Gunsmoke Blues by Balogun Ojetade

Author:Balogun Ojetade [Ojetade, Balogun]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781722386122
Google: TL08vAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 41927306
Publisher: Roaring Lions Productions
Published: 2018-09-16T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Charity Hospital, full moon.

Doctor Laveau yawned. After working an eighteen-hour shift he was reaching the limit of his endurance. Not since his days as a junior doctor had he been so overworked, and he had been a lot younger then. The number of patients requiring Intensive Care grew almost day by day. Never mind beds—there simply weren’t enough doctors to treat them all. Whatever this thing was, it was spreading at epidemic rates.

Susie was right. The bite cases needed to be kept away from other patients. Doctor Laveau had already asked the Medical Director for a dedicated ward, but the hospital was stretched to full capacity. He would have to deal with the outbreak with the resources already at his disposal.

He’d begun to make a little progress in treating the condition, mostly by trial and error. Administering intravenous fluids as early as possible was the critical factor. That, and the severity of the wound. Bites were a lot more dangerous than scratches, as far as he could tell.

The patients that survived the critical stage and regained consciousness seemed to make a partial recovery, but he wouldn’t say they were completely cured. In the end he had no choice but to discharge them in order to free up beds for new arrivals. The whole situation was just one step away from blowing up.

It had been hard to spot a pattern in the cases at first, because of the high degree of variability of the symptoms. The case reports had confused him too. Rats, humans. Sometimes bites, other times just scratches. It was hard to make sense of the information, and he still didn’t really know what he was dealing with. He’d had blood samples from his patients tested for viral, parasitic and fungal infections but nothing had shown up. Bacterial infection didn’t seem to be a factor either, or at least none of the antibiotics he’d tried had done much to combat the primary infection.

The patients’ immune systems were clearly battling against a pathogen of some type, but the doctors and laboratory technicians couldn’t identify it. The new condition had the hallmarks of something completely new to medicine.

He recalled reading something in the news a year or so prior. Some mad Negro doctor in Chicago—Dr. Williams, he remembered—had predicted a rat apocalypse, or at least that was how some of the newspapers had reported it. He’d read the original articles, but they were more fevered speculation than journalistic fact. He hadn’t been able to locate any actual medical papers. But he’d discovered something else in his correspondences with hospitals around the country that had piqued his interest—similar reports of cases from other hospitals. He’d even unearthed a few cases overseas, dating back nearly a year, close to the time of the newspaper stories. It was starting to look like Dr. Daniel Hale Williams’ predictions contained a grain of truth.

He was examining the progress of one of the bite patients when the screaming started.

They were a man’s screams, and not just the usual cry for help you heard on a hospital ward, but something more primal, more desperate.

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