Deathwatch - Final Read Online Free PDF

to lead her step by step across the nursery. Abby had just made the same trip successfully. I'd noticed her balance was slightly off, but then, she'd spent 12 years walking in tandem with her sister. She was seated now on the low hassock, her legs straight, her bare feet peeping out from under the hem of Regina's old nightdress.
    "Do it, Ellie," she urged her sister.
    Ellie closed her eyes, shook her head. Her face was a study in misery. Her left leg was drawn inwards, the foot lagging behind her right heel.
    "I think she's more frightened than anything," I said to Saunders.
    "No," she wailed, "it hurts." She dropped one hand, rubbing it gingerly alongside her flank, and with the motion, she swayed, her knees buckled and she was one faltering step away from collapsing onto the floor.
    Saunders leaped forward and caught her.
    Ellie shrieked, and this time, her left knee did give way. Saunders managed to get his arms under her slight body, and he laid her gently on the bed.
    In an instant, he had her nightgown lifted and he was examining her. I took a step toward the bed, but hung back, half afraid to look at the child's body.
    "Perhaps it's just a temporary weakness in the adductors," I said, closing my eyes, reciting from memory. "I've seen scissor gait treated with leg braces, passive exercises--then when she's strong enough and the muscles have been built up, she can move to a series of active--"
    "Are you really that dense?" Saunders turned, hissing at me. "Look at this--"
    I took a step nearer, and followed the line of his gaze. It was what the old timers called "hot flesh." Ellie had an infection brewing underneath the incision. The skin had gone red, there was swelling. There was no suppuration yet, no smell, no yellowish dribble of pus where Saunders gently pressed the girl's hip. We'd caught it in the early stages. "Wound gangrene," I began--
    "It's osteomyelitis, you jackass," he snapped at me. "An infection in her bone."
    "I know what it is," I said.
    Saunders gave a snort. "Then you know what we have to do," he said.
    "Surgery," I nodded uneasily, because I also knew what the treatment of choice was for clearing up infections in bone and bone marrow, and it wasn't something Abby or Ellie should even guess at. My eyes met Saunders's grey ones, and I knew he'd read my unease.
    "I'm going to try and inject gentian violet first, and mercurochrome," he said softly.
    The gaudy colors of both solutions--brilliant purple and sunset red--swirled in my mind. Both worked sometimes, I knew, but it was that other treatment, the one Ellie would wake to, that made me faintly queasy.
    "No more operations," Ellie said. "Please." I saw she was not only frightened, but her eyes were dilated with fever as well. "I'm afraid by myself," she whispered.
    "I'll stay with you," Abby soothed. "I'll be there when you wake up--"
    "No!" Saunders and I shouted at the same time.
    Both girls’ eyes had gone round, they knew something was amiss, but they didn't know what. We did.
    "Let's get her prepped." Saunders's voice was dead, dry.
    I nodded, not wanting to picture what would come next: The treatment of choice for bone infections was simple and chilling. You inserted maggots deep inside the dark red marrow…and you let them eat.

    - 7 -
     
     
     

    I f it had been high summer I suppose we might have kept the secret from the girls. Gabriel or myself could've scouted the nearby fields for a rotting woodchuck or raided the local butcher's garbage tin for guts and offal. But it was mid-February, and although every ten years or so there'll be a wild extravaganza of nearly hot, sunny days before winter returns, it was still cold, with a thin snow-cover crusting the lawns and roadsides.
    I don't know how she found out; but every day saw Abby more mobile, so perhaps she read the text of the Western Union Saunders sent to the Medical Supply House in New York City asking for meat maggots. Or maybe she was watching when Gabriel left empty-handed for