The Past and Other Things That Should Stay Buried(35)

“Does she look alive to you?” I raise my voice a little to make my point, and two minutes later, July’s on a bed in the hallway. The nurse tells us they’re short staffed and busy and that someone will help when they’re available, but based on the skeptical and exhausted tone in her voice, I’m not expecting that we’ll be seen soon. Which is a good thing.

July sits up. “See?”

“That’s creepy,” I say.

“What?”

“That you can lie perfectly still like that.” I grimace. “For a second, I thought you were actually dead again.”

“I wish,” July says. “Now what?”

I whip my head around to face July. “This was your plan.”

July wears a satisfied grin. “And it worked. I got us inside the hospital. Now it’s your turn. Do some science and figure out why I’m not-dead.”

“This is a hospital, not a lab.” I stare at her incredulously. “What do you expect me to do? Take your temperature? Your blood pressure?”

“Sounds like a decent place to start?”

“I already know the results! No heart, no blood pressure.”

July’s enthusiasm seems to be waning. A moment later, she slips off the edge of the bed and heads toward one of the rooms.

“Where are you going?”

“If you can’t help me, maybe there’s someone else here who can.” She peeks into the first room, moves onto the next, peeks in it, and then slips inside, leaving me to stand by her now-empty bed wondering how I got mixed up in this. July was right, though. For most of the night I’d been complaining that we needed to figure out what was happening, but the truth is that this is far beyond my abilities. Even with access to a laboratory filled with fancy equipment, I wouldn’t know where to begin. Should I look for physiological evidence or for answers in the realm of the divine?

I get why July thought it would be a good idea to sneak into a hospital, but solving the mystery of July Cooper is going to require help from someone much smarter than me.

“Dino.” July pokes her head out of the room. “You’ve got to see this.”

The room is crowded with three beds separated by curtains. July leads me behind one curtain where a woman is lying in a bed with leads stuck to her chest, and wires running in a bundle to machines that silently mark her heartbeat. She’s about my mom’s age. Dark hair, puffy skin, the right side of her head and face are covered with gauze, but something’s wrong. It’s like that half of her face is collapsed.

“What—”

“A chunk of her head is gone, Dino.”

“That can’t be,” I say. But I move closer to her and measure the geometry of her face. The woman’s eye follows me as my brain comes to the only conclusion it can. “She should be dead.”

“Ma’am? Can you hear me?” July snaps her fingers in front of the woman’s good eye but doesn’t get a response.

“She won’t answer,” says a voice from one of the other beds. It’s followed by violent retching. “Accidental shooting. More brain missing than is left.”

“This is my fault,” July whispers.

I start to tell her it’s not, that it can’t be, but I’m interrupted by vomiting, which July leaves to investigate. Maybe this is July’s fault. Not intentionally. She’s a lot of things, but she’d never willfully cause this kind of suffering to another person.

“I’m so sorry,” I say to the woman. I don’t know if she can hear or understand me, but I hope she’s not in pain.

I follow July to the next bed. It’s occupied by a guy holding a pan on his chest filled with black sludge that looks like tar. His body shudders and he sits forward and pukes into the pan. More of the black stuff pours out of his mouth. Tears stream down his eyes and he wipes them and then his mouth with his hand.

“What happened to you?” July says.

“Took too many pills.” His voice is raw.

“On purpose?”

I smack July’s arm. “You can’t ask someone that.”

But the guy nods. He looks like he’s maybe in his twenties, though it’s difficult to tell. His hair is receding and he looks exhausted and threadbare.

“Did you die?” This time when I try to interrupt July, she slaps me away.

The man shakes his head. “Should’ve,” the man says. “Doctor said so. We should all be dead.”

“We?” I ask.

The guy motions weakly at the bed with the woman in it. “Her, everyone. Overheard a nurse say no one’s dying that ought to.”

Until now we’d only had the word of the paramedic at Monty’s that people had stopped dying, but this guy and the woman missing half her brain prove it’s true. July isn’t the only anomaly.

“Why?” July asks.

We have to wait for the guy to throw up again before he can answer. I can’t believe how much of that black stuff is coming up. Now that I know why he’s here, I guess that it’s charcoal. When he finishes, he says, “You know what depression feels like?”

This isn’t the “why” July wanted to know about. She meant to ask why he wasn’t dead. I expect her to interrupt and rephrase the question. Instead she says, “No. Why don’t you explain it.”