“Ow . . .” Dan lifted his right foot.
“What?”
“I just had a stab of hot pain in my foot. Ow. There it is again. Damn, what is that?” He dropped to the ground and pulled off his hiking boot and wool sock.
Kelly knelt beside him and examined his foot. “I don’t see anything.”
“Jesus, it’s moving up my leg.”
“Maybe if I massaged it.” She grabbed his foot and began to work it with her fingers.
Dan’s scream silenced the birds. “That’s worse.”
“Cold water might help. Let’s get back to the house. Can you walk?”
“I think so.”
She helped him up, but when he put his tormented foot on the ground, he screamed again.
“God, that hurts. Oh no. Now it’s starting in my other foot.”
Suddenly, the forest was obliterated by a shimmering cloud of colors.
“Kelly . . . I can’t see. What’s happening to me?”
Normally, the worse a situation got, the calmer and more efficient Kelly became. But not this time. This was so bizarre, her mind unspooled. Stay with him and help him to the house, or leave him and call for help? She couldn’t decide.
Dan screamed again in agony.
She had to leave him and get to the phone.
“Babe, I’m going for help. You just—” Abruptly, Dan became a dead weight in her arms. He slipped from her grasp and fell backward onto the lip of the steep drop to the river. Then he began to slide. Kelly grabbed at him, but it was too late. Helplessly, she watched him roll down the hill until he was stopped short of the water by a small pine tree.
Chapter 15
“MICHAEL, IT’S CHRIS.”
It was now mid-morning, the day after their evening together. Chris had received Michael’s page while she was in the ICU, and she’d returned it immediately.
“Your father is still upset at being confined again in the hospital,” Michael said. “But otherwise, he’s fine. Thought you’d want to know.”
“I called over there myself first thing this morning and checked on him. Thanks, though, for telling me. I don’t understand why he’s doing well, but it’s good news.”
“Could the virus have gained virulence after he transmitted it to the others? That would explain why it’s not affecting him.”
“I don’t think so. It would have had to change in the same way in three people. It seems more likely that it already had the potential to cause vascular inflammation when they acquired it.”
“Well, so far, it hasn’t got Wayne. Say, are you busy tonight?”
Between thoughts about her patients, the Barrosos, Mary Beth Cummings, and her father, Chris had replayed the previous night with Michael at least a dozen times in her mind. She shouldn’t have kissed him. In a way it was understandable; both of them grappling with their own culpability in the deaths of three people. They’d needed each other. But regardless of what Michael had said about never hurting her, he couldn’t possibly know what he’d do five or ten years from now. Growing increasingly uncomfortable with what seemed to be developing between them, she retreated.
“I’m sorry, but I do have plans.” It was true, she told herself. Wash her hair, read, watch a movie—those were plans. “But I’ll be over there this afternoon to check on a patient. Maybe I’ll see you then.”
Chris arrived at Monteagle at two thirty. As she turned into a section of the outside parking lot reserved for the staff, she saw at the end of the row a Channel 5 news van blocking the way, and behind it another, from Channel 46. In front of the vans were two guys, each with a TV camera on his shoulder. Both cameras were aimed at an attractive black woman and a tall gray-haired man interviewing someone in a white lab coat. Wishing to avoid the congestion, Chris backed up until she could enter the adjacent parking area, where she took the first empty slot. By the time she’d locked her car, a van from Channel 11 had joined the fray. By now, she’d begun to wonder if this had anything to do with the transplant program.
As she neared the action, she saw that the subject of the reporters’ attention was Michael, who now had three microphones and another camera pointed at him. She heard the newest reporter, a curly-haired guy she often saw on the news at accident or crime scenes, ask, “Dr. Boyer, is it true that you recently transplanted the liver of a pig into a human male patient?”
“I can’t discuss this under these conditions,” Michael said. “I don’t wish to be rude, but I have to go.”
He turned and hurried for the hospital entrance, pursued by more questions.
“Dr. Boyer!” The female newshound jostled her male counterparts out of the way so she got a step on them. “There are rumors that two nurses and a man in Dahlonega have all died after contracting a virus from the patient who received the pig liver. Will you comment on that?”
Abruptly, Michael stopped walking and spun around to face his inquisitors. All the reporters held their mikes at arm’s length to catch his every utterance.
“Who told you a man died in Dahlonega?” he asked.
Chris, too, was shocked at this news. But she saw that by responding as he had, Michael was tacitly admitting that everything else the reporter had said was true. She swooped in to save him, taking him by the arm.
“Dr. Boyer, we’re very late for our meeting.”
“Chris, they said a man died of the virus in Dahlonega.”
“We must get to that meeting,” Chris insisted.
“Are you Dr. Chris Collins?” the female reporter asked.
“Sorry, no,” Chris replied.
Ignoring her denial, the gray-haired newsman said, “Dr. Collins, was the recipient of the pig liver your father?”
Seeing now that the entire situation was out of hand, Michael gave ground and joined Chris in full retreat for the hospital’s front entrance.
The reporters and their minions followed, but Chris and Michael were able to put some distance between themselves and their pursuers when the cameramen were slowed getting their equipment through the doors. The extra time allowed the pair to dart onto an elevator whose doors were just closing.
Unable to say anything because of the other passengers, Chris and Michael used the forced silence to catch their breath. When the doors opened on the second floor, they got off and headed down the hall.
“We don’t want to stay here,” Michael said. He pushed the door to the stairwell open, and they went up one floor, popped into the hallway, and slipped into a linen supply room.
“They said somebody else died,” Michael said, breathing hard. “Is that possible?”
“I don’t see how,” Chris replied, her heart hammering on her breastbone. “But they seemed to know everything. Where’d they get their information?”
“There’s clearly a big leak in the HMS Monteagle,” Michael said. “I certainly don’t think it came out of Scott’s office. If the transplant was nothing but a big success without the other baggage we’ve picked up, he’d be the first one on the phone to the press. But he doesn’t want this kind of publicity. He’s really going to be steamed over this.”
“Sidney,” Chris said. “My money’s on him.”
“Sure, he could have provided them with our names and all the other things they seemed to know. But what’s with the guy in Dahlonega? What’s that all about?”
“We need to call the Dahlonega sheriff. They should know about any recent deaths up there.”
Chris got her cell phone from her bag and Googled the number. A few seconds later, she had the Dahlonega sheriff’s office on the line.
“This is Dr. Chris Collins in Atlanta. May I speak to someone there who could talk to me about any recent deaths you’ve had in the community?”
While the call was relayed to the appropriate person, Chris was entertained with the theme from the T
V show COPS.
“Deputy Govan.”
Chris identified herself again. “Deputy, have you had any deaths lately in your jurisdiction that were unusual in any way?”
“Had one last night. Local man went blind, then just keeled over dead. Young fella, too.”
“Had he recently started losing lots of hair?”
“I believe somethin’ was mentioned about that.”
“Where’s the body?”
“On its way to the medical examiner’s office there in Atlanta.”
“When did it leave?”
“I’m not sure. The coroner took care of that.”
“What’s the deceased’s name?”
“Danny Gaynor. Ran a place a few miles out of town where church groups and companies could bring their employees to make plans for the year and not be disturbed by their daily chores. What’s your interest in this?”
“There may be some health risks associated with the body.”
“Guess that would explain why I got three other calls from Atlanta today about the case.”
“From whom?”
“TV stations. I asked them, too, why they were interested, but they wouldn’t go into it. Made me sorry I told ’em anything.”
“Did they know the victim’s name?”
“No. Say, Gaynor had a wife. Is she or any of the folks who handled the body in danger?”
It certainly sounded as though Gaynor had been a victim of the transplant virus. But without knowing that with certainty and having no idea how it could have traveled so far, Chris was no font of wisdom on the matter. But she had to respond. What should she say? Should everybody up there who’d come in contact with the victim be quarantined?
No. It wasn’t her place to be making those decisions. That responsibility rested with the state health department.
“Dr. Collins, you still on the line?”
“There’s currently no proof anyone else is at risk,” she said. “If that changes, someone will get back to you.”
“I’d appreciate knowin’ where you could be reached just in case.”
Chris gave him all the numbers where she could be contacted, then terminated the call.
“It sounds bad,” she said to Michael. “A local man died suddenly with all the earmarks of our virus.”
“How can that be? Dahlonega is more than sixty miles from here.”
“I don’t understand it either, but the guy I talked to said the body was sent to the ME here. And I want to see it. Do you remember the ME’s number?”
Michael didn’t, so Chris again used the Internet to find it.
“Medical Examiner.”
“This is Dr. Chris Collins. It’s my understanding that earlier today, the Dahlonega coroner sent your office the body of a man named Dan Gaynor. Has it arrived?”
“Hold on, I’ll check.”
Appropriately, there was no music when she was put on hold, only dead silence.
Then— “Dr. Collins, the body’s here.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s there,” she said to Michael. “Did you inform the state health department about the Cummings and Barroso deaths?”
“Pretty much had to.”
“They also need to be told about this Dahlonega case. But I want to see the body first.”
“Why? There’s not much to be learned from a superficial exam. To be sure this new one is related to the others, we’ll need the autopsy results and whatever Ash can learn from the blood and tissues.”
“I know, but I still want to see it. Have you heard from Ash yet on the others?”
“I called this morning, but he hadn’t had enough time to complete his tests.”
“Let’s check on those reporters.”
They left the supply room and went to a bank of windows that looked onto the staff’s outdoor parking area. There were now only two vans there. The female reporter and her cameraman were leaning against one of those remaining having a cigarette. A short distance away, the curly-haired male reporter was talking on a cell phone while his cameraman was kicking a bean bag into the air and trying to catch it behind his back.
“We can’t get to either of our cars without them seeing us,” Chris said. “I need a few minutes anyway to check on a patient in the ICU. Maybe they’ll be gone after I’ve finished.”
Michael accompanied Chris to the ICU, where she perused the chart of a forty-seven-year-old man with septicemia, examined him briefly, then wrote an order to start him on Cipro.
Looking at the parking lot now from a window four floors higher did nothing for the view, for the reporters were still there.
“We could take a cab,” Michael suggested.
“I wonder where Ash is parked.”
“Let’s ask him.”
The virology lab was tucked into a corner of the east wing on the sixth floor. Ash’s office was to the left of the counter where specimens to be tested were received. They found him at his bookshelves thumbing through a tome almost too large for one man to hold.
His office was immaculate, no stacks of paper or journals on the floor, all his books side by side on their shelves, none lying on the tops of the others. One wall was covered with black-and-white photographs of hexagon and spiked ball viruses with and without tails, and one that looked like a big Cheerio with a lumpy rope attached to it. Chris recognized this one as the deadly Ebola. Another wall was decorated with what looked like hand-tinted prints of mushrooms from some old taxonomy book.
“Michael,” Ash said. “I was just about to call you. Hello, Chris. I didn’t find virus in the blood of any of the three who died, but there was virus in the vessel samples.”
“Guess there’s no doubt now about what killed them,” Michael said.
“And we may have another victim,” Chris said. She explained the situation and said, “We’re on our way to the morgue, but there are reporters out by our cars looking for us. Somehow, the media know everything.”
“My car’s in the parking tower,” Ash said. “We can use it.”
“We hoped you’d say that.”
“I SEE YOU’VE heard what we got in this morning,” Hugh Monroe said, joining Chris and the others in the ME’s reception area for the living. As on their previous visit, Monroe was wearing green scrubs. “How’d you find out?”
“Some reporters showed up at the hospital to question us,” Michael said. “We heard it from them.”
“They didn’t get the information here,” Monroe said defensively.
“We know that,” Michael said.
“Not that there’s anything much I could have told them. We’ve been swamped today, and since I did the others, I wanted to do these as well. In fact, I was just about to start on the Dahlonega case. So it’ll be—”
“I don’t understand,” Michael interrupted. “You said you ‘wanted to do these as well.’ What do you mean, these?”
Monroe gave Michael a puzzled look. “The Dahlonega case and the one that came in an hour ago from North Druid Hills.”
Chapter 16
“THIS IS THE first we’ve heard about one from Druid Hills,” Michael said.
“Forty-two-year-old female bank teller,” Monroe said. “She was just getting ready to open her station when she suddenly went blind. One of her coworkers was taking her to an emergency room, but she died screaming in pain before they could get there. I haven’t done anything with her yet either, except take a look at her hair.”
“And?” Chris prompted.
“Like all the rest, there’s a discontinuity in the shaft of most of the hairs so they no longer connect with the matrix, which makes them easy to pull out.”
“I’d like to see both of them,” Chris said.
“Is everybody corning?” He look
ed at the two men.
“Might as well,” Michael said.
“I’m not keen on it,” Ash said, “but lead on.”
They followed Monroe into the hall, where he stopped at the elevator and punched the down button. “Are you finished with your tests on those samples from the other cases?” he asked Ash.
“Just wrapped it up before we came here. There was no virus in the blood of any of the three, but it was present in all the vessel samples.”
“That strikes me as odd.”
“In what way?” Chris asked.
The elevator arrived, and they all got on.
“Seems peculiar that the virus would be in the wall of blood vessels yet not be in the blood,” Monroe said. “How does it move around?”
“It was in the blood the first few days after they were infected,” Ash said. “It must have gotten into the vessel wall then.”
“I see. I believe you told me that on your previous visit.”
They rode down to the first floor, where Monroe led them to a supply room with disposable autopsy attire in open boxes on metal shelves.
“Even though we’re not going to be doing any cutting, you’ll probably want to gear up,” Monroe said.
A few minutes later, dressed in white disposable jumpsuits, booties for their shoes, caps for their hair, masks over their noses and mouths, and latex gloves encasing their hands, Monroe took them to a room lined with stainless steel cabinets and a cement floor painted with gray epoxy. The floor sloped gently to a drain in the center of the room.
“Where the hell is everybody?” Monroe said. “Must I do everything around here myself?”
He went to the door of a big cold room, unlatched it, and swung it open. Inside, on either side of a wide aisle, was a row of stainless gurneys, each bearing a naked body with a tag on the big toe.
“I could use a hand here,” Monroe said.
Both Michael and Ash started toward him.
“Just one of you is enough.”
Since Michael was the closest, he went into the cold room with Monroe. They emerged a minute later with a gurney bearing the body of a young man, lying on his back, arms at his side, a blue towel modestly covering his genitals.
The Judas Virus Page 14