The Serophim Breach (The Serophim Breach Series)

by Tracy Serpa

  Finally, she felt Thad’s hand on her arm, and she let her hands fall to her sides. She couldn’t understand; why would it bring Brandon back, and kill this girl? Why would it work on one, and not the other? There wasn’t anything else that could have made the difference between them.

  She turned on her heel and stalked to the other side of the room, leaving the body behind her. It was impossible to deny that her hopes had been high; despite the unsavory idea of going through a painful electric shock and momentarily being dead, the alternative prospect seemed much worse. And now her experiment had cost a girl her life. Foolish, impulsive, she berated herself.

  “Karen,” Thad called to her, “stop. Calm down. There’s something to be learned here. We just have to figure out what it is.”

  She quelled her revulsion at his clinical attitude, telling herself that he was right, that at least they could pull some information from this that might lead them toward another solution. Pulling in a deep breath, she turned to face him again.

  “It’s got to be time,” he said simply. She just looked at him, puzzled.

  “You said that when Brandon went into cardiac arrest, that’s when you did the defibrillation, right?”

  She nodded. “Yes, immediately.”

  “And Leilani also went into cardiac arrest, right?”

  “Right. But the power went out—”

  “And by the time it came back up, she registered a pulse again.”

  Karen’s eyes began to clear, and she stood up straight.

  “That’s right.” Karen glanced at the clock. “So the heart has been dead for over nine hours.”

  “And we don’t know what kind of effect the drug or the technology might have on the muscle system,” Thad continued. “I mean, there’s never been a case like this. We had no idea what to expect.”

  “So . . . this is all time sensitive,” she concluded.

  Thad nodded, his eyebrows lifting suddenly.

  “And . . . holy shit, I didn’t even think about this . . . you saw that second sample from Brandon. He still has no white cells. None. I presumed that once whatever was suppressing them was gone, his body would start manufacturing them again. But maybe once this thing shuts down a system, it’s shut down for good. You know?”

  His face paled as he considered the implications, and Karen felt the first real tendrils of fear clutch at her stomach. Even if the drug was stopped, the effects might be irreversible. And if that meant no white blood cells, it also meant those infected weren’t long for this world. Without a defense against infection, even the most benign of bacteria would quickly become fatal; the kidneys would struggle to function, and the liver would be overwhelmed. The list of complications expanded in her mind, and she let out a long exhale.

  “Tell me about it,” Thad answered, his eyes on the floor. She could tell he was thinking all the same things she was and had come to the same obvious conclusion. They were dealing with something that even when cured was incredibly dangerous, and probably meant other epidemics would follow.

  “We have got to get word out. Get the CDC up to speed . . . something,” he said.

  “How? Phones are down, Internet is down, even the cell towers are out,” Karen responded. They had tried contacting the mainland in every way possible several hours earlier and hit a wall each time. The generators that powered the hospital kept the computers and phone running, but without power to the island, there was no way to take advantage of their position.

  “Hey,” Thad said, suddenly looking up, “what about the guys outside?”

  Neither one of them had even seen the military triage tent that they had been told was going up outside, but Karen had seen a few young men in fatigues standing near the ER doors when she had been downstairs. They had seemed friendly enough, offering help to those showing up injured and direction to those who had just come to the hospital out of fear. She was certain that the bright lights would be a welcome beacon to the people of the surrounding neighborhoods.

  “They’ve got to have some way to talk to the mainland, right?” Thad continued. “Or at least the Big Island?”

  She nodded thoughtfully. A plan was beginning to take shape in her head, and she knew that if Thad was right about the military’s communications, they’d be one step closer to controlling this event.

  “You’re right. They’ve got to have some independent means of communication. So we go to them once we have this theory confirmed,” she said.

  Thad surveyed her face.

  “Isn’t that . . . don’t we have it confirmed? It doesn’t work.”

  She shook her head, holding his gaze.

  “No. It doesn’t work after the heart has stopped for a certain period of time. And maybe that’s not even true, but we don’t have a good way to test it right now.”

  He eyed her carefully as she paced slowly along the back wall.

  “But it worked with Brandon. Defibrillation started his heart, and as best we can tell, killed the nanites in his bloodstream. So if we test it on one more subject and get the same result . . .”

  Immediately Thad was on his feet, towering over her.

  “Are you crazy? We’re not trying this on you!” he shouted, jabbing his finger at her face.

  She held up her hands defensively and said, “Why not? You know as well as I do we need someone recently infected who’d give consent to the treatment. You want to go explain to an already panicked room of people what’s going on and ask for volunteers for an experimental treatment that thus far has a fifty-fifty rate of success? I sure don’t. And I also don’t want to end up like her.” Karen gestured toward Leilani’s pale figure. “And I don’t want to end up like Brandon. If his white cells don’t return, how the hell is he going to survive?”

  She realized with a start that she was shouting; her eyes narrowed, and her face screwed up in anger. Thad was watching her warily, both concern and anxiety in his eyes.

  “What?” she shouted, feeling the fury boiling in her chest.

  He didn’t react for a long moment, but just watched her face as she tried desperately to control her breathing, to slow her heart. Probably spreading it faster, she thought to herself.

  “Do we have an electroshock unit?” he finally asked.

  Karen considered this briefly, then shook her head.

  “No. Psych doesn’t use those anymore, at least not here. I can’t think of any other department that would have something like that, and really, we don’t have time for a scavenger hunt.” She steeled herself and did everything she could to make her face impassive. “The defibrillation is our only option.”

  Thad argued with her perfunctorily for a few more minutes, but eventually, after a long moment of silence, she saw that she had won. They moved the defibrillator to a room down the hallway, where she set up an assisted breather, a solar blanket, and a heart monitor next to the bed. As she removed her jewelry, she explained to him what he would need to do if her heart stopped, who to call, and what to say. He listened, nodding, as she talked, and she hoped he was truly paying attention. People survived electric shock all the time, she knew; but people also died from it every day.

  She sent him out of the room as she slipped out of her clothes and into a hospital gown, cringing slightly at the idea of Thad seeing her bare chest. Finally, she stretched out on the gurney and called him back in.

  It wasn’t until he set the unit to charge and she felt the hair lift on her neck again that the tears sprang up in her eyes. She wiped them away quickly, while Thad’s head was still turned, determined not to sway him from their decided course. If this didn’t work, she’d likely be dead in a few days anyway. Suddenly, she remembered Brandon.

  “Thad, if something happens, I need you to move Brandon to a quarantined room. Restrict his diet, like you would for a leukemia patient. And you’ll have to bring someone else on board. Tell them everything we know so far.”

  She worried briefly that her acknowledgment of the danger had pushed Thad too far when
he didn’t respond. But finally, without looking at her, he answered that he would.

  He moved to stand next to her with the paddles in hand.

  “It’s on the lowest setting?” she asked, and he nodded.

  She mentally ran over her body, checking for any jewelry she might not have removed, knowing full well it was all sitting on the counter on the other side of the room. Gingerly, she pulled the gown down to reveal her chest, avoiding Thad’s eyes. Karen pulled in a deep breath, feeling the stretch of her lungs as she breathed deeply for the first time in several hours. A small part of her lamented that it was stale and sterile hospital air she sucked in and not the heavy, fragrant breeze of the island.

  She exhaled and closed her eyes, waiting for the cold of the paddles against her skin. The contact still surprised her, and she felt Thad wince when she jumped.

  Hoping her voice would not fail her, she swallowed lightly and said, “Clear.” She tried to smile at the absurdity of the moment.

  She heard a thump and felt a stab of pain deep in her chest, and knew nothing more.

  Twenty

  Gary was relieved to find the same parking spot where he had found the Mustang was still available; in fact, he was relieved to be back in the abandoned neighborhood at all. Moments after leaving Carly’s office, he had plopped down into the driver’s seat, only to realize with a stab of horror that he had no idea how to get back to the warehouse. He had left without an address, without any way to contact his coconspirators; and the unfamiliar city loomed up around him, unfriendly and uncaring. Briefly, the thought that Hammond had planned it this way crossed his mind.

  When he had finally turned on the car and the GPS beeped to signal its power had returned, he felt both foolish and giddy. The route he had taken to the newspaper offices was still highlighted on the screen, and although it still didn’t get him to the warehouse’s front door, he felt certain that once he was back in the neighborhood, he could find his way easily enough.

  When he arrived back in the neighborhood of the warehouse, the fog had not yet burned off; it had only lifted away from the ground and building tops enough to make it easier to gain his bearings, although the sameness in the light gave him the strange sensation that time was not passing. On his drive back, he had listened intently to the radio, waiting for some indication that his information had worked its way from Carly’s desk to some editor’s eyes, but the stations all continued on with their normal business, only referencing the power outage in Hawaii briefly. The growing consensus seemed to be that some kind of accident at a central station had blacked out the entire grid. One reporter mentioned the lack of information coming off the island, then segued back into reporting on political polls and unemployment numbers.

  Just before his freeway exit, he had pulled out his cell phone and dialed each of his kids, getting the same strange, harsh ring that never connected. When he tried the house number, he got two rings before the line simply disconnected. A dull, fearful ache swelled in his chest, and he prayed silently that his family was somewhere safe, that his fears were unfounded, and that somehow this entire thing was some kind of exaggerated misunderstanding. As he pulled back into the parking spot, he realized he was grinding his teeth with stress and frustration.

  A short walk later, and he was standing in front of the same door through which he had exited only hours earlier. It looked innocuous enough, which was likely the point, but he still wondered how the group inside would react when he knocked. Were they expecting him to find his way back so quickly? Had they realized that he had gone without a golden thread to lead him back through the maze of the city? He shook his head and scoffed at his own paranoia. Still, he grinned, imagining Hammond dropping into some ridiculous defensive crouch as he banged loudly on the metal with the meat of his fist.

  He was just about to knock again when a whirring sound made him look up. A tiny camera he hadn’t noticed repositioned itself from a wide street view to take him in, and he tilted his head up so they could be sure it was him. After a second, the instrument moved again to survey the street in both directions before the whirring sound stopped. Finally, he heard the bolts being thrown, and the door opened just enough for him to slip into the building.

  As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he realized it was Josie who had opened the door; her face was set in a cool, distant mask—nothing like the concerned expression she had worn when he had walked out the door a few hours earlier.

  “You’ve been gone for a while,” she said flatly. She looked tired—exhausted, really. The bruises under her eyes were still a dark purplish-blue, fading to a sickly yellow near the bridge of her nose and cheekbones. She must have just showered; her face shone without makeup, and her damp hair was pulled back into a sleek ponytail at the nape of her neck.

  He shrugged and said, “I dropped the stuff off with a reporter at the LA Times. We spoke briefly, but like you said, all she really needed to see was the video, and she was off on her own.”

  Josie nodded, glancing toward the door before her eyes flitted back to his.

  “I hope you didn’t tell her too much about yourself,” she said in the same noncommittal tone. He decided to brush the statement off, as if he would never have revealed any kind of incriminating personal information. But briefly, he worried. Reporters had a duty to keep their sources anonymous . . . right?

  A significant change in the atmosphere of the warehouse began to dawn on him; there was a new tension in Josie’s body, in her attitude and expression, hiding just beneath the tired eyes and heavy body movements. And the way she kept glancing at the door made him feel as though if he turned to follow her gaze, he’d find a masked assassin waiting to shoot them both.

  “What’s going on?” he asked quietly, hoping that some of their previous conspiratorial interaction would return.

  Josie just shrugged and turned to head back, deeper into the building.

  “Nothing really. We’ve just been discussing ways forward. And starting to wonder if something had happened to you,” she said, moving away from where he stood.

  He followed, trying to make sense of the shift in their relationship. Had she been worried? A fight with Hammond maybe, once she had let him leave with such crucial information? But it had only been copies; he was risking nothing but himself by going to a news outlet. Ahead of him, Josie pushed open the door into the kitchen, where Reggie and Hammond sat, picking at the remains of cold pizza.

  “Hey! He’s back!’ Reggie’s exclamation did little to warm the frosty room or to convince Gary that something important hadn’t occurred while he was away.

  “Where is everyone?” he asked.

  “Out. Getting some things we need.” Hammond answered this time, his eyes trained on Gary’s face. “Did you speak to someone at the Times?”

  Gary was surprised by the question, both by the knowledge it implied and the strange inflection in Hammond’s voice. Was he curious? Hopeful? It felt like something more . . . something different.

  “I did, actually. I know I was just supposed to drop the info off, but, well, it was like you said,” Gary said, gesturing at Hammond. “They’re all going about their daily business, like no one knows anything other than the power’s out. And that’s no big deal. Just a minor inconvenience. I mean, they jumped from a tiny little blurb about Oahu to a story about mortgages.”

  Hammond raised one graying eyebrow as he wiped his fingers with a napkin and said, “And did you hear anything different after you dropped off the info? After you spoke to the reporter?”

  At that moment he knew that Hammond, and probably the rest of the group, knew something about his little foray into whistle-blowing that he didn’t, or couldn’t, know. Surveying each of their faces—Reggie’s tilted down at his mangled pizza, Hammond’s smug and calculating, Josie’s still closed and cool—he grabbed a nearby folding chair and seated himself at the table.

  “So, what’s the joke?” he asked, more than a hint of his frustration seeping into his voice.
When no one answered, he sat back hard in his chair and folded his arms, trying to convey with his posture that he would wait them out. Hammond stood with a quiet scoff and exited the room. Josie followed him with her eyes until he was out the door and his footsteps could no longer be heard. Then she slumped slightly in her seat.

  “Someone explain to me what’s happened since I left,” he pressed. When she looked up at him, the cool mask had fallen, and he could see again that she was tired, worried, irritated . . . and something more.

  “We let you go because you insisted,” she spoke up finally, wearily, “but we knew it was, in all likelihood, a pointless venture. And risky to boot. Hammond is sure someone will have followed you back, although I tried to tell him they don’t even know you’re working with us.”

  She went on to explain to him that they had, of course, looked into reporting the story to the news outlets days ago, before he had ever arrived. They had even sent in their own “anonymous tips,” and each one was met with cautious enthusiasm upon arrival and never mentioned on the air. Two of the reporters she had spoken to had been reassigned to overseas posts immediately after receiving her packets, covering the ever-escalating tensions in dangerous Middle Eastern locations. She hadn’t followed up with the others. Instead, she had done her own investigation and discovered what she considered to be the reason for the lack of coverage.

  “The parent company to Argo also owns controlling shares of one major network. That was as far as I got. I mean, it’s difficult to track corporate accounts, who owns what and things like that. But it was enough to assume that the other networks, even the cable outlets . . . they won’t run the story. Not until the shit hits the fan, because they can’t be wrong. Right now, with the blackout and no info coming off the island, there’s still too much of a risk. I’m sure they’re all at war with themselves, wanting to get the scoop but afraid of making such a potentially spectacular accusation, only to have it be proven false. They won’t break the story until they get something concrete off the island. Think about it: all we’ve given them is data from a study conducted on the mainland on some animals, and a few bits of paperwork to show that they did, in fact, move on to human studies. We don’t have anything linking this to the blackout, we don’t have any information about what’s happened with the trial between the animal studies and now, and we have absolutely no information linking the power outage to Argo. They’ll wait until they can get some kind of confirmation. And by that time . . .”