Jungle Fever

by Lexy Timms

  You didn’t need to see the process to see the results. You just had to know where to look.

  Manchester. That bastard. That was why he examined my patient. He was checking up on her because why? Because he knew that she had been hurt? Because he’s the one who hurt her?

  That thought brought her up sharp. That wasn’t a road that fit well. Manchester was an arrogant, self-absorbed little prig, but to deliberately injure a child—that was a stretch. Manchester wouldn’t allow that sort of thing in his hospital.

  Would he?

  Still, it didn’t answer the question that was the most pressing. Where was Charra now?

  After Taylor had passed out in her bed, Angelica had taken a nap and gone back to work. Cold showers had become a standard since they started on the long-distance relationship, but there was no replacement for demanding work to take one’s mind off the aching deprivation.

  “Doctor,” a voice called her, breaking her out of the reverie. They were bringing a gurney down the hall. For a moment her heart soared, thinking that Charra had been found. Then reason kicked in. The very idea that this was the girl again was ludicrous. She’d been released. There was no reason for her to be back... unless whoever had hurt her before had found her first.

  Angelica raced to the small group pulling the gurney in. It wasn’t the girl, it was the old woman. Angelica took her pulse, or tried to. Heartbeat, breathing... nothing.

  “They found her in her cot, insisted we bring her in.” It was Anitah, her face sweaty, obviously flustered. “She was pretty old and the stress of the camp... I tried to explain but then thought it might be easier to at least give the show of doing something, you know? I tried CPR...” her voice broke off, mournful. “There wasn’t anything we could do.”

  “You brought her in yesterday morning,” Angelica said, staring at the face so still in repose. No more accusations. The pain that had twisted her features was finally gone, leaving her looking almost at peace.

  Almost.

  “I did?” Anitah glanced back to the woman on the gurney.

  “She was with the girl who came in... the x-rays? Broken bones? I told you she was her grandmother. Except, it turned out she wasn’t.”

  “OH!” The light came on. “Yeah, I remember her now. Want me to try and find her granddaughter?”

  Angelica looked up and a sound halfway between a laugh and sob broke free from her lips before she could stop it. “Yeah.” She nodded. “That would be great.” She covered the old woman’s face with the sheet that was partly under her and turned away.

  Anitah took off back out the door.

  “This place is getting stranger and stranger,” Angelica murmured to the body. She found a nurse walking the hallways and asked her to take the body to the morgue. Though to call it that was laughable in its own right. Bodies were buried usually within the hour; the morgue was nothing more than a storeroom used for that purpose until they could be picked up.

  Angelica sighed and leaned against the wall. This massive refugee camp was a mess. There was dysentery, disease, and so much more. An old woman displaced and left to herself in an open camp, hadn’t stood a chance of survival. It pulled at her that no one would bat an eye at the old woman’s passing. Old people died in camps. The ancient were susceptible to all kinds of ailments. No one was going to look at this as suspicious.

  Except maybe one person.

  Taylor.

  ANGELICA RACED BACK to the apartment to get Taylor, but in the world of a doctor at a refugee camp ‘raced’ meant seeing fourteen other patients and spending a great deal of time going over orders with nurses and finding orderlies to move people from point A to point B. Her so-called ‘racing’ took almost an hour.

  Names meant nothing. Faces blurred.

  The prodromal phase is characterized by nonspecific symptoms such as fatigue, weakness, anorexia, nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain.

  “Isolate this one, now!”

  Physiologic reflex augmenting mucociliary clearance of airway secretions, characterized by the generation of high intrathoracic pressures against a closed glottis, followed by forceful expulsion of air and secretions on glottic opening. Intrathoracic pressures of up to 300 mm Hg and expiratory velocities approaching 500 miles per hour may be achieved.

  “Run a culture on this one and find a mask for him.”

  It was the same thing—too many people in too small a place. A cough could spread a variety of illnesses across the camp before anyone knew it was there. Hepatitis was as common as it was contagious. There was more work than any one doctor could handle and rushing home to one’s kinda sorta fiancé wasn’t really an acceptable way to spend an afternoon.

  It was nearly dark before she escaped. Somehow the afternoon had raced by and the sun was just settling down below the horizon, sending long shadows across the courtyard as she did a jog-walk to her door. The keys rattled in her hand as she approached.

  Please let him be awake. He’s probably been bored all day. And he was so exhausted yesterday. Poor guy.

  She put the key in the slot and had a wild idea to knock on her own door, to wake him before she even entered, but then she pictured him as she’d left him, sleeping on his back, his eyes closed and looking so peaceful. She licked her lips and thought of other ways to wake him, Sleeping Beauty switching genders. And going with the older version of the story as to location of the kisses she had in mind.

  I wish. There’s got to be something wrong with me. We have serious business to discuss and all I can think about is how much I want to taste him again.

  Truth be told, thinking about sex was a welcome distraction. The old woman’s death bothered her. Whether she wanted to admit it or not she was a little scared, and wondered if the old woman had been right. Had she died because Angelica had been putting her nose where it didn’t belong? It seemed more than coincidence that the woman had died right when she said she would.

  Cause... I need to find the cause.

  I hate this. I hate all of this. I became a doctor to prevent death, not leave it in my wake. What am I doing here? She hesitated, her hand on the doorknob. I want to forget all of this ever happened. Wouldn’t it be nice to curl up in someone’s arms for a while? What would it be like to let herself feel protected and nurtured? It might not be the politically correct way of thinking, but hadn’t the world lost something in the name of political correctness? The need to be taken care of was as natural as, well, as feeling overwhelmed. And when one felt the need, wasn’t it right to desire the other as a healthy response to that stress? Besides, she was willing to bet that everyone, even the great and powerful Taylor Mann, needed to feel like they were nurtured now and again.

  She quietly slipped in through the door, in case he was still sleeping.

  The first thing she noticed was the smell of coffee. The pot was half full and still on. There was an almost-empty cup on the table, a damp-looking towel hanging on the bathroom door, but no Taylor, tiger or otherwise.

  Great. Now I have a missing man to track down.

  Not so much worried as annoyed, she looked around for clues as to his whereabouts and came up with the yellow legal pad next to the empty coffee cup. She picked up the paper tablet and traced the notations with her finger. Taylor was strong, brave, funny, and smart. Penmanship, however, was not his strength. She smiled a little, enjoying the imperfection as she sorted through the scribble and tried to figure out what he’d been writing. Manchester’s name kept repeating on the page, occasionally circled, always underlined.

  A question about halfway down the page caught her eye. “Why wasn’t the grandmother tested?” It took her a moment to decipher the tested idea. The thought that someone would do that to a child just to see if she would shift made her ill.

  I should have seen that. Guessed the reasoning behind it. Maybe I would have done something differently.

  She shook her head. She hadn’t had time to think things through that quickly. She’d done what she could. Giving herself pe
rmission to let the blame for that one slide she studied the notes, her mind turning over various possibilities. Maybe the “grandmother” had been tested. How would she even know? She needed to find that old woman and look closer at her, see if she could determine the cause of death. She’d been so sure that no one would look closely at the woman that she’d done the same thing, and she was the one supposed to know better. She was supposed to have found out all she could. This one was her fault, and no one else’s.

  So, do something about it. Where is she now?

  Now the body was on the way to burial and she needed to go back and stop it, get it back to study, but Taylor was gone, too, and she needed to find him to let him know that the woman was dead. She needed to... hell, she needed to wrap herself in his arms for just a little bit, find her center and maybe, just for a moment, fall apart in his arms as he held her.

  She sighed and kept reading. Her eyebrow rose.

  “What the hell do you want a dog for now?” she asked the paper. It made no sense.

  As she dropped the pad on the table, a scrawl on the bottom of the page caught her eye. She’d paid little attention to it because it looked as though the pen had wandered over the paper of its own accord while waiting impatiently for him to move it. But at that moment, letters started forming on the page before her eyes. “Out for a run.”

  “Seriously?” she demanded from the page. “There are men out there with automatic rifles who Do. Not. Like. You. And you’re going out, what, for a nice little jog around the block? What the hell is the matter with you?”

  Angelica stood in the middle of her little hovel, trying to decide if she needed the body or the boyfriend. Prioritize. You can figure this out. It’s like triage. Same concept. Think. She stared at the notepad and shook her head. “Okay, he’s literally a tiger. He’s a trained agent and ex-military. So, fine. He can take care of himself without mommy running after him like pulling a toddler from a burning building.”

  She turned and stared at the door. “Shit” was all she could think to say, and as an afterthought she pulled the page free from the tablet and stuffed it into the pocket of her scrubs. There really was no time to waste. She ran all the way back to the clinic and was calling for Anitah before she’d even gotten fully through the door. Thankfully she hadn’t left yet, her shift ending an hour after hers.

  “That woman, the old woman who died today...”

  “There were three or four of those,” Anitah said, shrugging, her dark face impassive, though from the look in her eyes she likely thought the American doctor had gone crazy.

  “The one you brought to me, the one you tried to revive,” Angelica explained, trying to keep calm.

  “Oh yeah, that one.” She nodded, smiling now that she understood who Angelica was talking about.

  “I need to see the body again.”

  Anitah had the look of a deer in headlights. “You do?” She shook her head. “I don’t know where she is.” She shrugged. “There is many dead every day, too many peoples, too little beds, foods, meds. We take them to morgue and they bury.”

  “I know that,” she said, exasperated. “Can you please run down to the morgue and see if she’s still there? It’s important.”

  “Of course, Doctor.” Anitah nodded.

  “Now, Anitah.”

  “Oh, sure.” She shook his head and headed down the hall.

  Angelica, too restless to stand still, moved through the wards, checking on patients she wasn’t due to check on for hours. There was no indication of bruising as far as she could tell with the woman, but she hadn’t looked that closely. She kicked herself for that now. The death rate was a lot lower than it would have been without the clinic there. They saved lives every day, just by preventing the illnesses from spreading. They saved countless lives that would never know how close they might have come to becoming infected or even dying.

  Still, there were going to be deaths, and the number of dead was much higher in a concentrated place like this. The very old, the very young, those stressed and exhausted from being forced from their homes in the name of war, had immune systems already compromised from malnutrition and stress. Add to that the stress and strain of camp life, and how many more were lost? But had death become so rote, so common, that she simply didn’t pay it enough attention? She just passed the corpse on with the rest for a common grave and it never occurred to her to examine the final link to the only other shifter she’d met.

  “Sorry, Doctor,” Anitah said from behind her a few minutes later. Or maybe ten or twenty minutes. She had no idea. “They took her to the gravesite.”

  “Anitah, correct me if I’m wrong, but they have a mass grave, right? A trench with bodies piled into it and then covered?”

  “Yes.” Anitah shuddered.

  She wondered briefly what burial rites were common to his culture. If the way they did things here were as distasteful to him as they were to her. Still, there were things that had to be done. They were medical professionals, after all. And that sometimes called for extreme measures. “Then they can get her back. They can...”

  “Doctor.” Anitah shook her head, and she could see that this time she wasn’t going to jump to her bidding. “I’m sorry, but she’s gone.”

  She stared the nurse a long moment, and then finally looked away when she could see she wasn’t going to back down. Truly, she’d had no right to ask her. “Thank you, Anitah,” she said quietly. “You can go.”

  Chapter 10

  It occurred to Taylor that he wasn’t challenged leaving the camp. In fact, no one seemed to care about someone leaving the camp. Apparently, it was trying to get back in that would be the tricky part. He carried his passport and depended on being recognized by the security detail, such as it was. The fact that there were very few Americans in the area made it more likely he’d be remembered.

  He left the camp by simply walking away. The sun was setting, casting long shadows from the trees in the distance, the edge of the jungle where the heavy machinery had given up the battle against the wild. It looked like the jungle was trying to move back into the clearing, and without constant maintenance it probably would cover the entire area within a year or two.

  The clinic was closer to the city’s edge, a bulwark between civilization and squalor, though the edge of the city wasn’t exactly the part they showed on brochures either. But the night was clear, and the sounds of the jungle carried across the empty field where the giant bulldozers stood mute guard against the encroaching trees.

  Taylor looked around him, anxious to shed his clothing and trade skin for fur, but there was no place to hide in a large open field like this. While they did a wonderful job of keeping the jungle from the camp, the tradeoff was a long area of treeless, man-made desert. Taylor tried to figure out where to change.

  Visions of Clark Kent trying to find a phone booth in this day and age raced through his head, and all he could come up with was Superman having a very uncomfortable moment with Dr. Who. It was a ridiculous image, but it kept him chuckling for quite some time as he wandered further into the shadows.

  He saw a copse of trees that the dozers had missed, or perhaps hadn’t bothered to level. They grew in a tangle near where the equipment was stored, as if the bulldozers had to get a fresh scent before they could go hunting another tree. It was only about five trees altogether and the reason for their prolonged life soon became clear. There was a large hole between them, a natural divot that was the product of years of erosion, and in another million years or so might be a nice rival for the Grand Canyon. Currently it was just large enough to swallow one very expensive bulldozer.

  It was also the perfect place for a man to take off his clothing. Not only did the equipment mark the location, since he would be back before morning, but he could leave his effects inside the cab and not worry about the clothes being scattered by wild animals. He’d once lost a very nice shirt to a raccoon, and wasn’t inclined to risk his passport become monkey fodder.

  He ch
ose the smallest bulldozer, a tiny little thing, probably used to... he couldn’t think of a single reason for it to be there. It was dwarfed amongst its brothers, like a newborn elephant in the middle of an iron and steel herd. But it was the easiest to reach without having to climb and it was least likely to be useful to anyone out of all them, making it the perfect place to stash clothing and ID.

  Taylor stepped into the shadow of the machines, keeping the small copse and the great gaping hole to his rear, covering him from any wandering eyes from the city. He stood still for a moment, listening to the sounds of the night and the jungle. There was no hue and cry about some stranger hanging around the machines, no panic that a reporter/boyfriend/fiancé was missing. It was a quiet night, cloudless, with a sullen moon trying to rise in the distance as though in protest, like getting a teenager to mow the lawn.

  Taylor stripped off his shirt. The air against his skin felt glorious. He pulled off his shoes and then his pants, setting them all on the seat of the small bulldozer. His underwear went next, his watch and wallet and passport crowning the pile.

  For a moment he wanted nothing more than to stand in the night air, reveling in the freedom of his nakedness, letting the warm breeze caress him. The pull to change, to be really free, was too strong, too hard. He looked around one last time, letting a little paranoia work for him, and crouched down. Only then did he relax and welcome the cat.

  His limbs grew and shortened, bones cracking and grinding, his head and face shifting, aligning, breaking, healing. In his entire lifetime, the change had never happened so fast. It was as if a plug had been removed and suddenly the flow of the need to be the cat was overwhelming. It was a force he couldn’t control anymore, let alone stop.