Strangers by Dean Koontz Page A

attached to the body trunk. Clamping and tying off vessels, Ginger eventually exposed and separated the femoral arteries. As with the aorta before, she used thin elastic tubing and a variety of clamps to valve off the blood flow through these vascular fields, then opened both arteries where the bifurcated legs of the graft would attach to them. A couple oftimes she caught herself humming along happily with the music, and the ease with which she worked made it seem almost as if she had been a surgeon in an earlier life, now reincarnated into the elite brotherhood of the caduceus, predestined for this labor.
    But she should have remembered her father and his aphorisms, the bits of wisdom that he had collected and with which he had gently lectured or patiently admonished her on those rare occasions when she had been less than well behaved or when she had failed to do her very best in school.
Time waits for no man; God helps those who help themselves; a penny saved is a penny earned; resentment hurts only those who harbor it; judge not that ye be not judged….
He had a thousand of them, but there was none he liked better and none he repeated more often than this one:
Pride goeth before a great fall.
    She should have remembered those six words. The operation was going so well, and she was so happy with her work, so
proud
of her performance in this first major solo flight, that she forgot about the inevitable great fall.
    Returning to the opened abdomen, she unclamped the bottom of the Dacron graft, flushed it out, then tunneled the twin legs of it beneath the untouched flesh of the groin, beneath the inguineal creases, and into the incisions she had made in the femoral arteries. She stitched in both terminuses of the bifurcated graft, unclamped the restricted vascular network, and watched with delight as the pulse returned to the patched aorta. For twenty minutes, she searched for leaks and knitted them up with fine, strong thread. For another five minutes, she watched closely, in silence, as the graft throbbed like any normal, healthy arterial vessel, without any sign of chronic seepage.
    At last she said, “Time to close up.”
    “Beautifully done,” George said.
    Ginger was glad she was wearing a surgical mask, for beneath it her face was stretched by a smile so broad that she must have looked like the proverbial grinning idiot.
    She closed the incisions in the patient’s legs. She took the intestines from the nurses, who were clearly exhausted and eager to relinquish the retractors. She replaced the guts in the body and gently ran them once again, searching for irregularities but finding none. The rest was easy: laying fat and muscle back in place, closing up, layer by layer, until the original incision was drawn shut with heavy black cord.
    The anesthesiologist’s nurse undraped Viola Fletcher’s head.
    The anesthesiologist untaped her eyes, turned off the anesthesia.
    The circulating nurse cut Bach off in mid-passage.
    Ginger looked at Mrs. Fletcher’s face, pale now but not unusuallydrawn. The mask of the respirator was still on her face, but she was getting only an oxygen mixture.
    The nurses backed away and skinned off their rubber gloves.
    Viola Fletcher’s eyelids fluttered, and she groaned.
    “Mrs. Fletcher?” the anesthesiologist said loudly.
    The patient did not respond.
    “Viola?” Ginger said. “Can you hear me, Viola?”
    The woman’s eyes did not open, but though she was more asleep than awake, her lips moved, and in a fuzzy voice she said, “Yes, Doctor.”
    Ginger accepted congratulations from the team and left the room with George. As they stripped off their gloves, pulled off their masks, and removed their caps, she felt as if she were filled with helium, in danger of breaking loose of the bonds of gravity. But with each step toward the scrub sinks in the surgical hall, she became less buoyant. A tremendous exhaustion settled over her. Her neck and shoulders ached. Her back was sore. Her legs