Paradise Lost: Tales of the Dead Tropics (2 page)

"What do you make of that?" Emma asked.

I shrugged noncommittally, trying to ignore the uneasy feeling in my gut. "Encephalitis has been known to make people aggressive."

She looked at me incredulously. "Ok, Lori, but did you see his eyes?! And what about his skin - so grey and slack, like it was suddenly too big for his bones. Creepy!"

Looking sideways at her, my lips twitched. "Is that your professional diagnosis? Creepy?"

She flicked a rude gesture at me in response.

A yell jerked our heads around, to see more encephalitis patients being wheeled in, also struggling against their restraints. Another bleeding paramedic called for assistance. Nurses and doctors hurried over. I got a glimpse of blank eyes, bloodless skin and clawed hands as the trolleys passed by. Emma raised her eyebrows at me as she hastened after them, promising further discussion over coffee later.

I shook myself and walked over to Dave as Bob was led into a nearby examination room. "Come on, let's take a look at that arm." Dave obediently allowed himself to be led into a room and sat thankfully on a bed.

"Never seen anything like that before in my life." He muttered.

I glanced at him as I gathered my supplies. "Really? You know encephalitis can cause aggression and confusion."

Dave shook his head. "This is something else, Lori. This guy tried to
eat
me."

I laughed as I sat down beside him. "Come on, Dave. Never heard of a virus turning people into cannibals!"

The big man shrugged. " Yeah, well, I'm the one who had to watch this guy chewing on the piece of flesh he tore from my arm. He was drooling and chomping and watching me the whole time like I was a giant piece of meat dangling just out of reach...it was freaky."

I shuddered. "Quit it, Dave. That's gross." I pulled away the bandage and whistled. The patient had managed to tear a seriously thick chunk out of Dave's arm. "You are going to need some serious stitches, my friend."

"Yeah, I kinda figured that."

We sat in silence for several minutes as I cleaned the wound. Dave clearly had something on his mind as he kept clearing his throat and opening his mouth to speak, then shutting it. Finally, I sighed in exasperation and met his blue eyes firmly. "Just spit it out, for goodness sakes."

Dave straightened his shoulders decisively. "Lori, that guy was
dead
."

"Yes, I heard you say he had a cardiac arrest and you revived him. What about it?"

He looked a little embarrassed. "The thing is we didn't succeed in bringing him back. We'd given up. Then he just opened his eyes and attacked us."

"Okay." I frowned. " Odd, but spontaneous revival has happened before."

Dave met my eyes. "I saw the heart monitor. Even when we were struggling to strap him down, the monitor remained flat lined."

I blinked. "Well, it had to be broken."

"Yeah. That's what I thought. Until I talked to the other guys over the cb and found that the same thing had happened to them. What are the odds that all the monitors in all the ambulances were broken?"

****

When I left Dave, I was feeling a little worried. He had started to run a mild temperature. Bites are notoriously full of bacteria. After giving him a dose of antibiotics, I made him promise to go home and rest. He assured me that he would head out after checking on Bob.

As I made my way down the hall, I ran into Emma. She was bouncy with wide eyed excitement. "Those miners are completely insane, I'm afraid! It took six of us to get them into in the isolation beds. A couple of the nurses even got bitten, nothing serious, mind you. Now we've all got to wear protective gear around the patients." She chattered on eagerly as an avid audience of nurses grew around her. "We can't even sedate them; nothing seems to work. Poor things seem to be mad with the pain."

"What's the treatment plan?" A nearby nurse asked.

Emma shrugged. "Standard procedures but it will take a while to see if it is working. In the meantime all we can do is try to make them comfortable."

"Anyway, I have to get back." She looked over at me. " Meet you at lunch, Lori?"

" You bet. You know how I love cafeteria food. Highlight of my day."

Laughing, Emma wagged her finger at me. "Still living on the edge, I see."

I returned to the office and took a quick look at the board. Several people had presented with symptoms of possible encephalitis but that always happened when an alert went out. People started seeing serious symptoms in the common cold.

The sound of a rough cough startled me. I was surprised to see Bob leaning against the doorway and alarmed to see how unwell he looked. I hurried over and pressed my hand to his forehead. It was burning hot. His eyes seemed bleary as he tried to focus on me.

"Hey Lori, I think maybe that bugger gave me some nasty infection..."

"That, or you're on the grog again." I took his arm firmly and led him back inside. He lay down gratefully on the bed. "How long have you been running this fever?"

"About half an hour, I suppose. And I've got a hell of a headache." He groaned. "I've been trying to find someone to give me some damned pills so I can go home to bed."

I sniffed derisively even as my thoughts raced through the possibilities. Could this be encephalitis? Could it even develop this quickly? "You're not going anywhere, mister, at least not until you've been seen by another doctor."

Bob moaned in protest. "What did I do to deserve that?!"

I poked him lightly. "If you can still make jokes, there's hope for you yet."

I left him dozing while I hunted down a doctor. Dr Bennett stood at the nurse's counter filling in a form, and with a little persuasion, agreed to examine Bob. As I went to follow her, she shooed me away. "The triage nurse could do with some help. The waiting room is filling up with neurotic parents and hypochondriacs who are convinced that they've got this encephalitis bug." I gritted my teeth and left her to it. Truth be, there was a backlog of sniffling, groaning patients in the waiting room now, and I knew that Bob was in good, if irritating, hands. I'd always found Dr Bennett with her Margaret Thatcher hair and condescending attitude a pain but I couldn't fault her expertise.

After sending home two patients with the cold and referring another patient who actually could have the virus, I noticed a sudden flurry of activity as nurses and doctors rushed past my door.

"Excuse me." I murmured to the young girl I was with and hurried out. In the hallway, there seemed to be struggle going on. I heard a groan that sent a chill down my back. The young girl peered around me. "What's going on?"

I glanced down at her. " I don't know. Probably nothing but I am going to check it out. Stay here."

She nodded obediently and backed up.

I had a lump in the pit of my stomach as I heard that drawn out moan again.
It couldn't be.
As I neared, I saw that the staff had someone pinned on the floor outside Bob's room. Dr Bennett stood near by, her perfect hair mussed, face flushed and deep scratches on her cheeks. She glanced up at me and acknowledged silently what I had dreaded: it was Bob struggling on the floor under two men and two women.

"What happened?" I rushed forward to help them. Dr Bennett grabbed my arm and pulled me back. "Sudden aggression, disorientation...he tried to attack me and then a nurse."

I opened my mouth to respond when there was a scream of pain from one of orderlies. "The son of a bitch bit me!" He leapt up clutching his neck and I saw Bob looking up at me. But it wasn't Bob. Gone was the sardonic, wiry man I had worked with for years and in his place was ...blankness. With the pasty skin and the dead eyes, I knew without doubt that he had been infected by the same virus that had ravaged the miners.

Bob's empty eyes shifted to the woman holding his left arm.

"Don't let him bite you!" I called out. " He - he might be infectious!"

The woman squealed and released her hold, scrambling back. The remaining two men struggled to hold Bob down as he grunted and writhed and snapped viciously at them. "Hey, I can't hang on much longer!" One of the men pinning down Bob cried out. "Jab him with something, will you?!"

Dr Bennett grabbed an injection off a nearby trolley and pumped the full syringe into his thigh. "He should be out in a couple of minutes." She said with satisfaction. I knelt beside her, pinning down Bob's convulsing legs. "Dr Bennett, if this is the same virus as the encephalitis patients, sedation probably won't work."

"Where the hell is security?!" Dr Bennett yelled before turning to me in irritation. "Well, we can't very well sit on him indefinitely, can we? Go find security, will you? He needs to be properly restrained before he hurts someone else or himself."

I ignored the flare of anger and edged around Bob cautiously. As I passed the injured orderly, I paused to tell him to disinfect the wound and get checked out immediately by a doctor. If this was the virus, it had taken less than two hours from the time of the bite for the infection to reach Bob's brain. That was impossibly fast. Maybe Joe was right about the threat of an epidemic, after all. I suddenly wished I could talk to him. I feared a doctor would treat such a suggestion with ridicule. After all, maybe Bob had been exposed on an earlier job.

I hurried on. For some reason, there was not a single security guard on the floor. I decided to head upstairs to the isolation ward. Chances were the guards had been called in to deal with more outbreaks of aggression.

There was no one at the outside nurses' station, odd in itself. Nibbling on my lip tentatively, I pushed the doors open. The silence that greeted me was unnerving at first, but the sound I finally heard chilled me to the bone. I didn't know what I was listening to at first but as it got closer, I suddenly realized what it was.

Screaming.

Panicked, desperate screaming getting closer and closer.

4

Instinctively I hit the security alarm beside the door before racing into the ward. The hallway was completely deserted. Images flashed across my eyes like snapshots. A mop in a pool of water. A chair overturned. Records spilled on the floor. Coffee cup smashed. Bedding spilling off a trolley. What had happened here?

My ears were assaulted by the sounds of people's panicked cries ahead of me. My heart began to thump. I reached over and picked up the mop. Quickly I unscrewed the head, leaving me with a solid piece of wood to wield, if I needed to. And I had the feeling I would need to.

I sent up a quick prayer that security would respond soon and started to move down the hall. The screams had stopped to be replaced by even more disturbing sounds. Thumps, bangs, whimpers and growls merged with cries of pain and terror. Swallowing convulsively, I clutched my pole tightly and peered around the corner.

A sight beyond imagining lay before me. It was a few seconds before my brain could even make sense of the images it was seeing. But when it did register, I couldn't breathe. Bodies lay scattered along the length of the hallway. Five, six? Hunched over the closest ones were three blood-covered men. For a moment I thought they were trying to help the fallen individuals and then the truth dawned on me with horrifying clarity. They were
eating them
. I blinked rapidly to clear my eyes but still they continued to tear chunks out of the fallen bodies and chew the meat with such relish, that bile rose in my throat. Their pale skin was splattered with the blood of my
colleagues
! The blood was in their hair, their clothes, their nails.

A groan drew my eyes to the victim closest to me. It was a man laying on his back. Wrinkled face, grey hair...it was Dr Wilson. Oh my God, he was still alive! His eyes fluttered as he moaned again. The man kneeling over him - no, not a man, no human being could do that - the maniac leaned over and buried his head in his victim's chest, ripping pieces of flesh off with his teeth. As he flung his head up, I recognized the dark hair and blank eyes as the first miner I had seen coming in.

Slowly I pulled back. For a long moment, I stood pressed against the wall paralyzed. I was terrified of moving, for fear the maniacs would hear me. Then a new sound. A door slammed and footsteps ran up the hallway towards us. A feminine cry of despair as whoever it was realized what she had run into. I took a deep breath and forced myself to peer around the corner again.

Emma, dear bubbly Emma, stood a few feet from the scene of the carnage. Beside her stood a young man with glasses who looked vaguely familiar(Ken?). Slowly he reached over and grasped her hand and started to edge backwards and the maniacs stopped their dining to stare at them.

Behind them, a young woman came through the doors, and then another. With a sinking feeling in my gut, I saw the now familiar pale saggy skin.

Emma glanced behind her and cried out again. They were trapped and they knew it. Without thinking, I flung myself around the corner.

"Hey! Come and get me!" I waved my pole and jeered in a foolhardy attempt to distract the maniacs long enough to allow Emma and Ken to escape. "What are you waiting for, you ugly bastards?"

As the maniacs rose clumsily to their feet, I felt a thrill of satisfaction that my plan had actually worked and they were coming after me. Then - sheer terror.
They were coming after me
.
Shit, shit, shit.