“Fine,” she said. “Just be careful, okay?”
My phone rang. My dad’s phone, really, but it was amazing how quickly I thought of it as my own. I looked at the screen. It was Andrew.
“That’s the containment crew now,” I said. I took several steps back down the hall and shielded my mouth with my hand. “Hey, what do you need?” I asked.
Mei-lin opened the lab door.
It was too easy. I should have suspected something, but I had been too enamored with my own cleverness. The moment the door opened, a cloud of white powder billowed out, right into Mei-lin’s face. By pure luck, I was far enough away that it didn’t touch me, but Mei-lin, covered in the stuff, coughed and gagged and clawed at her throat.
I stared at Jintara, whose smug smile told the whole story. I took a step toward Mei-lin, but she held out her hands and screamed at me to get back. I reversed direction and held my shirt over my mouth. Ignoring Jintara, Mei-lin yanked a fire extinguisher off the wall. She raised it over her head and smashed it against the sprinkler head protruding from the ceiling. The first blow glanced off ineffectually, but the second struck it full on, breaking the frangible bulb inside and releasing the water.
Mei-lin turned her face up into the stream, letting it cascade over her body, drenching her. She opened her mouth wide, rinsing, rubbing her hands over her face and skin. When she stepped back, her clothes running rivulets onto the floor, she caught my eyes, and I could see the terror in them. We both knew that powder had been filled with fungal spores, and that the important ones were in her lungs, where she couldn’t wash them away.
“Paul said you’d come,” Jintara said. “It took you longer than he thought.”
I saw the expression on Mei-lin’s face shift from fear to anger. Without a word, she picked up the fire extinguisher and swung it at Jintara’s head. Jintara wasn’t expecting it and barely got a hand up to defend herself. The extinguisher connected with the side of her face with an audible gong, and she went down. It wasn’t enough to knock her out, but it wiped the smile off her face, and opened a bloody cut on her forehead.
With a cry, Mei-lin raised the extinguisher again and went in for another blow. Jintara was ready this time and scrambled away. The red container struck the cinderblock wall and rang with the impact. Jintara got to her feet and backed down the hall toward where we’d come in. “Give it a day,” she said, “and you’ll thank me for this.” She pushed through the double doors, and we heard her footsteps running away.
Mei-lin dropped the extinguisher and stalked toward the open door to the lab.
“We have to get you back to the hospital,” I said.
“First things first. Let’s get what we came for.”
I started to follow her into the lab, but she waved me back. “There are still spores in the air.”
“He won’t have left anything of value behind,” I said. “Not if he knew we were coming.”
Mei-lin switched on the lights. “If this is going to be my last day with control of my own mind,” she said, “I’m going to use it fighting this thing.”
I peered into the lab from a distance. I saw the same antiseptically neat arrangement of microscopes and glassware as the first time I’d been there. The rows of petri dishes on the central table, however, were gone. Mei-lin dragged a chair over to the doorway and stood on it, examining the setup that had dropped the powder when the door was opened. She pulled it down and showed me: The powder had been kept in a plastic bag tied with a string attached to the door, which had unraveled when pulled. Whoever had set the trap must have climbed out the window afterward.
Mei-lin put the plastic bag in a large specimen bag she found in a drawer, and sealed it shut. She yanked the wires out of each of the three computers in the lab and stacked them up to carry away. I had as much chance of gaining useful information from them as I did from interrogating a Bunsen burner, but I knew if I brought them to Fort Meade, there were people who could get them to spill all their secrets, whether the hard drives had been wiped or not.
We carried everything out to Mei-lin’s car. She handed me the keys. “I don’t trust myself,” she said. “Get us back to the hospital as fast as you can.”
On the way, she called a coworker in the emergency room. “Lauren,” she said. “I’m inbound with a critical case of invasive aspergillosis. I need a bed and a 5 mg/hour amphotericin B drip. Also, medical restraints.”
“On it,” I heard the tinny voice reply from the phone. “That’s a serious dosage. Is the patient CDT?”
“No,” she said. “The patient is just desperate.” She switched the phone off.
“CDT?” I asked.
Mei-lin grinned. “It stands for ‘Chronic Donut Toxicity.’ One of the many unflattering terms doctors disguise with acronyms or inscrutable terminology. She was asking if the patient was obese.”
“This is a common term?”
“Not commonly used in front of patients,” she said. “But yeah, it gets thrown around, at least by some docs. There are others. An ‘OAP’ for an ‘Over-Anxious Parent.’ GPO is ‘Good for Parts Only.’ And if you show up in the ER because, say, you were trying to jump your motorcycle over the creek and misjudged the distance, you might hear the term ‘fecal encephalopathy.’”
I thought about it, then laughed when I figured it out. “Wow, docs can be pretty nasty,” I said.
She shrugged. “Some of them are arrogant assholes, no question,” she said. “But everyone develops a bit of a gallows humor. It’s a tough profession, working with frightened and angry patients and families, seeing a lot more death from day to day than most people do, and inevitably feeling like some of it is at least partially your fault. The dark humor is a way to cope.”
My phone rang. I realized I’d never heard whatever it was that Andrew had called to tell me. I pulled the phone out of my pocket, dropped it in my lap, and told it to answer the call.
“What’s happening with you?” Andrew said. “Did you get disconnected?”
“It’s a long story. What do you need?” I said, talking loud enough that he would hear me over the background noise of the car.
“You were right about the Neuritol,” he said. “It fits all the patterns exactly. Unfortunately, it looks like the communication in tribal languages doesn’t start until weeks after the drug has been widely distributed in a geographic area. So it’s not just a matter of cracking down in the cities where we’re intercepting those messages. We have reason to suspect a significant spread into Dallas, Atlanta, Kansas City, even Chicago.
“The president and his staff are all on board now, and the DEA, FBI, and CDC are starting to flood the affected areas. I’m just afraid it’s not going to be enough. I’ve been recommending he declare a state of emergency and deploy the National Guard, but no one’s willing to take that step yet.”
“It won’t take long. Once the CDC sees how fast this thing is spreading, they’ll want to shut down every road in the country.”
“I’m just afraid that by the time they do, it’ll be too late.”
By the time we reached the ER, Mei-lin was coughing violently and looked pale. The symptoms had come on quickly, but then she had probably breathed in enough spores to infect an army. Her lungs must be coated with them, each taking root and prompting a surge of immune response. It occurred to me that such a large exposure might very well kill her before the fungus could take hold. Her clothes were still wet from the sprinkler, and she shivered uncontrollably.
She used her access to walk straight past triage and into the back, where she found Lauren, a painfully thin, forty-something woman with dyed blond hair and a serious expression. Lauren took control, stripping away her wet clothes and getting her warm and dry. She started the antifungal IV Mei-lin had asked for, but drew the line on restraints.