We walked out together and he said, “I’m making a full report of all our findings to Disease Control in Atlanta. Do you know anything about the red welt on the back of her neck?”
The Green Ripper
“She told me she was bitten by a bug this morning. She said it stung her.”
“Symptoms bear no relation to anaphylactic shock. We’ve taken some tissue from the area It’s being packed in dry ice and flown to Atlanta along with blood samples and so forth. Got more sophisticated analysis systems available up there. Paper chromatography. Thin-layer chromatology techniques.”
The hours blurred. I went in as often as I could. Night and day inside hospitals are too much alike. Saturday night. Sunday. Sunday night. She kept changing, little by little, going further away from me. They did a tracheotomy, and from then on a machine was doing her breathing for her, pumping her chest up and down. When I bent close to her to touch my lips to her dank forehead, I could detect the faint sour smell of mortal illness. At one point, early in the vigil, I went out to the car and made the mistake of trying to eat one of the clammy hamburgers and was siclc on the asphalt.
Meyer came out, bringing a change of clothes and my toilet kit. A nurse found me a towel and took me to a place where I could shower and scrape the pale stubble off my tired brown jaws.
Somebody forgot to stop me and tell me. I went in a little after eleven on Monday night, and she was gone. The bed was empty. The equipment had been moved away.
“Where is she?” I roared, and they came running toward me, hushing me, ushering me toward the door.
A big black nurse, big as a tight end, had been answering questions for me during other visits during that shift. She took hold of my shoulders and gave me a shake. “Easy now! Easy now!” she said in a husky whisper. “It’s better we lost her.”
“Better than what?”
“Hush now. You hush down. A temperature like that, for so long, it cooked her brain. She would have been a vegetable. Ternble thing, a strong young woman like that.” She had led me out into the corridor. “Who you got to come get you?”
“I’ll manage.” I tried to smile. The tears were mnumg down my face. No sobs. No shudders. Just eyes naming. “Where is she now?”
‘They’re doing an autopsy.”
“Who said they could!”
“It’s a law, Mr. McGee. When the cause of death is unknown, they have to. There’s no way anybody can stop them, and that’s a good law. Whatever is killing people, we have to find it out.”
“What finally happened? There was that machine…”
She shrugged. “Total kidney failure, and then the heart gave out right about the same time.” She shook her head. Her eyes were shining with unshed tears. “I don’t know. We get so many old ones here.
The Green Ripper
Not young strong women like her. Whatever it was, it came and wore her right down to nothing. It took the life right out of her. It ate her up, like it was some hungry thing.” She caught herself. “sorry. talk too much. Listen, if you’re the only one she had, what you’ve got to do now, you’ve got to make the arrangements. She’s got to have a burial”
I wallced on out of their hospital, snuffling from time to time, marveling that I could walk with so little thought and effort. Long strides, heels thudding against the tile door, hand lifting without conscious command to flatten against the push plate on the big glass door, push and let me out into the chill night, spangled with stars that were faint above the security lights of the parking area. I walked to the tall dark shape of Miss Agnes, my ancient Rolls, and leaned against one of her high front fenders, my arms folded, ankles crossed, eyes running again.
Cessation.. Ending. A stopping of her. I heard the night sounds of country and city. Yawk of a night bird nearby. Faraway eerie pulsing of siren. Whim poring drone of light traffic on University Drive, lights in moving patterns. Grinding whine of trucks moving fast, a mile or so away. Random night wind clattering palm fronds. This was the world, bustling its way on through its allotted four billion more years of ffme, carrying its four ~billicn souls gracelessly onward. A lot of them had stopped tonight, some in blood and terror. I tried to comprehend the enormity the obscenity of the fact that Gretel Howard had been one of them, just as dead as the teenagers who impacted a tree at a hundred and ten miles an hour near Tulsa, the llying dentist who didn’t see the power lines, the Muslim children dead by fire in Bangladesh, the three hundred elderly in Florida who would not make it through the night in their nursing-home beds.