Second Sight by George D Shuman Read Free Book Online Page A

he can scare up some cadavers for you to play with.”
    “Oh, don’t make it sound like a party.”
    “Sherry,” Brigham said seriously, “maybe it’s only a side effect of the Prussian blue. Or have you ever considered that the changes you might be experiencing are sight and that your night terrors are real memories fighting to surface?”
    Sherry pulled the bedcover to her chin. She dared not speak.
     
    The doctors would continue to take blood and urine every week. Those tests would provide the earliest indications of how well the Prussian blue was sweeping the deadly radiation from her body. But blood and urine tests wouldn’t tell her how much radiation had been absorbed into her lungs and bones. That would take four more weeks.
    In a month or so Sherry would undergo a whole-body scan at Boston Medical Center. The gamma ray test would be the final word on how badly her soft tissue and bone marrow had been dosed by radiation.
    How likely she was to get cancer.

3
N EW Y ORK S TATE P SYCHIATRIC H OSPITAL
    M OUNT T AMATHY , N EW Y ORK
    Mary Brighton was scratching a lottery ticket when she heard the dull tone of a monitor sounding in Corridor A. It was almost 4 a.m. and she was alone on the second floor. The state hospital could hardly afford overtime, let alone auxiliary staff on the graveyard shift. She brushed gray flakes from her scratch ticket and trashed it with a sigh. Then she stood and punched a button on the console as she reached for the box beneath the counter and tugged on a pair of latex gloves.
    “Security,” a man’s voice came over the speaker.
    “Checking out our friend in 1400 again, Jerome.” She snapped on one of the gloves. “You got the phones.”
    “You can’t convince him to wait another hour?” the man said with a dry New York accent. “I’m watching M*A*S*H.”
    Brighton rolled her eyes and disconnected, maneuvering her considerable weight past the counter as she started down the hall toward the flashing light over Room 1400.
    Thomas Joseph Monahan had been acting up all week, if you could call a seventy-six-year-old man who hadn’t spoken in half a decade acting up. Heartbeat low, blood pressure high. His breathing went from shallow to panting like a dog. For six straight days he had been tripping the monitors and running nurses to and from his room.
    The nurse entered the dark room, thumbed up the light switch, and stopped dead in her tracks. Monahan lay in his bed with eyes and mouth wide open. His cheeks were hollow, his arm leaning on the bed rail, a finger raised and pointing in her direction.
    She tried not to look at him as she picked up his wrist, simultaneously reaching to silence the monitor’s alarm.
    For more than fifty years, she thought, the entire span of her life, this man had been living in this asylum. His file, thick as a New York phone directory, recorded not a word of where he had come from or his next of kin. In fact, besides the routine records and various procedures he had undergone over the years, there was only a yellowed Kennedy-era document authorizing the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to accept all bills.
    Monahan’s end would be little more remarkable than his life, she thought. He would go to cold storage in the basement and then off to some medical school where students got their first experience with a scalpel. That’s where all the bodies with pink slips stapled to their jackets went.

4
    Case and Kimble had put most everything on the line when they focused early earnings and resources on a birth control pill in 1960. Then they moved on to C&K’s antianxiety silver bullet, distributed as Sentinal throughout the last quarter century. In the nineties they released their first erectile dysfunction pill that broke records on all world pharmaceutical markets. Billion-dollar profit makers like these served to stabilize the gargantuan pharmaceutical concern from damage incurred through economic depressions and class action lawsuits. But Case