Free Dead Tomorrow by Peter James Page B

his mouth ended in a small bag, with a tap at the bottom, half filled with a dark fluid. Susan read the labels on the drip lines: Mannitol, Pentastarch, Morphine, Midazolam, Noradrenaline. Keeping him stable. Life support. Preventing him from slipping away, that was all.
    The only signs that he was alive were the steady rising and falling of his chest and the blips of light on the monitor screens.
    She looked at the drip lines into the back of her husband’s hands, and the blue plastic tag bearing his name, then at the equipment again, seeing some machinery and displays that were unfamiliar. Even in the five years since she had left nursing for a commercial job in the pharmaceutical industry, new technology that she did not recognize had come in.
    Nat’s face, a mess of bruises and lacerations, was a ghostly shade of white she had never seen before – he was a fit guy who played a regular game of squash, and normally always had colour in his face despite the long – crazily long – hours of his job. He was strong, tall, with long, fair hair, almost rebelliously long for a doctor, not long past thirty and handsome. So handsome.
    She closed her eyes for an instant to stop the tears coming. So damn sodding handsome. Come on, darling. Come on, Nat, you are going to be OK. You are going to get through this. I love you. I love you so much. I need you. Feeling her stomach, she added,
We both need you.
    She opened her eyes and read the dials on the monitors, the digital displays, the levels, looking for some small sign that could give her hope, and not finding it. His pulse was weak and erratic, his blood oxygen levels way too low, brainwaves scarcely registering on the scale. But surely he was just asleep and would wake up in a moment.
    She had been in the hospital since ten this morning, arriving after the phone call from the police. It was another irony that she had been due to come to this same hospital for a scan today. That was why she had still been at home when the phone rang, instead of at Harcourt Pharmaceuticals, where she worked on the team monitoring clinical trials of new drugs.
    It had helped that she knew her way around the labyrinth of the hospital’s buildings and also that plenty of people who worked here knew her and Nat, so she wasn’t given the usual platitudes and kept out of the way, but instead got straight talking from the medical team, however unpalatable it was.
    By the time she had arrived here, half an hour behind Nat, he was already in the CT unit, having a brain scan. If it had shown a blood clot he would have been transferred to the neurological unit at Hurstwood Park for surgery. But the scan had shown there was massive internal haemorrhaging, which meant there was nothing surgical that could be done. It was a wait and see situation, but it appeared more than likely that he had irreversible brain damage.
    The medical team had stabilized him for four hours in A &E, during which time there had been no change in his condition and his total lack of responsiveness persisted.
    On the Glasgow Coma Score tests, before he had been sedated, Nat had produced a result of 3 out of a possible 15. He had no eye response to any verbal commands, or to pain, or to pressure applied directly to either eye, giving him the minimal score of 1. He gave no verbal response to any questions or comments or commands, giving him a score of 1 on this verbal part of the test. And he had no response to pain, giving him a score of only 1 in the motor response section. The maximum a person could score was 15. The minimum was 3.
    Susan knew what that result meant. A score of 3 was a grim, though not 100 per cent reliable, indicator that Nat was brain dead.
    But miracles happened. In her nursing years in this unit, she had known patients with a score of 3 go on to make full recoveries. OK, it was a tiny percentage, but Nat was strong. He could make it.
    He would!
    The short, friendly Malaysian nurse, Saleha, who had been with Nat