The Body Human (4 page)

I haven’t.

“The CDC publicly announced just last night what medical personnel have seen for weeks. A virulent strain of staphylococcus
aureus
has incorporated
endozine
-resistant plasmids from enterococcus.” He pauses to catch his breath. “And pneumococcus may have done the same thing.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means, you stupid woman, that now there are highly contagious infections that we have no drugs to cure.
No antibiotics at all, not even
endozine
.
This staph is resistant to them all. And it can live everywhere.”

I lower the gun.
The empty parking lot.
No security to summon.
The man who wouldn’t get on the elevator.
And Randy’s face.
“And you’ve got it.”

“We’ve all got it.
Everyone…in the hospital.
And for forcing your way in here, you probably do, too.”

“You’re going to die,” I say, and it’s half a hope.

And he
smiles
.

He stands there in his white lab coat, sweating like a horse, barely able to stand up straight, almost shot by a woman he’d once abandoned pregnant, and he smiles. His blue eyes gleam. He looks like a picture I once saw in a book, back when I read a lot. It takes me a minute to r
e
member that it was my high school World History book.
A picture of some general.

“Everybody’s going to die eventually,” Randy says.
“But not me right now.
At least…I hope not.” Casually he crosses the floor toward me, and I step backward. He smiles again.

“I’m not going to deliberately infect you, Elizabeth. I’m a
doctor
. I just want the gun.”

“No.”

“Have it your way. Look, how much do you know about the bubonic plague of the fourteenth century?”

“Nothing,” I say, although I do. Why had I always acted stupider around Randy than I actually am?

“Then it won’t mean anything to you to say that this mutated staph has at least that much potential”—again he paused and gulped air—“for rapid and fatal transmission. It flourishes everywhere.
Even on doorknobs.”

“So why the fuck are you
smiling
?” Alexander. That was the picture of the general.
Alexander the Great.

“Because I…because the CDC distributed…I was on the national team to discover…” His face changes again.
Goes even whiter.
And he pitches over onto the floor.

I grab him, roll him face up, and feel his forehead. He’s burning up. I bolt for the door.
“Nurse!
Doctor! There’s a sick doctor here!”

Nobody comes.

I run down the corridors. Respiratory Therapy is empty. So is Support Services. I jab at the elevator button, but before it comes I run back to Randy.

And stand above him, lying there crumpled on the floor, laboring to breathe.

I’d dreamed about a moment like this for years.
Dreamed it waking and asleep, in
Emerton
and in Bedford Hills and in Jack’s arms.
Dreamed it in a thousand ridic
u
lous melodramatic versions.
And here it is, Randy helpless and pleading, and me strong, standing over him, free to walk away and let him die. Free.

I wring out a towel in cold water and put it on his forehead. Then I find ice in the refrigerator in a corner of the lab and substitute that. He watches me, his breathing wheezy as old machinery.

“Elizabeth. Bring me…syringe in a box on…that table.”

I do it. “Who should I get for you, Randy?
Where?”

“Nobody.
I’m not…as bad…as I sound.
Yet.
Just the initial…dyspnea.”
He picks up the syringe.

“Is there medicine for you in there? I thought you said
endozine
wouldn’t work on this new infection.” His color is a little better now.

“Not medicine.
And not for me.
For you.”

He looks at me steadily. And I see that Randy would never plead, never admit to helplessness. Never ever think
of
himself
as helpless.

He lowers the hand holding the syringe back to the floor. “Listen, Elizabeth. You have…almost certainly have…”

Somewhere, distantly, a siren starts to wail. Randy i
g
nores it. All of a sudden his voice becomes much firmer, even though he’s sweating again and his eyes burn bright with fever.
Or something.

“This staph is resistant to everything we can throw at it. We cultured it and tried.
Cephalosporins
and aminoglyc
o
sides and
vancomycin
, even
endozine
…I’ll go into gram-positive septic shock…” His eyes glaze, but after a moment he seems to find his thought again. “We exhausted all points of counterattack.
Cell wall, bacterial ribosome, folic acid pathway.
Microbes just evolve countermeasures. Like beta-lactamase.”

I don’t understand this language. Even talking to hi
m
self, he’s making me feel stupid again. I ask something I do understand.

“Why are people killing cows? Are the cows sick, too?”

He focuses again.
“Cows?
No, they’re not sick. Farmers use massive doses of antibiotics to increase meat and milk production. Agricultural use of
endozine
has increased the rate of resistance development by over a thousand percent since—Elizabeth, this is irrelevant! Can’t you pay attention to what I’m saying for three minutes?”

I stand up and look down at him, lying shivering on the floor. He doesn’t even seem to notice, just keeps on le
c
turing.

“But antibiotics weren’t invented by humans. They
were invented by the microbes themselves to use…against each other and…they had two billion years of evolution at it before we even showed up…We should have—where are you going?”

“Home.
Have a nice life, Randy.”

He says quietly, “I probably will. But if…you leave now, you’re probably dead.
And your husband and kids, too.”

“Why? Damn it, stop lecturing and tell me why!”

“Because you’re infected, and there’s no antibiotic for it, but there
is
another bacteria that will attack the drug-resistant staph.”

I look at the syringe in his hand.

“It’s a Trojan horse plasmid. That’s a…never mind. It can get into the staph in your blood and deliver a lethal gene.
One that will kill the staph.
It’s an incredible di
s
covery. But the only way to deliver it so far is to deliver the whole bacteria.”

My knees all of a sudden get shaky. Randy watches me from his position on the floor. He looks shakier himself. His breathing turns raspier again.

“No, you’re not sick yet, Elizabeth. But you will be.”

I snap, “From the staph germs or from the cure?”

“Both.”

“You want to make me sicker.
With two bacteria.
And hope one will kill the other.”

“Not hope. I
know
. I actually saw…it on the
electrom
i
crograph
…” His eyes roll, refocus. “…could package just the lethal plasmid on a
transpon
if we had time…no time.
Has to be the whole bacteria.”
And then, stronger, “The
CDC team is working on it. But
I
actually caught it on the
electromicrograph
!”

I say, before I know I’m going to, “Stop congratulating yourself and give me the syringe.
Before you die.”

I move across the floor toward him, put my arms around him to prop him in a sitting position against the table leg. His whole body feels on fire. But somehow he keeps his hands steady as he injects the syringe into the inside of my elbow. While it drains sickness into me I say, “You never actually wanted me, did you, Randy?
Even before Sean?”

“No,” he says. “Not really.” He drops the syringe.

I bend my arm. “You’re a rotten human being. All you care about is yourself and your work.”

He smiles the same cold smile. “So? My work is what matters. In a larger sense than you could possibly imagine. You were always a weak sentimentalist, Elizabeth. Now, go home.”

“Go
home
? But you said…”

“I said you’d infect everyone. And you will—with the bacteria that attacks staph. It should cause only a fairly mild illness. Jenner…smallpox…”

“But you said I have the mutated staph, too!”

“You almost certainly do. Yes…And so will everyone else, before long. Deaths…in New York State alone…passed one million this morning. Six and a half percent of the…the population…Did you really think you could hide on your side of…the…river…”

“Randy!”

“Go…home.”

I strip off his lab coat and wad it up for a pillow, bring
more ice from the refrigerator, try to get him to drink some water.

“Go…home. Kiss everybody.” He smiles to himself, and starts to shake with fever. His eyes close.

I stand up again. Should I go? Stay? If I could find someone in the hospital to take care of him—

The phone rings. I seize it. “Hello? Hello?”

“Randy? Excuse
me,
can I talk to Dr.
Satler
? This is Cameron Witt.”

I try to sound professional. “Dr.
Satler
can’t come to the phone right now. But if you’re calling about Sean Pulaski, Dr.
Satler
asked me to take the message.”

“I don’t…oh, all right. Just tell Randy the Pulaski boy is with Richard and Sylvia James. He’ll understand.” The line clicks.

I replace the receiver and stare at Randy, fighting for breath on the floor, his face as gray as Sean’s when Sean realized it was murder he’d gotten involved with.
No, not as gray.
Because Sean had been terrified, and Randy is only sick.

My work is what matters
.

But how had Sean known to go to Sylvia? Even if he knew from
Ceci
who was on the other side, how did he know which people would hide him, would protect him when I could not, Jack could not?
Sylvia-and-Elizabeth.
How much did Sean actually know about the past I’d tried so hard to keep from touching him?

I reach the elevator, my finger almost touching the button, when the first explosion rocks the hospital.

It’s in the west wing. Through the windows opposite the
elevator banks I see windows in the far end of the building explode outward. Thick greasy black smoke billows out the holes. Alarms begin to screech.

Don’t touch the elevators.
Instructions remembered from high school, from grade-school fire drills. I race along the hall to the fire stairs. What if they put a bomb in the stairwell? What if
who
put a bomb in the stairwell?
A lot of people in dark clothing cross the back lawn and quietly enter Dan and
Ceci’s
house next door, carrying bulky packages wrapped in black cloth.

A last glimpse through a window by the door to the fire stairs.
People are running out of the building, not many, but the ones I see are pushing gurneys. A nurse staggers ou
t
side, three small children in her arms, on her hip, clinging to her back.

They aren’t setting off any more bombs until people have a chance to get out.

I let the fire door close. Alarms scream. I run back to Pathology and shove open the heavy door.

Randy lies on the floor, sweating and shivering.
His lips move but if he’s muttering aloud, I can’t hear it over the alarm. I tug on his arm. He doesn’t resist and he doesn’t help, just lies like a heavy dead cow.

There are no gurneys in Pathology. I slap him across the face, yelling “Randy! Randy! Get up!” Even now, even here, a small part of my mind thrills at hitting him.

His eyes open. For a second, I think he knows me. It goes away,
then
returns. He tries to get up. The effort is enough to let me hoist him over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry. I could never have carried Jack, but Randy is much
slighter, and I’m very strong.

But I can’t carry him down three flights of stairs. I get him to the top, prop him up on his ass, and shove. He slides down one flight, bumping and flailing, and glares at me for a minute.
“For…God’s sake…Janet!”