Infected

by Alana Terry

  “Well, Timothy Robertson is a patient here. His mom brought him in two days ago. Agreed to submit to the court order. But his dad’s not too happy about that. About an hour ago, he attacked the nurses who were transporting his son to radiology. Grabbed the boy and made a run for it. Got him within thirty feet of the exit to the parking garage before security stopped them. The boy’s back in his room safe and sound with his mother now, but the father is still somewhere in the hospital. Apparently, he’s got a history of mental instability and could be quite dangerous.”

  “You mean like he’s armed or something?”

  “I wish it were that simple.” Dominic shook his head slowly.

  “Then what kind of danger do you mean?”

  “I mean that as we speak, the bomb squad members of the SWAT team are sweeping the ER for explosives.”

  “What?”

  “They found evidence in Brian Robertson’s house that he’s been making bombs. They also found detailed blueprints of the ER.”

  Kennedy hadn’t realized until now how small the room felt. Small and suffocating. Where did all the oxygen go? “So why don’t they just evacuate?”

  “This information doesn’t leave the room, but one of the patients brought into the ER today has what’s almost definitely a case of Nipah. Once we get this bomb thing under control, we need to know exactly who got exposed and for how long so we can keep a finger on it all.”

  “Wait, have you seen Carl? Is that what he’s doing here?”

  Dominic shook his head sadly. He looked so tired. “I don’t know. I didn’t have time to check on him before everything else exploded. I mean ...” He cleared his throat. “Well, you know what I mean.” His pager beeped, and he frowned at the screen. “I hate to do this to you, but I need to hit the ground running again. There’s going to be some very scared people in the ER, and I’ve got to be there for them. I just couldn’t stand the thought of you being in harm’s way.”

  “What about my friends?”

  He frowned. “I told them to find you and Willow and bring you both back here, but the message must have gotten garbled. We’re going to do everything we can. Right now, we don’t know if there’s a genuine threat or not. I just want you to stay here and wait to hear from me, all right?”

  Kennedy nodded. “My phone’s dead.”

  Dominic’s eyes softened but he didn’t smile. “If you had a dollar for every time you let your battery die ...”

  Kennedy was in no mood for teasing, no matter how well intentioned. “Be safe, ok?”

  “I will.” He stood up and then stopped. “You be careful too.” He leaned down and let his lips brush against her forehead. It was the first time he’d ever kissed her. Kennedy just wished they weren’t in the middle of a hospital lockdown with a bomb scare and Nipah outbreak so that she could enjoy the moment.

  “I’ll be back soon, Lord-willing.”

  Kennedy didn’t like the ominous heaviness behind his words. She forced a smile.

  “Be careful,” she called after him, but he was already out the door.

  CHAPTER 15

  Kennedy sank back in the couch, breathless and light-headed. At least she wasn’t hyperventilating. Not yet.

  Here she was, far enough removed from the ER so Dominic wasn’t worried about a bomb blast reaching her, but how was that supposed to bring her any comfort? Everyone she cared about, every single one of her friends, was in that emergency room. The Lindgrens. Willow and Nick. And now Dominic. She squeezed her eyes shut. What she wouldn’t give for a phone charger. Call her dad. Let him know what was happening.

  Timothy Robertson. Kennedy hadn’t followed the boy’s case very thoroughly. Mostly, she’d heard details from others. Carl decrying the government overreach in depriving a couple of their parental rights. Willow was sympathetic from her homeopathic, anti-vaxxer philosophy on medicine, but the media was talking about the family as if they were negligent idiots at best and mentally unsound nutcases at worst. What was the truth? And how in the world could Kennedy expect to get to the bottom of any of it?

  She couldn’t. That wasn’t her job anyway. Her job was to wait here for Dominic. Pray that her friends would be ok, that they wouldn’t die in some explosion or contract the Nipah virus while sitting it out in a waiting room full of potential carriers.

  Her mind raced over what Dominic told her about a patient brought in earlier that day with Nipah symptoms. What if that was Carl? He couldn’t die. He was so healthy. So vigorous. He had children. Grandchildren. A God-ordained ministry. He couldn’t just catch some stupid disease and leave all that behind. What about his family? What would they do without him? Even worse, what if Sandy and Woong were exposed now too? What if they all ...

  No. She couldn’t let her mind dwell on all those horrific possibilities. Seize her thoughts. Take them captive. That’s what she had to do.

  Her conversation with Willow earlier about God watching over the birds got an old hymn stuck in her head. His eye is on the sparrow. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard it sung in church. In fact, the only reason she knew the words was because it was on the soundtrack of one of the Sister Act movies. She tried to let the lyrics lead her into a spirit of worship.

  She’d been working on her prayer life all semester, practicing the mental focus that was so hard to maintain in the midst of a busy, chaotic college schedule. She and Sandy talked about it quite a bit, and Sandy had been sharing some prayer tips with her, ways to keep her mind from getting distracted while she prayed. Keeping a journal was probably the most helpful thing Kennedy started. She didn’t always write out her prayers verbatim. Sometimes she just jotted down short lists, but even then she found the act of putting pen to paper kept her mind far more focused than it was whenever she sat down without any plan and simply tried to talk to God.

  Unfortunately, she didn’t have her journal here. And her brain was far too scattered, far too anxious to allow for that quiet communion with the Lord that she’d been trying to achieve in her regular prayer times.

  She stood up, hoping that pacing might help channel her focus just a little bit. Sandy sometimes prayed out loud, but even though Kennedy figured it might help keep her thoughts from wandering, she couldn’t get over her crippling self-consciousness to try it. Instead, she made a compromise and started mouthing the words to what she hoped would be an effective prayer for her friends in the emergency room.

  The difficult part was knowing what to pray for. Most of her energy was spent begging God to get them all out of there alive. Kennedy couldn’t wait to leave the hospital. Hopefully, she wouldn’t be coming back for a very long time. Maybe not until she was ready to start her residency. She’d had enough drama for the immediate future. She sighed, wondering if hospitals would always bring this sense of heaviness or if she’d get used to it once she started working in one. There were other places for doctors to put their skills to use after graduating med school. She sometimes thought about medical missions, about all the developing countries and the physicians who traveled the world serving others. Of course, she’d have to pay off her med school bills somehow, and volunteering her time while she trotted across the globe probably wasn’t the best way to work off student debt. She had time to figure out all those details later, but ...

  Kennedy stopped herself. Wasn’t she supposed to be praying? No wonder she was such a failure in her spiritual life. She couldn’t even hold a five-minute conversation with the Lord.

  She sighed, remembering Sandy’s admonition to be gentle with herself. Sometimes those distractions are what God’s telling us to pray about most. But Kennedy couldn’t believe that God would expect her to pray about student loans she hadn’t even started to accumulate while her best friend, her boyfriend, and her pastor’s family were all in danger of getting blown to pieces.

  She’d just have to try again.

  “Dear God.” She whispered the words this time, hoping that hearing her words spoken would keep her from getting off track a
gain. “I pray that you watch over ...”

  She stopped. Was that someone coughing? Her eyes shot around the room and landed on a skinny closet. It didn’t look large enough to hold more than a broom. Was she just making things up?

  “Dear God,” she tried again, but this time her voice was so quiet she couldn’t even hear herself. “I pray that you’d watch over me while ...”

  Another cough. Kennedy froze halfway between the closet and the exit, her mind too stunned to react. Her body stood frozen, ready to protect herself or ready to run away but unable to decide which she would need to do first.

  She braced herself in the ready stance she’d learned in her self-defense class as the closet door swung open. Her eyes focused on the barrel of a gun before they made out the features of the man holding it.

  “Hands up,” he ordered. His voice was nearly as quiet as hers had been while she was trying to pray. He waved the gun in her direction. “Step away from that door. Slow and easy.”

  Kennedy had no choice but to obey.

  CHAPTER 16

  “I don’t want to hurt you. Got that? The last thing I want to do is hurt you.” He took a step closer to Kennedy.

  She hurried behind the couch. Anywhere to put more distance, more obstacles between herself and her intruder.

  He locked the deadbolt of the conference room. “Listen, you don’t have to be afraid.” He slid a small loveseat in front of the door as a barricade. “I’m not planning to hurt anyone.”

  He sounded so earnest. Like he was scared of himself. So why did he have a gun?

  “What’s your name?” He nodded at the couch. “You can sit down. We’re going to be here a while, I’m guessing. May as well get comfortable.”

  Finding a cozy seat was the last thing on Kennedy’s mind.

  “Who are you?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”

  She ran through all of her dad’s stupid crisis training lectures. Had any of them prepared her for this?

  “My name’s Kennedy Stern. I’m a college student at Harvard.” There. Give him details to prove that she was a flesh-and-blood human. Not some sacrifice or human shield he could hide behind.

  “Harvard, eh?” He raised his eyebrows. “Impressive. What’re you studying?”

  “Biology.” She couldn’t raise her eyes to his. Hated the thought of that gun in his hand. Couldn’t find anywhere to focus her gaze. Wasn’t she supposed to be praying?

  “Oh, yeah? Premed?” She nodded, and he let out a little scoff. “Be a doctor, save the world? Is that the goal?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “Let me guess. You’re really smart, but you’ve got something of a bleeding-heart complex, so you’re going into medicine to improve the lives of your patients. Did I get that about right?”

  She glanced at the locked door. Someone would find her. Dominic would come to check on her. All she had to do was stay calm. Stay focused.

  His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me ...

  The man shrugged. “I guess you’re young enough not to know any better.” He sat down on the opposite side of the couch, keeping a full cushion length between them. “Doctors. Thinking you can play God. Thinking you alone possess the power to choose who’s going to be healed and who isn’t.”

  He lifted his eyes to hers and held her gaze. “Do you know who I am?”

  She had a good suspicion but still hadn’t found her voice.

  “I’m Brian Robertson. My son Timothy, you’ve heard about him in the news maybe.”

  She nodded slightly.

  “I don’t want to hurt anybody.” His voice sounded reassuring, but he still hadn’t let go of his weapon. “I swear, I don’t want to hurt you.” There was something earnest in his voice. Something that made Kennedy feel like he needed to convince her. He shook his head. “I’m so sorry. You must be terrified.” He slid his gun into the holster and reached for a bottle of water from the coffee table. “Need a drink? Go on. Take it. It’s perfectly safe. I haven’t even opened it.”

  Kennedy reached out. Hoped he didn’t see the way her whole body trembled.

  “Drink it,” he ordered again. “You’ll feel better. Man, I must have really terrified you. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  Kennedy took a few small sips from the bottle, felt the cool water slip down her throat.

  “That better?” he asked.

  “A little.”

  “Good. See? I’m trying to help. Just like you becoming a doctor. You and me both, we’re just trying to heal people. Know what I mean? It’s just that only one of us is doing it God’s way.”

  Kennedy stared. Wondered how long it would take before Dominic realized she was trapped in here. He was a man of prayer. A man full of the Holy Spirit. Couldn’t God tell him she was in trouble? Tell him to come back to the conference room and check on her? Dominic was the kind of believer who would listen to that sort of thing. Follow those promptings, those Holy Spirit urges.

  Please, God. Tell him to come back.

  “So you know why I’m here?” Brian leaned back in his seat and stretched his arm across the back of the couch.

  “I’m guessing it has something to do with your son.”

  He nodded. “My wife and me, we love that kid to death. Didn’t get pregnant until I was forty-one. Shannon, she was thirty-eight. We’d tried everything by then. Almost given up. Turns out all we needed to do was stop doubting and believe. Believe that God would give us the child he promised. And he did. When our little Timmy came to us — you’ve never met a better baby. I swear, you’ve never met a better little boy.” He stared past Kennedy’s shoulder. “Do you remember your first day of grade school?”

  “Not that well.”

  “Know what our Timmy was doing the first day of school? Having his third MRI. Know where he lost his first tooth? Right here at Providence. Peds floor. Know where he spent his sixth birthday? The hospital cafeteria. His aunt and cousin came and we ate plain rice with raisins before wheeling him back up to the oncology ward of the Children’s Hospital. Think that’s the kind of life any little boy deserves?”

  Kennedy shook her head. If she kept on agreeing with Brian, if she kept him from getting upset, this whole scenario might end peacefully.

  He frowned. “Not the kind of life he deserves at all. Which is why last summer, Shannon and I took him to a Cameron Hopewell crusade. You know him? Gift of healing. He’s the one who told us God would cure our son, but he wanted to do it without the aid of Western medicine. That’s the only way God would get all the glory. So we told the oncologist we were done. Done with the tests, done with the chemo, done with the poison they were drip-feeding him through those IVs. We believed God was going to heal our son, and he was going to do it through natural remedies and the power of prayer.” He let out a mirthless laugh. “Three hundred thousand dollars in lawyer fees later, and you know what? Here we are. Right back where we started.”

  “That’s got to be really hard.”

  “Know what Timmy told Shannon he wished for last Christmas? He told her he wished God would come down and carry him off to heaven so he wouldn’t have to hurt anymore.”

  Kennedy bit her lip.

  “What kind of monsters do this to a family? Do this to a child? Bishop Hopewell didn’t say alternative medicine was out. He just said no more radiation. No more chemotherapy. It’s not like we’ve been negligent. We took Timmy to several clinics, plunked down fifty grand for one consultation with the country’s most renowned naturopath. We had another virtual consult set up with an herbal oncology expert in Switzerland. He’s cured over a dozen cases just like Timmy’s. I don’t see all those other parents getting lined up and fined. I don’t see judges threatening to remove their children from their homes, land them in state custody.” He let out a heavy sigh. “You ever know anyone with cancer?”

  “Yeah, my grandma.”

  “She die of it?”

  “Uh-huh.” She stared at a painting behind Brian’s shoulder. The
portrait was of some stuffy-looking businessman, maybe one of the hospital’s founders or patrons.

  “Did your grandma get chemo? Radiation?”

  Kennedy nodded.

  “And still died, huh?”

  Another nod.

  Brian lowered his head. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I’m sorry for your son, too,” Kennedy whispered.

  “You must think I’m a horrible person.”

  She searched his face, hunting for clues that he was trying to trap her. She only saw pained earnestness. “No, I don’t think that.” She knew what was happening. Brian was trying to prey on her feelings of helplessness. Trying to convince her that he was doing the right thing. It was a classic case of Stockholm syndrome. Cognitive dissonance morphing into misplaced sympathies.

  “Well, you have kids one day, maybe you’ll understand. Heaven forbid they have to go through what my little Timmy has.”

  Kennedy didn’t know how to respond.

  “It just doesn’t make sense. You’ve got heroin addicts, prostitutes, abusive drunks — they all get to keep their kids. Abused children falling through the cracks in the system because someone passes one drug screen or takes one two-hour anger management seminar. But we’re the negligent ones. We’re the ones who would lose custody of our kid unless we bring him here, strap him to a gurney, listen to him scream his little heart out while nurses poke and prod his veins. It’s a test. I kept telling my wife God was going to test us, but she couldn’t stand the thought of Timmy being taken away from us, no matter what Bishop Hopewell said. In the court’s mind, we’re the bad parents. We’re the ones who don’t know what’s best for our child. We’re the religious nutcases who would rather see our son cured by the Holy Spirit, who heals completely and fully and doesn’t leave horrific side effects. But we’re told that we have to accept their poison, that if we don’t consent to chemo and radiation, not only will our son die, but he’ll die in the custody of foster parents while we rot in jail for neglect.”