“We better get you to the hospital,” said the soldier.
Mack stretched to look in the rearview mirror. It was turned at an acute angle, so that it pointed nearly at him. He groaned. A large gash ran down the center of his forehead. The skin had split to the bone, and Mack fought the urge to vomit at the sight of his own skull, bloody but undeniably white, visible between the edges of his skin. His eye looked only marginally better. The skin around his left eye was beginning to turn dark purple and swell, so that only a little slit of eye was still visible. If he was ugly before, he was goddamned hideous now.
“We’ve called an ambulance,” said the soldier.
“Forget the ambulance. Just take me to the hospital.”
The soldier looked uncertain. He was young himself. Probably only twenty or twenty-one.
“I’m not going to die on you. Save the ambulance for him.” Mack jerked a finger toward the body on the road.
The soldier reached for the radio on his shoulder. “Bring the truck around,” he called into it. “We need transport to the hospital.” He turned back to Mack, his eyes examining Mack’s destroyed face.
“Why’d they do it?” he asked. “What did they want?”
Mack looked at the body still out in the street. Sunset had faded to dusk, and the young man’s body and the soldier standing over him were turning into silhouettes. Or maybe it was just Mack’s vision. He could hardly see a goddamn thing.
He turned back to the National Guardsman standing over him.
“They wanted masks,” Mack said quietly.
Singh couldn’t believe his eyes.
“My god, George, what happened to you?” The ICU doctor stood over Mack in a windowless procedure room on the hospital’s third floor, where a plastic surgeon was carefully sewing Mack’s forehead back together. Every person in the room wore a mask.
Mack winced. “More local,” he ordered. The plastic surgeon stopped, pulled out a syringe, and injected more anesthetic into the wound edges to try to numb Mack’s skin.
“You should have a general anesthetic for this type of repair,” the surgeon grumbled.
“Just staple the goddamn thing,” Mack snapped.
Singh bit back a grin. He knew that surgeons often used staples to close surgical incisions on the body, but never on the face. Faces called for delicate, deliberate suturing, to minimize scarring. “Well, the good news is,” he said, “that you don’t appear to have any brain trauma on CT scan.”
Mack turned his one good eye toward Singh. “That’s a relief,” he said sourly.
The plastic surgeon sighed impatiently. “You’re making this very difficult, George. Can you please hold still?”
Mack grimaced. “What are the latest numbers?” he asked Singh.
“Too many,” the ICU doc answered, suddenly sober again. “There are hundreds downstairs. We opened up the urgent care clinic next door to handle the additional patients, but we’re running out of staff.”
“Have you called in everyone?”
“Everyone,” said Singh. “We’ve even called in retirees and people who have switched careers.”
“Are you getting any military help?”
“Some, but not enough. The problem’s the same, George. Too many patients. They’re overwhelming the system. We’re way, way above surge capacity. And that doesn’t even address mortuary services. We don’t have the capacity to deal with all the dead.”
“How many?”
“Five hundred.”
“Five hundred?” Mack was incredulous. “At Washoe Medical Center?”
“No, system-wide. But that’s still too great a surge for our mortuary services.”
“Jesus,” said Mack. He closed his one good eye, trying to think.
Which made him miss the sudden darkness that enveloped the room. He opened his eyes to audible gasps.
“What the hell?” said the plastic surgeon.
“Power outage,” said Singh.
“Where are the back-up generators?” said the surgeon. “We’re supposed to have back-up generators.”
Mack could hear the nurse fumbling for something in the cupboards. Someone crashed into a medical stand.
“We don’t have any power for the ventilators!” cried Singh. Mack heard the scuffling of shoes and then the creaking of a door opening. The ICU doc stood in the doorway, the dim illumination from the hallway’s emergency lights silhouetting his body.
The lights flickered overhead briefly. Mack saw the nurse freeze in mid-motion, her eyes looking upwards, before the room plunged into semi-darkness again.
“What in heaven’s name is going on?” she cried.
A second later, the lights came on again, but the pattern was different, only half of them illuminated. It was dead silent in the room.
“We’re on generator power now,” explained Singh. “Only the most important things will be powered.”
Mack felt a surge of adrenaline, but his body didn’t move. “I’m assuming that includes the ventilators,” he said.
Singh exhaled slowly. “It does. Man, that was a long outage. The generators are supposed to kick in within seconds.” He peered down the half-lit hallway, toward the ICU. “I’ve got to go find out what’s happening.” And then he was gone.
The plastic surgeon picked up his instruments. “I better finish your face,” he said. “Who knows how long we’ll still have power.”
“What do you think caused the outage?” asked the nurse.
“Haven’t a clue,” said the surgeon, his eyes focused on Mack’s forehead. Mack could see the man’s mask puff in and out with his breath.
“There’s a big fire downtown,” Mack said. “Could have taken out a relay station.”
No one said anything. Out of the corner of his eye, Mack could see the nurse glancing up at the lights uneasily, as if she expected them to go out at any moment.
Later, after the surgeon had left, the nurse gazed at Mack’s bandaged face with concern. “Do you need pain medicine?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, because it was true.
She crossed the room to the waist-high medication dispenser and punched in her code to open the locked drawers.“The doctor put in an order for Norco. Do you want one or two?”
“Two.”
She turned and smiled at him, but then she frowned. “Do you have a ride home? I can’t give you any narcotics if you don’t have a ride home.”
“What the hell does that matter?”
“We don’t want you driving if you’re on pain medication.”
Mack blinked at her incredulously. “I don’t even have a car. My car got busted up in the attack. How the hell am I supposed to drive home?”
“Do you have someone else to drive you?”
“No.”
“Well, then, I can’t give you pain medication.”
Mack stared at her. His face throbbed. He could feel his heart beating in his cheek. And she wasn’t going to give him pain medication, because he didn’t have a ride. “Fine,” he said.
She seemed to hesitate. Her eyes traveled over his bandaged face. “Oh, all right,” she said. “I’ll go ask Dr. Singh if an exception can be made.”
“Maybe he could give me a ride.”
She gave him an uncertain smile. “Well, I could ask.” She turned to leave the room before Mack could explain he was kidding.
He watched her go, the door closing softly behind her. The lights were still at half-power. He wondered when the electricity would come on again. He thought about the fires and the attack, the five hundred dead people and the hundreds more that were showing up, about to die themselves.
It was spreading like wildfire, this plague, and no matter what Nesbitt’s fancy computer program showed, there was still no pattern to the spread that Mack could discern. The plague just rolled on, a juggernaut of disease, inexorably spreading across Reno, like…
The Black Death.
His breathing slowed. He looked at the door that the nurse had
so softly closed, and then his eyes moved to the medication dispenser. He stared at it for a full five seconds before slowly heaving himself to his feet and unsteadily crossing the room.
She’d left it unlocked. He punched in an order into the keyboard. A drawer popped open. He took the seven ampules in the drawer and shoved them into his pocket. Very quietly, he closed the drawer.
He crossed the room again and sank into his chair. Exhaustion assailed him.
The nurse opened the door. She was smiling. “Dr. Singh says he’ll drive you home.” She crossed to the medication dispenser and pulled out a blister pack holding two Norco tablets.
While she was locking up, Mack popped the pills and took a swig of water.
Twenty-Two
Ryan Milosz was dead.
Carson watched the nurse zip up the black body bag containing Milosz’s body. Afterwards, she and two other bunny suited figures struggled to slip the body bag into a larger, clear plastic bag. When they were finished, they taped the whole thing closed with duct tape.
Carson stood outside the isolation room, his arms folded across his chest.
Now he was the last of them. The last UCSF doctor who had seen Yoshiki Yahagi out of isolation, and he didn’t even feel sick.
“What are you doing here?”
Carson turned at the near-shriek.
The nursing supervisor, a middle-aged woman with not-quite-natural-ash-blond-hair, marched toward him, arms pumping. “You’re supposed to be in quarantine!”
He wasn’t polite. “I’m here because I’m not sick, and you need me.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she snapped. She was the only nurse who dared confront the infectious disease fellow. “You should be in quarantine, and you know it. You’re putting the rest of us at risk!”
“At risk of what? I’m past the incubation period, Lois. And I feel fine.” He glanced over to the steady stream of nurses and orderlies that were moving equipment out of the ICU. “What are they doing?”
“Setting up another intensive care unit on twelve.”
“What?”
“You heard me. The CDC has ordered us to activate the epidemic management plan. They’re anticipating an outbreak here in San Francisco.”
“Why wasn’t I notified?”
“Because you were supposed to be in quarantine,” she retorted.
“I don’t have plague, Lois.”
She examined him closely. It was true. He didn’t at all look ill. He looked like Jim Carson: tall, thin, pale, a little stooped, but definitely not sick.
She gave him a reproachful look. “You should know better than anyone that hundreds of people have died.” She gestured toward the break room behind the central desk, where several nurses clustered around the TV. It was tuned to CNN. “Reno and Los Angeles are up to their necks in plague. We don’t want it to happen here.”
“I hate to break it to you, Lois. It is going to happen here.”
She glanced uneasily at the gurney being pushed out of the isolation room. A sheet covered the body bag to hide the corpse from anyone who might witness the gurney traveling to the hospital morgue.
“They’re reporting that it’s incurable.” Her gaze shifted to Carson’s face. “They’re saying there are no survivors.”
He didn’t look at her. Instead, he stared impassively at Milosz’s body as it was wheeled out the door. Unconsciously, he scrunched up his back and shoulders and then rolled his head in circles.
The nursing supervisor was staring at him. “He was your friend, wasn’t he?” she asked.
“Not really,” said Carson. He’d liked Milosz well enough, but a friend? Carson wasn’t sure anyone at UCSF was really a friend. He rolled his head again.
She seemed to be at a loss for words. Finally, she said, “Well, good luck, Dr. Carson.”
Carson wondered why she was wishing him good luck—because he wasn’t sick yet, and she was sure he would soon be? Or because she believed what the media was reporting, that there were no survivors?
He was still alive. There were survivors, he thought. He was one of them.
By noon, Susan couldn’t take her self-imposed quarantine anymore. She’d read her medical textbooks, checked the internet, and eaten a fine meal of Kraft mac and cheese, but nothing had soothed her restlessness. Even the TV news coverage made her twitchy. The local channels showed nonstop scenes of chaos throughout the city.
At the strike of twelve, fearing she would go mad if she didn’t get out of her apartment, Susan pulled on an N95 and headed for the door.
She knew that going outside was technically a violation of her quarantine, but Susan rationalized that her respirator mask, which was fitted to her face so tightly that she thought she would suffocate, reduced her chance of transmitting the disease to virtually zero. Besides, she thought irritably, I feel fine.
She slipped out the front door, locked it behind her, and headed to Fair Oaks Boulevard, the four-lane thoroughfare that served as the South Pasadena’s main commercial district. She was stunned by what she saw.
A hundred people, wearing white gowns with red crosses, clustered on the overpass where the four-lane boulevard crossed the 110 freeway. In the center, an enormous hooded figure stood on a makeshift platform erected over the median strip.
Susan stared. The sea of hooded figures appeared to watch the man intently, although the brilliant scarlet head coverings obscuring their faces made it hard to tell for sure. Chanting, low and rumbling, rose above the freeway noise. The cloying scent of incense floated in the air.
A crowd of mostly masked spectators ringed the gowned figures. Susan drew up next to a woman with a respirator similar to her own and asked, “Who are they?”
The woman didn’t bother to look at Susan. Her eyes were fixed on the figure on the platform. “Flagellants.”
Susan did a double take, remembering Ezra’s description of the medieval group that beat themselves during the Black Death. She couldn’t believe anyone would actually do something so crazy in modern day Los Angeles.
“Move it, lady,” someone said at her elbow. A masked man carrying a video camera pushed past her. Susan recognized the logo on his shirt as belonging to one of the local TV stations.
The chanting was very loud, a buzzing of words that Susan couldn’t understand. They seemed to be repeating the same sentences over and over again.
Preces meae non sunt dignae
Sed tu bonus fac benigne
Ne perenni cremer igne
The group began to sway, red crosses flickering and disappearing in the ocean of white. Each member clutched a book. The man on the platform reached his arms to the sky. The group chanted louder; the swaying grew more pronounced. Susan could feel the energy from where she stood a half-block away. The muscles of her back and abdomen contracted. She held her breath.
The man ripped off his hood, revealing dark, sweaty hair and—Susan’s stomach lurched as she admitted it—an extraordinarily handsome face. He held something in his hand. The crowd was chanting one word now, over and over, but Susan couldn’t identify it. She didn’t think it was English, but she didn’t recognize any other language either.
The man lifted the object to the sky, holding it with two hands. Susan gasped, as he suddenly brought the whip down against his back. The crowd cried out and then resumed chanting, a frenzy of sound. The man on the platform responded by bringing the whip down again. Small spots of blood appeared on the back of his gown. He raised the lash over and over again, his face twisted in determination and an odd sort of euphoria. The hooded figures were beside themselves, the chanting now deafening.
The man stumbled, stood up again, and lashed himself again. The whip cracked down so many times it turned Susan’s stomach.
Finally, the man staggered forward and caught himself, his gown stained deathly crimson. He turned to the crowd unsteadily, his face pale and sweaty, his eyes glittering. The crowd went silent, mesmerized. Slowly, the man reached up one last time, to the sky, and held thi
s position for a few endless seconds before he collapsed forward, landing on the platform in a heap of bloody cloth.
The crowd erupted. White and red figures surged toward the platform, screaming and shouting and crying. The news cameraman pushed through the group. Beside her, spectators dropped to their knees, their hands clasped before them.
Susan wanted to throw up.
“Ezra, they’re flagellants!” Susan said into her cell phone. She hadn’t wanted to talk to the infectious disease fellow, but he was the only one she could reach. The phones were still totally unreliable, the circuits overloaded. “It’s just like the Middle Ages.”
“Yeah, the Middle Ages with a Hollywood touch. They’re all over the city, beating the crap out of themselves,” Ezra said. “All on live TV.”
“What are you doing?”
“Watching TV, like the rest of the city.”
“Well, not everyone is watching TV. Some people are out here watching men beat themselves with whips. I’ve got to get out of here.” Susan moved quickly down the street, away from the crowd. The police and several military vehicles had arrived only moments earlier. She half-expected them to lob tear gas.
“You should be in quarantine,” Ezra said.
“I’m wearing a mask, Ezra. Besides, I feel fine.” She was breathless from talking and walking so fast. She was tempted to lift the edge of her mask to have a few unimpeded breaths, but she didn’t. Instead, she slowed her pace. She was now only a block from home. “Are you at the hospital?”
“Yeah.” Ezra didn’t sound happy. “They’re coming in like mad. The National Guard has set up a tent on the courtyard.”
“The courtyard?” Susan was astonished. The courtyard was the large open plaza in front of the hospital, where vendors sold knick-knacks from Mexico to the largely Latino population the hospital served.
“Yeah, the hospital administrators are freaking out. They keep making these announcements on the hospital loudspeaker. ‘All available security to the Courtyard, all available security to the Courtyard.’ I think they’re afraid the mob out there is going to bust down the doors.”
DRYP Trilogy | Book 1 | DRYP [The Final Pandemic] Page 19