“Here you go, buddy,” he said, slipping a pillow under his head.
“Hurt, Mist Sulliman,” Nabb groaned. “Hurt ver bad.”
He draped a blanket over him. “I know, Nabb. We’re getting help.”
He spotted Deek, another caddie he knew, and tried to make him comfortable.
“Why hurt, Mist Sulliman?” Deek said, looking up at him with watery brown eyes. “Why?”
“Because someone…” A blast of fury forced him to stop and look away. Who? Who would or could do something like this? He found it incomprehensible.
“Sweet Jesus!” someone gasped.
Patrick looked up and saw Holmes Carter and a slim, dapper man he didn’t recognize standing behind Tome in the barrack doorway. The stranger moved into the room, leaving the pudgy Carter alone, looking like a possum frozen in the glare of oncoming headlights.
“Tome wasn’t kidding!” the stranger said to no one in particular. “What happened here?”
“They started getting sick after eating the stew,” Patrick said. “Who are you?”
“Dr. Stokes. I’m an anesthesiologist. And I already know who you are.” He didn’t offer to shake hands; instead he knelt beside one of the sick sims, a female. “This one doesn’t look so hot.”
Tell me something I don’t already know, Patrick wanted to say, but bit his tongue.
“None of them do. Can you help?”
“I’m not a vet.”
Romy’s eyes implored him. “Help them! Please! You treat humans. How much closer to human can you get?”
Dr. Stokes nodded. “Point taken. Let’s see what I can do.”
As the doctor began pressing on the sim’s abdomen, asking her questions, Patrick glanced around and spotted a small, huddled form under one of the tables. With a cold band tightening around his chest, he rushed over—Anj. She lay curled into a tight, shuddering ball.
“Anj?” Patrick crouched beside her and touched her shoulder; her T-shirt was soaked. “Anj, speak to me.”
A whimper was her only reply. Patrick gathered her into his arms—Christ, she was wringing wet—and carried her over to Dr. Stokes. Her face was so pale.
“This one’s just a baby,” he told Stokes. “And she’s real bad.”
Patrick gently lay Anj on the floor between them. Romy was there immediately with a pillow and blanket.
“Diaphoretic,” Stokes said, more to himself than Patrick. He held her wrist a moment. “Pulse is thready.”
“What’s that mean?”
“She’s going into shock.” He turned back to the first sim he’d been examining. “This one too. They’re going to need IVs and pressors. What in God’s name did they eat?”
Before Patrick could answer, he heard the sound of a heavy-duty engine, slamming doors, and Carter saying, “You can’t drive that up here!”
He looked up and saw two grim-faced men, one in a golf shirt, the other in a sport coat, file through the door with some kind of cart rolling between them. They pushed past Carter as if he were a piece of misplaced furniture. Two more strangers, a man and a woman, both in flannel shirts and jeans, followed them.
“You can’t just walk in here!” Carter said. “This is a private club!”
Ignoring him, they pulled stethoscopes and blood pressure cuffs from the cart and fanned out into the room. The woman came over to where Patrick, Romy, and Stokes stood. She looked to be about fifty, her long brown hair streaked with gray and tied back. She nodded to Romy, then without a word she knelt beside Anj and the other sim and began taking blood pressures.
“They’re shocky,” Stokes offered.
The woman looked up. Her face was expressionless, all business, but her eyes looked infinitely sad. “You a doc?”
“Yes, I’m an—”
“We’ve got saline in the cart. If you want to help, you can start drips on these two.”
Stokes nodded and headed for the cart. The stranger moved on.
Patrick turned to Romy. “Who are these people?”
“Doctors.”
“From SimGen?”
She shook her head and bit her upper lip. Romy’s usually steely composure had slipped. She looked rattled, something Patrick never would have thought possible. Maybe it was the helplessness. Patrick felt it too—a need to do something but not knowing what.
“Your people then,” he said. “Your organization. How’d they get here so fast?”
“They’ve been on standby.”
“You mean you expected this?”
“Expected someone might try to hurt them.” Her eyes were black cauldrons. “Excuse me. I need a little air.”
He watched her breeze past Holmes Carter, still standing by the door, sputtering like an over-choked engine. Tome squatted against a far wall, his face buried in his arms. And all around Patrick, the strange, silent doctors, gliding from one sick sim to another.
Feeling useless, he decided he could use a breath of night air himself, but first he had something to say…
He stopped before Carter. “This your doing, Holmesy?”
Carter’s round face reddened, his third chin wobbled. “You son of a bitch! If I was going to poison anyone it would be you, not these dumb animals. They’re just pawns in your game.”
The genuine outrage in Carter’s eyes made Patrick regret his words. He backed off a bit. “Well…somebody poisoned them.”
“If you’re looking to place blame, Sullivan, find a mirror. This never would have happened if you hadn’t started poking your nose where it doesn’t belong.”
Stung, Patrick turned away. The truth of Carter’s words hurt and clung to him as he stepped out into the night.
Some sort of oversized commuter van was parked on the grass outside. The doctors had driven it straight across the club’s rear lawn to the barrack door; Patrick could trace the deep furrows under the pitiless glow of the moon peering down from the crystal sky. Up on the rise he spotted a number of Beacon Ridge members standing outside the clubhouse, gawking at the scene. And Romy…where was Romy?
He walked around the barrack and spotted her down the slope by the border privet hedge. But she wasn’t alone. A tall dark figure stood beside her. After a moment, Romy turned and began walking back up the slope; the tall man faded into the shadows of the hedge.
“Who was that?” he asked as she approached.
“No one.”
“But—”
Her face had settled into grim lines. “You didn’t see a thing. Now let’s go back inside and make ourselves useful.”
Patrick was about to comment on what seemed to be a lot of hush-hush, undercover nonsense but bit it back. It wasn’t nonsense at all. Not when poison was part of someone’s game plan.
Romy stopped dead in the doorway and he ran into her back, knocking her forward. He saw immediately why she’d stopped.
Chaos in the barrack. The formerly silent, seemingly imperturbable doctors were in frenzied motion, pumping ventilation bags and thumping sim chests.
“I’ve got another one crashing here!” one called out. He was on his knees next to an unconscious sim. He looked up and saw Romy and Patrick. “You two want to help?”
Patrick tried to speak but could only nod.
“Name it,” Romy said.
“Each of you get an Ambu bag from that cart and bring them over here.”
Romy was already moving. “What’s an Am—?”
“Looks like a small football with a face mask attached,” the doctor said.
Romy opened a deep drawer, removed two of the devices, handed one to Patrick. On their way back, to his right, he noticed Holmes Carter kneeling, using one of the bags to pump air into a sim’s lungs.
Carter…?
To their left, the woman doc waved and called out. “Romy! Over here! Quick!”