Let’s hope,I thought, as the second helicopter emerged from the clouds below us and both aircraft banked toward Atlanta.
I glanced at the heart monitor above Faust’s gurney. He was still with us. It was amazing he’d made it even this far. As an experimental procedure, hand transplantation wasn’t covered by the standard organ-donor consent Faust had on file. Mercifully, the rules for organ donation allowed for verbal consent. I’d recounted Faust’s last wish—“Give my hands to Garcia”—and Rankin had corroborated my story. I wasn’t sure how Rankin had managed to hear the words, since Faust couldn’t speak above a whisper, but he swore he had, and I chose to believe him. Within minutes after Faust’s brain ceased to function, UT’s organ-donation coordinator called Tennessee Donor Services, and a few hours after that, Dr. Alvarez had accepted the donation. Her original plan had been to bring Faust down by conventional ambulance, but when UT notified her that his condition was rapidly deteriorating, she’d arranged for the airlift—the airlift into the teeth of a gale.
We caught up with the storm front swiftly, just as the helicopter reached the crest of the Smoky Mountains. Pressing my head to the helicopter’s window and looking down, I glimpsed the grass-lined bowl of Cades Cove and, looming above it, Thunderhead Mountain, where I’d been caught in the cold and the darkness.
I was still weary from the ordeal in the mountains and the maelstrom of events since, and I closed my eyes and let the aircraft’s drone and vibration lull me to sleep. I was just drifting off when an urgent voice snapped me awake. “We’re losing him.” It was the flight nurse. “Guys, we’re losing him.” Her eyes were darting between the gurney and the monitor. “Pulse is irregular, blood pressure’s dropping.” The pulse line on the screen grew ragged, the peaks fluctuating in height, like a stock-market graph charting a volatile month. The heart-rate readout skittered rapidly: 88, 72, 79, 67, 59. The blood-pressure readout on the monitor edged downward: 140/80, 117/72, 88/60. Suddenly the blood-pressure numbers were replaced by dashes. The heart line went flat, and the pulse readout went blank. Even through the thick cushions of the headset, I could hear the monitor’s shrill alarm. “He’s coded; he’s coded. I’m going to defib.” She snatched a pair of defibrillator paddles from the rear wall of the compartment and pressed them to Faust’s chest. She glanced to make sure I wasn’t touching Faust or the gurney—“Clear”—and squeezed a switch in the handle of one of the paddles; as the electricity coursed through Faust’s body, it jerked against the nylon straps. She glanced at the monitor, still flashing its dashes and shrieking its alarm.
“Clear.” The body jumped again, but that was the only response to the jolt of current.
“Damn it,” said the nurse, “don’t do this to me.”
Flipping back the lid of a medical case, she removed a syringe and tore open a sterile wrapper, then depressed the plunger just far enough to spray a droplet out the end of the needle. “I’m giving him epinephrine,” she said. Sliding the needle into Faust’s arm, she slammed the plunger home and then yanked the empty syringe into a waste slot. She applied the defibrillator paddles again. “Clear.” The body twitched, and the blinking dashes on the monitor were replaced by numbers. Fluctuating, frightening, beautiful numbers.
I took a deep breath and looked up. Out the front windshield, the approaching skyline of Atlanta glittered like the Emerald City of Oz. Minutes later we settled onto a small rooftop helipad. A metal door at one side opened, and a pair of nurses jogged a gurney toward the helicopter, ducking beneath the spinning rotor. I checked the monitor: Faust’s heart was beating weakly and irregularly, but it was still beating, by damn. Within seconds the nurses had shifted him onto the gurney and hurried into the hospital with him. I unbuckled my harness, removed my headset, and followed.
Ten minutes later I found Carmen in an alcove outside a third-floor operating room. She hugged me and then wiped her eyes. I held my breath, bracing for disappointment again. “It looks good,” she said. “The transplant surgeon says they’re starting the procedure.”