***********************************************************
HOLDING OUT FOR
A HERO
By Tucker
McCallahan ©
This is a
copyrighted work of fiction. All rights
reserved.
*
121 Nautical Miles Off the Coast of Cabo San Lucas,
Mexico; 1983
The sky over the
Tropic of Cancer was a gorgeous wash of blazing pinks, fiery oranges, and
electric blues. The Pacific Ocean lay calm and serene under the pre-dawn
firmament, reflecting awe-inspiring splendor back at the sailors of the
American scientific vessel Thackeray.
The ship belonged to Oceana Electric, the third largest producer of power in
the American southwest, and at the moment, it served one purpose: it was a big,
floating babysitter.
520 meters below
the surface, Captain Mike Strong of the United States Marine Corps gazed
through the thick observation panel of the underwater habitat, Triton. Constant amazement and awe consumed
the first three days he lived in the undersea structure. Now, Mike wondered if
astronauts ever looked out into space and thought, damn, it all looks the same. The most excitement he got was when
Murray shouted he saw an octopus, and Mike ran to get a look. The thing wasn’t
even as big as Mike’s arm. Talk about a letdown.
He sighed,
reminded himself it was better than what the rest of his company was doing, and
immediately felt guilty. He should be in Grenada. He should be doing his part
in Operation Urgent Fury. Instead he was off on vacation with his best friend
and a bunch of kooky scientists, courtesy of Oceana Electric and the DOD. Mike
stared out at the foreign wonderland that spread as far as the eye could see
and sighed again.
Triton was the largest underwater habitat ever
built and successfully operated. Hydrolab had been running missions down in St.
Croix, the US Virgin Islands, but that tin can could only house four people.
They had six currently living and working in Triton. The Thackeray
restocked their essentials every week and provided their satellite com links
for TV and phone. All in all, it wasn’t a bad set up. Mike was career military
from a military family, though, so his opinion might’ve been a little bit
skewed. He probably could’ve lived in a sardine can and been polite to the
other sardines for the duration.
They’d completed
three weeks of the eight week assignment, and the isolation was starting to
wear on everybody. Mike missed his wife. Married for just over a year, he and
Tsukiko still enjoyed the honeymoon phase of their marriage. Mike silently
berated himself again. If he’d been deployed to Grenada with the rest of his
team, he’d have gone a lot longer than a few weeks without seeing her. Before
he got the orders for this crazy gig, they’d been talking about starting a
family.
The idea of Kiko
pregnant, her little tummy all swollen with his baby, made Mike nuts. He
groaned and reached down, palming his dick. That was the other problem living
in Triton. No fucking privacy. This
place was worse than a bivouac. Five other guys breathing down his neck all the
damn time and jeezus… He really missed
Kiko.
“Sorry to
interrupt your jack off time there, Cap, but we need to talk.”
“Son of a
fucking whore!” Mike dropped his dick like it burned his hand and yanked his
zipper up. His best friend stood less than two feet away.
“My mama was a
good Jewish woman. Don’t make me come over there and defend her honor.”
“Please, bitch.
I’m a Marine.”
“You wanna throw
down? I’ll take you out back and thrash that semper fidelis right out of you.”
“Out back, huh?
Murray, we’re in the middle of the fucking Pacific Ocean. You been licking
snail slime again?”
Murray
Levshtein, a marine biologist and his best friend since high school, frowned,
grinned at him, and then shrugged his massively powerful shoulders. “Maybe.”
Mike laughed.
“What’s up, you crazy motherfucker? You look like you’re ready to hit the
clubs.”
Murray’s thick,
curly brown hair was freshly washed and lay tight to his head in a pony tail he
secured at the base of his neck, Willie Nelson-style. His sea foam green
polyester suit was pure Saturday Night
Fever a la John Travolta. Had Murray stood six feet tall and weighed one
hundred sixty pounds like Mike, he would’ve looked hip. However Murray was a
squat five feet six and weighed in at just over two-ten, most of which he
carried in his shoulders and chest. He looked like a short, fat power-lifter,
which wasn’t far from the truth. He was the only civvie Mike knew who could
match him press for press on the weight bench.
“I’m all dressed
up for my date.”
“Your date? You
finally said yes to Stallings, huh?”
Their
metallurgist, Chad Stallings, succeeded in alienating every man in Triton within hours of arriving at the
habitat by announcing in a lisping drawl that he was here, queer, and they
should get used to it. He watched gay porn on the closed circuit television in
the main living area and hit on all five of the guys, including Mike and Dr. Whittaker
who had wives.
“Well, you know
me. I’m easy.”
“I knew you’d
cave, you cheap slut.”
“He’s such a
stud.” Murray fluttered his eyelashes. “The way he holds a laser-cutter gets my
motor running.”
Mike shook his
head and finished tucking his shirt back into his pants. “You’re seriously
freaking me out. If you weren’t my best friend I’d punch you. What’s up, for
real?”
“For real, I’m
going out.”
Mike stared at
the marine biologist, blinking slowly. “You really have been licking snails.
Murray, we’re 1700 feet below the surface. You’re not going anywhere without a
JIM or a dive suit.”
“Au contraire.
The very beautiful Angela van Eberley, Oceana Electric’s Vice President of
Research & Development, is picking me up in an ocean rover. We’re going to
have dinner together.” Murray grinned like a Cheshire cat. “I may have her for
dinner.”
“I hate you.”
“OE’s nearly gone
bankrupt financing this little venture. If the DOD hadn’t shown interest this
whole project would’ve sunk like the Titanic.
I’m going to show Angela our latest numbers and give her the catalog of the
hydrothermal vent ecosystem. That alone is worth this trip, but if Stallings is
right and those sulfide ores could be mined by the Thackeray while we’re here, then Oceana could recoup some of their
cost.”
“Okay… and
you’re telling me this why?”
Murray took a
deep breath and moved Mike away from the door toward the observation window. “I
think Stallings made an error. His report lists an unidentified metal as making
up thirty-seven percent of the yield. That’s absurd. At first I thought there
was just a decimal point missing, but when I re-ran the numbers they came out
right. Which means his sample was somehow contaminated; over a third of it is
an unknown. The fact that our metallurgist couldn’t identify over a third of
the sample isn’t going to impress Angela. So…”
“I get it. You
want a fresh sample.”
“Awesome!
Thanks, Mike! I’d love for you to
lead another dive and retrieve a fresh sample; that would be great!” Murray
clapped him on the back and almost knocked him to the floor.
“The shit I do
for you…”
Murray offered
him a cheeky grin, nodding, his big arms spread wide as he gestured to the
splendor of Triton. “Hey, just
remember, you could be sweating and living with minimal luxury in the jungles
of Grenada. Instead you’re here with me… sweating and living with minimal
luxury at the bottom of the ocean.”
Mike laughed.
“Go see your woman.”
Murray winked.
He had to turn his huge shoulders slightly to get them through the doorway.
Mike left the observation area to round up his divers. Each member of the Triton crew had been hand-picked by
either Mike or Murray for characteristics necessary to their mission.
Stacy Whittaker,
MD was part of NEDU, the US Navy Experimental Diving Unit, and the DMO or
Diving Medical Officer for Triton. As
bald as the rocks he studied, Doug Morris was a geologist specializing in
igneous rock, which was formed by the cooling and solidification of magma. Chad
Stallings, their metallurgist, was a New York City native who loved Broadway
show tunes and considered himself a modern alchemist. Kibo Hindi, the final
member of their team, was a short, thin, jet black African-American physicist
from the Department Of Defense.
For this
specific mission, Mike tagged Chad and Doug to dive with him. He put Kibo on
communications and left Doc on standby, ready to enter the water if need be or
handle a medical emergency if they had one. The three divers suited up and exited
Triton via the moon pool.
Using surface
supplied umbilical diving equipment, the three aquanauts sea-walked across the
ocean floor away from their habitat and over to their goal. Hundreds of meters
wide, the Triton crew named the field
of roughly cylindrical chimney structures that covered the gently sloping hills
of the seabed Top o’ London. Mike got
his first look at the chimneys, vents from underwater volcanoes that spewed
forth clouds of black mineral particles, and reminisced with his crewmates
about the scene from Mary Poppins when
the chimney sweeps danced across the rooftops of London.
Chad, the
resident show tunes addict, had broken into Chim-Chim-Cher-ee
followed by Step In Time, complete
with the soft shoe routine, which had almost resulted in Kibo spraining his
ankle trying to get out of Chad’s way. He was a rather… exuberant dancer. Murray
suggested the name as a way to stop any further impromptu performances in the
extremely tight and confined space of Triton.
Top o’ London appeared especially ominous today. In
addition to the narrow, crooked, black smokers, tube worms covered every
surface in great clusters. The intriguing creatures looked like the cut-off ends
of giant white Mickey D’s straws with huge red tongues hanging out of them that
wagged in the ocean current. They were creepy to say the least, even though
Murray assured him they were harmless.
Mike kept
moving. Today’s diving task was difficult and dangerous. The unstable ground
below their feet moved with alarming frequency as the tectonic plates shifted
underneath them. Likewise, the temperatures fluctuated wildly. Sometimes the
water erupting from the vents reached as much as 464 degrees Centigrade, parboiling
the ocean around them like a natural hot spring.
Kibo explained
to Mike on their last dive that another potential hazard was the pressure of
the ocean. Because salt water was denser than fresh water, the hydrostatic
pressure combined with the heat from the volcanoes could cause the water to
become a supercritical fluid. Mike joked that it had plenty in common then with
Murray’s Jewish mother, but a supercritical fluid was actually any substance that
possessed physical properties between those of a gas and a liquid.
Mike wasn’t a
brain; the government wasn’t paying him to do math or science. He was a
soldier, a Marine in Force Recon, an aquanaut who could do just about anything
underwater as good as he could do it on land. He’d asked for and received the
translation of what all the scientific mumbo-jumbo meant: the vents were
fucking dangerous. He should be careful and watch his ass because walking
through them was like traipsing through a mine field. Mike understand that.
Maybe Grenada
would’ve been a better assignment than this after all.
“Time to go to
work, boys.” Chad passed collection kits around as they reached the entrance to
Top o’ London. “The bigger the piece,
the better.”
“I heard that’s
how it worked for your kind.” Doug took his kit and took a large step away from
the metallurgist.
“And yet I’d
settle for you, Dougie. You let me know when you want that little trip to
heaven, okay?”
“I hope Strong
drops you down one of the black smokers.”
“Mikey likes
me.” Chad blew Mike a kiss, a ridiculous gesture in a diving rig with a large,
multi-part umbilical cable that supplied breathing gas, electricity,
communications, and water to keep the temperature of his suit regulated looped
over his arm, yet Chad managed it with style and a certain degree of grace.
“Clear the
channel, you two.” Mike put an end to the banter. He took his kit from
Stallings and scanned the field. “I’m heading for my objective, Triton. Check in when I get there. Out.”
“Received.”
Kibo’s voice over the open channel was crisp and clear. “Hydrogen, helium,
oxygen, and nitrogen are all within normal sat levels. Temperatures stable. 25%
of cord deployed.”
Mike filed the
information away and headed for his goal, keeping both his diving buddies in
his peripheral vision. Since Triton supplied
all their breathing gas, they didn’t have the kind of time limitations imposed
by scuba equipment. That was a good thing; they’d need the extra time. Mike
circled his chimney three times before deciding where he’d try to take his
sample.
Pulling his
hammer and chisel from his tool belt, Mike examined the surface of the rock. The
particles clouding the water made it impossible to see anything clearly. He
couldn’t feel his way around either since his diving gloves were so thick. He
supposed it didn’t matter what part of the thing he cut so long as he brought
back a sample; he figured he should check with Stallings or Morris just to be
sure, though. It would be just his luck to whack a chunk off this thing, find
out he cut off a hunk of something worthless, and have to risk his life on a
fucking third dive.
Chad was not
where he was supposed to be, but a quick reconnoiter of the area located the
wayward metallurgist. He was plastered to Doug’s back, the two of them huddled
next to a huge, towering chimney in Doug’s area. Mike found that pretty funny
after all Doug’s jokes this morning.
As Mike approached
he switched his helmet mike on, intending to hail them so that he didn’t
frighten either of his dive buddies. To his surprise, one of them was already
on the alternative channel, and Mike picked up every word the two men spoke.
“You bald men
are insatiable.” The affectation was gone from Chad’s voice. For the first
time, he sounded completely normal, and Mike was shocked to discover that the guy
had a nice, deep voice.
“High testosterone.
Fuck, Chad, I need you.”
“So stop
screwing around, get your sample, let me get mine, and we’ll head back to Triton. God, D, like I don’t take care
of you?”
“You’ve been
ignoring me.”
“You haven’t
exactly been nice lately. The homophobic asshole routine’s getting old, baby.”
“Please tell me
your com link’s off.” Doug’s voice rang with panic.
“Of course it
is.” Chad sounded disgusted. “We couldn’t possibly let the rest of the team
know you’re as gay as me, now could we?” He exhaled noisily. “You know if I
wasn’t in love with your stupid ass I’d let you suffer down here.”
The only thing
that kept Mike from tripping over his feet or his umbilical was years of
training doing covert operations. He couldn’t believe what he just heard. He
didn’t know if this meant that Stallings and Morris had gotten together in the
three weeks they’d all been living in Triton,
or if they’d known each other on the surface, and had somehow managed to
conceal that from he and Murray and get assigned to the mission together. If it
was the first circumstance, how crazy was that? If it was the second, that was
a major breach of both security and protocol.
Mike carefully
switched his helmet off and then popped it on so that they’d hear the buzz with
him being so close to their position. Sure enough, Morris jerked and turned
just as Mike spoke.
“Approaching on
your six, Stallings.”
“What’s the
problem, Mikey?” Chad’s lisping drawl was back in full force. Now that Mike
knew it was put on, it really annoyed him.
“Not sure where
to cut on my chimney. Is there something specific I’m looking for?”
“Come here and
watch Dougie.”
“My name is
Doug.”
“Whatever you
say, handsome.”
Mike observed as
Doug found a fissure and followed it until he could fit his chisel into the
crack, then struck with his hammer. An explosion of fragments came away from the
formation. Doug caught the biggest piece in his specimen jar.
Mike gave the
guys two thumbs up and turned to go back to his area when all the hair on the
back of his neck stood on end. He stowed his equipment and froze. Over the
years Mike had learned to trust his instincts. More than once they’d saved him
from getting shot, triggering a trip wire, or leading his team into an ambush.
He floated, his boots barely touching the ocean floor, eyes scanning all around
for the danger he sensed.
Without warning
the ground beneath him shifted violently, throwing Mike off balance and into
one of the chimneys. A rumbling that was as much a feelings as it was a sound
shook Mike like a rag doll. Doug’s hysterical voice over the general com link
sent adrenaline spiking through Mike’s blood stream.
“Chad! Fuck!
Fuck! Chad’s gone!”
“Dropping packs,
Triton, going to rescue and
retrieval.”
“Received.
Stallings’s video feed has gone black. Use extreme caution. Ground tremors at
Richter 4.0.”
“Copy that.”
Mike dropped all
but his essential search and rescue gear and did a jump-thrust maneuver toward
the last place he’d seen Chad and Doug. He landed with a thud and scrambled
around in the thick clouds to try to find the two men. The green blaze of a
glow stick nearly blinded Mike as Doug cracked one to life right in front of
him. Mike batted it from his hands. The stick flipped over their heads, past
the chimney, and disappeared from their sight. Mike flipped his com back on.
“He just
disappeared!” Doug was still in panic mode.
“Show me.”
Doug rounded the
tremendous chimney which now had an awful forty-five degree lean to it. As Mike
followed him around the unstable structure, he saw the opposite side dropped
off into an abyss. What had been a crevice in the seabed was now a canyon
without an identifiable bottom.
But Doug’s glow
stick had stopped about 25 meters down. Chad clutched it in one hand from his
perilous perch on a ledge.
“Oh my god!
Chad! Don’t move!” Despite his good advice to his lover, Doug took two steps
toward the stranded man. Mike grabbed his dive belt as the ground below Doug’s
right foot crumbled.
“And how about
you stay far away from the edge? This is my line of work, what I got hired to
do.” Mike pulled and Doug walked backward, his eyes never leaving the figure huddled against the canyon wall.
“Triton, we’ve located Stallings. Quake
opened a crevasse in the sea floor, running north-northeast to almost due south
approximately fifty meters long, unknown. Stallings is on a ledge, looks like
he’s about twenty-five meters from the lid. No contact on general com, switching to
helmet to see if I can raise him.” Mike switched his frequency. “Stallings, do
you copy?”
Doug paced back
and forth beside him, obviously panicked. “I tried that. We’ve been on helmet
since we got here!”
Mike looked at
Doug, his eyes finding Doug’s through the cloudy water. Mike’s face was calm,
almost cold. “You need to calm down. I’m going to go get him and bring him
back. I might need your help. I need to know I can count on you.” He stopped
Doug’s pacing with a heavy hand to his shoulder. “Can I count on you, Morris? Cause
Stallings’s life might depend on it.”
Doug’s anguished
face smoothed out. He nodded, the gesture awkward in the heavy diving suit. “You
can count on me.”
Mike flipped his
com back to general. “Commencing rescue. Have Doc ready for injuries.”
“Received. Good
luck.”
What Mike didn’t
tell Doug was that if Chad’s helmet com wasn’t working and his video feed was
black, it was a pretty good indication that there was significant damage to
both his umbilical line and his helmet. That meant every second they delayed
getting him up and back to Triton was life-threatening. Mike detached his line
and looked at the black smoker behind him. As far as stable structures for
anchoring, it wasn’t suitable in the slightest. The next closest chimney was
five meters away.
“Morris, come
with me.”
Doug clearly
didn’t want to leave his spot at the edge of the canyon, where he stared down
at Chad. But Mike didn’t give him much choice. He grabbed Doug’s umbilical and
hauled him along. They reached the small, squat black smoker and Mike pointed
at it.
“How stable is
this rock?”
Doug stared at
him blankly.
“Just ten-scale
it, Morris. Compared to the one that’s leaning like the fucking Tower of Pisa
over there, is this one better or worse?”
Doug bobbed his
head. “Better. Uh, stable. Maybe, a seven?”
“Okay. I’m going
to tie off here and I want you to keep an eye on my line. If it starts to slip
you let me know at the first sign, got it?”
“Will you stop
if it does?”
Mike took a deep
breath. “No, I’ll have to go into the wall with krampons, but that takes a lot longer. So
just do what I tell you and don’t waste fucking time asking me questions. Stallings
could be hurt.”
Doug’s eyes went
wide and he moved out of Mike’s way. Securing the line, Mike ran the drill the
same way he’d done it a thousand times. It could’ve been an exercise. He walked
to the canyon edge, pulled his line taut, leaned back, and tipped over the
side, walking down the canyon wall and allowing his weights to adjust as he
reached the slightly greater depth.
Stallings clung
to the wall like a starfish, his entire body pressed as flat as he could get
it, the glow stick between two of his fingers. His helmet was dented, a bad
sign, though he gave Mike a thumb’s up when Mike came into his line of sight.
Mike quickly D-ringed Stallings to his safety harness in case the ledge gave
way, and boosted the line up from the wall so that Chad could climb in front of
him. He dropped half of Chad’s weights and they began the ascent with the New York
metallurgist holding his own.
Halfway up, he
faltered. Mike saw his arms shaking from the exertion. Though it was cheating,
he had no way of knowing how badly Chad was injured. Mike dropped his own
weights and shot the rest of the way to the lid, overtaking it by several feet.
Mike hauled them back down to the seabed and hit his com.
“We’ve got
Stallings and one sample, Triton.
Returning to base.”
“Received. Doc
is ready for him.”
“Morris, give
your sample to Stallings to carry and we’ll just leave him buoyant, pull him
back.” Mike left Chad clipped to his line, floating several feet above the sea
floor. Doug handed over his container, his arms around Chad. Mike turned away.
“Let me unhook
your line, Cap.” Doug’s voice seemed steadier.
“Thanks. We need
to hustle.”
As Doug went to the
black smoker to unhook and retrieve Mike’s line, Mike looked over Chad’s
umbilical cable to assess the damage. The guy had been incredibly lucky. The video
and com cables took the majority of the damage, while the electric and gas
lines remained pristine. Mike laid a reassuring hand on Chad’s torso. He might
come through this with nothing more than a concussion from that knock on his
head.
Mike glanced
over at where Doug rose up, his line coiled neatly in his hands. Mike motioned
for him to hurry up and Doug nodded. Then without warning, the ground sifted
beneath their feet again. On instinct Mike leapt up, he and Chad still attached
to the line. His movement and the tremor threw Doug off balance and he fell
into the nearby chimney. As Mike watched in astonishment, the whole middle of
Doug’s body disappeared in a gushing eruption of… nothing. Mike never saw what hit the man.
Horrified, Chad
thrashed in the water, trying to get to where Doug had been, but what remained
of their geologist fell in two pieces to the ocean floor as the water turned red.
The temperature shot up and sweat broke out all over Mike’s body. The alarm on
his suit went off as Kibo’s voice sounded on the com.
“Get out of
there! Move! The water’s reached supercritical stage; it’ll go through solids
like a knife!”
No shit, Mike thought. He just witnessed that
demonstration of physics firsthand. Hauling Chad like a marlin on a line, Mike
moved through the water toward Triton
as fast as he could. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the specimen container
float away. Chad released it as he jack-knifed, whipping around in distraught
grief. Mike reached out and plucked it up before the current got hold of it.
After the events
of today there was no way Mike was leading a third dive to carve another chunk
off those damn black smokers. He wasn’t coming back to Top o’ London unless somebody with more rank than his two bars
ordered him to do it.
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. 2010
“He’s back.”
“Oh no, really?”
The two nurses
at Georgetown’s student health center exchanged looks.
“Dr. McKinley
just left for rounds at the hospital.”
“Who’s here?”
Sarah Barnes,
the star of the fourth year medical students, poked her head into the file
room.
“Who are you two
gossiping about in here? And do either of you have a stick of gum? I’m dying.”
The two nurses
looked at each other, chuckled, and grinned. Sarah summarily got a stick of gum
and a patient file.
“Exam room 4,
Dr. Barnes, and don’t keep him waiting. He’s in bad shape. He’s this year’s
contender for the prayer list.”
Sarah frowned as
she skinned the piece of Big Red and popped it into her mouth. With a competent
flip of her wrist she opened the file and read the notes. She got a third of
the way down the first page and scowled at the nurses.
“Is this a
joke?”
“No joke.”
“He’s been in
every day this week.” Sarah frowned. “McKinley wrote him a script for Percs
yesterday. For headaches?”
The portlier of
the two nurses nodded. “Do you want his test results from last week? We have
x-rays, a CAT, and a contrast MRI of his head.”
“Yes, please.
Thank you, Clara. And I’d like a blood draw, full tox.”
“We did one on
Monday. He’s clean.”
“Oh.” Sarah
flipped two pages and frowned again. “Run another just in case and do a
urinalysis.”
“Yes, Dr.
Barnes.”
“Clara?”
“Yes?”
“What did you
mean when you said he was this year’s contender for the prayer list?” Sarah
paused at the doorway and smoothed her blond hair with one hand.
The two nurses
looked at each other again. “We usually get one every year who we pray
transfers out to another college.”
Sarah laughed.
She walked down the hallway past several rooms with students waiting to be seen
for various ailments until she got to room 4. Knocking gently, she opened the
door and went in.
Nicholas
Pricewater hunched in the dark, in the corner of the exam room. He’d shut the
blinds and drawn the drapes as well as turning the lights off. Sarah noted that
he sat in the tripod position, his elbows on his knees and his head in his
hands, his fingers in hair as his thumbs massaged his temples. She couldn’t
tell what color his hair was; he was soaked with sweat.
“Mr. Pricewater?
Nicholas? I’m Dr. Barnes.” Sarah kept her voice low, a nod to his headache. He
looked up at her and Sarah fought to keep a neutral expression.
He had violet eyes.
“Where’s Dr.
McKinley?”
“He’s not on
duty today. I’ve looked over your file. You have a history of migraine
headaches that you see a neurologist for in Alexandria. When was your last
visit with…” Sarah checked the file. “Dr. Latham?”
Nick fought not
to scream. His head felt like it was going to explode at any given moment, and
this dumb bitch wanted to know when he’d last seen his neurologist, information
that he’d given student health last week. He knew it was all in his file, which
she had in her hands. He knew she didn’t believe there was anything wrong with
him. Or rather, she believed whatever was wrong with him was most likely
self-induced, meaning she thought he was a druggie. He was in so much pain he
would’ve cried if he could, but Nick Pricewater hadn’t cried in his entire
life.
Ever.
“Look, whoever
you are, I’ve given all this information to you people already. It’s in my
file.”
“I’d like for
you to tell me again.”
“I’d like for
you to get me Dr. McKinley.”
“He’s
unavailable. I’m afraid you’re stuck with me. How long have you had the current
headache?”
“Since birth.
Lady, I’m in an unbelievable amount of pain. I can’t read, I can’t walk in a
straight line, I can’t even keep my eyes open. I’ve been in here every
goddamned day for the last two weeks.”
Nick’s voice
grew louder and louder as he reiterated his symptoms, all of which were in the
file the stupid woman held in her hands. He focused on her, narrowing his
thoughts onto her: blond hair in a $10 haircut, crooked glasses, Wal-Mart
clothes; she was a fucking train wreck. The throbbing in his head got worse and
worse, pounding behind his eyes and roaring in his ears until he had to shout
to make himself heard over the waterfall in his head.
“Please don’t
exaggerate, Mr. Pricewater. If we’re to help you we need to accurately access
your symptoms.” Sarah stayed calm in the face of the little prick’s temper
tantrum. If he thought shouting would get him more pain pills he was sorely
mistaken. She jotted a quick note in his file about classic drug-seeking
behavior.
“Accurately
access my symptoms? Did you learn that at the cut rate med school across the
street? You cunt. I could get the endowment to that place cut in half with one
fucking phone call. Look at my name. And I’m not displaying classic
drug-seeking behavior. Have you even taken an addictionology class, you dumb
bitch?”
Sarah gaped at
him. She wasn’t sure how he’d known what she just wrote, or if his words were
just extremely coincidental. Sarah hit her emergency com button. “Clara, sed 4
stat.” She pulled her flashlight from her pocket and briskly walked over to
where Nick sat, his hands over his eyes. “Mr. Pricewater… Nicholas, may I
examine your eyes? Please?”
“Woman, don’t
waste your time. You’re not even a doctor. You’re one of the fucking fourth
years. Put your toys away and go get me some Hypnomorph so I can go to my
fucking classes today.”
Sarah stared at
him, astonished again. She flipped to his treatments. “That’s an experimental
drug. I don’t have clearance to treat you with it, nor do I have access – ”
“McKinley runs
the damn trials! There’s vials of the shit here.”
Hot daggers
stabbed through Nick’s eyes and he screamed, grabbing his head. It was too
late; he’d played around with this ignorant whore too long. Nick had been here
before, and now he was honestly terrified. He screamed and shrieked, the pain
overwhelming as his vision disappeared.
Sarah grabbed at
his hands, clamped over his eyes and head like a vise. She pried them loose and
jerked back, swearing. His nose bled in streams of bright red arterial blood.
Reprimanding herself for not gloving up before she touched him, Sarah hit the
sink and scrubbed her hands, stomping on the air dryer. She dried her warm red
skin, yanked on a pair of purple nitrile gloves, and approached her shrieking
patient again.
“Nicholas! Stop
screaming. Hold this gauze under your nose.”
She pushed
several four-by-fours under his nose and shone her light into his eyes,
frowning. His pupils were completely non-reactive to light. Fixed and dilated,
the only other time Sarah had seen anyone with pupils like his was when she’d
examined a coma patient.
Clara came to
the door with a tray holding the syringe full of sedative Sarah ordered, but
now she wasn’t sure she should give Nicholas Pricewater anything. And he
wouldn’t stop keening like a wounded animal. Clara winced at the pathetic
sounds coming out of the boy’s mouth.
“Nicholas, talk
to me. Are you experiencing pain or is it something else?” Sarah flicked the
light at his eyes again.
“I’m fucking
blind. I need Hypnomorph.” Another wave of pain crested and Nick braced for it,
but he still wasn’t prepared when the daggers stabbed into his head. He cried
out and jerked away from Sarah.
“Doctor?” Clara
asked.
“Just a minute,
Clara.”
“What’s going on
in here?”
Sarah looked
over at the door. Kazuo Strong, a first semester fourth year medical student
stood in the doorway. From California, Kaz favored his Japanese mother. His jet
black hair stood straight up on his head like a manga or anime character. Sarah
privately thought he was too beautiful to be a doctor, but so far Kaz had
proved more than competent. He was part of the complimentary medicine program
and had a way with difficult and recalcitrant patients, particularly the very
young and the elderly.
“Dr. Strong, chronic
migraines. Sudden onset of possible neuralgia with diminished vision.” Sarah’s
report was short and to the point. She didn’t think Kaz could do anymore than
she could, and figured they’d be paging McKinley shortly.
“I’ll take over,
Dr. Barnes. Thank you.” Kaz walked into the small exam room. “We won’t need
that, Clara.”
The nurse looked
at Sarah, who shrugged and nodded. Clara left. Sarah handed the patient file to
Kaz. “Thank you, Dr. Strong.” She tapped her pen over her notation on the words
classic drug-seeking behavior and Kaz
nodded, closing the door behind her.
“Who are you?”
Nick asked. He was close to passing out and breathed slowly through his mouth
to avoid it. His head hurt so badly he didn’t think he could take much more,
and now he was stuck in a room with somebody he couldn’t see.
“My name is Kaz
Strong. I’m a fourth year med student. I need your permission to touch you.”
“Please… I need
Hypnomorph. It’s the only thing that helps.” At least now he was alone with a
guy who’d been honest. Nick hated the med students who played at being
doctors.
“I promise you,
if I can’t help you, then I’ll get you some.”
Surprised, Nick
relaxed. He dropped his defensive posture. “Fine. Touch me. Ass fuck me. Just
get it done so this headache stops.”
“I don’t even
kiss on the first date.”
Nick let out a
shocked laugh. He was kind of sorry he couldn’t see this guy. Kaz had a sexy,
mesmerizing voice. He smelled good, too, which was strange. Nick couldn’t
handle most smells when he had a bad headache, but Kaz’s scent was pleasant.
Kaz stepped up
to Nick Pricewater and didn’t bother with gloves. He put his left hand over
Nick’s “third eye,” the space right between his eyes in the center of his
forehead. His right hand slid down the back of Nick’s True Religion jeans and
settled over Nick’s tailbone. Nick jerked; he couldn’t help it. He hadn’t been
expecting the touch.
“Relax,
Nicholas.”
“It’s Nick.”
“Relax, Nick.
Just let yourself drift, like you were going to sleep in my hands. Listen to my
voice.”
“I’m not
susceptible to hypnosis.”
“Okay. Listen
anyway. Let yourself drift. Feel my hands.” Nick felt his hands all right; the
guy was palming his ass. Nick grinned and wiggled. Kaz had unbelievably warm
hands. The heat surged right up his spine. “Sleep, sleep, sleep… in one, two,
three.”
Nick Pricewater,
who wasn’t susceptible to hypnosis, dropped into a deep sleep. Kaz
concentrated. Space and time fell away as he entered the man’s ravaged
cerebro-vascular system.
Kaz hadn’t
bothered to look at Nick’s MRI or CAT scan. In his experience they weren’t very
accurate. What he found in Nick’s brain were thousands of tiny blood vessels
that didn’t go anywhere. Blood flowed into areas of Nick’s brain in far larger
amounts than it should’ve and then didn’t flow back out. Daunted, Kaz looked
around at what he could fix to give Nick the most relief.
He chose the
largest vessels in the main areas of Nick’s brain and created connections for
them, outlets to other vessels so that they ran on a completed system. The work
was a bit like digging trenches for marshland or re-routing blocked inland
waterways. By the time he was done, Kaz was thoroughly exhausted. Curing Nick,
completely eliminating his headaches, would take hours, possibly days of work.
Kaz wasn’t sure that he had the skill or the stamina for it. He withdrew from
the young man, his hands still securely on Nick’s body.
“Three, two,
one. Awake, awake, awake. Hear my voice. How do you feel, Nick?”
Nick blinked his
eyes. His vision swam back into focus. For a moment he was totally disoriented.
He expected to feel the wrenching pain of his headache, but it was gone. The
shock of no pain was almost as bad as the shock of severe pain. His head
whipped sideways to stare at his benefactor, who was only now drawing away from
him.
Kaz Strong was
oriental and adorable. His jet black
hair and sapphire blue eyes hit Nick like a one-two punch. He was short, about
five feet seven inches tall and built spare like a swimmer. Nick put him at
around 140 pounds. Kaz’s skin was paper white, like it never saw the sun, and
as he wrote on Nick’s chart with a Mont Blanc ball point pen, Nick noticed that
he had small, delicate hands, like a musician.
Nick remembered
that hot little hand on his tailbone and got instantly, ragingly hard.
Kaz’s deep blue
eyes flicked up to lock onto Nick. “Nick? How do you feel?”
“What did you
do?”
“Eastern
medicine. Alternative therapy. Much more efficient and practical than drugs and
far less toxic. Could you look straight ahead for me?”
Kaz shone a
light in Nick’s pretty violet eyes. Very unusual for a Caucasian to have violet
eyes, Kaz thought, but Nick was blessed – or cursed – with them. His pupils
were equal and reactive to light now, and Kaz noted it on his chart. The
nosebleed had stopped as well. Kaz got a cotton swab and dipped it in peroxide.
“Tip your head
back, please.”
“You’re not
wearing any gloves.”
“Are you immunosuppressed?”
“No.”
“You have no
infections that I can determine and your health is excellent. I’m just going to
clean your face up so we don’t have to bother the nurses. They’re already
overworked.”
While Nick
wouldn’t have sat patiently for another living soul, he let would-be Dr. Kaz
Strong dab at his nose, upper lip, and chin with the damp cotton.
“So what did you
do?”
“I told you. I’m
studying complimentary medicine. I use traditional Eastern therapies –”
Nick reached up
and grabbed Kaz’s wrist, locking eyes with the pretty med student.
“I’ve had
migraines my whole life. Since before I could even talk. My family’s rich.
They’ve taken me everywhere, including Tokyo, Haryana, and Tibet, for
treatment. There’s nothing you know and no therapy you could’ve tried that my
family hasn’t already tried.”
Nick searched
Kaz’s face, those violet eyes so piercing and inquisitive. “So tell me, doctor, why am I without pain for the
first time, without drugs, in eighteen years?”
Kaz smiled.
“Nick, just because a treatment’s been tried, that doesn’t mean it was done
effectively. Eastern medicine depends a great deal on the melding of energies
between practitioner and patient. Perhaps whoever treated you before wasn’t
able to properly connect with you. Today, I did, and for that I’m very glad.
I’m sincerely pleased that I was able to provide you with a modicum of relief.
I don’t like the idea of you participating in Dr. McKinley’s Hypnomorph trials.
That drug is very strong and not intended to treat chronic migraines, chronic
pain, or cerebro-vascular issues.”
Kaz wrote
several more notes in Nick’s file, then went to the sink where he washed his
hands. Nick stared at the beautiful little oriental boy, his mouth agape. He’d
never been so effectively put off in his entire life. Nick didn’t know whether
to be amazed, aroused, or flatly furious. He was all three, and damn, his
erection wouldn’t go away.
“Sit here a
while longer to be sure the headache doesn’t return, and then you’re clear to
go to your classes today.”
Kaz turned to
shake hands with his patient. Nick Pricewater leaned against the table, his
arms crossed over his chest, an unreadable look on his handsome face.
“Was there
something else, Nick?” Kaz asked.
“How about your
cell number?” Nick never broke his blank expression.
Kaz blinked,
then nodded. “All right. If that will make you feel more secure.” Kaz took one
of the student health cards from the desk and jotted his pager number on the
back of it. He wasn’t about to give a stranger his personal cell phone number,
but he’d give a patient his beeper number. That was appropriate, particularly
given Nick’s condition. Kaz had a feeling he’d end up treating Nick again. He
handed Nick the card.
“If you get
another headache, page me. I’ll make arrangements to treat you.”
“Maybe we should
just start dating.” Nick smiled at Kaz. “I’ve had these headaches all my life.”
Kaz laughed, but
frowned. “You seem like a nice guy, Nick, and you’re very attractive, but I’m
straight.” Kaz flipped the patient file closed. “Increase your water intake.
You look a little dehydrated. Have a good afternoon, Nick.”
Kaz walked out,
leaving Nick to stare after him, baffled. Straight?
No way.
Nick looked at
the card in his hand. Kaz Strong. Huh. He got up and grabbed his hoodie from
the floor where he flung it when he came in. He had a few phone calls to make,
and he was dying for a Naked Juice and a salted bagel.
Straight boys
didn’t think about how smooth another guy’s skin was or how pretty their eyes
were, and that’s what Dr. Hunk had been thinking about while he palmed Nick’s
ass. Nick knew. He’d been reading minds for as long as he could remember, after
all.
And he had a
sneaking suspicion that Kaz Strong was more like him – in more ways than just
his orientation – than he wanted to admit.
*Where have all the good men gone and where are all the gods? Where's the street-wise Hercules to fight the rising odds? Isn't there a white knight upon a fiery steed? Late at night I toss & turn & dream of what I need... I need a hero. I'm holding out for a hero 'til the end of the night. He's gotta be strong & he's gotta be fast & he's gotta be fresh from the fight. I need a hero. I'm holding out for a hero 'til the morning light. He's gotta be sure & it's gotta be soon & he's gotta be larger than life... ~Bonnie Tyler
