Blood Ties Book One: The Turning Read online

  JENNIFER ARMINTROUT

  blood ties book one:

  the TURNING

  Much love and thanks to:

  The FNMS. Michele, for eye rolls and encouragement. Chris, for loving my characters (and me) enough to read revised scenes for the nth time. Cheryl, for your advice on shameless self-promotion. Marti, for the [expletive deleted] advice from that [expletive deleted] book. You know which one. Derek, for keeping the adverbs and alliteration at bay. And Mary, even though you weren’t part of the crowd then, you deserve a mention for being Cyrus’s biggest fan.

  Peggy, who let me pretend to be a writer on her typewriter when I was four years old.

  Shannon, for still liking the book after viewing my lame attempt at dancing.

  My editor, Sasha Bogin, and my agent, Kelly Harms, for being enthusiastic about this book and me.

  Joe, for believing I could do this and subjecting yourself to the ups and downs of living with a writer.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Coming Next Month

  One

  The End

  I read a poll in the newspaper once that said the number-one fear of Americans aged eighteen to sixty-five is public speaking. Spiders are second, and death a distant third. I’m afraid of all these things. But most of all, I’m afraid of failure.

  I’m no coward. I want to make that perfectly clear. But my life turned from nearly perfect to a horror movie in a matter of days, so I take fear a lot more seriously now.

  I’d followed my life plan almost to the letter, with very few detours. I’d gone from plain old Ms. Carrie Ames to Dr. Carrie Ames just eight months prior to the night I now refer to as “The Big Change.” I’d broken away from the sleepy, East Coast town I’d grown up in, only to find myself in a sleepy, mid-Michigan city. I had a great residency in the E.R. of the public hospital there. The city and surrounding rural communities provided endless opportunity to study and treat injuries inflicted by both urban warfare and treacherous farm equipment. Living my dream, I’d never been more certain that I’d found the success and control over my destiny that had always seemed to elude me in my tumultuous college years.

  Of course, sleepy mid-Michigan towns get boring, especially on frozen winter nights when even the snow won’t venture out. And on a night exactly like this, after only having been home for four hours from a grueling twelve-hour shift, I was back at the hospital to help deal with a sudden influx of patients. The E.R. was surprisingly busy for such a forbidding evening, but the approaching holiday season seemed to affect everyone with a pulse. Thanks to my rotten luck, I was charged with attending trauma cases that night, patients with serious injuries and illnesses that put them in imminent danger of death. Or, more specifically, carloads of mall-hoppers who showed up in pieces after hitting black ice on 131 South.

  After I’d admitted three patients, I found myself in great need of a nicotine fix. While I felt guilty for sticking the other doctors with a few extra cases, I didn’t feel guilty enough to forgo a quick cigarette break.

  I was heading for the ambulance bay doors when John Doe arrived.

  Dr. Fuller, the attending physician and most senior M.D. in the hospital, ran alongside the gurney, barking instructions and demanding information from the EMTs in his no-nonsense Texan accent.

  Distracted by the fact that Dr. Fuller’s smooth, Southern speech had been replaced by an urgent, clipped tone, I didn’t notice the patient on the gurney. I had never seen my superior lose his unflappable calm before. It scared me.

  “Carrie, you gonna give us a hand here or are you on a one-way trip to Marlboro country?” he barked, startling me. The cigarette between my fingers snapped in half when I jumped, reduced to a fluttering shower of dry tobacco. My break had been officially canceled.

  I brushed my hands clean on my lab coat and fell into step beside the gurney. It was only then that I noticed the state the transport was in.

  The sight of the patient paralyzed me as we entered the cubical and the EMTs were squeezed out to make way for the R.N.s who rushed in.

  “Okay ladies, I want splash guards, gowns, goggles, the whole space suit. Quickly, please,” Fuller snapped, shrugging off his blood-smeared white coat.

  I knew I should do something to help, but I could only stare at the mess on the table in front of me. I had no idea where to start.

  Blood might be the one thing I’m not afraid of. In the case of John Doe, it was not the blood that made working on him, touching him, even approaching him unthinkable. It was the fact that he looked like my dissection cadaver on the last day of Gross Anatomy.

  Puncture wounds peppered his chest. Some were small, but four or five were large enough to fit a baseball in.

  “Gunshot wounds? What the hell was he shot with, a goddamned cannon?” Dr. Fuller muttered as he probed one of the bloody holes with his gloved finger.

  It didn’t take a forensic-science degree to tell that what had caused the wounds in John Doe’s torso had not caused the wounds in his face. His jaw, or what was left of it, hung skinned from the front teeth to the splintered end, where it had been ripped from the joint to dangle uselessly from the other side of his skull. Above the gaping hole in his cheek, one eye socket stood empty and crushed, the eye itself and optical nerve completely missing.

  “I’d say someone used an axe on his head, if I thought it were possible to swing one with enough force to do this,” Dr. Fuller said. “We’re not going to get a tube down this way, his trachea’s crushed all to hell.”

  I couldn’t breathe. John Doe’s remaining eye, clear and bright blue, fixed on mine as if he were totally alert.

  It had to be a trick of the light. No one could endure this kind of trauma and remain conscious. No one could survive injuries of this magnitude. He didn’t cry out or writhe in pain. His body was limp and completely void of any reaction as the attending staff made an incision in his windpipe to intubate him.

  He never looked away.

  How can he be alive? my mind screamed. The concept destroyed the carefully constructed logic I’d built over three years of medical school. People did not live through something like this. It wasn’t in the textbooks. Yet, there he was, staring at me calmly, focused on me despite the flurry of action around us.

  For a sickening moment, I thought I heard my name from the mangled hole of his mouth. Then I realized it was Dr. Fuller’s frantic voice cutting through the haze of my paralyzed revulsion.

  “Carrie, I need you to wake up and join us! Come on, now, we’re losing this guy!”

  I could continue to stare at John Doe or turn my face to Dr. Fuller, to see him silently lose his faith in me. I don’t know what would have been more distressing, but I didn’t get to make a decision.

  I mumbled a feeble apology, turned swiftly and ran. I had barely escaped the grisly scene before I noticed the sticky splotches on the floor that stained the pristine tile a deep, glossy red. I was going to be
sick. I fell to my knees in the congealing blood and closed my eyes as the bile rose in my throat. I rocked back and forth on my knees, my vomit mixing with the blood on the tiles.

  A sudden hush came from the cubicle behind me, followed by the insistent whine of the heart monitor protesting the cessation of pulse.

  “All right, he’s gone. Pack him up and get him to the morgue,” I heard Dr. Fuller say. His cool, Texan confidence crept back into his voice, though it was tainted with weariness and resignation.

  I scrambled to my feet and ran to the staff locker room, unable to face my failure.

  I was still in the locker room an hour later. Fresh from a shower, dressed in clean scrubs from central processing, I stood before the mirror and tried to smooth my wet, blond hair into something resembling a ponytail. My mascara had run in the shower and I wiped at it with my sleeve. It only served to darken the circles under my eyes. My bone-pale skin stretched sharply over my cheekbones, my blue eyes were cold and hollow. I’d never seen myself look so defeated.

  When did I become so pathetic? So cowardly? Cruelly, I taunted myself with memories I couldn’t push aside. The way I’d snickered with the other students when the skinny foreign guy had tossed his cookies on the first day of Gross Anatomy. Or the time I’d chased Amy Anderson, the queen bee of the eighth grade, from the bus stop by sticking earthworms in her hair.

  It appeared that I’d become one of those people I’d despised. To the entire E.R. medical staff at St. Mary’s Hospital, I had become the squeamish nerd, the shrieking girl. It cut so deeply, I’d need emotional sutures to heal.

  A knock at the door pulled me from my self-pity. “Ames, you still in there?”

  The door swung open. Steady footsteps carried Dr. Fuller to the end of my narrow bench.

  For a moment, he didn’t say anything at all. Without looking, I knew that he stood with his head hanging down. His hands would be in the pockets of his crisp white coat, his elbows tucked in at his sides, giving him the appearance of a tall, gray stork.

  “So, hangin’ in there?” he asked suddenly.

  I shrugged. Anything I said would have been a lame excuse for my poor performance, one akin to those uttered by countless med students who stopped showing up for class soon after.

  “You know,” he began, “I’ve seen a lot of doctors, good physicians, crack under pressure. You get tired. You get stressed, maybe you’re having personal problems. Those things happen to all of us. But some of us leave it in here—” he pointed to the lockers behind me “—instead of taking it out there. It’s what makes us capable doctors.”

  He waited for me to respond. I only nodded.

  “I know you’ve gone through a lot this year, losing your parents—”

  “This isn’t about my parents.” I hadn’t meant to cut him off, but the words were spoken before I had a chance to think about them. “I’m sorry. But really, I’m over that.”

  He sighed deeply as he sat next to me on the bench. “Why do you want to be a doctor?”

  We sat there for a long time, like a coach and a star player who had fumbled the ball, before I answered.

  “Because I want to help people.” I was lying. Badly. But even I didn’t know the reason, and he didn’t want a real answer, anyway. Real doctors lose the capacity for humanity and understanding before they grab their diplomas. “And because I love it.”

  “Well, I love golf, but that doesn’t make me Tiger Woods, does it?” He laughed at his own joke before he became thoughtful again. “You know, there comes a time in everyone’s life when they have to carefully examine the goals they’ve set for themselves. When they have to admit their limitations and look at their capabilities in a more realistic way.”

  “You’re saying I should be a dentist?” I asked, forcing a laugh.

  “I’m saying you shouldn’t be a doctor.” Fuller actually patted me on the back, as though it would take the edge off his harsh words. He stood and walked toward the door, stopping suddenly as if he’d just thought of something.

  “You know,” he began, but he didn’t finish his thought. Instead he shook his head and walked out the door.

  My fists balled with anger and my breath came in noisy gasps as I struggled to regain my composure. I’d failed the Great One’s test. I should have told him I liked the money. It was considerably better than a stick in the eye. Though they were both reasons people entered the field, neither financial security nor desire to help others were my true motivation for becoming a doctor.

  It was the power that drew me to it. The power of holding a human life in my hands. The power of looking Death in the face and knowing I could defeat him. It was a power reserved for doctors and God.

  I’d pictured myself a modern-day Merlin, a scalpel for a wand, a clipboard my book of spells. I cringed at the ridiculous thought.

  I could have changed into my street clothes, slunk out of the hospital and never come back. But then I thought of my dead father and remembered one of the rare pieces of paternal advice I’d ever received from him.

  “If you’re afraid of something, face it. Fear is irrational. The only way to conquer your fear is to put yourself next to it.”

  Just as quickly as it had come, my self-doubt subsided. This was a test of faith in myself. I wasn’t going to fail.

  I got onto my feet and made my way through the packed E.R., blind and deaf to my coworkers and the patients that crowded the cubicles around me. I left the emergency and trauma ward altogether, pushing through the doors that led into the central part of the hospital.

  The offices I passed were closed, their windows dark. The main lobby was empty, with the exception of one custodian who leaned on the deserted information desk, idly reading an old newspaper while his cleaning cart sat neglected in the middle of the room. He barely glanced up as I elbowed the cart in my reckless flight and knocked a stack of paper towels to the floor.

  I continued to the elevators, pressed the button impatiently and tapped my foot. After what seemed like an interminably long time, the dull metal doors slid open and I entered. I pushed the button for the basement.

  An irrational determination took me down the long hallway to the morgue. I had only been through there once, during my orientation tour. It was a simple route, though, and I located the unlabeled door again without much difficulty. I ran my hospital ID through the badge reader and heard the sharp click of the releasing lock.

  I grabbed the handle and stopped, wondering for the first time what I intended to prove to myself. I feared I was a bad doctor, and I had come to confront my fears and view John Doe in all his mangled glory. What if I couldn’t handle it?

  Terror gripped me at the thought that his body might not be as damaged as I remembered. I recalled Amy Anderson’s horrified face as she’d held the wriggling earthworm in her palm, her fear making the harmless thing a monster. Had my panicked brain exaggerated John Doe’s wounds?

  No, you weren’t hysterical. You know what you saw. I entered the cool, antiseptic room before I could change my mind.

  Hospital morgues are much different from morgues in the movies. They aren’t cavernous spaces with stark lighting. In fact, the morgue at St. Mary’s was small and cluttered. The on-duty attendant had left a rumpled fast-food sack on the desk, a reassuring sign of life in a room devoted to the indignities of death.

  Before I approached the task at hand, I walked the perimeter of the room. I examined the cabinets, the plastic tubs of all sizes that held murky shapes of organs preserved for further study, and the autopsy tables. I avoided the one that appeared occupied.

  “Hello?” I called. I winced at the volume of my voice. The room was so quiet you could hear the buzzing of the fluorescent lights. The phrase “wake the dead” sprung unpleasantly to mind. I expected to see an orderly emerge from one of the back rooms, but no one came. The lucky SOB was probably on a smoke break. I would have to do the dirty work of locating John Doe myself.

  The morgue freezer held six gurneys. With the
high volume of patients today, it would be full, maybe even sleeping double. Not a pleasant thought.

  I stepped into the cooler and immediately wished for a jacket. The thermostat on the outside read thirty-five degrees, warm compared to the temperature outside, but it hadn’t occurred to me just how cold thirty-five degrees really was.

  Shivering, I looked over the six shrouded gurneys before me. They all faced the same direction, their occupants’ feet pointed at the back wall. I glanced down at my shoes and saw a dark stain on the sticky, unwashed floor. My skin crawled as I speculated exactly how long it had been since someone disinfected this room. Not that these particular patients were in any danger of disease or infection.

  I started with the body farthest to the right, not bothering to uncover them to search for their toe tags. I opted instead to read the more detailed tag on their shrouds.

  The first body was a female, age sixty-eight. The second was male, age twenty-three. So it went, each tag displaying the one thing I wasn’t looking for: a name. I didn’t see any bearing the big, red “unidentified” stamp, and it seemed that my field trip would prove useless.

  I rubbed my hands across my face, stretching tired skin as I pondered my next step. Where had he gone? It was unlikely that the medical examiner would have come at night for an autopsy that could wait until morning. Even if they had identified him, they couldn’t have released the body before the police finished with it.

  He has to be here somewhere. But as I doubled-checked, I had to accept the fact that he was gone.

  I would have to go back upstairs and face my embarrassment much to the delight of my colleagues. I’d missed the opportunity to confront my demon, but life would go on, as it always had. With the same resolve that brought me there, I left the cooler without a backward look. Someone would make a snide comment, or even pity me no matter what I did. I’d had enough experience with criticism that I could shoot down my detractors without actually having to go through the experience of looking at what was left of John Doe’s body.