Degrees of Wrong (17 page)

“How long have you been here? Why didn’t you wake me up?” He reached upward, stretching.

“You’re grouchy when you wake up.” I handed him my journal, ignoring his questions. “Dr. Folsom is under the impression that you speak French. I was hoping you could translate these entries for me.”

He took the papers and patted the seat beside him. I walked around the couch, anxious about the proximity of my seat to his—and about the intimacy of the couch, altogether.

He appeared oblivious to both. He glanced at the papers and back to me. “I’d be happy to, of course. Though I’m a little surprised she didn’t offer. She’s fluent in French.”

“
Is
she?” I said through clenched teeth. “Well, she must have been ready to retire for the evening. Maybe she thought I needed it immediately, when in fact, I could have waited until tomorrow.” I snatched the papers from his hand. “I’ll just ask her to do it in the morning. Thanks anyway.”

As I stood, a huge hand caught my wrist, pulled me back to the couch and yanked the papers from my grasp. “That’s not necessary. I can do it now,” he said.

“Are—are you sure? I interrupted your nap…” I was still unsure if I had actually
seen
him move. But he must have, because he hauled me down almost on top of his lap. Our legs touched on the seat and all the way to the floor.

“Yes.” He grinned. “I needed a nap. I was up late last night. Will be again tonight, I’d wager.”

“
Oh
!” I said, infuriated anew. I tried to grab the papers from his hand, but he stood and held them over his head. Even jumping, I couldn’t reach them.

“This behavior is not very becoming, Dr. Morgan.” He laughed as I punched him in the gut. My fist met with a sculpted wall of muscle which barely budged with the force behind the blow.

“I agree with you there,
Captain
.” I spat the title like an expletive and cradled my throbbing hand.

He laughed again. I decided to change tactics. “I’m
very
sure Lt. Sheldon would be interested to know of your recent workout schedule,” I informed him cheerfully.

It had the desired effect. His eyes narrowed, all traces of his previous glee eradicated. “You wouldn’t.”

“And why wouldn’t I?”

“Because then, Dr. Morgan, I couldn’t guarantee there would be any more chocolate orders approved.”

“I have friends higher up on the food chain than you, Nicoli Marek,” I snapped. “You may recall him from this afternoon, when he told me I could have whatever I needed?”

He remembered. His expression grew pensive. “Yes, that’s true, Dr. Morgan. Why don’t you go ahead and give him a call right now?”

I crossed my arms, glowering.

“What’s the matter? Oh, that’s
right
. You don’t know how to get in contact with him. And did you really just stomp your foot?”

I stomped it again and turned my back on him with a “Hmph.”

I felt the warmth of his body behind me, his hand on my shoulder turning me around. My face came entirely too close to his as he said softly, “Elyse. Why don’t you come back to the couch and we can read the entries you brought me?”

His eyes pleaded with mine as he took my hand and gently placed the papers in it. He took the other and led me to the couch. I nodded, speechless. We sat down.

“May I?” he asked quietly, indicating the papers I now held. I handed them back. He cleared his throat, and began to read.

“‘Monday, September 15th. We had a suspected case today of the HTN4. As soon as they entered the hospital doors, the lobby cleared out. The child was already exhibiting swollen lymph nodes with the development of buboes in the groin and neck. Despite having been told repeatedly to stay away from public areas, we continue to see these kinds of cases throughout the district. Turning him and his mother away was the single most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do, but in order to protect the lives of my staff and treatable patients, it was a necessary evil. I went home to my family today, much more appreciative of their company.

“‘Tuesday, September 16th. I may have been infected with the virus. I’m feeling disoriented. My fever is 103 degrees, and although my lymph nodes aren’t swollen, I seem to be displaying the pneumonic symptoms of the disease. I have an uncontrollable cough, and my sputum is tinged with blood. I’ve quarantined myself from my family, but my worst fear is that I already exposed them to it.

“‘Wednesday, September 17th. My case has been confirmed. I will be dead within twelve hours, I am sure. I do not care so much for my own life as I do my darling little Belle’s. She has grown quite ill, and has now developed the telling purple skin patches, in all likelihood due to D-I-C.’”

Here Nicoli interrupted. “What’s D-I-C?” he asked.

“It’s disseminated intravascular coagulation.”

“Blood clots?” he asked, surprising me yet again.

“Yes. She’s apparently displaying signs of septicemia. He’s probably right that she’s infected. It’s a common sign.”

“Why do they call it the Black Death? It’s not the same one that wiped out Europe centuries ago?”

“No, though it does display a lot of the same characteristics. That one, the Black Plague, was bacterial, believed to have wiped out up to sixty percent of Europe’s population at the time. What’s really horrible is that it could have been cured with a simple course of antibiotics. This one, the Black Death, is viral. And so far, everything we’ve done has been ineffective in preventing death.”

Nicoli sat back and studied me. “And it’s highly contagious.”

“Highly.”

“What are the symptoms?”

“Well, there’s a range of symptoms, really. First, a fever will develop, the body’s first response to an intruder. Some victims start to develop buboes, or bulblike growths that normally turn purple or black, hence the name. Others will develop severe pneumonia, as did our doctor in this journal entry. I’m sure we’ll find as we read on that his sputum will start to consist entirely of blood, instead of just tinged with it. And, as his little girl did, others will develop septicemia. No matter the symptoms, the outcome is always the same. The virus attaches to the cells, makes its way to the lymph nodes and attacks our immune system. We have no defenses against it.”

Nicoli nodded. “Would you like me to keep reading?”

“Please.”

He began again:

“‘Wednesday, September 17th. It is the late-night hours, and I have just been informed that my little Belle has already succumbed. I barely have the strength to move, my own blood even spotting these pages. My strapping boy Philippe has taken to the disease, and although my wife shows no symptoms as of yet, I am sure she will by morning. She has decided to come along with us, and is lying in the bed with our son, holding him tightly. I hope…’ It doesn’t say anything else.”

A long moment passed before either of us spoke. Finally, he handed me the papers.

“Thank you,” I whispered as I stood.

Before I could turn, he caught my wrist. “Elyse.”

The shock of his touch was almost as powerful as the flutter I felt when he used my first name. He cleared his throat. “Dr. Morgan. I have confidence in you, for what it’s worth.”

As the elevator doors shut behind me, I acknowledged to myself that his confidence in me was worth very much. Very much, indeed.

Chapter Nine

Despite my initial complaints about the amount of information I received, I managed to sift through and organize it within two days. I reviewed the lab tests first—most of which had been thorough and relatively creative. It became obvious that the UN sent me every single piece of information they documented on the virus, without regard to relevance. The spectrum of the work started at completely silly and ended with impressively ingenious. But they all ended up in the same category: failure.

One doctor’s work irritated me. He’d found a way to halt the functioning of infected cells. Unfortunately, he had stopped the functioning of every
other
cell in the patient’s body as well. By using hydrogen cyanide. The whole experiment was conducted with scarcely more elements than a grade-school science project. I wondered that this man’s findings even had a place among the experiments of his more brilliant counterparts. At the very least, a few lab rats could have been spared in preventing this man from practicing medicine. I shuddered at the more serious implications of his primitive experiment.

I was also disgusted, physically sickened, when I came across an experiment conducted with live human patients. Furiously, I scrolled through it, reading with horror that the anonymous scientist had intentionally infected human beings and had found to his surprise that he couldn’t reverse the effects of the virus. Every single patient died within the usual forty-eight hours, ranging from small children to the elderly. Happily, one of the patients tried to escape, facilitating the need for the doctor to restrain him, and thereby infecting himself with the disease. I scrolled to the end. His closing entry read:

I’m relieved to find I’ve been infected with the Black Death. I can now desist with these inhumane experiments and hope that God will understand why I had to do it. My only comfort is that I won’t live long enough to see my family executed for my failure. Surely they will understand that I sacrificed everything that a person could sacrifice for them. May God forgive me.

He had been held by the very terrorists who engineered the disease—somehow the UN had confiscated his findings. I hardly made it to the bathroom before vomiting. I lumbered back to the computer, still on the verge of tears. I needed a break.

Nicoli would be expecting me soon, anyway. That I even considered giving him the benefit of the doubt now seemed like a laughable waste of deliberation. The last few evenings were not dissimilar to the very first night that he appeared at the gym—except that I changed the variables leading up to my inevitable failure.

That second night, he’d materialized
again
on the machine next to me, choosing the same run I did—the Mountain Run. So, to test my theory—to give him the benefit of the doubt—I’d waited until he warmed up before changing my setting to the Beach Run, despite my aversion to it.

I’d known the moment my dot disappeared from his input screen—his head jerked in my direction. Mere seconds had passed before the devil red dot appeared on my input screen once again, only seconds more before it passed me there on the beautiful, unspecified shore.

Not even the solitude of the sunshine and gently lapping waves could have consoled my temper.

The third night, I’d waited a little longer before going to the gym. I’d figured that, as a scientist, I should introduce a new variable before I called a theory a fact. At one o’clock in the morning I started my warm-up on the Highway Endurance Run. I breathed in the solitude as I breezed through one small town and saw another one on the horizon.

The sound of the machine next to me starting up smothered the momentary peace. Nicoli grinned—though not at me directly—as he selected the Highway Endurance Run at a pace faster than mine. This completed the testing period, the theory now a proven fact—Nicoli was irritating me. On purpose.

I’d considered waiting until he ran at full speed before reaching over to push his emergency stop button. Dr. Folsom and her silly
do no harm
policy held me back. Barely. Instead, I plodded along, fuming, accepting my inescapable defeat at the end of the run—and cursing myself for eating so much chocolate in the first place. Because of the chocolate alone, I stayed and endured the humiliation. And as always, he finished before me and left the gym, depriving me of the chance to flail at him with my limp limbs and scream things at him no educated person had any business thinking about, especially at two o’clock in the morning.

So now, the fourth night, it was with burdened feet that I made my way to the gym. He leaned against my usual machine, grinning in his usual foolish fashion—which caused the usual heart palpitations.

“You’re making a nuisance of yourself, Captain.” I noticed he was fully dressed and fought back the disappointment.

His grin widened. “Am I? That’s not my intention, Dr. Morgan.”

“Perhaps you could explain your intention, then. Because from my perspective, it appears that you come here each and every evening, regardless of the time, and break the joint custody contract we verbally agreed to.”

“How much chocolate have you eaten today, Dr. Morgan?”

I could barely see him through my narrowed eyes. “You, of course, can see how that wouldn’t be any of your business, Captain.”

He chuckled. “I was just wondering if you could skip your workout this evening.”

“What for?” And why was he dressed?
Get a hold of yourself, idiot.

He shrugged. “There’s been a development which…Dr. Folsom thought you might be interested in.”

Dr. Folsom had been up to no good, of late. “What is it?”

He shrugged again. “It’s easier to show you than to tell you. Why don’t you run your things to your room and meet me at the transport pods?”

The
transport pods
? “Um, no, I don’t think so. Thanks anyway.”

I walked to my machine, but he moved to block my way. Undeterred, I moved to the next one. He caught my arm and whirled me around, scorching my skin with the contact.