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It was the middle of the night, but Nick lay awake, listening to the steady hiss of Brian’s ventilator with tears streaming down his face.

The guilt he felt was overwhelming. Brian was brain dead, and it was all his fault. If not for Nick, Brian never would have come to Key West, and he wouldn’t have been in that car when it crashed. If not for Nick, Brian would still be at home, alive and unharmed. This is karma, Nick realized miserably. This is what I get for leaving my grieving wife and sleeping with another woman, for almost drinking myself to death over my stillborn daughter instead of staying healthy for my son. My best friend is going to die because of me, and I’m going to have to live with his heart beating inside my body. The thought made him feel sick to his stomach. He knew he would never be able to forgive himself for what had happened to Brian.

“I’m sorry, bro,” he whispered through the darkness. “I wish it was me. It should’ve been me.” How many times had he been brought back from the brink of death in the past few weeks? Even now, he could feel his poor heart fluttering precariously in his chest. The monitor behind his bed began to beep faster, its rhythm syncopated by his fluctuating heart rate. He rested his hand on his chest and took a deep breath, trying to help it relax.

Across the room, he could hear the slow, steady blip of Brian’s monitor. “His heart’s perfectly healthy,” he remembered Dr. Elizabeth telling him. “It’s in great shape.”

“It’s not fair,” Nick said aloud, shaking his head. “If I could take your place, believe me, I would. In a heartbeat.”

If only there was a way to give Brian his brain, instead of taking his heart. But then he wouldn’t be Brian anymore, Nick realized. He’d be me, but with Brian’s body. The thought made his head hurt, but he knew he was right. The part of Brian that was responsible for his personality, his thoughts and memories, everything that made him the person he had been was dead. The body lying in his bed was nothing but a receptacle for his organs, which were being pumped full of oxygen and fluids to keep them functioning until they could be taken out and transplanted into other people. It looked like his best friend… but it wasn’t Brian. Not really.

Nick knew there was no point in talking to a dead body, but he wanted to believe Brian could still hear him somehow, whether his soul was already in Heaven or still stuck inside the shell of his body. “I love you, brother,” he said hoarsely, a lump swelling in his throat.

It might have just been Nick’s imagination, but he could have sworn he heard Brian’s heart monitor start beeping faster. He sat up, craning his neck so he could see the screen. He had to squint to make out the numbers, but after being hospitalized for so long, he now knew what they meant. Brian’s heart had been beating sixty times per minute, which was at the low end of the normal range. But as Nick watched, Brian’s heart rate suddenly rose to sixty-seven.

Maybe he can hear me, thought Nick with wonder. What else would make his heart rate go up like that?

He was afraid to get his hopes up, but he had to find out. “Brian?” he called across the room. “Can you hear me, bro?” And to his astonishment, Brian’s heart rate spiked to seventy-one before his eyes.

Nick’s own heart was beating faster now, too. “You can hear me, can’t you?” He could hardly believe what he was seeing, but the numbers didn’t lie. Brian’s heart was up to seventy-nine beats per minute, even though he was still lying motionless in bed. It had to be reacting to something, and Nick was convinced it was his voice.

“Dr. Elizabeth thinks you’re brain dead,” he said, watching Brian’s heart rate climb above eighty. “But you’re not. I know you’re not.” He felt defiant, eager to prove Elizabeth wrong. But first he needed definitive evidence that he was right.

He punched his call button, but was too impatient to wait for one of the nurses - probably Patrick - to respond. He didn’t need help to get up anyway; he had done it the previous night with no problem. He repeated the process of unplugging or removing as much of the equipment as he could, freeing himself from the tethers that were attached to the wall. Ignoring the alarms he had triggered, he climbed carefully out of bed. His legs were still shaky, and he had to cling to the bed rail for several seconds before he found his footing. He reached for his IV stand, holding onto it to help himself stay balanced as he took baby steps towards Brian.

Moving at a sloth’s pace, Nick pulled Elizabeth’s stool up next to Brian’s bed and sat down. He was already breathing hard, his heart beating fast from the physical effort he had exerted. Feeling anxious, he pressed two fingers to the side of his neck, as he’d seen Dani do so many times before, and found his pulse. He felt it pounding firmly against his fingertips and decided it seemed steady enough. Dropping his hand, he reached for Brian’s. “I’m right here, Frick,” he said, squeezing Brian’s hand. “You still with me, man?”

He waited for Brian’s finger to twitch, watching his face closely to see if his eyelids would flutter. But unlike the night before, nothing happened - at least, not on the outside. Brian didn’t appear to move a muscle, but his heartbeat accelerated again. Nick’s breath caught in his throat as he stared up at the monitor, watching Brian’s heart rate rise in response to his presence. “Yes, you are. You are still in there,” he whispered, squeezing Brian’s hand even harder.

After watching him fail every one of Dr. Elizabeth’s tests, Nick didn’t understand how it was possible, but Brian definitely wasn’t brain dead. He was convinced Brian could not only hear him, but comprehend what he was saying - which meant he must still have some cognitive function after all. It may have defied medical explanation, but Nick didn’t care. Brian had long held a belief in miracles, claiming to have been healed by the Lord’s hands when he was five. Now Nick believed in them, too.

“I’m starting to think you’re immortal or something,” he told Brian, laughing through the lump that had lodged into his throat. “But then, you’ve always been a lot stronger than you look. Remember you told me about how you tried out for the high school basketball team, but got cut because you were too short? Hell, bro, you’re one of the best basketball players I know. I’ve got like six inches on you, and you’re still better than me. You’ve always been the Jordan to my Pippen.” He shook his head ruefully, blinking back the tears that had risen in his eyes. “I knew you wouldn’t go down without a fight, dude,” he added, gripping Brian’s hand tightly. “You just gotta keep fighting, okay? Keep proving people wrong.”

Swallowing hard, he glanced again at the monitor. Brian’s heart was pumping at a rate of ninety-one beats per minute now, and there was not a doubt left in Nick’s mind that he was listening. “Fuck what Dr. Elizabeth says,” Nick declared triumphantly. “I can’t wait to see the look on her face when she finds out you’re still alive!”

He found Brian’s bed controls and pressed his call button. Still, no one came. Dani and Elizabeth were most likely asleep by now, and Patrick was probably lying low, afraid of facing Nick after what had happened the night before. Nick felt annoyed; what if there had been an emergency? He knew he needed a witness, someone to observe the way Brian’s heart was responding to his voice. He worried no one would believe him if he waited until morning to tell them. He couldn’t trust them to take his word for it; he had to show them now, while it was obvious. He would just have to find one of them himself.

“I’m gonna go get someone so we can show them, okay? I’ll be right back,” he said reassuringly, patting the back of Brian’s hand before he let go. Gripping the bed rail for support, he stood up slowly and shoved the stool aside. Then he shuffled back across the floor, wheeling his IV stand alongside him. He walked past his bed to the doorway, where he paused to catch his breath before continuing through it.

The hallway was empty. Nick looked left and right, wondering which way the nurses station was. He remembered his bed being wheeled to the right when he was taken into surgery to have his ICD implanted, so this time, he decided to turn left. He stayed close to the wall, hoping it would help break his fall if he were to faint again. He hadn’t forgotten his ill-fated first attempt to walk to the nurses station, when he’d ended up on the floor. He could still feel his heart fluttering in his chest, but he wasn’t as woozy as he had been before. Aside from the weakness in his legs, he actually felt all right. Nick didn’t know if the drugs were finally working or if it was pure adrenaline that was helping his weakened heart pump hard enough to keep up with the demands he was putting on it. As long as it kept beating, he didn’t care. All that mattered to him at that moment was Brian.

Nick made his way slowly down the dimly-lit hall, running one hand along the red stripe on the wall while he hung on to his IV pole with the other. Suddenly, he was struck by a wave of deja vu. In his head, he could picture Brian walking down a similar hallway, people running past him in slow motion. Then it hit him: he was remembering the hospital scene from their music video for "Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely." The set had looked just like this hallway, with a red horizontal stripe painted across the white walls. No wonder it seemed so familiar.

He had a weird feeling inside that didn’t seem to have anything to do with his heart, but he kept walking, determined to find Dani, Dr. Elizabeth, or even Patrick so he could prove Brian wasn’t brain dead.

As he rounded the corner, Nick expected to see the nurses station ahead of him, but instead, there was nothing but a closed door at the end of the hall. He continued toward it. A sign on the door said Preparation Room. Through the small, rectangular window, Nick could see a wall of cabinets with a countertop and sink. Deciding this must be the staff’s break room, he cracked open the door and peeked inside.

He was expecting to find a table and chairs where the doctors and nurses could sit down to eat or do their paperwork, perhaps a couple of comfortable couches for them to lounge on. Nothing could have prepared him for what he saw instead.

The only piece of furniture in the small room was a stainless steel table, which was rattling rhythmically under the weight of the two people having sex on top of it. He recognized Patrick first: red-faced and sweaty, the nurse was panting hard as he humped the naked woman beneath him, his fleshy body flopping about like a beached whale. Nick’s jaw dropped, his eyes widening as they took in that which they would never be able to unsee. He wanted to back out of the room, but his feet remained frozen in place as he watched with equal parts fascination and repulsion. It was like passing by a bad car wreck: he knew he shouldn’t look, but he couldn’t bring himself to turn his head the other way.

At first, he thought the woman with Patrick was Elizabeth, but no, her hair was darker than his doctor’s, her complexion far too fair. Even compared to Patrick’s pasty coloring, his partner was distinctly pale. The arm she had draped over his shoulder was fish-belly white with bruise-like blue blotches, giving her skin an almost marbled appearance. Nick was just starting to wonder if she was part of the staff or another patient when Patrick suddenly shifted his weight. The woman’s hand slid off his back, her whole arm flopping straight down like a broken branch falling from a tree. There was something strangely familiar about the sight of it hanging limply over the edge of the table.

As Nick’s eyes moved across her nude body, he saw a marking that made his blood run cold: a caged bird tattooed beneath her right breast. That was enough to trigger his memory. In his mind’s eye, he could see Dani hovering over her body with her hands planted between the woman’s breasts, pumping her chest up and down. He could hear Rob’s defeated voice saying, “I’m calling it. Time of death…” while the heart monitor wailed on in the background. He could remember being transfixed by the woman’s expressionless face, her glassy gray eyes open but out of focus. He didn’t have to see her eyes now to know without a doubt that this was the same woman he had watched die over two weeks ago - and, judging by her mottled skin, she was now in the early stages of decomposition.

His stomach lurched, its contents threatening to erupt, as Patrick went on defiling the woman’s corpse. Nick drew in a sharp breath and held it as he ducked back into the hallway, afraid he would gag if he allowed himself to inhale again before he had closed the door.

Unfortunately, Patrick heard him gasp. The nurse’s head snapped up, turning towards the source of the sound. His eyes grew huge as they locked with Nick’s, looking both guilty and terrified.

Nick took another step backward and tripped over the base of his IV stand. He lost his balance and fell to the floor, landing hard on his tailbone and taking the IV stand down with him. The metal pole toppled over with a tremendous crash, and the bag burst, spilling clear fluid all over the tile floor.

The racket was enough to bring Dr. Elizabeth running. “Nick!” she cried, when she rounded the corner and saw him lying in a heap at the end of the hall. “What on earth are you doing all the way down here? You know you’re not supposed to be out of bed!”

Nick was breathing hard, still stunned by what had happened. His mind raced as he tried to remember how he had ended up there in the first place. “Brian!” he gasped hoarsely, his heart pounding hard against his ribs. “He’s not… he’s not brain dead. I… I pressed my call button, but nobody came, so I went looking for a nurse… and I found…” He shook his head, unable to put into words what he had just witnessed. “...Patrick,” he whispered, pointing to the preparation room. All Elizabeth had to do was look inside, and she would see the same horror Nick had seen.

Her eyes followed the path of his trembling finger, but she did not poke her head through the door. Instead, she looked back at Nick with a strange expression on her face. “I sure wish you hadn’t seen that,” she said softly.

While Nick was wondering what that was supposed to mean, he saw her reach into the front pocket of her white coat and pull out a syringe. “Wait… what are you-?” he started to splutter, but before he could get the words out, Elizabeth plunged the needle into his neck. Ignoring Nick’s protests, his cries of pain and confusion, she injected the entire contents of the syringe into his central line.

Light-headed and woozy as he was, Nick still tried to scramble to his feet, but found that he no longer had the strength to stand. The ceiling felt like it was spinning over his head, more like a funhouse than a hospital. His heart hammered frantically in his throat, forcing the drug through his veins. The hallway began to look like a dark tunnel, as blackness closed in on him from both sides. Even as his vision faded, the image of Patrick violating his former roommate’s corpse remained clear in his mind until Nick finally lost consciousness and collapsed, his head hitting the cold floor.

***