. Before I killed you.”

Oh, God! Jesus! In a desperate effort to get away, Travis lunged forward in his bed, pulling hard against the unyielding restraints. Wiggins recoiled a half-step, then punched him hard in the chest, rocketing him back against the sheets. The impact drove the wind out of his lungs and reignited the fires from the day before.

Please don’t!

“Don’t try to fight me, kid,” Wiggins growled. “That’s a mistake every time.” He wiggled a finger at the respirator. “Now, Travis, did you know that this machine here is what keeps you breathing on schedule?” He patted the top of the control panel as if it were an old chum. “Every bit of air you breathe has to come through this part right here.” He tugged on the end of Travis’s ET tube, where it attached to the hose from the machine.

Travis was beyond panic now, and he struggled in vain one more time to reach the controller. Wiggins seemed amused by the effort. For the first time, the smile seemed genuine.

“Want to feel something really scary?”

No! Please, God… No!

Wiggins snapped the respirator connection away from the end of the ET tube. Travis winced, expecting to suffocate, but in the midst of his terror actually felt relief when the air still flowed into his body.

Then Wiggins put his thumb over the hole.

The pediatric floor was a welcome departure from the emergency room. Hospitals were disagreeable places no matter what, but at least up here, the paintings of Sesame Street and comic book characters on the walls gave everything a lighter feel. Had to be tough, Sparks supposed, to work with kids who’d been deprived of their childhoods by illness. At least kids had the sense of natural optimism to make such a tough job feel worthwhile.

He stepped off the elevator and paused, trying to figure out where to go next. The pediatric floor spanned out before him, arranged as a giant rectangle that was dominated in the center by a sprawling nurses’ station. He looked in all directions, but he didn’t see a cop. Conscious of the racket his heels made against the spit-shined tile floor, he walked on tiptoes over to a lady in blue scrubs. Thoroughly absorbed in notes she was jotting on a clipboard, the lady didn’t acknowledge him. He cleared his throat.

“Excuse me,” he said lightly.

The nurse held up a finger while she finished writing a thought. “I’m sorry,” she said when she was done. “Can I help you?” She wore an orange stethoscope draped casually over the back of her neck, with tiny stuffed koala bears hugging each of the earpieces. A huge yellow button over her breast pocket read, “It’s a wonderful day!”

“Hi, I’m George Sparks, with the FBI.” Even the nurses are happier up here. He returned her smile and flashed his credentials. “You’ve got a patient up here named Travis Donovan, I believe? I need to speak with him.”

The nurse’s smile morphed into a frown, deep furrows tracking across her forehead. “Travis Donovan? On the pediatric floor? Hmm.. ” She rolled her chair over to a stack of files and riffled through them. “I don’t see a Travis Donovan here,” she said. “You’re sure he’s a peds case?”

George shrugged. “Well, I know he’s thirteen years old.”

“That’d make him a peds case,” the nurse confirmed. She rolled her chair toward a computer terminal and tapped a few keys. “We don’t have anybody by that name on the floor here,” she explained, pausing while the computer whirred. “I’m trying to check the admissions file. Maybe they put him someplace else. The name sure rings a bell… Wait a minute! He’s the kid with the parents, right?” Now she got it.

Her characterization made George smile. “That’s the one.”

She smacked her forehead with a palm. “Duh,” she said. “He’s in the hospital, all right, two floors up in pediatric ICU.”

Travis’s lungs screamed for relief as he kicked and squirmed on his bed, trying to break free from Wiggins’s grasp. As he thrust his head violently in an effort to get away, his attacker’s hand never loosened, and he could feel the long plastic tube shifting from side to side, deep inside his chest. His eyes begged for mercy, but it was like pleading with a shark as he dragged you deeper and deeper into the water.

His sheet was gone now, kicked off onto the floor, and his body’s struggle to breathe had pulled his sweaty, smooth skin taut against his thin frame. The bones of the boy’s chest seemed to rise out of his skin as his diaphragm strained to pull in a breath, and his abdomen seemed to collapse, his navel heaved so far into his belly that it looked like it might actually touch his spine.

Please stop! Oh, God, please make him stop! I’ll be good! Tears poured from his eyes as he realized he was going to die. He started to hear the same rushing sound in his ears that he’d heard in the car, and the colors started to drain again from his surroundings…

Wiggins let go.

The rush of air into his body made Travis feel suddenly dizzy, as if somebody had put his bed on a lazy Susan and spun it. There wasn’t enough air in the world now to fulfill the boy’s need. He sucked in huge lungfuls, and he ended up swallowing nearly as much as he breathed. He gagged once and tried to vomit, but nothing came up.

He was alive! The feeling of relief was overwhelming.

“Told you that would be scary, didn’t I?” Wiggins said, smiling. “I timed that one. A minute and a half. That’s it. Felt like a much longer time, didn’t it?”

This asshole wasn’t done! He said that already, didn’t he? He said he was gonna kill me! Travis remembered the syringe, and his panic bloomed even larger than before.

Wiggins just kept talking, like he was trying to figure out where to have dinner. “I mean, it felt like a much longer time to me, and I was just standing here. For you, it must’ve seemed like an hour.”

The fight had left Travis exhausted, soaked with sweat. Even through the fear, he could smell his own body odor, and it was horrible. His muscles told him to quit, but his brain shrieked at him to keep fighting. He tried to move his right hand again and could feel the fleece lining slide a little further down his wrist. If he used his imagination, he could almost feel the restraint sliding off his hand.

Wiggins seemed suddenly tired of this game. “Want to go on that ride one more time, or shall I just get on with my business?” Holding the syringe directly in front of the boy’s face, he took his time sliding the blue plastic cap off the end of the needle. “I think you’ve probably suffered enough,” he said as he shot a spider-silk stream of poison into the air.

Pediatric or otherwise, the ICU was anything but cheerful. It had the same rectangular design, but it was much smaller. This was a place for very, very sick children, and under the circumstances, the larger-than-life mural of Barney the Dinosaur looked horribly out of place; sacrilegious almost.

The place was bedlam. Over on the far side of the nurses’ station, a cast of thousands swarmed like gnats around the bedside of a child who looked way too small to have a problem so big. Sparks recognized the look of helplessness in some of the faces, and he knew what it meant. He turned away. It had been a long, long time since he’d dealt with death real-time, and the fact that the victim was a kid made it worse.

“What happened?” George asked as he approached the uniformed guard at Travis’s door.

The commotion down the hall had obviously unnerved the cop as well. “Can I help you?” he asked in a half-polite, half-surly tone.

The agent flopped open his black credentials wallet. “George Sparks, FBI.”

Recognition flashed in the cop’s face. “Oh, sure,” he said. “I know you. Bill Rubie.” He turned his gaze back down the hall. “I don’t know. Best I can tell, the kid just died. They’ve got every doctor in the state trying to bring her back.” He looked at his shoes as he sighed. “Makes you think.” When he looked up, he was past it all. “What brings you here?”

“Travis’s mother tried to hang herself in jail last night,” Sparks explained, eliciting a pained groan from Rubie. “I was downstairs when they brought her in, and she was babbling about some plot to kill her kid. I told one of your buddies I’d relay the story to you, so he could stay put with the prisoner.”

“And who’s supposed to be hatching this plot?”

Sparks started a chuckle, then stifled it as he remembered that death was nearby. “The FBI,” he said. Traces of a smile remained.

Rubie rolled his eyes. “Ah. I see. Well, the only folks who’ve been in with the kid are doctors and nurses, and they’ve been coming in by the truckload.”

Sparks reached for the doorknob. “Have you checked in on him yourself?”

The cop shrugged. “I see him when the door opens, but other than that, what’s to check?”

George considered that for a moment, then nodded. “Good point. Mind if I peek in on him?”

The cop made a face that spoke his words: “Suit yourself. There’s a doc in there right now, though. Said he wanted to have some privacy with the kid.”

Sparks paused, his hand a half inch from the knob. “I’ll wait,” he said. “I hate the body fluids business, anyway.”

Rubie laughed at the turn of phrase. “I don’t know how they do it,” he agreed.

Travis closed his eyes at the sight of the needle. This was it, fifteen seconds from now, he’d either be alive or he’d be dead, all depending on what he did next. Concentrating exclusively on his right hand, he forced his thumb as far in toward his palm as it would go. His wrist hurt as his thumb formed an X with his pinky, making his hand as small as it would ever get. He yanked once, very hard, and spun his wrist in the fleece. There was resistance for maybe half a second, and then he was free!

He moved faster than Wiggins could react. The needle was poised under Travis’s suspended IV bag, just an inch from the brown rubber injection site, when the boy made his move. With no idea what might happen, Travis grabbed a fistful of IV tubing and pulled. The swiftness of the move caused Wiggins to jump back as the tubes came free of the bag and flopped like so many clear snakes across the boy’s legs.

Furious, the killer lashed out and smacked the boy across the face. Travis felt something rattle inside his mouth, but he ignored it. Instead, he shifted his attack to the EKG monitor on his left. He needed some attention, right this very second, and this seemed like the way to get it. As Wiggins recoiled for another blow, Travis rolled to his left and smacked the side of the heart monitor as hard as he could, sending thousands of dollars of machinery crashing to the floor.

“What the hell was that?”

At the sound of the crash, Sparks and Rubie spun together and dashed through the door, into Travis’s room. Neither was prepared for what they saw. A doctor was beating his own patient!

“Hey!” Sparks yelled. “What the hell…” The instant the man turned, Sparks knew he was no doctor, and the rest of the situation crystallized. He reached for his weapon.

The attacker moved with remarkable speed, launching a vicious kick to Sparks’s hand, just as the pistol cleared its holster. The weapon skittered across the floor. A second kick-really a continuation of the first-folded Rubie’s knee backward onto itself, rendering him instantly useless.

Sparks tried to brace for a fight but, in reality, never had a chance. He saw something moving in the doctor’s hand, and then George’s whole world flashed red. His head erupted in agony as the syringe needle came around in a horizontal arc and buried itself into his right eye. He heard a snap as the point impacted bone and broke off. He screamed; an inhuman howl that rose up from a place deeper than his throat as he clutched his hands to his face and fell helplessly to the floor.

“Oh, God! My eye! My eye!”

Rubie was screaming, too, as he squeezed his ruined knee with both hands, as if he could clamp off the flow of pain. The scream ended abruptly; cut short by yet another kick that at once crushed his larynx and drove his lower jaw with jackhammer force into his upper jaw, severing his tongue in the process.

Rubie collapsed backward onto the floor. Struggling for breath, but choking on blood instead, he was dimly aware that someone had lifted him by his hair, but felt nothing as the doctor smashed his head like a melon against the hard tile floor.

Everything was moving too fast for Travis to process it all. He didn’t see it all in detail, but he saw the blood and he heard the screaming, and he found himself wishing more than anything that he could scream, too. So much noise. So many people, all running in to see what was going on.

“Oh, shit!” someone yelled. “Jesus Christ! Get us some help up here!”

God, there was so much blood! Travis was mesmerized by it all. And so were the hospital staffers, until they realized that their real patient was a naked little boy, whose color suddenly matched that of his disheveled bedclothes. All at once, they descended on him, shouting orders to each other as they reconnected his respirator, yanked out old IVs, and went about the business of establishing new ones. No one talked; everyone yelled. But for his role as a pincushion, he might as well have not been there.

Where is he? Travis’s mind screamed as he searched the assembled faces for the man who’d tried to kill him. He slapped at each of the hands that approached him, fearful that the murderer was still there. He didn’t see him, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t lurking around somewhere, waiting for his chance. He’d done it once; he could do it again.

The hands fought him back; they were all over him, pushing and prodding and poking all the places they’d pushed and prodded and poked before. Everyone talked at him, told him to relax, but no one even seemed remotely concerned about what happened to the asshole who did all of this.

They had more pressing matters to worry about: like the guy on the floor whose screams sounded more animal than human; and the other one, whose brain matter formed a slick coating under people’s feet.

Travis closed his eyes and wished for it all to go away. He wanted his mom and his dad. He wanted to go back to Farm Meadows to smell the mildew and the accumulated trash. He wanted to die-quickly and easily this time. He wanted to be anywhere but here.

Somewhere, from outside his darkness, a hand gently touched his cheek, and a voice said, “Travis, honey, are you okay?” It was his mother’s tone but someone else’s voice. He opened his eyes, and there was Jan. She gave him her warmest smile. “I only got as far as the cafeteria,” she explained softly. “I was worried about you.”

He reached up to hold her hand, but someone told him to hold still. He tried to shake his arm free, anyway, but whoever was working on him down there fought him back.

“Let them do their job, Travis, okay?” Jan soothed, stroking his shoulder. “You’re okay now. I’ll be right here. Nobody can hurt you if I’m right here, now, can they?”

He relaxed and closed his eyes again. He felt her hand in his hair, petting him gently and whispering about things that didn’t matter. Her touch reminded him of how his mom would sit with him all night long whenever he’d get sick as a kid. He thought about his dad’s laugh; how he’d always howl at the dirty jokes that his mom would pretend to be offended by.

He thought about all the horrible things he’d said and felt about them on their last day together, and in that moment, he knew he’d never see his parents again.