"Holly Lisle - Sympathy for the Devil" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

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