she tried to see what was on the monitors, but they were too far away. The figure obscured the screens, leaning over the body to examine it closely.
“Will this one survive?” the voice murmured rhetorically, as though speaking to itself.
A chill rippled down her spine.
“Let us pray that he does. Eighty degrees.”
She turned her head and began twisting her wrists back and forth, seeking a weakness in her bonds. The straps were tight, but her wrists were narrow and her hands small. If she could just fold her hand slightly and tuck her thumb in, she might be able to squeeze it through the straps.
She tried first with her right hand, but the pain from the intravenous line in her arm scared her, so she tried with the other. She forced her thumb inward, twisting and pulling against the strap. The thick canvas scraped against her skin, but she felt the edge slipping. Encouraged, she pulled harder, rolling her wrist into a better position before pulling again. The strap slipped farther over her hand, crushing it. She gritted her teeth together, dominating the pain and taking a deep breath before pulling hard.
The strap slipped across her hand and then it jerked free. She clenched her hand a few times before reaching across and loosening the strap on her right wrist.
“Eighty-one degrees.”
She sat up in the bed, looking down at the intravenous line in her arm. She reached down to begin easing it free when a strange, unearthly sound caught her attention. It was a distant, feeble whimper, as though someone were crying out for help from deep underwater.
“He’s coming round.”
She leaned toward the gap in the muslin sheet, watching as the figure, wearing a white doctor’s coat, stood back from the body on the table. The body quivered, a shuddering that seemed as though the patient were suffering some kind of seizure.
“Pulse is good,” the voice said again. “Hypothermically viable.”
The body shivered again as though live current were bolting through the muscles. Another murmur came from deep within the chest cavity, infected with something that sent little insects of fear scuttling beneath her skin, the tones of an endless suffering freed at last.
The body jerked wildly and the man’s mouth opened as from within came a ghoulish cry of anguish, of a terror primal, pure, and undiluted that soared from its prison somewhere deep within him to fill the room.
The body flailed wildly, the man sobbing and screaming as he thrashed about on the table.
She saw the doctor reach across to a nearby table and grab a syringe, while struggling to hold the flailing patient’s arm and get the needle into a vein, but the man was fighting with insane strength, screaming all the while.
“Can you hear me?”
The doctor’s voice interrupted the screams, and in the half-light she saw the crazed patient staring wide-eyed at him, blubbering incoherently, his face stained with tears and his eyes filled with something incomprehensible that caused her bowels to lurch in sympathy. A gabbling torrent of unintelligible noise fell from the man’s mouth amid a stream of bile and spittle. His eyes wobbled in their sockets, limbs jerking frantically in the doctor’s grip.
“Can you hear me?” the doctor repeated.
The man began frothing at the mouth, choking on his own fluids as his head began slamming violently against the table with deafeningly loud cracks that reverberated around the room.
The surgeon stood up with the syringe in his hand, pinning one of the patient’s arms down on the table and jabbing the needle deep into the flesh. The patient continued to flail, and to her horror she saw him suddenly snapping his mouth open and shut. His teeth smashed together with loud cracks, a thick torrent of dark blood spilling across his lips as he crunched through his own tongue. In a moment of sheer terror she recognized the guide who had arrived at her camp, the Bedouin. Ahmed Khan.
Slowly, the sedative began to take effect, and the man’s insane thrashings rippled away until he sank back onto the table, his ruined tongue dangling by threads from his mouth and strings of blood drooling away toward the floor. The doctor released the body, the limbs dangling from the table at awkward angles.
“How disappointing,” he said into a voice recorder. “I shall dispose of him.”
A wave of panic flushed across her body and she reached down, grabbing the restraints around her ankles and yanking them free. As they parted the metal braces clattered loudly against the side