Sunday Evening

Sam stood with his back to his daughter's bed, staring out of the window into the darkness beyond without really seeing anything. Lightning flashed, momentarily illuminating his features and reflecting in the tears that streaked down his face.

The anger and fury of the storm matched the turmoil in his soul.

This isn't right, he thought, and not for the first time. She's so young, so pure. No-one deserves this, least of all she. His hands clenched into fists, his arms trembling with the strain of holding back his emotions. He wanted to run around the room and smash things; destroy the equipment that so emotionlessly foretold the failure of Jessica's physical body, shatter the bottles of pills that she'd been required to take for what seemed like years now, scream at the top of his lungs to release all the pain and anguish that had built up inside since first hearing of her illness.

But he stood by the window, motionless, so as not to awaken her.

The latest tests had been devastating. The slide that had started Thursday afternoon hadn't stopped. In less than thirty-six hours, the disease had spread at a tremendous rate. Her liver, kidneys, and left lung had all suddenly failed. The medical team had managed to get her stabilised and onto life support, but that was the best they had been able to do. The doctor's words from earlier that afternoon seemed to haunt the darkness around Sam.

I'm sorry, Mr Dalton. The disease has intensified its attack, and it's only a matter of time now. There's nothing more that I can do.

His final statement still hung in the air of the room three hours later, like a leech sustaining itself on Sam's misery, sucking its very essence from the pain and despair in his soul.

Outside, the rain thundered against the glass, phantom fingers rapping at the windows, reaching for his little girl.

He knew that science had run its course. The doctors could do no more for her. So, too, had religion failed; he'd learned that in the months following Denise's death.

No, if he was going to save her, he would have to take the hard road, the dark road.

In that moment, he made his decision.

He refused to give her over to that darkness.

He would fight.

No matter what the cost.

Turning away from the windows, he moved swiftly to her side. They'd doped her up several hours earlier and she lay still in her bed, her eyes closed and her chest rising and falling slowly. If her respiration got any worse, a breathing tube was going to be necessary. Despite knowing she couldn't see, hear or feel him over the medication, Sam took her hand and gave it a small squeeze.

"Don't worry, baby, Daddy will fix it. Daddy will fix everything."

***

He took the stairs two at a time, his footfalls echoing in the empty space. He fled through the door at the bottom and emerged into the alley behind the children's wing. Within moments of leaving the sanctuary of the hospital walls, he was soaked through to the skin, the rain pummelling down around him, but he barely noticed, intent as he was on his mission.

The night streets seemed darker, more mysterious than they did during the day, but he didn't care. He strode east, retracing his steps as best he could, not caring who or what he might encounter on the way.

Perhaps it was that very sense of disregard that saved him, for he managed to travel the entire distance without once being accosted by any of the street folk he passed on his way. Predators can sense their own; the weaker always avoid challenging the strong. Tonight, Sam Dalton deserved to be in their midst, for he had become one of them.

No longer a victim.

No longer easy prey.

When a man loses all he lives for, he is no longer afraid of dying. The denizens of the night sensed this and gave Sam a wide berth as he marched past.

It took him fifteen minutes to return to that little park he'd been in on Thursday morning. Once there, he started rousting the sleeping homeless as he found them, dragging them out of their blankets to get a look at their faces, searching for the man who'd spoken to him that day.

He'd been at it for a while, had covered half the park, when a man thrust a knife at his throat in the mistaken belief that Sam was trying to rob him of his meagre possessions. Sam shoved himself backward, away from the glistening blade, and ended up on his ass, defenceless.

Luckily for him, his assailant was more interested in escaping than finishing off his opponent, and he left Sam lying there in the dirt as he rushed off into the darkness.

Sam climbed to his feet and was brushing himself off when a voice spoke from almost directly behind him.

"Looking for me?"

Sam whirled around, his hands raised to protect himself, only to find one of the very men he'd just finished checking a few moments ago standing behind him, this time with empty, bleeding sockets where his eyes had previously been. Sam didn't know how it happened, this sudden assimilation of a person's form, but the wave of frigid cold that rolled off the man let him know this was undoubtedly the same being he'd encountered several days before.

He didn't bother with introductions. "I want to save my daughter."

The other man laughed, a deep, mocking laugh. "The prodigal son returns, I see."

"Cut the bullshit. You said you knew how to save my daughter. I'm willing to do whatever it takes. Just tell me how." Sam paused, then continued, "She doesn't have much time left."

Those eyeless sockets bored into him, prying, hunting, searching his thoughts, invading his mind, reading the Braille engraved on his very soul.

Sam stood his ground, determined to be found worthy under this hideous onslaught.

Apparently he succeeded, for a package was abruptly thrust into his hands; the same square-shaped object wrapped in dark cloth and tied with twine that he'd been offered before. This time, Sam accepted it. It felt like a book or maybe a videotape. Sam moved to open it.

"No!" the other said. "Not here. Once opened, time will become even more precious to you than it is now. Break the seal only when you are ready."

Sam looked up and met the man's gaze. "This is all I need?"

Again the laugh. "That, plus a little more. But you'll discover that soon enough."

A distant cry reached his ears from elsewhere in the park, and Sam looked over in that direction, suddenly afraid of what else might be out there in the darkness. When he turned back, his visitor was gone.

***

Sam returned to the hospital, but went directly to the garage and his car rather than returning to Jessica's room. He knew he'd need some privacy, and home seemed the best place to get it.

The fifteen minute ride seemed to take hours, and more than once he cast an anxious glance at the small package riding on the seat next to him. He wanted to tear it open, to discover just how it could help his daughter, but prudence kept him from doing so; the warning had been quite explicit.

Once home, he parked in the garage and entered directly into the kitchen.

Turning on the overhead light, he moved directly to the table and examined his prize. Very quickly he could see that untying it was going to take some time. Unwilling to try and wrestle with the knot, Sam grabbed a knife from a nearby drawer and simply cut the twine in half. He carefully removed the cloth, to find another parcel inside. This one was smaller, about the size of a thick book, and wrapped in newspaper remnants held together by a thick dollop of red wax. Some kind of seal had been pressed into the wax, writing of some kind, but Sam was unable to decipher the language, never mind the words.

After a moment of trying, he gave up and cut the wax from the paper instead

He unfolded the newspaper to discover his first guess was correct; it was a book.

It was old, that much was immediately obvious. Yellowed pages, the dry, musty smell of old parchment, a weathered cover of some kind of leathery material with more than its fair share of cracks.

He reached out to trace one crack with a finger.

The book shifted beneath his touch, as if trying to escape.

Sam yanked his hand back in surprise.

He stared at it with sick fascination, the way one stared at the victim of a bad accident; disgust and horror combining with a deep seated need to see, to understand, to know just how bad it really was.

Slowly, tentatively, he reached out again.

This time, the cover yielded slightly to his touch but didn't pull away. It still didn't feel right, though. Unlike any other book he'd ever touched, this one was warm, pliable, like a living thing.

He half expected to hear it breathing.

Horrified, yet strangely entranced and fascinated at the same time, Sam gently pulled the cover open.

The pages came apart like soggy newspaper, and the room was filled with the stench of things long left to rot. Sam was reminded of the time he'd found the remains of the household cat after it had been clawed open by an angry raccoon, its organs left splayed out to bake in the morning sunlight.

Holding his breath, he glanced at the title page.

The words written there were gibberish.

Meaningless.

What the hell?

Nose wrinkled in disgust, he bent closer in an effort to see them better, to try and decipher the script. Maybe he just wasn't seeing it clearly …

Up close, with the reek of the text filling his nostrils and turning his stomach, the words suddenly swam into focus.

Sam began to read.

***

Three hours later he was finished.

The book was horrible, disgusting … and utterly captivating. It outlined a secret ritual that ancient Coptic priests had used to save those inflicted with what they saw as supernatural ailments and strange, unearthly diseases. Diseases surprisingly like the one that was eating Jessica alive, minute by minute, hour by hour.

The ritual itself was straightforward. Seven murders corresponding to seven major bodily systems - the circulatory system, the digestive system, the respiratory system, the nervous system, the endocrine system, the muscular system, and the skeletal system. A major organ or bodily part was to be harvested from each victim and ingested by the patient. The entire sequence had to be completed within seven days, with the patient ingesting one offering every twenty four hour period, and each victim had to be killed in a different fashion than the one before.

By the end of the week, the patient would be cured.

The rational, scientific side of him wanted to laugh. No way in hell could this ever work. The ritual was bullshit, pure and simple. Modern science had long ago replaced the various superstitious practices that had been used to "heal" people in earlier eras. Gone were the days of leeching, bleeding, drilling holes in the skull and other horrific measures that had been utilised in the name of medicine. This was the 21st Century, not the 13th.

And yet …

And yet the other side, the wretched, reckless, desperate side, said: "What if?"

What if it was true? What if the ritual worked? What if he could save Jessica's life?

Thoughts of how he'd come by the book pushed at him, lending credence to the ritual contained therein. It wasn't every day you received a book of ritual magick from an eyeless street prophet who came and went like the wind. If he could do that, he could certainly deliver a ritual that actually worked, couldn't he?

The very idea was blasphemy, but still he paused, considering it, such was his desire to keep his little girl from Death's cold and unloving hands. Anything was worth it, anything at all, even the life of a stranger, wasn't it?

He glanced back down at page where the ritual was laid out.

Check that. The lives of seven strangers.

He had reached the point of desperation. Sam knew it. Otherwise, he never would have run out into the rain on a will-'o-the-wisp's chance of actually learning something useful from a homeless street prophet who stank worse than last week's garbage. But could he slaughter seven innocent people in cold blood on the crazy off-chance that this ridiculous ritual could help his daughter?

Time stretched, but then he had his answer.

No.

No, he couldn't.

And just like that, Sam Dalton gave in to despair, just as he had done following the death of his wife. Like an alcoholic drawn to the bottle, Sam was drawn to this darkest of human emotions, and he felt it settle over his shoulders like a well-worn coat. "Fuck!" he cried, hurling the book across the room in anger.

He stomped around the room cursing and screaming, trying to release the hostility that lurked just beneath the surface of his skin like a balloon waiting to explode, but even that didn't help.

There was only one thing left to do, he decided.

Time to get blind, roaring drunk, while he could still afford to do so.

He retreated to the kitchen, savagely kicking an end table aside as he moved past, but once again fate stepped in.

Both the liquor cabinet and the refrigerator were empty.

Unable to find even a single bottle of beer anywhere in the house, he grabbed his coat and stalked down the street, headed for the nearest bar.

***

"Is this seat taken?"

Sam turned to find a woman standing nearby, indicating the seat next to him. She was dressed in jeans and a tight fitting shirt, her blonde hair spilling down across her shoulders. Without waiting for an answer, she set herself down onto the stool next to him and signalled the bartender.

"What a shitty day, ya know? I damn well need a drink." She ordered a scotch on the rocks, glanced at what Sam was having, and got him another while she was at it.

He'd seen her here several times before. Gossip had it that she was a widow, a fact pointed out to him once by an overeager bartender trying to play Cupid six months after Denise had died. At this point he didn't care if she was Queen Elizabeth - anyone willing to buy him a drink was okay with him, dead husband or not.

They exchanged first names and Sam promptly forgot hers, but readily accepted the drink. Given his current state, he probably would have forgotten his own if he hadn't had it his whole life.

Much of the rest of the evening passed in a blur. Soon she was as drunk as he was, and when the bartender shouted "Last Call," it seemed only natural for him to suggest they continue drinking at his place, since it was only a few blocks down the road.

Maybe it was the loneliness, maybe it was the despair, maybe it was simply the seven glasses of rum he'd consumed since her arrival, but when Sam's senses swam back into focus sometime later, he found himself on the couch in his living room, making out with the woman, whatever her name was.

Her hands were all over him, her lips pulling at his own. Her breath stank like scotch and cigarettes, and in the harsh light of his living room she appeared older, more haggard than he remembered.

Anger reared its ugly head.

What the hell was she doing here? What did she think she was doing? His daughter was dying and all she wanted to do was suck face and rut like a bitch in heat on his couch?

Wherever the anger came from, it blossomed like a fast-moving forest fire, his rage becoming overwhelming in an instant. He tore his face away from hers and wrapped his large hands around her delicate throat, squeezing. He was determined to choke the shit out of her, to teach her a lesson about coming on to people when they were as desperate as he was.

Instantly she fought back, slapping at his face, clawing at his hands with her fingernails, bucking against him, but he used his body to pin her to the couch beneath him, to hold her in place. He'd teach her a thing or two. A voice seemed to be speaking in his ear, a deep guttural voice speaking a language he did not recognise, but one he knew he'd heard or maybe seen before. Almost unbidden, his lips formed the words, slowly at first and then with greater precision and volume, until he was shouting out the phrase over and over again, drowning out the woman's weak pleas for him to stop. She kicked and struggled, her mouth gaping open like that of a fish out of water, but his size and strength meant the deck was stacked against her from the start.

Her eyes rolled in their sockets and her face grew a stark shade of red.

Her hands pulled feebly at his own, no longer able to strike him with any real strength.

As if in a trance, Sam kept repeating the strange line, over and over, as her struggles to free herself grew increasingly ineffectual.

Squeezing.

Squeezing …

Long after she was dead, Sam kept at it, unaware and unseeing.

***

He stared at the corpse, afraid to move, to attract its attention. He could just imagine her suddenly sitting back up and chasing after him, a revenant spirit out for revenge, hungry for his flesh.

The notion made his skin crawl.

He shook himself, forcefully chasing the images away. He didn't need to scare himself silly; he was having a hard enough time with things as it was.

He'd strangled her.

He'd fucking strangled her.

What the hell was he going to do now?

The answer, when it came, was so obvious he was amazed he hadn't seen it sooner.

He scrambled up and away from the corpse, hunting for the book he'd cast aside so angrily earlier that night. For a moment he couldn't find it anywhere, and fear seized his soul as he imagined it had vanished as swiftly as its deliverer, but then he saw one corner peeking out from beneath the drapes covering the bay window.

Snatching it up, he flipped through the pages, searching.

The phrase practically leapt off the page at him.

"Tua vitam rapio ut alius supersit." He still didn't have a clue what it meant, but at least he knew he wasn't going completely crazy. The ritual required that the phrase be said when the victim's life was taken. Without it, the victim's death would be useless.

At least he'd gotten that right.

For a moment his conscience nagged at him, screamed at him that he had just committed murder, and that no stupid ritual was going to save Jessica …

He smothered the thought and moved on, a strange sense of excitement growing in his soul.

The chart was a few pages further in the text, and it specifically outlined the organs and other bodily parts required for the ritual. Sam's knowledge of anatomy was limited; while he could probably find the heart or the lungs, telling the difference between a liver and a kidney would be difficult without more research.

Okay, a lung it is. At least I know where it is. Removing it can't be that hard, can it?

Getting started was, however.

Five minutes of delay turned into ten, then fifteen.

Finally he couldn't take standing around any longer.

He had to do something.

Book in hand, Sam walked around the sofa, moved through the living room to the kitchen and through the connecting door to the garage. There, he rooted among the tool cabinets and storage boxes until he found the thick tarpaulin he'd used a few years before while repainting the interior of the house. He dragged it behind him back into the kitchen, moved the table out of the way, and spread the tarp out on the floor. He replaced the kitchen table where it had been, in the centre of the area now covered by the tarp.

You're not really going to do this, are you? a small voice asked in the back of his mind.

Oh yes I am, he replied, and the voice shut up, as simple as that.

He returned to the living room.

The woman's corpse was right where he had left it, half on and half off the couch.

Before he could lose his nerve altogether, he stepped forward, bent over and thrust his hands beneath her armpits. Lifting her upper body off the floor, leaving her head to sag limply forward, he dragged it across the room and into the kitchen. He rested a moment just inside the door, and then moved her closer to the table. Taking a deep breath, he heaved upward, bending backward while doing so, until her ass cleared the edge of the table and he could dump her on top of it.

She fell with a muted thump.

He adjusted her legs to make certain she didn't topple back off, and then rested a moment to catch his breath.

Now that he had the body on the table, he was struck once again by the magnitude of what he had done. An hour earlier he had been kissing this woman's lips. Now those same lips were cold and blue, mute testaments to the overwhelming power of grief and the evil that lurks deep within its shadow.

No matter. What's done is done. Think of Jessica.

Get the lung.

Right.

Steeling himself, Sam reached out. Hesitantly, almost reverently, he unbuttoned the woman's blouse, letting the material fall away to either side. He undid the front clasp of her bra and let each end drop to her sides as well, leaving her exposed to the waist.

Her skin, where his knuckles grazed it in the course of undressing her, was already cool to the touch, and the harsh light of the overhead fluorescents leeched even more of the colour from her flesh, leaving it pale and pasty white.

He took a moment to go through the pockets of her jeans as well, thoughts of a car abandoned at the bar making him nervous, but he was unable to find any car keys. Maybe she had walked, he thought, making a mental note to check the living room later for a pocketbook or purse of some kind.

Next, Sam pulled on a pair of plastic yellow dishwashing gloves and then turned and surveyed the tools he'd laid out on the counter behind him; a wide selection of cutting implements of various shapes and sizes. He'd need a strong blade, he knew; one that wouldn't bend too much. Something long but thick and preferably wide so he wouldn't have to cut more than was necessary.

He debated for a moment and then chose an older carving knife from the set his mother had given to him and Denise on their anniversary three years earlier.

Hefting the blade in his right hand, he turned back to the corpse and considered where to begin. On its surface, the ritual itself was rather simple; the inflicted had to ingest seven organs harvested over seven days from seven healthy strangers. Each organ had to come from one of the major bodily systems - circulatory, digestive, respiratory, muscular, nervous, endocrine, and skeletal - but, as with most things in life, the devil was in the details. Each of the victims had to be killed in a manner that reflected the bodily system from which the organ would be harvested.

As Sam reviewed the ritual in his mind, his gaze lifted slightly and fell on the dead woman's face.

She was staring at him.

Her head had slipped to the side and her eyes lay open now, bloodshot and staring.

Accusing.

His heart pounded violently in his chest, and the hand holding the knife suddenly shook uncontrollably.

No matter that he'd come this far, no matter that Jessica's life might just hang in the balance; finding those dead eyes staring at him was almost enough to make him drop everything and walk out of the house so that he could turn himself in to the first cop he could find.

Almost.

Sudden thoughts of the fate that awaited Jess rescued him from the fatal impulse, however.

"Come on, come on, you can do this." His voice seemed to echo in the silence of the cellar. "You can do this."

He'd seen more than his fair share of CSI episodes, and knew what a Y incision was supposed to look like. Steeling himself, he raised his arm, gritted his teeth, and then sank the blade into the woman's pale flesh near her left pectoral muscle.

Blood welled up from inside the body and seeped down its sides to drip, drip, drip onto the plastic sheeting he had laid down earlier.

Working with a kitchen knife was a lot harder than using a razor sharp scalpel, and more than once he had to resort to pulling the knife out and starting again, but at last he had a fair representation of the typical incision. Laying down the knife, he slipped the fingers of both hands into the incision, gripped the edges, and pulled it back toward him and away from the ribs.

The flesh came free with a sucking sound, exposing the bloody sternum and ribcage, and an overripe stench wafted up from inside the corpse.

That was all it took. Sam's detachment crumpled. He barely had time to turn before the contents of his stomach came barrelling back up to splash across the tarp at his feet. He spent the next several minutes retching, the spasms so strong that he was left gasping for breath, his eyes watering from the effort.

He stumbled over to the sink and washed the vomit from his face, standing there with his head hanging downward until he was certain he had regained control of himself. It took a few moments, but at last he turned and faced the corpse once more.

You've come this far, no sense in stopping now, he thought to himself. It was just a body now; nothing more than a pile of skin and blood and bones. Nothing he did could bring her back, so why not move ahead and see what happened? Keep your thoughts on Jess. It's all about Jessica. Everything else is irrelevant.

Before resuming the dissection of the body, he opened the cabinet just above the sink, where he stored the cold medicine, and removed the jar of Vicks VapoRub. Dipping a finger into the gooey mixture, he smeared a sizeable amount beneath his nose. The medicinal scent brought fresh tears to his eyes, but overcame the smell of the newly exposed viscera in the corpse.

Now fortified, he stepped back over the body, ready to continue his efforts.

He didn't have any rib cutters handy, so he used a pair of long-handled garden shears to cut them away one by one. A sharp tug, and the entire sternal plate came away, giving him the access he needed to the organs beneath. A few quick cuts of the knife, and the lung finally came free in his hands.

He dropped the organ into the Tupperware container he'd prepared for it on the table next to him. Picking that up, he moved over to the sink, where he turned on the tap water and rinsed the organ as thoroughly as he could, lifting it out of the container with his hands and allowing the water to cascade over as much of its surface as it could reach. It was bad enough that his baby girl was going to be eating someone's lung; he didn't want her ingesting the blood and bodily fluids that went with it.

Now clean, or as clean as it was going to get, the lung went into the blender next to the sink. It made a soft, squishy sound when it hit the bottom, the spongy grey tissue pushing against the glass like some kind of alien life-form from a grade B science-fiction film.

Sam stared at it, trying to wrap his mind around the fact that he'd just butchered a woman in order to remove her lung. A lung he intended his five year old daughter to eat.

How in heaven's name was he going to manage that?

He looked around the room, searching for heaven knows what. The Dummies' Guide to Organ Preparation maybe? Inane thoughts poured through his mind, the flotsam and jetsam of an educated life - the human lung weighs ounces, the lungs have over 1500 miles of airways, you breathe in more than thirteen pints of air every single minute - as the rational part of him struggled to deal with what he'd done. Then it came to him.

He needed camouflage.

He rushed over to the refrigerator. He hadn't been shopping in a while, so there wasn't much to be found inside, but after rummaging around, he managed to come up with a half-drunk carton of orange juice, three Strawberry Burst juice boxes and a packet of powdered Kool-Aid. All of them went into the blender. In the pantry he found a couple of bananas and an apple. They joined the juice. Last, but not least, he added a handful of ice, figuring the cold might help mask the taste, and then stepped back to survey his work.

The blender was full. The lung could barely be seen beneath the rest of the ingredients.

Good enough.

He put on the lid, laid a finger on the power switch, took a deep breath, and then pressed the button down.

The machine jumped to life with a hideous groan as it fought to grind the rubbery flesh into tiny little chunks. Sam let it go on for several minutes, switching back and forth through the various settings, until he was certain the contents had been thoroughly mixed, chopped, and pureed.

He took a large thermos out of a nearby cabinet, and opened both containers. Being careful not to spill even a single drop, he poured the greyish-orange mixture from the blender into the thermos, and then put the thermos into the fridge.

Next he returned to the table and picked up the knife and garden shears. He washed those as thoroughly as possible, and then carefully dried them with a dish towel. All three items were placed on the counter nearby for later disposal.

That done, he took a quick glance at his watch.

Just after 3 am.

Entering the hospital wouldn't be a big deal, getting into his daughter's room would be even easier. After all, they expected him to be there. But if he waited too much longer, there would be a shift change, which meant another set of rounds. That would be a problem. Getting caught in the act wouldn't be good. Which meant he didn't have time to dispose of the body properly. He'd have to settle for hiding it in the basement for the time being.

After checking to be certain he hadn't stepped in any of the blood or vomit that had landed on the tarp, Sam left the kitchen and climbed the stair to the second-floor linen closet. He removed an old bedspread from the shelf and returned with it to the kitchen.

This time, the sight of the gaping chest wound didn't bother him as much. Gone was his revulsion about touching the corpse. Gone was his dismay over what he had done to this innocent stranger. Purpose had eradicated guilt; the woman had died so that his daughter could live. He was doing only what was necessary to save his little girl. What parent wouldn't understand that? He picked up the rib cage and forced it back into the opening in the chest. It didn't fit quite right, but Sam didn't care. All he wanted was to keep the rest of the internal organs from spilling out everywhere when he wrapped the body in the bedspread. Once the chest plate was in place, he folded the flaps of flesh back over the wound, leaving him with a relatively intact torso. A gap of no more than two inches split the skin down the centre of the corpse. Several long stretches of duct tape pulled tightly from one side to the other readily dealt with the issue.

When he was satisfied, he shook out the bedspread and spread it out next to the corpse. Putting both hands beneath the woman's body, he rolled it over so that it lay face down on the bedspread. Several more minutes of effort and he had the corpse wrapped up tightly in the fabric, both ends twisted and secured with more duct tape, the rubber gloves he'd worn through the procedure wrapped up inside the shroud as well. He hefted the body up and over one shoulder, then carried it down the cellar stairs to the basement, where he tucked it away into a dark corner for the time being.

He returned to the kitchen, rolled up the tarp, and stored it in the basement alongside the body. Later, he'd deal with both with more finality, but for now they would be safe from all but a determined search of the property.

If it came to that, all was lost anyway.

***

Jessica was asleep when Sam slipped inside her room an hour later. He held the door open a crack, watching the hallway, making certain no-one had followed him. When he was satisfied, he gently closed the door and did what he could to wedge a chair beneath the handle. It wouldn't keep out a really determined individual, but it might give him time to hide the thermos and its contents if it became necessary.

Moving over to his daughter's bed, Sam used the remote to raise Jessica into a sitting position. Gently, he shook her by the shoulder. "Jess? Honey? You need to wake up, sweetheart. I have some new medicine for you."

"Daddy? Is that …" The rest of her sentence came out garbled, a result of the heavy sedation the nurses had given her earlier. Sam breathed a sigh of relief; her condition would make what he had to do easier on them both.

He took the thermos out of the backpack he was carrying and twisted off the top. Rather than using the cup, Sam raised the container itself to his daughter's lips. "Here, sweetheart. Drink this."

Catching a whiff of the stuff, Jessica turned her head away. "Ugh! What is it?"

"I know it smells bad, Jess, but the doctors want you to drink it. You want to feel better, don't you? Now, come on, one sip at a time."

Jessica did as she was told, leaning forward and taking a cautious sip. After she'd swallowed her first mouthful, Sam moved to take the thermos away, expecting her to gag on the stuff, and was surprised when her hands jumped off the mattress to lock on his own, holding the container to her mouth with surprising strength, more strength than she'd had in weeks. Perhaps more strength than she'd ever shown before. The sound of her greedily sucking down the mixture sent a chill through his bones, but he let her continue nonetheless.

Several long minutes later, the thermos was empty.

Then, just like that, Jessica rolled over and went back to sleep.

Sam sat there, dumbfounded by it all. He'd never expected that kind of reaction from her.

He stayed seated in the chair next to her bed, watching her closely, waiting for her body to suddenly reject the mixture and vomit it back up, but she remained peacefully asleep. Second thoughts came and went like ephemeral phantoms in the night; there was no turning back now. Either it would work or it wouldn't. Time would tell.

Placing the thermos back into the backpack, Sam settled into the depths of the chair and watched the rhythmic rise and fall of his daughter's chest, rise and fall, rise and fall …