Ten years ago
Beyond the frosted panes of double glass, the wind screamed its displeasure. Day had slipped into night with the coming storm. The WKOB weatherman was predicting three feet of snow today, another six inches tomorrow; the worst storm to hit in thirty years, he said. Do not leave your homes unless it’s absolutely necessary.
The young doctor was listening intently to the radio at the second-floor station when her pager beeped. She checked the code, slipped quickly across the wine-red carpet to the nearest window, and peered out on a desolate winter scene. The little hospital parking lot wore a sheet of inch-thick ice pinned by mountains of plowed snow. It was mostly empty, the hospital all but shut down in preparation for the storm. Only three patients today, and two of them had come in on the same call, a couple of skiers who got disoriented in the woods and had frostbite. One of them, a pretty young thing, lost the little toe on her left foot. The doctor found it necessary to amputate.
Blood. She saw it again as she closed her eyes, bright-red blood coating her gloved hands.
The radio buzzed now and then as the wind made the signal come and go. She opened her eyes. The parking lot lights barely cut through the snow as it started to fall faster. Nothing that looked like an emergency, but she could hardly see anything at all. She shivered as the scene below her faded into a writhing white blanket of dim and mysterious shapes.
Down at the front entrance the admitting desk was empty. Above the little waiting area with its row of plastic-molded chairs, a nineteen-inch television set flickered from a bracket on the wall. The rug here felt damp and the color had faded in a trail from the waiting area to the front desk. Smelled like cleaning solution, and something underneath like a boil that lingered beneath the skin.
The doctor spotted movement through the sliding glass doors. Two emergency techs were unloading a woman from her car. One of them slipped to his knees and cursed, a black man in a green hospital coat and slacks, bare hands and head, tight, coal-black hair frosted with snow. James or something. No, Jack, that was it. Likely to lose his earlobes to the cold if he isn’t careful, and maybe the tips of his fingers too. It could happen in five minutes in this weather. The other one had a scarf wrapped around his neck and wore knitted pink mittens that had been sitting in the lost and found, and he looked warmer, but not much. A country boy, thick and heavy like he might play linebacker on the local college football team. Stewart was his name, or Stan. Young kid. She had only been working there a week and couldn’t remember everybody yet.
The sliding glass doors opened and they wheeled the woman inside on a stretcher. A gust of wind hit the doctor like a gut punch. For a moment the lobby was transformed into a blizzard; the doors closed and the snow settled in the silence like one of those Christmas globes that had been shaken and then put to rest.
She stepped forward to break the spell. The woman was sitting up on the stretcher, wrapped in a white horsehair blanket and curiously calm. She appeared to be suffering from shock. It took the doctor only a moment longer to discover that her new patient was naked under the blanket, and in labor.
The woman’s heart beat slow and steady in spite of the pain she must be in. How was it possible? The contractions are coming almost on top of each other. She would deliver soon. And yet her breathing hardly changed.
The empty car sat sideways just outside the entrance, lights shining away from them, motor still running. The doctor leaned forward, close to the pregnant woman’s face. “What’s your name,” she asked. The woman smiled vacantly. “Your name,” the doctor said again, sharply this time. No response. She pinched the fleshy part of the woman’s upper arm, watched it flush pink. Her skin was creamy and perfectly smooth, almost poreless. She had the look of a backwoods girl but there was something more to her, some special kind of glow or aura.
Pregnant women can be like that, the doctor thought. She’d witnessed it before, but this sort of glow seemed unnatural under the harsh glare of the hospital lights. She stared at the woman’s naked legs beneath the blanket, felt herself enter a slow dream free-fall, and shook her head to clear it. Something seemed to be buzzing far away, like a fluorescent bulb about to blink into life.
“Creeps me out,” the black tech said. “She was doing that in the car when we went to get her. Just sitting there smiling like that.”
“Is there anyone with her?”
“Car’s empty,” he said. “Lights are on but nobody’s home, know what I mean? How in Sam hell she drove here all by herself–”
“Get the delivery room ready,” the young doctor said. Her hands felt clammy and she wiped them across her white coat, then raked her fingers through her hair. She looked at the pregnant woman again. What was wrong with her? Drugs? The situation was maddening. She had come to this little town to get away from the pressure of the big city hospitals and their twenty-hour shifts, and now here she was in the middle of something her very first week. Should have gone into psychiatry like the rest of her friends back at UDA.
They were wheeling the woman towards the delivery room when the power went out.
First there was a great cracking sound, like a tree limb snapping under tremendous pressure. Then a back-surge of air, as if something huge and warm had taken a deep breath.
And then they were plunged into darkness.
“Don’t move,” the doctor said. Dim red lights blinked on down the hall. She waited a moment for the main generators to kick in and give them something more, but nothing happened. It was no good; without lights the delivery room was useless.
They stood bathed in red.
The wind howled. The doctor put her hand on the woman’s belly and found the swelling had moved lower and turned. This baby was coming now.
They set her up right there, lying on her back on the stretcher with her legs spread under the blanket. The two techs held flashlights, one on either side; a nurse appeared with boiling water from the gas stove in the staff kitchen, and towels, along with a few instruments on a stainless-steel tray from the delivery room. The doctor crouched between the woman’s legs, going through a checklist in her head. She could see something now, wet and bloody at the woman’s opening, bright and strange in the flashlight beams.
Sweat stung her eyes. She blinked it away, glanced up and over the blanket.
Something was wrong. “Push,” the doctor said, getting a grip on the baby’s slippery head. “We’ve got to get it out now. Do you understand me?” The woman did not respond, but the doctor felt her muscles working. How could she be so calm? She hadn’t even been given a painkiller, it was too dangerous without knowing what else she was on.
The doctor raised her hands. Blood, dripping from her fingers, her palms. She hadn’t put on any gloves.
Blood.
She felt the room spinning. The hairs raised on the back of her neck. That great dark something around them took another sweeping breath.
They were engulfed in a huge, smothering silence. The lights blinked on, stuttered, and went off again. She found herself staring at the woman’s face over the blanket as shadows danced in the beam of the flashlight. So beautiful, the doctor wondered through the buzzing that filled her head. She had to be the most beautiful woman in the world. She felt herself falling again, that sweet dizzy rush, and this time she let it pull her down to her knees.
A rattling sound filled the room like the beating of a hundred tiny drums.
“Oh, Jesus Lord,” one of the techs said in a hoarse whisper. “Look at that. Would you the Christ look at it?”
The doctor glanced over through the fog that had begun to claim her, and saw the glittering-steel instruments marching across the tray like tiny soldiers across a silver field. A hollow, deep-throated booming began. The floor shook under her. A great light poured out from somewhere now, and the young doctor squeezed her eyes tightly shut, her head seeming to split wide open. She heard a howling noise like a creature coming at her down a long tunnel, and then she opened her eyes and looked down at what she held in her hands.
Somebody screamed.
It took the doctor several seconds to realize it was her own voice she heard.
