A Killer Harvest Read online

  Shapes, colors, lights—they are waiting for him, according to Dr. Toni. Faces, movies, words on a page—hell, he’ll even be able to drive. He’ll be able to walk through parks and cities and sail the seas and look up into the stars. This permanent darkness of his will disappear. What will fill his dreams? Until now, his dreams have been of sounds and tastes and falling and floating. His whole sense of reality is going to change. And, of course, the Joshua who woke this morning isn’t the same Joshua who will fall asleep tonight. This new Joshua Logan is going to be angry at the loss of his father. This new Joshua Logan is going to see for the first time, something he has wanted more than anything—just not at this price.

  “If we had more time, I’d run through it again, but I’m afraid we don’t have that,” Dr. Toni says.

  His mother asks about the risk of infection, the complications that can come from that, but Joshua tunes the conversation out. He closes his eyes and studies the darkness he’s grown up with, aware of a different darkness in his life now. The words drift past him, the breeze from the fan scatters them around the room. His mother asks another question, and the conversation continues.

  “Can we get started?” he asks, interrupting them.

  “Only when your mom is ready,” Dr. Toni says.

  “I . . . I can’t risk anything going badly,” his mom says. “I can’t . . . I can’t . . . bear to think . . .”

  “Joshua is going to be in good hands,” Dr. Toni says.

  “It’s going to be okay, Mom,” he says, then smiles at the irony of saying the one thing he’s gotten sick of hearing. “I want to get started and . . . and to be honest, being asleep means I won’t have to hurt so much, right? All I feel now is pain,” he says—but more than pain, he feels empty inside. He’s tired too. He doesn’t want to talk anymore.

  “I know, baby,” his mom says, and she leans across and hugs him. He can feel her tears on his cheek.

  “I’ll leave you for a few minutes,” Dr. Toni says, and Joshua hears her get up and leave. The door closes behind her.

  “Did you see Dad?” he asks.

  “Yes,” she says, still holding him.

  “How did he look?”

  “He looked . . . peaceful,” she says.

  “Is that the truth?”

  “Yes,” she says, but he doesn’t believe her. People who die in their sleep might look peaceful. He imagines people who have fallen to their death look the absolute opposite of peaceful.

  “Is it going to be weird?” he asks. “When you look at me, you’re going to see his eyes.”

  She holds on tighter then, and her body shakes as she cries.

  “Because I think it might be weird,” he adds, struggling to get the words out.

  “I don’t know,” she says.

  “Will you stay with me? During the operation?”

  “I can’t be in there with you.”

  “But you can be outside the room, right?”

  “And I will be,” she says, “for as much of it as I can. But I have other things to . . . to arrange.”

  “Things to do with Dad?”

  “Yes.”

  “What will happen after?”

  “After the funeral?”

  “After I can see again. What will happen to me?”

  “I don’t know yet,” she says, “but it will be an exciting time for you, despite what’s happened.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Joshua . . .” she says, and in the pause that follows he knows she’s thinking carefully about what she wants to say. “What your father has given you is a miracle, and you need to honor him by using that miracle to the best of your abilities. You’re only sixteen, but now you have a lot of growing up to do. You owe it to your father to be the best man you can be.”

  Dr. Toni comes back and tells them it’s time. He’s taken down the corridor in a wheelchair. He catches snippets of conversations, people talking about broken bones and cancers and the weather and how hard it is to find decent parking. They enter an elevator. His mother still has his hand in hers. Somebody slaps at a button and they begin to move. A few moments later he’s being wheeled down a different corridor, this one quieter and cooler.

  “Okay, Michelle, this is as far as you can go. I’m sorry,” Dr. Toni says, and he can hear a familiarity in the way Dr. Toni uses his mom’s first name and he wonders how well they used to know each other.

  His mother crouches and puts her arms around him and hugs him tight again. He can smell her hair. Can feel her breath on his neck. He’s scared. He doesn’t want to let go. “I’ll be right here for most of it. I promise,” she says.

  He can’t speak. His throat feels blocked. His tongue feels fat. She lets him go.

  “You’re going to be okay,” Dr. Toni says. “I have a great team.”

  “Is this going to hurt?” he asks.

  “No.”

  “I mean . . . after. Will it hurt when I wake up?”

  “There are drugs we can give you for the pain, but mostly it will just be uncomfortable. The thing you’ll suffer from the most is the boredom of being kept in a hospital. Well, that and the food.”

  “I’m going to be different, right? When this is done? Not because I can see again, but . . . I mean . . . everything will be different.”

  “Life won’t be the same anymore, Joshua, and I’m sorry we haven’t had time to prepare you for the changes that are going to happen in your life.”

  “What do you mean?” his mom asks.

  “Not only will he see the world differently,” Dr. Toni says, “but the world he knows will see him differently. I’m sorry, but we really must get started.”

  He climbs out of the wheelchair and onto a bed. The bed is rolled into a room that sounds like it’s the same size as his classroom. He wonders what his classmates are up to now. He imagines Mr. Fox telling them what happened. He wonders how his two best friends are reacting. He’s known William and Pete since his first day at school. They’ve been to his house a million times, as he’s been to theirs. He knows their parents, and they know his. Right now their shock will be the same as his, but not their pain.

  “Are you ready?” Dr. Toni asks him.

  He knows he’s so empty inside that when Dr. Toni removes his eyes, she’s going to see nothing behind them, only a cavity and the back of his skull.

  “I’m ready,” he says, and he falls into sleep.

  SEVEN

  Todd Wilkinson pushes open the door to the operating theater where the two bodies are being stripped for parts. Todd has always thought of it as an icky process, and the idea of having some other bloke’s heart or kidney or whatever inside you has always creeped the bejesus out of him. He guesses desperate people will do anything.

  He lets the door close behind him. The operating theater serves two purposes: first, it’s a teaching theater, where has-been surgeons try to keep themselves relevant by sharing their knowledge; and second, it’s to this theater where bodies are brought to have their organs harvested. Over the years the theater has become known as the Cutting Room to the students who come here.

  Dr. Tahana is staring at him with a stupid look on his face. His default setting, Todd thinks. Tahana is a bit of a loser, truth be told, a guy who, for some reason, never works on the living. He thinks that some reason has something to do with the fact that cutting bits and pieces out of corpses is no more complicated than assembling a drive-through hamburger, and Tahana can’t cope with complicated. In fact, in a few years when Todd is running this place, the first thing he’s going to do is fire the balding hack. He’ll do it publically too, really humiliate the guy.

  He pops out his headphones to the sound of Dr. Tahana jabbering on at him that he shouldn’t be listening to music during work hours, to which Todd wants to tell him that he shouldn’t be so bald and gross during work hours, and that even though the guy is fifty years old, he may as well be five thousand, since all his techniques are Stone Age. Todd says nothing. He turns the music off
and stands there listening to instructions exactly the same way any good intern would. It’s not like it’s complicated. Two sets of eyes. One set goes to operating theater B. One set goes to operating theater D. Both theaters are on the second floor, and both boxes are clearly labeled. The instructions are so simple, his thoughts start to drift. He wonders what Tahana would look like with a mustache, or if somebody cut off his ears.

  “Are you even listening to me?” Dr. Tahana asks.

  “Always.”

  “Good. Now don’t make me remind you again, but stop listening to your MP3 player during work hours.”

  “Sure thing,” Todd says, as he picks up the transplant boxes. Once he’s in the corridor he puts the boxes down so he can put his headphones back in. Then he carries on, an organ-transplant box in each hand. Part of his job as an intern is to be underutilized and treated like a delivery boy. He hates it. The flip side is that he has been able to work with a few of the transplant teams. Two hearts and one kidney. Though work is a loose term, one he uses when he’s telling stories over drinks at the bar. Observed would be more accurate, but observed doesn’t impress the ladies.

  He reaches the elevator and has to wait for it. The elevators in this place have always been too slow. It’s empty when it arrives. He steps inside. The doors close. He sets the containers on the floor and takes out the small yellow plastic bottle from his pocket and pops the lid. Inside are methamphetamine pills. They’re stronger than the caffeine tablets other doctors use to stay awake. They help make him feel sharper. More alive. They’ll help get him through the day with enough energy to have a good time at the bar tonight. He takes one. Within seconds his body feels like it’s getting warmer. The music is getting louder. He presses the button. The elevator goes up. The climb takes longer than it ought to, even taking the slow elevators into account, and when the doors open he realizes why—he’s pressed the wrong button. He looks at the panel and sees that instead of pressing the 2, he’s pressed the 4, though really he probably did press the 2 and the mistake lies with the elevator, not with him. He can’t ride it back down to 2 either, because another doctor steps onto the elevator, and that doctor would think the mistake is Todd’s. And Todd isn’t a guy who makes mistakes.

  He steps out and walks to the stairwell as if that were the plan all along, and when he gets there he decides what he really needs even more than a brisk walk down the stairs is another pill, and what he needs as much as that other pill is to crank his music up even louder. He gets into the stairwell and goes about fixing both of those problems. He turns up the volume, puts one container under his arm while still holding the other, then reaches into his pocket.

  He has the pill halfway to his mouth when the song ends, and in the two seconds between tracks he hears the door on the floor beneath him close, then footsteps on the stairs. With the start of the new song already blasting in his ears, he shoves the pills back into his pocket—at least that’s the plan, but the edge of the container gets caught on the side of his pocket, it tips, and, because the lid is still off, the pills rain down the stairs.

  “Ah geez . . .”

  He starts after them, knocking the transplant container in his left hand against the stair rail, causing it to fly from his grip. It hits the top step and, like the pills only a few seconds earlier, it heads downhill.

  “Damn it,” he says, and he reaches forward to grab it, and then he, like the pills and the organ box, begins an uncontrollable descent. His legs slip out from underneath him as he overreaches, and he has to let go of the second box he is holding to grab for the rail. Which he misses. He lands on his back, his shoulder hitting the second organ box and sending it to the landing with the first.

  He switches off the music and listens for the footsteps he heard earlier, but whoever it is must have gone through another door. There is only silence. He is, he believes, alone.

  If only he’d pushed the correct button in the elevator.

  He wiggles his fingers and toes and nothing is broken, which goes to prove how awesome he is—no chance Tahana could fall down a flight of stairs completely unscathed. He imagines the doctor bouncing his way down, a cartoon version doing cartwheels, his head bouncing off one step, then his feet, like a starfish.

  He is sitting on the floor surrounded by pills. It would be impossible for him to talk his way out of this situation if anyone saw him right now. He plucks the pills off the ground one by one, in the process discovering they are the least of his problems. Both organ containers are open. Ice and eyeballs have scattered across the landing. Three of the bags have come out of the containers, and two of those bags have survived the fall, the eyes resting undisturbed in the saline solution. But the other bag hasn’t been so lucky. There’s a tear down the side through which the eyeball has escaped. It’s come to a stop against the wall.

  He moves down the stairs, sweeping the pills into his hand. When they’re all in his pocket he works with the ice, scooping it into the containers, not needing to be as thorough as with the pills, because any pieces he misses will melt. The bags are labeled left and right, but not which left goes with which right, but that’s an easy fix. He picks up the one that didn’t fall out of the container. It’s labeled left. The eye is blue. He picks up one of the surviving bags. It’s labeled right. The eye is also blue. Easy. He puts them into the container. He picks up the other bag. It’s labeled left.

  The eye is also blue.

  Oh no . . .

  That means the other eye is going to also be blue.

  That means he could have gotten the other set wrong.

  Or right . . .

  He can see only one solution. He has to guess. If he tells Dr. Tahana, he’ll be fired. This way he has a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right—more like seventy-five, twenty-five, really, when he factors in a 25 percent awesomeness bump for being so damn awesome all the time.

  If there’s a problem, and the patients reject their new eyeballs, and somebody figures it out, well . . . well, that’s a long-term problem, and one that’s unlikely to occur. There is only one way forward. Guess now, and if necessary, blame someone else later.

  He is buzzing from the pills. If he had to choose one word to sum up how he feels right now, it’d be excited and amused. Oops—that’s two words, he thinks, and he has to fight the urge to laugh. He is, he must admit, a little concerned that he’s not actually freaking out. There’s dirt and dust stuck to the eyeball that came out of the bag. He tries his best to blow it away, but it’s too stubborn to move. He’s about to wipe it across the front of his scrubs when he realizes the damage it will cause. That’s when it comes to him—a simple solution. He licks the eye, knowing it’s not ideal, but far better than being found out. His tongue has barely made contact with the clammy surface when he wonders what the hell he’s doing. This is not what someone in his right mind would be doing, especially when he’s got two containers full of ice.

  It’s the pills. The damn pills are messing with him.

  He melts some ice in his hand, then drips it over the eye until it’s clean. He puts the eyeball into the split bag and puts it next to its partner. He’ll slip it into a fresh bag of saline once he gets to the operating theater—which, he then realizes, would have been the better way to clean it.

  “No more pills,” he murmurs, but he doesn’t really mean it.

  He carries on down the stairs. On the second floor, he straightens his clothes and wipes the sweat off his face. For the briefest moment he thinks Dr. Tahana might have had a point about not wearing his MP3 player at work, but then that moment passes and he remembers what a has-been that old guy is anyway. Outside the first operating theater he finds a fresh bag and some fresh saline, and a few minutes later hands the container off to one of Dr. Coleman’s nurses. Nobody will ever know what happened. He takes the second container to the second theater. Aside from a little scare, all in all it’s been a job well done.

  EIGHT

  Two hours in, and the surgery is going well. Som
e surgeons like to listen to classical music while they operate, but Toni isn’t like other surgeons. Sometimes it’s Pink Floyd, or Springsteen, or the Rolling Stones. She always operates to music, but never the radio. You don’t want to be hands deep in somebody while listening to ads for whiteware and taxi companies, or when some DJ is making a joke.

  Today she is listening to the Beatles, and the Beatles are keeping her calm. The two other times she’s performed this operation have also been to the Beatles, and both of those patients came out of the surgery how she hoped, and she sees no reason to mess with a winning formula. There have been no slipups.

  Six hours in, and the first eye is complete, and Joshua’s second eye is in the process of being removed. Dr. Toni is happy—slightly fatigued, but happy. Her team is right on schedule. The Beatles are on their second go-around on her playlist, and magic is being made.

  Outside the operating room and downstairs, Michelle Logan is sitting with Ben Kirk. There is a spot of blood on her palm that she notices for the first time, and a couple more on her sleeve, blood that must have come from Mitchell when she held his hand before the surgeon told her it was time. She wipes at them, getting rid of the one on her hand, but the one on her blouse only sets in deeper.

  “You should be with family. I’ll stay here and make sure everything is running smoothly,” Ben says.

  She turns to look at him and focuses on the bandaging around his arm. The same thing that happened to Mitchell could have easily happened to Ben. “Are you okay?” she asks him.

  “It’s only a flesh wound,” he says. He looks down. “I’m sorry I couldn’t have done more. If I could switch places with him I—”