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Will showed Jim how to use the prep sponge. Then he stretched out on
his back across the deck behind the cockpit, and closed his eyes.
Jim slapped the sealed container the way Will had demonstrated, causing
Betadine and alcohol to combine, and tore it open. But as he scrubbed
the skin around the raw, red gash in Will's left breast with the brown
disinfectant mix he found it impossible to imagine picking up the scalpel
to slit his living flesh.
It was hard enough sticking him with the Marcane syringe. Will jumped
at the first prick, then bit his lips and braced himself as Jim pierced
the tender skin again and again, squeezing the local pain killer from
the hypodermic the way he recalled the dentist spreading it around his
gums. It took effect immediately and when he shot him again just to be
on the safe side, Will didn't even notice.
Still, he emptied the syringe, stalling while he tried to get ready to
do what he had to next. It was the first close look at the wound that
Will had allowed him, and it dispelled his last doubts about the intentions
of Margaret in the white dress. Dumb luck when the blade slid between
his second and third ribs that it hadn't ripped through his heart or severed
the big arteries rising out of it.
What the hell was the second rib called? His many training courses included
some basic anatomy. Very basic. The second sternal. Sternals were true
ribs, as opposed to the lower false ribs, and the floating ribs.
He was fleeing the moment.
He forced his eyes back to Will's collarbone. Will's clavicle. But bones
were remote, safely invisible. Dr. Angela had referred to tissue. But
this was about flesh. Cutting into flesh, exposing rotten flesh, lancing—incising—pus-poisoned
flesh. Flesh was real—nothing remote or detached about flesh. Unless you
forced yourself to remember that flesh was made of muscle—the improvement
of which, training, firming and sculpting—put meat on the fitness instructor's
table.
He picked up the scalpel, poised it over the red gash, and tried to concentrate
on cutting the skin on either end of the red gash by remembering the names
of the muscles he studied in anatomy. Margaret's knife had plunged into
his pec. Pectoralis major. The depth the knife had pierced indicated that
it had gone through the pectoralis minor as well, depositing bacteria
on every single layer that it penetrated.
"I'm really starting to float out on the morphine," Will whispered.
"I don't feel a thing."
"How about this?" Now or never. He held the scalpel like a pencil.
The angle was wrong. He shifted it in his hand and guided it with his
index finger.
"Jesus!" Will gasped.
Jim jumped back. Blood was oozing from a half-inch slit he had added to
one side of the knife wound. Blood as bright red as the sky was blue and
the clouds white.
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