Second Sight (4 page)

In the same narrow room the bald teen and the fat man were sitting opposite two long-haired men at a kitchen table. Cigarette smoke formed a gray halo over their heads. The men wore buckled boots and leather vests. They had prominent cheekbones and smooth dark skin; one had beads threaded into his black hair.

The kitchen table again, the men were laughing, the teenage boy was showing them the inside of the black cylinder she had seen in the back of the truck. One end was ragged as if it had been sawed from the machine. The other glowed electric blue, its light flickering eerily over their sweat-soaked faces.

The boy reached into the cylinder and withdrew his finger covered with the luminescent blue light and he drew an X on his forearm and the X glowed blue as he raised it over his head.

A young woman with brown hair; she was in her thirties, maybe forties, wearing blue jeans and a dirty blue bra. She was sunburnt and she was kneeling between the bumpers of two mangled cars, puking into the sand.

The little girl was lying on the mattress, staring at the empty bathroom. Flies were lighting on her nose, walking across a sticky spot of vomit by her face. The fat man was reaching for her, picking her up in his arms, and he carried her outside and put her into the back of the truck. Then something covered her and it was dark.

She was lying facedown in garbage, there were voices and the sound of heavy trucks coming and going. A sliver of light appeared above her. Something ran across her back. Cold water hit her face. She felt ice cubes lodging next to her eyes, something orange in the air, the light above her opened wide and went dark again.

Sherry waited, but there was nothing more. She let go of the hand and was immediately turned and led back to the door. A minute later someone was helping her out of the suit and then she was taken barefoot to a sink where someone scrubbed her hand until it was raw.

Dr. Lynn was waiting for Sherry when she came out of the storage facility. “Well, did it happen?” the administrator wanted to know.

Sherry nodded numbly as they walked to the elevator. The doors opened, then closed.

“She was in a house trailer,” Sherry said. “I could tell by the windows. How they were wrapped around the kitchen.”

“Who was there?”

“A woman in her thirties, maybe older, she was sick. Her face was burnt red and she was vomiting in a junkyard.”

“Describe her?”

“Brown hair, rings of tattoos around her neck and both wrists.”

Dr. Lynn punched buttons on a phone and lifted the receiver. “Jeffrey, get Captain Forrest on the line.” She hung up. “What else?”

“A man was in the house, an older man; he had a very large stomach. There was a huge woman, she was twice as big as the man, and there was a skinny teenage boy with his head shaved. He had swastika tattoos on his arms. The woman used drugs, a needle.” Sherry demonstrated using her forearm and finger. “The boy was breaking open a metal canister of some kind. It had glass on one end, round and thick. He was showing the big man and two others the inside and it glowed blue. He touched whatever was inside of it and drew an X on his arm and the X glowed blue.

“There was a dog, it was black and brown. There was a fire, and a woman’s red wallet on the ground beside it. I think her body was in that fire. The dog had a spiked collar around its neck. I saw a machine in the back of a truck. It was large like a refrigerator and it had pink plastic cushions on one side, like you could lie on it or something. I saw…”

“Why do you call it a machine?” the doctor interrupted.

“It had gauges on one end of it, some buttons and dials, and this arm that went up over the top like a crane.”

“Sherry,” she said. “This machine with the cushions on it. Do you remember what color it was?”

“Like a bluish green, the color of jewelry…”

“Turquoise?”

“Yes,” Sherry said quickly. “Turquoise.”

“Where was it?” Dr. Lynn’s voice had elevated a notch.

“In the back of the red pickup truck,” Sherry said.

“No, I mean where was the truck?”

“I couldn’t tell. The man with the stomach picked up the girl and threw her in the back of the same truck. It was empty then. She was covered and later thrown facedown in a large container. There was garbage all around her. She felt ice melting against her face. There was darkness and light and then she died.”

The phone rang and Dr. Lynn snatched it up. “Captain, the ranch is hot! Remember the radiotherapy unit that was stolen in El Paso? I think it’s in the Spencers’ scrap heap. Whoever had it must have broken into the cesium canister.”

Dr. Lynn listened for a moment.

“Yes, absolutely. It could cause the same symptoms, pulmonary and internal hemorrhaging. I’m calling the army medical corps. Anyone who went in or out of those trailers is dead and anyone who touched them isn’t far behind.”

“Don’t hang up!” Sherry said excitedly.

“Hold on,” Dr. Lynn told the captain.

“The trooper who picked me up this morning,” Sherry said rapidly. “She has it in her car. She ran over it last night. She got a flat tire and cut her hands on it. Her skin was burning up, she was sick in the stomach.”

“Wait, wait,” the doctor said, holding the receiver away from her ear. “What are you talking about? What’s in what car?”

“The trooper who picked me up at the airport. She was assigned to sit on the scrap yard last night. The place you’re talking about. She ran over this cylinder and she said it glowed blue in
side. It was in her car when we were coming here. I touched it.”

“Oh my God,” the doctor said. “Did you get that, Jim? Your trooper, she’s got the cesium canister in her squad car. Don’t let anyone near the machine or the trooper, and whatever you do, don’t let her get into her house.”

“The glowing light,” Dr. Lynn hung up the phone and turned toward Sherry. “You’re sure it was blue?”

“That’s what the trooper said.”

“But you, how do you know you saw blue downstairs when you were holding that girl’s hand?”

“I had sight until I was five. I know blue,” Sherry said, scared. “What does it mean?”

“You described a radiotherapy machine that was stolen from our clinic in El Paso a month ago. The machine was obsolete; it was on a loading dock waiting to be removed, but it contains a small amount of radioactive cesium and can’t be scrapped by just anyone. They were waiting for a licensed hazmat dealer to come take it to Texas.”

“And you said radioactive poisoning would have similar symptoms to the hantavirus you described?” Sherry’s heart was pounding in her chest.

“Yes.” The doctor sighed, punching a button on the phone console. “Jeffrey, get CDC on the line, tell them we’ll need doses of Prussian blue. Lots of doses!”

“How is it transferred?” Sherry began to rub the palm of her hand.

The doctor grabbed the hand and turned it over. “Touch,” she said, “or through the respiratory system. You touched it, you said?”

Sherry nodded. “What’s going to happen to me?”

“You’re going to be treated. There’s a substance that will clean the heavy metals from your body, and you weren’t exposed all that long.”

“Am I going to get sick?”

“Yeah, you’re probably going to get sick. Flu symptoms, but they’ll be gone in forty-eight hours.”

The doctor stood abruptly. “Just what in the fuck did they think they were going to do with a scrap radiology machine? There are warnings all over it. How stupid can someone be?”

She put a hand on Sherry’s shoulder. “We’re going to fix you, but I want you in our hospital lab for a workup right now. You can maybe fly back to Philadelphia at the end of the week, as soon as you start responding to the medicine, but right now I’ve got to find the state trooper who picked you up, and anyone else who came in contact with that canister.”

“Jeffrey!” she yelled, running out of the room.

Within a day Sherry was experiencing fever, nausea, and stomach cramps. Then the strangest lights began to swirl and sparkle in front of her eyes. And it wasn’t as if she could shut her eyes and make them go away. While the condition was painless, it was most disconcerting, even with her unusual abilities. Sherry had always been aware that her condition, cortical blindness, was a state of the brain, not the eyes, and that on any given day the condition could reverse itself. But she knew this wasn’t sight she was seeing.

Prussian blue, discovered in 1704, is a dye that when ingested can reduce the half-life of cesium 137 by two-thirds in as little as a month. Sherry had been told it was highly effective if the dye was administered immediately and if the patient had received only a small amount of contamination. The dye has chelating properties that can cleanse the tissue and muscle where predominant distributions of the cesium tend to inhabit, all but negating long-term effects. Her first installment of a month’s worth of doses would arrive within twenty-four hours from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

Something was different about her. She just knew it. Something was changing in her brain and she wished she could make it go away. She wished she could go back and reconsider her decision to go to New Mexico. Her only consolation was that because of her, the female trooper who had picked her up at the airport was stopped before she could reach her home and expose the rest of her family. That she was put on early medication and stood a good chance of surviving. But Sherry’s dream of a life with Brian? Well, until she knew more about her condition, she considered that on hold.

If only she could forget. Sherry had recently read online, via her specially adapted computer, an article about the concept of neurological reconsolidation. It was the process of strengthening existing synaptic connections in the brain and forming new synapses—both of which express certain genes—to prevent transportation of painful short-term memories to the archives of our mind. In short, erasing unwanted memories before they became permanently stored.

She had laughed at the time, thinking it wouldn’t be long before her ability to read memories was replaced by science.

“Are you comfortable, honey?” A nurse marched into the room and stuck a thermometer in her mouth before she could answer. A second later she clipped an oximeter on her finger and yawned out loud. “Chilly in here—you want another blanket?”

Sherry nodded with the thermometer still in her mouth.

In spite of her pleas, Brigham and Brian were on a plane to Albuquerque before midnight. He said that he’d noticed the change as soon as he saw her. In addition to the flulike symptoms that came as promised, he could tell exactly when she was seeing the lights because she kept placing a finger against her right temple. Sherry hadn’t noticed her involuntary reaction until he mentioned it, but, yes, she had been doing that a lot lately.

Now Brigham wanted her to get brain wave tests when she returned to Philadelphia, only to be cautious, he assured, but she should be certain that the exposure to radioactive isotopes
hadn’t contributed to something in her brain as well as to the all too real possibility of dying of bone marrow cancer ten or fifteen years later.

Brian was worried too, but she knew he had little idea how tumultuous her life had been before he came along. How this little peculiarity was but one more big peculiarity in a long, long string of peculiarities that had been vexing her in thirty-seven years of living.

Sherry Moore would have scoffed at the idea of more hospital tests a year before, arguing that she’d been treated like a lab rat for the last time. That she had been to the bottom and back, and was content to remain who she was. The reality was that no one could really explain what was going on in her brain and that it might be another fifty or hundred years before anyone was competent to try.

But Sherry didn’t argue with Brigham, and in fact, to his surprise, she would finally agree to let Brigham take her to Nazareth the day she arrived back in Philadelphia.

Part of it, of course, was that Sherry didn’t want Brian Metcalf thinking she was the hardhead she was. But Sherry had to admit she was actually scared. She’d experienced the odd malady over the years, and she had gone through the endless bouts of night terrors before. Sherry had an acute awareness of the myriad sensations in her mind. She was like a marathoner, very much in tune with her body. But this time she wasn’t convinced one way or the other. There might be something just a little bit different this time. Something infinitesimal might have shifted. Something in New Mexico could have altered her brain.

Here in the hospital, with all this time to think, she began to feel cheated.

It seemed so wrong, she thought. That this should happen after thirty-odd years of living alone. After such a great weekend in Boston with Brian’s parents, and then the romantic weekend in Delaware before that fateful call from New Mexico.

Sherry had found Boston quite the complex affair. Everyone going overboard to be nice to Brian’s new blind girlfriend: parents, siblings, nieces, and nephews. Nice, though you knew you were constantly under the microscope and that a critique followed every act and every scene. But she had pulled it off, she was sure, and without a hitch. The weekend had gone fabulously and after that she was one step closer to…what?

Now that she’d been exposed to radiation in New Mexico, she couldn’t help but wonder if everything had changed.

She had already lost one of the most important people in her life when a bullet felled Philadelphia police detective John Payne two years before. She had already survived a year of self-medicating in a haze of severe depression. Wasn’t it enough to be blind and without parents? she lamented. Couldn’t she find happiness without all the doubt and fear of drawing someone who was innocent into her world? Of becoming someone else’s burden?

She could actually see now why some people choose the solitary life. It wasn’t the life she wanted, but then people don’t always get what they want. It would be selfish to misrepresent herself, to occupy the dream of another without knowing if she was going to live.