“What is your name?” I asked.
“Pearse,” he whispered again, in a garbled voice. He was staring at my chest, and I realized that my name tag was there. I turned and surveyed the outer room through the thick plastic tent, where yellow suits moved about hazily. He could not have read my name tag from that distance, and only barely could have made out my face.
“Who are you?” I said again, but his eyes had retreated into a faraway, blood-sodden gaze. I gave up and printed out an Unoccupied label, then proceeded to swab the man’s elbow with alcohol. I was still a bit rusty, and it took me three attempts to locate a viable vein for a blood sample. I released the tourniquet and watched the plastic barrel slowly fill with blood.
It happened in an instant. One moment I was finishing off the blood draw; the next, the syringe was falling from my hand, and there was a stinging in the center of my left palm. A shudder or a jerk, that by the laws of atrophy the patient should never have been able to make — and somehow his hand had come up and struck mine just as I was withdrawing the needle from his arm.
Afterward I stood for some time staring at the man beneath me. He had settled back into the mattress, the blood-filled syringe lying alongside his leg. His face was fixed and phlegmatic, his half-open eyes regarding me as though with a blithe red wisdom. All I kept thinking was He should not have been able to move like that.
Finally I left the staring patient and broke away from twenty-six. I threw aside the curtain and rounded the crowded nurses’ station, entering the air lock leading back out to the corridor. Lamps of deep blue light came on inside the chamber, and doors on either side of me bolted automatically. I had forgotten about the ultraviolet light shower. I tried the second door anyway with my right hand, a wasted effort. It was locked fast. I drew my left hand into a tight fist, and it felt inconceivably warm and heavy; I imagined my glove filling with blood. I closed my eyes and stood for 120 seconds as the blue light cooked the viruses on my suit.
Down the corridor and away from the others I found an examining room with a scrub room inside. I locked the inside door and the light over the sink blinked on, harsh and suddenly blue to my eyes. I turned on the sink faucet. I broke open my warmed suit one-handedly and shrugged off the shoulders and hood, freeing my left arm. There was no blood visible through the gloves. I snapped off the first layer, then the second, and withheld my bare left hand. Still no blood, and no visible breach. I gripped it by the wrist, palm up under the light, and searched for a hole, close enough to see the faint mound of beating pulse in the center of the scoop of my palm. With growing relief, I pressed down on the area with the thumb of my right hand. A single drop of blood squeezed out.
I shoved my hand under the water. It was cold. I needed it hot. Friction was imperative and I rubbed and squeezed at my hand as the water scalded and the sink began to smoke. I forced my hand to bleed. I pulled and prodded at my flesh, trying to open up the meat of the wound in order to irrigate it. I found a bottle of soap and pumped some clear gel into my palm. There was a low-grade antiseptic cleanser on the countertop and I pulled the sink trap and sloshed the green solution into the steel bowl. I thrust my hand into it and expected it to burn, hoped that it would burn. But it did not. I found a scrub brush and scraped at my palm until it was raw.
I pulled out my hand. I slicked away the excess liquid and again held the dripping, reddened palm to the light. In doing so, I caught the reflection of my face in the steamed mirror and was stunned by its look of terror. I moved closer and examined my staring eyes. Wide and unblinking, a thin orbit of blue circling the dilated black. I knew exactly what was happening. The locus ceruleus, a cluster of nerve cells that is the control center of the brain, responds to stress by releasing hormones that activate the hypothalamus, which in turn triggers the pituitary gland to release adrenocorticotrophic hormones into the bloodstream, which then make their way into the kidneys, which respond by spewing out adrenaline — all of which causes the eyes to dilate, the blood vessels to open wider for increased blood flow, and the heart to pump faster.
It gets into your palm; you could cut off your hand but it’s already in your arm; you could cut off your arm but it’s already pumping through your shoulder and circulating down into your heart, flooding into the spleen, the liver, the brain. My own body was facilitating the infective process and revolting against me. I felt a gag deep in my throat as though a hand had reached up from my stomach and pulled. I pitched forward with an awful groan and vomited into the sink.
I cleared the trap with my right hand and the sink basin drained. I straightened, choking, one hand gripping the sink edge, the other flat against the wall beside the mirror, holding me up. But then a cooling sensation spread from my spine outward, a sudden, bracing chill of realization, the muscles of my back softening as I faced myself again in the glass of the mirror. I was well acquainted with the horror stories of doctors who imagined themselves into getting sick, and immediately I regained my breath, coughing up a burst of nervous laughter. That passed, and I was sober once again. I washed my face, blotting the sweat from my brow with a paper towel, then wrapped my bleeding hand in a tight gauze cushion. I looked down at the four gloves lying discarded on the floor like pate, strangled birds, and at once disposed of them in biohazard, pulling on two fresh pairs, gathering my suit up around me from the waist and sealing myself back inside. I cleaned the floor and the sink, replaced the soap bottle and the empty jug of antiseptic cleanser, then unlocked the scrub room door and emerged.
I returned to the green zone. The second door opened onto the trauma unit, and my anxiety began again immediately. I needed to see the patient in bay twenty-six. I needed to speak with him, for my own sanity, feeling somehow that he had something to say to me. I found the gaudy curtain pulled aside as I had left it, the tent zipper undone, the Unoccupied sticker peeking out from the bed rail chart.
The bed was empty. The patient was gone. I felt panic welling up, and whirled around to check the adjoining bays.
“Dr. Pearse.”
It was Tenney approaching, carrying a printout. “Have they taken any patients out of here?” I asked him.
He was startled. “I wouldn’t know, Dr. Pearse—”
“How long was I gone just now?”
“I wouldn’t know, sir. You sent me out.”
I noticed two patients laid out on gurneys in front of the air lock and hurried over to them. One was an advanced case inside an oxygen tent, a middle-aged woman, her palsied face locked in agony. A black rubber body bag lay on the other gurney. I seized the zipper, pausing a moment for confidence, then quickly drew it down. The seam opened on the wasted, staring corpse of an elderly black man.
I backed away. “How many others have you taken out?” I said to the woman who was attending them.
“None, sir,” she said through her hood. “None myself.”
“Then there were others?”
“Maybe, Dr. Pearse. A few.”
I returned to twenty-six. I drew the hanging curtain around the bay, closing myself off from the prying eyes of Tenney and the rest, and looked at the shrouded bed. I tore aside the plastic tent opening near the cart The bed linen had been shucked down to the foot of the mattress and I gathered the sheet and blanket in my hands, but my rubber gloves prevented me from feeling any warmth. I shook each out separately, looking for the blood-filled syringe I had dropped there, then pulled up the mattress. I searched beneath the bed and broke apart the plastic biohazard box. I checked the sheet, the blanket, the mattress, the apple green floor for drops of blood. Nothing.