the dead.
He stepped out of a moon-shadow that resembled a giant, canted, broken
wheel, and he headed toward the moldering structure where he kept the
dead. His collection.
3
“Sixty-four minutes,” Gina said, consulting her Rolex with the pink
leather band. “This one could get messy.”
Jonas couldn’t believe how fast time was passing, just speeding by,
surely faster than usual, as if there had been some freak acceleration
of the continuum. But it was always the same in situations like this,
when the difference between life and death was measured in minutes and
seconds.
He glanced at the blood, more blue than red, moving through the
clear-plastic exsanguination tube into the purring bypass machine. The
average human body contained five liters of blood. Before the
resuscitation team was done with Harrison, his five liters would have
been repeatedly recycled, heated, and filtered.
Ken Nakamura was at a light board, studying head and chest X rays and
body-sonograms that had been taken in the air ambulance during its
hundred-eighty-mile-per-hour journey from the base of the San
Bernardinos to the hospital in Newport Beach. Kari was bent close to
the patient’s face, examining his eyes through an ophthalmoscope,
checking for indications of dangerous cranial pressure from a buildup of
fluid on the brain.
With Helga’s assistance, Jonas had filled a series of syringes with
large doses of various free-radical neutralizers. Vitamins E and C were
effective scavengers and had the advantage of being natural substances,
but he also intended to administer a lazeroid-tirilazad mesylate-and
phenyl tertiary butyl nitrone.
Free radicals were fast-moving, unstable molecules that ricocheted
through the body, causing chemical reactions that damaged most cells
with which they came into contact. Current theory held that they were
the primary cause of human aging, which explained why natural scavengers
like vitamins E and C boosted the immune system and, in long-term users,
promoted a more youthful appearance and higher energy levels. Free
radicals were a by-product of ordinary metabolic processes and were
always present in the system. But when the body was deprived of
oxygenated blood for an extended period, even with the protection of
hypothermia, huge pools of free radicals were created in excess of
anything the body had to deal with nsrmally. When the heart was started
again, renewed circulation swept those destructive molecules through the
brain, where their impact was devastating.
The vitamin and chemical scavengers would deal with the free radicals
before they could cause any irreversible damage. At least that was the
hope.
Jonas inserted the three syringes in different ports that fed the main
intravenous line in the patient’s thigh, but he did not yet inject the
contents.
“Sixty-five minutes,” Gina said.
A long time dead, Jonas thought.
It was very near the record for a successful reanimation.
In spite of the cool air, Jonas felt sweat breaking out on his scalp,
under his thinning hair. He always got too involved, emotional. Some
of his colleagues disapproved of his excessive empathy; they believed a
judicious perspective was insured by the maintenance of a professional
distance between the doctor and those he treated. But no patient was
just a patient.
Every one of them was loved and needed by someone. Jonas was acutely
aware that if he failed a patient, he was failing more than one person,
bringing pain and suffering to a wide network of relatives and friends.
Even when he was treating someone like Harrison, of whom Jonas knew
virtually nothing, he began to imagine the lives interlinking with that
of the patient, and he felt responsible to them as much as he would have
if he had known them intimately.
“The guy looks clean,” Ken said, turning away from the X rays and
sonograms. “No broken bones. No internal injuries.”
“But those sonograms were taken after he was dead,” Jonas noted, “so
they don’t show functioning organs.”
“Right. We’ll snap some pictures again when he’s reanimated, make sure
nothing’s ruptured, but it looks good so far.”
Straightening up from her examination of the dead man’s eyes, Kari
Dovell said, “There might be concussion to deal with. Hard to say from
what I can see.”
“Sixty-six minutes.”
“Seconds count here. Be ready, people,” Jonas said, although he knew