Unsafe Haven

by Betsy Ashton

  “But if I can’t catch it from my daughter, how can I spread it?” The woman who asked this crossed her arms under ample breasts and glared from doctor to doctor, black eyes sparking.

  “I’m running cultures to see if there is more than one pathogen. These organisms need time to grow,” Dr. Gupta continued as if no one had interrupted.

  “I put the samples through our centrifuge to separate the blood into all of its parts and looked at everything under the microscope.” Dr. Klein ground knuckles into his eyes and shook his head. “I don’t understand what I’m seeing.”

  “How can that be? I thought you were one of the best,” the smoker threw at him. Nods from most of the other parents. Tri-lingual muttering filled the momentary silence.

  Dr. Duval stood alongside Dr. Running Bear. “Dr. Klein is the best, but medicine is a science. Like all sciences, it likes to keep its own mysteries. What we are seeing under the microscope is a mystery, because we have never seen this combination of cells before in any outbreak. I give you my promise we will solve it. Now, I need a promise from you. I ask you to stay patient and do as we ask.” She looked into the eyes of each person, then to Johnny and me with a silent plea for help. “Do I have your promise? Mrs. Davies? Mr. Medina?”

  Heads turned toward us. People looked at each other. We nodded. Other heads joined us, albeit reluctantly.

  “Well, what Jerry said makes everything as clear as mud,” Johnny murmured. I bobbed my head again.

  Dr. Anderson’s phone vibrated, and she slipped away as quietly as a cat on the hunt.

  “Thank you all for your support,” Dr. Running Bear said. “We’re going to draw more blood today to see if any of you have changes in the number or kind of pathogens in your veins.” His phone vibrated. He glanced at the screen and cursed. Before anyone could react, he bolted out of the room. No medical staff followed, so I didn’t think it was a crisis in the ICU. I stared out the cafeteria windows facing the front entrance. A flurry of activity broke the isolated quiet of our quarantine. Three more black SUVs pulled up and stopped.

  “Government vehicles,” Johnny whispered. “Wonder which part of the cavalry is coming to the rescue.”

  “We’ll find out soon enough.” Six men and two women exited the vehicles and marched to the locked double doors. Because the entrance vestibule jutted out from the building, I could see Dr. Running Bear standing inside with arms crossed over his chest. Angry voices rose outside, but he didn’t move. He held up one hand, palm outward in an age-old gesture. Halt.

  Ignoring what was going on outside, Dr. Duval waved Toby to the front of the room. “In the next hour, Toby will be around to draw more blood.”

  Dr. Duval left to join the growing group of doctors at the front door. Johnny took my elbow and guided me toward the lobby. Dust motes danced a merry jig in the low sunlight slanting through the windows, swirling through air-conditioning currents and creating a sharp contrast to the dusty black vehicles hulking and snorting just outside the glass.

  I wanted to be outside, to feel the sun on my skin, and to breathe the dry desert air. Living in air conditioning in a closed environment, especially one where the doctors didn’t know the method of disease transmission, spooked me. The windows pressed down as if trying to suffocate me. Johnny wrapped his arms around me from behind, his chin resting on the top of my head. We watched the standoff. Doctors, including the team from the CDC, outnumbered the suits sweating in the late-day heat.

  Dr. Running Bear answered his phone. From the sudden darkening of his skin, I assumed he wasn’t pleased with what he heard. He listened for over two minutes without saying a word before barking an order: “Drive around back. I’ll meet you at the loading dock.”

  We might as well have been will-o-the-wisps, invisible or ignored by Dr. Running Bear. Sharon slipped up behind me. “FBI. They think our outbreak may be man-made.”

  It could be. I thought about Emilie’s message. It could very well be.

  Sharon gestured to Keith, her omnipresent Rottweiler. Together they headed to the loading dock. For once, Johnny and I didn’t follow.

  “Did you know there is a pretty good medical library here?” Johnny asked. “I’ve been doing some rather scary research.”

  “When have you had time?”

  “Mostly when I should have been sleeping,” he admitted.

  What Johnny learned about the only named virus wasn’t reassuring. We knew the symptoms because most of the children exhibited them, and that the virus was found in rodent droppings, but until today no one had told us it couldn’t be transmitted through the air.

  “We now know we probably can’t get sick from Alex, but I’m far from reassured we’re out of danger here. I don’t feel safe, and I want to feel safe,” I said.

  Motes moved across my field of vision. Are they carrying something that could sicken and kill Alex? Or Johnny? Or me?

  “The incubation period for hantavirus is all wrong. Alex fell about six days ago. True, he landed face down in the dirt. And true we’d both commented on the sound of mice and other small animals scurrying around the pine nuts.”

  “And?” I held my breath.

  “I did the math. Initial symptoms show up between four and ten days after exposure, so if Alex really contracted hantavirus through natural means, he had to have been exposed before we reached the ranch. Hantavirus isn’t endemic in Mississippi or Virginia, both places where he was within a week of our coming here.”

  “Could he have a super strain?” I didn’t like where my mind was going, but I was powerless to stop it.

  “I haven’t found any articles describing such a thing, but some of the data is so dense you’d have to be a doctor to decipher it. The symptoms are clearly written for a layman like me to understand, however. It’s perfectly clear that rashes are not part of hantavirus.”

  My entire body stiffened. I shivered again. “So, this isn’t hantavirus?”

  “I’m inclined to believe Dr. Gupta. She’s the expert, and like her, I think something else is going on.” He tightened his arms around me and kissed the top of my head.

  My eyes glazed over as I stared through the glass. The sky was so crystal clear that it might ring like a bell if I flicked it. Movement behind me caught my attention. I refocused my gaze on two new reflections in the window as Dr. Gupta and Sharon walked up behind us.

  “Thank you for believing me, Mrs. Davies. Not all the parents do,” Dr. Gupta said.

  “Please, call me Max.”

  “I’m Johnny.”

  “And I’m Meenu.”

  Sharon told us that the FBI had arrived from the Albuquerque field office. “You should have seen their faces when we stared them down.”

  I had to laugh, even though the situation was hardly funny.

  “Why is the FBI involved?” Johnny asked.

  “Because some cases originated outside the hospital. They want to treat this as a terror attack.” Sharon rolled her eyes. “It isn’t, of course.”

  I didn’t find her composure reassuring. “If the pathogen could have been introduced deliberately by a person, I can understand why the FBI would construe this as terrorism and look into the outbreak.”

  “Unfortunately, as soon as someone mentions terrorism, the world turns upside down. People start believing the most outrageous rumors,” Sharon said. She cautioned us to be circumspect in what we said, even to each other. Johnny looked at me. I looked back. We agreed. My pocket buzzed. So did Johnny’s. Our watchdogs concurred.

  “We don’t know who or what is behind the outbreak,” Sharon said. “Let’s keep our conversations and speculations just among us, okay? If we speak out of turn, we could start a panic.”

  Johnny and I nodded. Until I was certain someone was maliciously infecting the children, I’d keep my thoughts closely guarded and my mouth shut.

  “So, what can the FBI do?” Johnny looked again at the SUVs, most of which were pulling back onto the access road.

  Dr. Gupta said, “Dr.
Duval asked them to interview all the people in the community. We’ll develop the questions. Tick wants to get out into the town, but she can’t because of the quarantine. Until it is safe for her to leave, we’ll let the FBI be our eyes and ears.”

  “Boy, the agent in charge was not amused when he learned his role would be subservient to Dr. Duval. Not any happier than the Rottweiler is,” Sharon said.

  Dr. Gupta changed the subject. “We need your support.”

  “How can we help?” Johnny asked before I could. I was momentarily distracted by two agents, who appeared to be in violent disagreement near the last Suburban. I wondered what it was about.

  Sharon laid a hand on my goose-fleshed arm. “Help the families stay calm. You already set a terrific example through your actions and demeanor. And what you said at the meeting diffused a potentially unpleasant situation.”

  “It’s not like we don’t have an equal amount at stake,” I said. I freed myself from Johnny’s comforting embrace and stood more upright than I thought possible. I wanted to collapse into a puddle of self-pity and fear, but that would have to wait.

  “I don’t want the families to know just how much this isn’t behaving like a normal hantavirus outbreak, if there is any such thing,” Dr. Gupta said. “It would upset them too much. I’m concerned that most don’t trust us to find the solution.”

  “How so?” Johnny asked.

  “Why don’t we go back to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee?” Sharon stepped to my other side and steered Johnny and me away from the window. Dr. Gupta followed. Is there something she doesn’t want us to see, or does she not want to risk being overheard? “I know it’s late in the day, but none of us are getting much sleep. Another jolt of caffeine isn’t likely to change things.”

  My phone buzzed with a text message: She really needs you to intercede with the families. They are so close to panicking. Emilie, once again using her expanding special gift to put my mind at ease.

  I showed the message to Johnny, who squeezed my arm before he batted at his face as if he could stop Ducks from touching him from a distance. I grinned in spite of the gravity of the situation.

  “Who is it? Your granddaughter or her friend?” Sharon asked after Johnny’s reaction. “Dr. Running Bear and one of the nurses, Leena I think her name is, mentioned you have ‘spooky watchdogs’ helping.”

  “I do. My granddaughter with a text, her friend Ducks with a tap on Johnny’s cheek.”

  “I wish he’d stop doing that,” Johnny grouched, still not comfortable with any physical manifestation from either watchdog. “He could just as easily text.”

  Johnny’s phone buzzed. Roger that was the message.

  Once we were settled in with fresh coffee, Sharon turned to me. “I know one of your friends.”

  I had a lot of friends, but none had mentioned knowing the wife of the vice president. Enough moved in the same political and social circles, though, so I hazarded a guess. “You must mean Hank Scott.”

  Johnny and I met him and his wife Valerie Bysbane when they were volunteering at a Habitat village after Hurricane Katrina. Hank was the former secretary of the treasury and a Nobel Prize-winning economist; his wife was a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post. They’d giggled about hiding in plain sight, since few people recognized either of them. Johnny and I enjoyed Friday night potlucks with them for more than six months.

  “That makes three friends we have in common, since I assume you know Val, too,” Sharon smiled. “I was referring to Eleanor Stephans.”

  That fit. Eleanor, my closest friend, mentor, and the alpha Great Dame, knew everyone worth knowing, both inside the government and out. An economist with expertise in rebuilding nations after wars, she was in near-constant demand to speak around the world.

  “I guess I don’t need to ask how you know her.”

  “We’ve been friends for a couple of decades. She’s an amazing woman. Time enough for sharing stories later. Right now, we need to present a united front.”

  Johnny rubbed his forehead. Fatigue magnified his worry lines. “What aren’t you telling us?”

  As it turned out, a lot. Hantavirus was indeed confirmed in several of the children, including Alex, but it wasn’t the only pathogen Dr. Klein found.

  “He’s found pieces of at least four other organisms that he can’t identify.”

  “Pieces?” If Johnny’s frown deepened any further, he’d need Botox to smooth it out.

  “As he said at the meeting today, he’s working day and night to solve the problem,” Dr. Gupta said.

  “So, Alex has hantavirus, but he also has other symptoms that don’t fit that diagnosis,” Johnny said, putting some of his research to good use.

  “Yes and yes. Symptoms vary among the children.” Dr. Gupta rocked her tea cup on the tabletop. “Tick is mapping the outbreak to determine where the clusters of cases are. She wants to know where each set of symptoms started in order to understand the method of transmission, the timing, and the potential origin.”

  Most of the sickest children went to a single school on the reservation, but summer vacation was in full force. The school couldn’t be where they were all infected.

  “Their classmates are being monitored, as are the teachers, but Tick hasn’t found a pattern, much less the initial case. If this were a typical outbreak and the school were the reservoir, we’d see more cluster cases there.”

  I pointed out the obvious. “Well, Alex doesn’t go to school here. Okay. If Alex has hantavirus plus another pathogen, how did he get it? We’ve been to Johnny’s ranch, a ride up into the foothills, and here. The only thing all of the sick children seem to have in common is the hospital.”

  “Alex has something else, too.” Dr. Gupta looked grave. “Jerry doesn’t know what it is, but whatever it is, it doesn’t occur here naturally.”

  “That’s true. Other children were brought in after they got sick. So far, only Alex seems to have arrived in a healthy state,” Sharon said.

  “What about the baby? How did it get infected?” Johnny asked.

  “I have no idea,” Meenu said. “He’s about six months old. We sent CDC inspectors from Albuquerque to his house, but they haven’t found any sign of rodents. The house is clean, but he’s gravely ill.”

  “Will the FBI do a thorough assessment?” Logic told me that the FBI was the agency best suited to eliminate all extraneous information.

  “It will.”

  “Go on, Meenu,” Sharon said. “Tell them everything.”

  “We have new symptoms.”

  Some children had signs of rash on their faces and torsos and complained of pain in their lymph nodes like Alex did. Others had worsening coughs and presented pneumonia-like symptoms, one with pulmonary edema, or swelling in the lungs. Again, like Alex, these children were on oxygen. The child with edema was on a ventilator and not expected to survive.

  “Which child is it?” The parents would need our support managing the reality of their loss.

  “The girl two doors up from Alex.”

  The room where the mother never left her daughter’s bedside.

  “You said this combination of symptoms doesn’t occur in nature.” I knew I didn’t like where this was heading. No way, no how could this be good news. “Why is someone targeting children in the hospital and in the community at large?”

  Ducks buzzed in with a text on Johnny’s phone. Don’t ask why; ask who. Johnny held it out to the two doctors.

  “Can he read minds now?” Johnny asked.

  “It would seem that both he and Em can eavesdrop move closely than I’ve ever seen. It could also be that we are transmitting our feelings very strongly,” I said.

  Sharon lowered her voice so that it didn’t carry beyond the edges of our table. “We think these pathogens have been purposefully released into the community. It’s as if someone is using this hospital as a giant Petri dish.”

  Silence hovered over our coffee cups. Reaching hands froze in mid-air. No one moved
as each of us processed the information.

  Before I could respond, Toby chirped his way into the cafeteria. “There you are. Time for Toby Vampire to take more blood.” He pointed to Johnny and me. “You two stay. The doctors can leave.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  TOBY STABBED A needle into my vein and filled two syringes with blood. He’d done this so many times daily that I barely paid attention—his incessant chatter made me want to throttle him.

  “Now, don’t you worry. We’ll find out what’s going on soon.” He removed the needle and bent my arm over a cotton pad. My arm ached slightly. He turned to Johnny. “Your turn, big guy.”

  My mind tossed like an unruly ocean current. The phrase, a giant Petri dish, gnawed at my brain like a nest of fire ants.

  Could it be that someone released this whatever-it-is on purpose? Why is someone trying to kill the children? And what about the few adults who’ve fallen ill? Are they of a similar ethnic background? Of the same socio-economic level? From the same physical location? In the wrong place at the wrong time, like Alex? How much of the release was targeted at specific people, if someone is acting intentionally? How are they transmitting the pathogen? And who the hell has access to it?

  I pressed my lips together, afraid I’d blurt out a question that should be kept secret. Toby finished with Johnny and dashed away.

  “He should count himself lucky I didn’t strangle him,” I growled.

  “He won’t shut up, will he?”

  Johnny and I left the cafeteria, fresh Band-Aids in the crooks of our elbows. I squeezed Johnny’s hand. We needed to talk alone. I wanted his advice on the thousand questions elbowing for room in my mind.

  “Did you notice how he said he was helping find out what was going on?” I picked at the edge of the Band-Aid. “Is he giving himself a role he wishes he had? Something doesn’t feel right. Did you see him break the seal on the needle before he stuck you?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t watching him.”

  Just like me, I had to admit.

  Before we reached the stairs to the second floor, my phone rang.