John Saul: Black Lightning

He struggled against the urge; took a step backward.

Then the bands tightened around his chest, his left arm began to tingle once again, and he felt that clammy sheen of sweat coat his body.

“Glen?” he heard someone ask, but now the voice sounded too far away even to be readily identifiable. “Jesus, Glen, what is it?”

Glen staggered backward, groping for something to steady himself with.

Found nothing.

His right hand moved wildly now, reached for the elevator.

Missed.

He staggered, his balance failing him, his knees buckling.

It was his heart.

Something had gone very wrong with his heart.

He could hear it pounding in his ears, feel it beating crazily in his chest.

Now the bands constricting his lungs tightened. He struggled for breath.

“He’s having a heart attack,” he heard someone say as he felt strong hands grip his shoulders, steadying him as he crumbled onto the thick planks of the platform. “You got your phone, Jim?”

Jim Dover was already punching 911 into the pad of his cellular phone, and as George Simmons and Alan Cline knelt next to Glen Jeffers’s supine figure, Dover ordered an ambulance, then began barking orders into the walkie-talkie that allowed him to communicate with the crew below. A moment later, all his instructions issued, he slapped the phone shut, dropped it into his pocket, and took charge of the situation on the tiny platform. Suddenly, even to Jim Dover, the sturdy planking seemed to be no more than an insignificant speck suspended in the middle of nothing. “We have to get him into the elevator. George, you and I should lift him up. Alan, hold his head. Not real high — just enough to slide him into the cage.”

As the three men raised Glen Jeffers a few inches off the planking and eased him through the open gate of the elevator, the semiconscious man’s lips worked, and an incomprehensible sound came faintly from his lips.

“What did he say?” Alan Cline demanded. When no one replied, Alan bent over his partner. “It’s okay, Glen,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady and reassuring. “Soon as we get you down, you’re going to be just fine.”

The metal gate clanged shut and Jim Dover jabbed impatiently at the elevator’s controls. After a second’s hesitation, the cage jerked once, eliciting a barely audible grunt of pain from Glen Jeffers, then began inching its way downward at what seemed to be an impossibly slow pace.

“For Christ’s sake,” Alan Cline demanded of no one in particular, “can’t you make this damned thing go any faster?” No one answered him, and he bent over his partner once more. “Take it easy, Glen. Just take it easy, okay?”

Above his head, Jim Dover and George Simmons glanced uneasily at each other. Glen’s breathing was coming only in the shallowest of gasps, and his complexion had lost all its color, taking on a ghastly faint bluish pallor. “Either of you know CPR?” Dover asked. “I don’t think he’s going to make it.”

Alan Cline glared up from his crouched position next to Glen. “Shut up, Jim, okay? Nobody’s going to die.” But as if to belie his partner’s words, a terrible rattling sound issued from Glen Jeffers’s lips, and now the blood drained from Alan Cline’s face. Racking his brain to remember what he’d been taught in the cardiopulmonary resuscitation course he’d taken almost a year ago, he pulled Glen’s mouth open, checked to make sure his tongue wasn’t blocking his throat, then began pressing rhythmically on his chest. As the elevator continued its agonizingly slow descent, he bent over, closed Glen’s nostrils with the fingers of his right hand, and began breathing directly into the unconscious man’s lungs.

After three deep breaths he went back to work on Glen’s chest.

They were only twenty feet above the building’s floor when finally another small groan escaped Glen Jeffers’s lips and his lungs began to work once again, though the most they appeared able to produce were spasmodic, gasping breaths that seemed incapable of sustaining life.

“Come on, damn it,” Alan Cline whispered. “Breathe! For God’s sake, breathe!”

As if in response to his partner’s voice, Glen seemed to gain a little strength, and his chest heaved.

The elevator banged to a stop and Jim Dover threw the door open. “Where’s the ambulance?” he demanded of the assistant foreman, who was waiting at the elevator’s base.

The man’s eyes fixed on Dover for a moment, then shifted to Glen Jeffers, whose ragged breathing had abruptly stopped again. “Not here yet,” he said as Alan Cline went back to work on Glen. Then his gaze came back to the contractor and he shrugged helplessly. By the time the ambulance arrived, would it already be too late?

The crowd of demonstrators had begun gathering the day before, and every hour since the first arrivals had set up their makeshift camps, more of them had poured into the field across from the prison, until now the entire space was filled with tents, trailers, cars, and people. All night long a bonfire had burned, the demonstrators clustering around it as they sang songs of protest and chanted their conviction that the condemned man must not die, that somewhere some nameless lawyer was feverishly working in an ill-lit office, finding new grounds upon which to challenge Richard Kraven’s sentence of death.

Perhaps there would be an error discovered in the court records, or some piece of evidence could be newly challenged.

Or perhaps the governor would have a change of heart and commute Kraven’s sentence at the last minute.

But as night faded into morning and the bonfire burned lower, until all that was left of it were glowing coals smoldering angrily beneath a thick layer of ash, a watchful silence had descended on the crowd.

Anne Jeffers gazed down upon the scene from the window of Wendell Rustin’s office on the top floor of the prison’s administration building. A few curling wisps of smoke still rose from the last embers of the night’s bonfires, and the demonstrators still stood facing the prison, waiting in bitter anticipation for the last moment of Richard Kraven’s life.

How many were there — five hundred? A thousand?

And who was to say that their feelings about what was going to happen here today were any less valid than her own? An image of her daughter came to mind, and she saw once more the earnest expression on Heather’s fifteen-year-old face a few nights before, when they had once more debated capital punishment over the dinner table. With the absolute certainty of her youth, Heather had insisted that there was not — could not — be any justification for a government executing anyone.

“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” she’d insisted. “And besides, aren’t we always making a big deal about being a Christian nation? What about the ten commandments? The Bible says ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Which means that capital punishment is just plain wrong!”

Now, her daughter’s words ringing in her ears, Anne wondered just when it was that she’d lost her own innocence, had lost the ability to see the world in black and white. It had not, she reflected, been that many years since she’d agreed with Heather wholeheartedly.

Except that somewhere along the line she’d begun to believe that in some cases — cases like Richard Kraven’s — there was no other real choice. To some extent, she supposed that her work had hardened her, that her many years of observing and reporting on man’s cruelty to his own species had changed her.

As she gazed down at the demonstrators in front of the prison, scanning their faces, she saw among the crowd scores of people her own age, and just as many who were twenty years older. Even as she watched, an elderly woman sitting in a wheelchair, swathed in a long peasant skirt and a rainbow-colored shawl, proudly waved a sign that read CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IS MURDER.