THE SCALPEL
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.