“I’m fine.”
Lucy leaned back on the toilet. Several feet away, a plastic curtain had been pushed against the wall. She glanced through into a handicapped-accessible shower. Metal railings lined each wall, and there was even a seat bolted into the wall.
Hmmm.
She saw it all play out in her mind’s eye.
Benjamin carried her back to the bed.
Winslow re-bandaged her legs and set up the negative pressure wound therapy.
When everyone had finally left, Lucy tugged out the morphine line and waited for the pain to come.
Within the hour, it came.
And with a vengeance.
Pure and blinding pain from head to toe.
Even with the nerve block supposedly good for a few more hours, the agony was far and above anything she’d ever experienced or imagined.
She’d always had a theory that pain was only pain if you fought it.
If you couldn’t stand to look it in the eye.
Over the years, she’d tried to explain that to those poor souls she’d dragged down desert highways, as they lay screaming and flayed on the pavement.
Tried to make them understand that it wasn’t pain, but intensity, that they should love it, because they would never in their lives feel more alive.
And so she shut her eyes and ground her teeth and tried to love it, too.
The song was right. Love hurts.
Love hurts like fucking hell.
One thought got Lucy through.
When the tears were streaming down her face.
When the concept of death looked as pretty as it ever had.
Donaldson.
Donaldson tied down. Unable to escape. Unable to defend himself. And her standing right there beside him, smiling down into that fat, double-chinned face. Maybe she had a knife. Maybe something hot. Maybe nothing but her teeth.
The pain kept coming, straining to wreck her fantasy.
But finally, after almost giving in to it, she experienced a moment of brilliant, startling clarity, and Lucy separated herself from the pain.
The pain didn’t belong to her. It belonged to Donaldson. She was Donaldson, and Lucy imagined herself staring down into her own eyes, watching him contort in agony, watching him writhe like a bug on a pin, watching him scream for mercy.
This was Donaldson’s pain, not hers.
And the more pain, the better.
By midnight, Lucy had learned to tolerate the pain.
She’d come to accept it. Not embrace it. Certainly not love it. But at least they could co-exist.
As she stretched her toes toward the instrument tray at the foot of the bed, she forced a smile at the screaming of her torn left quadriceps.
Her right big toe just grazed the tray, but she was never able to fully reach it.
At 2:19 a.m., Lucy plugged her morphine line back in and pressed the NURSE CALL button.
A nurse she hadn’t seen before walked into the room. Middle-aged and slightly overweight, she sidled up to the bed.
“I’m Denise,” she said. “You rang?”
“I need to use the bathroom,” Lucy said.
“I’ll get the bedpan.”
“No, I want to use the real bathroom.”
“I don’t know about that-”
“Dr. Lanz said it was okay. Should I call him and tell him you won’t let me? He was nice enough to give me his number at home, but I’d probably wake him up.”
The nurse went a shade paler than her English complexion.
“No, I’m sure it’s fine then. Just let me get the deputy and an orderly.”
Nurse Denise unplugged Lucy’s IV lines and removed the draining tubes from her legs while that same dough-boy deputy unlocked her left wrist.
Benjamin the orderly scooped Lucy out of bed, the pain so exquisite she had to grin. He lowered her into a wheelchair, which he pushed ten feet to the bathroom door.
“I think I got it,” Lucy said, struggling onto her feet. She fell back into the wheelchair, a bolt of mind-warping pain engulfing her ass. “Or maybe not.”
The orderly grabbed her under her arms and lifted her onto her feet.
Lucy staggered into the bathroom and shut the door.
She collapsed onto the toilet and took a moment to let this new blast of agony embrace her, trying to really savor it.
The pain was radiant, but at least she could think, and she could even stand and, she suspected, walk.
Lucy turned her arm over and pulled the IV needle out of the vein.
“Denise!” she called. “I could use a little help!”
The bathroom door opened and the nurse peeked in.
“What’s wrong, Lucy?”
“Come here,” Lucy whispered.
The nurse stepped in.
“Close the door,” Lucy said. “It’s embarrassing. Kind of a girl problem. I don’t want the boys to see.”
The nurse shut the door, stood staring down at Lucy.
“What is it?”
“Look,” Lucy said.
She had tears in her eyes.
Happy tears.
She pointed at her crotch.
The nurse knelt down, and when she leaned in for a closer look, Lucy thrust the heel of her hand up into Denise’s nose.
Denise dropped onto her butt, and Lucy pitched forward and grabbed the woman’s hair. She slid the needle into the nurse’s throat, just far enough to draw a bead of blood.
“Now listen carefully, Denise,” Lucy said. The burst of exhilaration had momentarily dulled her pain. “I will run this needle straight through your neck if you make so much as a whisper. Got it? Nod, bitch!”
The nurse nodded.
“You want to live through this?”
More frantic nodding.
“Okay, here’s what you’re going to do. What floor are we on?”
“Four.”
“Is there a basement in this hospital?”
“Yes.”
“What’s down there?”
“Um…”
Lucy pushed the needle in a tad farther. This was the best she’d felt all day. What she lived for.
“I’m thinking…the lab…radiology…the blood bank.”
“There you go. Tell the orderly I’m bleeding and send him down to the basement for several units of blood.”
“Okay.”
“I swear to God if you fuck this up I’m going to use your neck for a pin cushion.”
“Now?”
“What?”
“You want me to tell Benjamin now?”
“No, let’s wait another twenty minutes. Yes, now!”
The nurse cleared her throat as Lucy edged her toward the door.
“Benjamin?” she said.
“Everything okay, Denise?”
“Lucy’s having some heavy blood loss. I want you to head down to the blood bank and bring up three units of AB.”
“Should I page Dr. Lanz?”
“I’ll take care of that. Go now.”
Lucy heard the orderly padding away.
“You did well, Denise. You did really well.”
Lucy tightened her grip and jammed the needle twenty times into the nurse’s throat, numerous lines of blood branching and intersecting and running over her fingers as the nurse gurgled and fought to throw her off.
Outside the door, Lucy heard the deputy say, “Denise?”
Lucy dragged her back into the shower and her thirty-third puncture hit home because Lucy felt something swelling in the side of the nurse’s neck.
When the bulge reached the size of a golf ball Lucy gave it a prick and it exploded in a burst of bright red arterial spray that splattered across the shower tile.
Lucy felt the woman’s legs give out and she eased her down onto the floor of the shower.
The deputy knocked on the door.
“Denise, what’s going on?”
The physical exertion had brought on a wave of agony, and Lucy wanted to scream it was so fierce. Instead, she tugged Denise out of the shower and draped her across the toilet.
Lucy returned to the shower stall, pulled the curtain and backed up against the tile, her heart rocketing along, a smile spreading across her face.
So good to be alive.
In the space between the curtain and the wall, she saw the doorknob begin to turn.
The door swung open.
The deputy said, “Oh, shit.”
He took a step toward the nurse, who was still twitching.