T Parker - The border Lords

His legs and feet were without feeling and even his arms were heavy and dull and slow to obey him. To the north a commercial airbus out of Lindbergh Field began its big U-turn over the water. Far to the south Ozburn saw a small Cessna heading for Catalina Island.

He called up the image of Seliah asleep in her hospital bed. And although her beauty had long ago burned into his memory, it still caught him by surprise as it so often did-Seliah, the girl with the green hair walking into the lecture hall, Seliah cutting through the water at the Pan Am Games, Seliah on their wedding day, Seliah on their honeymoon beach on Moorea, Seliah combing out her hair or making coffee or polishing her car or fussing with a bouquet of flowers. Even sleeping she had the power to move him.

Betty coughed and sputtered and started up again but then she fell silent. Ozburn heard the wind whistling past the fuselage and the hiss of air on the wings. The night was immense beyond all his comprehension.

He felt Betty's nose turn toward earth but he couldn't move his arms to correct her course. He looked down at his hands and ordered them into action but they refused. The altimeter reading plummeted and the compass needle circled crazily. He tried to move his feet and raise his knees but they had forsaken him, too. Instead he imagined his first real date with Seliah, breakfast at the Congress Hotel in Tucson, and they ate and sat and drank coffee for two full hours and at the end of it Ozburn knew his life had changed and she was to be the biggest part of it. That was in February and they'd run through a pouring rain to Ozburn's beat-up Dodge, and halfway back to her place the Dodge stalled at a light and they had to get out and push the thing to the roadside. They were drenched and half-frozen and the gutter was a torrent of brown water that pushed at the car like a big hand. Then their first kiss, both of them trembling with cold with the heater on full blast and the windows fogged and the rain belting the roof of the car. Now Ozburn could feel nothing of his body except the vertigo of that kiss, the warmth and softness of it so startling and right in a cold, hard world. He held his eyes open and steady and watched the spangled Pacific rising up to claim him.

Ten days later Dr. Jason Witt of UCI Medical Center decided to suspend Seliah's sedatives and wait for her to awaken from the coma. She had been under heavy sedation for sixteen days, metabolically sustained with infusions. She had been bathed daily, and moved several times each day and night to promote circulation and prevent bedsores.

Witt wore a linen suit and white court shoes, and his tone of voice was more neutral than hopeful. "We've been monitoring regional cerebral perfusion using Doppler ultrasonography. Her serum, saliva and cerebrospinal fluid samples have been tested every other day for immune response and viral clearance. Her rabies-specific IgM and IgG and viral excretions in the saliva have fallen dramatically. The nuchal biopsy shows only very weak rabies virus antigen and the polymerase chain reaction was negative. What all that means is she's beaten back the virus. It's almost totally absent now. It has done its damage. If she awakens, she will be insensate to pain and touch, and paralyzed. But she'll be electrically viable. Her brain is functioning and it should continue to function. She'll have to learn many things again. She's going to have to boot up from scratch. So to speak."

Witt explained this to Seliah's parents and two brothers, Sean's parents and two sisters, and to Charlie Hood, allowed by the families to loiter around the edges of the tense inner sanctum. There had been some long and painful hours. Hood felt spent. But the families had shown strength and deep feelings for Sean, and Hood had not detected any blame for what Seliah was now going through. Not of Sean. Not of ATF. Ozburn had been found by fishermen in the wreckage of Betty, twelve miles west of San Diego, eight days ago.

"We do know," the doctor said solemnly, "that only a very few unvaccinated people have survived rabies after symptom onset. Very, very few."

"Five," said Seliah's father, Glen.

"Yes," said Witt. "We embarked on this protocol with both hope and awareness of risk. It has worked in the past. Sometimes it has failed. We've hoped and prayed it will work for Seliah. She is obviously loved very much and that is a great help. Now it's time."

There was an uneasy silence during which eyes did not meet. "How long?" asked Seliah's mother, Shivaun. "If she's going to wake up, when will it be?"

"In the best scenario, she should be able to blink or cough within twenty-four hours. After that, the chances of her waking go down significantly. We hope that she will respond to rehabilitation. You've been through a lot. So please stay. Wait together. Talk to her. Talk to each other. Pray. We'll wait for Seliah to come back." Deep into the first night they took turns sitting with her, waiting for her to cough, or maybe even open her eyes briefly. Sixteen hours came and went and she did not move except to breathe. Her pulse, respiration and blood pressure all registered low normal. The flesh of her face looked somewhat slack, as did her arms. Hood saw that she was pale now, beyond just fair, and with her platinum blond hair spilled back on the pillow, she was a ghostly sleeping beauty. And your prince came to kiss you, Hood thought. He heard Janet Bly's voice: We don't live in fairy tales, Charlie. She was right. But what did they live in?

Hour twenty arrived with sunrise at its back and Hood looked out at the gray morning light. Beyond a knot of freeways he could see Arrowhead Pond and Edison Field and to Hood these temples of man seemed vain and superfluous. To the northeast the purple flanks of the Santa Ana Mountains sat heavily against the lightening November sky.

Hood closed his eyes and listened to the thrum and mew of the intensive care unit. Sean's two sisters sat to his left and Seliah's two brothers on his right. He thought of his own brothers and sisters and his mother and father. They were spread across the map but they were still a family. For Hood there was some consolation in this.

When he looked at her again he saw the glimmer of Seliah's open eyes. A week later she still could not move anything but her eyes. She tracked her visitors and gave no sign of recognizing anyone except her mother, whose little finger she was able to squeeze. The others she regarded with mute but unmistakable fear.

Over the next eight days she slept in four-hour cycles and cried for hours in between. Witt said she was frustrated with her paralysis. He said she was like a baby, having to learn things again but she was in a hurry because she remembered how she used to be. She would learn patience. She would have to.

Gradually Seliah began crying less.

By the end of another week she moved her head, then her hands and feet. Her respiration tube was removed and she breathed on her own.

She began looking at people with diminished fear, except for her mother, who held her hand and brushed her hair and rubbed the lotion on her body. Seliah stared at her with love unconditional.

She whispered, then talked very softly, gibberish at first, then words, then sentences.

She sipped water and broth.

She appeared to remember some of the deep past but little of the recent.

She was sleeping less. Slowly she could concentrate on a conversation-ten seconds, then twenty.

What happened?

Why am I here?

I love you, Mom. Is that you, Dad?

It's very loud in this place.

Late one night Hood handed her a plastic cup of ice and water.

She took it and looked at him with an expression of wonder.

"Sean," she whispered.

"I'm Charlie."

She sipped and handed him back the cup and smiled very slightly. Then her eyes closed and she was gone again.