Outbreak (13 page)

“Decontaminate,” I shout to Miles, not taking my eyes off Lenny as I lay her on the crisp white sheet. Maybe it’s the sickly light from the chamber, but she looks much too pale. She needs to go through the decontamination shower, too, but I worry she doesn’t have time.

I can’t see her abdominal wound clearly, but the blood is seeping through her uniform at an alarming rate. I press my hands down and apply pressure to stem the bleeding, and a look of agony flashes over her face.

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “You’re okay.”

I hear the shower running again. Yanking down the zipper on my suit to access my interface, I page the medical ward for immediate assistance upon arrival. I don’t bother stripping off the suit completely. I’m going to be in trouble, but I can already feel process breaking down. 

I’m not ready for this.

“Help me push,” I yell to Harper.

I can’t see her, but the gurney starts moving toward the megalift.

The doors open, and Caleb rushes out — nearly careening into our gurney.

“What’s going on?” he splutters.

“GSW,” I pant. “Take care of the others.”

Caleb freezes on the spot, but I don’t have time to worry about him. 

Miles appears on my other side wearing just his shorts. Droplets of water are sliding off his tattooed chest, and he’s trembling slightly.

The sight of a man his size on the verge of a breakdown causes a lump to form in my throat, but I shove it down and keep moving.

“I can take it from here,” I say gently. “Go with Caleb.”

“I’m comin’ with you,” he growls.

“Just until we get up to the medical ward. Then they’ll take her into surgery.”

We crowd onto the lift, and Caleb just stands there — paralyzed by the responsibility that’s been thrust upon him. I hear some garbled instructions coming through my interface, but all I can think about is the warm gush of blood under my gloves and the pale, broken girl on my gurney.

As the lift doors close and we shoot up toward the medical ward, I give Lenny a cursory examination. Then her eyes drift closed, and I start to panic in earnest.

“Lenny. Lenny! Stay with me.”

She doesn’t move.

Harper’s face blanches, and I swallow down the bile burning in my throat.

Lenny is still bleeding profusely, and she’s dangerously pale. I can’t lift my hands to check her pulse, but I can tell she’s in serious cardiac distress.

After what seems like an eternity, the lift dings, and Harper shoves the gurney forward into the ward.

That’s when all hell breaks loose. Nurses rush forward to usher Harper and Miles into separate exam rooms, and another pack of them shove me aside to rush Lenny to an operating room. There’s a flurry of hands unsnapping her shirt and sticking monitors onto her chest, but I already know she’s in serious trouble.

I feel the sting of separation as the gurney rolls away. I start trailing after them, but a sharp yell calls me back to reality.

“What in the
hell
are you doing?”

I freeze.

“
Are you out of your fucking mind
?” Dr. Watson growls, striding toward me with his white coat billowing behind him like a cape.

That’s when I remember I’m still wearing the hazmat suit and I’m elbow-deep in Lenny’s blood. 

I open and close my mouth several times, but no words come out.

His watery blue eyes flash. “Lyang! You’re contaminating this entire unit!”

“I had a gunshot victim!” I splutter. “I couldn’t decontaminate her without delaying treatment, so —”

“She hasn’t been decontaminated either?”

“N-no.”

Watson swears loudly, and those telltale angry creases appear on his forehead. They’re the lines he gets just before he berates someone in a very humiliating public fashion. “She hasn’t been decontaminated? She hasn’t been —” He sighs. “Is this your first day, or are you just
stupid
?”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“You’re sorry? You’re sorry. You just put this entire ward at risk! And for what? One first-year Recon operative who’s just going to die on the table?”

An alarming amount of heat is radiating from my body, and I clench my fists together to stop them from shaking. I can barely see Watson’s livid expression through the tears accumulating in my eyes, but I can hear the hatred in his voice.

I’m going to be put on probation for sure. I might as well say goodbye to Progressive Research. If Watson has his way, I’ll be taking urine samples for the rest of my life.

“I have half a mind to tell you to hand in your scrubs and hoof it down to Operations right now.”

Horror flashes through me. I couldn’t have screwed up this badly — not badly enough to get me thrown out of Health and Rehab, surely.

But then the lift doors fly open, and an eruption of shouts forces Watson to put his rant on hold.

Eli strides out of the lift, followed by a frazzled-looking Caleb. He’s stripped down to a pair of boxer briefs, and Caleb is just in his scrubs. Eli is clutching his rucksack to his chest like a life preserver, and I’m caught between the urge to laugh, cry, and check out Eli.

“We have to get you to an exam room,” says Caleb. 

He tries to pull the rucksack out of Eli’s arms, but Eli twists out of his reach easily.

“And you can’t take that with you. It hasn’t been decontaminated!”

“That’s my cadet you just wheeled off!” yells Eli. “I want to see her.”

“You can see her when she gets out of surgery,” says Caleb, an annoyed edge to his voice.

“What the hell is this?” Watson splutters. “Can none of you do your job?”

Caleb whirls around. As soon as he sees me and Watson, his face goes bright red.

“Uh . . . he’s just a little hysterical, sir.”

“I’m not hysterical,” snaps Eli.

“I need to take this,” says Watson.

Eli jerks out of his grip, but between Watson and Caleb, they manage to successfully peel the rucksack out of Eli’s death grip.

“Who the hell are you?” Eli barks at Watson. “And where’s Harper?”

“Cadet Riley was just admitted, but I’m afraid you’ll have to wait to see her.”

“This is
bullshit
.”

Under any other circumstances, I’d find it hilarious that a patient was standing in the tunnel in his underwear yelling at Caleb and Watson. But this is Eli. In the few interactions I’ve had with him, I’ve learned that he’s a little unpredictable when it comes to Harper. And right now, he looks frantic.

“Eli, I’ll take you to see Harper as soon as she’s been debriefed,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady.

His steely gaze softens a little, but I can feel Watson’s cold glare burning a hole in my back.

Finally, Eli yields and allows Caleb to steer him toward an exam room. He should be in a wheelchair. It gives me some satisfaction to know that Caleb is going to get a lecture later, too, but it’s nothing compared to the browbeating I’m about to receive.

“Decontaminate
now
and scrub up for Riley’s exam,” Watson snaps. “Then meet me in my office at twenty-two hundred so we can talk about your dangerous stupidity.”

He breezes away, leaving me standing there in my hazmat suit. 

For a second, I don’t think I’m going to be able to move, but I force my feet to shuffle down the tunnel toward secondary decontamination.

I lock myself in the little shower and try to extricate myself from the suit. But as soon as I’m alone, all my scared, angry tears start pouring out. 

My sobs echo back at me off the white tiled walls, and my gloved fingers fumble uselessly at the zipper running down the front of my suit. Usually we pair up to take these off, but I can’t have anyone witnessing my meltdown. 

I keep struggling with the zipper long after the shower cycle has stopped, and once the last water drains from the sloped floor, I cringe at how pathetic I must look.

Sinking down onto the cold tile, hopelessness swamps me. 

Maybe I’m not cut out for this. After months and months of work, I don’t feel any closer to being considered a legitimate doctor or researcher. All those sleepless nights, extra shifts, and dirty bed pans were for nothing. One stupid mistake was enough to destroy my job prospects.

Then I think about Harper and how she’s going to react when she learns that she’s lost her friend. I don’t know for sure that Lenny’s heart stopped, but she didn’t look good. And if she does die, Watson’s going to make me break the news to Harper and Eli myself.

After all that, nothing I did mattered. Lenny was always going to die.

A soft knock on the shower door pulls me briefly out of my misery, but the voice on the other side is the absolute last one I want to hear.

“Sawyer?” calls Caleb. “Are you okay?”

“Go away, MacAvoy,” I blubber. “I’m not in the mood.”

The door rattles briefly, but then he stops. “I’m coming in,” he calls, a note of hesitation coloring his determined voice. “You decent?”

I groan.

There’s a brief pause, but then the door opens. Caleb is standing just outside the shower, looking exhausted but not unsympathetic.

“You shouldn’t be in here,” I say, gesturing to my suit. “You’re going to have to decontaminate and rescrub all over again.”

“I don’t mind,” he murmurs, kneeling down next to me and reaching for the zipper.

His expression is warm and calm as he tugs it down, and my overheated body welcomes the rush of cool air filtering through my scrubs.

Caleb takes my hands and helps me into a standing position so he can pull the suit down to my ankles. It’s much trickier than putting the suit on, since the plastic suctions to every inch of exposed skin.

“I heard Watson yelling at you through the lift doors,” he murmurs.

“Who
didn’t
hear that? Now everybody thinks I’m an idiot.”

“Are you kidding? You’re the smartest intern here
by far
. No one thinks you’re an idiot . . . least of all me.” 

From the tone of his voice and the set of his jaw, I can tell he isn’t just saying those things to make me feel better. He genuinely believes them. 

I let out a long sigh and deflate against the shower wall. “Why are you being so
nice
to me?” 

“Because you had a shit day,” he answers quickly. “And because I think you did the right thing.”

“Not according to protocol.”

“Fuck protocol,” he snaps. “That girl would have died if you’d followed protocol.”

My heart sinks. “I think she did die.”

“No, she didn’t.” He sounds surprised. “They’re still working on her in suspended animation.”

“
What
?”

I don’t want to believe him. It seems too good to be true. And I can’t allow myself to feel any false hope. That will just make the blow of failure that much more painful.

“Yeah. I saw them wheel her in there with the crash cart. They’re going to try to bring her back after they operate.”

My heart rate picks up a little, and despite my best efforts, hope beats down on me like a warm ray of sunshine. 

I’m also a little bit excited. I’ve never seen this procedure performed, and I want to be there when they do it.

“You wanna go watch?” Caleb asks, correctly interpreting the eagerness in my eyes.

I glance back up at his face and crack a smile.

“Okay. Hang on.”

Caleb reaches up and hits the button to run the decontamination cycle again. I cringe as cold water pelts us both, and a strange feeling of intimacy creeps over me as I watch the water soak through his scrubs and rain down on his face. 

He grins at me through the blast of water, and I feel myself go a little red as I stare at the tiny droplets clinging to his blond eyelashes and ruddy lips.

Then the water stops, and he turns to open the door on the other side. There’s a stack of fluffy towels that smell like bleach and a bunch of scrubs in odd sizes waiting on the shelf. I hurriedly dry off my hair, and we turn away from each other to change.

I don’t know what that was, but a new excitement is thrumming through my veins that has nothing to do with the medical miracle I’m about to witness.

Maybe I don’t have to hate Caleb after all.

eleven

Sawyer

I’ve watched dozens of surgeries from the gallery above this operating theater, but I’ve never had the urge to fall right through the glass and shout in the patient’s ear,
Come on! You can do it!

I’ve always been a detached observer, as though it was a staged production where the nurses, doctors, and even the patient knew exactly what was about to happen.

This is nothing like that.

The doctors put Lenny in suspended animation — a procedure I’ve read about but never actually seen. She’s lying on the operating table under layers of scratchy blue paper with her arms at her sides. The surgical lighting makes her look even more like a corpse: Her hair is a bright, unnatural orange, and her skin is practically translucent.

She looks dead because she is, technically. When her heart stopped, the doctors pumped all the blood from her body and replaced it with a saline solution. Chilling her body should delay brain death and buy the doctors a few hours to fix the damage to her organs and repopulate her body with blood.

“That’s incredible,” breathes Caleb.

The look on his face captures the way I’m feeling exactly. His nose is barely an inch from the glass, and I can see Lenny’s body reflected in his wide eyes.

“She still might not make it.”

He glances over at me. “She definitely wouldn’t have made it if it weren’t for you. Her heart stopped right when she got here. A few more minutes, and . . .”

I swallow, trying not to focus on the “what ifs.”

Caleb turns back to watch the operation, and his face falls into a scowl. “I just can’t believe it.”

“What?”

“That it’s all true. I thought ExCon was making everything up about the hostile survivors in the cleared zone, but
someone
had to shoot her.”

“Oh.” I hurriedly school my expression. “Yeah . . . you’re right.”