There was magic in the smell of antiseptic.  It was the sharp aroma of happier times.  The harsh cleanser burned the sinuses with memories of the emergency room, with its constant commotion—an electric, non-stop stream of lacerations, broken bones, and hemorrhaging.  The trauma unit was as close to a natural element as Barbara Gracie had ever known.  The only place she had ever felt more at home was the OR.

Barbara was a figure of perfect calmness when the chaos of the hospital was spinning around her.  She always worked best with that race against the clock, as life was slipping away from a shattered body—wrist-deep in a body cavity, with shredded organs under her deft fingers—that's where she belonged. 

In contrast to her memories, the corridors she walked down were quiet.  A dull peacefulness lingered in the ward like the presence of death.  Silence and orderly calm were the decorations of a place where the patients weren't expected to live.

At the end of the hall, an open door gave a view of a young woman asleep in bed.  Barbara entered the room, noting that the door was bolted to the wall to ensure it never closed—to ensure the patient didn't collapse on the floor and block it.

Barbara took a seat by the bed and waited.  She adjusted her white smock and took a glance at the forged credentials.  Delgado had come through.

"This is our chance," he said to her when he had returned to the motel.  He had entered and shut the door without a sound, but the activity had woken her just the same. 

What time had he left?  It must have been early, while dreamless sleep held her tight.

"I just got word that Maxwell's out of town.  He's not expected back until Sunday."

"Do we only have to worry about Wiley?"  She sat up in bed, wondering who else might care if she went missing.  Within the Music Box, Blass kept close tabs on everyone but he wasn't any threat.  What concerned her were the invisible people that Wiley and Delgado reported to.

"Since this is your day off, there shouldn't be any problems.  One of my men is supposed to run a couple of random spot checks on you.  But I'll make sure he gets an emergency assignment."

There was a fluttering in Barbara's stomach—a burst of excitement and she needed to move.  She threw off the blanket and stood in front of Delgado oblivious to her own nakedness.

"So you'll be covering for me," she said.

Delgado was carefully positioned in the blind spot to the left of the motel room's only window.  He shifted uncomfortably and banged his leg against an armchair held together by dust mites and several years' worth of bodily fluids.  His head bobbed in a nod as he kept his gaze away from her.

She hated this little-boy act of his.  Perhaps he was trying to be polite or respectful.  Barbara wished he'd be bold instead.

She stepped closer to him, making her body harder to ignore.  "And what happens when the name Barbara Gracie enters the TSA system?  How long before it pops up on an Agency alert?"

"That's where these come in."  He pulled an envelope out of his jacket and held them out for her to take.  His eyes were fixed on the doorknob.

She ripped it out of his hand and walked over to the bureau.  "You weren't so shy last night."  She spoke in a low grumble, more to herself than to him.

"Sorry."  There was a shifting sound behind her but she didn't look.  Barbara popped open the unsealed envelope and dumped the contents onto the dresser.

There was a driver's license, a credit card, and a visitor's ID for the University of Colorado with hospital privileges, all bearing the false name Dr. Barbara Parker.  Not very original but it would do.

"It's just that when we're together—"

Barbara cut him off.  "What if they get suspicious at the airport?"

"It's a domestic flight so airport security will be fairly lax.  So long as you don't make a scene, there won't be any problems."  He cleared his throat.  He sounded closer.  "The important thing is to talk to her and get back here before anyone notices you're gone."

Did Delgado have any idea what he was risking with this venture?  What was to stop her from taking this ID and jumping on a flight out of the country?  His trust felt like a weight.  There was a tense hostility in her muscles. 

The thought of taking a flight to Mexico or Honduras instead of Denver played in her head.  She smiled without any warmth.  It would serve him right.

Warm hands gripped her shoulders at the base of her neck and rubbed the tight muscles. "Don't worry.  This will all go smoothly."  His lips brushed the skin just below her right ear.  "I'm sorry.  I was afraid if I looked at you we'd spend the whole day in bed.  You're so beautiful."

She flung her head back so their lips were less than an inch apart. "If you're going to be in my life, you need to learn not to be afraid of that."

The memory of their passionate goodbye played through her head as she sat in a hard chair and stared at the waxen face of the young woman.  Her dirty blonde hair was greasy and limp.  It probably hadn't been washed in days.  It was likely she had nothing but sponge baths.  Dark shadows like bruising hung to her eye sockets.  Weight loss made her cheekbones more pronounced.  Crusty flakes specked her eyelashes and a white paste clumped at the corners of her mouth.  If she hadn't been sick for so long, Whitney Cullen would have been considered attractive.

The afternoon was fading by the time her breathing stopped its slow, steady rhythm and her eyes fluttered open.  The pupils darted around before settling on Barbara.  It was several minutes before she spoke.  "Do I know you?"

"Hello, Whitney.  I'm Dr. Parker.  We met last week.  I'm a specialist from Delta County Memorial."

"We did?"  She rubbed her nose with a sluggish hand.  "I don't remember."  Her arm struggled on its way back to the bed cover.  It acted like it not only didn't remember the way but also didn't remember how to move.  It jerked in an erratic arc like a broken clockwork toy.

"That's understandable."  Barbara was familiar with her case.  Whitney's illness was eating away at her brain and her memory.  Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease was tearing through her neural network spreading dementia in its wake.  By tomorrow, she probably wouldn't remember this meeting.  Or perhaps, if she did, she would attribute it to a hallucination after her real doctors told her that there was no specialist from Delta County looking in on her.

"How are you feeling today?"  It was a standard doctor's question.  Barbara asked it only to establish her credibility.  How many times had she done it with her real patients back in Minnesota?

Whitney grunted in reply.

"The last time I was here, you were telling me about your brother..."

"Tray?  Is Tray here?" She began to raise herself from the bed and look around.

Barbara patted her shoulder as a way of letting her know to lie down again.  "No, he isn't."  Had anyone bothered to tell her about his death?  Did they not want to upset her with the news?  Or had she forgotten?

"He's supposed to visit.  When I spoke to him yesterday, he said he was coming to see me."

"Yesterday?"  How delusional was she?

"Yes, he called me.  He said he was sorry.  He kept apologizing.  He told me that they wanted him to do something bad, but he wouldn't do it and he was sorry.  See, he isn't a bad kid.  Just misguided."

"Who did he mean by they?"

"I guessed it was his work.  The lab he told me about.  The one where he had to take an elevator deep into the ground."

Perhaps this wasn't a delusion.  Could she just be mistaken in thinking this memory was recent?

"What did they want him to do?"

"I don't know.  He said, Palmer would be mad but he knew I would never forgive him if he did such a horrible thing."

"Who's Palmer?"

"I don't know.  I think he might be with the study."

"What study?"

"The one in Denver that Tray was going to get me into.  I hope I get to go."

"You're in Denver."

"No, we aren't."  Panic began to creep in around Whitney's eyes.  Barbara had seen the look before.  The woman was sensing the fear of not knowing.  The terror of having no grasp of the reality around her.

 "No.  We can't be there.  I've never been.  I always wanted to go there.  There and Paris.  I rem'er as a lil' girl..."  Her voice slipped into a slurred muttering as her lucidity slipped away.

Whatever Barbara had hoped to glean from this woman, she was too late.  The disease had chewed up her brain and there wasn't much left.  Another few weeks and she would be dead.  Her remaining time would be filled with confusion and pain.  At some point, they'd probably pump her with so much morphine even a healthy person wouldn't know who they were.  There would be mercy in death.

It was thoughts like that which started all the madness.  It had all begun with Ryan Cooper and a talk about merciful deaths.

His mangled body was pulled off the blacktop, where the hit and run driver had left him, and rushed to Hoffman Memorial, straight into her OR.  By the time he landed on her table, he had been cut out of his clothes and was wearing only the paramedic's neck brace.  His body was a chewed up mess.  He was in cardiac arrest and his chance of survival was negligible.  A lesser surgeon might have thrown in the towel—might have simply waited a minute for nature to do its work, and then call it.  But Barbara leaped into action.

"Nurse, rib spreaders.  Prepare 6 mg of Adenosine.  Get an intravenous going.  He's lost lots of blood and he'll lose more before we're done."  Seconds later, she was in his chest giving him open heart massage.  The damage was everywhere.  It was impossible to know what to start with, but as she pumped life back into to him, she began triaging the injuries. 

"Bag him," she yelled to get the assisting doctor to start aiding his breathing with a ventilator.  With her free hand, she reached across for a chest tube and jammed it into his collapsed lung to vent the air.

It took forty-five minutes to get the heart beating on its own and to seal up his chest.  Then she went to work suturing the damage to his organs and legs. The left kidney was too badly damaged and had to go.  Same with the spleen.  She cut them loose and handed them over to a nurse to dump in the medical waste bin.

At the four hour mark, she got the neck brace off to survey the damage it concealed. 

"Looks like he has damage from T3 to T8," she called out, identifying the injured vertebrae. "Administer the methylprednisolone.  35 mg.   And get a spine-board ready.  I'm going to check for bone fragments."

In all, she spent eleven hours on Ryan Cooper.  When she left the OR, he was stable.  Barbara had cheated death.  As she peeled off her gloves and worked the pain out of her exhausted hands, her surgical team gave her a round of applause.

Three weeks later, she visited Ryan Cooper in his hospital room.

"You asked to see me?"

"I hear I have you to thank for this."  The cervical collar pushed his jaw upward and he spoke through clenched teeth.

"No need to thank me.  I was just doing my job."   That's what you were supposed to say.  She couldn't say, you were lucky you got me or you would have been roadkill.

"I was being sarcastic," he said.

"What?"

"I was a runner."

"Yes, I heard that your accident happened while you were running."

"No.  I was a runner."  He emphasized the word and his anger seethed out so strongly even she could feel it.  "I was going to go to China next year.  You know, the Olympics."

"I see."

"Do you really?  They tell me I will be paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of my life."

"Yes, but you'll be alive.  You'll have years to develop other interests and pursue new goals."

"Are you fucking serious, lady?  I'm fucked.  My parents are dead.  I'm not married—not even a girlfriend.  Who's even going to be there to sit me up in the morning?  To feed me?  To wipe my ass?"

"There are care facilities..."

"Care facilities?  Your hospital administrator has already been by to see me.  The work you did on me blew my insurance limit out of the water.  I'm going to be bankrupt by the time I get out of here."

"Insurance really isn't my area."

"Not your area?  You're a fucking piece of work, you know that?"

"It's understandable to be depressed after what has happened.  There are therapists that can see you through this transition period.  But being alive is better than the alternative."

"Is it?  Do you really believe that or is that just something they programmed you to say, you goddamn robotic bitch.  What kind of life will I have?  The alternative would be a fucking mercy."

That night, Barbara wondered: could he be right? 

Did she view her job too simply?  If you're taught to repair cars, success is getting them back on the road.  Failure is sending them to the junkyard.  But as she was constantly being reminded human beings weren't simple machines—if only they were.  The complicated emotional aspect made even the simplest things messy.

His anger was understandable.  A phase he would pass through.  At least that's what the psychiatrists said.  Not that they knew anything.  What if coming terms with it wasn't what people were supposed to do?  What if the first reaction was the right one and everything that came after was self-delusion?  Merely the fragile human mind trying to hold onto its own existence.  Would she want to live that way?

Had she done Ryan Cooper a disservice?  Could it be possible that the correct course of action was to let him die?  Had she screwed up by saving him?

Two days later, Ryan Cooper flatlined in the middle of the night.  The medical examiner called it cardiac arrest due to ventricular fibrillation.  A more thorough autopsy would have found the chemicals in his system that had stopped the heart that Barbara Gracie had once held in her hand.

She had rectified her error.

Barbara left Whitney Cullen muttering to herself and marched over to the nurse's station.  Despite the temptation to alleviate the woman's pain, Barbara had left the woman to her horrific fate.  She was on too many security monitors.  It would cause both her and Delgado problems if a patient's death was investigated.

At the desk, an exhausted middle-aged woman with tobacco-colored hair was going over paperwork.

"Excuse me, I need information on Cullen."

"And you are?"

Barbara slapped her ID down on the counter.  "Dr. Boyd asked me to consult."

"Then you should talk to Dr. Boyd."

She leaned across the counter and in a low voice said, "It's like this: every time I meet with him he gets a bit...well..."

"Grabby?  I hear ya'."  The nurse pushed her chair back to a filing cabinet and started to search out the file.  "What is it you want to know?"

"Is she a participant in a study?"

"Was," the woman clarified digging out a folder.  "Didn't Doctor Feel-Good tell you?"

Barbara ignored the question.  "What was it for?"

"Some experimental drug.  It seemed to be working, from what they said when they brought her in here.  At least, it was slowing the progress."

"What happened?"

"She was dropped from the program."

"Why?"

The nurse sighed and started leafing through the file.  Papers flipped by—pink, white, swamp green—they passed through her fingers until she stopped on one and read it carefully.

"The patient's treatment has been compromised by a consistent and prolonged error in dosage," she read aloud.  "Despite positive results, we must drop her from the study since all findings related to her treatment must be discarded as unreliable and unusable."

 "When was this?"

Her finger traced its way to the top of the page. "May 11th."

Barbara didn't have to think about it—it was the day after Tray's death.  She did not believe in coincidences.

"Who was running the drug trial?"

Instead of answering, the nurse held the sheet up.  In the top left-hand corner, there was the familiar logo of SBI Pharmaceuticals.