Dayne stripped out of her scrubs and threw them in a pile on the floor. She fished through the dryer and found a T-shirt, a pair of shorts and a pair of thick socks; she tugged those on angrily, then stormed around until she managed to locate her sneakers. She didn't pet either of the cats that twined around her ankles hoping for attention. She didn't check the messages on her answering machine, though the blinking light indicated that there were four—more than usual.
She ran up the stairs two at a time to the second floor of her two-story apartment, into the spare bedroom that she used as a gym, and moved the setting on her stair-stepper up to FAST.
She was furious—angrier than she had ever been. She was angry with Dr. Batskold, with herself, with the universe in general. She climbed on the stair-stepper, checked her watch, and started off at a running pace.
Mrs. Paulley had died twice more on the same shift. Both times, Dr. Batskold managed to get her back, and both times he gloated as if he'd done something wonderful.
Dayne's other patient, a young man who'd tried to kill himself with household chemicals and who didn't have any kidneys anymore, had gone into withdrawal from the other drugs he apparently had been taking without anyone knowing. She didn't even want to think about what she'd had to do to him. He'd sobbed and cried and begged her to just let him die—and she'd kept right on working on him, because it was her job, because she was a nurse and that was what nurses did. The Nazis had used the same excuse when questioned—they'd been following orders.
"Just like me. I feel like a damned Nazi. No I don't—I feel like Hell's chief torturer," Dayne snarled, pumping on the stair-stepper. She ran upstairs for twenty minutes, as fast as she could push the machine, then jumped off, sweating and breathing hard, and dropped to the floor. She did a hundred push-ups military-style, rested a moment, did a hundred more, rested a moment, and did a third set. She got up and settled onto the Roman chair, and did Roman chair sit-ups, two hundred and fifty at a time.
It didn't help. The anger still burned in her belly, hot and steady and real. She wasn't just angry about the things that had happened that day; the torture she'd put her patients through had wakened that other, older anger. And as mad as Dayne was at Batskold, she was madder at God. She blew through bench presses and flyes and lat pulldowns and rows and squats, pushing herself harder and harder, trying to take herself to a place beyond the anger—but there was no place inside her that the anger didn't touch.
She put the weights down at last and stood in the center of the room, breathing hard, and she faced the fears that ate at her.
More than once, she'd looked at herself as a torturer—as the person who did terrible things to nice little old ladies and to sweet old men, to people who were helpless and hopeless. She was only half joking when, talking with friends, she referred to her job as the job from Hell. One thing kept her in nursing—the fact that sometimes the terrible things she did to her patients made them better. Sometimes she was able to make things right.
But Dayne believed in Hell—in a real, literal Hell where the souls of the damned went to be tormented for eternity. She believed in Heaven, too, but thoughts of Heaven hadn't given her much solace in the four years since her husband Torry died.
She'd loved him. He drank, he ran around on her, he got into trouble, he was a failure as a husband and as a human being—but for the whole three years they were married, she'd loved him.
He died the way he'd lived—driving fast, stone drunk, with a woman who was not his wife in the car with him. He'd smashed into a telephone pole going at better than a hundred miles an hour, and he and his most recent girlfriend had flashed out of existence before they'd had a chance to know what happened to them.
And right now, Dayne thought, down in Hell, someone was torturing Torry.
She stood in the center of that room, thinking of the pain she inflicted—and the fact that she inflicted it as gently and quickly as she could, and of the fact that it ended—that no matter how badly she hurt the people she cared for, their pain ended. Dr. Batskold couldn't make them live forever, even though he tried. Sooner or later they would die and escape.
Torry couldn't escape. And when the universe blew out of existence and all of Time came to an end, someone would still be torturing Torry.
He'd been twenty-four when he died—young and beautiful and foolish. His fundamentalist parents had jammed religion down his throat until he'd thrown it up; he'd come to despise churches and religion and everything he connected with them, and his life had been one big attempt to spit in God's eye. Dayne had loved him anyway—not wisely, but with her whole heart.
In spite of everything, she still loved him—and for four years, she'd gotten up every morning and gone to bed every night, thinking of Torry in Hell.
This day, this hellish day that had come hard on the heels of a week of hellish days, had brought thoughts of Torry to the front of her mind, and heated up her anger until she couldn't hold it in anymore.
She looked up toward Heaven, and with her eyes wide open, she said, "Okay, God. I've had it. I've thought about this until I can't stand to think about it anymore, and now we're going to have to do something about it. You said that whatever we asked of you, if we had faith, you would give to us." She took a deep breath, and her hands clenched into fists.
"Hell is all wrong. You claim that we have free choice—the choice to love you or not, to follow you or not. But there isn't any choice to it. If a thief held a gun to my head and told me to give him my car keys or he'd kill me, I'd give him my keys . . . but nobody would say I did so of my own free will. And if he stuck the same gun to my head and told me to love him or else, I might pretend to love him . . . at least until I got hold of the gun.
"You're holding a gun to our heads, God. You're saying `Love me or writhe in torment for eternity' and eternal torment is a pretty damned big gun for anything a person could do in eighty years.
"You claim to be a God of love. I say that only a sadistic, spoiled child would torture someone for eternity, no matter what reason he had."
She exhaled slowly, and her eyes narrowed. "You said ask and believe. So now I'm asking. Let them have the chance to repent, God. All of them. Every single soul in Hell. Let them have the chance to learn from the mistakes they made; let them into Heaven if they repent.
"Until you do this, you can consider me a conscientious objector, protesting the policies of Heaven. When I die, you can send me to Hell, because I won't go to Heaven until every soul can find a way there, God. Every soul. No matter who they were, no matter what they did.
"Eternity is too long for a loving God to condone the torture of his children."
Sweat ran down Dayne's face, mixing with her tears. She stood defiant, with her back straight and her head high, holding her own soul over the abyss, because her soul was the only thing she knew for sure God valued. She held her challenge up to God. She meant every word she said, with everything inside of her. And she believed.