The words were English but Italian-accented and spoken with just the right mix of authority and sarcasm to ensure they would be obeyed. They came from Dr. Ambrosini, who was now standing on a catwalk above them.
With the grace of a dancer, she came down a ladder and across the cargo bay to where Kurt and the MPs stood face-to-face.
“But Dr. Ambrosini…” one of the foreign medics protested.
“But nothing, Dr. Ravishaw. He saved my life, the lives of eighteen others, and he’s given us the best clue to the origin of this problem since the beginning of our investigation.”
“This is highly irregular,” Dr. Ravishaw said.
“Yes,” she replied, “as a matter of fact it is.”
Kurt took some pleasure in the exchange and noted wryly that Dr. Ambrosini was the smallest person in the room but undeniably in charge. She seemed genuinely pleased to see Kurt, yet a few smiles and kind treatment weren’t enough to defuse his anger. “You want to tell me what’s going on here?”
“Can we talk in private?”
“I’d love to,” he said. “Lead on.”
Dr. Ambrosini made her way to a small office next to the cargo hold. Kurt followed and shut the door after he stepped through it. By the look of it, the office was normally meant for a quartermaster, but it had clearly been co-opted by the medical personnel.
“First off,” she began, “I want to thank you for saving me.”
“Looks like you just returned the favor.”
She laughed it off, brushed a strand of hair back from her face and tucked it behind her ear. “I highly doubt I’ve saved you from anything,” she said. “More likely, I saved those poor MPs from a painful scuffle that would have bruised their egos, at the very least.”
“I think you overestimate me,” Kurt said.
“I doubt that,” she replied, folding her arms in front of her chest and leaning against the edge of the desk.
It was a nice compliment. Probably half true, but Kurt wasn’t here to exchange pleasantries. “Can we get to the part where you tell me why those quacks out there are doing experiments on my dead friends?”
“Those quacks are my friends,” she said defensively.
“At least they’re alive.”
She took a deep breath, as if deciding how much to say, and then exhaled. “Yes,” she said. “Well, I understand why you’re upset. Your friends, like everyone on the island, have suffered quite a bit. But we need to find out—”
“What kind of toxin killed them?” Kurt said, interrupting. “I think that’s a great idea. Unless I’m mistaken, that’s done through blood tests and tissue samples. And while you’re at it, maybe someone should be testing the smoke coming from that freighter. But unless you can tell me something I’m missing, there’s no need for the Dr. Frankenstein treatment I just saw out there.”
“Dr. Frankenstein treatment,” she repeated. “That’s a surprisingly apt description of what they’re trying to do.”
Kurt was confused. “And why is that?”
“Because,” she said, “we’re trying to bring your friends and the rest of them back to life.”
12
For a moment, Kurt was at a loss for words. “Say that again” was all he could muster.
“I don’t blame you for being surprised,” she said. “As Dr. Ravishaw said, the situation is highly irregular.”
“More like crazy,” he replied. “You can’t really believe you’re going to reanimate people like some kind of witch doctor?”
“We’re not ghouls,” she said. “It’s just that the men and women in that cargo bay aren’t dead. At least not yet. And we’re desperately trying to find some method of waking them back up before they do pass on.”
Kurt considered what she was saying. “I checked several of them myself,” he replied. “They weren’t breathing. On my rounds, while I was waiting for the Italian military to arrive, I passed rooms filled with patients hooked up to EKGs: there were no heartbeats.”
“Yes,” she said, “I’m aware of that. But the fact is, they are breathing and their hearts are pumping blood. It’s just that their respiration is extremely shallow and occurring at long intervals, with less than one breath every two minutes on average. Their heart rates are hovering in the single digits and the ventricular contractions are so weak that a typical monitor won’t pick them up.”
“How can that be?”
“They’re in a type of coma,” she said, “a type we’ve never seen before. With a normal coma, certain parts of the brain are switched off. Only the deepest, most primitive sections continue functioning. It’s assumed that the body does this as a defense mechanism, allowing the brain or body to heal itself. But these patients show residual activity in all parts of their brains, yet they’re unresponsive to any drug or stimuli we’ve tried so far.”
“Can you give that to me in layman’s terms?”
“No damage has been done to their brains,” she said, “but they can’t wake up. If you imagine them to be computers, it’s as if someone put them on standby or sleep mode and no amount of pressing the on switch will get them functioning again.”
Kurt knew just enough human physiology to get himself in trouble, so he decided to ask rather than jump to conclusions. “If their hearts are pumping so softly and infrequently and pumping such little amounts of blood, and their breathing is so restrained, don’t they risk oxygen deprivation and brain damage?”
“Hard to say,” she replied. “But we think they’re existing in a state of suspended animation. Low body temperatures and low levels of cellular activity mean their organs are using very little oxygen. That could mean the shallow breathing and weak cardiovascular activity is enough to keep them healthy, enough to keep their brains intact. Have you ever seen someone pulled from frigid water after a near drowning?”
Kurt nodded. “Years back, I rescued a boy and his dog from a frozen lake. The dog had chased a squirrel onto the ice and got stuck when his hind legs broke through. The boy tried to help him, but the ice cracked and both of them plunged into the water. By the time we got them out, the poor child was blue, he’d been underwater for seven minutes or more. He should have been long dead. The dog should have died too, but the paramedics were able to bring them both back. The boy ended up being fine. No brain damage at all. Is that what we’re talking about here?”
“We hope so,” she said, “though it’s not exactly the same. In the boy’s case, the frigid water caused a spontaneous reaction in his body that could be reversed once he was brought back to a normal temperature. These people didn’t face such an instant temperature change; they were affected by some kind of toxin. And, at least so far, neither warming nor cooling nor electric shock nor direct injections of Adrenalin nor anything in our Frankenstein’s bag of tricks has been able to bring them out of it.”
“So what kind of toxin are we dealing with?” Kurt asked.
“We don’t know.”
“It has to be the smoke from that freighter.”
“You would think,” she said, nodding, “but we’ve sampled the smoke. There’s nothing more than burned petroleum fumes in it, with a slight mix of lead and asbestos, no different than what you’d find from any shipboard fire.”
“So the fire and the cloud enveloping the island are just a coincidence? Somehow, I don’t buy that.”
“Neither do I,” she said. “But there’s nothing in that cloud to cause what we’ve seen. At worst, it could produce irritated eyes, wheezing and asthma attacks.”
“So if it’s not the smoke from the ship, then what?”
She paused, studying him for a second, before continuing. Kurt sensed she’d decided to speak more freely. “We believe it was nerve toxin, weaponized by the explosion, either deliberately or accidentally. Many nerve agents are short-lived. The fact that we find no trace of it in the soil, air or in blood and tissue samples from the victims tells us that whatever agent it might have been, biological or chemical, it lasts no more than a few hours.”