The waiting room was packed, and there was a line out the door. A lot of them were wearing masks, some improvised. Everyone thought they had symptoms, although triage was turning most of them away because they were perfectly healthy.
She dove right in, and it was more than an hour before she took a break from setting a broken arm to grab a cup of coffee. The little flat-screen television in the café was on, and she stood and watched for a minute. Dreyfus, the former police chief, was announcing his candidacy for mayor. She wasn’t sure she liked him enough to vote for him, but when he was asked about the retrovirus and he started cautioning against panic, she nodded.
It was the right message. She hoped people heeded it.
She checked her text messages and saw that David Flynn had left one. She hadn’t heard from him in a while, and wasn’t sure how she felt about it now. When she read the message, though, she realized he was writing a piece on the virus, and wondering if she had any insights to share. So she just nodded knowingly, and put the phone away.
Talia was about to look at what was next when she heard screaming coming from one of the triage rooms. She bolted out the door and down the hall.
When she got there, she found a man in his mid-thirties, brandishing a knife at Ravenna. The nurse was visibly shaken, but she didn’t look hurt.
“Okay,” Talia said, holding out her hands, palms forward, and trying to sound calm. “What’s going on here? What’s the matter?”
“What’s going on,” the man shouted, “is this stupid bitch says there’s nothing wrong with me. But I know I’ve got it. I know I do. And I want the vaccination or whatever. The cure.”
She heard a scuffle of feet behind her and saw that Biggs, the security guard, was there, with his pistol drawn.
“Wait!” she shouted. “Just hang on. I’ll see you, Mr.—?”
“Max,” the guy said. “I’m Max.”
“Okay, Max, I’m Dr. Kosar. Come with me.”
The man looked uncertain.
“Come on,” she said, and she gestured gently with her fingers.
He lowered the knife. Talia stepped over as Ravenna edged away. She studied Max for a bit.
“Yes,” she said. “The nurse made a mistake. Come with me.”
He looked wary, but followed her, knife still in hand.
“Randy,” she said, as soon as they were out of earshot of the waiting room. “Prepare an IV for Max here, and make sure the MH and sodium levels are adjusted.”
She turned back to Max.
“We’re just going to give you some fluids, get you hydrated. We call it buffing, here in the ER.” She glanced pointedly at the knife. “You won’t need that anymore.”
“I think I’ll hold onto it,” Max said.
“Fine,” she replied.
“You’re pretty for a doctor,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said. “Okay, here’s the IV. Ever had one of these before?”
“I guess,” he said. “When I was a kid.”
“So I have to find a vein and put a needle in it. Are you okay with that? You’re not going to stab me if I prick you? It’s going to sting a little.”
“No,” he said. “I can handle it.”
“All right, then let’s get it done.”
It seemed like a long time before she found the vein and got the catheter in. She felt as if her heart was trying to push itself out of her body. Max’s pupils were dilated and she was pretty sure he was on something—meth, probably. She wouldn’t have time to move if he used the knife.
But then it was in, and Randall hooked up the bag.
“All right,” she said. “That’s all we need to do for now. Why don’t you just lie down, get comfortable?”
“I think I’ll stay sitting,” he said. “And I want someone to stay with me. So that guy with the gun don’t come in here.”
“I’ll stay for a few minutes,” she said. “But I have other patients I need to see.”
“I’m sorry I was rough on that other girl,” he said. “But she kept saying I don’t have any of the symptoms, but I do. This friend of mine, Jay-Cee, he got it. He said he got it from a monkey or something. And he and I… you know, we smoked a little weed together. So I know I’ve got it.”
“Well, you were right and she was wrong,” Talia said. “When we have this many, it’s hard to be right all the time.”
“Yeah. I guess.”
The knife fell out of his hand as the methohexital took effect, and she caught him as he fell face-forward toward the floor.
“Tell security they can have this asshole now,” she said.
6
Malakai woke in the gray before dawn. The fog lay thick across the land, and he was as wet as if he had been in a brief rain. He remembered hearing somewhere that fog came on cat’s feet—perhaps it was in a poem. But to him it felt more like it had come in like a giant slug.
He stood and fingered the damp bark of a tree. The water had actually beaded there, as if the tree were a glass of ice water on a warm, humid day. It rarely rained in the Bay Area in summer, but the condensation from the fog provided water for the giant trees and other forest life.
He was reminded powerfully of another forest, another mist—the cloud forest in the Virunga Mountains. He had awoken there, too, cold and damp. He and his uncle had spent the previous day trekking up from the tropical lowlands to a place so strange that his eight-year-old mind could hardly imagine it. He remembered how struck he had been with the beauty of it, and how he said so. Babbling in wonder.
Like Clancy, for God’s sake.
But he had been eight. Clancy didn’t have that excuse. His uncle had cut a trail with his machete, and Malakai reflected that at that time, he had never seen a machete used for anything other than cutting vegetation. It was like being caught up in a magical tale, carving a tunnel through the green forest that might have been growing on a cloud. To him, it had felt as if anything might happen. For long moments, he had almost forgotten the tight emptiness in his belly, and the look of his mother and sister when he last had seen them—drawn, emaciated.
His uncle would point to this and that and call each thing a sign. To Malakai, they mostly just looked like bent leaves and scuffs on the ground. But there was one place even he could spot, an area where branches and leaves had been crushed in a roughly circular area. Some of them looked almost as if they had been woven together.
“A gorilla nest,” his uncle told him then. “And not very old.”
They continued on for a bit, and then his uncle suddenly stopped. Malakai thought something was the matter. But then his uncle pointed across a little valley, and there they were.
He had tried to imagine them from his uncle’s stories, but this was a case where the story did not match reality.
His heart pounded as they moved closer, coming to within ten yards. He could still feel that, the hammering in his chest, the cold of the mist on his skin, the smell of the broken vegetation, the thinness of the air in his young lungs.
And the gorillas.
They watched his uncle and him arrive, peering with almost human regard. The largest, a silverback, crouched a yard or so off of the ground, on a bent tree. Malakai thought they would be attacked, but the gorillas seemed only curious. A small one—a toddler—came over and brushed his uncle’s legs before running back to his mother.
He remembered a story he had once heard, about a god who had three sons—Whiteman, Blackman, and Gorilla. Blackman and Gorilla sinned against their father, and so the god took his favored son Whiteman to the west, along with all of his wealth, which Whiteman inherited. Gorilla and his kin went to live in the forests. Blackman remained where he was born, but was impoverished, yearning for the wealth inherited by Whiteman.