by Scott Britz
“Fuck you.”
Niedermann laughed. “I’ll take that as a vote of confidence.”
Eden gave him a hard, unblinking stare. But sweat was on his forehead. “You’re playing a dangerous game, Niedermann.”
“I’ve already crossed the Rubicon, haven’t I?”
“You sure as hell have.”
Five
CRICKET HUNG UP THE WALL PHONE as she watched Hank toss a skilletful of shrimp scampi into the air. “Well, that’s that. It’s now officially too late to catch the four o’clock from Boston to Atlanta. No seats left on anything else until tomorrow morning.” She had made up her mind not to leave without at least seeing Emmy one more time. Maybe taking Emmy to Atlanta was out of the question, but she couldn’t leave things as they were. There might never be another chance to make peace.
Hank shrugged. “You’ll be staying for lunch, then. You still go for garlic?”
“Sure. Lay it on.”
Hank sprinkled some diced cloves into the skillet, then stooped to fetch a bottle of white wine from under the counter. “Don’t worry,” he said with a wink. “It’s just for cooking.”
With the wine sizzling in the skillet, Hank threw in some angel-hair pasta, flipped the mixture in the air a few times, then poured two servings onto plates. Carrying a plate in each hand, he sat down across from Cricket at the breakfast island. Cricket wasted no time in jabbing a fork into the steaming mound of pasta and winding it around the tines. The first mouthful made her moan with delight.
“I really don’t think I should be here.” She sucked loose strands of pasta through her lips. “Maybe I should wait in town. Get a hotel room in Bar Harbor.”
“Uncomfortable with me?”
“No, no, it’s not that. It’s . . . it’s Charles. He seems to have it in for me. You could get hurt in the cross fire.”
Hank shrugged. “What will be will be. Right now, you and Emmy come first. I’ll worry about Charles.”
He went on eating, as though his loyalty was something she should have taken for granted. Cricket wondered if he had always been like that. “Thanks,” she said, spearing a piece of shrimp.
The phone rang. As Hank got up to answer it, he nodded toward the bottle of wine by the stove. “There’s enough of that chardonnay left to make a glass. You want it?”
Cricket shook her head.
Hank picked up. “Hello, Hank Wright speaking.” Cricket saw his look go from casual to anxious in a microsecond. “Princess, is that you?” he exclaimed.
Cricket dropped her fork onto the plate.
“Where are you?” Hank pressed a hand against his free ear as he strained to listen. “I’m sorry, you’ll have to speak up, Emmy. I can’t hear you.”
Cricket hurried around the island to the phone. “It’s really Emmy?” she whispered.
Hank nodded. “Okay, okay, honey. I’ll put her on.” Hank covered the mouthpiece as he looked toward Cricket. “She wants to talk to you.”
“Me?” Cricket was astonished. It had barely been two hours since they had come to blows. Cricket reached for the phone skeptically, even suspiciously. “Emmy? Emmy, hon? Look, I’m sorry. I know I’ve been an ass—”
A thin, faltering, frayed thread of a voice came through the receiver. A voice from a million miles away. “Mom, I think I’m sick.”
Mom! That first word eclipsed every other thought. This wasn’t the Emmy of two hours ago. This was little, four-year-old Emmy, helpless and scared the day she fell off a rock and broke her arm. For a moment Cricket couldn’t breathe. “What is it, honey?” she said at last.
“I’m cold. It’s so cold. . . . I don’t know what’s happening. . . . I threw up all over myself.”
“Where are you, Emmy? I’ll come and get you.”
The sound of a little girl weeping. Then the faint voice again. “Please help me, Mom.”
“I will, Emmy. I will. Just tell me where you are.”
“I’m . . . I’m afraid. . . . I can’t get up.”
“Where, Emmy?” Cricket shouted, twisting the receiver cord in her left hand. “You’ve got to tell me where you are.”
“Gas station . . . ladies’ room . . . Oh, God, I’m going to be sick again.”
The sound of vomiting, like an old-fashioned pump handle.
“Emmy? Emmy? Talk to me!”
Silence. Cricket pulled at the cord so hard, she was on the verge of unplugging the phone. Then, finally, the little girl’s voice once more. “Mom . . . I’m afraid.”
“Emmy? Where are you? I can’t help you if I don’t know where you are. What kind of gas station is it?”
Silence.
“Is it a Shell? A Citgo? What town, Emmy? What town?”
Nothing.
Cricket looked for help from Hank, but he had disappeared. On the verge of panic, she started pacing with the phone to her ear. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Hank in his study, typing on his computer.
“What the hell are you doing? Emmy’s sick, Hank. It sounds like Yolanda all over again—”
Hank held up a solitary finger. “Her cell phone has a GPS in it. I’ve got the locator right here.” As Hank huddled over the screen, Cricket chewed her lower lip. At last, Hank jumped up from his chair. “She’s in Bar Harbor. Let’s go!”
Hank pulled the receiver out of Cricket’s hand. “Princess, can you hear me? We’re coming to get you. Stay where you are, okay? We’ll be there in twenty or thirty minutes.” He and Cricket listened together for a response. Then Hank shook his head and hung up.
They got into Hank’s blue pickup truck and sped out toward the highway. Summer traffic was with them all the way. Hank ignored the double lines and passed four, five, six cars at a time. Once, at a red light in Seal Harbor, he veered out into the oncoming-traffic lane to get past a line half a block long. Neither he nor Cricket worried about the cops. Indeed, Cricket called the Bar Harbor Police on the way to put them on the lookout for Emmy’s car.
“If you find her, call me back immediately,” she said. “Do not, I repeat, do not go near her or allow any EMTs to approach. Wait for me. The disease she’s carrying could be extremely dangerous.”
“Do you really think it’s the same thing Yolanda had?” asked Hank.
“Her voice . . . her voice sounded exactly the same.”
Cricket spotted the Subaru first, at a Hess station next to a Dunkin’ Donuts on south Main Street, just coming into town. When Hank came screeching up, the station manager, a potbellied man in a dark blue jumpsuit, was already outside, banging on the door of the restroom with an elderly woman customer at his side.
“Hey, you in there!” he shouted. “What’s goin’ on? I got someone here needs to use the john.” He pounded again. “Goddamned druggies,” he said, half muttering, half apologizing to the woman. “They shoot up in there all the time.”
“She’s not a druggie,” said Cricket, pushing him aside and knocking on the door herself. “Emmy? Emmy, it’s Mom. Can you open the door?”
There was no answer.
Cricket turned to the manager. “My daughter is in there. She’s sick. Do you have a key?”
“She’s got the key in there with her.”
“Is there a spare?”
“Yeah. Yeah, sure.” He grudgingly fished a ring of keys from his belt and unlocked the door. It opened only six inches before bumping against something on the ground. Through the crack, Cricket could see that the linoleum floor was covered in blood.
“Jeeee-zus Christ!” cried the manager. “She cut her wrists in there?”
“Get back!” ordered Cricket, as she squeezed inside. “Hank, keep everybody out, will you?”
“Is it Emmy? Is she okay?” asked Hank.
“It’s Emmy, but she has it.” It infuriated Cricket to know that she didn’t even have a name for the disease. �
��It’s what we were afraid of.”
Emmy was lying on her side, with one arm propped against the base of the toilet. Her face was sunk in a pool of blood. No, bloody vomit. The same dark coffee-grounds stuff that had been splashed all over Yolanda’s bedroom. And with it, the same sickening sweet nail-polish smell that Cricket had smelled before—the sign of metabolic ketosis.
Cricket snapped on a pair of rubber gloves that had been left in Hank’s truck the night they took Yolanda to the BSL-4 lab. Squatting down, she touched her fingers to Emmy’s slender neck to feel for a carotid pulse. It was faint, but incredibly fast, almost like a message in Morse code—at least 150 beats per minute.
At her mother’s touch, Emmy drew her legs up into a fetal position and groaned. Her eyelids were slits. Although her lips were moving, no words came out.
“I’m here, baby,” said Cricket, stroking her daughter’s back. “Your dad’s here, too. We’re gonna take you home. Okay?”
Emmy’s left knee moved a little.
There was a whoop of a police siren. A blue strobe light reflected off the mirror and the white tiled walls of the restroom. When Cricket got up and looked out the door, she saw a police car sitting next to Hank’s pickup.
An officer stood directly outside the door, peering in. “Are you the one who called, ma’am?”
“Yes.” Cricket removed one glove and used that hand to pull her CDC badge from her skirt pocket. “I’m a doctor, a medical officer with the Centers for Disease Control. I am declaring a public health emergency.”
“Do you need an ambulance?”
“No. Mount Desert Island Hospital isn’t equipped to deal with this. She needs to be taken back to the institute, where we have facilities to treat her. We would appreciate an escort.”
“You got it.”
Cricket looked at the station manager. “And this restroom needs to be sealed,” she said, raising her voice for all to hear. “No one is to go inside for any reason. Touch nothing. Leave the customer key on the floor as it is. We’ll send a biohazard team out to decontaminate it. That goes for her car, too.”
The manager looked aghast. “What is it? Smallpox?”
Smallpox? thought Cricket, almost laughing. Would to God it were. But she realized that the man was simply naming the most terrible disease he could think of. And in that sense, he was absolutely on the mark. “We don’t know yet,” she said stiffly.
With the police officer herding back the ever-growing crowd of onlookers, Hank and Cricket rolled Emmy onto a blanket and lifted her into the back of the pickup. Cricket then climbed in with her, while Hank jumped into the cab and pulled out onto the highway. The blue-and-gold patrol car led the way through the endless caravans of tourists with its siren and flashing lights. In only fifteen minutes they came skidding to a halt in the parking lot of the BSL-4 lab. Summoned by a cell phone call from Cricket, Jean Litwack and another nurse stood waiting in blue biosafety suits, with an isolation stretcher between them.
“Put her in Bay Two,” shouted Cricket, as she hopped down from the truck. “She’s severely volume-depleted from loss of blood. Start a big-bore IV as soon as you get inside, at least sixteen-gauge. Use the external jugular if you can’t raise an arm vein. Push saline while you hang the first unit of blood. She’s type B-positive. Got that?”
“Yes,” said Jean. “Everything is ready.”
“And the aciclovir?” asked Cricket. Jean nodded. The drug sometimes worked for herpes simplex infections. It was a thousand-to-one chance that Wig Waggoner was right and Yolanda had really had herpes, but it was worth a shot.
If only I knew what I’m dealing with, thought Cricket, as her daughter—already barely visible through the plastic walls of the isolation tent—was wheeled through the front door.
She followed close behind the stretcher. Hank held back, slumped against the side of the pickup, as if that were the only thing holding him up. Tears streamed down his face. His head was bobbing up and down.
Cricket looked at her hands. They were steady as rocks. She, the emotional wreck, the basket case haunted by ghosts of the Congo and memories of tears of blood—she was the calm one now.
The outer air lock whooshed as she followed Emmy into the lab.
Six
CRICKET, ENCASED IN HER PLASTIC BIOSAFETY suit, reached into the porthole sleeves of the isolation tent. Picking up Emmy’s hand, she carefully unwound the iodine-soaked bandage. She was shocked to see a swath of fiery-red bubbles extending from thumb to wrist.
“What happened here, Emmy? Did you cut yourself?”
The IV fluids had revived Emmy a little, but over the intercom her voice sounded hesitant. “It’s nothing. They took care of it in the infirmary. It was an accident.”
“I see tooth marks.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You want to tell me what bit you?”
Before her daughter could answer, Cricket was startled by a man’s voice butting in through the intercom.
“What the hell’s going on?” Gifford was out in the corridor. His tie was askew and he sounded irate.
“I explained it all on the phone. This is the same virus Yolanda had. Purpuric rash, cold sores on her face and trunk, bloody vomiting, high fever.”
“You broke your word to me.” Gifford raised himself up on his toes to get a better view. “You were supposed to be on a plane to Atlanta by now.”
Cricket was swabbing Emmy’s hand for cultures, but dropped one of the swab sticks. “Jesus Christ, Charles! This is Emmy! Look at her! Fucking look at her! If you want me out of this lab, come drag me out yourself.”
Inside the tent, Emmy let out a groan. “Could you guys stop yelling? It’s making my headache worse.”
“Sorry, Emmy.”
Gifford, too, eased off. “All right, have it your way. But I won’t have you interfering with the Vector rollout. There will be no communication with the outside. Not with the press, the CDC, or even the other labs on campus.”
“Yes. Fine, yes.”
“Until Friday at noon, consider yourself in quarantine. You may not leave this building. I’ll have a cot brought into the office here, and food sent down from the cafeteria. But the instant you walk through that front door, I’ll have you ejected from campus—Emmy or no Emmy. You will not be allowed back.”
“I won’t leave her side.”
Cricket sealed a new culture swab in a vial, then began winding a fresh roll of gauze around Emmy’s hand. “So, we were talking about this bite mark,” she said to Emmy. “Was it one of the dogs in the lab?”
“Yeah . . . yeah, a dog,” Emmy mumbled, looking away.
“Which one? Which dog was it?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes, Emmy, I need to know how you got sick.”
“It . . . it . . . I’m feeling kind of groggy, Mom.” Emmy didn’t look groggy. She looked agitated. Her heart rate had spiked to 115.
“Jean, could you bring me that red crash cart by the door? We’re going to need two milligrams of lorazepam.” Cricket suspected that Emmy was covering up something. She was deeply attached to the animals she worked with and was probably afraid that the dog that had bit her would be destroyed. But right now Cricket needed to give her a sedative to get her heart rate down.
Jean wheeled up the cart, yanked open the top drawer, and grabbed a small vial. Turning it upside down, she punctured the rubber cap with a syringe needle, drew off a small amount of clear liquid, then handed the syringe to Cricket. Cricket screwed the syringe onto the Luer-Lok connector of the IV line and slowly pushed the plunger.
She looked out the window into the foyer, where Gifford watched her every movement. His hands fidgeted at his sides. His ramrod posture had sunk into a slump.
He’s in shock. He’s not himself. Better watch out.
As the sedative took effect, Cricket studi
ed the face of her daughter. Gone were Emmy’s freckles and the pink bloom of her cheeks. Through the plastic of the isolation tent, her skin appeared smooth, like white wax, revealing through its translucence a faerie web of tiny capillaries. Her lips were dark crimson. Her once-buoyant hair now spread limp across her pillow. Yes, sickness had ravaged her, but there was something otherworldly and beautiful about her, like a Botticelli Venus painted upon a gauze of silk.
Still beautiful, Cricket thought. The virus seemed to be attacking her more slowly than Yolanda. But, no mistake—it was the same disease, and it would kill Emmy, too, if something wasn’t done to stop it. But do what? She had tried everything she knew on Yolanda, and it had failed.
She didn’t even have a name for what she was up against.
Seven
TWO P.M.
Cricket stood by the isolation tent, holding Emmy’s hand through double layers of blue nitrile gloves. Hank and Jean had gone to the office to gulp down some sandwiches. Cricket couldn’t remember when she herself had last eaten.
Aciclovir, the antiherpes drug, wasn’t working. The oxygen saturation of Emmy’s blood was dropping, slowly but inexorably. The sedative had worn off, and Cricket could see her daughter’s neck muscles straining as she breathed. An X-ray showed shadows where fluid was building up in her lungs.
“Emmy, when Jean gets back from her break, we’re going to have to put you on the respirator to help you breathe.”
Emmy’s eyes opened wide. “Does that mean you’ll have to stick a tube down my throat? Please don’t do it. Please! I’ll be okay.”
“I’m sorry, I have to.”
“How will I be able to talk with that tube in me?”
“You won’t. But you won’t feel any pain, either. Before we insert the tube, we’ll give you a drug to relax you, and then a neuromuscular blocker to keep you from choking.”
“Neuro— . . . That will paralyze me, won’t it?”
“You have to trust me, honey.” But why should she? Cricket thought. “Look, Emmy,” she said, fumbling for words, “I’m sorry . . . about this morning. I’m a jerk, and I . . . I lose my head sometimes.”