It had been just twenty-four hours since he’d dropped onto the deck of the Reagan. The rest of the world had barely started to prepare for what would hit it, while here, the whole island, despite having staggered into some kind of dazed response, already seemed overwhelmed, rescuers and victims alike waiting for some higher authority to tell them what to do. By taping up windows and going to ground behind locked doors, they’d mustered little more than a duck and cover.
Eight hundred thousand people to rescue--not counting tourists--the logistics boggled his mind. It would take days, maybe longer. How many had already been exposed to significant radiation from the mist or would be during the evacuation, despite all precautions? And what of everyone afflicted with SHAKES? Once they deteriorated, there’d be no taking care of them all.
He immediately banished such verdicts, stored them in a no-go zone, and hauled himself into the mind set that all doctors adopted in hopeless situations. Move on to the next case, intubate the next lung, pump the next heart. Act by act, head down, fail or succeed, you stay blind to impossible odds. Above all, never look up to see the despair in the faces of all the victims who you won’t get to in time. That’s how doctors got through hopeless!
Amplified by his headphones, the rustle of palm bows overhead, normally a soporific whisper, sounded desiccated, like the rattle of small bones.
At the hospital a small band of armed soldiers in khaki HAZMAT suits didn’t let him past the parking lot.
“You go in, we take your suit, and you don’t come out.”
The entrance way to the building had an airlock chamber, as did most hospitals since the bird flu pandemic, and Terry could see portable showers to decontaminate all comers inside the foyer. “But I work here,” he explained, “and can disinfect myself, squeaky clean, going in and coming out. Nothing’ll get spread around.”
“We’re still going to commandeer your suit,” their leader insisted. “Go in, decontaminate, and strip, then leave it at the door.”
“Look, I’m here to see someone on official business, but must return to Pearl--”
“No visitors.” He had assumed that loud step-away-from-the-vehicle tone cops use when they feel their authority is being challenged. He also widened his stance, as if bracing for the crowd of one to charge.
“I’m a doctor, not a visitor--”
“Sir, you will now be told the standing orders that are in force! No persons shall be permitted to enter these premises unless they’re deathly sick or reporting to work, sir! Once inside, all persons must stay put, sir! These regulations are enforced to lower the risk of contaminating the general population out here, sir!” He’d rhymed off this new-found mission in life with such urgent haste that he sprayed the inside of his own visor.
“Hey! You don’t lecture me about reverse isolation--”
“I repeat, sir, we are under orders to commandeer all HAZMAT suits from people who go inside, sir. We need them for the evacuation--”
“What evacuation? Nothing’s happening.”
“That’s because most of the military’s HAZMAT suits are in the Middle East, sir. Now how about you hand over yours?”
Jesus. Welcome to the new order of things. As always when people were scared and didn’t know what to do, the young ones in uniform got officious.
“First of all, soldier, I’m keeping the suit. Second, you don’t like my authority as an MD, then consider me Major Terry Ryder. Correct me if that doesn’t outrank you. Now how do I get a message to someone inside without you shooting me?”
The man stayed silent a few seconds, swaying on his wide stance, then his posture slumped. He pointed toward a kiosk where a dial pad and speaker had been mounted on a post.
“I suggest you use the house phone, Sir.” His tone had turned sullen, but obedience to rank remained unscathed.
* * * *
“Hey, Ryder.”
He wheeled about and saw her grinning at him through the visor of an orange, hospital-issue HAZMAT outfit identical to his own. “Carla!”
They embraced, suit to suit, her whispers amplified by the headset until it sounded as if her mouth were at his ear. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“Let’s get out of here,” she replied.
He saw the soldiers eye her state-of-the-art garb. “Sure. Just let me set these guys straight so they can forget hassling you for your suit when we return--”
A fast, rolling movement of her arms against his back silenced him.
At first he thought she had shuddered or started to cry, not at all in character for Carla, but everyone’s emotions were running wild, including his own. He tightened his embrace.
The jerking motion continued.
“We have to talk,” she said, increasing her own hold on him, her voice perfectly steady.
The shaking transmitted through his body like a tiny seizure that wouldn’t stop.
She held him closer still, insisting he feel it, giving him time to absorb the truth.
The clinical part of his mind diagnosed her in a flash, but the rest of him dodged the obvious. It’s simply a spasm, a passing twitch from tension and fatigue. Nothing more.
“Remember, you lie worse than I do,” she said, as if reading his mind, her voice low and eerily calm. “I need you to face it with me, Ryder, up close.” She pressed even harder against him. “Anything less would be just too damn lonely.”
He incongruously thought of how she trembled with excitement when they made love.
With SHAKES, think weeks, intruded the part of his brain that wouldn’t be denied. Because there was an old saying in medicine: However long it took to make them sick is how long you have to make them well. With heart attacks, that could be minutes. With cancer it could be months, even years. If the rule held true with SHAKES, it would be weeks. “Shhh,” he said, tightening his embrace another notch and, having held too much in for too many hours to contain any more grief, broke into a sob. His next breath stuttered its way into his lungs. Comfort her, leap into doctor mode, call in every marker and get her the best care possible, do for Carla what he did in ER--fight for a life, no matter how bad the odds--his instinct to act overwhelmed him, then he stopped himself. To her, it would all be a fraud. She knew as well as he did that they’d nothing to justify his usual there’s-always-a-chance kind of courage.
Carla held fast, imprinting herself on him, until he realized this was more than an embrace. She was sensing him, reading his reaction, as if waiting to see if he would break. I know you’re not good at hopeless, he imagined her saying.
And hopeless continued to swarm through him, rendering his prowess with science and procedures hollow.
But he didn’t break.
The way a lower order creature might grow a new limb to survive catastrophic change, he extended his reach and attempted to tap another type of courage, one rooted in the moment and brave enough to love what he could not save. He’d seen survivors of doomed patients pull it off. Now would be his turn. He started to tremble, but his embrace of her never flinched. That fecund imagination of his focused on how to make the next few hours all about love, not death. Act by act, head down, blind to the impossible odds--he knew the drill.
Chapter 19
That same morning, Friday January 23, 2009, 5:04 A.M. IPT
Waianae Mountain Range, West Oahu
He stood with Carla on his balcony, the stars obscured by wispy tentacles of mist that had twisted in from the south. Once a spot where Terry felt more at home than anywhere on earth, now he could only visit it dressed like a spaceman on an alien planet. Radiation would kill off this cradle of life in a matter of weeks.
Carla leaned into him. “Let’s go inside, Ryder. I want you to do something for me.”
His grip on the rail tightened.
She led the way to his bedroom, but his thoughts continued to race.
“Don’t, Ryder!” she told him over her shoulder.
“Don’t what?”
“Brood on the nitty gritty
of what will happen to me. That’s not what I need from you.” She lay on his bed and pulled him by the hand to lie beside her.
He tried to snap off his imagination, but it was like circling a bottomless pit while trying not to look down. With SHAKES, think weeks. She might not even have that long if her immune system failed. Any on-board microbe would sweep through her unchallenged--
“Goddamn it, Ryder, I mean it!” She scowled at him through her visor. “I’m a good enough nurse to figure out the details myself. But if you let that brain of yours see how bad I’ll get, don’t think I won’t see it in your eyes. It’ll be like watching you watch me go through whatever horrific junk your damn inner movies come up with. Frankly, I’ve neither the time nor courage for that crap. Hell, I can’t handle never having your child, everything over--”
“Carla, don’t!” he whispered. She’d put into words the kind of loss he didn’t dare fathom in a single onslaught, rather needed to let come at him, bit by bit.
She fell silent, but he could feel her entire body trembling through their suits, a vibrato of high emotion, not the sickening roll from earlier.
“Ryder?” she said at last .
“Yeah.”
“Do you remember our first night together?”
“Of course.”
“Tell me how you recall it.”
“Tell you?”
“Every detail.”
It wouldn’t be hard. His life had changed forever that night. But she’d never asked him to reminisce about it before. “From the beginning?”
“From the beginning.”
He didn’t know if this was such a good idea. A trip down memory lane would only highlight everything they were about to lose. “Carla, maybe we shouldn’t--”
“Ryder, it’s what I want from you.” The urgency in her voice told him that she would not be denied.
So be it. “Well, it was December 31, 2003. We went to the beach--”
“From earlier,” she interrupted, “including the parking lot.”
He smiled, determined to mask his foreboding that neither one of them would stand the pain. “Of course. We can’t leave out the parking lot. Let’s see. That afternoon we’d been working on a tough case. I can’t remember the details, so it must have turned out okay. You know how the bad ones always stick.”
“Not that far back, silly. Get to the good part.”
“The good part. How about I jump to a few hours later? Walking out of ER at the end of my shift, I saw you sitting on a bench under the large banyan tree.”
She snuggled closer, like a child settling in for a bedtime story, and the material of their suits crinkled noisily.
His foreboding eased off. If she could take comfort from this, not fear, then goddamn it, so could he. Better warm to the task, and do it right. “You know the one. It arched over the hospital grounds like a cathedral ceiling, before they cut it down to reduce the number of birds hanging around. ‘Nice work in there today, Carla,’ I called, and wished you ‘Happy new year.’ Figured you must be expecting a ride from someone. After all, a gorgeous, magnetically alluring woman like you wouldn’t be alone on New Year’s Eve.”
“Keep talking.”
This wasn’t so bad. He grinned at her. “You waved, got to your feet, and strolled in my direction, stopping when you reached a point directly in my path.”
“That obvious, eh?”
“No, the obvious part had already happened. In ER, you always laughed at my jokes.”
“Well, someone had to--”
“Everyone knows that laughing at a man’s jokes is the quickest way to seduce him.”
“I was just being polite.”
“Polite? You conned me into thinking I’m witty, and at the ER parties your intentions were even more obvious.”
“Intentions?”
“There you plied me with the most intoxicating of rarities for an overly serious, thirty something male--pure lighthearted fun while dancing the night away. You neither pushed nor denied the possibility of anything more, rather left it unspoken, as enchantingly enticing and invisible as a fragrance from an exotic flower. You, my lady, were cunning.”
“A young thing like me?”
“Of course a young thing like you. Youth, beauty, and brains--how could I resist?”
She pulled herself closer to him. “Continue.”
“You said, ‘Hey, Ryder, I’ll bet you haven’t any plans for tonight.’ Quite the cheeky move, using my last name--inside ER it had always been the respectful title of ‘Doctor’--”
“Not cheeky. That was my opening salvo in a campaign against you taking yourself too seriously--”
“It was cheeky, and once I got close enough that we could talk without anyone else overhearing, you stood in front of me, legs slightly apart, adopting exactly the same defiant stance that you unconsciously assume whenever a case in ER gets tense--”
“What! I do not--”
“Sure you do. A lot of people in the emergency game have private talismans--little physical rituals or secret thoughts as real as worry beads, and they use them to keep nerves steady on the fly. Yours is the defiant stance.”
Carla laughed. “Even if that’s true, Ryder, what’s my ‘defiant stance’ got to do with us in the parking lot?”
She’d always loved zany little digressions into nonsense. It was a game they played, each topping the other’s absurdity until one or the other ended up laughing too hard to continue. “Zat stance is how you connect with your prowess surfing zee waves,” he said, switching to a Wernher von Braun imitation, in an attempt to sound ridiculously professorial. “Vee know zat you draw on it azz a source of calm. Zeeing you assume zee pose while making zee move on me, it vas clear you vere giving it your all--”
“What?” The white of her smile flashed inside the darkness of her hood. “You think I’d do all that for a stodgy old thirty-something?”
“Hey, surfer girl, whether in your imagination or for real,” he continued, “you tap the forces that you ride, and the joy of it makes you as alluring as hell. Always has, always will--”
He checked himself, the shadow of her future sweeping over them.
“Go on, Ryder,” she said, her voice instantly serious. “It’s okay. I need to hear the story.”
He began to realize there was more at stake here than a trip down memory lane. He was narrating their history. This was a summing up, a seeking of validation.
He swallowed, determined to recapture the magic from a few seconds ago, but his mouth felt so dry, it became difficult to pronounce the words. “Okay, we’re back in the parking lot. You cocked your head and said, ‘From the hang-dog face you’ve been wearing lately, I think you better take a big break from whatever put it there . . .’”
He’d lost the fun of it, however contrived it might have been, and to his own ear could have been uttering a dirge at a wake. “I mean, what a come-on!” he added, forcing a more cheerful tone. It sounded phony as hell.
She cupped his hand with her own. “Just tell our story, Ryder. You don’t have to pretend anything.” The throaty warmth of her voice relaxed him as only she could.
A different kind of courage, he reminded himself, and pressed on. “Then came the zinger. You said, ‘How about I teach you to surf? Midnight, my place. Dress optional,’ and flashed me a smile that released what felt like . . . like a . . . like a . . . flock of wings inside my chest.”
She laughed with a groan. “That’s so lame.”
“It gets better. You handed me the written directions, which proved your ambush was entirely premeditated, and added the final kicker that would snag me for sure--
“‘Unless, of course, you’re afraid of sharks.’” They said it together, both of them breaking into smiles.
“And you took the dare,” she added.
“Damn right! What self respecting male, especially a stodgy thirty-something, could cop out on a challenge like that? To top it off, you turned heel and walked away. Not even the crisp wh
ite material of your uniform could hide the . . . uh . . . uh . . . pearl-drop swell of your hips.”
She gave another groan that ended in a giggle. “Cornier still, Ryder. Have you been reading romance novels?”
“True Confessions. And here’s another saucy secret that I never told you. Right there in the parking lot I imagined what those hips would look like naked, plunging through phosphorescent waves under moonlight.”
She snuggled closer still, the material of their HAZMAT suits crinkling more noisily than ever. “Now that’s better. I love it when you talk juicy. So what did you do then?”
“I drove home to here, stood on that deck out there, poured myself a flute of champagne, twirled the stem of the glass in my hand, and had lascivious thoughts about you.”
“What kind of thoughts?”
“Never you mind, but ‘Don’t date where you work’ had always been my motto, yet there I continued to stand, sipping Dom Pérignon, sorely tempted by your offer.”
“Only tempted?”
“Stunned might be a better word.”
As they bantered back and forth, he remembered the reality of that night. Laughter had tinkled up from the houses below as people were already beginning to celebrate, but it failed to penetrate his mood. The wet, messy work of saving a life was still too fresh on his mind.
He’d always thrived on that part of his job, holding death at bay, sometimes just long enough to change the odds in life’s favor. The power to stare fate in the face and make it back down was his narcotic, a high like no other. But he’d been retreating into that high more and more in 2003, the year of SARS, and his suspicions about three little blue pins.
By then his job with the task force on bioterror had deteriorated into the grim business of planning triage on a world-wide scale--determining who would be sacrificed to save others. Because once his group had made a list of organisms that could be weaponized and devised treatment plans indicating which drugs would best treat what infections, a hard reality remained at the core of this readiness. The initial victims were toast. They’d be cut away from the survivors like so much dying flesh. To save the greater body of humankind, one of the microbiologists had written in the conclusion. And they’d all agreed. Medications and resources would go toward protecting survivors outside the hot zone, end of story. After two years of work, human kind seemed a more fragile colony than ever, the protection he offered no more substantial than if he’d stretched a bubble across the face of the earth, ready to be popped by the single-cell order of things.
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