(Note: this is Part III of the Second Coming series. Part I was released last December, Part II a few days ago, confusingly titled Second Comings - Sex Type Thing. This current posting is Part III, and they should be read in order for the tale to make much sense. Thanks to "rightbank" for pointing this out!)
Second Comings III: The Mask of Anarchy
May
Justin Lake sat behind Sharon Hastings as she drove towards Boston on the Mass Pike; Jordan Secord sat beside Hastings, looking out the window, his face a mask – lost in thought. Alternating between hope and despair, Secord ignored the world around the car, his thoughts oscillating through extremes as he felt his way through all the possible outcomes of this day. Michele...his Michele...was dying. What was left of this world but darkness?
A half hour into surgery she had crashed. Multiple cranial fractures created an almost impossible surgical environment, then fractured ribs and a punctured lung complicated the series of life-saving procedures her surgeons needed to get done simply to stabilize her. Both were general surgeons, however, and as events unfolded she desperately needed both neuro- and thoracic surgeons. The closest were in Hanover and Boston, the best at Mass Gen. A helicopter was summoned, the patient prepped for transport – still under anesthesia. Two physicians jumped in the helicopter before the patient was loaded, then the aircraft rose and dashed to the east. A Volvo wagon sped from the hospital, it too bound for Boston. The remaining general surgeon dashed back to the ER, to the gunshot wound that had just arrived – and he was now the only surgeon in the house. The on-call surgeon was summoned, an orthopedist, but she wouldn't arrive for a half hour.
This new patient had three gunshot wounds, all from 9mm rounds: one in her upper right arm, two in the upper chest, both near the right subclavian artery, but her pressure was steady, the apparent bleeding minimal. She had been stabilized in the ER, taken up to OR5 and while he scrubbed-in he looked at her chemistries on the blue LCD display. Something didn't look right, so he ordered a narcotics panel while the anesthesiologist prepped her. He went in quickly, wanted to talk to her before she went under.
"What's her name?" the surgeon asked.
"Grier, Laura Grier," a scrub nurse said.
He went to her, pinched her earlobe gently, waking her slightly. "Miss Grier, I'm Dan Wilkins, and I'm about to try to get these bullets out. Do you understand me?"
She nodded. "Yes. Where am I?"
"You've been shot, and you're in the hospital now. Can you tell me, it's important now, but can you tell me what drugs you've taken today? Any medications? Any cocaine? Anything like that?"
"Yeah, so what? Fuck you – why don't you just let me die!" Grier said raspily, then she turned away and closed her eyes.
He saw she was crying now. Not good. "Okay," Wilkins said. "That's that. A soon as we get those labs let's take her under. I wanna get to work while her pressure's good."
A police office stood in the corner of the operating room, taking notes.
+++++
Tony Bianchi sat in the small interrogation room, wondering what had happened to his life, what had gone wrong that morning. All Laura Grier wanted, she'd told them, was for them to rough her up a little, but when he saw her, right after they'd broken into that house, something inside him broke loose. He remembered kicking the bitch, stomping her head, then Kyle was pulling her panties down, fucking the fag-bitch in the ass, and all of a sudden it was like some kind of fucked-up war movie...like someone flipped a switch – the four of them were out of control. Animals, he thought, they'd turned into animals. He shook his head, looked around the little room again, then down at the handcuffs on his wrists – and the ankle shackles binding him to the floor.
Acoustic tiles, a one-way mirror, all props right out of central casting, Bianchi thought. A gray metal desk, three grey metal chairs, two lights in the ceiling, everything coated with the brown sheen of cigarette smoke. Decades of oily shit, coating everything, probably his lungs now too, he thought. None of it mattered though. He knew his dad would get him out, and get him off. He was a good lawyer, and he'd told him not to say a word until he got there. The detectives had given up on him and he smiled, but perhaps that was because Kyle Chandler, his friend from the Lacrosse team and the one who'd approached him about doing this shit in the first place, had been talking non-stop ever since they'd been caught inside the Secord residence. He wouldn't have smiled if he'd known Chandler had blamed it all on Bianchi, and had proof to back up his assertions.
+++++
Hastings made her way to Storrow Drive, then to Fruit Street, looking for the main parking garage entrance as she got close to the Mass Gen campus. Both Lake and Secord were, she thought, impossibly quiet now, but she'd seen Secord's hands shaking several times during the drive. Once she parked the car, she went to his door and helped him out, but she could tell there was something seriously wrong with him now. Secord could hardly breathe when he stood, and his gait seemed unsteady. Lake came over and they helped Secord walk, first across the glassed in walkway above the street, then into the Lunder Building, to the information desk, and this was where Secord fell to the floor.
Orderlies picked him up, put him on a gurney, and Sharon rushed with him into the ER. "I don't believe this," Lake said as he shook his head and took off behind Hastings.
+++++
Wilkins looked at the films, looked at the bullets in Laura Grier's arm and thorax, and due to the amount of damage he saw he decided to start on the arm first, as he looked at the latest labs. Worse than expected, he thought. Very high levels of Xanax, SSRIs off the charts, as well as what profiled out as a possible anti-psychotic. 'Ah-ha!' he said to himself: residual levels of cocaine too, but most unexpected were trace amounts of heroin in her system and almost undetectable levels of an amphetamine.
"Whoa!" he said to the anesthesiologist. "Jack, look at those T-cells; they're kind of whacky. Can we get a quick-count HIV going?"
"Yeah, I'll pull a tube, but you do the paperwork, okay?"
"Yeah. Is she under?"
"Yup. You about ready?"
"Yeah, coming in. She's got a pretty serious cocktail on board. Everything from coke to H, uppers and downers and anti-depressants."
"A real happy camper. Her chemistries are a anemic, Dan, and her sats are falling. We better not dawdle on this one..."
Wilkins went into her arm, peeling away layers of muscle rather than cutting through them, hoping to preserve function and speed healing, then he got to the humerus. He looked up, saw Jane Wilson, an orthopedic surgeon, scrubbing in; he continued to expose the humerus until he had the head was fully exposed. "I can see a lot of damage in the brachial plexus, Dr Wilson, and the humeral head is just shattered. And I do mean shattered. Bullet must have hit there, then tumbled down..."
"How's the brachial artery," Wilson asked. "Intact?"
"Yes, but I see some pooling near the ulnar."
"What's going on up there," she said as she entered the room, pointing to the two entry wounds on her chest. "Was this woman shot?"
"They didn't tell you?"
"No. Looks like 38s, maybe 9mil."
"Cops tried to arrest her, she resisted, with a knife," one of the nurses said.
"Just what my dad always told me to do. Go after a cop with a knife. Smart. She a local?"
"English prof, at the college," the cop in the corner said.
"What are you doing here?" Wilson demanded.
