by JJ Pike
Mimi had been as sharp as cut glass until the chemo, but then she got the foggy brain or whatever they called it. She’d gone from being flinty to fluffy. Not that she didn’t love Mimi, but how terrifying would it be if “Nurse Betsy” turned out to be as flaky as Mimi? She slid Nigel’s number into her pocket, glad she had backup on tap.
Midge whimpered.
Petra grabbed Nigel’s arm. “What does it mean?”
“We need to get more pain meds on board before we move her.”
They’d reached the hospital’s side entrance. Petra handed the car keys to Jim and directed him to the place she’d left Betsy waiting. “Like he said, his wife’s a nurse. You should tell her about the medication.”
“Wait here. I’ll be right back.” Nigel jogged away.
Petra didn’t dare touch Midge again. Her whimpers had turned to little staccato grunts. “Don’t tank on me, baby. Stay stable. Let us get you home. I don’t want to leave you here.” Midge’s eyeballs jerked under her eyelids. “Oh, lord, don’t wake up yet. Stay under. Stay sedated until we get you home.”
The car with the makeshift “bed” in the back pulled up. Jim jumped out, and Betsy rolled down the passenger side window. “Is our girl ready?”
Petra looked for Nigel, but didn’t see him. Slowly, carefully, gingerly Petra wheeled Midge to the back of the car, lifting the gurney when she hit the curb. Jim already had the back of the car open and ready.
Petra was strong, but was she strong enough to lift her sister from a gurney and into a car without bumping her and making her squeal? Jim was in bad shape. He’d been trying to fake her out by overriding his limp, but she knew it was still there. He’d put on a good face then go home and take himself off for a “soak in the tub.” She hoped that meant mega-duty pain meds along with hot compresses. She was no fan of pain.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” said Jim. “You’re going to climb into the back of the car. You’re more agile and flexible than us geezers. I’ll take the bottom two corners of her sheets, you’ll take the top two and we’ll ease her in.”
Petra did as she was told, pushing all the cushions to the edges of the trunk so there’d be nothing for Midge to bump into. She leaned forward and grabbed the top corners of the sheets.
“On my count,” said Jim. “Three, two, one, lift.”
They lifted, but Midge’s screams halted their efforts immediately.
“How much morphine has she had?” Betsy was twisted around in her car seat.
“I don’t know.”
Betsy unbuckled her seatbelt. “I’m coming back there.”
“No, stay where you are,” said Jim. “Petra can bring you Midge’s medication and you can tell us what to do.”
Petra clambered to the front of the car and handed Betsy the bag of medications the surgeon had given her.
Betsy dug through the bag, rattling off names and reasons you might use this antibiotic over that one. “Interesting,” she said. She held up two bottles. Betsy was far enough away that Petra couldn’t read the labels. “They’re worried about SSI’s. They should be. Hospitals are terrible places for sick people. The things you can catch when you’re in a hospital bed.”
“What’s an SSI?” said Petra.
“Surgical site infection,” said Jim.
Betsy nodded. “Things that live on our bodies, the staph up your nose, enterococci and klebsiella found in the digestive tracts of healthy individuals, acinetobacter which is found in the soil…”
“But how do they relate to Midge?” This was exactly the kind of thing she was afraid of. Fog brain that made her wander off into the weeds and not concentrate on what was most important.
“I was getting to that. Ordinary bacteria that lives on us and around us can become deadly for someone whose immune system is compromised. We’re not worried about Midge in this regard. She’s young and healthy…”
“…and has a hole in her skull that would let all those things in.” Petra finished Betsy’s sentence.
Jim and Betsy both clucked and cooed and made noises that were supposed to make her feel better but didn’t. They made her worry that she had flunked the biggest test of her life by trusting them with her sister.
“I promise you,” said Betsy. “Your sister is going to get the best care in the world. I’ve nursed soldiers who’d lost half their face and both legs back from the brink of death in a tent with shells landing all around us and less than half the meds the Army had promised us…”
Three hundred years ago, thought Petra, when you were young and fit and still had your eye on the ball.
“Here we go,” said Betsy. “Morphine. Do you know how to draw this into a syringe?”
Petra shook her head. No way she was going to do it. What if she got it wrong? She’d never found a vein before or stuck a needle in someone’s arm.
“I’ll do it,” said Jim.
Betsy handed Petra the vial of morphine. Jim was the other side of her, his palm outstretched. If she didn’t give him the drug they’d both know that she didn’t trust them.
Nigel thundered out of the hospital, breathless. “Why didn’t you wait for me? I said I’d only be a minute.” He threw a heavy-duty trash bag, filled to bursting point, into the back of the car. “For later.”
Three nurses joined him and surrounded Midge’s gurney.
“Tell me the plan,” said Nigel.
“We lift her, using the sheets, and lay her in the back of the car. When she’s positioned, we place cushions all around her so she can’t roll.
Nigel stood, his arms folded, his lips pursed, and thought for a minute. “We can do better.” He turned to his team. “Ashly, go get a backboard. Tell Grendel’s Mother that it’s for another incoming. Tim, I want a double set of those weighted bean bags they use in the physio labs. Do you know the ones I mean?” Tim nodded and took off. “Krista, you’re going to sit up front with our resident nurse and talk to her about medical protocols.”
“She is?” said Betsy.
“Ma’am, I’m sure you were the best of the best, but protocols change every year. I want to be sure you’re set up for success.”
Betsy didn’t protest.
Petra stood back as her new buddy built a system that would secure her sister to a backboard and that backboard to the floor of the folded-down backseats.
“Grendel’s Mother, eh?” Jim’s mood had lifted considerably.
Nigel smiled. “Every great hospital has a Warrior Princess who oversees all the nurses. She might be Grendel’s Mom, a Gorgon, Nurse Ratched, or Florence Nightingale, but there’s always one. She’s loved and feared and rules with an iron fist. Cross her and you might as well hand over the family jewels and call it a day.”
Jim laughed.
“Now, let’s see if we can get this little one a mite more comfortable before we move her.” Nigel took the morphine from Jim and retrieved a syringe from the black garbage bag. “I know you know how to do this, Sir. Do you?” He directed the question to Petra.
She shook her head.
“Come closer and learn. You’re going to need to be Nurse Betsy’s eyes and ears. Rule number one, what do we do?”
Petra shook her head.
“Measure seven times, cut once. By that I mean, make sure you’ve gone through every one of these steps I’m about to teach you at least three times before administering any drug. First up, is the patient allergic to any medications?”
Petra shrugged.
“You’re going to learn how to write up a chart and keep a history, okay?”
“Okay. I’m listening.” Petra sat with her legs dangling off the back of the car, eyes on Nigel but her brain moving at half speed.
“Is this drug contraindicated? What else is the patient taking? When did they last have a dose? How much do they weigh?” Nigel stopped. “Is this overwhelming? Can I go on?”
Petra didn’t want to admit that she wasn’t taking anything in, but neither did she want to say she understood, when s
he didn’t.
“Nurse Betsy will go over this with you many times before you have to do anything yourself. Check the chart, check the bottle, make sure you’re giving the correct dose, and don’t confuse milligrams and milliliters. Get it?”
“Got it,” said Petra. “Check, check, check.”
“Right,” said Nigel. “With me, guys. You know what to do.” His teammates were fluid, almost like a dance troupe. Midge was sedated, secured to a backboard, and installed in the back of the car as if it were no effort at all.
“Now go, before Grendel’s Mom finds out you have one of our precious backboards.” He slammed the trunk closed and waved them off before Petra even had a chance to say goodbye.
“What a nice young man,” said Betsy. “We could do with about ten of those.”
Petra wished with all her heart that Nigel was coming with them. She pulled her phone out of her pocket to add his number to her contacts.
She had 15 missed calls and 67 unread texts from Sean. The last one was in all caps. Two words. “STAY AWAY.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“She’s lying.” It was the barefoot woman. “She’s not infected.”
Christine wished she knew her name. Wasn’t that the way you got them on your side? Say their names? Over and over again? In her rush to get Angelina on board, she’d concentrated all her energies on the captain (whose name she still didn’t know) and Naomi, who was her only ally.
Naomi had shifted away from her. Or the boat had moved her and she hadn’t resisted. Either way, she was too far for Christine to be able to whisper instructions to her. “Tell them,” she said. “Tell them what I told you.” Naomi shrugged. That probably meant she didn’t understand. Why wouldn’t people just use language? Plain, ordinary language with no flourishes. She needed someone who understood her. She needed an Alice. “I told you not to touch the girl. Tell them that. That’s the truth.”
Naomi nodded.
“I told you she was delicate, which is true, but not the whole truth.”
“You told me she might have lesions in her mouth. That she was susceptible to infection. That I should not touch her, for her safety.”
Christine nodded along. She had said all of that. Thank goodness she’d stuck to a version of the truth. If she’d lied in that instance, she would never have been able to track her own lies and come up with an explanation that knitted everything together seamlessly with the stress of 19 people looking at her. “She’s delicate. She’s very ill.”
“Is she even part of this debacle?” Naomi threw her hand over her shoulder, pointing towards Manhattan as it disappeared behind their foam.
Christine didn’t know which “debacle” she might be referring to. There were so many.
“Is she the key to understanding why Manhattan is collapsing?”
Why was she suddenly so angry? Where had the “friendly” version of Naomi disappeared to? What was it that made people turn from friend to enemy so fast? She would never do such a thing: pretend to be one thing while secretly being another. Neither could she turn her emotions on and off like these people. They were an anathema to her, a mystery. Naomi frowned, her mouth turned down and her eyes tight and slit-like.
“I thought you said the terrorists were responsible for that?” barefoot woman again. She was pushy, her face red, her spit out of control. Those facts—the expansion of blood vessels in the cheeks, the increase of saliva in the mouth—fell under the “not good signs” column.
“She is.” Christine knew it was important she say only 100% true things now, but she still didn’t want to tell them the whole story. New Jersey was still several minutes away. If they threw her overboard, she’d probably drown. If they shot her and threw her overboard, she wouldn’t need to drown. She’d be dead already.
“How?”
“I don’t understand the question.” It was always best to admit when you were lost, even if people got angry at you for it. You couldn’t stay on track if you lost the clue to what was going on. It was the perfect word for this encounter. “Clue” was derived from “clew…”
“Hey!” Naomi shouted. All the friendliness had drained out of her and been replaced with pure hostility. “Stay with us. Answer the question. How is this girl connected to what’s going on in Manhattan?”
“She is Patient Zero.”
The people on the boat took a collective step back, though it was more of a shuffle in their seats than an actual step. They wanted their distance. How strange that the phrase “patient zero” had even more power than the word “infected” which had riled Naomi so.
“As in an Ebola-style ‘patient zero?’”
Christine nodded. For all she knew, Angelina was that kind of patient. She might be the locus of an outbreak that could bring everyone around her to the point of death, though she’d seen no bleeding eye sockets or hacking up of blood. The reports from the hospital where Angelina had been treated were of spontaneous sores and a rapid spread of burn-like symptoms. She didn’t remember if any deaths had been reported, but she hadn’t asked Fran—Alice’s assistant—for an update when last they’d spoken. The facts of the matter didn’t calm her as they should. There were too many inputs. She didn’t do well when so much attention was focused on her directly.
Naomi was raging mad. Christine could tell because more “whites of her eyes” were showing, as well as more gum line. The human features stretch to their extremes when a speaker is enraged. Her hands were probably fists. Christine didn’t dare look. She’d learned long ago to keep looking at the eyes for as long as possible, even when it creeped her out and made her heart beat out of sync with its normal rhythm.
“What happens if you touch her? Tell me everything.” Naomi was also trying to calm herself. The heavy breathing, with the pursed lips when she exhaled, was the tip-off.
“MELT has survived on her skin.”
“MELT is the enzyme that eats plastic?”
Naomi had inadvertently revealed her own lie. Would it be prudent to tell her so?
“And it malfunctioned?”
Christine nodded. “It burned her, but it has retained the capacity to transfer to someone else’s skin and burn them.” She didn’t dare test her own lip to see what was happening there. The blood dribbled down her chin and dropped onto her shirt in regular intervals, but she was able to keep her focus on the conversation because, in this precise moment, the mood of the crowd was more important than her own health. MELT might disfigure her, or even kill her in the long term, but these people could kill her now.
Naomi checked her own hands, front and back. She’d never touched Angelina with her hands. She checked her knees, which was a good call. She might have bumped into the child while she was close to her.
“You’re probably fine,” said Christine. “We took the precaution of keeping her wrapped in cotton so she couldn’t touch anyone else. We’ve been particularly attentive to that eventuality. It is not my wish, nor the wish of any of my colleagues, to do harm to humans. This compound was supposed to help the environment, not harm it.”
The woman with no shoes guffawed. “Looks like that’s a massive failure. Take a look behind you. Manhattan is burning.” She poked Naomi in the shoulder. “Enzyme. You said enzyme again. It doesn’t add up. Did the terrorists release a virus or an enzyme?” Receiving no reply, she turned her attention to Christine. “Is she a terrorist?”
Naomi locked eyes with Frank and jerked her head backwards. He was at her side immediately. It was like a miracle, that silent code they had. Christine would never have been able to decipher the meaning of that gesture.
“My husband is armed,” said Naomi. “Any attempt to harm me or the Professor will result in a flesh wound.”
Frank raised his gun. He’d already used it in their presence, so they had to know Naomi wasn’t bluffing.
“You will get only one warning. Flesh wound to the leg for one infraction, next bullet is to a major organ. You might live, you might not. There is no admis
sion of premeditation on our part, only an admission that we will protect our own lives with force if needs be.”
“Keep talking, you slick piece of garbage.” The speaker had his hands over the three-year old’s ears. Presumably to protect him from the ruckus that was unfolding. The little one followed along with glee, his eyes tracking each speaker. If he was a Normal, the emotion of the crowd would hit him in all the right places and, language or no language, he’d be following the drama.
Christine hoped, as she often did, that the kid was more like her than a Normal. Being her meant life was much cleaner, for the most part. She’d organized her days so she worked a zillion hours and had no commitments when she got home. She had a cat. “Oh, William! I’m so sorry,” she thought. “Who will feed you? I’m so sorry. I’ll find a way to have someone come over. I’m not going to be back in Brooklyn Heights for a while, I don’t think. This mess on Manhattan is going to take us a month or more to tamp down. Not that I think we’ll have it under control and cleaned up in a month, rather that I believe the major damage will be done, the fires will have burned themselves out, the gas will have been turned off, the electricity, ditto. Things will be a mess, but a controlled mess. Then I will be able to come back to you. We’ll probably move, because the detritus from this accident is going to flow across the East River. It’s a lot like 9/11, if you think about it. The wind blew the ash of three thousand lives over Long Island. I had colleagues as far east as Park Slope who reported finding scraps of paper from the Towers on their streets in the days following the attacks.”