Father Klein frowned; he could see no bloodstains on her clothing. "Let me help," he said, stepping nearer.
From Controclass="underline" "Some things take time, Sanger. We're on the way."
Sanger juggled her auditors, waved the priest away savagely while staring hard into his face. "A surgeon, as soon as humanly possible. How long?"
Controclass="underline" "Not long."
Father Klein: "Ten minutes, I suppose. I don't have a link to him but I'll take my bicycle to the village. It's pretty primitive here, I'm afraid." He gazed at Quantrill, fascinated. Sanger saw that Quantrill was staring at nothing, but his hand tore at the hair over his mastoid as though idly plucking fur from a stuffed animal.
Then he glanced at the others, half-smiled; dropped his hand, oblivious to the strands of hair caught between his fingers.
"Make it five minutes, will you?" So far, she had given Control no hint that she might be speaking directly to a fourth party. She gestured the priest on his way, looking about her for equipment she could use. In a thigh pocket she had the first item, the hypospray canister.
"Is that as loud as you can do it, Control?" Quantrill's forehead glistened with sweat, his eyelids flickering in tune with some maddening noise that Sanger could not hear.
Using muted gutterals that Control alone could decipher clearly, Sanger lied, "I think he's fainting.
Control." If the bastards thought him unconscious they might not pull his plug. Oh, but they wanted him bad, she thought, so they could dissect him at their leisure. Well, they might just get some dissection — but not on their terms.
She noted the prewar dishtowels folded near the sink, the small hardwood cutting board that hung at the side of the chopping block. They would have to serve. She faced Quantrill, hurrying on with it, certain that if she faltered only once she would not be able to continue. She addressed him twice, once aloud and then in sign talk. "Quantrill, you're about to get your moment of truth." Pause, then, "I love you," said her hands.
He was plucking at his hair again, but stopped as he read a phrase he had never seen her use. Evidently the sounds in his head took a lot of cognitive jamming because his silent reply was jerky: "Sony I doubted you. Even if you took me out, I'd go loving you, Marbrye." Aloud he managed to say, "We may just go out this way together, Sanger."
Lips and hands moving: "Don't try to scare me, little man." "That's the way I'd want it, my love."
She moved to him, raised a hand to his cheek, saw his eyes close as he kissed her open palm to seal a pact; one that might accept, if not mutual suicide, then double murder. It was then that she brought up her other hand with the tiny canister of hypo-spray.
Sanger's weapon was not as gentle as most drugs, but only curare was quicker. At least the stuff would put him out instead of leaving him paralyzed and fully conscious. She placed her mouth on his for one heart-rending instant before triggering the canister against the side of his head and then, as she pulled back, spraying it into his mouth.
Stumbling, wiping furiously, he backed against the chopping block. "Sanger! Oh Sanger, what the hell have you done?"
"Outlasted you," she said. She dared not approach him as he faltered; his dismay was tinged with fury.
Yet her hands said, "I love you, Ted. Trust me. Love you. Trust me," as she watched him register betrayal and, mercifully, loss of awareness.
Control was braying for a report. "Hypospray," she gasped. "Got the little fucker but — inhaled a little."
She pulled him onto the butcher block, face down, and snatched up a handful of clean towels. Two of them, folded thick, went under his chin. Her belt medikit provided sterile pressure patches which she lay face-up on the wooden surface. Her utility knife with its retractable blade guard was as sharp as a filleting knife. If Sanger could shave her legs with it, perhaps it would shave a patch of skull. She did, nicking him only once over the swell of mastoid behind his ear; and saw the thin scar appear, a neat job by men of great expertise and no vestige of human compassion.
The cleaver was her first choice but she feared it was too dull. The largest of the carving knives was almost as heavy, and wickedly sharp. She sterilized its blade with an ampoule from her kit, grabbed the small cutting board by its handle, laid it down again and gripped her hands tightly to quell their trembles.
She might be killing him anyway, but if either hand shook she would surely fail.
Several long breaths, murmuring to assuage Control, and then she gazed again at that neat livid scar.
Somewhere beneath it lay the small horror that had driven them both past cold-blooded murder and on to self-hatred. She wiped the shaved area to sterilize it, placed the heavy knife squarely on the scar, lifted the cutting board again, and with steady hands she readied for the blow. "I think Q is out, Control; but I intend to make sure." With that, she struck with her makeshift mallet against the back of the heavy blade.
Quantrill grunted with the impact; made no other sound. She saw that she had struck too lightly, peeled back a flap of skin and struck again, harder, from another angle. A rough trapezoid of tough spongy bone popped away. Sanger had watched training films of appendectomies and had spilled a lot of blood on her own account, but none of that had been Quantrill's blood. She bit her lip and continued, perspiration rivuleting her face.
Marbrye Sanger clung to the tatters of reason as she peered into the cleft she had forced into the spongy bone mass behind her lover's ear. Now she knew why surgeons rarely elected to work on a loved one.
For the first few seconds, surprisingly little blood welled into the cavity she had driven nearly two centimeters deep and twice as long. In the deepest part of her brutal incision the hollow irregular mastoid cells were larger, and Sanger perceived a larger cavity the size of her fingertip before upwelling gore from surrounding tissue blocked her view.
She wondered if she were insane. She did not know what the damnable critic looked like, nor exactly where to look, and rumor claimed that it would explode at her touch. Yet she knew it must include a rechargeable energy cell and a gram or so of explosive. Surely, she insisted to herself, she would recognize such a foreign body when she saw it.
That little cavity at the deepest limit of her cut: was it larger than it seemed? The edge made a curve that seemed too regular to be part of the surrounding bone. Blinking against tears, her lower lip bleeding between her teeth, she swept the synthoderm face of a pressure patch through the scarlet mess; saw the tiny cavity; eased the tip of the knife in and felt nearby bony cells carved away like half-rotted wood under her careful assault. She flicked the knifetip out to dispose of bone fragments, swallowed against a bitter taste rising in her throat, — and then she saw it.
She nearly sobbed aloud, facing the hellborn thing. Gleaming unnaturally white in the pinkish gray of human tissue, wedged into the mastoid antrum cavity, lay Ted Quantrill's loathsome critic. Inside its firm flexible surface Sanger could see striations as of dissimilar materials stacked inside an oblong capsule.
She carved away more bone, infinitely tender, willing her arms not to shake.
"Sanger!" Control's voice was strident in her head. "What is he doing? We're getting anomalous readings; how hard did you hit him?"