Stinger Prologue May 2    The green Chevy Lumina sped through the darkness. For several miles the two men inside said nothing, until the driver yawned and the other said, "Tired?"    "It's three in the goddamn morning."    "Yeah."     "Well, we're almost to Virginia. Bridge is just a few miles away."    "Pretty heavy woods."    "The ass end of nowhere."    The passenger didn't reply. He stared at the road ahead. The car's headlights carved a narrow lighted path down the highway, itself a gray slash through the black silhouettes of oak, hickory, Southern pine. Once the driver reached for the radio, glanced at the other man's face, and drew back his hand. Another car, the first in several minutes, approached in the other lane, and both drivers switched from high beams to low.    The huge buck in full spring antlers dashed from the woods so fast it seemed to materialize directly in front of the Lumina. The driver cried "Son of a bitch!" and wrenched the wheel to the left, fruitlessly. The Lumina slammed into the buck, flinging its body to the left onto the narrow grassy median. The Lumina spun ninety degrees while skidding sideways. The rear crashed into a hickory at the edge of the woods. Metal shrieked as the trunk flew open, the rear body crumpled, and the back seat thrust forward hard. With a final shudder the Lumina came to rest backward against the tree, engine stopped and headlights still shining.    The driver's face was moonlight white. "You okay?"    "Yeah. You? Oh, God--the locals."    The second car had skidded to a stop. A man jumped out and ran toward the crash. In the beam of the Lumina's headlights his deputy sheriff's uniform was clearly visible.    "Anybody hurt? Are you people all right?" His voice was young and excited.    "We're fine," the driver called. He gave his companion a look that said shit shit shit. The passenger tried to open his door, but it had been mangled too badly when the rear of the car caved forward. Finally he climbed awkwardly over the gear shift and followed the driver out the left front door.    By that time the driver stood with the deputy at the front of the car, away from the gaping trunk. The passenger walked toward the back and peered inside. The metal cage sat as twisted and crushed as the back end of the car, a cage no longer. Empty.    "Can I see your license and registration?" the deputy said. The passenger walked to the front of the car to join the driver, so both of them could talk to the deputy. Could persuade him of what had really happened here. How the scene had actually gone down.    They had fucking better make it A-one. # # # May 28    "...and now, ladies and gentlemen," the local chairwoman finished in her strong Brooklyn accent, "join with me in welcoming the United States Senator from Pennsylvania, Malcolm Peter Reading."    Not too bad, Larson thought as he watched the senator mount the steps of the school auditorium. A fairly short introduction, dignified but not starchy, and no proud to present to you the next president of the United States in that too-insistent, too-confident way that some supporters had. That wouldn't have played well, not in this particular section of Manhattan. Premature. Larson had an ear for these things.    Although maybe, he thought, as he watched Reading launch into his speech, it wouldn't have mattered after all. Damn, but Reading was good. The candidate stood on the wooden grade-school stage, under that faded school-assembly flag, as if the place were the Oval Office. He had the facts, he had the grasp, he had the vision, and none of that would have mattered if he hadn't also had the touch. Which he did. Able to touch any group--black, white, rich, poor, gay, straight, conservative, liberal, men, women. Furthermore, it was sincere. Larson had watched a lot of politicians over the years. This one meant what he said, and he didn't say what he didn't mean, and he was able to say it in ways that different audiences could actually hear.    Maybe Reading really could go all the way.    It was the first time Larson had really let himself believe it. A handler, after all, was paid to manufacture images, not to be seduced by substance. And the skeptic in Larson didn't actually believe the United States was ready for a black president. But listening to Reading in this too-old school with its echoing wooden halls and permanent smell of chalk, Larson suddenly wasn't so sure.    Reading had it all. Intelligent, educated, born in the racial disaster of North Philadelphia but now comfortably upper-middle-class, war hero (only in a "minor" war, although they never were minor to the guys who had to fight them.) Solid-gold middle-of-the-road voting record. Faithful husband to the pretty-but-not-too-pretty wife listening to him with her intelligent eyes alight. High-achieving kids, no other women ever, no financial scandals. A capable and decent human being. And Reading had the touch, without which the rest of it wouldn't have mattered for shit.    The audience, mostly left-of-center middle-aged New York types, laughed at something Reading said. Larson could feel them warming. A few more minutes, and Reading would have them eating from his hand. Which was just the right color: clearly black, but not too black. A rich chocolate. Malcolm Peter Reading, he of the racially provocative first name and reassuringly capitalist last one, was a handsome man. On top of everything else.    The audience laughed again. Beside Larson, an elderly white man in preppy khaki trousers nodded thoughtfully. A young black couple in the row ahead--she wore one of those African headscarf-things, he had on a Grateful Dead tee shirt--grinned at each other delightedly. Even the cop stationed at the door looked impressed.    Jesus. If Reading could do this equally well in New Hampshire, the primary would be a walk.    Larson's head whirled. In a flash--it felt like that, a brilliant flash of Technicolor light--he pictured himself at the White House, still advising long after the campaign was over, still necessary...to the President of the United States. In the Oval Office, at a press conference in the Rose Garden, on Air Force One...    Rein it in, Larson.    He did. From long habit, from innate skepticism. Keep grounded, keep focused. Listen to what the candidate is saying here and now, not at some hypothetical moment in some hypothetically glorious future. More important, listen to the audience. How is the candidate playing now?    From his wooden folding chair on the far left side of the auditorium, Larson bent forward, hands on his knees, intent gaze scanning the audience overflowing the small room and craning necks in the hall outside. Thus it was that he missed the beginning of Reading's trouble. He didn't notice it until the audience began to frown, to twitch, to glance at each other in concern. Larson's eyes snapped to the stage.    "...policies that...embrace all of...that embrace..."    Reading stopped speaking. He seemed dazed, uncertain. Sweat glistened on his forehead. His eyes unfocussed, then focused again with what looked to Larson like a supreme act of will.    "...policies embrace...our diversity...policies..."    Suddenly the left side of Reading's body jerked. His left hand fell from the lectern, dangled helplessly by his side. He swayed and crashed to the floor, thrashing to the left of the lectern and coming to rest at the very edge of the wooden stage.    Anita Reading screamed. People rose to their feet, calling out. A few tried to climb onto the stage. Larson stood immobile. He knew what he was seeing.    "Please let me through, I'm a doctor. Let me through please, I'm a doctor--" A tall woman in jeans, pushing her way determinedly down the center aisle from the back of the room. She leapt onto the stage and bent over Reading.    No. Larson refused to believe it. Malcolm Reading was only forty-nine, healthy as an ox. Never smoked, ate right, exercised. How could he be having a stroke?    Still Larson didn't move forward. The doctor looked up from Reading and said briskly to the people clustered behind her, "Ambulance, please. Tell 911 you need it for a thrombosis--a serious stroke. Go now."    Someone--Larson couldn't see who--went now. Anita Reading had stopped screaming and seemed to be quickly following whatever instructions the doctor was giving her. The crowd changed subtly from startled hysteria to the kind of half-guilty excitement that meant somebody else was the victim. A few people talked excitedly into cell phones. Reporters.    "Bill?" Anita Reading called, her voice high with strain. "Where's Bill?"    "Here," Larson said, and finally moved forward. His body felt thick, clumsy, as if he were moving through something sticky and clotted. And he was. Disappointment could be as retarding as mud, slow you down as much as sewage.    Malcolm Peter Reading would never be president of the United States. Bill Larson would never stand in the Rose Garden, advising the president about the world. # # # June 3    The small Maryland city of La Plata steamed in the humid heat, even at night, even though it was barely June. Over ninety in the day, only marginally below eighty at night. Rain every afternoon, a choking hot drizzle that passed in an hour and left nothing cooler than before.    "Gonna be a wild night," the nurse said, coming back into the Emergency Room from the parking lot. Smoking was forbidden anywhere inside the community hospital, a one-hundred-bed well-staffed facility that was the pride of two counties. "Lots of violent trauma. I can smell it."    The younger nurse smiled nervously. It was her first night ever in Emergency.    "They'll all be outside, escaping the heat. Drinking and fighting and shooting each other. Like they do every hot summer night. You mark my words, Rachel."    Rachel turned away. There was something in the older woman's use of "they" and "them" that the young girl didn't like. Something...well, a little racist?    She told herself not to judge too hastily. Manners in the East were just different from the small town in Ohio where she'd grown up and gone to nursing school. People here just talked rougher, didn't consider as much what they said. Just a regional difference. That was probably all it was.    By nine o'clock, two hours after her shift had begun, Rachel still hadn't seen any trauma due to violence. A car accident, minor abrasions only. An infected compound femoral fracture. An elderly phlebitis, a woman in labor, a little kid who had fallen off a fence and needed six stitches. A man brought in falling-down drunk, his speech slurred. An average night.    Just after nine, the ambulance shrieked up. The charge nurse got off the phone. "All right, people, resident's on his way down. Two strokes--not one but two, count 'em--within a few minutes of each other at an A.A. meeting. Both severe." She talked rapidly, organizing the response duties. The resident rushed in from the corridor.    For the rest of her life, the next half hour remained a blur to Rachel. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't recall any details. Apparently she did everything she was told to, and did it right, because nobody yelled at her afterward. She must have assisted with the CT scans to determine if the strokes were ischemic or hemorrahgic, must have administered the tPA, must have hooked the patients to acute-care monitors. But she couldn't remember what she had done, or how, or in what order.    She only remembered the patients. A young woman in her twenties, with a ring in her nose and corn-rowed braids. A man in a clerical collar. He died; she slipped into a deep coma. And the falling-down drunk, it turned out later, had no alcohol at all in his blood. They'd just assumed he had, from his behavior and his stinking clothing and the plastic garbage bag full of all his possessions. But he, too, had had a thrombotic stroke. And so did another patient, on toward midnight. A young, active mother of three, her husband said, who had never been sick a day in her life. And then, at 3:17 a.m., a vacationing professor from Howard University, a healthy man in his thirties who died at 4:30.    The resident frowned constantly, lost in thought. The charge nurse was subdued, not looking directly at anyone. The older nurse said, too loudly, "Coincidence. Bound to happen someplace, sometime. If all the apes in the British museum..."    "Shut up," the charge nurse said.    Rachel said nothing. There was a tight mass in her stomach, as if she were constipated in the wrong place. I'm scared, she thought clearly. I don't know why, but I'm scared.    All five patients had nearly identical thrombotic cerebral strokes. All five were black.

Copyright ©1999 Nancy Kress