Chapter Four – The Last Death

The Last Death

Chapter Four

She awoke to blinding white light and a voice speaking to her.  “Welcome to the Bellevue Healing Clinic,” it said.  The voice was metallic and void of emotion.  She knew immediately that she was in one of the many revamped hospitals, and lying in one of the new attendant beds that monitored many of your vitals while your body recuperated and regenerated.

“Ah, she is awake,” came a warmer sounding, more human, voice.  A nurse came into the room and quickly glanced at the bed’s bio readouts before looking her in the eye.  “Better now, are we?” she asked.  “Hello Mariel, my name is Grace.  You’ve been healing for quite a while.  Do you remember what happened?  Yes?”  Nurse Grace evaluated her with a seasoned eye, hands resting on her hips.  “You’re a quiet one, aren’t you?”

Nurse Grace checked the readouts once more, situated the remote in Mariel’s limp hand, and strolled out of the room.

Mariel, she thought, yes, that is my name.  Mariel Forth.  And I live at, –no, I used to live at, well, it’s not important anymore.  Her thoughts flittered away as the doctor entered her room.  He quickly checked her vitals on the bed-panel, scribbled his name on the touch screen and left.  If he had noticed her quietness, he hadn’t mentioned it.

“Welcome to the Bellevue Healing Clinic.”  Again, that robotic voice would not let her gracefully awaken; it was intentionally disturbing to make you want to leave the facility as soon as your legs would carry you.  Now more fully awake from her nap, she stretched long and hard, most of her soreness had gone with only a few kinks in some of her joints.  She would be able to leave soon.

Her doctor returned before the nurse had even had a chance to make a preliminary visit.

“Hello Mariel,” he said, his eyes impulsively checking her readings without actually noticing her there.  His eyes stopped suddenly, he poked a finger at the screen and read a little farther.  “Well, it looks as though you are indigent at the moment, but you must have lived on the grid at some point to have the chip implants.  Great invention, those.”

With the onset of immortality, granted from alien technology a little over a year ago, the government had initiated a chip implant process that carried personal identification information.  The chips were implanted into the arms, legs, skull and trunk of a body, so if any of those parts were found, or if your body was in a deep healing mode, they could easily identify you and get you into a clinic.  It was a disturbing little reality that now since no one could die, people could be found damaged in the most gruesome and violent ways, either by choice, by violence or by general carelessness.

The chips also made it much easier for all the employees of the healing clinics, from check-in to treatment to release.  It was a voluntary choice to receive the chip implants but many people simply did not want to relinquish any rights of privacy.  The healing clinics and ambulette services had fought back by initiating their own program that if your body was found unconscious and did not have an implant to scan, then you were left wherever they had found you.

“You seem to be almost fit and able enough to leave on your own accord.”  The doctor paused.  “I see here that your DNA data on the chip matches your body’s DNA, so you’re a legitimate patient.  We’ll get you a visit from the Psych Ward to talk to you about any Post Trauma/Post Mortem concerns you might have.  But there is something else, Mariel.  It would appear from these readings that you are almost 4 months pregnant.”

He finally looked her in the eye.  Mariel was ready for it.  She had known she was pregnant, and knew she was getting close to the cutoff date.  She just wondered how long until the doctors or nurses would bring it up.

“You do know that in a little over a week, that child you are carrying will have to go full-term, right?”

Mariel slowly nodded.

“Have you decided then?”  The doctor hated dancing around the subject but it was a necessary evil of his profession.  Even though immortal, women could still give birth, and their babies inherited the immortality, but only after the fourth month of pregnancy.  If a woman wanted to abort the fetus, she couldn’t take too long in deciding its fate because the alternative was horrible, and the general public had been educated on what exactly that could entail.

After four months, the fetus could be removed, but it would still live.  In complete agony and suffering it would live until somehow its regenerative abilities could catch up and surpass the damage done to it and heal into a baby that was then dependent on someone’s care until the child was able to fend and think for itself.  There were horror stories of children left to that torture in every city across the world.  It was a sickening and cruel fate with severe penalties for the mothers of those children, if they could ever be found and brought to justice.

The doctor continued to stare at her.  She finally called him closer with her index finger until he was leaning over so she might whisper in his ear.

“Kill it.”  The first two words she had spoken since arriving in the clinic.  The doctor stood back up watching her intently for a moment, shrugged, signed in his scheduled visit on the panel and left.  Mariel just wanted to go back to a peaceful sleep where no one chased her, no one caught her and no one attacked her.  She was drifting slowly back into that world when she started hearing her name being called.  It was soft at first, then slightly more demanding.  She opened her eyes and clicked the remote in her hand simultaneously, thereby shutting off the bed’s annoying welcome message.

Before her stood a middle-aged woman with her black hair pulled back tightly, a white doctor’s smock covering a pink turtleneck sweater.  “Hello, Mariel.  I am Dr. Judith Light.  I’m here to check and see if you’re alright, and if you’d like to talk about anything.”

Ah, the shrink arrives, thought Mariel.  She held bitter contempt for most of the medical professions, but couldn’t decide which were worse, the oncologists or the psychiatrists.  At least the oncologists were all unemployed now.

“So what brings you here, Mariel?”

Medulloblastoma, thought Mariel bitterly.

“Brain tumor?” Dr. Light asked.  “How could you possibly have a brain tumor?”

Horrified, Mariel couldn’t believe she had actually uttered that evil word out loud.  Dr. Light scanned over the medical screen quickly to confirm her doubts.  She reset the panel and gazed at Mariel.

“Who had the tumor, Mariel?”

Mariel winced at the word.  Disparaging thoughts ran through her mind, too much of her painful past dredged up too quickly.  She had been running from those memories and burying them through various methods of pain and disregard for the past fourteen months.  Now it seemed as though they had caught up to her at lightning speed and bled out of her mouth through a single word.

“Those types of tumors are more common in children if I recall correctly.  Who had the medulloblastoma, Mariel?”

Mariel sighed in defeat.  “Rachel, my daughter.”

Rachel had been two and a half years old when the first curious side effect of her condition set in.  Her latest trick had been to spin and spin herself in circles until she was dizzy-drunk enough to stop and attempt to walk around the room.  It was quite comical as she would stumble about with her head thumping along to some internal beat and eyes darting back and forth as though still trying to catch up to the past revolutions.  This time though, it didn’t happen like that.  This time she fell on her knees hard, grabbing at her head as a screaming migraine ripped through her skull.

Mariel and John attributed the strange pain to an ear infection that might have already disrupted her balance and triggered her blinding headache.  Rachel had gone through having tubes put into her ears when a year old, so ear infections had been a common reoccurrence, and even though the infections had fallen off, they still were not extinct.

But the dizziness and headaches continued to slowly grow into a steady pattern for Rachel.  Mariel started asking questions.  Her first inclinations were that maybe children could get migraines and that Rachel was starting to develop that painful affliction, maybe even succumbing to cluster migraines from the way they disabled her at times.  It wasn’t until a few months after her first strange attack that the doctor mentioned the possibility of a tumor in her brain.

Dr. Light had been scrutinizing her since she confessed her daughter’s illness, but the lines around her eyes softened as she realized that Mariel was mentally re-living the event.

“You don’t have to keep it inside.  Just let me listen.  You’ll feel better.”

“Right,” scoffed Mariel.  “I’ve been trying everything under the sun for quite a while now to feel better; the best I can feel is empty.  And numb.”

Dr. Light sat down beside Mariel on the bed.  “You ever just tried talking?”

It was a simple statement but had a profound affect on Mariel.  Once the theories had been confirmed that Rachel did indeed have a tumor, a rapidly growing, mentally disfiguring beast, swelling inside her brain, Mariel had shut down.  She hadn’t spoken to John at all.  Even though he was Rachel’s father, he couldn’t break through Mariel’s silence, and he couldn’t accept Rachel’s fate.  So he left.  Without a word to either, he just simply stopped showing up at the hospital.

Mariel’s only notice of his absence was the distraction of not having someone bringing her coffee or telling her repeatedly to get some rest; things that reassured her that there was a world still living outside these sterile white walls.  Mariel would not leave Rachel’s side.  She bought books from the gift shop that Rachel would enjoy having read to her.  She wouldn’t eat unless one of the staff snuck her sandwiches.  She wouldn’t accept the things the doctors told her.

“The day before her third birthday they operated on her.”  Mariel began.  “She wasn’t sure what was happening to her, –none of us were, really.  But by the time they were ready to operate, she was sleeping about 18 hours a day, and the six hours she was awake she would try to play around the pain and vomiting.  She always had a smile for me.  She was so brave.  She was so brave and so tired.”

Mariel wiped her eyes, the first tears in over a year.  “I think by the time they were ready to operate, Rachel and I both were just wishing that this would be the end of all of her pain.  They had already run CT scans and MRIs, I even held her screaming body as they performed that lumbar puncture madness on her, trying to draw spinal fluid from my little baby.”

“They returned with glum faces that told me all I needed to know.  They tried reassuring me that by operating on her brain they could remove a large part of the tumor, and that the remaining cells and the spreading tumors in her spinal cord could be treated with chemotherapy and radiation.”

Mariel threw the remote that she had been squeezing absently in her fist.  “Besides cutting out part of my baby’s brain they were also going to inject her with ungodly medicines and drop radiation directly into her brain through a tube!”

“They were trying to save her life, Mariel.”

“They were delaying the inevitable!  They couldn’t admit they were powerless to save her, so all they did was extend her suffering.  I confronted them about it until they finally admitted it, Dr. Light.  They couldn’t look me in the eye.  They knew that I knew that giving a child that young such strong doses of chemo and radiation weren’t doing her any good.  If she were to live through it she would have irreparable damage from the medicines and radiation – it was a zombie life they were trying to give her.”

“But you did let them operate?”

“Of course I let them operate.” She sighed.  “What else could I do but also try and cling to some desperate hope that my daughter could once again spin and dance and laugh like a three year old little girl should.  Damn them all!”

“What happened after the operation, Mariel?  Did it help?”

Mariel lost herself in memory for a few moments and returned with a grim smile.  “It helped for a little while.  For a short time I had my Rachel back.  My little angel, her little brain just wanted to soak up everything it could in that short time.  She wanted to learn how to tie her shoes, and the poor thing didn’t realize that she had been living in her Eeyore slippers for 4 months.  She wanted to learn how to count by tens so she could count along with some hand puppet on a children’s television show that was piped in daily.  She wanted to know all the words to the Pledge of Allegiance because in one corner of the children’s playroom in the oncology center was a flag.”

“I kept the same schedule as Rachel so that I could spend every possible minute with her.  We did that for about two weeks.  Then they started the chemotherapy.  It was aggressive.  It was maddening.  Rachel lost her remaining hair in clumps.  Her curly brown hair dropped out more and more each day.  She became anemic, and was reverting back to her long sleep times and lethargic speech.  The sores around her mouth were painful and she quit smiling at me altogether.”

“That was when I had to put a stop to it all.  When my daughter that had been the light of my life, whose glow warmed everyone around her, when she quit smiling was when the treatments were stopped.”

“You didn’t hold any more hope of her living, then?” Dr. Light prompted.

“My hope was that my child could finally end her suffering.  All she would say to me anymore was ‘Mommy, I hurt’.  She was asking me to put an end to it.”

Dr. Light cleared her throat.  “And how long did she last after that?”

“Oh we’re not to the good part yet, doctor,” she said caustically.  “No, we’re not there yet.”  Mariel tried to sit up more in her bed but she had thrown the remote and couldn’t trigger the upper section to rise.  Dr. Light leaned over and triggered the bed from a side-control and the top portion lifted with a slow, quiet grind.  She motioned at the doctor when she was finally sitting high enough.

“Here, I’ll let you in on a few of my realities.  For the last year I have gone from a financially secure educated woman that owned her own business to a homeless vagabond that has been beaten and gang-raped many times over.  I have tried to run from every memory that is locked inside my brain.”  She thumped her temple violently with her finger.  “I have tried blanking them out with hard-core drugs, I have attempted to spray them as a mist on a brick wall with a gun and I have drowned, beaten and burned those memories.  But every time I recover, there remain the memories.”

“And I just saw you look at my belly.  No, Dr. Judy, I do not know who the father is; he could be one of many men that took me against my will or one of the many that I welcomed to help my memories retreat for a while.  And that thing growing inside my body does not need to be yet another memory for me.”

“Of course, I’ve read that you wanted the pregnancy terminated.”  Dr. Light began.

Mariel cut her off.  “Kill it.  I want the little bastard gone.”

“There are alternatives,” Dr. Light attempted to continue.

“No, there are less alternatives, these creatures don’t die like they used to, doctor.”

“Just stop!” the doctor interjected.  “Listen to me for just two minutes and I’ll let you continue.”

Mariel glared but did not respond in any other way.

“There is a man.  He has become a sort of surrogate father for all the unwanted children in the area.  He used to be a priest but his church,.. failed.”  Mariel snorted at the statement, she’d seen the fallout from immortality; God had been forgotten.

“He is a compassionate man that is trying to raise these children with a sense of self-worth and pride.  He is trying to raise children that do not take their immortality lightly.  He is instilling values in these children that will carry them throughout their lives and hopefully they too will pass on those values.”

Dr. Light took a cautious breath.  “If you would like to go and stay with him and have the child there, his name is Paul Deuce.  He would let you stay there with no strings attached.  You can have the baby and leave if you want to.  He is just a man full of love for children and wants what’s best for them.  There, I’ve said what I wanted to say.”

Mariel’s gaze didn’t waver.  “I won’t do it.”

It became a quiet staring match between the two as Mariel stood her ground and Dr. Light finally let her convictions drift away so that she might regain the balance between compassion and professional detachment.  In a soft voice, Judith prompted, “Tell me about Rachel.”

“With her treatments now halted,” Mariel continued.  “The love in her eyes started to glaze over.  The hospital shuttled us off to a hospice center, but I don’t think Rachel ever even realized that we were somewhere else.  She had forgotten the names of her favorite nurses and her sight was failing.”

“Did I tell you how long ago this was, doctor?  Any idea of a timeline come into focus yet?”  Maria’s eyes held pain and hatred, and they focused on Judith as she spoke.  “See, they gave us a nice cozy room for Rachel and me to stay in and during the long hours when she was sleeping fitfully, I would click on the television.  One night all the normal programming stopped.  We now had this alien on every channel imaginable.  They were covering stories of where he had come from, speculated on what he wanted and what he would do to us.”

“Rachel was only awake a few hours a day now, and that short time alone was full of pain that medications couldn’t cut.  She would cry for me and not even my hugs and kisses could ward off the fear and pain invading her body.  I started telling her about the alien, the man from outer space.  She loved trying to pronounce his name; K’Chul Kan.”  Mariel lightened momentarily with the memory.

“We would talk about how he must have flown for a long time in space to get to our planet.  I would explain to her how tall he was because everything on the television was a blur of colors to her now, but she would imagine what he would have to go through to fit inside our little room.  She would make the funniest sound effects as she attempted to imitate him lumbering and scrunching around the room, until her strength would give out and I would have to return her to the bed.”

“She was sleeping the afternoon that K’Chul Kan made his announcement to the world.  He told us he was giving us the gift of immortality.  In one hour from his speech, spores would be scattered into our atmosphere.  Three hours following that, he promised us eternal life.  I sat there stunned.  Could we believe him?  Was he really going to go through with this?”

“I woke up Rachel.  I knew it wasn’t fair, and she told me in her weak little voice how sleepy she still was.  I told her about what K’Chul Kan had said.  That in an hour she would be healed and then we could leave the center and go back home.  She tried to share my excitement but could barely garner the strength to give me a smile.”

Dr. Light had noticed as Mariel’s story grew grimmer that her hands had slid down to her abdomen, subconsciously cradling the child inside of her.

“I picked her up and held her shrunken body in my arms like when she was a newborn and sat in the rocking chair.  I stroked her bald little head and told her how tomorrow we would be back home, and she could swing in her swing set out back again, and she could hold the kittens that had missed her so badly.”

“The news played in the background as we rocked.  I could hear them as they announced that some satellite systems were picking up on objects entering our atmosphere and parking in orbit around the globe.  It could only be the releasing of the spores.  And I kept telling my baby to hold on.  Hold on, Rachel.  Soon you won’t be sick anymore.  Soon you’ll be able to spin, you’ll be able to dance and sing.  Soon, baby soon.  She looked up at me and smiled her old smile and gave a little wiggly kick.  ‘I’m ‘cited, Mommy.  I’m so happy.’  And she closed her eyes and died in my arms.”

Dr. Light leaned in to rest her hand on Mariel’s shoulder.  Mariel shook with small choking sobs.

“It wasn’t minutes later that I could feel the spores settling into my body.  I held my baby as the pain started.  I held her throughout the hours as my soul was ripped away and I was made immortal.  I welcomed the pain, so that maybe I could understand some of what Rachel had gone through.”

The room was silent and Mariel had stopped crying.  Dr. Light slowly stood, awkward without anything to say.  Mariel had suffered a loss that was permanent.  There would be no holy reunion in the idea of an afterlife for her and her daughter.  Thinking along the same path of thought, Mariel said, “I guess she at least got her yard to play in, they closed the gates behind her in heaven.”

Judith held Mariel’s hand for a few minutes trying to comfort an old wound with quiet compassion.  The intercom intrusively called the doctor’s name and she excused herself with promises of a quick return.

Three hours later an intern entered Mariel’s room.  “Alright Ms. Forth we can take you in to have your…”  The bed was empty.  The sheets were strewn on the floor.  Dr. Light came in just seconds behind the intern hoping to speak to Mariel one last time before it became too late for the baby she was carrying.

“Guess I’ll call an orderly to clean up,” the intern said with a shrug.

Dr. Light hid her smile and reached for the phone in the pocket of her smock.  She browsed to a number in the address book and hit the dial button.  After the second ring it was picked up.  It was a deep, somber voice that answered.

“Paul?” Judith asked tentatively?

“Judy, is that you?”

“Paul, listen, someone just left here and I think she might be heading your way.  She’s had it pretty rough.  She might seem like a lost cause, but a lot of it is just for show.  Her name is Mariel Forth and she has had the presence of mind to have a chip implant even after all the pain she’s suffered, so you might be able to save her and her child.”

“Well, Judy,” his calm voice replied, “she’s already making some good choices.  Word has already traveled that she’s asking around about me, so she’s being led this way.  I’ve already sent out a couple of the older boys to help get her here without incident.”

“Recruiting some of the old gang boys, Paul?”

“They’re all just children, Judy.  You know that.”

“Yeah, I know, Paul.  They’re all becoming your children.  Take care.  I’ll check in later.”

“Goodbye, Judy.  Nice work, and bless you.”

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