by Howard, Bob
Petty Officer Gibbs did a quick inspection of each body to be sure they were dead, then she started checking them for their crew identification cards. She was surprised to find that two of them weren’t carrying ID’s.
A security detail arrived within a few seconds being led by the Chief of Security. When he saw the bodies, he was furious with himself. They had inspected the crew for bites, but even when they had searched the ship for crewmen who were hiding, they had failed to detect stowaways. As a matter of fact, they had never given the problem a thought. Gibbs told herself she would have thought to check for stowaways if she hadn’t been assigned to be a celebrity bodyguard. It wasn’t that she blamed anyone. It was more that she considered it the job of the Chief of Security to think of everything else. She promised herself she wouldn’t make that mistake again.
It was a little too late for the four dead crewmen, but if there were two stowaways, there could certainly be more. As much as he wanted them shot on sight, the Chief of Security gave orders to search the ship and to restrain anyone who was not a member of the crew.
The second outbreak was only a few days later on the midnight shift when a patient managed to free himself from his restraints. At first the nurse thought he had unbuckled the strap on his wrist. When she tried to pull the patient’s arm back to the straps, she saw that the hand was still in the restraints. In the split second before she was savagely bitten, she understood that the patient had died and then had pulled so hard at the restraints that the hand had detached at the wrist. She was so surprised she didn’t even bother to scream.
Because of the late hour, there were no doctors in the medical bay. During the day, there would be a dozen or more doctors running their tests, trying to isolate the virus, and observing the patients who were dying right before their eyes only to become reanimated minutes later. This was the last patient still alive, and since the others needed no medical care, there had only been one nurse on duty. One nurse to watch the patient, and one security guard at the door.
When the door to the isolation ward began to swing open, the security guard thought the nurse was just coming out to socialize for a few minutes. Boredom on the midnight shift was how most mistakes were made, and that was how it had always been, even before the infection.
The security guard didn’t have a chance to draw his weapon. His M4 was leaning against the bulkhead, and even if he had pulled his sidearm from the holster, he wouldn’t have had the opportunity to switch off the safety and aim a shot to the head.
The bite hurt worse than he could believe, and shock made him react more with disbelief than to let his training take over. First he asked her what she was doing, then he went to his knees looking at all of the blood as she bit him again on the face.
The nurse moved past the body toward the distant sounds ahead, and she didn’t look back when the security guard pushed himself to a standing position. Dead eyes that looked like red rimmed cataracts turned in the same direction as the first infected dead. The sound of her movements down the passageway were enough to make the second infected dead choose to go in that direction.
Unlike most ships, hospital ships have wheelchair ramps in large numbers. One such ramp needed to go directly to the medical bay so emergencies could be treated more quickly. If the two infected dead had made a right turn at the next passageway, they would have fallen to the bottom of a ladder over twenty feet high, but they made a left and began stumbling down the long curve of the wheelchair ramp. The bottom of the ramp came to an end at the port side emergency door where a gangplank could be lowered to a dock. It stood open because the seas were calm, and the two infected dead were drawn to the sound of the ship moving through the water.
A rope railing stopped them from tumbling over the side of the ship, and the bow was riding slightly higher than the stern, so they turned toward the rear of the ship. The port side crewman who was standing watch at the bow glanced down the length of the ship, but all he saw was two people taking a slow walk toward the stern. He continued on his rounds toward the starboard side of the bow.
The stern had been a favorite place for sailors since the beginning of sailing ships. Standing at the stern watching the wake of the ship seemed to make the world better, and on this particular night there were several groups of crewmen who had been unable to sleep. They were lined up along the aft railing smoking cigarettes and cigars. They were a long way from home with no idea of what was happening to their families and friends, and this was the closest thing they could find to give them peace.
One of the men who was leaning on the top rope and had one foot up on the bottom rope noticed the arrival of a nurse and a security guard. At first they were nothing to him except two new arrivals on a calm night. Then they crossed over one of the sections of the deck that was under a light, and he saw they were infected. If not for his warning shout, the group nearest to them would have joined the list of victims.
Everyone scattered away from the approaching pair of infected, and someone was screaming for the stern watch to shoot them. The watch was just taking aim when Doctor Sellers looked over the railing from above and shouted to stop.
“Get a net over them. We need them for tests.”
The crew was beginning to hate the doctors. All they ever wanted to do was run their tests, but that meant keeping these things on board. Now two more were dead, and the crew was losing its patience.
A heavy net was thrown over the pair of infected dead, and they were unceremoniously dragged back to the medical bay. Doctor Sellers came down from the upper level of the ship and met the crewmen who were returning the nurse and the guard to the medical bay. As soon as they were strapped into place, he was drawing blood for his tests. He had learned that their blood tended to clot quickly because their hearts were no longer pumping. The blood just sat inside their veins and turned to mud.
This pair of victims hadn’t been dead very long, so he was able to draw some good samples, and he rushed them to his lab. He had also learned that the blood tended to congeal even after it had been drawn. It became as thick as maple syrup before he was able to run any meaningful tests.
Doctor Sellers prepared some slides and was beginning to study the samples when he became aware that someone else was in the room with him. He was shocked when he turned and saw the physical shapes of men moving toward him. Before he could say a word or yell for help, a big hand covered his mouth. He was easily lifted from the floor, and someone grabbed him by the ankles. He struggled, but he was being roughly carried from his lab by at least six men.
The lab was on the same side of the ship as the emergency medical bay, and the men switched from his feet to his shoulders to get him through an open door. The cool night air hit him, and it didn’t seem real, but he could feel himself being lifted higher as the men got ready to drop him over the rope railing into the ocean.
“You doctors and scientists in your white smocks are always messing around with things you don’t understand,” said one of the assailants. Doctor Sellers wasn’t sure of the accent, but he was fairly sure it was one of the cooks.
“We’re all going to die on this ship, and all you do is keep strapping people down and taking their blood,” shouted one of the crew. “If we don’t stop you, all of us are going to wind up strapped to your tables.”
They all heard the familiar sound of someone putting a round into the chamber of an automatic. Doctor Sellers was suspended over the railing by several pairs of hands ready to let go, just as a voice said, “If he goes over the side, all of you will go with him.”
Cassandra was mostly in the shadows, but there was no mistaking the deadly serious tone of her voice. They had all seen her in action, and there was no doubt she could shoot every one of them before they got to her.
“I’ve been given the job of ensuring the personal safety of Doctor Sellers and Doctor Nkrumah, and you people are making me look bad.”
Sellers could feel the hands around his arms and ankles grip tighter as each of
the men started to understand the need to keep him from slipping out of their grasp. Accidentally dropping him would have the same effect as throwing him. He couldn’t see Cassandra Gibbs because he was facing upward toward the night sky, but he had been able to hear the deadly menace in her voice and expected to hear a gunshot at any moment.
He felt himself being eased back toward the ship, and his feet lowered to the deck. There were apologetic voices pleading with Petty Officer Gibbs, and Sellers could hear the men saying they were afraid the doctors were going to bring the sickness to them all.
“The Captain didn’t say anything to me about keeping you guys alive,” said Cassandra. Each word was said slowly, and Sellers could see that the men were showing her their hands.
More than one was saying they were sorry, and Cassandra gradually began rotating around the group until she was between them and Doctor Sellers. When they had the open door behind them, the men took it as their reprieve and began backing through it. Then they ran.
“Thank you, Miss. I would be well on my way to drowning if not for you.”
Petty Officer Gibbs holstered her sidearm and faced Sellers. She hadn’t really paid much attention to his appearance before, but in the shadows outside along the railing, she could see why the crewmen had treated him as if he was a monster. Slightly stooped from too much time looking through a microscope, and the white jacket…always the white jacket. Gibbs realized that somewhere in the world there was someone like him, someone in a white jacket who probably gave birth to this disease that was wiping out the population in the worst possible way.
“We’d better get you back inside, and while we’re at it, we should locate Doctor Nkrumah to be sure he’s okay.”
She pointed at the door but stepped ahead of him as he started for it.
“I’ll lead. Just in case one of those guys has a change of heart.”
On the way back to the lab, a quick radio call to the security team confirmed that Doctor Nkrumah was asleep in his quarters. Gibbs spoke with the Chief of Security and he agreed to place extra guards in the corridors that led to the cabins belonging to the medical staff.
After she saw Doctor Sellers back to his microscope, Gibbs found a chair and placed it where she could see the corridor, the lab, and the plastic curtains that surrounded the beds where the dead had been restrained. It worked on her nerves a bit to see movement where there shouldn’t be any, but the dark shapes were in constant motion. There was also that sound. It wasn’t quite a groan or a moan. It was just something that escaped from them when they opened their mouths.
Doctor Sellers was peering through his microscope, and it startled her when he sat bolt upright on his lab stool. It looked like he had seen something, and it was coming through the microscope after him. He had been pale skinned before, but now he looked like he had been drained of blood.
“Did I hear you say Doctor Nkrumah was asleep?”
“Yes,” she answered. It came out sounding more like she had answered his question with a question.
“Can you radio your security people and have him brought to the lab?”
Gibbs nodded at the doctor as she raised her radio to her face and said a few words. She heard an affirmative and said, “He’s on his way.”
They heard Doctor Nkrumah coming long before they saw him, and he burst into the lab with his security guards following right behind.
“What is it, Sellers? What did you find?”
Nkrumah was almost out of breath even though it hadn’t been that long of a run from his cabin to the lab.
“The sample I prepared on the slide. It’s changing.”
Sellers pointed at the microscope as he moved out of the way to let his colleague take a look.
Nkrumah took Sellers’ place on the stool and seemed to stare through the lens forever. Gibbs didn’t even realize she had stood up and was watching the doctors instead of the corridor. The two security guards who had followed Nkrumah into the room were also watching intently.
When he looked at Sellers, the expression of shock was obvious on Nkrumah’s face.
“What am I seeing here, Sellers? What’s different about this sample?”
“Did you see it too?” asked Sellers. “Did you see the cells attacking each other?”
“I saw it, but how was this sample prepared? Can it be replicated?”
Sellers was ecstatic, but he managed to explain that he had never tried mixing the blood of two victims. It had occurred to him that the infected never bit each other, but that didn’t mean they were immune to the infection. Before he had been grabbed by the crewmen and dragged outside, he had mixed the blood of both victims on the same slide. The cells from one victim had dominated the cells of the other.
“What does that mean?” asked Gibbs.
Both doctors looked at the security officer as if they had just noticed her for the first time.
“I’m not entirely sure,” said Sellers, “but it’s something we didn’t know before.”
Gibbs blinked her eyes as if she was trying to clear her vision.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Are you saying you got all excited about a discovery, and that was all there was to it?”
She didn’t know why it made her so mad, but it did. Maybe it was because she thought for a moment that it had meant a cure was within reach. Whatever it she had thought, she didn’t expect to see so much excitement over nothing.
Sellers explained just a little too patiently that any new information was worth getting excited about. As a matter of fact, he was speaking as if she wouldn’t understand if he spoke too fast, and that didn’t help.
“Doctor Sellers, if I had not received orders from the Captain to protect you, I’d call the crewmen back up here and ask them how far they could throw you.”
Petty Officer Gibbs motioned for the security team to follow her, and she stormed out of the lab.
Unfazed by the comment, Nkrumah asked his friend a second time, “Can this be replicated?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to try.”
The two doctors spent the rest of the night mixing the blood from the infected dead that were restrained on the beds of the isolation ward. First they tried mixing the blood from the same two infected that had just been returned to the ward, but there was no activity in the blood. The cells were dormant.
The disappointed doctors understood the discovery was related to the length of time the infected had been dead. As the blood had congealed in their veins, it had died along with the victims. The heart needed to be pumping in order for the blood cells to be alive, and they had never had the opportunity to closely examine the vital signs of patients that had just died. What they learned was essentially that the heart kept beating for a brief period of time after the victims came back as infected dead.
“Nkrumah, we will need to study the vital signs of the next victim as he comes back from the dead.”
Nkrumah stared at Sellers with his mouth slightly open. If he had just heard his colleague correctly, he was saying they needed someone else to die from this awful disease. The only way they could study the discovery they had just made was to be there when a victim died, and then study everything as fast as they could before the heart stopped.
Sellers saw the expression on Nkrumah’s face but didn’t understand at first, then it dawned on him that he must have sounded as heartless as the crew had thought him to be. He had dedicated his life to giving free medical care in needy countries, and now he sounded like a Nazi doctor in a concentration camp. He felt ashamed that he had forgotten the victims were people too.
“I’m sorry, Nkrumah. We should focus our efforts on finding a way to reanimate the blood cells and hope there are no more victims. I won’t hesitate to gather information as quickly as we can if there is another victim, but I think we should help the Captain find a way to keep this from spreading to the rest of the crew.”
Nkrumah was glad to see his friend come to his senses, but at the same time he dreaded th
e possibility that his friend had been right in a terrible way.
“We will have more victims, won’t we?”
Doctor Sellers didn’t answer, but he nodded slowly.
“We should talk with the Captain about finding a way to isolate the crew into separate groups. If we have an outbreak, we might be able to contain it,” said Nkrumah.
******
As the sun came up on the horizon, the Mercy Mission ship sailed across a calm ocean toward North America. The security teams had separated the crew and begun a process of examinations to ensure there was no infection coming from another source, and that the means of transmission was still just from being bitten.
Cassandra Gibbs rotated between protecting the doctors and patrolling the ship. She always had her M4 ready as she checked the different levels, watching for signs of infection. There was no doubt in her mind that she would shoot anyone that looked like they had a head cold, and she was much more jumpy than usual.
She was checking the vehicle deck when she saw a crewman getting sick into a bucket. She had been looking inside the rows of jeeps to be sure no one was hiding even this far out to sea, and there was a retching sound. There was always the chance it was one of the volunteers who couldn’t get his sea legs under him, and it was nothing more than sea sickness, but that was usually gone by the time they had been at sea for a week or two.
Petty Officer Gibbs switched from her M4 to her Glock and eased around a Jeep to get a better look. The crewman had all of the symptoms of someone who was better off staying on land, but he was just a little too sick. He had his back to her, so she couldn’t see his face, but she expected him to have a bite mark.