by Betsy Ashton
Nurse Leena looked troubled. “Let me get someone more technical than I am to dig into this.”
My watchdogs had added Nurse Leena to their network. Although she wasn’t quite as in tune with them as I was, she was in close touch with similar spiritual leaders in her own community.
“I wish I knew what to make of this outbreak. Too many symptoms, too many contradictions for it to be occurring without help,” she murmured.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m certain the outbreak is caused by human intervention.” Leena closed the laptop and walked to the door.
“Like someone introducing something into the hospital?” I asked, relieved that my watchdogs weren’t the only ones operating with that suspicion.
“Yes.” She told me a couple of shamans were going to perform another healing ceremony on the hospital grounds in a day or so. They were currently purifying themselves in a sweat lodge. “They’ll try to drive the demons out.”
“And what if the demon is human?” I asked. Ducks tapped my cheek encouragingly. “How do we drive him out?”
Leena looked at me, dark eyes impenetrable. “I have no idea.”
Two and a half hours later, Toby took Alex downstairs for his CT scan. I went to find Johnny, who wasn’t in our room or in the cafeteria. I grabbed a bottle of water and dropped into the medical library. No Johnny. He had to be in the conference-room-cum-diagnosis-lab.
Floor tiles stretched in front of me. Not bothering to resist the urge, I played hopscotch down the length of the corridor. I was glad no one saw me. It felt good to act goofy for a minute or two.
I found Johnny standing near Dr. Duval, who was in deep conversation with Sharon. They didn’t notice Dr. White let me in. I walked over to Alex’s board. New entries in red screamed at me. Johnny pointed at one word underlined in red on three boards—pox. My breath caught in my throat, leaving me light-headed.
“Oh my God. Does that say what I think it says?”
Dr. Duval turned. “Yes, Mrs. Davies. Alex has some form of pox. His rash has formed small blisters in the last few hours. It is not the pustules we expect to see, not like the girl has.”
“Or the orderly,” I added, but I couldn’t shake the chill that ran across my shoulders.
“That is correct. It is not smallpox, so do not jump to that conclusion. That was eradicated back in the seventies,” she assured me.
“But smallpox still exists in some labs, doesn’t it?” Johnny and his damned research again.
“Yes, Mr. Medina. We have frozen samples, and so does Russia. Both are officially locked in the most secure areas in the world. I repeat, this is not smallpox,” Dr. Duval said.
I struggled to stay calm. “Other than chickenpox and smallpox, what other kind of poxes are there?”
“Has Alex had chickenpox?” Sharon deflected my question with one of her own. She hadn’t been present when Dr. Gupta took our health histories. With the change in some data on Dr. White’s boards, all the information had to be validated anew.
“He did when he was four. His mother said he was the most miserable little boy she’d ever seen. He spiked a 105 fever and was hours away from being admitted to a hospital when the fever broke.”
I thought back on Merry’s frantic phone calls. She wouldn’t let me come down to help, so I comforted her as much as she would allow from a distance. “He should be immune, shouldn’t he?”
“This is not chickenpox. Neither is it shingles.” Dr. Duval’s eyes never stopped moving from board to board.
“Isn’t shingles something only older people get?” I asked. My friend Grace once had an attack and was in dreadful pain for weeks until the last of the blisters disappeared.
“We rarely see it in a child. Besides, the blood work shows no sign of varicella-zoster, the virus that causes chickenpox and shingles. Rule that out.” Dr. Duval’s island intonation, so lilting, so gentle, should have calmed me, but it didn’t.
“What do we rule in, then?” Sharon pointed to three additional boards where pox also appeared in red. One was the little girl next to Alex. One was the first child who died. And the newest was was an older child recently admitted.
“Did that first child die from pox?” I asked.
“We do not know. We know he had a form of pox when he died. If it was the cause of his death, we are not sure.”
“Didn’t the autopsy tell you?” Again, Johnny with a question designed to drag more information from the doctors. I wished for a moment he hadn’t done so much research, taking away my ability to retreat into comforting ignorance. He was right, though.
“Is Johnny on the right track? What did the autopsy show?”
A new voice joined the discussion. “It showed us too much.”
Dr. Klein, the pathologist, walked in with a fistful of paper. I hadn’t heard his knock or noticed Dr. White open the door, so deep was I into the enormity of what the doctors faced.
“I’ve run a dozen different tests on his blood and other tissues, as well as on the samples taken from all the patients. So far, what I have is a viral and possibly bacterial stew.”
That didn’t sound very professional, but I got the gist. “Back to that spilled jigsaw puzzle, huh?”
Dr. Duval, Sharon, and Dr. Klein were lost. I explained the metaphor Dr. White and I had used.
“Every time I think I have the answer, all I have is another question,” Dr. Klein said, staring at reports in his hand. He shook his head and focused on the floor. My gut said he was looking for clues that either didn’t exist or were confusingly plentiful. I doubted he’d find the answers in tile patterns. Maybe he should play hopscotch with me to clear his mind.
Dr. Duval pointed to the word that terrified me. Pox. “We must focus on this first. Have you isolated the virus that is causing Alex’s symptoms?”
“Yes and no,” Dr. Klein said.
Johnny put his arm around my shoulders.
“What I have looks like a virus smoothie, if you’ll forgive the metaphor. It’s as if a bunch of viruses were tossed in a blender. Some are such tiny fragments that most likely can’t infect anyone, while others appear whole but damaged. And still others are larger than normal. I can’t figure out which are active and which ones are dormant.”
Dr. Klein sounded and looked exhausted. I doubted he’d slept much since the CDC got here.
“I’m running cultures on everything,” he finished.
“It is time for the daily briefing. We will keep this among the five of us for now. I will speak with Dr. Running Bear in private. There is no need to panic the parents. Jerry, brief Tick, will you?” Dr. Duval asked before leading us toward the cafeteria.
“And I’m not panicked?” I whispered to Johnny. He squeezed my shoulder. Halfway down the corridor, I realized Dr. Duval never answered my question: What other types of pox were there?
###
Instead of a brief meeting with medical updates, Dr. Running Bear stood beside Keith the Rottweiler, whose face was purple with fury. A revolver lay on the table in front of him.
Uh oh. I looked at it quickly. “Whew. Not mine,” I whispered to Johnny. “Mine’s in my handbag back in our room.”
“My Sig’s in my kit,” Johnny whispered back.
“We were searching the hospital with Dr. Running Bear this morning, when we found this in an unlocked file drawer in a nurses’ station on the second floor.” Keith’s body language dared someone to claim the gun. He held it up. “Whose is this?”
A mousy nurse raised her hand. “It’s mine.”
“Take her away.” Two agents levered themselves from the wall and took a step and a half toward the terrified nurse.
“Wait,” Dr. Running Bear said, his voice low but authoritative. He held up a hand. “Don’t jump to conclusions.”
“What conclusion should I draw, Dr. Running Bear?” the Rottweiler sneered. “Our advance team warned the staff that guns would not be allowed on the premises when the vice president’s wife was visitin
g. This nurse is in clear violation of our safety protocols.”
“I don’t remember any such warning,” Dr. Running Bear said.
“Whether you remember or not is irrelevant. We always secure a facility. No guns of any kind. This breach won’t be tolerated.
“Where did you get this?” Keith demanded. He turned toward the nurse, who was doing her best not to quake. The two agents moved closer.
“I brought it to work. I have a license to carry it.” Her voice quivered, and a tear trickled down her cheek. “I always lock it in my desk or in a cabinet. I must have forgotten with the scramble to care for all the sick children. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” Keith’s face turned an even darker shade.
“You may have noticed, agent, that the territory around the hospital is damned empty.”
Dr. Running Bear glanced around the room, nodding to the assembled staff and parents. He gestured to the vista outside. “I encourage my nurses and doctors to arm themselves, particularly when many of us work nights. It’s for our own safety.”
Keith looked at the crowd in front of him. “How the hell many of you have guns?”
Every nurse and doctor raised a hand. So did several of the parents. I raised mine, as did Johnny.
“How the hell many of you brought your guns into the hospital?”
The same hands stayed up.
“Jesus.” He scanned every face.
“The guns wouldn’t be much good if they were at home or in our cars, would they?” Dr. Running Bear gestured for his nurse to take her seat.
Sharon broke the tension by laughing. “As my kids would say, get over it, Keith. Let’s let this little ‘oversight’ not bother us any longer.”
“Welcome to Wild West, agent,” Dr. Running Bear joined in the laughter. “If you want mine, you’ll find it locked in the upper-left hand desk drawer in my office. I can give you my keys if you like. I fired it a couple of weeks ago, but cleaned it before putting it away.”
“Why did you fire your gun?” asked the agent-in-charge, who was not in charge.
“Six-foot rattler in the parking lot right next to my front car door. I didn’t want to have to treat anyone for snakebite.” Dr. Running Bear turned away from the agent, dismissing his concerns. “Now, can we move on to fighting the pathogens? I guarantee guns won’t be of use in this fight.”
With that, he provided a brief medical update, after which Johnny and I returned to the ICU. We put on our gear and entered Alex’s room. Toby the vampire was drawing another blood sample.
“Oh, good. I was getting ready to hunt you down. I need your blood, too. Still checking to see if the virus is spreading.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
JOHNNY AND I followed Toby to the central nurses’ station. We shed our gowns, rolled up our sleeves, and exposed our lower arms.
“You’re the last ones on this floor. I’ve bled everyone else,” he said, setting his supplies on the counter.
Toby’s persistent vampire joke had grown a long gray beard by the third time I heard it. Now, my nerves were raw, and all I wanted was for him to take the sample and get the hell away from me.
Johnny went first. Toby tied a rubber tourniquet around his upper arm, swabbed his inner elbow, picked up a syringe, and slowly inserted the needle into a vein. Blood filled the plastic tube. Toby pulled the original tube away and inserted another one. When that one was full, he released the tourniquet, extracted the needle, and told Johnny to hold a cotton ball tight against the puncture. A Band-Aid followed. When my turn came, I scarcely paid attention. The routine had become so, well, routine.
Toby exited with the tray of blood samples.
“I’m going to the head,” Johnny said, heading out of Alex’s room, only to catch a face-full of spray from a bottle Toby was using.
“What the hell? Watch where you’re spraying that shit,” Johnny snapped at Toby. He stalked off to the bathroom, wiping moisture from his eyes and mask.
“What’s in the bottle?” I demanded an answer.
“Disinfectant,” he said shortly. Then he was gone. I lowered my mask and took a tentative sniff. Whatever it was didn’t smell like anything. Not disinfectant. Not cleaning materials. It hung in the air, however, like a greasy film. I pulled my mask back over my nose and mouth.
Once Johnny returned and we were alone again in Alex’s room, he absentmindedly rubbed his arm and stared at the beeping machines. “What’s the matter?” I’d been so focused on Alex that subtle changes in Johnny’s behavior evaporated like fog at dawn. I stared hard at him and didn’t like what I saw.
“Don’t you feel all right?”
Something in the way he stood put me on alert. Usually so erect and square shouldered, now he leaned his head against the wall, his right hand holding his left arm. He shook himself before turning to me.
“I’m all right. I was thinking about Toby.”
His hand went back to his left arm, probably still sore from the needle. He glanced at a sleeping Alex. We kept our voices low.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, my radar locked onto his arm.
“Something about the way Toby took our blood. Not to mention recklessly spraying whatever that was. I can’t quite figure out what was different, but something was.” He pushed his mask aside and rubbed his nose. When he coughed, we both stiffened at the sound of congestion. “Guess I’d better not touch Alex, huh?”
I shook my head.
We needed to talk about the blood extraction with Dr. Running Bear. Now that I thought about it, Toby had changed the way he extracted blood several times. Today, he selected a needle from the far end of the row instead of picking up the nearest needle as he had in the past.
“The protective sleeve of the needle he used on you lay beside it, but he placed the needle in the sleeve after he drew your blood. My syringe was sealed when he picked it up.”
“Could he have removed the sleeve to save time? After all, he’s been taking blood daily. Maybe he wants to speed things up.” Johnny rubbed the back of his neck.
“That doesn’t make sense. Why change his style for one of us and not for the other?”
Johnny winced.
“Do you have a headache?” I asked.
“I think we’d better find Dr. White.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
WE TRACKED THE epidemiologist down in her locked diagnosis room. She answered our knock and stepped aside to let us in. If she thought we looked silly and out of place in our protective gowns, masks, and gloves, her face didn’t give her away.
“What’s the matter?” Dr. White shoved a couple of stools our way. “Take off your gear, and tell me what’s going on.”
Johnny stripped to his light blue scrubs, and told her what we’d experienced with our blood work.
“So, Toby didn’t follow protocol?”
“I don’t think so. It’s not the first time something seemed off, either,” I said. “I’d be more comfortable if you’d call Dr. Klein and take a fresh sample. Can he test it without anyone but you and him knowing about it? I particularly don’t want any of the hospital staff to know.”
Dr. White called Dr. Klein on her cell. He promised to be up as soon as he finished an autopsy.
“Who died this time?” I asked. With death surrounding us, I tried to sound sanguine but failed.
“The orderly who came in last night,” she sighed.
My mouth dropped open. “But he was just admitted.”
Apparently, he’d lost consciousness a few hours earlier and died of what Dr. Klein thought was congestive heart failure brought on by pulmonary edema.
“These symptoms don’t go with any kind of pox, do they?” Johnny asked, growing pale. Sweat peppered his forehead.
“Not usually. We’ll wait for Dr. Klein’s autopsy results before we list his cause of death.”
Ten minutes later, Dr. White let Dr. Klein in. She updated him quickly with a few spare sentences. Dr. Klein reached for a tourniquet and went through the st
eps to extract blood from our left arms.
“I’ll run the tests tonight. If I find anything odd, I’ll let you know.” He put the vials in his pocket and left.
“You did the right thing. Can’t be too careful in all this chaos, though I doubt there’s anything to worry about,” Dr. White said.
I mustered up a weak smile. “I’m probably seeing bogeymen where there aren’t any. I’ve been known to do that in the past.”
“And you’ve seen evil when the rest of us missed it,” Johnny said. “Don’t forget you recognized the look of that endangered child in Mississippi.”
I gave Tick a quick recap of my daughter’s death and the girl who had been trapped in a dangerous situation. I concluded, “I don’t really think we have a bogeyman on the loose. I think we have a flesh-and-blood human on the loose. I don’t know who it is, though.”
I mentioned my unnerving conversation with Nurse Leena about Alex’s electronic record and my suspicions that it might have been changed.
Dr. White stared thoughtfully at her boards. “I’ll check this out. If someone tampered with or confused the records, we need to know who. We can’t let things fall apart here just because of extenuating circumstances. Too bad we don’t have a forensic IT tech on hand.” She paced the room.
“The FBI should have one to spare, shouldn’t it?” I asked.
###
Johnny and I headed for the cafeteria for an afternoon snack. We sat in deep, silent thought for a long while. Johnny picked at his slice of apple pie. I tried to write off his diminished appetite—I wasn’t all the hungry either. The cafeteria food lost whatever allure it had when we first arrived eight days earlier. At least the coffee remained strong and hot.
“Something is so wrong here. Like Dr. White, I don’t know who’s involved, but someone who works in or has access to this hospital is behind the outbreak,” Johnny said. Melting vanilla ice cream surrounded the remainder of his pie.
“And how do you know this?”