“The meat,” said Nadia, from the doorway, “has arrived.”
She was dressed in her nurse’s uniform, all cotton, white on white. Her hair was still pulled back, and Sweeney found it strange to see her Clinic persona playing here in Gehenna. She stared at the Sheep and ignored Sweeney.
Nadia reached into her pocket and withdrew a vial. It was small and plastic, capped with a green stopper and filled with a pink liquid. She handed it to the Sheep, who held it up to the light and closed one eye to look at it.
“You said it was okay if I got some blood with the fluid.”
Nadia sounded brittle, a little defensive. But Sweeney could see that the Sheep was thrilled.
“A little blood,” he said, “might be just the thing.”
He moved to the hot plate, pulled the stopper with his teeth, and poured the pink liquid into the soup. Then he grabbed the wooden spoon and began to stir. Nadia looked from the Sheep to Sweeney and said, “The kid says hello.”
Sweeney came around the tables toward her, and the Sheep, without taking his eye off the saucepan, said, “Don’t fuckin’ touch her.”
Nadia couldn’t stop the smile. She put a hand on her hip, gave an exaggerated roll of the eyes. “You chivalrous bastard,” she said but Sweeney couldn’t tell to whom she was talking.
“What was in the vial?” he said to Nadia.
“So much for the afterglow,” she said but the Sheep answered the question.
“It’s Danny’s brain fluid,” he said. “They check the pressure in his skull cavity and if they need to, they drain the fluid. You know that, Sweeney.”
Sweeney couldn’t stop staring at Nadia.
The Sheep went on.
“Don’t make a big thing out of this. Normally, they’d throw the drainage in toxic waste and it’d be burned in the morning. We’re taking something he doesn’t need, Sweeney. Something that’s poisonous to him.”
“We’re helping Danny out,” Nadia said. “And if you can control yourself, we’re going to help you out too.”
He wanted to slap her. Knock her to the ground. Break an arm or a leg. But everything they were saying was true. They did have to drain Danny’s shunt once or twice a week. They’d done it back at St. Joe’s. It relieved the pressure on the brain. A simple procedure. And the fluid was nothing but waste product. He’d watched Mrs. Heller throw a hundred vials into the toxic box. He’d never given them another thought.
He turned to the Sheep and said, “You’re going to drink this shit?”
Nadia laughed and the Sheep said, “Actually, we’re gonna take it intravenously.” He put down the wooden spoon again and turned to Nadia.
“Call the boys in,” he said. “And tell Buzz soup’s on.”
23
The Abominations had built a little campfire inside a massive stew kettle. They’d placed the pan on the floor in the center of the lunchroom and were sitting around it in a semicircle. Buzz was prodding the makeshift kindling with a tire iron. Opposite him, Sweeney was staring at the faces, all of them warped by shadow. The bikers looked like kids on Christmas morning, made silent by a panicky desire for a specific gift and a concurrent terror that it might not be under the tree.
The Sheep was in the middle of the semicircle, on his knees, holding a tin beer tray that held a pile of syringes. While everyone watched, he began loading the spikes with the contents of the saucepan.
Buzz put down the tire iron and said, “Looks a little thin.”
The Sheep shook his head.
“Looks,” he said, and snapped a finger against the last needle, “can be deceiving as a motherfucker.”
Buzz smiled but he let his voice go low when he said, “Careful there, Alvin.”
“How ’bout you take a taste, Buzz,” the Sheep said, “and then tell me how thin it is?”
Sweeney had watched his son receive countless injections but this was something else. Something disconnected from the medical, and tied, entirely, to the ritualistic.
Buzz extended his arm. The fire lit a coating of sweat across the bulge of muscle and vein. It was cool in the room but Buzz was stripped to the waist. He made the Sheep come to him. There was no rubber tie-off, no alcohol swab or sterile gauze. The Sheep put two fingers in his mouth and wet them with his tongue. Then he popped them free and slapped them across the underside of Buzz’s forearm. It was a sound that would stay with Sweeney.
The Sheep hugged the arm against his stomach, picked his line. He waited a second, concentrating, then looked up. He and Buzz stared at each other. Then he forced the tip of the needle under the skin and into the channel. He pushed until the hilt of the syringe came flush to the arm, then thumbed the plunger, forcing the soup into the bloodstream. Buzz didn’t move. Didn’t blink. But Sweeney thought he saw his lips tremble.
After a while, the Sheep pulled the needle free and threw the syringe into the fire. Buzz sat back on his heels. The Abominations studied him. He put his head in his hands, pulled in a long breath. He said something to himself. It might have been, “Oh, Jesus.”
The Sheep gave a self-satisfied nod and handed the beer tray to the Ant, who took a syringe and passed the tray down the line. The rest of the crew fixed themselves, messy or neat, but all of them relatively silent. When the tray got to Sweeney, he handed it back to the Sheep.
“Your turn,” said the Sheep, holding up a syringe. He smiled and thumbed the plunger just a bit to make the needle spurt.
“I don’t think so,” Sweeney said.
“I can’t fix,” the Sheep said, “until you fix. Buzz’s orders.”
“Buzz,” Sweeney said, “is incapacitated.”
“True enough,” the Sheep said, glancing down at his leader, who was moving his mouth but failing to emit any sounds. “But he’ll be better than new tomorrow. And he’ll be disappointed if he finds out we didn’t follow orders.”
“Well,” said Sweeney, “there’s at least two ways around that.”
The Sheep smiled but it was forced.
“Should I even hear them?” he asked.
“The simple way,” Sweeney said, “would be for us to tell him what he wants to hear.”
The Sheep shook his head, disappointed, patience exhausted.
“That won’t work,” he said. “For reasons you won’t understand unless you take your medicine here.”
“That leaves the second way, then.”
And though the Sheep didn’t want to ask, he said, “Which is?”
“Which is,” Sweeney said, “I go outside and drain all the petrol out of your tanks. Then I come back inside and pour it all over these scumbags. And then I drop a match and run the fuck out of here.”
The Sheep finally let the hand that held the syringe drop into his lap.
“I know we just met,” he said, “but I don’t think so. You’re a fuckin’ pharmacist from Cleveland.”
Sweeney stood up, loomed over the Sheep, and said, “I’m tired of people who don’t know shit about me thinking that they do.”
The Sheep wouldn’t back down.
“So you’re saying,” he said, “that you’d rather incinerate all of us than take a chance and find out what this is all about?”
“You’re threatening my son. The only reason I wake up every day is to take care of my son.”
“And you can’t believe that we’re here to help you both?”
Sweeney stared at him. The Sheep held up the syringe halfheartedly and said, “C’mon, take the leap.”