25
By the time Sam had ordered in pizza, the number of drop-offs had finally slowed to a trickle and ended at eighty-seven. Two of the new ones seemed to have the vague lethargy that foreshadowed bad things, so she moved these into the dwindling space of the isolation room.
Dwindling. It was a word that captured so much about their situation—time, resources, and, now that Sam had learned from the dean that her father was missing again and not even aware of her plea for help, hope. She would need to tell Tom about the sick dogs, she decided… and then convinced herself that a few more hours of delay would be excusable.
When the pizza finally arrived, the shelter crew all took a needed break and gathered around the staff room table, numbly chewing slices while watching the local news report that there was no progress in halting the virus or isolating the vector.
“This sucks.” Greg finally broke the silence. He tossed pieces of his crust to a few dogs sitting at his feet.
“Let’s take a step back,” Sam said. “What do we know?”
“We know this sucks,” Greg repeated.
“Something slightly more constructive?” Sam pressed.
“We’ve got sick dogs and dogs that show no signs of infection,” Luke offered.
“And,” Beth added, “we’ve got humans that have come into contact with the sick dogs, with no signs of infection. At least not yet.”
“What do we know about the dogs that are sick?” Sam asked, and passed around a stack of patient folders. They each reviewed a file, although they already knew the limited contents.
“Bloody diarrhea,” Sid said, reading from his file.
“Abdominal tenderness,” Luke added.
“Dehydration,” Beth chimed in.
“Yeah, but the second two symptoms are probably the result of the first,” Greg said.
“Right.” Sam nodded. “There’s also a fever, but we know there are no signs of parasites and our initial blood slides showed nothing out of the ordinary under the microscope.”
“What do we know about the dogs themselves?” Greg asked.
“Not a lot, except for Nick,” Luke responded, looking through the file folders.
“Nick was a park stray before he found me,” Sam responded. “So nothing useful in the history there. What about the others? Who’s their vet? Maybe those offices have some helpful background.”
They all looked through their files.
“Morgan for mine,” Luke said.
“Morgan,” Sid said, reading from his.
Greg scanned his intake interview notes. “According to what they told us, except for Nick, the eight sick dogs had Morgan as their primary vet.”
“But that sort of makes sense,” Sam said. “She’s the only local practice. Most people don’t travel too far for their routine vet care. Plus she’s got the lab.”
“So that’s a dead end,” Greg said. “Morgan’s not going to turn over her files to you.”
“Maybe I can have Walden call her on the authority of the mayor. We were promised city hall support.” Sam checked her watch. Morgan was probably gone by now anyway. “Greg, are you still friendly with that tech over there?”
“Petra? Yeah, I guess.”
“See if you can reach him. He’s at least reasonable. Tell him to expect a call from downtown, but don’t tell him any of the dogs are sick.”
Greg gave Sam his “How stupid do you think I am?” look and left the room.
Beth cleared her throat. “Isn’t it a bit… I don’t know… fantasy to expect that we’re going to be able to figure out something that the CDC with all its resources can’t understand?”
“My father worked with the CDC,” Sam said. “He was never a fan. They have some great people, but it’s a bureaucracy with lots of protocols. They don’t move fast.”
“And we have one thing the CDC doesn’t,” Luke said. “We have the dogs.”
“Exactly,” Sam concurred. At least for the next few hours. After that, Sam figured all bets were off.
Greg returned to the room rubbing his chin. “No answer at Morgan’s either on the phone or from the service.”
“Someone must be there,” Sam said. “At least a tech for the overnight. Probably just not picking up the phone with everything going on. Can you go over and take a look?”
Greg returned fifteen minutes later. “Locked up tight.”
“What do you mean?” Sam asked.
“Lights out, nobody home,” he answered. “No signs of life at all.”
Sam shook her head. “That can’t be. What about her staff? Her clients? She’s a twenty-four-hour operation.”
“Not today,” Greg said. “I called Petra on his cell. He told me that all the staff got an e-mail that the practice would be closed for the duration of the quarantine, and they would be on paid leave. Petra said that Morgan’s just sitting at her big old house in Bedford watching Ellen while you do the city’s crap work.”
“But what about the animals Morgan had in-house when it happened?” Sam asked.
“Petra said Morgan sent the surgicals to the Animal Medical Center across town before the wall came down, and the rest went home or were transferred.”
“This still doesn’t make any sense,” Sam complained.
“You’re not thinking like Morgan,” Beth offered. “I know her type. Shit, I am her type. She doesn’t want to get involved, doesn’t want to get pressed into doing service for the city for free, and doesn’t want to stay in the infection zone.”
“Yeah, I guess, maybe,” Sam said, far from convinced. “I guess we—”
The pounding on the front door stopped her.
“Another drop-off?” Greg asked.
“Not likely,” Sam said. The drop-off window had closed and the Guard had taken to turning people away.
“Probably more press then,” Luke said. “I’ll get it.”
Sam was already on her feet. “Finish your pizza. I’m not hungry anyway.” She left them and opened the front door, still thinking about Morgan.
In the next instant, every thought flew out of her head as she struggled to process the fact that her father was standing before her.
Daniel attempted to smile, but Sam could see the pain behind it. “I wanted you to know… you deserve to know that I lied to you,” he said. “I do remember the faces of those dogs I mutilated… I actually see them all the time… they stare out at me from the cages. But those aren’t the worst of the images. I know those are memories and beyond any power to repair. It’s the ones with you—the dreams I have where you are locked away alone in a cage of my construction—that are the most painful to bear. Those gut me because I know they are both true and told in real time.”
Sam’s first instinct was to say something hurtful. But her fear and need for help in this moment were greater than her urge to cause pain.
She stepped aside and allowed Daniel to cross the threshold into the shelter.
26
Sam and her father examined a male bull terrier, one of the new deliveries to the isolation room. They were making such an extraordinary effort to avoid any subject that might call for anything other than a clinical response that their conversation sounded like something out of a vet school lab practical. Sam’s emotional guard—well trained to protect her around anything to do with her father—was up so high at this point that she couldn’t see where it ended.
Daniel’s expert hands felt the dog’s abdomen. The dog winced and snarled. “Tenderness,” he said.
“Same as the others,” Sam replied.
He pulled down the dog’s lower lip and touched his gums. “Dehydration.”
“Same as the others.”
He checked the dog’s chart. “Fever.”
“Same as the others.”
Daniel slid his hands along the dog’s spine. “Lipoma on the left side. Do any of the other dogs have it?”
“Not that I noticed. But my hands have been pretty full.”
“I’m not judg
ing, just asking. How many dogs have you seen since the virus was first reported?” he asked.
“I’ll need to check the records. We have over eighty new ones with us now, so maybe another twenty-five on top of that. A hundred and ten would be a good guess.”
“And these were the only ones that were symptomatic, of all the ones you saw?”
“Yes.”
“Show me the dogs that have been in the isolation room the longest.”
Sam led her father to the cages.
“How do they seem as compared to when they first came in?” he questioned. “Any worse?”
“No. Actually a bit brighter. The blood in the diarrhea appears to be resolving.”
“What are they on?”
“Flagyl.”
“You didn’t keep a comparison group?”
“No.”
“Then I guess we don’t know if that worked or they’re just getting better on their own.”
“I was trying to cure them, Dad, not test a hypothesis,” she snapped.
“Asking. Not judging,” Daniel repeated. “It is odd, though.”
“What?”
Daniel turned to his daughter. “All of it, actually. The fact that the disease is self-limiting, that more dogs are not ill despite the close proximity, the sudden onset, the absence of an obvious vector. This is atypical for contagion. I’ll need to review all the lab results.”
“Be my guest.”
“And I’d also like to run some additional tests—a few pathogen screens we developed at Cornell for emerging viruses. What kind of equipment do you have in your lab? I’ll need to recalibrate.”
“My lab?” Sam laughed at him. “You’re not in Cornell anymore, Toto.”
“You need to send everything out?” Daniel asked. “How do you function?”
Sam despised that all-too-familiar tone. “You’re forgetting that I run a shelter. All I’ve got is a crappy little microscope set up to do fecals and basic blood smears, chem strips, and an old X-ray machine.”
“This won’t be enough.”
“I know, Dad. That’s why I was seconds away from calling the CDC.”
“Really?”
“This is way out of my league. I don’t want to do anything that might make more kids sick.”
“But this,” Daniel said, pointing to the cages, “obviously isn’t rabies. I can tell you that without running a single test.” Daniel took a bowl of water and placed it before the dog he had been examining. The dog took several laps and then rested his head near the bowl. “No hydrophobia, no evidence of painful swallowing.”
“Then how do we explain this otherwise impossible coincidence?”
“I don’t know yet. But if you want all the dogs in this shelter kept alive, I would delay that call to Atlanta and get us some access to appropriate equipment.”
Sid jumped into the room, his shirt soaking wet. “We need more towels,” he said.
“What happened now?” Sam asked.
“A little problem with a water pipe in the basement. I’m taking care of it.”
“There’s a box of rags in the storage area in the back,” Sam said. Armed with that information, Sid jumped back out.
“What equipment specifically?” Sam asked her father.
“Cellular-level magnification, gas chromatography.”
“That’s all? Well, I’ll just pull all that out of my ass.”
He waved the comment away. “So where can we go?”
“What about Cornell?”
“Too far,” he said. “And given how I left things, it’s not like I can just waltz in there and borrow a million-dollar machine.”
Sid entered again. “Sorry. I checked. No rags there.”
“Hold on a sec,” she told Sid, and turned back to her father. “Even if I convinced the dean, I guess he’d need to tell the CDC what we’re doing.”
“And that would be the end of this little project,” Daniel confirmed. “How about someplace else in the city?”
Sid raised his hand like a schoolboy asking to go to the bathroom. “Excuse me, but I could really use those towels.”
“Morgan’s place is the only one I know with that level of equipment and she’s not about to let us use it,” Sam said.
Sid tried to interrupt. “Samantha?”
“What if I ask her?” Daniel suggested. “Tell her it’s an emergency?”
“Are you kidding? There’s only one person she hates more than me—and I’m looking at him. What the hell did you really do to her anyway?”
“I tried to help her. She didn’t see it that way.”
“You do have an odd effect on people.”
Daniel shrugged. “You asked. What did you do to her?”
“I wasted years of her precious training when I declined her offer of employment after Mom died. Oh, and then I started giving away free vet care to her clients.”
Daniel nodded. “That would do it. So she’s off the list.”
“The only way would be to get the mayor to order it and Morgan would just get her lawyers to stop us. And we’d still need to disclose to the mayor what we’re doing. That’s a dead end. You’ll need to find another way.”
“Samantha…,” Sid tried again.
“In a minute, Sid!”
“There is no other way,” Daniel argued. “You said I can’t go to the city. We certainly can’t go to the CDC. And if they find out that the dogs are ill, regardless of whether it’s related, they’ll start the cull and these dogs—including Nick—will be on the first truck out, euthanized and on a necropsy table an hour later.”
“But Samantha…,” Sid interrupted.
“I know, Sid, I know! The towels!”
“No, no,” Sid started, the excitement making his voice squeak. “I think I can get you in.”
“What?” Daniel and Sam asked at the same time.
“Morgan’s place. I can get you in. I’ve done work there. I know her security system.”
It took a moment for Sam to get her mind around Sid’s proposal. “You’d risk that?” Sam asked finally.
“For you, Samantha? The world.”
“But if she finds us in there…” She didn’t finish.
“There is no ‘us,’” her father said. “Only me. If I get caught, you had nothing to do with this.”
“I’m already in this. Don’t start trying to protect me now. Besides, you’re going to need another pair of hands.”
“No,” Daniel said. “If you get involved in this, it will destroy everything for you. You’ll have no future. I won’t allow that.”
She moved to within an inch of her father’s face. “I’m in,” she said. “They’re my dogs. You owe me this.” At this truth Daniel’s shoulders slumped forward in defeat. “I’ll let the others know,” Sam said. “You start drawing new bloods.”
27
Carrying a small Coleman-like cooler in each hand, Sam and her father peered into the dark of the evening from the sidewalk in front of Morgan’s hospital. They served both as lookouts and as a human screen for Sid, who, standing behind them, examined the alarm control panel adjacent to Morgan’s front door. The panel, about the size of a paperback novel, with two LEDs on the front that blinked like angry red eyes, had an alphanumeric keypad and a swipe groove for a key card.
Sid scratched his head, a concerned look on his face.
“You really know how to disarm that?” Sam asked.
“I think so.” Sid did not express the confidence Sam had been expecting.
“Can we get on with it then?” Daniel hissed.
“I’m thinking,” Sid answered, but made no move toward the panel.
Daniel shifted nervously on his feet. “Well, if you’re thinking it looks perfectly natural for us to be on the street carrying lab coolers in the middle of the night, I’m going to disagree.”
“Leave him alone, Dad,” Sam cut in. “He’s thinking.” Then her nerves kicked in. “How much longer, Sidney?”
Sid took a
key card from his pocket, wiped the metallic strip against his hand, and slid it through the swipe strip. The LED continued to blink.
Sam glanced behind her. “Is it supposed to do that?”
“No. Actually, the light should turn green.”
“What happens if it doesn’t?” Daniel asked.
Sid checked his watch. “My guess is that the cops will be here in under two minutes, so listen for sirens.”
The alarm box beeped sharply. This time Sam and her father both spun around to stare. Sid shrugged. “I maybe would get ready to run,” he said sheepishly.
After what seemed like an eternity, the LED finally turned green and the three of them exhaled in relief. “I guess it still works,” Sid said. “Now for the code.”
“What code?” Sam asked.
“I have thirty seconds to punch in Morgan’s specific password or the alarm will trigger. So count out.”
“One Mississippi, two Mississippi,” Sam began. “What’s her passcode, four Mississippi, five Mississippi—”
“I dunno,” Sid said.
“What!” Daniel exploded.
“Eight Mississippi, nine Mississippi…”
“It’s a personal password. She never told me,” Sid explained. “I was taking it one step at a time.”
“Are you joking?” Daniel spit. “What the hell are we supposed to do?”
Sam tried to concentrate on her count, rhythmically calling out the numbers, but her heart was already skipping beats. “Twelve Mississippi, thirteen Mississippi, I can’t believe you don’t know it Mississippi, fifteen Mississippi. We are so fucked Mississippi… seventeen Mississippi…”
“I originally put in a skeleton key password, just in case she ever got locked out,” Sid said, rubbing his generous chin.
“… nineteen Mississippi, twenty Mississippi…”
“Hopefully, she never reprogrammed the override.” Sid began punching letters into the keypad—“C-H-A—” He spoke the letters out loud as he keyed them in.
Just Life Page 20