James Gunn - The Immortals

The shover looked startled. He glanced apprehensively into the shadows. “What do you think? Come on, medic, give me a break. You wouldn’t really shoot me, would you? A medic and all?”

“Sure I would,” Flowers said evenly. “Who’d care?”

The light came on like a detergent spray, cleansing the darkness. Flowers heard the rotors overhead and blinked blindly.

“Don’t move,” said the bull voice. “You’re under arrest.”

The shover dashed for the darkness. Flowers aimed carefully. The needle caught him in the back of the neck, just below the basi-occipital bone. He took one more step and crumpled, half in darkness. The police sergeant listened to Flowers’s description of events with unconcealed impatience. “You shouldn’ta shot him,” he said. “What’s the man done, he should get shot?”

“Shoving,” Flowers began firmly, counting on his fingers with the muzzle of the needle gun. “Bribery. Adulterating, too, if you’ll analyze that ampule.” It was in the middle of the broken sidewalk, miraculously whole. The sergeant stooped for it reluctantly.

“That’s no proof,” he said sourly. “You think we got nothing better to do than answer false alarms? I ought to run you in for disturbing the peace and false arrest.” He glanced again at the ambulance, speculatively, and back to the needle gun.

“Proof?” Flowers echoed, scowling darkly. “What do you need? There’s a man with ten million units of penicillin. There’s my testimony. There’s this.” He pressed the Playback button on his belt buckle.

The voice was rich and cultured. “Contraindications are known ilotycin sensitivity and—”

Flowers hit the stud hastily and reeled off a few feet of tape before he started it again.

“Penicillin,” said the shover’s husky whisper. “Hot stuff. Straight from the lab, and the price is right…”

When it was finished, Flowers erased the tag end of Dr. Curry’s lecture on internal medicine and added his own affidavit, “I, Benjamin Flowers, seventh-year medic, do hereby swear by Aesculapius and Hippocrates that…”

The officer’s reluctant confirmation made it legal, and Flowers dropped the bobbin-sized spool into the officer’s meaty hand. “That should be plenty. There’s your prisoner.”

The shover was on his hands and knees, weaving his head back and forth like a sleepy elephant. Flowers put one foot on his back and shoved him over. “I’m going to follow up on this case,” he said. “I want to see this man get the full penalty. I’ve got your badge number. I wouldn’t let him escape or lose any of the evidence.”

The sergeant’s voice dropped to a whine. “You don’t have to get tough. I’ll do my job. You should understand, though—a man’s got to live. These is hard times. Why, that man’s probably trying to meet payments on a medical contract! Look at it from our angle. If we was to run in every shover in town, we’d have ’em stacked eight deep in the city jail. How’d we feed ’em? How’d we keep ’em there if they didn’t want to stay?”

“That’s your problem, Sergeant. It’s rats like that who are chewing away the foundations of medical treatment. If drugs and antibiotics circulate without supervision, the life span will plummet to seventy or lower. We have enough trouble with antibiotic sensitivity and resistant bacteria strains without this.”

Flowers looked down again at the shover. He was sitting up, bewildered. He rubbed the back of his neck and pulled his hand away to stare at it. “I ain’t dead,” he said.

“My business is saving life, not taking it,” Flowers said harshly.

The shover looked up at the voice and snarled. “You! You lousy body snatcher! Quack! You ain’t gonna get away with this! John Bone’ll take care of you, butcher!”

“Here, now!” the sergeant broke in sharply, hauling the shover to his feet. “That’s enough out of you.”

But his hands were surprisingly gentle. Flowers’s lips twisted wryly.

Over the muffled throb of the helicopter’s rotors, the shover shouted at him, “You and your kind—you’re responsible for all this!”

The searchlight swept along the front of the porch roof and picked out two numbers hanging rusty and askew. Luckily they were the last two.

The house stood beside a vacant lot crammed with disintegrating pipe and machinery and the decaying derrick of a gas-drilling outfit. At one time the yard had been paved; now it was little better than powdery gravel as Flowers drove up to the front steps.

He turned off the lights and sat in the darkness staring up at the place. There were two stories and an attic. A dilapidated porch reached across the front. The windows stared dark and blind into the night.

Had the resident made a mistake? It would be typical.

Then he saw a dim flicker behind the west second-floor window.

Carefully, Flowers climbed the rotten wooden steps. The light built into the black bag splashed against the old door. Flowers knocked. There was no answer. The only sound was the comforting vibration of the ambulance motor.

He tried the antique brass handle. The door swung open. He pulled out the needle gun and entered cautiously. To the right an archway had been boarded off with worm-eaten plywood. Ahead was a flight of stairs.

As he climbed noiselessly, the light gleamed from hand-turned spindles, polished by generations of small hands. When he could afford a place of his own in the country, he told himself, he would have something in it like that—old, haunted by a thousand memories of the past. If he found some really good examples of early woodwork in this hovel, he could buy the place or have it condemned by the public health department.

At the top of the stairs were six doors. Flowers turned right. The door he tried was locked. It rattled under his hand.

He listened uneasily to the noises of the house. It creaked and squeaked and stirred as if it had acquired a life of its own over the centuries. His shoulders twitched.

The door opened.

The light from the black bag spilled over the girl like quicksilver. She stared into it, unblinking. Flowers stared back. She was perhaps five feet five. Her dark hair would have been very long, he thought, if it had been allowed to fall free, but it was braided and wound around her head like a coronet.

Her face was delicate and slender, the skin very white, the features regular. Her dress was yellow, flowing, belted in to a small waist; it was impractical and unflattering and completely unlike the straight, narrow fashions women were wearing these days. But there was something suggestive about the hint of figure beneath the cloth and the bare, white feet. His pulse climbed ten beats per minute.

Only then did he notice that she was blind. Her corneas were opaque, darkening the pale blue of her eyes.

“Are you the medic?” Her voice was low and gentle.

“Yes.”

“Come in before you arouse our roomers. They might be dangerous.”

As the girl bolted the door behind him, Flowers surveyed the room, which was reasonably spacious. Once it had been a bedroom; now it was a one-room apartment containing two chairs, a gas burner, an upended crate serving as a table for a smoking kerosene lamp, and a cot made of wood and canvas.

On the cot was a middle-aged man, sixtyish, his eyelids closed, his breathing noisy in the bare room.

“Philip Shoemaker?” Flowers asked.

“Yes,” the girl said.

He noticed her eyes again. In the sun they would be the color of wild hyacinth.

“Daughter?”

“No relation.”

“What are you doing here?”

“He’s sick,” she said simply.

Flowers studied her face. Its peace and calmness told him nothing.

As he sat down on the chair beside the cot, he unlocked his black bag. Quickly, without wasted motion, he brought out a handful of instruments, trailing their wires. One small pickup went over the old man’s heart; another was fastened to his wrist; a third, to the palm. He wrapped a sphygmomanometer band around the bicep and watched it grow taut, slipped a mouthpiece between pale lips, fitted something like a skullcap to the head…