temperature. Jonas Nyebern shivered.
Helga checked the digital thermometer that was patched to Harrison.
“Body temperature’s up to seventy degrees.”
“Seventy-two minutes,” Gina said.
“We’re going for the brass ring now,” Ken said. “Medical history, the
Guiness Book of World Records, TV appearances, books, movies, T-shirts
with our faces on ’em, novelty hats, plastic lawn ornaments in our
images.”
“Some dogs have been brought back after ninety minutes,” Kari reminded
him.
“Yeah,” Ken said, “but they were dogs. Besides, they were so screwed
up, they chased bones and buried cars.”
Gina and Kari laughed softly, and the joke seemed to break the tension
for everyone except Jonas. He could never relax for a moment in the
process of a resuscitation, although he knew that it was possible for a
physician to get so tightly wound that he was no longer performing at
his peak. Ken’s ability to vent a little nervous energy was admirable,
and in the service of the patient; however, Jonas was incapable of doing
likewise in the midst of a battle.
“Seventy-two degrees, seventy-three.”
It was a battle. Death was the adversary: clever, mighty, and
relentless.
To Jonas, death was not just a pathological state, not merely the
inevitable fate of all living things, but actually an entity that walked
the world, perhaps not always the robed figure of myth with its skeletal
face hidden in the shadows of a cowl, but a very real presence
nonetheless. Death with a capital D.
“Seventy-four degrees,” Helga said.
Gina said, “Seventy-three minutes.”
Jonas introduced more free-radical scavengers into the blood that surged
through the IV line.
He supposed that his belief in Death as a supernatural force with a will
and consciousness of its own, his certainty that it sometimes walked the
earth in an embodied form, his awareness of its presence right now in
this room in a cloak of invisibility, would seem like silly superstition
to his colleagues. It might even be regarded as a sign of mental
imbalance or incipient madness. But Jonas was confident of his sanity.
After all, his belief in Death was based on empirical evidence. He had
seen the hated enemy when he was only seven years old, had heard it
speak, had looked into its eyes and smelled its fetid breath and felt
its icy touch upon his face.
“Seventy-five degrees.”
“Get ready,” Jonas said.
The patient’s body temperature was nearing a threshold beyond which
reanimation might begin at any moment. Kari finished filling a
hypodermic syringe with epineplrrine, and Ken activated the
defibrillation machine to let it build up a charge. Gina opened the
flow valve on a tank containing an oxygen-carbon dioxide mixture that
had been formulated to the special considerations of resuscitation
procedures, and picked up the mask of the pulmonary machine to make sure
it was functioning.
“Seventy-six degrees,” Helga said, “seventy-seven.”
Gina checked her watch. “Coming up on seventy-four minutes.”
6
At the bottom of the long incline, he entered a cavernous room as large
as an airplane hangar. Hell had once been related there, according to
the unimaginative vision of an amusement-park designer, complete with
gas-jet fires lapping at formed-concrete rocks around the perimeter.
The gas had been turned off long ago. Hell was tar-black now. But not
to him, of course.
He moved slowly across the concrete floor, which was bisected by a
serpentine channel housing another chain-drive. There, the gondolas had
moved through a lake of water made to look like a lake of fire by clever
lighting and bubbling air hoses that simulated boiling oil. As he
walked, he savored the stench of decay, which grew more exquisitely
pungent by the second.
A dozen mechanical demons had once stood on higher formations, spreading
immense bat wings, peering down with glowing eyes that periodically
raked the passing gondolas with harmless crimson laser beams.
Eleven of the demons had been hauled away, peddled to some competing
park or sold for scrap. For unknown reasons, one devil remained silent
and unmoving agglomeration of rusted metal, moth-eaten fabric, torn
plastic, and grease-caked hydraulic mechanisms. It was still perched on
a rocky spire two-thirds of the way toward the high ceiling, pathetic
rather than frightening.
As he passed beneath that sorry funhouse figure, he thought, I am the
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