Trepidation squeezed the air out of my lungs until I forced myself to take the next breath, but if she was already infected, I doubted anything like what had happened to Gussy and the other pregnant women would have happened to her. “She died a hero. I’m sure she didn’t regret that.”
“She was one of the good ones,” Dom agreed with me.
“That she was.” No protest from me, but a new layer of regret slowly settled into the depths of my mind.
“Progression was delayed to about two days of incubation time and three days from onset of symptoms until he expired, if you were wondering,” Dom went on, skipping right to where I’d not dared to venture yet—the science behind the gruesome stuff. “With Stanton, it was three days and an estimated five to seven, at the very least. As I said, we don’t know. With you it was two days, right? Regular progression.”
I nodded. “Nerve damage set in almost immediately, and I was running a fever by late afternoon, about three hours in? Virtually no incubation time, but they got me good. Norm is between five and twelve hours post-infection for minor wounds.”
“I can show you the updated computer models that we made. Later,” Dom added, glancing meaningfully at Blake before he fell silent again. Bless him.
We walked by another lab, this one dark and deserted. I was starting to wonder where Wilkes had exiled us to, when around another bend a last door appeared, this one with a somewhat agitated Sunny waiting for us. Apparently, whoever had informed Dom must have alerted Sunny to the fact that we were coming down here. He looked a lot less at ease seeing me than Dom had, but then our last visit had ended on somewhat rocky terms, with me being angry at him for cutting up my unborn child and him thinking me childish for it. Ah, the good old days. I greeted him with a raised hand and as much of a smile as I could muster. He did the same, visibly easing up. Why did everyone expect me to go right for their jugular these days? And that was before either Dom or Sunny’d had a chance to hear me out.
“This is it?” I assumed as Dom reached for the door handle, halting before he opened it.
“You could say that,” Dom murmured under his breath as he flipped on the lights. The stench of bleach was overwhelming as it hit my clogged nose. At least someone had tried to do some preliminary cleanup.
“Let me guess. This is where they tried to dissect the zombie,” I hazarded a somewhat informed guess. The bloodstains that had remained on the walls, resistant to anything but a good paint job or a sledgehammer, kind of gave it away. Only the bare workbenches remained with not a single bottle on them, but there must have been a lot of shattered glass.
“Yup,” remained Dom’s only answer. Turning to Sunny, he asked, “Nobody else coming?”
Sunny shook his head. “Just me. I’ll get everything we need from the other labs, once we know what we’ll need.”
They both went into the room, but before I could follow, Blake held me back, blocking the door by reaching across the frame in front of me. I looked up at him, not even bothering with a glare. Of late, that emotionless stare seemed to work much more effectively. “Yes?”
“You stay in there,” he stated in a deep bass befitting someone who’s chest resembled a barrel. “You sleep in there, you eat in there. You try to step out, and I’ll throw you right out into the snow.”
“What, no potty breaks?” I wisecracked.
“She can’t sleep in here!” Dom groused from inside the room. “This is a designated lab space. Certainly no consumption of food or liquids. There are a few maintenance rooms further down the corridor where you can put up makeshift quarters. Use that.”
Blake’s eyebrows drew together. “That’s not what Wilkes said—“
Dom huffed at him, looking mighty proud to have a reason to get into the beefcake’s face. “That’s what he meant, dumbass. If you need me to spell it out for you, I’ll vouch for her. You heard the commander. We have forty-eight hours. We won’t waste much on idle chatter but I’m not going to pull two all-nighters in a row. If you want to watch her sleep, be my guest. But it makes far more sense to put up a cot for her in the next room and get a comfy chair for yourself out here. Unless you want to come inside with us?”
Blake didn’t exactly blanch, but removed his arm so I could step inside. “You wait until I’m ready to get you,” he told me before he slammed the door shut. It was one of those without a glass pane to the outside so we were alone among ourselves.
Sunny didn’t waste a moment before he rounded on us. “What exactly is going on?” He stared imploringly at Dom first before he turned to me, his eyes scrunching up as he scrutinized me. “Are you sick?”
Outside, the redness around my nose and the bloodshot eyes could have easily been explained by the cold, but with my body slowly thawing up, they must have become more obvious. My eyes still burned from the bright overhead lights, but not just because of that.
“Kind of. Yes,” I started, then launched into my explanation—starting at feeling a little off at training which had ended with Nate knocking out my molar, and ending with the increasing signs of what felt more and more like a mix between a sinus infection and strep throat, if slow progressing ones. They both looked kind of scandalized when I started peeling off my clothes, but the moment Sunny’s gaze fell on the blooming bruise on my thigh, he stopped asking me what I thought I was doing mid-question, hunching over so he could get a good look. “Call me paranoid,” I joked as I held still, letting him do his thing. I was wearing the same underwear I’d donned in the settlement, so I was quite sure that it was only scientific fascination that got him putting his face there. “I’m infected with a virus that’s partly a hemorrhagic fever. That’s one hell of a bruise, and it’s not starting to fade.”
Sunny prodded it lightly, surprised when I didn’t flinch. “We should do a biopsy,” he concluded as he straightened, gesturing me to get dressed again as he turned to Dom. “So we do what? Run a full blood panel? I have a kit in my lab with testing strips for all kinds of things. I should get that.”
Dom nodded. “We should have enough prepped agar plates for the standard antibiotic resistance tests. I’ll make some more for the less common stuff.” Seeing my confusion, he shrugged. “If we plate the samples on antibiotics and find some where nothing grows, we could try dosing you with that and see if it goes away? Would be a shame if we get all alarmed and shit, and all you really need is a week’s course of Erythromycin. No offense to whoever did the testing in New Angeles, but that sounds like a load of cross-contamination and bullshit to me.” He indicated one of the lab stools. “Get comfortable while we get what we need to get started. Wanna lend a hand?”
I had to snort at Sunny’s weird look at Dom’s question. “Hey, just because I learned how to blindly field strip a gun doesn’t mean I don’t know how to work a pipette anymore. Just hand me the protocol and I’ll follow it like a trained little lab monkey.”
“Great.” Dom flashed me the first real grin, excitement pushing away bad memories quickly. “Go turn on the hoods in the back there, we’ll get some centrifuges and other stuff we need. There should be some spare incubators in the B-lab, right?”
“You can just take one from mine,” Sunny offered. “And we need an autoclave.” Scrutinizing me, he pulled open a drawer and handed a face mask to me. “Wear that.” When he saw me frown, he explained. “All of us will, but I don’t particularly want to breathe in anything that might come out of your lungs. Maybe you’re not infectious, but this is a closed air system in here. Let’s err on the side of caution.”
I watched them bumble out into the corridor, chatting excitedly between them. I figured that even if Blake intended to spy, he wouldn’t understand more than every fifth word. I felt a light wave of nostalgia as I put on the mask and some gloves before I walked over to the laminar flow hoods at the very back of the lab, switching them on after wiping the workspace inside down and closing the front up once more. I wasn’t really bothered about contaminants, but more than a decade of safety drills was
surprisingly hard to ignore. Then I rolled back to one of the tables by the wall and waited for Sunny and Dom to return.
Maybe I really was too paranoid. Maybe this was nothing.
My thigh gave a painful twinge where my fingers kept drumming on the bruise. Not just painful like it hurt when you slammed into a desk corner, but a deep-seated kind of ache that I felt for several heartbeats longer after I’d removed my hand.
Maybe. But somehow, I was starting to doubt it.
Chapter 15
Dom’s protest to Blake aside, we ended up with a field cot rolled into the lab, and it soon saw some use in irregular intervals as one of us crashed there while the other two worked. None of the other scientists joined, but when Sunny stepped out for a smoke break toward the evening, he returned with an entire stack of handwritten notes and photocopies. Come close to me none of the others would, but curiosity was a devilish thing, eroding moral high grounds quicker than a scientist could rattle off the periodic table of elements. I would have lied had I insisted that I hadn’t been counting on that. Whatever else had changed in my life over the past year and a half, that was still a constant. Just as I hadn’t been able to brush Nate’s concern off and ignore the signs, none of them could sit idle and not wonder.
It had been forever since I’d last worked with bacteria, but the actual lab work wasn’t that hard. There was some fumbling involved on my part, but after a few—decidedly embarrassing—mistakes I got the gist of it, much to Dom’s amusement. Sunny eased up soon after that, the somewhat tense atmosphere turning collegial bordering on comfortable. I had a million anecdotes from my years working in labs somewhat better equipped than this one to regale them with, and for once an audience appreciative of them—something I couldn’t pass up. So far, everything was working splendidly.
What turned out to be tricky was the material we were working with. By the time Sunny had drawn the third vial of blood from my arm, the contents of the first were already congealing. I’d warned him about what the doc in New Angeles had told me, but he obviously hadn’t taken me seriously. Murmuring something about EDTA and the powers of chemistry, he started dumping an entire cocktail of reagents into the vials until he found the perfect balance that didn’t make it all look like goo—even if it was resembling pinkish water by then. More out of curiosity than expecting to see anything, Dom put some of the congealed goo on a slide to check it under the microscope, and came up a second later, cursing.
“That good, huh?” I hazarded a guess.
Rather than reply, he grabbed one of Sunny’s discarded dilution attempts and checked that. When he looked up at me this time, he was doing his best to school his features, but that alone told me more than I wanted to know. Ignoring my imploring stare, he turned to Sunny instead. “Let’s get started on the sensitivity tests right away. I can’t wait to see what grows on which plates.” That made me guess that my blood was teeming with bacteria, all right—which normally shouldn’t have been the case. That slide, still under the bright light of the microscope, kept calling my name, but I resisted. Whatever they’d find, I figured the Reader’s Digest version would be interesting enough.
After that first hitch, things went surprisingly smoothly. Dom was smearing agar plates for the antibody resistance tests, while Sunny was busy doing the Gram staining on the blood culture to try to narrow down what critters might be inhabiting the many spaces in my body where they shouldn’t be. I vaguely remembered that, usually, one needed to actually cultivate cells of any kind, including bacteria, to get enough growth so there was anything to stain, which just underlined my guess at how bad the results had looked under the microscope. Sunny had me prep the samples for PCR and Western blots, making me guess they’d run those same tests that all of us who later became the Lucky Thirteen had been subjected to when they’d so succinctly fished out those who’d received the serum before. Part of me felt like protesting, but they already had my profiles from that first test and when I’d recovered from the infection, I figured, so might as well check what my immune system was up to now.
Late afternoon turned into evening as I was slogging along, watching the blue bands on a gel electrophoresis separate slowly, when I heard Dom cursing from where he was checking on the plates he’d done earlier. The entire batch went straight from the incubator into a medical waste bag, with Dom continuing to mutter under his breath. By the time I stepped up to him to catch a look, he was already tying the bag off and bundled it into the small autoclave, set on destroying whatever had grown there.
“Likely some heavy cross-contamination,” Dom groused when he couldn’t ignore me any longer. “It’s pretty much the same across all plates. That’s virtually impossible, unless there was something in the agar itself. I’ll do them again.”
“Maybe not such a bad idea,” Sunny muttered from across the room. “But we should do some controls, too.” Looking up, he focused on me. “Think your folks would mind if we drew some blood from them as well? Your husband makes the most sense, seeing as we have his old profiles, too. And if there’s anyone who might catch anything from you, it’s him.”
It turned out, not only Nate was willing to get stuck with needles, but Burns, Tanner, Gita, and Jason insisted that they’d check their results against mine as well. It made sense—there was a chance that Burns might have gotten too close to me a time or two, same as Gita, while Tanner and Jason were the equal set of immune and normal controls that I hadn’t shared too much quality time with of late. It took us until midnight to prep everything and get the experiments and cultures started. Then all we could do was wait. Dom was the first to crash, his plates needing at least half a day to show realistic results, if at all, while Sunny continued to hog the microscope. I was a little surprised that their chief geneticist would be the one to do the bacterial stains, but as Dom had pointed out, they’d had a lot of time down here to catch up on each other’s fields of expertise. It had only made sense to try to get everyone up to par on all the fields of biology they’d neglected before the shit had hit the fan. Meanwhile, I’d learned to become pretty efficient at killing things. I still wasn’t sure which had been the better idea.
Sunny and Dom switched places at around 3:00 am when I insisted that I wasn’t really sleepy. A lie, but standing guard at all times of the night had made me pretty good at going on even when my body was screaming for rest. Besides, my contribution to the effort was basic lab tech level at best. I’d rather the experts were well-rested enough for their brains to work.
The first thing Dom did was check the incubator—and rather than curse, he ended up just staring at the plates inside, stupefied. This time I was quick enough to get there before he started throwing them out, rescuing one from the bottom shelf while he started emptying the top one. The petri dish was filled with beige-colored solidified agar and wrapped with tape—and the entire surface of the growth medium was dotted with white, gray, green, yellow, and red cultures, some with fuzzy lines, others perfect circles. Checking what exactly the medium contained, I blew out my breath as I skipped over the no less than six antibiotics that should have kept the plate pretty much empty of everything as a negative control. Anything growing on there wasn’t just immune to one, but all of the antibiotics at once. “Yum,” was all I said when Dom held the waste bag open for me to drop it in.
Rather than throw it all away and start anew, Dom took two of the plates back to the hood and started transferring single cultures to new plates before junking the old ones with the rest. A quick check revealed that none of the other plates—containing all the control samples—had anything growing on them yet.
After seeing that plate, sleep wasn’t really on the menu for me anymore.
By morning, most of what I’d been working on was done. The results were, at best, inconclusive. I’d tried to clean up the samples as best as possible with the basic equipment provided, but the bacteria in my blood not only wreaked havoc on the blood drawn, but also did a great job contaminating everything else. The only rel
iable result was that Nate’s immunological status wasn’t as clear as it had been before—and we were talking about results there that already looked like a toddler had thrown up all over them. My guess was that close contact with me had resulted in him getting a healthy dose of my resident bacterial playground as well, but because his immune system had had years to turn into a maximum security prison, he didn’t show any symptoms as the little critters could do barely more than exist for a short time before his serum-empowered immune system killed them all off. Burns’s results were clear, as were the others’.
Half a day later, Dom declared that he’d found about the same on his plates—Nate’s blood looked clear but there was some growth under unrestricted conditions after twenty-four hours, yet nothing compared to what was going on with me. Sunny went up that evening to get another sample from Nate to run them again, with both of them agreeing that if it was clear, Nate was likely an innate, closed-off system for that matter. That analysis cracked me up on so many levels.
I tried to stay awake but after Blake brought in our dinner that second evening, I had to catch some shut-eye, and next thing I knew it was eight in the morning. Dom was sleeping on the floor next to the cot, bundled up in blankets, while Sunny inhaled an entire cup of coffee over by the microscope while I watched. I personally wouldn’t have touched any food or drink in that very same room as the bacterial cultures were grown, but I knew all too well that lack of sleep could impair common sense judgment quickly. Ignoring him for now, I got up and stretched before I slogged over to the incubator to check Dom’s plates. All of those that held my name were overgrown, resembling cheese or something that you’d forgotten in the fridge for months. Next to that, I found a smaller stack holding two plates that I hadn’t noticed before. Maybe Dom had brought them in overnight. I couldn’t make sense of the abbreviations on them, but the different dates written were from a little over two months on one side, and half a year ago on the other.
Green Fields (Book 7): Affliction Page 21