Read Online Hideaway by Dean Koontz - Free Book Online Page A

appearance and higher energy levels. Free radicals were a by-product of ordinary metabolic processes and were always present in the system. But when the body was deprived of oxygenated blood for an extended period, even with the protection of hypothermia, huge pools of free radicals were created in excess of anything the body had to deal with normally. When the heart was started again, renewed circulation swept those destructive molecules through the brain, where their impact was devastating.
    The vitamin and chemical scavengers would deal with the free radicals before they could cause any irreversible damage. At least that was the hope.
    Jonas inserted the three syringes in different ports that fed the main intravenous line in the patient's thigh, but he did not yet inject the contents.
    “Sixty-five minutes,” Gina said.
    A long time dead, Jonas thought.
    It was very near the record for a successful reanimation.
    In spite of the cool air, Jonas felt sweat breaking out on his scalp, under his thinning hair. He always got too involved, emotional. Some of his colleagues disapproved of his excessive empathy; they believed a judicious perspective was insured by the maintenance of a professional distance between the doctor and those he treated. But no patient was just a patient. Every one of them was loved and needed by someone. Jonas was acutely aware that if he failed a patient, he was failing more than one person, bringing pain and suffering to a wide network of relatives and friends. Even when he was treating someone like Harrison, of whom Jonas knew virtually nothing, he began to imagine the lives interlinking with that of the patient, and he felt responsible to them as much as he would have if he had known them intimately.
    “The guy looks clean,” Ken said, turning away from the X rays and sonograms. “No broken bones. No internal injuries.”
    “But those sonograms were taken after he was dead,” Jonas noted, “so they don't show functioning organs.”
    “Right. We'll snap some pictures again when he's reanimated, make sure nothing's ruptured, but it looks good so far.”
    Straightening up from her examination of the dead man's eyes, Kari Dovell said, “There might be concussion to deal with. Hard to say from what I can see.”
    “Sixty-six minutes.”
    “Seconds count here. Be ready, people,” Jonas said, although he knew they were ready.
    The cool air couldn't reach his head because of his surgical cap, but the sweat on his scalp felt icy. Shivers cascaded through him.
    Blood, heated to one hundred degrees, began to move through the clear plastic IV line and into the body through a thigh vein, surging rhythmically to the artificial pulse of the bypass machine.
    Jonas depressed the plungers halfway on each of the three syringes, introducing heavy doses of the free-radical scavengers into the first blood passing through the line. He waited less than a minute, then swiftly depressed the plungers all the way.
    Helga had already prepared three more syringes according to his instructions. He removed the depleted ones from the IV ports and introduced the full syringes without injecting any of their contents.
    Ken had moved the portable defibrillation machine next to the patient. Subsequent to reanimation, if Harrison's heart began to beat erratically or chaotically—fibrillation—it might be coerced into a normal rhythm by the application of an electric shock. That was a last-hope strategy, however, for violent defibrillation could also have a serious adverse effect on a patient who, having been recently brought back from the dead, was in an exceptionally fragile state.
    Consulting the digital thermometer, Kari said, “His body temperature's up to only fifty-six degrees.”
    “Sixty-seven minutes,” Gina said.
    “Too slow,” Jonas said.
    “External heat?”
    Jonas hesitated.
    “Let's go for it,” Ken advised.
    “Fifty-seven degrees,” Kari said.
    “At this rate,” Helga said worriedly, “we're going