Invasive Procedures (18 page)

The greater part of him, however, pushed on, the part of him that remembered Nick. Nick was still in trouble, he told himself. Nick needs me to make it.

Soon he could hear the faint twang of country music coming from the car radio. It made him smile. He was only a few steps away now.

The embankment was so high and steep that Jonathan lost sight of the state trooper when he reached it. No matter. He only had to ascend a short distance and there the state trooper would be again, ready and able to help him. He began to climb when a heavy hand grabbed his shoulder. It flipped him over and pinned him against the embankment. Lichen stood over him, hunched so as to be concealed from the road. He put his other hand over Jonathan’s mouth.

Jonathan wanted to kick himself free, but Lichen’s knee held him against the ground. Jonathan’s hand fumbled in the dirt beside him until it unearthed a large stone. Swinging it in an arc he struck Lichen on the side of the head.

Lichen fell backward, releasing him, and Jonathan scrambled free, clawing his way upward, expecting Lichen’s heavy grip to return at any moment. But it didn’t. Jonathan reached the top and staggered onto the roadside.

“Help,” he heard himself say.

Across the street the state trooper turned abruptly, his hand whipping to his holster. He was young, barely twenty, and when he saw Jonathan his eyes widened.

Jonathan rushed forward into the street, almost falling, arms outstretched.

Blinding white light flooded Jonathan’s eyes. He turned and saw the grill of the approaching semi truck the instant before it struck him. Tires screeched and smoked as Jonathan’s limp body flew through the air and fell hard onto the asphalt twenty feet away.

The truck came to a screaming halt, and the driver was out in an instant, the engine still running. He put his hand to his forehead and ran to Jonathan’s body. The state trooper was right behind him.

“He came out of nowhere,” the driver said, pale and terrified. “Ran right into the road. I didn’t have time to swerve or nothing. He ran right in front of me. You saw him. He ran right in front of me.”

“I think he’s alive,” the state trooper said.

The truck driver bent down to inspect further.

“Don’t touch him,” the state trooper said, grabbing his radio. “Nine fifteen to county. Request ambulance on US Highway 49, mile marker 67, over.”

The dispatcher was acknowledging the call when the state trooper saw a flash of movement in the clearing below him. He unbuckled his flashlight and pointed the beam over the field. A big man in black was running back toward the treeline.

“Hey!”

The man in black didn’t stop.

“Freeze!”

The state trooper pulled out his pistol just as the man in black reached the shadows of the forest and disappeared.

Sirens wailed as the ambulance bounced down the highway, rushing to the hospital and rattling the patient inside. Jonathan lay strapped to a stretcher, his neck in a brace, his face broken and bloody. The EMT hovered over him, assessing the damage and moving quickly.

It didn’t make sense: the kid was already dressed like a hospital patient, wearing hospital scrubs but carrying no identification. Even more puzzling, according to witnesses, the kid had walked out of the forest miles from anywhere.

The EMT cut away Jonathan’s shirt and found a bandage sopping with blood. He continued cutting, pulled back the dressing, and looked with horror at the gaping wound. What appeared to have once been a well-stitched incision was now mangled, torn, bleeding. The EMT applied appropriate pressure and in moments his gloved hands were dark red.

“He’s got massive abdominal hemorrhaging,” he shouted to the driver. “If I don’t stop this he could go into cardiac arrest.”

As if on cue, the machines monitoring Jonathan’s vitals gave an unending beep. He was flat-lining.

“I’m losing him.”

The driver hit the gas; it was late, the road was deserted, and every second counted. They could afford to go a little faster.

The EMT stuffed gauze into the wound and grabbed the defibrillator. Unless he could shock the heart into action, Jonathan would die in
moments. He waited for the light to indicate a full charge, then put the pads to Jonathan’s chest. With a jolt, Jonathan’s body jerked, and miraculously the heart sprang to life, pumping rhythmically again.

Suddenly Jonathan’s eyes shot open, and his hand reached out and grabbed the EMT’s collar, pulling him close. The EMT was only inches from Jonathan’s face when fluid erupted from Jonathan’s mouth and splattered across the EMT. Immediately the heart monitor flat-lined a second time.

Instead of helping again, however, the EMT grabbed his own face and stumbled back against the wall of the ambulance. It felt as if his skin was on fire. Everywhere the fluid had touched him was burning hot.

He tore through his supplies; found a large, sterile gauze; and vigorously began wiping at his face.

“What’s the matter?” the driver shouted.

But the EMT didn’t answer. The liquid felt as if it was boring into his flesh, drilling straight to the bone. He fell to his knees, covered his face, and screamed.

The driver momentarily lost control of the ambulance, the scream had startled him so badly. With a quick jerk of the steering wheel, he righted them again. “What is it?” he asked, his voice panicked.

“Burning my eyes. I can’t see. My eyes.”

The driver hit the brake and pulled over. With the lights still flashing, he got out, hustled to the back, and threw open the rear doors. The EMT collapsed into his arms.

The driver gasped. The EMT’s face looked severely burned, as if it had been held over an open flame. He lowered him to the ground, and the EMT coughed, spraying the driver with blood and saliva. The driver wiped his face on his sleeve, then watched helplessly as the EMT began to convulse violently on the roadside.

In seconds the twitching stopped, and the EMT’s chest deflated. He lay there limp, mouth open, face charred. Even without checking for a pulse, the driver knew the man was dead.

Frantic now, the driver dragged the EMT to the tailgate. If he could get him back inside the ambulance, maybe he could resuscitate him.

But try as he might, he couldn’t lift him. The EMT was too heavy.
And since the stretcher was occupied, his only hope was to call the other ambulance.

He ran back to the driver’s seat and reached for the radio, and that’s when the pain hit him. Suddenly his face stung with heat. The EMT’s saliva burned like acid, stabbing like a needle, cutting through the fleshy tissue of his cheeks. He cried out and stumbled to the ground.

Panicked, he clawed his way into the driver’s seat, put the ambulance in gear, and hit the accelerator. Gravel sprayed from under the tires as the vehicle rocketed back onto the highway, covering the forgotten EMT in a cloud of chalky dust.

The rear door of the ambulance was still open, and the stretcher bounced against the ambulance walls, banging into medical equipment, knocking some of it loose, sending it flying out the back. Tubs and packages, boxes, and straps all tumbled out onto the highway, leaving a trail of medical debris. If not for the harness anchoring the stretcher to the ambulance’s interior, it too would have shot out the back and crashed onto the highway.

Moving at eighty miles an hour, the driver clutched the steering wheel with one hand and wiped at his face with the other. The road was becoming increasingly more difficult to see. His vision was going. Even the windshield in front of him was hazy and unfocused.

All that mattered little, though, compared to the searing pain in his face. He was tempted to let go of the wheel completely and claw at his face with both hands, but he didn’t. He held firm. He was closer now. He could make it.

In an instant, that optimism vanished. The road turned sharply, and he hadn’t seen the curve coming.

The front end of the ambulance smashed inward as it hit and then ripped through the metal guardrail. The driver was already through the windshield, flying outward and over the ravine before plummeting two hundred feet to the rocky bottom below. The ambulance was right behind him, a crumpled mass of disfigured metal and broken glass. It bounced twice against the cliff face before rolling to a stop near the driver, its emergency lights still flashing.

The alarm sounded high and shrill and woke Frank from a deep sleep. He sat bolt upright in bed, disoriented, and blinked at the red flashing siren mounted on the wall near his barracks door.

There was noise and commotion out in the hall. Frank got out of bed, hurried to the door, and opened it. Four men, all agents of the BHA and all still dressed for sleep, were running out of their barracks and down the hallway toward the locker room.

The wail of the siren stopped, but the lights continued to flash.

Carter ran past.

“What’s going on?” Frank said.

“Looks like another drill,” Carter said, not slowing down.

Frank leaned against the door frame and rubbed his eyes wearily. The last few days had been exhausting. Riggs was on the warpath. After learning that Frank’s countervirus had been effective, Riggs had formed an assault team to deal with the Healer threat. The team consisted of six tactical field agents, one communications expert, and one medic: Frank. It would be Frank’s job to treat any infected person they found in the field and to assist the team in containing the virus. “You know and understand V16 better than any of us,” Riggs had said. “If we find it, be it in its raw form or inside someone, I want you there to either annihilate it or contain it on-site.”

Frank hadn’t objected, but it did bother him to be thrown so suddenly into a tactical team with whom he had no experience. Plus, he had come to the BHA with the understanding that he would be conducting research or treating patients in an infirmary, not strapping a sidearm to his hip and kicking in doors.

And yet, there was a part of him that craved action like that, the rush of adrenaline, the heavy march of boots. He was a soldier first and a doctor second, or so his commanding officers had always told him.

What he didn’t crave were the constant drills that inevitably came with any field assignment. Riggs had seized this principle with gusto and had been running drills nonstop for the past four days: forming a perimeter around a suspected hot zone, storming the home, subduing the infected person, containing the virus, and on and on and on and over and over and over again until Frank, who had thought himself in top physical condition, found himself crawling into bed each night, aching from muscles and bones he didn’t know he had.

Overall, Frank had been impressed with the members of the team. Most were ex-military or ex-intelligence and had come to the agency with top credentials and service records. Some even had combat experience. And although Frank was the only one among them who was currently on active duty, he found himself hard-pressed to keep up with them.

The only exception was Peeps, the team’s youngest and slowest member.

Peeps was the team’s communications expert and had warmed to Frank immediately, since he considered Frank as much an outcast as he did himself. Since their first meeting, Peeps had made it his duty to tag along with Frank to every meal and explain the do-eats and don’t-eats of the cafeteria. Normally Frank would have felt smothered by the attention, but for the time being he didn’t mind the company.

“You coming?” Peeps said.

Frank blinked and raised his bowed head. He was falling asleep just standing here. “It’s a little late to be running another drill, don’t you think?”

Peeps shrugged.

He was a young kid, barely out of high school, tall, thin as a post, with a somewhat goofy expression. His curly brown hair suffered from a bad case of bed head at the moment, and a few pimples dotted his face. He
wore a white pair of cotton pajamas with a comic book hero printed on them and looked as if he had just been teleported from a third-grade slumber party.

Frank said, “What would they do if I went back into my room, put my pillow over my head, and went to sleep?”

Peeps laughed, then looked as if he wasn’t sure this had been intended as a joke. “You better come,” he said.

“Right.”

They jogged together down the hall toward the locker room.

“You’re a little old to be wearing that, don’t you think?” Frank said, gesturing at Peep’s pajamas.

“They’re comfortable. Besides, women love a man in pajamas.”

“I didn’t know you were a ladies’ man, Peeps. Aren’t you a little young to be chasing members of the opposite sex?”

“I’m eighteen, thank you very much. That’s voting age. If I’m old enough to vote for the president, I’m old enough to chase skirts.”

Frank grinned, feeling looser now—awake, even. “I thought
videotaping
skirts was your specialty.”

“That too,” Peeps said with a wink. It was common knowledge that Peeps had been recruited out of high school after rigging the varsity girls’ locker room with surveillance cameras and then broadcasting the feed over a local cable channel. After he was convicted, men in nice conservative suits had come to offer him an alternative to prison time. Peeps, who was no idiot, had taken the offer.

The press, which had followed the trial and made Peeps somewhat of a folk hero among the twelve- to twenty-four-year-old male demographic, had called him Peeping Tom, and the name had stuck. Peeps had recounted the whole story at length to Frank immediately after introducing himself.

When they reached the locker room, some of the men were already in their biosuits, rushing toward the elevators.

Frank and Peeps opened their lockers and began changing. As soon as their suits were on, Agent Carmen Hernandez appeared, fully dressed and ready to go.

“Taking your sweet time, I see, boys,” she said. “You might want to step it up a bit. Most of us finished dressing a full minute ago.”

Peeps clapped. “Well, whoop-dee-doo and congratulations to you. I’m sure the agency has a medal or something for getting dressed so quickly.”

Hernandez smirked. “If
you
go slow, we
all
go slow.”