Night Prey

bothered him; burning blood . . .
    Weather explained quickly what she was doing, expanding and spreading skin to cover the burns on the girl’s arms. Weather ran the show with quick, tight directions, and there were no questions.
    And she spoke to Lucas from time to time, distractedly, focusing on the work. “Her father was running a power line from a 220 outlet to a pump down by the lake using an extension cord. The connection where the two cords came together . . . started to pull apart. That’s what they think. Lucy grabbed them to put them back together. They don’t know exactly what she was doing, but there was a flash and she’d gotten hit on both arms, and around her back on her shoulder blades. . . . We’ll show you. We’re doing skin grafts where we can, and in some places we’re expanding the skin to cover.”
    After a while, talk around the table turned to a book about a love affair that was dominating the best-seller lists. About whether the lovers should have gone off together, destroying a marriage and a family.
    “She was living a lie afterwards; she was hurting everyone,” one of the nurses declared. “She should have gone.”
    “Right. And the family is wrecked and just because she has a fling doesn’t mean she still doesn’t love them.”
    “This was not exactly a fling.”
    In the background, music oozed from a portable radio tuned to an easy-listening station; on the table, under Weather’s gloved hands and knife, Lucy bled.
    They harvested skin from Lucy’s thigh to cover a part of the wound. The skin harvester looked like a cross between an electric sander and a sod cutter.
    “This looks like it’s going to hurt,” Lucas said finally. “Hurt a lot.”
    “Can’t help it,” Weather grunted, not looking up. “These are the worst, burns are. Skin won’t regenerate, but you’ve got to cover the wounds to prevent infection. That means grafts and expansions. . . . We put the temporary skin on because we couldn’t get enough off her the first couple of times, but you can’t leave the temporary stuff, she’ll reject it.”
    “Maybe you should have told her it was going to hurt,” Lucas said. “When you were talking to her outside.”
    Weather glanced up briefly, as though considering it, but shook her head as she continued to tack down the advanced skin on one of the expansions. “I didn’t tell her it wouldn’t hurt. The idea was to get her in here, quiet, with a minimum of resistance. Next time, I can tell her it’s the last time.”
    “Will it be?”
    “I hope so,” Weather said. “We might need a touch-up if we get some rough scar development. Might have to release scar tissue. But the next one should be the last one for a while.”
    “Huh.”
    She looked at him, grave, quiet, over the top of her mask, her pink-stained fingers held in front of her, away from the girl’s open wounds; the nurses were looking at him as well. “I don’t do therapy,” she said. “I do surgery. Sometimes you can’t get around the pain. All you can do is fix them, and eventually the pain stops. That’s the best I can do.”
     
     
     
    AND LATER, WHEN she was finished, they sat together in the surgeon’s lounge for a few minutes and she asked, “What do you think?”
    “Interesting. Impressive.”
    “Is that all.” There was a tone in her voice.
    “I’ve never seen you before as the commander in chief,” he said. “You do it pretty well.”
    “Any objections?”
    “Of course not.”
    She stood up. “You seemed disturbed. When you were watching me.”
    He looked down, shook his head. “It’s pretty strong stuff. And it wasn’t what I’d expected, the blood and the smell of the cautery and that skin harvester thing . . . It’s kind of brutal.”
    “Sometimes it is,” she said. “But you were most bothered about my attitude toward Lucy.”
    “I don’t know. . . .”
    “I can’t get involved,” she said. “I have to turn off that part of me. I can like patients, and I like Lucy, but I can’t afford to go into the operating room worrying that I’ll hurt them, or wondering if I’m doing the right thing. I’ve worked that out in advance. If I didn’t, I’d screw up in there.”
    “It did seem a little cold,” he admitted.
    “I wanted you to see that,” she said. “Lucas, as part of my . . . surgeon persona, I guess you’d call it, I’m different. I have to make brutal decisions, and I do. And I run things. I run them very well.”
    “Well . .