“How goes it?” Jennifer asked.
Veronica shrugged. The heavy air-tight suit barely twitched from the effort. “I’m ready to take a look at this stuff under the microscope.”
“Stuff? It’s blood, V. Just blood.”
Veronica shook her head. “It’s not just blood.” She held it up to the strong fluorescent overhead lights. A single bubble burst from the top of the liquid. “See that?”
Jennifer reached out and took the tube from Veronica. She pulled it close to her faceplate and studied the dark fluid. “Wow.”
Against the far wall of the room sat a powerful microscope. The post-Liberia protocols called for every major hospital designated for quarantine operations to have at least one. Courtesy of the Federal Government, of course. Jennifer pointed to it.
“Let’s get this in there. See what we’re dealing with.”
Veronica took the blood sample back from her boss. “I’ll get it under there. But we may need the S.E.M. after all.”
“Okay,” Jennifer said. “Take a look. Let me know when you have something.”
Veronica nodded and headed to the microscope. Jennifer turned and surveyed the room. Webb was running a number of test tubes in the gleaming centrifuge. The machine spun, the test tubes turning into a dizzying propeller. The machine whined for a second and then spun down.
Webb waited for it to stop and then picked up one of the test tubes. He held it up to the light and frowned. “Boss?” he called. “Come take a look at this.”
She walked to the wall and stood next to him. “What have you got?”
Webb shook the test tube. A small dot of pitch black rose in the tube and headed to the surface. It sat there, floating atop the liquid. Jennifer was surprised she could still make it out against the extremely dark blood. A bubble rose from the bottom of the tube and popped at the surface.
“Shit,” Jennifer said. “What the hell is doing that?”
“I don’t know, Boss.” He put the test tube in a holder. The plastic stopper kept anything in the tube from getting out, not to mention anything getting in. “Think I should try and aspirate it? See if I can get that little black thing out?”
“Let’s wait until V gets her sample under the microscope. If that’s some sort of virulent bacteria, I don’t want to risk it getting out.”
Webb picked up another test tube, looked at the label, and raised it above his head. The color in the tube was that of normal blood, not as dark as the stuff they’d drawn from Krieger. He rolled it around in the light. It didn’t bubble and there was no black dot floating in it.
“We’ll have to wait for the other tests, of course, but I don’t think Mr. Strange and the EMTs are infected.”
“How can you make that assumption?” Jennifer asked.
He swiveled in the chair and looked up at her. “Strange said Marie’s symptoms may have started with a cough, fever, and body aches.” He pointed at the monitor on the shelf. It showed the temperature of all four patients as well as their heartbeats. Marie’s was at the top with Darren’s just beneath it. Marie’s line was thready, twitchy. Her heart rate was slowing while Strange’s was normal, if a bit fast.
“The other three aren’t showing any such symptoms. In fact, if you remove stress response, I think all three of them are healthy males.”
Jennifer nodded. “Fine. Great. But don’t think for a second that’s all we have to go on.” She tapped him on the shoulder. “Let’s run the real diagnostics before we start making conclusions.”
“Okay,” Webb said. He swiveled back in the chair and placed the test tube into another machine.
Jennifer looked back at Marie Krieger, A.K.A. patient zero. Hurtado and Mathis stood over her. Mathis held a metal disc to her chest. Thick, dark liquid beaded on Marie’s skin.
“Mathis. Got anything?”
He didn’t turn around. “Only if you like the sound of broken glass and thickening blood.”
“What do you mean?” She walked to the bed and stared down. It was much worse than she’d originally thought. Marie’s flesh was sweating the viscous fluid. It erupted from her pores and stained both her skin and the cloth coverings. “Jesus.”
Hurtado rubbed a finger gently down Marie’s stomach. Her mouth opened in pain, but no sound escaped her throat, and her eyes remained shut. Fluid bubbled out of her skin and followed Hurtado’s finger. “Boss? What the hell is going on? It’s like she’s dissolving inside out.”
“I don’t know.” She gestured at the black ooze. “I want a sample. We need to get it under the microscope as soon as possible. See what that stuff is.”
“Swab it. Type it. Examine it,” Mathis muttered. Hurtado didn’t move. Mathis tapped him on the shoulder. Hurtado’s frightened eyes stared back. “Do it, man. Now.”
Hurtado gave a curt nod and then picked up a swab from the table. He pushed it along the groove in the flesh and held it up to the light. A tendril of white vapor rose from the cotton. “What the hell?”
“Get that in a test tube. Right now,” Jennifer said.
Hurtado’s eyes were locked on the swab. He didn’t move.
“Matt!” she said in a raised voice. He stiffened and nearly dropped it. He turned to her, eyebrows raised. “Get your shit together, Matt. Put it in a test tube!”
“Yes. Uh, yes, Doctor.” He grabbed one of the tubes from the table, dropped the swab in, and capped it with a rubber gasket. “Back to Webb?”
“Yeah. Hurry.”
More tendrils of white vapor rose from the blackened swab. Hurtado walked away from the bed. Mathis turned to her. “What the hell is going on, Jennifer? This ain’t right.”
Vapor. Black fluid dribbling out of flesh. Thickening blood. “I don’t know. Continue stabilizing her.”
Mathis blanched. “I have to pee.”
She rolled her eyes. “Christ, Mathis. I’ll get Veronica over here.” The EKG stopped its familiar slow bounce in tone, flatlined, and then started up again. “Hurry up. But I don’t think it’s going to matter.”
Chapter 6
The pressurized cabin whooshed and bled air. Ellis waited until the large LED above the door glowed red, and then opened it. The roaring wind and rain greeted him. Ellis stepped out of the command center, closed the door behind him, and walked to the ER doors by the tunnel.
The HPD patrol car had pulled far beyond the facade; there wasn’t enough room for another vehicle beneath the overhang. Ellis watched two cops get out of their car, both men wearing heavy, yellow rain slickers. The wind tore at the coats, the ends flapping in the wind. One of the cops looked like an over-ripe lemon, his waist bulging out of the coat. The other was thin as a rail. Laurel and Hardy? They sent us Laurel and Hardy? He smirked and managed to stifle a gale of laughter.
By the time they were beneath the overhang, the slickers were soaked and the cops looked a little more than pissed off. Ellis inwardly groaned. This was just the kind of night he’d wanted.
“I’m Doctor Ellis with the CDC,” he said.
The two cops looked at one another and then back to him. “I’m Pendleton,” the heavy-set one said. “This is Fletcher. What’s the situation?”
“Nice to meet you.” Ellis gestured at the doors. “We need to make sure no one goes in or out unless they’re HPD or Federal employees.”
Pendleton stared at the quarantine tunnel. “Shit. They told us to get here as quick as we could. Didn’t tell us why.”
Ellis sighed. “We have a quarantine underway inside the ER. That tunnel is the only way to get into the hot-zone. We need one of you to make sure no one messes with the tunnel and the other to guard this entrance.”
“Quarantine,” Fletcher said. The thin man’s face had already paled. “You have suits for us?”
For a moment, Ellis didn’t understand the question. He paused and then shook his head. “We wear the suits,” he told the cop. “You’re just here to make sure no one gets in that’s not supposed to. And no one leaves without ID.”
&nb
sp; Pendleton nodded. “Okay. We got it, Doc. Everyone else inside?”
“We have six CDC personnel, including myself,” Ellis said. “There are still a number of doctors and nurses in the ER and the trauma center has two surgeries ongoing.”
“So you’re the door man?” Fletcher asked.
“Funny.” Ellis glared at the cop and then jerked a thumb to the command center. “I’m manning the communications network and video feeds in there.”
“Good,” Pendleton said. “I assume that means you’ll know if something goes wrong before we do.”
“Probably,” Ellis agreed. “But the only thing we should have to worry about is someone trying to get in that isn’t supposed to, or a patient freaking out and trying to leave. So one of you inside the double doors, the other guarding the tunnel. That should be all you need to do.”
The two cops looked at one another and then at the tunnel. Something unspoken passed between them. Fletcher walked past Ellis and inside the doors.
“We got it, Doc. If I need you, I can just bang on the RV?”
“Right,” Ellis said. “Sorry for the cold.”
Pendleton pulled a wrapped cigar from the pocket of his slicker. “I don’t mind. At least I can smoke a stogie.”
Ellis laughed and turned back to the command center. A vicious gust of wind blasted the overhang and he actually felt his hair standing up. The world flashed for a moment and then three seconds later, the sky exploded with sound. The thunder vibrated his skin. He got back in the command center, pressurized the cabin, and sat back in the comms chair.
He glanced up at the monitors just in time to see Mathis leaving the room. “Where the hell are you going?” Ellis said aloud. Webb, Hurtado, V, and Jennifer were all crowded around a microscope. The fact he didn’t have audio was more than a little maddening, but he could fix that.
He hit a button on the console and opened up the speakers to the audio stream. In addition to the video cameras Hurtado and Webb had placed around the room, each of the CDC suits had mics to record interactions. After Liberia, it was common practice. If one or all of the team became infected or died, home base would have a full record of what happened.
The speakers hummed with communal breathing. Ellis listened distractedly and then his eyes swung back to the monitors. Suddenly, he was very interested in what they were saying.
Chapter 7
Bullshit, is what Matt Hurtado was thinking. The microscope had to be defective. Either that, or they’d all been subjected to hallucinogenics. In a way, Matt wished it was the latter.
The test tube holding the swab was stained with black. He’d put the test tube in one of the metal holders next to the microscope. He didn’t want to open the stopper and he didn’t want to know what that fluid was. The cotton swab end looked burned and the cotton itself seemed to have departed this plane of existence.
As if that wasn’t strange enough, Webb had asked him to take a look through the microscope and that’s what he was blinking at. Webb was looking at him, presumably waiting for him to say something.
Matt tried to put everything he felt into words. “Bullshit.”
A grin touched Webb’s normally humorless face. “I’m fairly certain that’s not a scientific term.”
Matt glared at him. “You know what I see?” He pointed at the microscope. “I see massive deformity in the blood cells. I see vacuoles. I see something that seems to be tearing them apart. They’ve lost their shape and started to, I don’t know, coagulate?” Matt shook his head. “Bullshit. She’d have been dead hours ago.”
Webb nodded. “Exactly. And what about those black flecks?”
Black flecks. So that’s what he’s calling those things. Something had to be wrong with the machine, dammit. Or the slide. Something. The blood cells were so deformed, they might as well be protozoa and they had started to stack on top of one another, thickening. The aptly named “flecks” spun around the edges of the cells like microscopic gnats.
“Never read of anything like that. Sure as hell never seen anything like it.” Webb’s face had gone a little pale. “Have you?”
Webb paused for a moment. “No.” He looked over at Veronica. She stood next to Webb, arms crossed in front of her.
“V?” Matt asked.
Veronica was staring off into space. When she didn’t respond to his question, he asked again. Her eyes didn’t deviate from the wall, but she slowly shook her head. “No one has,” she said.
“Great. Even our blood expert says this is impossible.” Matt tapped his gloved hand on the table. “Guessing we need the S.E.M. for this.”
V looked at him, the corners of her mouth twitching into a dim smile. “Yeah. I think that’s what we need too.” She swung her head toward Marie’s bed as the EKG went into a flat tone.
Matt whirled and stared at the dying woman. Marie’s body twitched slightly and then lay still. The EKG returned to a slow, thready beep. “She’s going to die,” Matt whispered.
V nodded. “Yeah. She is.” She turned and picked up the test tube containing the blood sample. “But maybe we can keep the other three alive. If we can figure out what this shit is.” She walked to the door and disappeared into the tunnel.
Matt watched her go, wishing he was with her. He turned back to Webb and the microscope. “What do you want to do with that sample?”
“Set it on fire,” Webb said. “I’m going to be seeing this shit in my nightmares. What we just looked at isn’t really possible.” Webb put his eyes back to the microscope lens. He peered for a moment and then pushed back his chair. He slowly raised a shaking finger.
“What is it?”
Webb didn’t say anything. Matt leaned toward the microscope and then stopped. He didn’t need to look through the lens to know what Webb had seen. The blood on the slide was completely black now. And it seemed to be moving.
Chapter 8
V radioed him as soon as she headed to the ER entrance. Ellis donned his helmet, made sure the pressure levels were good, and walked out of the command center.
A large plastic case dangled from his arm, the bright red biohazard decals practically glowing in the light from the overheads. The HPD cop smoked a cigar at the tunnel’s side. In his pressurized suit, Ellis smelled nothing.
The cop, Pendleton if he remembered correctly, took the cigar from his clamped jaws, and held it expertly between two fingers. “What you got there, Doc?”
Ellis waited until he was close enough for the man to hear him through the helmet. “Sample case.” Ellis pointed to the tunnel. “I’m bringing back a sample from the quarantine area. If you don’t want to be quarantined yourself, please step through the doors far past the tunnel entrance.”
The cop blinked, but said nothing. He removed something shiny from his pocket and put it over the cigar. A few sparks flew from behind the cone-shaped piece of metal. He shook it twice, put the metal back in his pocket and then placed the snuffed-out cigar into his jacket.
“Thank you,” Ellis said.
The cop nodded and walked through the doors until he was past both sets.
“Ellis? Where the hell are you?” V’s voice crackled in his headset.
“Be right there, V.” The sample case swung a little as he moved into the tunnel. V waited at its rear, the brightly lit ER triage room just beyond. A test tube jutted from her fisted right glove. “See?”
He unlatched the case. The airtight gaskets grudgingly released and it opened. Ellis took the test tube from Veronica and placed it in the case’s holder, quickly closed the lid, and relocked it. “Okay,” he said. “We’re done.”
“We need we to get a shot of it from the S.E.M.”
“Our patient is dying,” Ellis said in a monotone.
Veronica opened her mouth and then closed it. She gave a slight nod, her face dropping into an expressionless line. “Let’s see if we can keep the other three alive.”
“Understood.” Ellis turned and quickly made his way through the tunnel. Out of the corn
er of his eye, he saw the two cops standing beside it. Hopefully, they knew well enough to stay away from him until he reached the command center.
As soon as he left the tunnel, a gust of wind hit him. The rectangular case pulled at his hand. Ellis put his head down and forced his way to the command center. He touched the outer button and the doors opened. Once inside, he pressurized the cabin and placed the case on the long counter filled with instruments.
He nearly took off his helmet before remembering he had a pathogen in the vehicle. Sighing, he threw away his coffee, emptied the coffee machine, put a biohazard sticker on it, and placed it in a cabinet.
Ellis turned back to the case. The test tube was almost completely black. Almost, but not quite. Small blobs of a strange red color swirled inside. He hit the button for the strong overheads. A sudden burst of light chased away the shadows in the cabin.
With a deep breath, he unlatched the case and began preparing a slide of the blood. The portable scanning electron microscope, or S.E.M., was actually large. It crowded the back of the command center, leaving just enough space for a person to stand in front of it. The power consumption was considerable, but that’s why the command center wasn’t a normal RV. As long as he didn’t do too many runs, the command center would be fine.
He thumbed the radio on his suit and stared at the too-dark test tube. “Veronica?”
“Yeah, Ellis?” She sounded almost bored and he knew what that meant—she’d already given up on saving Krieger. It was her own special defense mechanism. Whenever the shit got bad, she just seemed to shut off any and all empathy. She became a robot. It didn’t make Ellis feel any better.
“Any idea what’s going on in there? This blood looks, well, looks wrong.”
Normally, she would have said something like “duh.” Instead, all he got was a “Yes. It’s too dark.”
The Black: Outbreak Page 3