Plague (4 page)

When she came out of the locker room she saw Dr. Amoy speaking on
his cell phone.
“I have to go
…
love you too.” He looked to her. “Ready?”

“I’d like to see their charts first if I could.”

“Certainly.”

They went back to the elevators and up to the top floor. They walked down a long corridor
where
there was only one reception desk
, which
was left unattended. She noticed more offices than hospital rooms and also a kitchen and lounge area.

“They’re converting this floor but this used to be our psychiatric unit,” Amoy said.

“I gotta tell you, this is one of the nicest hospitals I’ve ever been
in
.”

“You’re preaching to the choir. My residency was done in
St. Catherine’s in Detroit. You ever been?”

“No.”

“It’s like a cheap
office building with an OR. We’d get a dozen gunshot victims a weekend and it would take the staff days just to clean up the blood. We were underfunded and they contracted the janitors out
—it’s
just up here to the right.”

They turned down another empty corridor and walked past some construction that was taking place. No workers were there at this hour but Sam saw half-empty Gatorade bottles and burrito wrappers
lying
out.

Once they were in
a small conference room with a fridge
,
Amoy went in and pulled two charts off a wall hanger. He sat down at the table and Sam did the same.

“Clifford Lane, resident of Honolulu, twenty-nine and in perfect heal
th before this. Second victim i
s an
Erin Simon from Los Angeles. She
was here on vacation.”

He passed the chart
s
to her and she began reading. She took notes on her pad
of the patients’ statistics
: height, weight, occupation, marital status, sexual orientation
,
etc.

“I’ll need their medical records,” she said.

“We can get that afterward when you’ve signed the HIPPA release. I really think we should see them now and do the paperwork later.”

They rose and Sam checked her gloves and mask for any tears or holes. Amoy did the same and they walked out to the corridor and down to the room at the end of the hall.
T
wo adjoining rooms
were
connected by a thick door and Sam saw a woman of thirty-six lying on her back, her eyes closed, a morphine drip attached to her arm.

“Hello
,
Erin,” Amoy said, approaching the bed. “How we feeling today?”

Sam stood by the foot of the bed, bending as close as she dared to get a good look at her exposed arms and neck. Her skin appeared smooth, no
pustules
, but splotches of black and dark purple appeared underneath. It didn’t cover her
entirely
but it occurred frequently enough that she could tell instantly it wasn’t bruising. It was blood that was flooding out of her body just underneath the skin.

Sam looked to the woman’s mouth. Crusted, dried blood lined her nostrils and her lips. Her teeth were stained with it and her mouth was completely dry and hanging open as if she were struggling to suck in air.

She heard something out of the patient that sounded like a groan but caused Dr. Amoy to respond and Sam realized the woman was speaking.

“I want to go for a walk,” she gasped. “I’ve been in this bed for five days. I want to go for a walk.”

“Soon,” Amoy said, checking the morphine
.
“
We
just gotta make sure we’re dotting our I’s and crossing our T’s before we take you for a spin. We want to get you home to your family as soon as we can
,
darling. Would you like anything else right now?”

There was no response and Sam saw that the woman had dazed off into sleep or unconsciousness. Amoy lightly touched the bed, running his fingers over the sheets. Sam could tell he wished to touch the patient
;
human contact was important to the best doctors, the ones that went into medicine to actually heal patients rather than for money or prestige. Instead, he had to settle for the sheets behind a rubber glove.

“I’d like to see the first patient,” she said, not taking her eyes off Erin.

Amoy walked to the door and opened it
to reveal
another room identical to the first but set up diametrically opposite. The bed was against the wall
,
facing them
,
and Sam stopped at the doorway when she saw the patient.

He looked as if he’d been burned in a fire. His skin was black and large portions of it were covered with antiseptic gel used for burn patien
ts when the skin had peeled
off. Bandages covered his legs. He opened his eyes briefly, flashing a feverish anger from confus
ion, and she could see a bright red conjunctivitis
,
the
whites of his eyes soaked in blood. His eyes closed and he let out a long, raspy whisper.

“He’s unresponsive at this point,” Amoy whispered so the patient couldn’t hear. “We’ve spoken with the family and they’re upset that they can’t see him but I figured I’d wait for the OK from you guys first
,
in
case this is something serious
and dangerous
to the public health.
”

“We shouldn’t be in this room,” Sam said. “We need to set up
full-
barrier nursing for both of them
. You need to make sure no one has access to this room except nurses who know how to handle the barrier and won’t have a problem with it.”

“Why would they have a problem?”

“Nurses can get brave around illness over time. They may feel it’s not a big deal.”

Amoy took a deep breath. “You’re right. I should have
done that from the beginning.”

“I understand why you didn’t. I’ll need tissue and blood samples to send to the labs in Atlanta. Until we find out what this is, nobody can
be
up here.”

CHAPTER 6

On a quiet stretch of land in Fort Detrick, Maryland, Duncan Adams pushed on his brakes as he arrived at t
he United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases
,
the most advanced research facility in the world dealing with bioterrorism
and
home to over eight hundred scientists, both military and civilian.

At the entrance of t
he unassuming
building, which
could
have
easily pass
ed
for a community college or
an
antiquated office building
,
Duncan showed his identification to the guard and parked in a stall reserved for civilian employees. He took out his notepad
—
a small pad bound by looped wires that he carried around in his pocket
—
and wrote “
1
9%” on the front page underneath today’s date. The percentage was what he thought the probability was that he would
catch a fatal disease
that day
.

It was morbid, childish, immature, and completely unscientific. The number,
after all
, was based on nothing more than what he felt as he parked and turned off his car every morning. It wasn’t based on any reports or conversations or historical data. It was just a gut hunch. Despite this, he stuck to it with religious fervor. If the number he wrote down on any given morning was higher than 40%, he would take a vacation day and not go in. It had happened twice in the four years he’d worked at the Institute.

Duncan went inside, preparing his badge to show the layers of security set up at the site. He
went to the fourth
floor and
rode the elevator with what he guessed was a
colonel
and they both stepped off and went in separate directions.

Housed at USAMRIID were some of the deadliest diseases
Mother Nature
had ever produced. He needed a
top-secret
clearance just to enter the offices he was entering and log in
to the computer he was logging in
to.

Most of the
organisms
didn’t concern him.
F
our levels
were
set up
,
corresponding to the safet
y required when handling a biologic
al agent. Biosafety Level 1 were
viruses
, such as canine hepatitis,
thought not to be dangerous to humans
. Biosafety Level 2 were
viruses and bacterium, such as Lyme
disease
, thought dangerous though not typically deadly to humans
. Level 3 contained potentially deadly viruses, bacterium
,
and parasites
,
such as SARS and anthrax. It was reserved for a select few within the military and civilian workforce that had the experience, education
,
and guts to work with such agents day in and day out.

Duncan was a researcher in Biosafety Level 4.

Level 4 was, by his estimation,
one of the most dangerous spaces on the planet earth. There were obviously better candidates
for deadliest environment—
such as the bottom of the Marianas Trench in the Pacific where a screw becoming loose
in your helmet
could result in your he
ad imploding from the pressure—
but to a person not seeking out extreme environments, no place could bring about such a thrill, and at the same time paralyze you with fear
like
Biosafety Level 4
.

It
was
where nightmares lay dormant, frozen in liquid nitrogen. Marburg, Ebola, Congo Hemorrhagic Fever
…
and numerous other viruses referred to as “
hot agents
.”
A
section of the laboratory
was
devoted to what
were
termed X Agents: viruses that had yet to be identified. This was the area Duncan most liked to spend his time. The Age of Exploration had ended and his generation and every generation after would not have anywhere on earth to e
xplore and declare discovered. Most people believed s
pace was the next great landscape of discovery. But in this building was a storage unit that housed ancient beings as strange as anything science fiction had dreamed up. When he was there, surrounded by unknown agents, he felt like he was on a different planet
, like
an explorer observing things that no one before had known existed
.

He saw Dr. Janice Dickinson
working in another part of the lab
and she came over and sat on his desk, sipping coffee out of a mug that said, WORLD’S GREATEST MOM.

“What’d we ge
t today?” Duncan said, opening his email.

“Reporter coming to watch a blood extraction.”

“I thought that was next Friday?”

“Nope, today.”

“Who’s he with?”

“
LA Times
.”

“Oh, I kind
a like the T
imes actually. Maybe I’ll decide not to hate him.”

“Any big plans for the weekend?”

“
Racquetball
with my pops and then back here for some good
old-
fashion
ed
thesis research.”

“When’s that damn degree gonna be done anyway?”

“This summer
,
I ho
pe. My bioinformatics professor
is giving me some grief but he’s a raging
alcoholic.
I think once he has
a lucid spell I can get what I want out of him.”

She finished her coffee and took a deep breath. “You ready?”

He closed all the windows on
his
mac and stood up. “Let’s do it.”

Duncan followed Janice up to the BSL 4 area and to the locker rooms where he changed into scrubs. He thoroughly washed himself and
put on
latex gloves, rubber gloves over those
, and Kevlar gloves over those. Then he did
the same for his feet
with
different
booties
.
In the
waiting area leading to the labs
,
he found his blue suit and began to prepare.