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.