Pestilence: A Medical Thriller (6 page)

14

Ian leaned the seat back in the Audi and glanced over at Katherine. She had cried for nearly fifteen minutes straight and then sobbed a few more before quieting down. When she was calm enough, he asked, “You hungry?”

She looked
at him in amazement and then back out at the road.

“Well
, I’m hungry. You know anywhere good around here? I feel like Mexican.”

She was quiet a long while and then said, “
Paiso is good.”

“
Paiso it is. Let’s go.”

She got off on the next exit
, and they headed through a somewhat rundown part of the city Ian wasn’t familiar with. The addresses had only street names instead of numbers, and most of the stores had bars on the windows.

“How’s a good girl like you know about this part of the city?”

“I used to work here.”

“
Doing what?”

“Delivering meals.”

“To who?”

“Homeless youth.”

He laughed. “Really? Wow, what an incredible waste of time.”

“They’re kids,” she said quietly.

“Let me tell you something, Katherine. I’ve been everywhere in the world and met all kinds of people, and you know the one principle that applies to all of them? They are in their life exactly where their past thoughts have brought them. Our thoughts are what make us who we are. You keep thinking negative thoughts, and that’s all you’re going to bring into your life. Bailing out those that haven’t mastered themselves doesn’t help either person. It’s actually an embarrassment to both.”

“What about you?” she asked. “Did your thoughts bring you here?”

“They did,” he said, looking out the window as they passed dimly lit liquor stores and fast-food restaurants with thick, bulletproof glass in the drive-throughs.

“So you thought about killing people?”

“No, I thought about efficiency. That’s what I do. I’m an efficiency expert in an industry where that is sorely lacking.”

After t
urning into a lot filled to the brim with cars, Katherine parked in back near the dumpsters and they walked to the entrance. A line stretched in front of the restaurant, and they were told it would be a half-hour wait. Ian checked his watch.

“Do you want to find somewhere else?” she said.

“No.”

He took out a wad of hundred dollar bills and went to the hostess. He whispered
, “Beauty is a terrible thing not to reward.” Then he slipped her three hundred dollar bills. She took two menus and, without calling any names, sat them by the window.

“You paid three
hundred dollars to eat here?” Katherine asked when the hostess had left.

“You can’t put a price on quality,” he said a
s he opened the menu and looked over the items.

After he ordered a
chimichanga with spicy mole, he handed the menus to the waitress and asked Katherine, “You sure you don’t want to eat anything?”

She shook her head.

Ian smiled at the waitress and told her, “Just me today.”

When they were alone, Katherine looked around
, and Ian noticed.

“You could scream your head off right now
. But that wouldn’t change anything.”

“They would call the police.”

“Eventually, yes, they would. But this is Los Angeles in a shitty part of the city. The police will take at least ten, maybe fifteen minutes to respond. And what do you think will happen in that ten or fifteen minutes?” He glanced over at a fat man in a suit who was accompanied by a woman dressed like a hooker. “You think he’ll come to your rescue?” He looked at another young man of about twenty on a date. “Or how about him? Or maybe you think these poor waiters earning two bucks an hour plus tips are going to run over here and risk their lives for a customer?”

“Maybe.”

He grinned, glancing back at a child at the table behind them. He leaned back in his chair, partially exposing the holster with the pistol inside. “I’ll tell you exactly what would happen. Nothing. Not a single person in here would do anything once they saw this gun. I would pull it out, shoot you in the head, and then again in the heart to make sure you were dead. I would take the keys out of your pocket and then find someone else to drive me. Maybe the hostess.”

She shook her head, her eyes
on the table. “Why are you doing this to me?”

“I’m not doing it to you. You were brought here by your choices. The choices you’ve made in life brought you here
, and the choices I made in life brought me to this side of the table.”

“You’re not making sense. You said our thoughts bring us where we are.”

He smiled. “Thoughts make our choices, and our choices make our actions, which make our lives.”

The food came out a short while later
, and he ate with gusto, then chugged a full glass of water.

“You were absolutely right about that,”
he said. “That was delicious.” He wiped his lips with a napkin. “So have you made your decision?”

“About what?”

“About whether you’re going to scream or not.”

She didn’t say anything
, and he rose from the table, leaving a hundred dollar bill next to the plate. He took her arm and dragged her out of the restaurant, and she didn’t protest much.

Once they were on the road again
, he pulled out his phone and checked the next name before he said, “Head to the 405. We got a thirty-minute drive ahead of us.”

15

Dobbins Air Force Base was the closest air base to Samantha
, and she sped down the interstate to get there in time for her flight. She wouldn’t arrive in California until early the next morning. But she was too wired to sleep on the plane, so she’d brought her iPad, which had several movies on it she hadn’t watched yet.

When she arrived
, the flight wasn’t scheduled to leave for another forty-five minutes, so she waited by the gate since they wouldn’t let her in without proper clearance. Duncan had forced himself onto the flight and demanded that he go with her. She protested, saying he should be on the flight for purposes of getting her there and then fly right back after dropping her off. But he wouldn’t take no for an answer, and she didn’t fight hard. The truth was she could really use someone with her.

Within minutes of her arrival, Duncan appeared at the gate in a cab. He paid
before getting out, then hugged and kissed her.

“You sure about this?” he
asked by way of greeting.

“She’s my only sister. And she’s in trouble
. I know it.”

He nodded. “Okay. But we’re going there as part of the military. I only got you clearance by saying the CDC needed access as part of a study I’m doing and that I couldn’t do
it without you. You cannot go anywhere without me. I’m serious, Sam. You have to stick by me once we’re there.”

“Why? What did they tell you was going on?”

“I’m not entirely clear on the details, but it sounds like they’ve shut the entire state down, and no one can leave. I don’t know how they intend to enforce that, but that’s their plan.”

She shook her head. “I thought we were done with this. I though
t the agent had died out in South America and Oahu.”

“Nature doesn’t know how to give up
. But I think it’s contained. Just under a hundred known infections, every one of them quarantined in a hospital. Hopefully, this will be over once no more cases appear.” He looked at the guard at the gate and then back to Sam. “You certain?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, let’s go.”

16

Dr. Aneil Deluge walked down the corridor of Saint Anthony’s Hospital in Napa, California. Under his arm, he carried a clipboard with two intake sheets attached. He took the elevator to the quarantine unit on the top floor, which was really nothing more than a portion of that floor cut off from the rest.

The elevators dinged and opened
, and he stepped off. The nurse behind the desk smiled at him, and he smiled back without greeting her. He walked the length of the corridor to a room separated from the others. He looked in on the patient through a glass viewing window.

Candice Montgomery was
a twenty-four-year-old student at Napa Valley College. She was studying communications and had been a cheerleader for the football team. Deluge hoped she had not been to a game or practice before she’d been admitted to the hospital.

Her symptoms were, at first, i
ndicative of the flu—fever, rashes, headaches, and vomiting. But, in a progression so quick that Deluge was left wondering if she’d been poisoned, her condition deteriorated.

First
, she developed small pustules on her skin. Little bumps that looked like kernels of corn had popped up on her flesh. Then her eyes, throat, and nose became irritated and swollen. These symptoms were not entirely alarming to Deluge or the ER staff, but what happened next, they had never seen before.

She broke out in pustules so severely
that they covered nearly ninety-five percent of her body. They even broke out inside her throat, on her tongue, and over her eyes. She had gone blind as the pustules ruptured the conjunctiva, iris, and pupil. Heavy scarring had occurred afterward, and he guessed she was permanently blind.

But a more alarming symptom had developed th
at morning. Her skin appeared to be black. Though full barrier nursing was in place and the risk of infection from an airborne pathogen was low, two nurses and a phlebotomist had turned down his requests that they tend to her. Since he had to suit up and withdraw the blood himself every time, running many tests was difficult. The pustules had made injections extremely painful for her, as well, and she would thrash about whenever the needle went into any part of her body.

The blackness underneath her skin had spread over her entire body
, and she appeared as though she’d been charred. One nurse, brave enough to examine her, had revealed to him that Candice’s membranes in her orifices were disintegrating. The soft tissue at the opening of her nose, anus, vagina, and eyes was slipping off her as if they had rotted away.

Candice had been at Saint Anthony’s for eight
days, and it only took one day of her symptomology for Deluge to notify the Centers for Disease Control. They had flown out, improved the barriers to prevent further infection, and then left. The man that had been sent, a doctor by the name of Cheney, told Deluge that she was too far gone for treatment and that they should keep her comfortable for the next few days. Nothing else could be done.

Blood tests had confirmed the presence of smallpox, but in a form the hematologist didn’t recognize. The CDC had taken all her infected blood and the
test results.

“There must be something we can do,” Deluge had said to Cheney as he was preparing to leave.

“This pathogen is a hundred percent fatal.”

“
That’s ridiculous. Nothing’s a hundred percent fatal.”

Cheney glanced
at him and then handed him a sheet of paper. “Write down anyone that has interacted with her since she’s been in the hospital. Then speak with her family and see if you can find out who she’s interacted with in the five days before she was admitted here. If any of them are showing symptoms, they have to be admitted with a full barrier set up. If you have any concerns, here’s the number to our local office. They’ll send someone out to help you.”

With that, Cheney left, leaving Deluge to wonder
exactly what the hell he had on his hands.

Nancy Claiborne had worked at Saint Anthony’s Hospital for thirteen years and loved every minute of it
—even the horrible patients who yelled, threw up on her, and fought. They had once even wrestled a gang member to the ground because he was on PCP and had knocked the doctor out cold.

B
ut her first shift in the quarantine unit was unnerving. Many of the nurses had refused to even go in, but she wasn’t scared. She had dealt with the worst outbreak of flu she’d ever seen and had lived to tell the tale without a scratch.

She was in the locker room
, changing into her scrubs. She put on her Crocs and then went out onto the floor. Walking to the elevator, she didn’t really speak to anybody, which was unusual for her. But she wanted her concentration, and the best way to maintain it was to ignore others.

She stepped off on
the top floor, and Dr. Deluge was standing in front of one of the patient’s doors. As she came up next to him, she looked into Candice’s room.

“How is she?”

“Stable, I suppose,” he said. “Has she moved or talked?”

“Not since about three days ago.”

“Any vomiting or bowel movements?”

“One
bowel movement yesterday, but it was mostly blood.” She shook her head. “Poor girl. She’s my Mathew’s age.”

Deluge rubbed his temples with his thumb and middle finger. “I’m going home
. I’ve worked a twenty-hour shift. Keep me apprised of any major updates.”

“Sure.”

As Deluge left, Nancy walked back to the nurse’s station on the quarantined floor and relieved the lone nurse sitting there, surfing the internet. She stretched and then opened solitaire and began playing.

Around midnight
, Nancy heard something on the monitor. She paused the video she was watching on YouTube and listened. It sounded like coughing. She rose and walked over to Candice’s room to make sure she was all right. Glancing in, she nearly screamed.

Candice
was covered in a thick black blood. The fluid was spurting out of her eyes, ears, and mouth. Nancy wouldn’t say she was vomiting because the heaving reflex was absent. Her blood was just coming out of her body as if being pulled by gravity.

Nancy called
the ER. “I need a crash cart and a doctor up here in quarantine right now!”

Unthinking, seeing only a young girl in pain, she ran in.

She pushed past the transparent barrier and turned Candice to her side. A metal bowl near her mouth caught most of the blood, but it was still coming out of her ears. Nancy grabbed a bedsheet and pressed it to her ear canals to try to slow the bleeding.

For a single moment, Candice stopped vomiting and
sobbed. “Please help me,” she cried.

Before Nancy could say anything, Candice convulsed violently and
jerked onto her back on the bed. She vomited an explosive stream of blood that hit Nancy in the face. It was warm and smelled like foul steak.

Nancy panicked
, turning Candice to her side again, allowing her to vomit into the bowl. But so much blood was coming that it filled the bowl and spilled onto the floor.

The door opened
, and a crash team was there.

“No,” someone shouted down the hall. One of the trauma doctors, Roger, ran over to the room and looked in. “Don’t go in
,” he said. “Gear up first.”

“There’s no time,” Nancy said.

She realized suddenly that the crash team was staring at her. She wondered why, until something wet dripped off her face and onto her hands. She touched her face and came away with the blackness that covered Candice. Until then, she hadn’t registered that the blood on her face was hemorrhagic blood.

“Roger…”

“Get into the shower, now.”

She walked to the bathroom in the corner of the room and washed her face and hands. She started slow
ly and used a little soap, and then rubbed her hands together furiously. She was using so much soap that the suds covered the sink. She scrubbed violently at her face, and after a short time the skin was raw and pink, and she was crying.

She screamed and ran out of the room. The crash
team were in the supply closet where they kept the biohazard gear, and Roger yelled out to her, but she didn’t hear. She was sprinting down the hall. She had to get out of there. The hospital walls were closing in around her, her heart was racing, and she couldn’t breathe. Her chest was tight, and she worried she was having a heart attack.

The elevator
took too long to arrive, so she sprinted down the stairs instead. Hysterical, she burst out onto the first floor and ran for the exit.

The sliding doors opened and another nurse,
Lance Page, walked in. She tried to run past him, but ended up running into him, nearly knocking him off his feet, and their faces bumped.

“Nancy,” he said as she stood and
ran out the door. “Nancy, what’s wrong?”