“I’ve had three cases in the last week that don’t match up with anything I’d expect to be seeing. You had one of them, actually. Winston Black?”
“Presented with difficulty speaking and tracking conversation, mild motor impairment, and difficulty breathing,” said Kathleen without hesitation. “All signs pointed to a mild stroke. We kept him overnight for observation, and then his family took him home.”
“He died.”
Kathleen froze. “What?” she finally managed to squeak. Apart from his stroke symptoms, which had been reasonably mild, Winston Black was a man in the pink of health. He didn’t smoke, didn’t eat red meat, and ran two miles every morning. She had actually been worried about how healthy he was — paradoxically, the people who had the fewest problems before a stroke could have some of the worst problems after, when they had to adjust to their new limitations. Physical therapy and rehabilitation could restore the bulk of their lost function, but not always. There was no magic bullet where brain damage was concerned.
“This morning,” said Phil. “He was also presenting with early-stage cataracts.”
“Yes, I noted that on my report.”
“Kat, he had galactosemia, and we didn’t catch it, and he died. His heart stopped.”
Kathleen stared.
Phil continued: “I only caught it because something looked off on his blood work, so I dug deeper. There was a child in the family fifteen years ago who died of the same thing.”
“I remember.” Little Suzie Black, less than a year old, and dead because her family hadn’t trusted the doctors who tried to convince them to cut all dairy from her diet — even her mother’s own milk. They’d heard galactosemia as lactose intolerance, and thought the doctors insisting that it was something different were just busybodies, looking to interfere with the way they’d always done things.
Kathleen had been in college when Suzie Black died. It had been in all the papers, and she remembered thinking that it was a death that she could have prevented, if she’d been there to talk to the family, to explain to them what was happening to their daughter. They had needed the local touch. That was one of the cases that had sealed her determination to come home after she had her degree, to work at a local hospital and make sure that things like this would become the anomalies they should have been all along. But Winston…
“That’s not possible,” she said, finding her voice again. “Galactosemia appears in children, infant children, not in adult men. It must have been something else.”
“There’s a family history. He shows the blood markers.”
“I’ve seen him eating pizza with his family! He wasn’t even lactose intolerant!”
“I know how this sounds, but I’m telling you, it was galactosemia, and that’s not the real problem.”
“What is?”
Phil looked at her wearily. “We have two more cases presenting exactly like his.”
Rudy Sanchez was considering the merits of a cold beer, a warm bath, and a bed that split the difference between the two when his phone rang.
His first impulse was to ignore it. He wasn’t on duty, and the number wasn’t Joe’s: for Joe, he would have answered even if the world had been on fire. There were other people who could do everything he could do for the office, and many things he couldn’t do: everyone who worked for the DMS had their own area of specialization. Let someone else mop up the mess for a change. He’d earned the time to himself.
Guilt followed hot on the heels of the idea that he had earned anything. He was still standing, wasn’t he? So many others weren’t. They deserved his full attention to duty, the willingness to serve when he was called upon, no matter what. He grabbed for the phone.
The ringing stopped.
Rudy blinked for a moment, nonplussed. Then he chuckled, half-wry, half-relieved. “That settles that, I suppose,” he said.
Someone knocked on the door.
He was on his feet before he’d consciously decided to move, heading for the sound with long, ground-eating strides. Not fast enough; the knock came again, harder this time, until the entire door shook in its frame.
“I’m coming!” he shouted as he reached the door, unlocked it, and swung it open to reveal two of the last people he’d been expecting to see on his doorstep. He blinked.
Bunny, standing with his massive hand raised for a third round of knocking, looked abashed. “Evenin’, Dr. Sanchez,” he said. “I wasn’t sure you were home.”
“The lights are on, my car is in the driveway, and when I left, I said I was going home,” said Rudy. “Where else would I be? Mars?”
“I hear the weather’s good there,” rumbled the mountain standing behind Bunny. Top was one of the only men Rudy could think of who could make the hulking Farm Boy seem to have been built according to normal human scale.
Just my luck, he thought. I wanted to help the world, and wound up playing the Lilliputian in an action remake of Gulliver’s Travels. Aloud, he asked, “To what do I owe the honor?”
“We have a bit of a problem,” said Bunny.
Nothing about this was normal. Had he been looking for normal, Rudy wasn’t sure he would have been able to find this moment on the adjoining maps. He took a step back, making space for the two to enter. He did not, however, invite them in. If they wanted that particular pleasantry, they were going to need to explain what they were doing there after hours.
Rudy would never have done this if Joe had been on his doorstep. But Joe was his friend, even outside of work, and more important, if Joe had been involved, the world would already have been on the brink of ending.
They came in. “One of the analysts flagged a report from a hospital in rural Alabama,” said Top. “Lots of medical jargon, but one bit that really stood out: they’re seeing a sudden cluster of adult-onset cases of a rare genetic disorder called ‘galactosemia.’”
Any thoughts Rudy had about his disrupted evening dissolved like sugar in water. “That’s not possible,” he said. “Galactosemia is diagnosed in childhood. It’s diagnosed, or you die.”
“Well, we’ve got five cases at a hospital in Troy, Alabama. Started at three a few hours ago. Four of the people involved are related.”
The Dragon Factory. The diseases they’d designed to kill the people whose genetic backgrounds they hadn’t approved of. People like him. “That’s not possible,” Rudy repeated, even though experience told him that it was bitterly, brutally possible. Things like this happened every day, whether he wanted them to or not. “All the agents were caught before they could deploy the viruses. We stopped the release of the bottled water that would prime populations for contamination. We stopped it.”
“Nice ‘we’ there,” said Top with dark amusement. “Doesn’t change the report we intercepted.”
“Joe—”
“Joe’s busy,” said Top in a tone that brooked no argument.
Rudy wondered sometimes whether Joe was aware of how many of his men — of his friends — would gladly die to protect him, even when he didn’t need protecting. He didn’t think so.
“I’ll get my coat,” he said. “You call Dr. O’Tree. If we’re doing this, I’m not going to be the only medical authority on hand. I’m not that kind of doctor.”
“So we’re doing this?” asked Bunny.
Rudy paused long enough to look at him wearily. “Was there ever any question?”
“Kat, we’re up to fifteen cases, and we’ve lost three more.” There was a weary helplessness in Phil’s tone that Kathleen had never heard before, not once. He sounded beaten.