Under the Knife(71)

She had killed Mrs. Sanchez.

God help me, I killed that poor woman.

The blackness was all but complete when she heard Dolores say: “Initiating laparoscopic cholecystectomy protocol for Swiss Army number three.”

That’s strange, she thought.

Delores was beginning the operation on its own.

Why? What had made Delores do that?

And then Delores said: “Iatrogenic hepatic injury detected. Initiating emergency hemostasis safety protocol.”

Rita raised her head from the trash can, vomit dribbling from her chin, and as if through a haze, saw the video screen.

Dolores’s camera was fixed on the middle of the bleeding liver. The three Swiss Army instruments were moving with blinding speed and singularity of purpose.

Dolores.

What are you up to?

She puked again into the trash can.

“Rita!” Spencer’s voice, approaching.

(Sorry, Spencer, I’m so sorry for everything…)





SPENCER


Rita vomited again, into the trash can, then knocked it over as she collapsed, spilling its contents across the floor, her body jerking in violent spasms.

She was seizing.

He ran to her side and shoved a pillow behind her head to keep her from fracturing her skull on the tile floor. On her scrub pants, a dark, damp stain spread outward from her pelvis and down her thighs. Urine. The sharp smell of it filled his nostrils. He held her hand and grimly waited for it to end.

She seized for a long time.





FINNEY


Finney watched as Dr. Wu toppled to the floor. Her glasses fell from her head and landed with the camera lens facedown on the floor, so he could no longer see what was happening.

But that was all right.

He no longer needed to.

Listening to the shouting and commotion, as Mrs. Sanchez bled and Dr. Wu seized, he leaned back and interlaced his fingers behind his head.

And, at long last, he allowed himself to smile.

It had been a gamble, to be sure. He’d had to push her to the brink of mental collapse. Yes, he’d underestimated her resilience. But, in the end, it had turned out magnificently, exactly as he’d planned: In one fell swoop, she’d been disgraced, and the robot’s full potential realized.

He took the small, worn-leather notebook and the mechanical pencil from the front pocket of his shirt, opened the notebook, placed it on the table in front of him next to the tablet, and clicked the pencil three times.

The lead tip hovered over the empty box next to Dr. Wu’s name for a full minute as he considered putting an X through the box and an end to his business with her. He pondered the quality of mercy, and what Jenny might have done in this situation. Perhaps, he mused, he’d now exacted his pound of flesh and should abort the rest of the plan. Maybe allow both Dr. Wu and the sister to live.

He touched the pencil tip to the paper.

Jenny.

It had all been for her. Of course it had. He would have doused himself with gasoline and burned himself alive if she’d asked it of him. He would have died for her.

No.

Instead of marking an X, he ground the pencil tip into the page until it snapped.

NO.

Dr. Wu would have no mercy.

Because she deserved none. That scalpel-wielding whore had butchered his wife and child.

As for the sister, well … that couldn’t be helped: Before he killed her, Dr. Wu needed to experience the full extent of his pain, what it felt like to have the one closest to her suffer, then die.

He laid the notebook and pencil on the table and touched an icon on the tablet. A new window appeared on the screen. It had a clock in it, and the clock began to count down toward zero, as if to the launch of a rocket. He continued jabbing at the icon with his finger, over and over, for no good reason other than he felt like it.

He would have died for Jenny.

Now he would kill for her, to atone for her suffering.

And mine.

And he would restore balance to the universe.





RITA


Through the darkness, Rita heard the trill of a pulse oximeter, bleating rhythmically in time with an unseen patient’s heart as it measured the blood oxygen levels; and the hum of far-off conversations; and the muffled, intermittent murmurs of an overhead PA system.

Rita opened her eyes. She was in a bed. The patient with the pulse oximeter was she; the oximeter sensor was taped to her left index finger. She was wearing a hospital gown. An IV line ran into her left arm, attached to a bag of clear fluid. She peered at the small lettering on the side of the bag. She didn’t have her glasses, so the lettering was blurred, but she could make out it was normal saline. For dehydration.

She looked around. The bed was in the middle of a hospital room, which she recognized as one of the private rooms in Turner’s ER. A heavy, sliding-glass door, like a patio door, with a large number 5 printed on it took up one entire wall. The door was ajar, and voices drifted through. Chase was sitting in a chair at the foot of her bed, texting.

“Chase?”

Chase squinted at her with red-tinged eyes. He appeared spent, as exhausted as she’d ever seen him.

“Are you all right?” he said.

God, and his voice: It sounded like gravel rattling in the bottom of an empty metal can. No trace of TV anchorman at all.

Am I all right?