by Greg Dragon
Scot said, “He’s got to be vertical.”
Bill’s father hesitated and then took off his belt. He leaned over and dropped the side rail. “Get the door, Scot.”
“Bill’s lungs might collapse any minute,” his mother said, rounding the foot of the bed like a protective guard dog. “It’s unfair for you to make such a promise.”
Scot turned around and pushed both nurses out. He closed the door on their objections.
The respiratory technician finished plugging in vent cables and stood. He looked like a beefed-up weightlifter. Veins on his arms stood out like snakes.
“Do something,” Bill’s mother yelled at him.
“I’m the Jesus freak who believes in prayer, remember? Besides, I’m not passing up a chance to witness a miracle. Can I help?” he asked Eddie Jean.
Bill’s mother put her hands over her face and sobbed, “He’s my only child.”
“Yes,” Eddie Jean said, feeling confident. “Help him stand.” The technician pulled Bill into a sitting position while his father secured the belt around Bill’s waist. Alarms shrilled, but the respiratory technician reached over and silenced them.
“Is his oxygen line long enough for him to stand by the bed?” Eddie Jean asked.
“Yeah.”
A call for security went over the overhead hospital paging system.
Eddie Jean looked at Bill’s father. “Stand him up.”
“He could crash,” his mother shrieked.
“Would you use your machine to block the door?” Eddie Jean asked the technician. He didn’t hesitate to do it, which freed Scot from the door.
“Better hurry,” the respiratory tech advised, and locked the wheels. They lifted Bill. His face blanched and his eyes crossed.
“Pressure just dropped,” the tech said as he moved to hold up Bill.
His legs hung down, but Bill couldn’t stand. His father and the tech moved behind him and used the belt and their legs to steady him. Scot stood in front of Bill. He placed Bill’s arms over his own shoulders and put his hands at Bill’s waist to support him. Eddie Jean squeezed into the tight space between them. Bill’s perspiration smelled musty and his breath putrid from mouth breathing. Her body began to twitch. Scot’s body heat made her temperature rise faster. That’s interesting.
Bill groaned.
She put one hand over Bill’s heart and the other on his damp forehead and clicked the spark. That’s how she thought of it—like flicking a Bic lighter, but in her mind.
Eddie Jean believed the mental flick turned on a special pathway in her brain. Her imagination enlarged as she concentrated on helping someone. She envisioned dark spots swimming through Bill’s blood and getting caught in his organs and traveling up his nerve paths to his brain. Icy colors popped underneath her skin, and she knew the others could see them. The colors swirled, creating frosty goosebump sensations along her nervous system, making a hidden place in the center of her brain whir.
“What’s happening to her face?” Bill’s mother asked.
“She’s hotter than a furnace,” his father said, grunting.
“He’s turning blue,” Bill’s mother yelled, “and he’s freezing.”
“Oh, dear God, look at her arms!” Bill’s father said.
Deeper focus made her color spirals darken into rich, jeweled tones, like the inside of a kaleidoscope before simmering down into softer hues, like the insides of an oyster shell. Eddie Jean felt weaker than she’d ever experienced, and not as cold as she should be. Maybe it was because Bill’s body mass was greater than hers.
“Something’s happening,” Bill whispered. “I feel leg cramps.”
Eddie Jean focused on dropping her temperature.
Scot stiffened and groaned.
In the next instant, Scot’s body became a heat conductor. An additional arc of energy pulsed through her. It gave her the extra push to reach the healing peak or chilling point, she wasn’t sure which to call it, but she felt frozen, encased tomblike in ice. In this icy moment, the healing transfer reached its crest.
“Warm,” Bill said. “Feels good.”
“He’s bearing his own weight,” the technician said in an excited voice.
The heavy coldness saturated her bones and made her eyelids droop. Bill’s virus needed heat to thrive.
Bill’s father yelled, “Look at the monitors!”
“Amen,” the technician said.
Bill’s mother pressed a palm against her forehead and spoke, but Eddie Jean ignored her. Her mind took flight, sailing straight up into blinding, milky light only she could fathom. Seconds passed and she opened her eyes.
“Ah,” Bill croaked, breathing easier but hanging tight to Eddie Jean.
Bill’s mother wiped her tears and mumbled, “I can’t believe it.”
As the vivid colors cooled under her skin, she melted and warmed up until her blood burned like lava. She focused on healing not hurting, life and not death, and ice and not heat to cool the virus making Bill sick. Her hands felt like they were sunk in goo.
Bill’s sharp intake of breath was followed by a low laugh.
She dropped her hands, spent. Pale concentric circle patterns would scar her skin for hours afterward as the colors faded. The wheals made her look like a pale giraffe.
A smile tugged on Bill’s chapped lips. He took a deep breath and yanked off his oxygen line. A moment later he walked under his own power to the glass door. Bill clasped both hands like a boxer after winning a fight at the mute audience standing behind the glass.
By now, Eddie Jean supported Scot’s weight. He had wrapped his arms around her and pressed his weight on her back.
Bill returned to the bed and sat.
The technician went to his machine and removed it from blocking the room door.
“Scot?” Eddie Jean asked. His legs trembled. She managed to turn and face him. He hadn’t cooled off as fast as she did.
The others watched Bill breathe normally.
Scot mumbled, “Don’t feel so good.”
She grabbed his lab coat with both hands and managed to keep him from smacking the floor. Eddie Jean lowered him down.
“What’s wrong?” Bill asked.
Eddie Jean squatted down beside Scot. His eyes were open, but she understood. “We both need water.” She reached into his lab coat pocket and removed her water bottle, lifted his head, and put it to his lips. He gulped the fluid as people crowded into the room. A nurse with an orange stethoscope around her neck stooped to take Scot’s pulse.
“EJ? What’s wrong with Scot?” Bill asked.
“He’s dehydrated.”
Bill’s father handed Eddie Jean a cup of water. Scot had guzzled the water bottle dry and sat up, back against a wall. He snatched the Styrofoam cup and drank it too. “More,” he begged.
Bill’s mother passed Eddie Jean a water pitcher. “Drink some, honey.”
Eddie Jean gulped half. “We both need more.”
“Lots more,” Scot added, and reached for the plastic pitcher.
“What happened?” a man asked, walking in.
The technician said, “A miracle, doc.”
“Bill walked,” his mother said, taking her husband’s hand.
“For crying out loud, get the kids off the floor,” the doctor said, stepping around them to check his patient.
Helping hands lifted them. A nurse led them around the oval nurses’ station and back into a break room with a mustard-colored couch, two round tables surrounded by chairs, and a large sink. They took turns gulping tepid water from the tap.
“Could’ve warned me,” Scot said between slurps.
She glanced over at him and grinned before splashing her face.
“Excuse me, I’m with security. You two, follow me,” a man in a brown uniform said. “Now.”
They kept drinking. The guard waited until they stopped and then he repeated his order. They followed him from the ICU. A small group of people begged her to heal their sick relatives. So much for not being notic
ed. The guard ushered them to the quiet sanctuary of a waiting back elevator. She saw Scot read a text and then squint at it again.
The guard inserted a key into the control panel and the elevator door closed. It dropped fast without stopping for passengers. “We’re escorting you out to the parking lot. Go back to school.”
“Stop on the second floor. Quitman Delaney is waiting for her,” Scot told him. “She’s his granddaughter.”
“Sure.”
Eddie Jean’s happy smile faded. She stared at Scot until red circles swallowed his cheeks. His Adam’s apple bobbed. Her premonitions didn’t reveal his betrayal. Tears welled in her eyes, and she looked away from him. She had forgotten that Scot hated her.
“Q promised to break up our parents,” Scot said. “Mom threatened to leave town.”
“He’s going to punish me.”
“Suck it up.”
His cold words squeezed her happy heart flat. She faced the elevator doors. Wasn’t he the one who said “trust me?” Times like this tempted her to embrace the coldness of her intellect, but she didn’t want to stumble through life avoiding her feelings or her conflicts. Still, his callous words hurt. She wanted to scream and kick him, but didn’t.
When the elevator door opened, Quitman Delaney glared back at her.
“Sir,” the security guard said, respectfully.
Her granddad’s eyes resembled twin olive-green flares underneath a jutting forehead. Dramatic black eyebrows had reminded her of bat wings since early childhood. They fluttered and moved like they were about to take flight. Strangers remembered the fanatical glower from his eyes more than his thin-slitted shark-gill lips. Few people noticed the rumpled silicate-colored lab coat with the VIP badge embroidered over the breast pocket in red, stamping him as being on the board of directors. Quitman Delaney lurched forward a step and his rough hand tightened around her throat. A necklace pierced her skin under his hand.
“Hey dude, wait a…” Scot said.
Granddad pulled her out and the elevator doors closed behind them.
Louis
Louis and Ava lingered over brunch in the private jet terminal. At first he had been miffed they landed in Alabama instead of Atlanta. Ava had explained the lab was in Cloudland, but the corporate offices were in Atlanta. Over soup and sandwiches he lapped up stories of Ava’s childhood in Seattle. Only child of doting working-class parents, and they had spoiled her. Louis pushed back from the table satiated, and wanted to know more about his father’s work. She had been coy with specifics.
A young waitress stood nearby, ready to jump and remove unwanted dishes. She obeyed Ava’s pinkie movements and collected the soiled dishes and cups.
“Flameion hired me right after residency,” Ava said.
“Really?”
She laughed at his surprise. “Louis, I had over a quarter of a million dollars in student loan debt. It seemed prudent to let Flameion pay it off. Five years of servitude seemed like a good deal at the time, plus I have no regrets. A tour of the lab sold me. From the beginning, my income has dwarfed yours. And yes, I know your salary. Flameion does its research.”
He was appalled at the intrusion into his privacy. “But you have to live in Alabama.”
She laughed. “Touché. The trick is to forget you’re in ’Bama. Wait till you meet the real Cloudland. A researcher’s paradise.”
A man came into the hangar and waited inside the exit door. Ava stood and retrieved her jacket and briefcase from an empty chair. “Our ride.” She answered her phone and walked out the exit door.
Louis dropped a tip on the table and hurried after her. He got into the immaculate limo and said, “Don’t get me wrong, Birmingham is a research power, but Cloudland? Never heard of it. My father could be a snob about where he worked, or so I thought until today.” The car pulled out onto a narrow road. From what he could see, Cloudland was a remote, rural haven.
She scanned a text. “Your dad loved it here during his tenure. There are four handwritten letters from him requesting to stay on longer. He saw something he liked.”
No way. He’d know that, wouldn’t he?
Ava watched his face like an actor waiting for a cue. “All before my time. Your father’s immunological work was brilliant. Like I said, Cloudland is unique and mysterious in all the right ways. We’re located northeast of Birmingham and south of Huntsville, and we’re near the Georgia border. Town isn’t on maps either, so we don’t see many tourists.”
“How does a town stay off a map?”
Ava shrugged.
Louis searched his memory, but he couldn’t remember his father being absent from Boston for a year. But he did recall a story. “The three Army brothers. My father’s mentor noticed as a young doctor in World War II three fast healers in his surgery. He even cut the brothers with clean and dirty instruments to measure their healing responses. I saw the graphs he charted and compared to a control group. Infections in the other men forced him to stop. Dad was fascinated by their story and their immune systems. He called them super-healers. They hailed from Cloudland?”
“Yes. Ballsy to do research in a war zone, don’t you think? If the brothers hadn’t demanded to be put in the same unit, doctors wouldn’t have noticed them. Military physicians studied them for years and claimed they discharged them in 1948, but their families never saw them again. The shady event ended any chances, besides those of Flameion, to get a second shot at observing other unique Cloudland residents.”
“’48? The war ended in ’45, didn’t it? I could be wrong. What happened to them?” Louis gazed out the window, hoping he’d contained his shock about his father.
Ava sent a quick text. “It doesn’t matter what happened to the brothers. Quitman Delaney, Flameion’s head of R&D, convinced the corporation to build a hospital in town. It’s a state-of-the-art facility, and in return the hospital labs funnel us specimens, blood, and live patients to examine. In exchange, scientists like me can’t live in Cloudland. Most of the locals work at the facility, but they never see the R&D teams. We have private suites on site, our shopping is done for us, or we use the internet. We’re instructed to keep a low profile.” She lowered her voice. “You know why, right?”
“A new disease?” he joked, clueless.
“Exactly,” she answered. “I’d hoped you would send me a note after receiving your father’s papers on the topic. Guess you were too busy or you’re just rude. I had to sign company waivers to release them. Your father studied Swarm disease, but he never saw a live case.” Ava’s face changed into a glimpse of her reserved, scientific persona. “Thankfully, Swarm is rare. But you’ll get a chance today to observe a recent case and follow up on your father’s assumptions if you want.”
“Really?” Louis asked.
She didn’t crack a smile. “Swarm disease is Flameion’s secret for now.”
Feeling drained from his body. Was she deliberately trying to confuse him? “Lots of changes at UVA—a reorganization taking place. I didn’t get a chance to study Dad’s records. I’ve never heard of Swarm disease. Will that be a handicap?”
Her normal breathing became stridor-like. She stared at him, unable to believe what he said. “I thought you sent me an underground message when you put the microbe on the internet. Testing our response, so I thought. How else could you have discovered it?” Her eyes narrowed as she studied him.
He pointed to his forehead.
Ava kicked the seat across from them. “Great! Just great.” Her annoyance revealed an unpleasant side of her character. “You’ll have to sign a confidentiality agreement about Swarm.”
Like hell I will.
Louis waited a few beats, noting her toes were pointed down as she awaited his reply. Her stridor worsened. “Of course Ava, but I must return home tonight. I’m required to lobby for departmental funds. That said, what links have you observed between the microbe and this Swarm disease?”
Her toes popped back up, and she reached over and tangled her fingers in his lik
e couples do. Her reaction came across as fake, yet he didn’t pull away.
“Our plane leaves at five,” Ava said. “As for the connection, it’s not easy to establish. We hope you’ll become a catalyst, like your father.”
In one day? He laughed. It had been a while since anyone thought he might find answers. “I don’t understand why a new disease is kept secret. Makes me think it’s a joke.”
“Was the microbe a hoax?” Her soft voice had hardened.
Coldness radiated from her expression like an air conditioner. She had roller-coasted through various emotions since they landed, and her behavior confused him. Even her bow-shaped lips thinned into a red check mark, making her appear angry.
He said, “Absolutely not. I found it inside my grandpop’s brain. He died over a hundred years ago.”
The limo glided to a stop, and the chauffeur jumped out to open the door. Ava pivoted and swung her legs out and then turned back to say, “Your grandpop, as you call him, an amateur archeologist in his youth, came to this area searching for Native American relics and pottery from the Mississippian culture. He did find quite a few treasures, as I recall. So, your family has a connection to Cloudland. Prepare yourself for a real lab experience.”
Louis climbed out. The lab jutted into the backside of a mountain.
Ava completed a quick call on her cell before turning back to him. “Awesome, isn’t it? As I told you earlier, Flameion-Cloudland is not public knowledge. I have a secretary waiting with our standard non-disclosure agreement inside the door.”
He had heard whispers of facilities like these, and he had no intention of getting involved with one. “Ava, I have no interest in any lab associated with the military or funded by their subsidiaries.”
“No problem,” she said and opened the door.
“Wait.”
She turned back, eyebrows lifted into an elegant arch. Sunlight struck her eyes, reminding him of the blue hydrangeas his mother planted in the shade garden.
“Who funds the company?” he asked.
“Private donors. They’re all hoping for longer lives through our research. Ready?”
He nodded, disquieted. His first glimpse of the inside before the secretary interrupted was more than enough to make him eager to see more. The place screamed investment monies. No cost cutting here. He signed several forms without reading them. The facility air was cold and contained a hint of limonene. Even the lighting seemed clear and natural.