Hideaway by Dean Koontz Page B

EKG showed escalating arrhythmia that could lead only to cardiac arrest.
    No longer sweating, calmer now that the decision to fight Death had been made and was being acted upon, Jonas said, “Better hit him with it.”
    No one doubted to whom he was speaking, and Ken Nakamura pressed the cold pads of the defibrillation machine to Harrison's chest, bracketing his heart. The electrical discharge caused the patient to bounce violently against the table, and a sound like an iron mallet striking a leather sofa— wham! —slammed through the room.
    Jonas looked at the electrocardiograph just as Kari read the meaning of the spikes of light moving across the display: “Still two hundred a minute but the rhythm's there now … steady … steady.”
    Similarly, the electroencephalograph showed alpha and beta brain waves within normal parameters for an unconscious man.
    “There's self-sustained pulmonary activity,” Ken said.
    “Okay,” Jonas decided, “let's respirate him and make sure he's getting enough oxygen in those brain cells.”
    Gina immediately put the oxygen mask on Harrison's face.
    “Body temperature's at ninety degrees,” Helga reported.
    The patient's lips were still somewhat blue, but that same deathly hue had faded from under his fingernails.
    Likewise, his muscle tone was partially restored. His flesh no longer had the flaccidity of the dead. As feeling returned to Harrison's deep-chilled extremities, his punished nerve endings excited a host of tics and twitches.
    His eyes rolled and jiggled under his closed lids, a sure sign of REM sleep. He was dreaming.
    “One hundred and twenty beats a minute,” Kari said, “and declining … completely rhythmic now … very steady.”
    Gina consulted her watch and let her breath out in a whoosh of amazement. “Eighty minutes.”
    “Sonofabitch,” Ken said wonderingly, “that beats the record by ten.”
    Jonas hesitated only a brief moment before checking the wall clock and making the formal announcement for the benefit of the tape recorder: “Patient successfully resuscitated as of nine-thirty-two Monday evening, March fourth.”
    A murmur of mutual congratulations accompanied by smiles of relief was as close as they would get to a triumphant cheer of the sort that might have been heard on a real battleground. They were not restrained by modesty but by a keen awareness of Harrison's tenuous condition. They had won the battle with Death, but their patient had not yet regained consciousness. Until he was awake and his mental performance could be tested and evaluated, there was a chance that he had been reanimated only to live out a life of anguish and frustration, his potential tragically circumscribed by irreparable brain damage.

12
    Enraptured by the spicy perfume of death, at home in the subterranean bleakness, Vassago walked admiringly past his collection. It encircled one-third of the colossal Lucifer.
    Of the male specimens, one had been taken while changing a flat tire on a lonely section of the Ortega Highway at night. Another had been asleep in his car in a public-beach parking lot. The third had tried to pick up Vassago at a bar in Dana Point. The dive hadn't even been a gay hangout; the guy had just been drunk, desperate, lonely—and careless.
    Nothing enraged Vassago more than the sexual needs and excitement of others. He had no interest in sex any more, and he never raped any of the women he killed. But his disgust and anger, engendered by the mere perception of sexuality in others, were not a result of jealousy, and did not spring from any sense that his impotency was a curse or even an unfair burden. No, he was glad to be free of lust and longing. Since becoming a citizen of the borderland and accepting the promise of the grave, he did not regret the loss of desire. Though he was not entirely sure why the very thought of sex could sometimes throw him into a rage, why a flirtatious wink or a short skirt or a sweater stretched across a full bosom