DeVille's Contract. Scott Zarcinas

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ an overdose. The doctors don’t think she’ll pull through.”

      Suddenly, the warbling intensified into a deafening squeal and the greatest pain he had ever felt smashed through his chest in an explosion of heat and flesh and bones. Sarah was still berating him, but he couldn’t make out anything she was saying. He sunk forward, collapsing face down onto what used to be his desk, now a chasm of nothingness. For some reason the last voice he heard wasn’t Sarah’s. It wasn’t even his. It was his wife’s.

      “I was right, wasn’t I Louis?” Lady Di said. “Told you you’d die at your desk.”

      Then he heard no more.

      CHAPTER FOUR

       Louis’ Choice

      LOUIS stirred to the sound of scuffling footsteps. He was lying on something comfortable, not what he expected a hospital bed to feel like, lumpy and hard and sheeted with plastic in case your sphincters opened before a nurse slid a bedpan beneath your smelly ass. More like a leather seat with the flip-out footrest, the kind in first-class you can just lay back and sink into with a pillow and blanket all the way to LA or London, or wherever the hell it was you were going.

      He then heard scuffles again, though couldn’t pinpoint exactly where they were coming from. One second he could have sworn they were to his left. The next, they were to his right. Then in front. Then behind. Then, amazingly, on the ceiling.

      When they faded completely, he kept looking around. He saw only whiteness. No door. No window. Just whitewashed walls and a ceiling. A modern building, he reckoned, or recently renovated. Probably St. Mary’s Hospital, one of the private rooms in the ITU, which didn’t quite make sense either. There was no medical equipment. No beeping cardiac monitors. No whispering artificial ventilators. No bags of blood or fluid over his head. Nothing. Absolutely nothing to suggest where he might be. There wasn’t even a call button.

      “Nurse! Nurse!” he yelled. “Goddamn it! I need some help here!”

      No one answered. Just good ol’ Louis DeVille and this goddamn white room, he mused. At least that horrid blackness had gone. His vision seemed pretty much back to normal, too. Better than normal, in fact. He could see everything without the need for bifocals. Close, far, in between, everything was as clear as daylight, as if the medics had fixed his eyesight while they were rerouting his clogged up coronaries. Goddamn paid a fortune for medical insurance; they damn well should have fixed his eyesight while he was under the knife.

      Maybe that explained the bandages. He was covered like a goddamn mummy wrapped head to tail in cotton strips: his arms, legs, torso, just about every goddamn inch of his body. The medics had left holes for his mouth, nose and eyes, but not his ears. He didn’t feel uncomfortable, just stupid. What if he had to go to the bathroom in a hurry and there was no one around to help him unwrap? What about that, huh? Which brought him back to the room. He would have to ask the nurses to do something about it. A TV would do for starters. God knew what had been happening while he was infirmed. Another goddamn war in the Middle East could have started and he wouldn’t have had the foggiest. Worse, the stock market could have collapsed. How much money had he lost lying unconscious in this goddamn place?

      Some things didn’t need to change, however. The leather bed, or layback thing, whatever it was, was comfy enough. A pillow and blanket would have been in order, but he was all right for the moment. The temperature was rather pleasant, actually, for a hospital. Damned frigid places, usually. Or worse, damned hot. They were always one way or the other. You either had to wear a coat and gloves like you were stepping into a goddamn refrigerator, or you had to strip everything off like a sauna. This hospital had it just right, though. Nice and cozy. Not too hot. Not too cold.

      Still, the light was too damn bright. He would ask the nurse when she came to pull the drapes. But was there a window? He couldn’t exactly say. The light seemed to emanate from the walls and ceiling as if they were made of some kind of fluorescent putty, the kind of Glow In The Dark stuff his grandkids used to play with that radiated unnatural lime when the lights were switched off, like it had been bombarded with x-rays or gamma rays or whatever. Not that he thought this room was radioactive. The emanating light almost caressed him, you could say. Bright, but without heat, and it certainly didn’t glare his eyes like the low-lying winter sun. The emanation was – dare he say it? – almost cathartic.

      It was. He had no more chest pain, and the head-crushing warble was gone. He felt fantastic, actually. Kind of refreshed, in a well-rested kind of way, like he had slept for a whole week or just returned from holidaying in the Bahamas. In fact, he hadn’t felt so goddamn good since he was a kid quaffing homemade ice cream on his grandfather’s farm just outside Fairmont, Indiana. Ice cream that was exactly what the name implied: iced cream. Not that watered down chemical crap the dairy companies had the gall to sell the kids nowadays. The stuff grandma made was the real thing. Cream churned from cows that he had even helped to milk himself, whipped fluffy and then left to settle overnight in the icebox.

      Those were the days, weren’t they? Yes sir-ree, he remembered them well. He wouldn’t be able to sleep after grandma had set to work. He would lay awake all night thinking of ice cream melting in his mouth, filling his belly until it overflowed from his ears and nose. Then next morning before the rooster crowed he would sneak downstairs to the kitchen and help himself to the tub on the bottom shelf. One spoonful was enough to send him into spasms of ecstasy. Good ol’ grandma.

      He probably didn’t feel quite as good as that now, but he felt pretty damned fine all the same. He wondered what miracle drug the medics had suffused him with, some kind of magic ice-cream infusion that had mended his palpitating heart and put him on top of the world. Not to mention what it had done to his vision.

      Scuffled footsteps coming his way brought him back to reality, then kept going. “Nurse!” he shouted. “Don’t you leave me here! Don’t you leave me!” The scuffles faded, then they were gone. “Goddamn it! I need some help!”

      All right, he thought, trying to get off the leather layback, if nobody’s going to help me, I’ll just help myself.

      He couldn’t get up, however. Something was restraining him. He could move his arms and legs and neck, but something was immobilizing his torso, something like a seatbelt strapped around his guts (Waistline, dear, it’s a waistline!). He felt around for the offending item, finding nothing save the bandages. Straining against the invisible restraint, he gave up and sunk back into the leather layback wondering what he could do next.

      Stuck as a pig in muck, Louis, he mused, staring at the ceiling. That’s what his grandma would have said. Yar gone and put yarself thar. Now yar gone haf’t git yarself ait.

      Only he couldn’t remember how he had got there. How could he? He had been floating in a goddamn sea of blackness for god knows how long.

      Yet that didn’t ring quite true. Where he had been was closer to nothing than blackness. Blackness was at least something. You might not like it, but you could at least tell it existed. Nothing, on the other hand, was nothing. It wasn’t even blackness. That’s what he remembered. Goddamned nothing. Time and space had just folded in on itself and vanished into nothingness. Then he was here. Wrapped head to tail in bandages and strapped with an invisible seatbelt to a leather layback in a room whose walls and ceiling were made of Glow In The Dark putty. What the hell was he supposed to do next?

      Goddamn it, he hated losing control. That’s what he hated most about this little prank.

      And it was a prank. No two ways about it. Someone – some goddamned medic and his good-for-noth’n СКАЧАТЬ