“Post-traumatic stress?”
“Bad as it gets. His psychosocial diagnosis is in the file. He’s not responding to anti-depression meds, and he’s refused counseling. His doctors in Germany had him on round-the-clock suicide watch.”
Leigh opened the folder. She glanced at the PTSD evaluation, then read the patient’s military history aloud. “Four deployments: Al-Qaim, Haditha, Fallujah, and Ramadi, plus a stint at Abu Ghraib. Christ, this one took a tour of Hell. Has he been fitted for a prosthetic?”
“Not yet. Read his personal history, you’ll find it especially interesting.”
She scanned the paragraph. “Really? He played professional baseball?”
“Pitched for the Red Sox.”
“Well, then, take your time ordering the prosthetic.”
Geoff smiled. “We got off lucky. This kid would have been a Yankee killer. First year up, he’s a rookie sensation, eight months later he’s in Iraq.”
“He was that good?”
“He was a star in the making. I remember reading about him in Sports Illustrated. Boston drafted him as a low-round pick in ’98, no one gave him a shot at sticking around. Three years later, he’s dominating hitters in Single A. The Sox lost one of their starters, and suddenly the kid’s pitching in the majors.”
“He jumped from Single A to the majors in one season? Damn.”
“The rookie had ice water in his veins. Fans nicknamed him the Boston Strangler. First game up he pitches a two-hitter against the Yanks, that made him a cult hero with Red Sox Nation. Second game he goes nine innings and gives up one unearned run before the Sox lost the game in the tenth. His rematch with the Yankees was penciled in for mid-September, only 9/11 happened. By the time the season resumed, he was gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?”
“He flaked out. Left the Sox and enlisted in the Marine Corps… crazy schmuck.”
“The bio says he’s married with a daughter. Where’s his family now?”
“She left him. He won’t talk about it, but a few of the vets remember hearing rumors. They say his wife took the kid and split after he enlisted. She was probably pissed off, who could blame her. Instead of being married to a future multimillionaire and sports celebrity, she’s stuck raising her little girl alone, surviving on an enlisted man’s pay grade. Sad really, but we see it all the time. Relationships and deployments have never made for a good marriage.”
“Wait… he hasn’t seen his family since the war began?”
“Again, he won’t talk about it. Maybe it’s for the best. After all this guy’s been through, I wouldn’t want to be sleeping next to him when he starts dreaming about combat. Remember what Stansbury did to his old lady?”
“God, don’t remind me. Where’s the sergeant now?”
“Finishing up his physical. Want to meet him?”
“Assign him to Ward 27, I’ll catch up with him later.”
The room smelled. Bedpans and ammonia. Disease and death. A way station to the grave.
Pankaj Patel stood by the foot of the ICU bed, staring at the elderly man’s face. Cancer and chemotherapy had combined to drain the life force from his mentor’s physical being. His face was pale and gaunt. Skin hung from his bones. The eye sockets were brown and sunken.
“Jerrod, I am so sorry. I was in India with my family. I came as soon as I heard.”
Jerrod Mahurin opened his eyes, the sight of his protégé stirring him into consciousness. “No… not there! Stand by my side, Pankaj… quickly.”
Patel moved to the left side of the professor’s bed. “What is it? Did you see something?”
The elderly man closed his eyes, gathering his last reserves of strength. “The Angel of Death waits for my soul at the foot of the bed. You were too close. Very dangerous.”
Unnerved, Patel turned to look back at the empty space. “You saw him? The Angel of Death?”
“No time.” Jerrod reached out to his protégé with his left hand, the pale flesh baby soft, marked by a minefield of telltale bruises from a dozen IV drips. “You’ve been an exceptional student, my son, but there is far more to this sliver of physicality we call life. Everything you see is but an illusion, our journey a test, and we are failing miserably. The imbalance is tipping the scales to favor evil over good, darkness over the Light. Politics, greed, the capitalism of warfare. And yet everything we have stood against are merely symptoms. What drives a man to act immorally? To rape a woman? Sodomize a child? How can one human being commit murder, or order the deaths of tens of thousands… even millions of innocent people without a single spark of conscience? To find the real answers, you need to focus on the root cause of the disease.”
The elderly man closed his eyes, pausing to swallow a lump of mucus. “There is a direct cause-and-effect relationship in play, a relationship between the negative force and the levels of violence and greed that have once more risen to plague humankind. Man continues to be seduced by the immediate gratification of his ego, moving us farther away from God’s Light. Mankind’s collective actions have summoned the Angel of Death, and with it, the End of Days.”
The blood beneath Patel’s skin vasodilated, leaving goose bumps. “The End of Days? The conflict in the Middle East… will it lead to World War III? A nuclear holocaust? Jerrod?”
The dying man reopened his eyes. “Symptoms,” he coughed. The smell lingered.
Searching an untouched breakfast tray, Patel spooned an ice chip, placing it in his teacher’s mouth. “Perhaps you should rest.”
“In a moment.” Jerrod Mahurin swallowed the offering, watching his protégé through the open slits of his feverish eyes. “The End of Days is a supernal event, Pankaj, orchestrated by the Creator Himself. Mankind… is moving away from God’s Light. The Creator will not allow the physical world to be eradicated by those drawing strength from the darkness. As with Sodom and Gomorrah, as with the Great Flood, He will wipe out humanity before the wicked destroy His creation, and the terminating event, whatever it may be, shall happen soon.”
“My God.” Patel’s thoughts turned to his wife, Manisha, and their daughter, Dawn.
“This is important. After I pass on, a man of great wisdom will seek you out. I’ve selected you.”
“Selected me? For what?”
“My replacement. A secret society… nine men hoping to bring balance.”
“Nine men? What am I required to do?”
A diseased breath wheezed softly from Jerrod Mahurin’s mouth like a deflating bellows, the smell stale and harsh.
Pankaj Patel recoiled. “Jerrod, these men… can they prevent the End of Days? Jerrod?” Reaching for another ice chip, the pupil placed it gingerly on his teacher’s tongue.
Water dribbled from the open slit of the elderly man’s mouth.
A moment passed, the silence broken by the steady beep of the flatlining cardiac monitor.
Dr. Jerrod Mahurin, Europe’s foremost authority on psychopathic behavior, was dead.
Leigh Nelson entered Ward 27, one of a dozen areas her colleagues referred to as a “fishbowl of suffering.” Here, everything was on display, the carnage, the emotional wreckage, the ugly side of warfare that no one outside the hospital wanted to be reminded of.
Although there were only fourteen amputees treated during the entire first Gulf War, the second Bush administration’s invasion was a far different story. Tens of thousands of American soldiers had lost limbs since the 2003 occupation, their long-term care overwhelming an already overburdened health-care system, their anguish purposely kept from the public eye. And still the war raged on.