The War of Immensities (5 page)

Felicity might
have been listening to herself except it wasn’t the same patient.
The couple had flown in from Norfolk Island and were the parents of
the other girl from the helicopter crash, Lorna Simmons, who had
just a few cuts and abrasions. And unexplained coma...

Shirley Benson,
the Head Nurse, was going by and Felicity caught her arm.

“I thought you
went home,” Shirley said in a not very friendly way.

“Not yet. Just
a couple of things I want to sort first. Tell me, how many of the
comatose patients are not under sedation.”

Shirley scowled
and consulted the list in her mind. “A few.”

“Which ones
exactly.”

“Oh, um... Miss
Simmons, and Miss Rice. And Mr Solomon who was with them in the
helicopter but he has serious injuries...”

“..but no head
injuries...”

“CT was
negative.”

“Who else?”

“Mr. Wagner—the
American chap—multiple fractures to the lower limbs...”

“But not his
skull.”

“Yes, again CT
negative.”

“Keep
going.”

“Miss
Starlight.”

“Is that really
her name?”

“Apparently.
Um—Mr. Rogerson—the pilot of the helicopter. But he’s on a
respirator and not expected...”

“Any
others?”

“What are you
looking for? We still have thirty-one ICU casualties in the
building.”

“CT scan
negative—no head contusion or other injury that justifies
coma.”

“I see. Well, I
think that’s all.”

By this time,
George had broken away from the couple and come to join the
discussion.

“I want those
cases isolated to a single ward. Full quarantine,” Felicity was
saying.

“You sure
that’s justified?” George asked.

“No. But all of
these people are comatose and there isn’t any identifiable reason
why they should be. Maybe its some gas or some bacteria thrown up
by the volcano. I don’t know, but I think we’d better isolate them
until we do.”

They reached
the chateau on the third morning after the eruption. There were
still hot spots everywhere and bubbling mud pools in the midst of
the grey moonscape. An eerie, acrid steam drifted across the whole
mountainside.

The rescue team
looked at the chateau and saw what they already expected from
aerial photographs—that the building was completely flattened with
most of the debris scattered over a wide area and the whole lot
buried under several centimetres of mud that was the result of the
ash combining with the melted snow.

There was no
hope of survivors by then—it became the morbid task of digging out
the forty or so bodies that they knew to be in amongst the dripping
wreckage. Twin-rotor helicopters lowered in excavation equipment
and the gruesome job began. The machines gnawed at the
ever-hardening wall of ash and the men came in behind, removing the
remaining fragments by hand. Within a few days, those bodies not
removed would be entombed in stone forever.

The bodies they
found were charred, fragile remnants: it soon became apparent that
nothing recognisable was going to be recovered. They directed the
mechanical claw in ahead of them to hurry the job, but after about
an hour, a new tragedy almost occurred when the machine and its
driver broke through the surface and crashed into a hole. The
driver broke a leg and was evacuated and the machine had been towed
out only with great difficulty. As the men stood around the dark
chasm they had inadvertently opened, an unexpected odour reached
their nostrils.

“Shit,” the
leader said. “We’ve broken through to the wine cellar.”

Two men in
fireproof suits and breathing apparatus entered the hole, flashing
brilliant torches. They saw the cellar roof remained intact even
though the shelving had collapsed and the floor was a swamp of wine
and broken glass. They searched for a time and then came upon a
corpse. And then came the cry.

“We got a live
one here!”

Paramedics went
in and carefully brought the injured man out on a stretcher. He was
unconscious and someone even dared joke about that being the result
of two days and nights immersed in fine vintage wine. But in fact
he had been lying on a raised bench with the corpse of another man
on top of him. They found a few minor lacerations and a great deal
of contusion; he had serious respiratory problems and something
similar to scurvy had glued his clothing to his flesh. But he was
alive.

Eighty-five
people had died, two hundred and thirty-three were rescued from the
ravaged area, forty-two were admitted to hospital needing intensive
care, eleven were missing never to be found. Brian Carrick was the
last miraculous survivor of the triple eruption on Tongariro
plateau.

Gavin served
breakfast on the patio—it was a rare treat. He enlisted the aid of
the girls as waitresses while Wendell scanned the newspaper.

“They’ve
unearthed another survivor,” he announced, perhaps not realising
the cruelty of his words.

Felicity tried
not to care. She had obeyed Barbara’s orders. Long sleep, two
meals, time with the family. Gavin should have been at school, she
knew, and the girls at childcare, and Wendell at his rooms. They
all took the morning off because mum was finally awake. Breakfast
was at ten that morning.

Melissa spilled
the grapefruit juice on her dressing gown, Megan slopped too much
skimmed milk into the muesli, Gavin had boiled the egg thirty
seconds too long, and the croissant was cold by the time Wendell
filled it with blackberry jam. In other words, it was the most
perfect breakfast she could ever remember. And the freshly brewed
coffee, after gallons of the muck at the hospital, was a joy in
itself.

“Amazing after
all this time,” Felicity murmured.

“Ah,” Wendell
grinned. “Am I to assume that your lack of interest indicates the
crisis is over?”

“What makes you
think I’m not interested?”

“You let me
read the paper first. Didn’t jump up and rush off to the hospital
when you heard about your new patient. I regard all this as
indicative of your recovery.”

“I’ll get there
soon enough.”

“Well, at least
it banished politics from the front page for a few days,” Wendell
mused.

“There wasn’t
much lava,” Gavin protested.

“What happens
to the people when their toes are coma-ed?” Melissa asked.

“Your mother
doesn’t wish to talk about that,” Wendell scolded gently.

“You didn’t
come home for three days,” Megan said, crawling into her lap.

“Meegs, mum is
tired,” Melissa said bossily.

“She’s all
right,” Felicity smiled. Her knees, like her back, were still very
stiff. She had pushed it all right. Still, she was rested and
feeling good. Then the telephone rang.

Wendell went
and answered it, and returned immediately. “Possibility one,” he
said sourly.

With a groan,
Felicity set Megan back on her feet and found her own and hurried
through the house.

“Dr Campbell
here.”

“Oh, Dr
Campbell,” Shirley Benson blubbered on the other end. “We had a new
IC patient come in overnight...”

“Yes, Shirley.
I heard.”

“CT was clear,
but he’s in a coma—like the others. Can’t really justify it from
his condition.”

“What major
traumas do we have?”

“None really,
except his epidermis is falling off...”

“Truly?”

“He was pickled
in wine, apparently.”

“Lucky bugger.
I wish I was.”

“I really
shouldn’t have rung you at home but...”

“What’s your
problem, Shirley?”

“Do you want
him isolated, like the others?”

“Yes. Have any
of them showed signs of consciousness?”

“No.”

“Okay. Yes,
isolate him too. I’ll be there in a couple of hours anyway.”

“Fine...”

“Is everything
else okay?”

“Umm… Oh yes.
Yes. Everything’s fine.”

When she hung
up, Felicity stood by the telephone for a few minutes. It wasn’t
like Shirley Benson to make such a call. She had already known the
answer to her own question anyway. Felicity could not help thinking
that there was some other reason why she rang—something that, once
on the telephone, Shirley could not bring herself to express.
Felicity returned to the patio, smiling at her family.

“I have to go,”
she said.

“You should
really rest a little while yet...” Wendell scowled.

“No. I have to
go now,” Felicity insisted.

Shirley Benson
had suffered a rare fright. The truth was that the new patient—Mr.
Carrick—was already in the isolation ward and had been since he
arrived that evening. Shirley was on night duty and should have
gone off in the morning but she waited for Doctor Campbell to
arrive. She would wait—no matter how long it took.

In the night
she had visited the isolation ward and stood amidst the beds, the
lights were dimmed but for the monitoring equipment with its
screens of tracings busily indicating that everything was normal.
The lights flickered, and the room was abuzz with a faint sound,
and it was probably only Shirley’s long experience with such
equipment that caused her to sense something was wrong.

She busied
herself, trying to ignore what was an irrational sensation. These
people were all ones across the board on the Glasgow Scale—yet
there was full EEG, ECG, respiration normal. Every four hours, they
needed liquifilm to keep their unblinking eyes moist but otherwise
nothing happened. There was no decerebrate rigidity—their limbs
remained flexible, skin texture good except poor Mr. Carrick. For
all intents and purposes, they might have been asleep. Electrolyte
balance good, respiratory and circulatory status good. Nothing was
wrong, except she could sense at the core of her being that
something was different. Something weird.

At first it was
impossible to say what. She walked over to Mr. Solomon’s console
and considered it for a time. All readings normal. EEG, ECC pulse
rate, blood flow, normal, normal.

“You seem fine,
Joe. Everything ticking along perfectly,” she told the unconscious
man.

Joe Solomon’s
spine was broken and no one had told him yet. No one had told him
that his wife was dead either. You could never tell just how aware
comatose patients were. For Joe Solomon, it might be better if he
never woke up.

Worse still was
the American gentleman, Kevin Wagner, who didn’t yet know that he
had lost his whole family. Alone and far from home—but he was a fit
and healthy young man who, unlike Joe Solomon, would eventually
make a full recovery. Chrissie Rice had some nasty abdominal
injuries, and there was Brian Carrick’s pickled skin—best not to
drive after being too close to him. Lorna and Andromeda were in
perfect health. Only sleeping. Strange in itself. But there was
something else.

She crossed to
Lorna Simmons’ monitor and thought about that. Normal, normal. All
normal, even Mr. Carrick. And then it struck her. It was all just a
little too normal.

For a time she
moved about the monitors, not quite sure of what she was doing but
doing it anyway. She switched switches, individualising the screens
and sequences until she found what she wanted. And when she did,
she jolted with shock. She almost screamed. She did run out of the
room.

She took
herself to the cafeteria and had a cup of coffee. Her hands were
still shaking. The equipment was faulty. That had to be it. She
would call maintenance in the morning and have them sort it out.
Only it wasn’t an equipment fault. She had checked each monitor and
knew the absurdity it indicated so clearly was the truth.

For it had been
when she cut out the input from all sources except the EEG on all
six monitors that she understood what had bothered her. They were
all the same. All six patients had precisely the same alpha waves.
It was as if only all of the monitors were reading the output from
just one patient.

She went back,
calmer now, and tried the experiment again. It wasn’t a maintenance
problem. They hadn’t foolishly hooked all the EEGs into just one
patient. All six people were experiencing exactly the same brain
activity. There was no doubt. The fact that it couldn’t possibly
happen was rapidly becoming irrelevant.

Felicity stood
in the ward with Barbara Crane, Roy Bannister the Maintenance
chief, and George Hanley, as they considered the machines. Shirley
Benson had been sent home with a sedative.

“Perhaps they
were all switched on at the same instant,” Barbara suggested to
show how little she knew about it.

“Doesn’t
matter,” Roy Bannister said. “Each monitor would immediately pick
up on the waves of the individual brain it was monitoring.”

“Then how do
you explain it?” Barbara wanted to know.

“I can’t. It’s
kinda like they all got the same brain.”

“A sort of
collective unconsciousness,” George suggested.

“That’s right,”
Roy thought. “You know. They reckon we all share the same
sub-conscious mind.”

“Let’s leave
Freud out of this, shall we?” Barbara scowled, knowing a dirty word
when she heard one.

“I don’t know
if we can,” Felicity murmured, looking around as if Sigmund was
standing right behind her.

“Well, the
patients all seem to be surviving it, whatever it is,” Barbara said
irritably. “And we do have a lot of other sick people to deal with.
Can’t afford to waste time over this.”

Barbara hurried
off as if she had patients needing her attention, rather than
paperwork, and Roy wandered away, scratching his head but then he
often did.

“Well, at least
now we know why the comas don’t relate to their injuries,” George
said thoughtfully. “They’re all in the same coma, literally.”