The White Protocol

By Lockett Hollis

We are beginning to see the end of the world.

But Sammie can see more than most . . .

Mere months after the successive deaths of her mother and younger brother, and with her father scarcely able to retain the house in which she was raised, Sammie finds herself alone in a vicious city, having landed a job at a gaunt and gigantic teaching hospital on the eastern side of the desolate metropolis, where she hopes to earn enough to help her father keep their home.

At the hospital, encompassed by illness, pain, violence and death, having found herself physically incapable of releasing the grief she carries for her lost loved ones, Sammie begins to see things: nefarious, nebulous entities which no other persons seem able to see, and which seem to her not only to have manifested from—but indeed to be feeding upon—the ever-expanding banquet of human misery.

And now these scavengers seem all the further allured by the unpurged agony Sammie has stoppered inside of herself.

Down in the bowels of the hospital subbasement, Dr. Eli Anani has developed a miraculous cure for Alzheimer's. But his treatment requires further testing, including MRI examinations of human subjects, performed under the guidance of imaging guru Marc Marini, who befriends and entices young Sammie to take part in their ground-breaking research.

But as the already brutal city grows worse with the world, until it seems everything everywhere is descending into irremediable chaos, Sammie discovers herself deep in a world of deception, drug trafficking, and terrifying forces that are beyond and yet beholden to humanity’s suffering, and to its own inhumanity. There is a madness spreading. What begins as a hope for healing memories concludes in unforgettable cataclysm as the forces awakened by the minds in the magnet turn their ravenous attentions to the wider world, to propagate turmoil in an insidious celebration of torment and terror.

Likely to be one of the most bleak and frightening books you will ever read, ambivalently supernatural and psychological, The White Protocol will pull you into a place where only two things are certain: death and madness; and there it will leave you, far more disturbed by what you don't see than that which you do.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lockett Hollis
• Release date: Oct 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301855551

Book preview

Prologue: Before the Storm

And near to the place of those four rivers dwelt a man called Namhul. He was an artificer of tools for men to turn the fields, and the father of men who knew the Earth by labor, causing Her to bring forth good things in great abundance.

And when it was seen how he caused his own lands to yield so well, men besought him to make for them these tools, and to give them instruction.

For this they gave to Namhul treasures of brass and of gold, and traded fish of the seas that he had never seen. These they gave for his tools, and for the fruits also that he had grown, which they brought back to the city of Mari, to sell unto people of the lands that lie to the North and the West of the river called Prattu.

And the works of Namhul became a great wonder in the land, and many sought him in Mari, and in the lands there about, that they might learn his name, and where to find him.

But the trading men told not of him. Instead they returned to his valley, and they begged of Namhul and his sons to sell them more of their fruits and their tools, that they might satisfy the hunger of many. So Namhul did this, and he brought these things with him to the North out of the valley of his fathers, to where the traders came from across the river Prattu to meet him.

For many years would they meet in that place, and Namhul became very prosperous in the land, and as the land was exceedingly fertile, so the children of men fed well upon the fat of the land, until in those days they became of great and wondrous stature, and very long of life. And some of these sought for their own affliction, for they were heard to call upon unseen and unseemly things.

There came a day when the traders came to the river in company with evil men, whose faces were fierce and unknowable even in the daylight, and these took from Namhul all his animals and all those goods that the creatures had carried, and they did slay and scatter his servants. They robbed him also of his garments, so that he was made to flee away from the road, and to wander barefoot across blistered and broken lands, where the rocks cut his feet, and where there could not be found any meat, nor any drop of water.

And when the night was near at hand, Namhul could no longer find the road, and from the shadows where the sun was falling there came a wailing that was not an echo of his own.

Namhul was a righteous man. He sought the mourner long and long, climbing the name-lacking mountains, searching amongst the rocks and through the brush, and ever the sorrowful voice lamented ahead of him, so that he could not find the one who mourned at the end of the daylight.

And Namhul feared lest he should come upon some hungry lion behind the rocks of the slope, or should step beside the stinging serpent.

Yet at last came he upon a woman, and she in the travails of childbirth, and she bled from beneath through her toiling, crying her torment out to certain stars.

But when the woman saw Namhul, when she saw how that he was circumcised and without any blemish therefrom, she smiled, and Namhul was stricken by fear.

Even as she bore upon her offspring, she cast her eyes upon the trembling man before her, and she beckoned to him, inviting him to lie with her in a close place amidst the rocks. And her voice spoke from out of the gnashing of her teeth, so that Namhul could not know it for laughter or for a lamentation.

Then there fell moonlight upon that mountain side, and Namhul could see how out from that woman’s womb came the writhing things, the many blind and pale worms whose mouths were full of children’s crying, as infants which should never see the light.

And Namhul fled from her presence, unable to find his way, and her voice followed him in the darkness as the screech owl that will not rest.

At last came he to rest at the cold mountain crest where, from the valley beneath, rose many voices, as of a great and awful multitude.

When Namhul looked down from the mountain, through the mist in the midst of the valley, he knew where was that place which lay before him; for his wandering had brought him to the desolate Vale of Hinnod.

There he beheld a great assembly of abominations; in that place the He-goat came in unto the jackal, and Giants out of the Earth came to know the Sons of Man. And he saw there how the Nephilim deflowered and then devoured the Daughters of Men, and where many people did themselves unspeakable perversions with unclean beasts, and abided in pleasure with pestilential creatures, and with the things that were not of the world.

And many were stricken with fevers and with plagues, and suffered in the midst of their pleasures, yet they persisted in the torture and invasion of their neighbors for their own diversions.

Amongst the giants was a one endowed as it were a woman but also as it were a man, having a great beard which hung even unto its heavy breasts, and this one pleasured itself with a young man, allowing the youth to sport with it for a time.

By and by the Giant took up the youth and did bow him forward in its hand, breaking him at the back so that the youth’s backside could be plunged into the door of the giant’s womb even as the head of the young man screamed before the sight of his own paling and unfeeling feet that had been brought before his face, whilst the giant toyed with his body, which could no more contain its own filth.

And the sound and the stench of all this Sheol filled all that horrid vale.

Namhul stood high upon his torn feet and cried out at them, commanding that they stop. He rebuked the people for this degradation, and he sought to expel those other unclean beings out from the sight of men, to foul no more the valley floor, lest they provoke Heaven’s heavy wrath and thus swiftly be struck down even from their great might.

There came a small Voice to his ear, and Namhul knew her and called her by the name Eliah. And her voice blessed him for his righteousness, and told him he must hasten out of that place.

So Namhul fled down the slope of the mountain even as that army of abominations came for him. Through uncounted darkness did he run, fearful at the sounds behind him, until that Namhul came to be lost in the shadows of the wilderness.

. . .

Near to death, Namhul returned unto his lands.

In his sickness he heard again the small voice of Eliah.

When he was healed, he remembered what her voice had told him, and he rose up from his bed to take a lamb out of his flocks, and this he sacrificed unto her. Then gathered he his servants and his sons, and together they brought down many cedar trees and cypresses that grew out of where their forefathers lay sleeping in the Earth, and also they took the wood of their homes for their use. And Namhul fashioned curious tools and with these he held mastery over the wood, and he built with the wood as he had been commanded to do.

Namhul measured the doorways by his arms and the window by his hands.

And the sun drove above the valley of his family many times.

Beasts out of the wilderness and birds from the skies came near them, to see their labor, and these watched over them, as guards may keep watch over a good people.

But Namhul’s youngest son went far from the road, and he found a garden hidden and full of sunlight, where strange trees grew covered in flowering vines, and fruit thereof was good to eat. And he thought himself alone as he began to eat, until he saw that there were others that hid in nakedness amidst the trees, and these he saw were watching him, making him afraid.

They came to him, but he took quickly of the fruit from the vine whereof he had been eating and hastened away with it, to hide it inside of the great vessel that his father had built.

Before the storm, Namhul took the narrow path out of his valley, to climb into mountains of the North, and to speak closer to the sky. There Eliah’s voice came to him and said, My First Born is jealous of you for my sake. His heart is full with wrath. He brings a great storm and flood upon his shoulders, and he will tear apart the seals of the deep. But because of your righteousness, I will set a Cloud of Myself upon the great vessel that you have made, as I have instructed you to do.

I will remember you when all else that is remembered has passed.

A wind took the voice away, and also took the Sun. Namhul saw the thunder and the lightnings. He saw the feet of the Desolator walking with the clouds. The Earth shook, and many rocks hurried with Namhul down the mountain and away from the rain coming out of the sky, and many living things fled with him to the great vessel that he had built, to seek a shelter from the doom that approaches.

Rav. B. C. O’Dyle, The Clouds of the Qodesh, Bk II. pp. 56-65

English translation © Benjamin O’Dyle

Part 1: Unalone

Son of Man . . . I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

... Fear death by water ...

One must be so careful these days.

T. S. Eliot, The Burial Of the Dead

1

Something was wrong about the wind blowing in from the ocean. Those who were out of doors turned, frowned. The feel of it was unright on the skin; the skin wanted it wiped off. Hands in absent response brushed the back of an arm, or drew across lips. The sea birds sought havens further inland, tucked ducking heads away from the inauspicious skies. People turned their eyes windwardly, to where over the sea the color had changed and was approaching, encroaching, turning pupils into sinkholes inside the eyes’ widening whites. Behind the watching people the sun was still there, preciously oblivious, a small boy playing in the road, heedless of distant rumbles.

The color took over and changed into a lack thereof that took away the summer. On the beaches people donned jackets and ushered children away.

The breeze became a gale that no one had forecast, and then black clouds in their countless tunnage invaded, ravenous, and they rained for a long time. Too long.

When the wind at last had heaved itself into a stillness, the black clouds stayed unmoved above the city for many days, force-baptizing, meting out submersion, haunting a compressive and windless atmosphere. Before the rain might all be spent, another unforecast wind—out of the northwest this time—guided to the skyline yet more lumbering thunderheads. Some of these passed over, casting aspersions on towers with flicking fingers of passing rainfall. Heavier, blacker ones seemed to settle over the buildings and reach down, a bruising imposition of hands.

On the streets beneath, actual precipitation—such that sprinkled the head and stole across the nape of the neck—was inconstant; but even when unraining the clouds remained, keeping grim congregation over buildings that scraped their bellies like flints inviting fire, until further eastwardly-tending winds inspired a strident procession out to sea. In their going, boiling into dance like devilish dervishes, they threw flashes, thrashed in the throes of a cruel electrical ecstasy, their waters falling as loud laughing crowds. Overhead, their nether surfaces gleamed and burned, and seemed to reflect the glass and granite beneath in an sea of roiling mercury.

After most of them had wandered back out over the ocean again, the remaining stormclouds spread across the cityscape, resigned to reigning over a new sunlessness, stretching into a low bleak ceiling. The trudging city subsisted below, a swoon into feeble unready arms, asleep in healthless senescence. People forced themselves through their days. Those already hurting grew worse, especially the ones dragging many hard decades behind them. Bones became thornier; joints ground like restless night teeth. And in many minds something similar was happening, though no one could really see their neighbors’ thoughts growing teeth.

The entire living system was prey to the pressure. The heads of those on the sidewalks hung lower than they would have, had the sun been admitted into the crisscrossing canyons of the streets they walked; most heads remained lowered even when the rain stopped falling. There was a pulling inward of the posture, an unconscious hunching. People downcurled like cold plants, receded, staying inside their own blank eyes. Awkward silences invaded conversations, windows fogged until the rooms they looked out of shrank like cellophane sealings, laughter stopped sooner in classrooms and bars, but water still chuckled in gutters. When people approaching one another looked away while passing, they looked toward wet, out-of-focus places.

A newspaper page, tumbling, the same color as much of what surrounded it, reported the sorry but unsurprising suicide of a high-rise tenant. Others had gravitated to the same decision as he, after so many circadian failings, filled with the slow unstopping barometric pounding. His rebuttal to the steady inner buckling was the sudden aspiration to fly away. The window faced southeast. Unlike the others in the apartment, this window was unsmutched. A bottle of blue window cleaner sat nearby on the carpet, beside an extendable squeegee for wiping the outer surface. The vista beyond the pane was a bare grey wall that leant no certain distinction to the sky and the sea and the fog in between; but at the right time of day, wasn’t there a slight hint of the sun out there? Something in the light as the day grew late?

The coast had been cacophonous, acres of water battered like sheet metal, hushing the crash of his abandoned body. He was lucky it was reported at all. People needed any moral crutches they could clutch, and his demise was less than helpful.

The same newspaper would, in a week, list the same vacant apartment for lease, making up for the lapse in etiquette, Brueghel’s ploughman pushing on . . .

2

:19 And Jehovah God formeth . . . every foul of the firmament, and bringeth in unto man, to see what he doth call each; and whatever the man calleth a living creature, that is its name.

Name us and know us, Ben. Give us a name, in Heaven’s Name! Amen! but the form that stood before Benjamin was just one person, the background unclear, a portrait drowned in a pool, and Ben—who had rather good eyes—found it out of focus, his eyes aching with the strain of trying to catch any detail. However he was certainly not seeing double. Did this figure use the Royal ‘We’?

You could see it as so, Ben Small. Breathe a word to name us all.

Okay, he said, placatingly shaking his hands. Don’t fret.

Suddenly finding himself back at the house where he’d grown up, at his mother’s antique walnut vanity, writing before the mirror, he wrote a word he did not know.

So too did his reflection, with the other hand.

It was not the same word, nor backword.

Behind his reflection, in the back of the room, he saw a figure sit up in his mother’s bed, white face turned his way, white gown flowing,

Instantly! standing directly behind his reflection now,

looking down

over

his shoulder ... the fuzzy, unclear head ...

... nods ...

Approval.

He bent down to read the words. They were so blurry; he would have to nearly touch his nose to the paper.

His head jerked up, and the book in his lap hit first his feet and then the floor.

He was awake in the chair beside his mother, who was also awake now and sitting up in her hospital bed, like what he thought had been her, in the dream.

Benjamin! Give me back my Bible! You should never drop it on the floor!

He picked the black book up and gave it back to her. It had been early morning, before any light, and very still in the small hospital unit she was on, and he’d taken it out of her sleeping hands and had begun to casually read it in the chair beside her.

He started at the beginning of course, but fell asleep before he had even gotten through the second chapter of Genesis. And then those dreams had come, and although Ben had always been a vivid dreamer, these dreams were among the most vivid visions he could remember ever having.

Oh Benjamin! she exclaimed. Oh my Lord Jesus, did you do this?! She had been straightening some pages dog-eared by the fall, and had found something that had upset her. She turned a pale accusing face upon him, made even more sinister by the flaccid side stricken by her Bell’s palsy, as she also turned the open book. Written deeply as though with a sharp pencil upon the pages where he had left off reading were two words. The second word was toward the bottom of the page, and written upside-down.

No, Mom, I didn’t do that. Ben didn’t even have a pencil, though he looked down at his lap and the floor anyway. There was none. But the words meant possibly more than nothing to him. Weren’t they terms he had encountered during some of his postgraduate meteorological studies? Did they come from his subconscious somehow, while he was dreaming? But even if so, what the hell had he written them with?

She turned face and book away again, looking very sorrowful. He felt regret swell in him for her as softly she said, as though to the book, It was my mother’s. I was going to leave it for you, if you cared. To remember me, and her.

Suddenly he thought he really didn’t want it, not with those words in there.

Mom, I fell asleep when I was just reading it.

She stared at the book, then closed it, running her wrinkled fingers down its cover, feeling the gilt title on its binding. The room was completely silent but for the sound of her fingers on the cover.

His guilt kept stinging through disorienting doubt. Mom, he said, I don’t think . . . I don’t remember writing in it.

She turned toward him again, her face very mild now, the twisted side only slightly more slack than the rest of her tired and lovely face.

Writing in what, my love?

He got up and gave her a sudden hug, rushing his face towards her shoulder, wanting to tell her he loved her so much, but he couldn’t say anything.

She didn’t remember, and she wouldn’t understand why he was crying.

3

Sammie was surprised at how sore she was after taking the past couple days off to move into her new apartment. They’d been days hardly fit to call ‘days off’, full of running trips back and forth to the rented van, water pouring off her raincoat and into the backs of her shoes. She had to remind herself repeatedly that this wasn’t small-town Virginia—she’d better lock the van and take the keys if she didn’t want to find it stolen on the next trip down. She’d taken numerous squeaky walks across lobby floors, ignoring the stares of interested disinterested people. When she finally pried her shoes off the stains on her sopping wet socks reminded her that she didn’t know yet where to find the building’s laundry room.

She was exhausted afterward. She’d done all of the moving herself. Jay apologized that he couldn’t be there, since his responsibilities as a first year resident physician kept him overbusy and under-slumbered. Many of his nights were spent on a cot in a closet at the hospital, when there was a long enough lull to allow for down time.

Sammie had been seeing the young doctor for a few weeks, since his first—and at the time flattering—instigation. Jay was a nice looking guy, and attentive, and he was eagerly attracted to her—he’d made that clear from the first. But something just wasn’t clicking. In some ways she was glad she had managed the move alone, just the way she had gone through much in the past year since her family disintegrated.

Now back to daily duties, though at least it was (thank God!) Friday.

She would maybe try to pick up some extra shifts to recoup the moving costs. And any week now she should be looking at earning an extra $100 a month, just for getting a few MRI scans. Jay had introduced her to his friend Marc, lead MRI technologist for the research project in question, and the initial offer Marc had arranged, funded by a company she had never heard of called Mnemonicon Pharmaceuticals, had been for $500 a month. Sammie was elated, until Marc brought her small green bottle of white fluid with a printed label that read simply nLZ3, followed by the Greek letter β in blue pen.

What’s this?

It’s the medication you’ll be taking. For the Leukotonin research protocol.

"The what protocol?"

He snapped his fingers and pointed them gunnishly at her. "Almost. More like the white protocol, really. ‘Leuko’ is from the Greek for ‘white’. Leuko-tonin is a primary drug Mnemonicon is investigating these days."

Ah, Marc, I don’t want to take any drugs, she wavered. I thought I just had to get scanned.

He laughed outright. For $500 a month? Sorry, I don’t think they’ll go for that. We could scan you as a normal control—you wouldn’t have to take anything—but they probably won’t offer very much, if anything.

Oh, she said, disappointed. She looked at the bottle, opened the top. No smell.

Marc took it gently from her and showed her how a dropper hung from the inside of the bottle’s cap. See, the patient takes it like this. He lifted the dropper and let a couple of milky drops fall onto his tongue. On someone like you or me it really doesn’t have much of an effect that we know of. But for Alzheimer’s patients, it seems to gradually reverse their brain atrophy, and I swear I’ve seen patients virtually backtrack from vegetable to animal in just a few months. It’s pretty amazing stuff for them. But for you, with your big healthy brain, probably it won’t do anything. Or you might just get even smarter! Either way, you’d have more spending money.

No side effects? she asked.

Doubt it. But that’s why we have trials. If it makes you feel sleepy you can take it before bed. And look, if you don’t like it, then just stop. Someone else’ll be okay making your five hundred bucks.

She fell silent, a little too dourly for Marc’s liking, and he said, Go on, try one drop. Trust me, it tastes just like clouds on a boring day.

She smirked quizzically at him. Shrugged. Lifted the top, looked at the fluid dripping from the dropper, looked down into the mouth of the small bottle. Sniffed again. Nothing. Stuck her tongue out.

See?

Smacking her mouth a couple times, she looked up. Yeah, I don’t think I even really taste it.

Sweet! So look, take just two to three drops a day, whatever time you want—just make a note of it for me—and we can start scanning you in the next few weeks And paying you!

A week later, Sammie gave him back the bottle and asked to be in the control group instead. She couldn’t explain why without feeling capricious, even superstitious, so finally she just tersely told him, Look, I just don’t want to take it anymore, alright?!

After that, Marc let it go. He made the arrangements without complaint, even bragged of negotiating her compensation up from $75. He said they would be ready to start her in the next month or two, and she had been thankful. It felt like at least half-decent luck, given how the year had gone so far.

The new apartment also seemed like a lucky find: more private than the one downtown, and a lesser privation to her modest paycheck, on which she depended not only for her rent and living expenses, but to help her father make the late payments on his mortgage and keep him from losing the house in Virginia. She couldn’t bear for that to happen. Not after everything else.

Yesterday, in the new bedroom, muffled in the grey quiet of rainy late-afternoon, she turned away from yawning boxes and flopped back on the bed. New white paint on the ceiling, good for staring. She found thoughts of Mom there, and of little Joebot, both gone nearly unthought of for a few solid weeks of apartment hunting and clustered double shifts at the hospital. Good thoughts: Mom coming from the house in a baggy grey sweater with a really good hot chocolate; Joey catching crickets for his jar and naming each before dropping them in on his rip-up of grass, or the little guy practicing hitting one of her softballs with a little league bat, and one time twirling into a grinning twisted heap, looking to see if she saw but already laughing with her; last Christmas with the sparse snowfall and the dim strings of lights still shining on some houses after lunchtime but looking so dull as she walked alone down the road to a friend’s. She should have stayed home, but had wanted to get away from the noise in the house for a while. The cold walk had its own lonely peace, which she had thought was a rare kind. Life would change her mind about that. Now that chilly solitude was not so unfound, and what was rare was the warm familial company.

She didn’t have to be alone like this if she didn’t want to. Jason would move in in a heartbeat. She could explore the adventure of having her first live-in boyfriend—a new world of emotional distraction.

No.

In the new bedroom, she didn’t think of Jay very long. There were more memories to see in the dozy blankness of the ceiling.

Little Joey hugging both her and Mom together before going up to bed just like he was told, and Mom saying nothing, but smiling at Sammie over her good boy. His childish finger paintings still on the fridge in the house in Virginia. He had yellow, but he always colored the sun red— does he see the sun as red when he looks at it? she had wondered. Now she couldn’t ask him.

She thought of the tree growing near where they were now. She had laid on her back in damp grass, looking up at the undersides of new leaves, seawater-silvergreen in the dimness of a day too drizzly to bring visiting loved ones there. A good day thereby, because she wanted to be this completely alone when she visited them. Her closed eyes were red and sore, but not wet, because when they passed away Sammie became unable to cry. Something had shriveled up and dried in spirit, despite a ceaseless supply of hurt that rightly should crack a fissure and strain the pain inside her, pain compounded by the guilt of not crying for them.

But the soul stayed undrained, and sometimes it pulsed with a cramp-like sadness she could find no way to disperse. So she ignored it through her days even while some muscles in her face were ever-tense, like someone daily in the companionship of an intractable headache. On that dim spring day in the churchyard, Sammie turned over and fell asleep on her belly in the grass. She dreamed of them standing and looking at her. A nice dream. Sweet in a tiny way, though rinded by an almost ignorable bitterness, a good berry in poison skin. Going home after the dream, the day remained behind her and unrecalled until it awoke in her dozing mind, eyes closed under the narcotic white of the ceiling.

But since the week on Leukotonin, different dreams arose, of Mom and Joey, maybe, standing there as she drowsed. These dreams were not so nice. Faces could not be both blank and stern like that, could they? It made them seem inhuman. In the morning the sheets were tossed and twisted, her eyes red and sour again, abrasive when rubbed.

As she washed her face, blinking her eyes in the cup of her hands, she wished she could cry: just crack up and crumble and violently sob. It ought to be possible. But nothing amended the drought.

After a shower and coffee, her eyes looked better. A little eye-liner underneath, no time to get a lunch ready, rush to the bus stop.

A four block walk in cold drizzle. The ankles of Sammie’s scrub bottoms were wet to a darker blue than the rest. Sopped buildings around the bench bared the cracks and degradations of the years since they’d been poured and propped, mottled in shades of mortar that was smeared in to seal the scars. On cornices and ledges, pigeons roosted begrudgingly, like blunt lumps of unshaped clay, braced against the wet chilly breeze.

She stood for ten minutes under her small umbrella in the otherwise unsheltered wet, since vacating her spot on the glass-shielded bench in courtesy to a hunched old woman in dirty clothes dragging a small and even dirtier bag on wheels beside her, who had accepted the seat without a mutter of thanks, though her gummy mouth was not without mutterings. Sammie walked toward a vacant bank branch on the corner, and stared past the grimy plastic of the newsstand. The newspapers inside were some of the last of the medium not yet out of business.

Flash Riots Explode On City Streets At Rush Hour

DRIVERS PULLED FROM CARS DURING DOWNTOWN RIOTING.

CHILD MISSING, TAKEN WHILE STILL IN SAFETY SEAT

Rainiest October on record: Summer Drought Paid in Spades!

Indian Ocean Mystery: Another NATO Ship Explodes, Sinks, No Survivors

Imam of New Mecca Praises Victors of War of Ummah, Destruction of Zion

Fallout Concerns Extend Across Europe

More Countries To Host Relocation of Surviving Refugees

Exiled Officials Denounce Sites as Concentration Camps

How To Raise A Pop Star: From Diapers To Diva in 5 Easy Steps

Cars, Local Businesses Torched During Thursday Riot

Alien Encounters In War-Torn Jerusalem

plus Hottest Expectant Moms in Hollywood

At the grumble of the coming bus, Sammie turned back to the bus stop. Rain slanted in under her umbrella. She climbed up the steps after the others had gone in. The driver started off before she could find a seat, making her catch at the greasy metal pole in the aisle to keep her feet until she could maneuver into a seat. The driver’s head leveled from an acute angle to the mirror to face the road again, too fast for her to fully catch his disdainful amusement.

So finally the day could start. Her hands were officially too dirty to eat with, too dirty to touch a face, felt glazed with a general smirchiness. She would spend the day washing them, but it wasn’t until the final shower in her apartment that they felt her own again. Going to, being at, and coming home from work, the city’s dinge felt at one with her skin.

Sammie took a tissue from a little pack in her purse and wiped condensation off the window. Some of it dripped down the glass. The tissue came away browned.

The bus bumbled beyond blocks of cluttery storefronts, sidewalks of grimy idlers and plasticky clean-cuts walking nearly fast enough to keep up, parked cars and soggy trash in cans by the gutter. Her body swayed with the bus’s swagger as she idly gazed, growing sleepy in the warmer surroundings.

At a stoplight she watched rows of people crossing, winding around each other like braids. One disheveled woman in a ski cap stopped in the crosswalk to bend and scratch at a red puckered wound on her lower leg, and Sammie could have sworn she saw the finger actually dip inside the wound for a moment. Sammie’s mouth dropped in revulsion. The woman moved on, the dry brown skin of her leg contrasting with the ashy scores from her fingernails and one barely discernible red streak that turned the wound to a weak exclamation mark.

At the next stop, a young man with a coffee and a bag over his shoulder boarded and began down the aisle. His hair was dark, nearly black, and his face looked not merely shaved but almost without ever any beard, though something about the finishedness of its shape made her sure he must be at least three years older than she was. He noticed her, his look long enough not to be a mere glance— his mouth twitched a tiny hello smile before he averted his eyes.

As he moved passed her down the aisle the corner of the bag he held bumped her seat and narrowly missed her head. He stopped, barely keeping the coffee he held in his other hand from spilling, saying over the creak of the bus’s shutting doors, I’m sorry.

That’s okay, she started to say, smiling. Would you like a sea— and then the bus was lurching onward and his feet shuffled awkwardly over each other trying to keep him balanced. A little coffee shot right out of the top of his cup and onto his sleeve and shirt. He made a hissing noise in annoyance. Jeez! No petty rage in his face, just chagrin.

Feeling suddenly imperative in a way so opposite to how she had felt about the rude old woman she’d given her spot on the bench to— the woman who still sat somewhere behind in a reek of rank onions—Sammie grasped him by the sleeve of his jacket and as she moved over told him to go on and sit down. He gave her a look like a meek thank you.

Here, I’ll hold your coffee, she said, extending a hand.

He gave it to her and sat, tucking the bag beneath the seat to keep it out of further trouble.

Thanks, he said taking the coffee back. He took a well-earned sip between bumps of the big rolling box.

Good as it smells? she asked him.

Yeah, it’s pretty good. He paused, then offered: Sorry I don’t have another for you.

She laughed out loud before she could stop herself. That’s okay. You’d have had me wearing it! He laughed too, glancing at the stain on his shirt, and they both relaxed enough beside each other that Sammie could just barely tell their arms were against each other, and she didn’t feel the need to maintain the stiff posture of allowing as much space cushioning between them as the bus seat made possible. It was warm to laugh with someone who seemed so immediately nice. But soon they were just silent, swaying fitfully as the bus jostled down its rutty route.

Finally he turned again to her, switching hands with his coffee so he could extend the right hand. I’m Ben.

Nice to meet you. I’m Sammie. They shook.

Sammie, he tried it on. Nice. I don’t know any Sammies.

Yes you do, she said pointedly. She felt a little smile on her face, spontaneous and natural and very good-feeling on this dark awful day, a smile so alien to the past few months, while the mind behind her smile cawed, You’re totally flirting with him, you’re so obvious!

Right, I guess I do now.

It’s just short for Samantha.

I like it.

Thanks. They both lapsed into quiet again.

Deciding finally to break it, she began to ask: ‘Going to work?’ but had barely managed to get the ‘Going’ when simultaneously he began a question: So do you . . .— presumably he was to follow this with something like ‘live around here’, but they both paused to hear the others’ query, then both rebounded again with a concerted: I’m sorry, go ahead! and then they were laughing again, and getting a strange look from a cantankerous scruffy fellow across the aisle in an oversize navy blue hoodie.

She found herself speaking softly so it could be just to him, almost as though they whispered to each other, their voices insulated in the hum of the engine. She answering a few questions about herself— how long she’d been in the city, where she’d lived in Virginia before coming here, the fact that she was working as a CT tech at the hospital— so that when the bus arrived at the stop outside the medical campus she still knew next to nothing about Ben, but found him disembarking with her at the same stop.

Are you visiting someone here, Ben?

Yeah, my mom’s here right now.

Oh. She felt no right to pry. I’m sorry.

Her phone buzzed. She looked at it and saw the time. It was her coworker Clarissa calling. And it was already 7 o’clock.

Damn! She’d have to catch an earlier bus, or one with a less roundabout route.

She answered by saying, I’m almost there. I’m sorry.

He waited while she listened, noticing a couple tiny raindrops hit near his shoulder. More sprouted spots on the sidewalk.

No thanks, she was saying. I’ll get something a little later. Thank you. Bye. Sorry. She said the last to Ben, after hanging up.

That’s okay. You late?

Yeah. It’s gonna be a long day.

Well, maybe I’ll see you around. He smiled.

She smiled back, wishing he’d say when. Okay.

It was nice meeting you. And thanks again for sharing your seat. He gave her a little wave before turning.

You too! she responded to his next to last statement, and felt like smacking herself on the forehead.

A sudden change from thinnest drizzle to downright shower had them running now, in opposing directions, each bone-soaked well before they could slide in through a doorway.

4

The influx of orders for emergency and in-patients was steady, but nothing she and her shiftmate Clarissa couldn’t handle. There were several elderly osteoporotic patients pained with rainyday backs, one woman with a three-day headache and spiking blood pressure creating concern for a stroke, an 18-year-old girl with multiple lip piercings, scabby knees and right lower belly pain, found positive for appendicitis. She had more lip piercings than could initially be assessed, which became apparent on the lower-most slices of the exam, making Clarissa snicker before sharing with Sammie that she herself had had her nipples done, and held the labia majora under future consideration.

Ouch! Sammie impugned, before going to disconnect the young girl from the injector and take her back to her ER room.

Don’t knock the knockers ‘til you try ‘em! Clarissa called to her from the console, and Sammie wanted to hide somewhere when the patient on the table turned to her and asked, Huh?

Nothing, said Sammie, not meeting the girl’s eyes as she unhooked injection tubing from her IV. Just technical talk.

They finally caught a break around noon, and Sammie invited Clarissa to go ahead to lunch, even though the noon tech had yet to show up. Sammie found herself with time to simply sit and stare in the swivel chair by the console, which was a blessed thing to be doing for once.

Sammie spent all the brighter hours of most days inside, and then journeyed back solo through the city’s greasy shadows. And as the days got shorter, it began getting to her; sometimes she felt a strong, varicose kind of strain in the viscera after a long day full of other peoples’ blood and pain. And more and more she spent the entire workday in the department, without ever seeing the sun.

She thought about that word: department. DEPART-MENT. It might imply a state of being: the state of being departed, though never used by people in that regard. Department. A place of being and yet not being. Windowless rooms, occupied by people in the way minds would occupy heads whose faces had never formed eyes. No concept of weather in there, though there was no reason to think it wasn’t still wet and dreary. Right now it could be any time at all, which sometimes gave time a sudden, fleeting inexplicability that slid like brown sludge on the nerves and lay leaden in the belly.

Seated in the hum of the computers, seeing her semi-translucent reflection in the finger-smeared glass that looked into the scanner room, the word for the feeling of pre-storm quiet she felt arrived: dread. Compulsively she whispered it to the empty room; it sounded like how it felt. Dread. The way the letter ‘r’ stretched the bootclump word ‘dead’ into an implication of wilting and starving, waiting and wasting in the mind, where the feeling she called dread could, if she allowed it to, scour sanity like yellow fingernails on bared brain. She’d never had thoughts like these before; they were as new as the city to her. Dread. Something bad coming: new, heartless, quietly nearing, like treading dark shark-haunted waters. Some swimmers have said they could feel the hollow eyes looking at them, before the teeth had even touched their legs.

Hey Lady! The door swung open and she started almost violently— she had nearly been dozing off in her troubled reverie. She turned in her chair to see Marcelo Marini leaning halfway into the control room.

Jeeeesus! she hissed, hand on her galloping chest.

"Close. But did you miss me?" he asked through a grin, then ducked back out the door to narrowly avoid the scratch paper pad she launched at his head. It flapped into the door like a frantic seabird.

Next time it’ll be something heavy and maybe sharp, and I won’t miss!

He inched short black hair, a corner of olive-skinned forehead, and one eye back in past the edge of the door, then finally enough of his face to show a bemused mouth. Hold your fire! You’ll make me spill the chai latte I got you downstairs.

You did?! Thanks Marc, said she as he came in. Marc had become a good friend in the last few weeks, dropping in to see her once in a while, thinking to get her something to drink when he passed by the cafeteria or coffee shop. Almost makes up for dying of a heart attack a moment ago.

Don’t worry. I compress the chest enough to keep you alive, but I won’t crack young healthy ribs like yours. And if you needed mouth to mouth …. He stopped, smiling at the hard line of her lips while handing her the drink. He then made his way to a low office chair by the far corner of the control room. You used to pitch baseball, right?

Yeah, I did, she vaguely threatened. Hardball and softball. Overhand if the rules allowed. I could make it hurt the catcher’s hands.

I’m sure your catcher learned to stop lotioning calluses, he remarked, sipping. Those arms do scare me, Haybales. He wasn’t smiling, but amusement still glinted in the eyes. Sammie had spent many a late summer hoisting hay and performing other farm chores in Virginia. Her arms were not very thick, but were sneakily strong. She had challenged him to an arm wrestling match in the first month of her job, right on the same table where now he rested an elbow, and (using some tricks her wiry father had taught her) had actually won. After explaining to him why she was tough enough to do so, he dubbed her ‘Haybales’.

You’re lucky I like you enough to let you call me that. And you probably don’t need that coffee. You’re like a hyperactive child!

After a long drink, he swallowed. Won’t kick in for an hour, and believe it or not I’m already needing it again today.

I keep saying you shouldn’t work so many overnights.

He shrugged. It’s not even the number of hours I spend here. I work doubles at my other job too. But something about this place just leaves me drained. I mean, you know me, I stay pretty upbeat, right? But some days in this old place it ain’t easy. Shit, some days lately I feel all worn out the second I park the car.

"I know exactly what you mean! It’s like, even when it’s not busy— when’s that, right?— no, but seriously, I always feel like I’ve been busy, or stressed out. Drained out."

How have you been sleeping well?

I don’t know. I think I sleep through the night, but seems like I’ve been having lots of weird, intense dreams the whole time, and I can’t remember any of them; I’m just very off beat the next morning, like I’m about to get sick. And I’ve been healthy my whole life!

She leaned toward him. "Don’t think I’m crazy, okay Marc, but . . . a lot of times I think, I’ve been to cities before, and in busy hospitals, but never anyplace like here. I think everyone feels it here in some weird way, in this city, in this hospital. I really think it’s this place sometimes. Like the place actually is . . . I don’t know . . . mean . . . do you think that’s crazy? Whole places being mean."

Marc clunked the coffee cup down and said, No, it’s a pretty mean-spirited place. But it might also be your personal life, being tired and dirty and busy all day, all the sick people, all the junkies getting shitty with everybody when the ER docs don’t give them a fix. You’ll get used to all of it. Any hospital’s a helluva place. And you’re still new. Wait till you been here a bit, you’ll get calluses where you’re soft at right now. He knocked a fist on the left side of his chest. You’ll be a sorta different person, maybe, but it’ll keep you from losing your mind. Most people don’t think or talk about it. I’m just a little weird. Not as weird as you though!

Want me to throw more things at you, weirdo? she threatened. Beginning to feel a little more at ease, she turned to the table between them against the far wall, on which the printer had just spat out some new orders. One of them was a repeated request for a patient who had yet to come down. I called this one earlier: Tessa O’Dyle. The nurse said she wasn’t quite ready to bring the patient.

He glanced at the paper. ‘Change of mental status’, he read as the indication for the scan. That was the differential diagnosis for you too, right?

What, to go crazy like the rest of you city slickers? Monkey see, monkey do, monkey go insane too, I guess.

He laughed. Yeah. Monkey sees, monkey shines. She gave him a puzzled look. Made me think of an old horror movie I saw once, he said. Nevermind.

"Yeah, you know, you are weird, Marc."

He shrugged. "Tell me what I don’t know. So, that’s the only house patient to come down, right? After she affirmed this, he asked, Want to get some grub while it’s quiet?" He knocked on the table surface in a superstitious attempt to prevent the ‘Q-word’ from jinxing her and ushering in a hell of busyness; the emergency room could go from quiet to riot in the same minute.

She was about to ask if he knew of anything good (or even safe) to eat in the cafeteria, when a tinny voice blatted overhead:

"Adult Level One trauma now arriving, Critical Care Room Three."

Marc picked up his travel mug, drained the rest of the coffee, and set it down on the scan request. It began to make a crescent shaped dark smudge around the patient’s order:

O’Dyle, Tessa

MRN: 29314-3367

DOB: 9/27/1947

UNIT: NRU bed 2

NURSE 12pm-12am: Ariana, extension 992

EXAM: CT scan head w/o contrast

REASON: H/O Alzheimer’s, poss change in mental status, prev TIA, hypertension, headaches, vision changes. Sundowning vs. Stroke

REQUESTING PHYSICIAN: Kirill Petrov, MD Neurology. Pager: 3923.

Whoops, he said, moving his cup.

Did you see the unit she’s in? Sammie asked. I haven’t heard of the NRU before.

It’s Neuro.

But Neuro’s up on 3 West. Its extensions start with a 3 too. This is some unit on the ninth floor. Look at the nurse’s extension. She pointed to ‘Ariana, extension 992’.

Ms. O’Dyle’s a study VIP or something. I think it’s sort of a swankier ward. Real silverware to eat your hospital food with or whatever. Unless you’re gorked out on a feeding tube.

Feet pounded in the hall outside. The door suddenly popped open. Alyssa had finally arrived, but sticking her head in told Sammie everyone was headed to see the trauma in critical care. Marc lifted his lanky frame out of the chair and slapped Sammie shoulder lightly while going past her to the door. Let’s go see what’s up. Come on!

She followed him down the corridor, light green and glaring under fluorescents, and through glass double doors that led directly to the critical section of the Emergency Department. Medical personnel power-walked past them into a large alcove made small by a congregation of machines, monitors, colorful wires, carts and drug dispensers. They were not the only onlookers. Sammie had to lean around a beefy fellow in a maroon scrub top to see the man on the