“Thanks for coming,” he said, a little smile on his face. “I mean, I know how you hate hospitals.”
This time Jillian laughed out loud, luxuriating in the rapturous delight of his return.
Spencer’s face darkened. “How’s Alex doing?” he asked. “Is he all right?”
The look on her face told him all he needed to know. “Not good,” she said sadly. “The doctors say that there was a terrible strain on his heart.”
Spencer seemed to wince in pain and he closed his eyes. “Is Natalie with him?”
Jillian nodded. “Yes. She’s there.,”
Spencer nodded. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s good…” Then he seemed to slip into a peaceful sleep. Alex Streck had been consigned to the Ultra Intensive Care Unit and lay unconscious, inert on the bed. He had more than a simple intravenous tube in his arm. His chest was dotted with pressure pads, and a bank of machines monitored every breath and nerve in his body. They whirred and clicked and beeped softly, mechanical guardians that never slept.
Natalie Streck, clothed from foot to neck in a clean suit, slept soundly in a chair at his side. Her face was gray and lined, her mouth slightly open, dead to the world. She was sleeping so deeply that she did not notice what was happening to her husband.
Without warning, his eyes began to flicker and move beneath his eyelids, as if he had slipped into a massive rapid eye movement cycle. Then his cracked, dried lips began to move.
“Spencer?” he whispered, his voice dry and, raspy. “Jesus Christ, Spencer…”
Natalie did not hear her husband, but the monitors began to come alive. The beeping became faster and more urgent as his heart rate accelerated alarmingly. His respiration rate shot up and a sweat broke on his brow. His eyes remained closed.
“What is that?” Streck’s voice was full of alarm and fear. “Spencer, do you feel that?”
The machines picked up the rising agitation and began racing faster and faster.
“What is that? Oh God!” Streck thrashed as best he could in the bed as if trying to run away from his own nightmare. “Oh God, what is that? What’s happening?”
Suddenly, Alex Streck’s eyes snapped open, but they were unseeing, as if he thought himself in an-other place. “Jesus!” He almost managed to yell this time. “What the hell is that?”
The monitors hit the red zone and an alarm split the air, the loud howl wakening Natalie instantly. She jumped to her feet and rushed to the bedside of her husband.
“Alex? Alex? What’s wrong?”
The machinery kicked up another notch; a second alarm joined the first. Lights flickered and rolls of graph paper, scratched with a crazy quilt of ink, began to pour out of the mouth of one of the monitors.
“It hurts!” Alex wailed. “Oh God, it hurts!”
“Alex!” Natalie screamed. “Wake up!”
Somehow, Alex found enough breath in his weakened body to let out a terrible howl. “Jesus! It hurts so much!”
At that moment, the door flew open and a team of doctors and nurses swept into the room.
A nurse pounced on Natalie and tried to pull her away. “He’s in pain,” Natalie yelled. “He said something and he’s in pain.”
“Come with me, Mrs. Streck. Please…”
“He’s dying!” wailed Natalie. “Save him!”
“Let the doctors do their work,” the nurse insisted, pulling her away from the bed.
“Oh, Alex!”
In the bed, Streck began to thrash wildly. A doctor and two more nurses fought to keep him down on the bed. Alex’s eyes rolled back in his head and his body arched off the bed as if a million volts were running through every nerve, muscle, and synapse in his tortured body. Half-formed words broke from his spit-flecked lips as he struggled to say something, as if he was desperate to speak.
“Jesus, hold him,” said one of the doctors, gritting his teeth. “Don’t let him break out.”
A nurse handed an enormous hypodermic needle to the doctor and without hesitation he jammed the horrific instrument into Streck’s chest and jammed down the plunger, shooting the liquid deep into the astronaut’s body.
The monitors were screaming—all except the one that measured Streck’s heart rate. In a sickening monotone, the machine shut down and flat lined. Abruptly Alex stopped thrashing in the bed, his body falling flat and rigid.
“He’s going,” said one of the nurses matter-of-factly. “His vitals are dropping.”
“Not yet, not yet,” said the doctor firmly. “Get ready to defibrillate, nurse. ”
The nurse grabbed the portable defibrillator and pulled it to the side of the bed.
“Paddles,” the doctor ordered. He grabbed the paddles and placed them against Streck’s chest.
The nurse watched the machine. “Charging…Go!”
“Clear,” the doctor ordered.
He gave the dying man an unholy blast of electricity right over the heart, Alex’s body arched tight again but the heart rate remained at a sickening flat line.
“Still at zero,” the nurse announced.
“Again!” yelled the doctor.
Another powerful charge of electricity surged through Alex Streck’s body, convulsing him once again.
No one noticed that Jillian was watching this terrible tableau from the open door. Leaning heavily against his wife was Spencer. Jillian seemed horrified at what she was seeing. Spencer seemed curiously detached from the proceedings.
Another zap of electricity went through Alex— and as Alex’s body spasmed he opened his eyes and looked directly at Spencer. Jillian saw it, the two men staring at one another and all the action in the room seemed to have stopped, the frantic sound in the room fading away. Spencer looked into Alex’s eyes and nodded to him, a slight move of the head, as if he was saying “okay,” giving Alex some kind of permission.
In that instant, motion and sound seemed to return to the room. Alex closed his eyes calmly and the heart monitor began to climb up from the flat line, working its way back to a weak but steady pace. The doctor and his nurses sighed.
“He’s back,” the doctor whispered. “We got him. It was close, but we got him back.” A moment or two later a nurse discovered Spencer and shooed him back to bed, clucking like a hen as she returned him to his room. Once Spencer had returned to his room a doctor entered, administered a sedative, and sent Spencer off to a very deep and dreamless sleep.
Then the doctor turned to Jillian. “There’s nothing you can do here, Mrs. Armacost. He’ll be out all night. Why don’t you go home and get a good night’s sleep…”
But there was no sleep for Jillian that night. She tossed and turned in her bed for a while, then threw aside the covers, pulled on a robe, and walked to the French doors and looked out into the still night. The sky was dappled with stars, white points of light that, on another night she would have found pretty and reassuring. Not tonight. Tonight they looked incomprehensible and tinged with evil.
5
After a couple of days of what doctors always called “observation,” Spencer Armacost was released from the hospital, having been awarded a completely clean bill of health. In accordance with hospital policy, however, Spencer Armacost—clean bill of health and all—had to leave the facility not under his own steam but in a wheelchair. Jillian wheeled him to the front door and as the double doors swept open Spencer took a deep breath of the sweet, humid Florida air.
“That’s good,” he said.
“There’s lots more out there,” said Jillian smiling.
Spencer twisted his wheelchair seat and looked over his shoulder at his wife. He smiled broadly.