Winter Moon by Dean Koontz Page A

might have been the least of the challenges facing Jack. She lowered her eyes, unable to meet the surgeon’s gaze.
    “I had to remove his right kidney,” Procnow said, “but otherwise there was remarkably little internal damage. Some minor blood-vessel problems, a nicked colon. But we’ve cleaned that up, done repairs, put in temporary abdominal drains, and we’ll keep him on antibiotics to prevent infection. No trouble there.”
    “A person can live…can live on one kidney, right?”
    “Yes, certainly. He won’t notice any difference in his quality of life from that.”
    What
will
make a difference in the quality of his life, what other wound, what damage? she wanted to ask, but she didn’t have the courage.
    The surgeon had long, supple fingers. His hands looked lean but strong, like those of a concert pianist. She told herself that Jack could have received neither better care nor more tender mercy than those skilled hands had provided.
    “Two things concern us now,” Procnow continued. “Severe shock combined with a heavy loss of blood can sometimes have…cerebral consequences.”
    Oh, God, please. Not this.
    He said, “It depends on how long there was a decrease in the supply of blood to the brain and how severe the decrease was, how deoxygenated the tissues became.”
    She closed her eyes.
    “His EEG looks good, and if I were to base a prognosis on that, I’d say there’s been no brain damage. We have every reason to be optimistic. But we won’t know until he regains consciousness.”
    “When?”
    “No way of telling. We’ll have to wait and see.”
    Maybe never.
    She opened her eyes, fighting back tears but not with complete success. She took her purse off the end table and opened it.
    As she blew her nose and blotted her eyes, the surgeon said, “There’s one more thing. When you visit him in the ICU, you’ll see he’s been immobilized with a restraining jacket and bed straps.”
    At last Heather met his eyes again.
    He said, “A bullet or fragment struck the spinal cord. There’s bruising of the spine, but we don’t see a fracture.”
    “Bruising. Is that serious?”
    “It depends on whether any nerve structures were crushed.”
    “Paralysis?”
    “Until he’s conscious and we can run some simple tests, we can’t know. If there
is
paralysis, we’ll take another look for a fracture. The important thing is, the cord hasn’t been severed, nothing as bad as that. If there’s paralysis and we find a fracture, we’ll get him into a body cast, apply traction to the legs to get the pressure off the sacrum. We can treat a fracture. It isn’t catastrophic. There’s an excellent chance we can get him on his feet again.”
    “But no guarantees,” she said softly.
    He hesitated. Then he said, “There never are.”

CHAPTER SIX
    The cubicle, one of eight, had large windows that looked into the staff area of the ICU. The drapes had been pulled aside so the nurses could keep a direct watch on the patient even from their station in the center of the wheel-shaped chamber. Jack was attached to a cardiac monitor that transmitted continuous data to a terminal at the central desk, an intravenous drip that provided him with glucose and antibiotics, and a bifurcated oxygen tube that clipped gently to the septum between his nostrils.
    Heather was prepared to be shocked by Jack’s condition—but he looked even worse than she expected. He was unconscious, so his face was slack, of course, but the lack of animation was not the only reason for his frightening appearance. His skin was bone-white, with dark-blue circles around his sunken eyes. His lips were so gray that she thought of ashes, and a Biblical quote passed through her mind with unsettling resonance, as if it had actually been spoken aloud—
ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
He seemed ten or fifteen pounds lighter than when he had left home that morning, as if his struggle for survival had taken place over a week, not just a few hours.
    A lump