Death's Nemesis: The Apocalypse Doctor Who Refused to Die

Fifty-Three Minutes

He did the prep in nine.

Behind the counter, in a drawer someone had missed, he found a box of nitrile gloves and a half-dozen sealed gauze packs. In the stock room there was a bottle of isopropyl alcohol that had not evaporated, three out-of-date ampoules of lidocaine, and a headlamp with a dying battery. Not much. He'd operated with less, once, in a school gymnasium, during the second week, by flashlight, on a girl who had been hit by a car.

She hadn't made it. He hadn't forgotten that either.

"Roll him on his stomach," Ethan said. "Head turned left. Put the rolled blanket under his chest."

Tamsin did it with a care that told him she'd done this before, in other places, for other people. When she was done she stood with her hands hanging.

"What do you need me to do?"

"Hold the lamp. Keep it steady. Whatever you see, don't make a sound, and don't move it."

"I've seen worse."

"No," Ethan said, gently. "You haven't seen this."

He scrubbed his right hand to the elbow with alcohol, pulled on a glove, and then did the thing he'd been dreading. He pulled the glove off his left, the broken arm, and took the splint off. It hurt like a bonfire. But he needed the second hand, even if it only held skin, and the left arm, however damaged, could hold skin.

He injected lidocaine along the line the Eye had drawn. Voss didn't stir. The System's ledger flickered at the edge of his vision.

[Procedure: Cervical parasite extraction. Difficulty: extreme.]

[The Spectral Scalpel will follow understanding. Remain anatomical. Do not hurry.]

"Everyone's a critic," he muttered, and put the blade to the skin.

It went in like a thought.

The cut opened along the back of the neck in a clean, pale line, barely bleeding, the blue-white edge of the scalpel parting skin and fascia as if they were wet paper. Ethan peeled the layers back with his bad hand and, beneath it, found the trapezius, the semispinalis, the dense rope of muscle he'd memorized in a lecture hall a lifetime ago. The Eye lit the path. He followed.

Tamsin's light shook once and steadied.

The thread was deeper than he'd feared. It had curled around the vertebral artery like a vine around a pipe. Every instinct he had screamed go around, but there was no around, only the single narrow corridor where the parasite wound between the bone and the vessel and the spinal canal. A millimeter's error in any direction, and Voss would either bleed out in thirty seconds or never walk again.

[Distance to brainstem: 0.9 cm. Time remaining: 17 minutes.]

He breathed out. He did what he'd always done when the room was too loud: he stopped hearing it.

The scalpel moved. It didn't cut so much as persuade. A hair-fine slice here, a retraction there, the left hand lifting tissue while the right slid the edge beneath it. He felt the thread resist. He felt it notice him, a faint, ugly shiver in the air, and in the Eye's pale overlay the black filament tightened around the artery like a fist.

"No you don't," Ethan whispered.

He slid the blade between the thread and the vessel, found the single node where it was anchored, and cut.

The parasite screamed.

Not out loud. It was a sound that went through the bones of his jaw, a thin, shivering shriek that made the lantern flicker and Tamsin gasp. The filament thrashed. For one terrible moment it whipped across the incision and he thought it would take the artery with it. Then Ethan's left hand, the broken one, the one that should never have been able to do it, closed around the writhing thread and held.

Pain lanced up his arm like a wire pulled through bone. He did not let go.

"Light," he said, through his teeth. "Light."

Tamsin steadied the beam.

He drew the thing out, six inches, nine, a foot of glistening black cord that left the vertebral channel with a slick, reluctant sound. It lashed once more against the countertop and then went still.

Silence.

Voss's chest rose. Then it didn't.

[Warning: Host in cardiac arrest.]

[Time since last pulse: 4 seconds.]

"No," Ethan said. "No. Not after all that."

He tore off the glove, threw himself over the bedroll, and began compressions.