Gibbon's Decline and Fall by Sheri S. Tepper Page A

winter. After sunset, as the temperature dropped toward freezing, the city shrieked in the icy air, strident and combative. Despite the QUIET, HOSPITAL ZONE signs near the emergency entrance of Manhattan South Receiving Infirmary, the bellicose clamor was, if anything, intensified. Voices threatened, security-car horns battered, sirens cut and slashed as ambulances howled themselves in and away. Though the building had been open for only a year, the stark facade was already verminous with graffiti, the hallways scuffed to gray, the enameled walls patinaed by pressing hands. People held on to the walls. They leaned their heads against the walls, seeking a shoulder where there were no shoulders.
    Dr. Ophy Gheist had stopped noticing the dirt. When she’d arrived a year ago, she’d noticed the cleanliness almost with shock: the smell of fresh paint, the feel of slickly waxed floors. Now MSRI—which everyone, including herself, called Misery—was just another hospital like all other urban hospitals, a levee being washed out by the flood.
    â€œTell me again. What did he say?” she asked the man before her, concentrating on being patient. Doctors had to be patient these days, because patients weren’t. So her husband, Simon, said.
    The white-clad ambulance tech sighed, much put upon.“Before he pass out, he say he couldn’t no more so he did himself.”
    â€œCouldn’t what?”
    â€œI should know what? Whattam I? Some kinna mind reader?”
    She looked down at the bloody mess on the stretcher. The nameless, unconscious patient had shot off most of his shoulder in an attempt, presumably, to put a bullet through his heart.
    â€œWhatever he couldn’t do, it included killing himself,” she commented.
    â€œYeah, well, tha’s the truth. He didn’t do that so good, either.”
    The ambulance door opened; gurneys came in, two or three of them. Someone was screaming, and she gritted her teeth as she made quick notes. Surgery would be complicated and time-consuming. More than one procedure, certainly. Rehabilitation would be problematical. The city would spend a million or so taxpayer dollars on this man’s behalf, after which he would probably buy another gun and try it again. Next time in the head, she urged him silently. It’s quicker and less messy, overall.
    â€œWhat’s the plan?” asked the AT.
    She shook her head. “We’ll get the bleeding stopped, we’ll stabilize him, and then we’ll send him on over to Ortho as soon as I can get him a slot.”
    The ambulance driver joined them, rubbing his neck, flapping his notebook with the other hand. “Benny Jenks. That’s who he is. His wife showed up out there. She’s with some cop, and the cop wants to talk to the doctor.”
    â€œTell him I’ll be there as soon as I can.” She muttered orders to the green-suited Misery tech who was hovering at her elbow and watched Jenks’s bloody form wheeled away before she turned toward the new gurneys, three girls, dark-skinned, dark-haired, no more than seventeen or eighteen. One was already dead, one barely breathing, the third was the screamer, howling mindlessly at the ceiling.
    â€œGunshot,” muttered the tech in charge. “Both.”
    The barely breathing one couldn’t wait; Ophy barked orders into the surgery com, getting a team together. No time to move this one anywhere but to the OR. “Was this a drive-by?”
    â€œNo. The guy was after them. She”—he pointed his chintoward the screaming one—“she says he yelled something about vessels.”
    Green-clad techs ran the gurney away while Ophy administered morphine to the screamer. The noise faded to a shriek, then to a catlike whine. The girl whispered, “Impure vessels, he said we were impure vessels. It was my uncle, and my cousins.…”
    There was no exit wound. Ophy guessed the bullet was lodged in or behind