“I’m . . . going to go home now,” Manny said.
His voice was still as strong as ever, but the expression on his colleague’s face revealed the truth in and around him: No matter what he told himself about feeling better, he was not what he once had been. He looked the same. He sounded the same. He walked the same.
He even tried to convince himself he was the same.
But something had changed that weekend, and he feared that there was no going back from it.
“Would you like someone to drive you?” Goldberg asked tentatively.
“No. I’m fine.”
It took all the pride he had not to start running as he turned to leave: By force of will, he kicked back his head and straightened his spine and put one foot calmly in front of the other.
Oddly, as he went out the way he’d come in, he thought of his old surgery professor . . . the one who’d been “retired” by the school admin when he’d turned seventy. Manny had been a second-year med student at the time.
Dr. Theodore Benedict Standford III.
The guy had been a straight-up hard-ass prick in class, the kind of fucker who liked it best when the students gave the wrong answer, because it provided him with an opportunity to dress people down. When the school had announced his departure at the end of the year, Manny and his classmates had thrown a going-away party for the sorry bastard, all of them getting drunk in celebration that they were the last generation to be subjected to his bullshit.
Manny had been working as a custodian at the school that summer for cash, and he’d been mopping the hallway when the last of the movers had taken the final boxes from Standford’s office . . . and then the old man himself had turned the corner and wing-tipped it out for the last time.
He’d left with his head high, walking down the marble stairs and leaving through the majestic front entrance with his chin up.
Manny had laughed at the arrogance of the man, undying even in the face of age and obsolescence.
Now, walking that same way, he wondered if that had been true.
More likely, Standford had felt as Manny did now.
Discarded.
SEVENTEEN
Jane heard the tearing sound all the way down in the training center’s office. The ripping woke her up, yanking her head off the pillow of her forearms and snapping her spine straight from its curl over the desk.
Ripping . . . and flapping . . .
At first, she thought it was a gust of wind, but then her brain clicked on. No windows here underground. And it would take a damn thunderstorm to create that much of a disturbance.
Bolting up from the chair and scrambling around the desk, she hit the corridor outside in a run as she gunned for Payne’s room. All doors were open for precisely this reason: She had only one patient, and although Payne was mostly quiet, if something happened—
What the hell was all that noise? There was grunting, too—
Jane skidded around the doorjamb of the recovery room and just about screamed. Oh, God . . . the blood.
“Payne!” She rushed for the bed.
V’s twin was going wild, her arms flailing around, her fingers clawing at the sheets and also at herself, her sharp nails biting into the skin of her upper arms and shoulders and collarbones
.
“I can’t feel it!” the female yelled, her fangs flashing, her eyes so wide there was white all around them. “I can’t feel anything!”
Jane lunged forward and grabbed one of those arms, but her grip slipped the instant contact was made, snapping off all those slick scratches. “Payne! Stop it!”
As Jane fought to still her patient, bright red blood spackled her face and white coat.
“Payne!” If this kept up, those wounds were going to be deep enough to show bone. “Stop—”