The head nurse reached around her waist and spun her around. “Hey sexy, how about you give me a complete physical?” Tom Lee asked.
“Not until I get a shower and eight hours of sleep,” she replied, giving her husband a quick peck on the cheek. “Any hope of clearing out some of these patients? This guy over here has been down here for nearly two days.”
His tone changed. “Same story as yesterday — no beds anywhere. Have you talked with Dr. Branson lately?”
“Not for a week or so.” She had been so busy that she had missed all of the hospital meetings. “Why, what have you heard?”
“First, that this quarantine has nothing to do with TB.”
“Oh, there’s a big surprise,” she said, and pulled out of his embrace to let a staff nurse squeeze by them. The weak excuse of a virulent form of TB was an insult to anyone who knew better, which was pretty much everybody.
“Well, Doctor Smarty-Pants, do you know why there’s a quarantine?” He pressed himself into the wall as a patient on a gurney was wheeled down the corridor.
“No, but I’m sure our omnipotent chief of staff, who knows all, revealed the deep dark secret while you were peeing on a wall somewhere.”
She started to walk back to the nurse’s station, and he followed close behind, his voice falling to a whisper.
“Seriously, Cat, he says that it’s because of this flu bug. Apparently, a lot of people who get it are dying.”
She stopped and waited for him to catch up. “Dying? How many?” Spending all her time in the ER, she had little opportunity to keep tabs on the patients admitted through the emergency room; she would have to attend the staff meetings to get that kind of follow-up.
“About half, and it’s not just the old people.” They were back in public view, and he maintained a professional distance.
“Half! That can’t be right. We’d be up to our elbows in Health Department lookie-lous.”
“The morgue is full, and the military has been making regular trips to our loading docks, and I don’t think they’re delivering anything.”
“Damn, this is serious. I better give Dr. Branson a call. I’ll see you later.” Absently, she gave him another kiss. Ten minutes later, she was still waiting for Bob Branson to return her page. He probably won’t answer because he thinks I want him to shake some beds loose, she thought while leafing through the Health Department’s notification forms. Influenza was a reportable disease, and every case they saw generated a report.
“Seventy-nine,” Cary Tees said, and Cat looked up. “Seventy-nine cases in the last. . ” She checked her watch. “. . nineteen hours. Episcopal and General are both over a hundred. TB, my ass. This quarantine is about this flu, or whatever the hell it is.” Cary was from New York, and Cat occasionally enjoyed her in-your-face style, but this wasn’t one of those occasions.
“Do you have something for me, Cary?” Cat passed the stack of reports to the unit assistant.
“The patient in five, Dr. Rucker, is awake and wants to talk with you. Did you know he’s the coroner?”
“Thanks,” Cat said and weaved her way through the circus that her emergency room had become, hoping that maybe Dr. Rucker could clue her in on what was happening down here in the trenches. She pulled the curtain back with a flourish and found Phil sitting on the edge of the gurney, trying to keep his balance. “Dr. Rucker, you should not be trying to get up on your own.”
She reached for his shoulders and steadied him. When she touched his skin, he went rigid, almost as if she had given him a powerful shock. “Are you all right?” she asked and stood on tiptoe to look him in the eyes.
“Yes,” he said through tight jaws. She let go, and he slumped perceptibly. “What happened to Melissa?” As soon as he said her name, Phil knew. Some strange sense told him that she had died.
“She arrested, and we couldn’t bring her back,” Cat said softly.
Phil saw Dr. Lee running the Code that would end with an official time of death for Melissa Shay. He watched her cursing the implanted pacemaker and defibrillator that kept discharging. Every five seconds, the device jolted Melissa’s heart, and finally, the muscle stopped responding. In the end, a surgical resident was called to remove the device, but it was much too late. Her myocardium had been shocked to death.
The vision ended, and Dr. Lee was staring at him intently. “Are you all right?” she asked him again.
“I didn’t even know she had a pacemaker,” Phil said more to himself than to her. An unfamiliar feeling of loss stole over him.
“I’m sorry,” Catherine Lee said, and touched his bare arm.
A whirlwind of images invaded Phil’s mind. Unbidden and unwelcome, he saw Cat with other patients, and then with her husband. Phil was paralyzed with horror as he watched them make love in the shower. He felt like a degenerate as they enjoyed each other’s bodies in the privacy of their own home, and when he realized that parts of him were responding to the vision, he vomited.
Cat jumped back, but not in time, and the connection between them was broken.
Nurses arrived, and orders were given. He felt the IV in his arm sting as they injected him with Zofran. The powerful antiemetic agent began to cloud his thinking, but a part of him clung to the realization that he had been infected. His consciousness began to fragment, and he saw the tall, dark man staring into the eyes of a scared young man dressed in a uniform and holding a gun.
“Shoot him,” Phil said to the young man. “He’s going to kill you.”
Dr. Lee and the nurses stopped what they were doing and stared at the now unconscious Phil, waiting for him to explain what he had just said so clearly.
* * *
“Seventeen dead and fourteen wounded, all from some sort of explosion. The strange thing is that there was no fire, and none of them had any burns.”
Rodney Patton was relaying what he knew about the situation in Mescali to the mayor. “The FBI is fairly sure it was our guy Reisch. He’s using the name Lyon now.”
No one was certain what had happened or how Reisch had escaped. The single survivor who could speak said that he had been unconscious before the other guardsmen were attacked. He told the FBI that Reisch had reached into his mind and squashed it, an account uncomfortably similar to Yaeger’s. Rodney kept that part to himself. “They’re also fairly sure that he was shot. There was a whole lot of blood at the scene that can’t be accounted for. The state forensics team is working on it now.”
“Good, at least the bastard is hurt. That ought to slow him down some.” The mayor coughed loudly into the phone, and Patton winced. “Both the feds and the locals asked if they could borrow you for the day. Apparently, what happened yesterday was as close as this guy has ever come to being caught. I guess they think that some of that luck will rub off on them.” He laughed and then started into another coughing fit.