“Yes. Sanders called me to tell me he died that night.”
“And you’re certain that you got a needle stick?”
“Of course.”
“Then, Susan”—he focused his scientist eyes on her—“I would be very interested in looking at your blood.”
Susan Barry as laboratory specimen was an intriguing idea, but one that ultimately made her impatient. She allowed Hodis to poke her with his needles and take ten vein-emptying tubes of blood before she finally rebelled.
“Tom, I’ve got to go. They need my help at the hospital.”
He looked at her, his eyes troubled. “It’s not good over there, Susan.”
“I know. I saw the TV reports.” She shrugged on one of the lab’s white bunny suits and snapped on some gloves. “You’re lucky you still have these. I heard the hospital’s running short.”
“They’re running short on a lot of things.”
“I can imagine,” she said, but she was wrong.
She had no idea.
Patients were everywhere, covering every square inch of ground around the massive hospital—so many sick people that Susan was forced to pick her way between them. The stench of human waste filled the air.
“I’m sorry,” she said repeatedly as she pushed her way past the gatehouse and up the ramp toward the emergency department entrance. She could hear security guards yelling, but the shouting seemed to have no effect on the crowd. They pressed onwards toward the entrance until they were repelled back.
In the mad shoving, Susan lost her balance. She felt herself falling, and then a hard contact with the ground. Light disappeared. A foot stepped on her leg. Another crushed her hand. Somewhere near her, she heard a cry. Susan realized there was a little girl beneath her.
“Get off me!” she shouted, but her voice was smothered by her respirator. She grabbed at the girl and tried to pull her up, but the crowd switched directions again, and she and the girl careened into the pavement.
There were legs everywhere. Susan pulled the girl into her arms to shield her, but a disembodied foot kicked her, and Susan lost her grip. Someone yanked the respirator from her head.
She couldn’t breathe. She looked wildly for the girl, found her, and shoved with all her force at the legs of the people around her.
“Get off of her!” she screamed. She and the girl crashed into the pavement again.
Someone fired a gun, two shots cracking in the air. The crowd parted suddenly, the turbulent sea stilled. Susan heard someone speaking Spanish, and then she felt someone pull her to her feet. The child was gently lifted from her arms. A National Guardsman propelled her toward the emergency entrance.
She looked back over her shoulder at the child, who lay limply in a soldier’s arms. She tried to tell herself it didn’t matter. She had seen the black marks on the little girl’s hands, the telltale sign of plague. The girl would have died anyway.
But Susan knew the truth. The truth was that the world had lost all humanity in the panic of the plague. The little girl’s smothered form was proof of it.
Hodis placed the vials in the protective packaging, slapped a biohazard sticker on top, and waited for the military courier.
The five vials of Susan’s blood are insurance, he told himself. He wasn’t sure how much longer his lab’s electricity would last. Even though the utilities people said they were diverting energy to maintain electrical service in critical areas like LA County + USC Medical Center and all its associated research facilities, the medical campus was running on generator power more than it wasn’t. Hodis was pretty sure his lab would be out of power permanently in less than seventy-two hours.
For the moment, the lights still burned, but Hodis was no fool. He knew the contents of those vials was far too important to risk on a lab with a flickering power supply. He gazed down at the package thoughtfully.
The blood of the first known survivor. True, he hadn’t inoculated Susan directly, which would have been the ultimate experimental proof, but still, he was pretty sure the combination of her own direct inoculation and the countless other exposures she’d received all ensured his hypothesis was true. This plague would have survivors. The question was how many.
He checked the address label one last time before handing it to the courier.
The label read:
MAJOR JAMES HEGER
USAMRIID
FORT DETRICK, MARYLAND
EXTREMELY URGENT
Thirty-One
The stench was worse in the hospital. Susan sat in a side office off the emergency room, trying not to breathe too deeply while Sanders, her fellow medical resident, pressed a small alcohol wipe to her cheekbone. She couldn’t help herself. She gasped in pain.
“I’m sorry. It’s all we have left. The resupply trucks haven’t come yet.” Sanders peered at her face. “You look like you’ve been in a boxing match.”
“I feel like I’ve been in a boxing match.” She winced again as he took a final swipe at her skin.
“I’m sorry. We don’t have any bandages.”
She shrugged. “Don’t need a bandage. When do you think the re-supply trucks will come?”
He looked at her with a clouded expression, as though he were trying to decide how to answer. Finally, he said, “I don’t think they’re coming.” He turned and threw the balled up wipe wrapper at the overfilled garbage can in the corner. It bounced off the top and landed on the floor. “The government has given up on us, Susan. They’re trying to save other cities.”
She didn’t believe him. There was no way a country as wealthy and powerful as the United States would give up on one of its major cities, but the expression on Sander’s face told her not to argue. He looked exhausted. He probably hadn’t slept in days.
She pushed herself to her feet. “Where’s Ezra?”
“How should I know? Half the docs are gone. Most of the nurses are gone. There’s only a few of us left.” He gave her a haunted look. “Your boyfriend’s still here. He didn’t run.”
“Brian’s here?”
Sanders waved his hand vaguely. “Yes, somewhere.”
She turned to leave, but Sanders put his hand on her arm. “Where are you going?”
“To the unit,”’ she said.
“Then take this.” He shoved something into her hand. It was an N95 respirator mask.
“It’s the last unused one,” Sanders said.
Susan took it without a word.
If the main hallway from the ER was empty, the rest of County was not. There were thousands of people inside the giant hospital, in wards that had previously been closed for decades. Patients filled every bed, and some spilled onto the floors, but the most shocking sight was the dead bodies in the hallway. The few remaining health care workers stacked the corpses in makeshift body bags of sheets and plastic wrapping.
Susan was horrified. The faces that she had known were gone, the ones left unfamiliar in their PPE.
She bypassed the ICU and went straight to the surgical call rooms. If she could find Brian, he could tell her what sort of emergency plan was in place.
Her heart slammed in her chest when she found him. He was slumped against the call room wall, his face ashen and fully visible. A mask lay on the floor next to him.
“Brian!” she cried.
He didn’t seem to notice her. He looked glassily ahead, his breath coming in shallow, little puffs.
She put her arms under his arms, and heaved with all her might, trying to pull him to his feet. But he was heavy, and she only managed to drag him halfway out the door before she slid out under his weight, collapsing against the slick hospital floors.
“I need help!” she shouted, but the call rooms were deserted, and her voice echoed emptily off the old hospital walls.
“Come on, Brian. We’ve got to get you into the ICU,” she said again. She shook him, trying to rouse him, but he didn’t respond.
She put her arms under his again and pulled, but his large athlete’s legs dragged
heavily behind him. She only traversed a few feet before sagging with exhaustion.
“Susan,” she thought she heard him say, but she wasn’t sure, because her own heavy breathing was deafening her.
“Come on, Brian. Just a few feet further,” she gasped, heaving him through a second set of doors.
The lights were out in the ICU. Several bunny-suited people turned to look at Susan as she let Brian slump to the floor.
“He needs oxygen.” She could barely get the words out. She felt as if her lungs would explode. “Please help me—it’s Brian. Brian Cain. Help me get him in a bed.”
The bunny-suited figures looked at each other, their eyes meeting with a meaning that Susan didn’t understand. Finally, one of the health care workers came to her, grabbed Brian underneath his arms, and lifted. The second figure grasped Brian’s feet, and the two men carried Brian’s limp form to a bed in the first glass-enclosed ICU room.
“He needs oxygen,” she said again, moving to the outlet on the wall. “Where are the oxygen masks?”
The bunny-suited figures gazed at her, but they didn’t move. She realized that there were no sheets on the bed, that they had dropped Brian directly onto the mattress.
“I need a mask,” she said again. The two men looked at each other.
“There aren’t any masks,” said a voice from the doorway. She turned to find Sanders, leaning against the door frame, white-suited but unmistakable. “I told you. The supply trucks haven’t come.”
Her heart stopped. She looked from Sanders to Brian, saw the darkening hue of his skin. Her throat squeezed painfully. “Then get me an IV. I’ll put it in.”
The bleakness in Sander’s eyes frightened her. “We don’t have those, either.”
Suddenly, she registered the significance of the darkness in the ICU. The unit was silent, except for soft intermittent moans and distant coughs. There was no beeping, no whoosh-whoosh of the ventilators, no ding-ding of the monitors. Everything was gray, half-lit by two windows that cast dreary shadows across the room.
The ghost of compassion flickered in Sanders’s eyes. Susan knew what he would say, and she couldn’t bear it. She turned to Brian. “Don’t worry, Brian. I’ll figure something out. You need oxygen. I’ll get you oxygen.”
Perhaps Brian heard the anguish in her tone. He opened his sunken eyes and gazed at her. His words were far away, a weak echo of the powerful voice she had known. “Don’t, Susan.”
“Just hang in there,” she answered. She took his hand and held it. “I’ll get the oxygen. I’ll get an IV. We’re just having a power outage. We’ll get the power back on.”
He closed his eyes. “Morphine,” he whispered. “Morphine.”
She turned her face to Sanders in a desperate plea. The medical resident shook his head, and Susan felt her heart strangle in her throat. She turned back to Brian, to tell him some lie, but she couldn’t get the words out.
It didn’t matter. Brian had drifted off again, his eyes closed against his bluish skin, the tension in his face fading as life slipped away from him.
When the second backup generator failed, Ajay Singh and his remaining staff were plunged into darkness. Someone flicked on a flashlight, its beam crossing the small office off of the ER.
“What happened to the generators?” one of the nurses asked. She sounded afraid.
“Not sure,” said Singh. He reached for the small Motorola radio on his belt. They had given up on the portable phones. Without a reliable power source, the phone system in the hospital had gone down. “Jim, we’re dark here again.”
The radio emitted a burst of static. It was a cheap two-way radio that one of the nurses had bought at a sporting goods store, but it was reliable, and the hospital’s emergency services were now coordinated over the eighty dollar radio set. Singh thought it was the best eighty dollars ever spent on health care.
“Generator number two is down, Dr. Singh,” a voice crackled over the radio.
“What about number one?”
“It has a fuel pump leak. It’ll be at least twenty-four hours before we can get the replacement part.” There was another burst of static. “I’m not sure what’s happening with number two.”
Singh turned to the nurse. “Go to the unit. Make sure they’re bagging the ventilator patients.” He no longer felt panic every time the power went out, but he knew that this time, it was bad. Both backup systems had failed, which meant that the hospital was really and truly incapacitated. There would be no monitors, no ventilators, no sterilizing services, no computer or lab services. Even the IV pumps, which had a limited battery backup, would eventually go down.
Singh keyed the radio. “Is it fuel?”
“Nope, we’ve got another forty-eight hours of diesel. The generators are old, Dr. Singh. They’re not used to running for extended periods.”
A heavy sense of doom settled over Singh. “Keep me updated.” He clicked off.
He realized that all the people in the room were watching him. He could see the fear in their eyes. In Singh’s eyes, this made them all the braver still.
He wished he could tell them something encouraging, but he couldn’t.
“Round up all the flashlights you can find. Use laryngoscopes, if you have to,” he ordered. “We can’t assume that the power is going to come on any time soon.”
“What about the patients?” one of the nurses asked.
“We’ll have to hand-ventilate the intubated patients. The rest—” He broke off. There wasn’t much he could do but try to provide light. “Move patients in rooms without windows to rooms with windows. No new patients in the hospital. They’ll do just as well outside.”
Despite a bone-weary exhaustion and the beginnings of a throbbing headache, he moved quickly. He knew he should sleep, but whenever he curled up on the old stuffed chair in his office and started to drift off, sunken-cheeked images of dying people jerked him back into wakefulness. As a consequence, he hadn’t slept in days. And now, his joints and muscles ached, and he yearned to lie down and rest.
But he couldn’t rest. The hospital was his responsibility.
When he made it to the hallway and discovered he was alone, he slowed down. It took too much energy to maintain the façade of control. In fact, even standing up straight felt difficult. He slumped as he trudged up to the intensive care unit. The heart of the hospital’s high-tech medical capabilities was reduced now, in the absence of power, to little more than those of a hospital from 200 years ago: just a place to isolate and die.
He’d let them down. He’d failed to ensure that the hospital would be ready for this. But how could he have known? How could he have possibly known that the exchange student would start this, this unspeakable progression of death and failure and collapse?
He pushed into the stairwell to climb to the second floor. The elevators required too much energy to justify powering them with a generator. He and all the others had been forced to haul themselves up the stairs, and he must have climbed them a thousand times in the last forty-eight hours. But now, it seemed as though the task were beyond him. He stopped at the landing, his breath coming in shallow gasps.
A viscous bubble rose in his chest. He felt the overwhelming desire to rip the mask off his face as he began coughing. He thought he would never stop.
When he finally did, he stood there with his chest heaving, his eyes fixated on his left hand. He shined his flashlight beam on his fingers and felt his heart slam in his chest.
The dark spots were tiny, but they were unmistakable.
Singh didn’t go to the ICU. He pushed himself up the final steps into the hallway, and then down the hall to his office, where he collapsed onto a chair. He kicked the door closed and pulled the mask from his face, sucking in air.
When his breathing slowed, he lifted his exhausted body up to grab the cell phone on his desk. He punched in Suma’s number and waited.
He heard the same mechanical voice that he had heard for the last twenty-four hours: “Sorry, w
e are unable to complete your call at this time…”
Despair swept through him. He dialed again. And again. And again.
My children, he thought. My children.
He hit redial, clutched the phone to his face, tears rolling down his cheeks.
Each breath came as a torture. A torture that he deserved, because all of this was his fault, every suffering person outside of the hospital, every agonized patient in every other city, all the misery that was spreading relentlessly. It was all his fault, he knew.
He had let Yoshiki Yahagi transfer without a mask.
Thirty-Two
It was the first thing he had stolen since grade school, but all things considered, it wasn’t even in the same league. Grand theft auto. When the plague died down, there would definitely be jail time waiting for the chairman of Wheeler Energy, but at the moment, Alan Wheeler didn’t give a rat’s ass. He roared down Soto Street in the old Ford Econoline van, astounded and grimly relieved that, in a city where nothing seemed to be working, the old hunk of steel charged down the hillside like a bull on steroids.
He glanced at the fuel gauge. Less than a quarter tank. Enough to get him to Beverly Hills, but not much farther. That was far enough.
He approached the on-ramp to the 10, slowed the van enough to wave at the military men standing there. They looked at the LAC + USC logo emblazoned on the van’s side and walked slowly out to the center of the road.
Alan pulled the van to a halt and rolled down the window.
“Where are you going?” one of the soldiers asked.
“White Memorial Hospital,” Alan answered. He’d rehearsed the response, knowing that travel around the city was now severely restricted. “Need to pick up a couple of docs over there to bring back to University.”
DRYP Trilogy | Book 1 | DRYP [The Final Pandemic] Page 25