27.

And, elsewhere: Dr. Edward Walker.

Still alive, yes; an inmate of this same darkness, though not exactly. Here was a man who had never in his professional life entered into a situation whose outcome he felt he could not in some way influence. He stood now pressed flat against a wall, silver nitrate eyes a beacon in the black—if not of hope, then certainly of clarity. For surely, amid such confusion, any man able to rein in his fear must in his way evanesce, even shine, despite the darkness shivering around him.

He was somewhere in the labyrinthine bowels of the ground floor, sliding along the wall, senses extended for any variation in the cinder-block surface ahead of him. Moving? Yes, with great care. He had a penlight in his pocket but wouldn’t yet permit himself to use it. His hands were already full. In his left, a police radio, scavenged from the corpse of the officer upstairs. And in his right hand…

Well, he was already considering what he needed to do with the object in his right hand.

He advanced with the patience of a man who had trusted his sense of touch for a living, palpating the darkness as he might a patient, acutely aware of any variation in temperature or texture. He knew how to move forward under adverse circumstances—moving forward, after all, was what he had been trained to do, long before medicine had become his fate—but so much was at risk. Not just his own life, but the institution whose walls he’d come to think of as an extension of himself.

First we attack the sickness, then we protect the patient: his own personal twist on the Hippocratic oath. Nothing he would ever admit aloud, but his religion nonetheless. Medicine was his sacred war, a red church of bone and blood. Remember the awe you felt the first day of Gross Anatomy, scalpel in hand; hold on to that awe, take a little every day, it will immunize you against fear. In the end fear, not death, was the killer.

Walker was not a young man anymore, or even middle aged; no, now he was old, and death knew his location at all times. He and death were old acquaintances, more intimate than his wife, his mistresses, or his colleagues. Trauma, cancer, infection—the particulars were endless. Despite Walker’s best efforts to protect and preserve life, so many children had clutched his hand at the end, so many slipped away. Tonight Walker sensed them gazing back at him from out of the dark, so real that if he turned on his penlight he would see them gathered silently around him, a pale topiary of upraised faces.

He put the police radio in his lab coat pocket, took out his penlight and shone it on the wall, spilling shadows with an irregular recklessness that bothered him. Yet there was something invigorating about it, too. His hearing was not especially keen anymore, his night vision poor, but his sense of touch had saved hundreds of lives, and he felt a hot, almost erotic thrill to be using it now to save his own. Surely such adrenaline was the sole province of those who could count the remainder of their lives in hours or less. There was power in the inevitability of it. As he slipped his hands deeper into the enormous skull of this place, Walker knew that in some way his entire career had been leading up to his own appointment with death.