Mercy 6 by David Bajo

Author:David Bajo [David Bajo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Published: 2014-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

33.

Mendenhall went directly from the roof to Pathology. The lab door wasn’t locked. She entered. Claiborne was slumped over a side desk, head resting on arms. His feet had dolled outward, nothing holding him up but the stool, which appeared ready to slide away and spill him to the floor. Cello music played, a soft, pulsing solo. Above him two screens displayed full-body scans.

Each body was shown in both profile and sublimate position. She felt herself already gone into ER mode, three seconds of assessment before moving.

“When it’s crazy bad,” her mentor had explained, “count to three before moving. You’ll save time. You’ll spare yourself, the front end of your nerves.”

But this shouldn’t have been crazy. There was only one thing—

Claiborne. The scans above, the two bodies multiplied, were throwing her, casting her perception into a high wind. She snapped on fresh gloves and rushed to Claiborne. His lips were parted, his fingers in a gnarl, no respiration. But she wasn’t waiting that long, long enough to watch for breathing. In front, her gloved hand felt disconnected, leading.

He bolted upright before she touched him, and she froze, hand raised, two fingers ready. He blinked and then focused on her hand.

“You put on gloves. You were going to check for pulse.”

She nodded upward to the screens. “It was them, the other bodies. Sorry.”

Claiborne pulled at the back of his neck, flexed his shoulders.

“Don’t be. It shows there’s hope for you. It shows you kind of really might think it’s viral.”

“I’ve been thinking that,” she said. “Mullich got me thinking. I told him it was in there. In him. In them. Us.”

“Well.” He motioned to the screens. “It’s not in you or him.”

She realized the one screen was her. She flinched and turned to the one for Mullich.

“What?” asked Claiborne. He nodded to the scan of Mullich.

“What’s he have you thinking?”

She resisted looking at the scans. She focused on the cello music, imagined breathing it. “What if it is in us? Some of us.”

“You’re thinking syndrome?”

“Why not? We have nothing but death and indicators. Maybe we can’t find the one thing because there are two things. It happens to us all the time in ER. Maybe it’s like Reye’s. Working off a common virus. Coryza plus something else. Zoster plus something else.”

He almost laughed, no smile but a straightening of the shoulders.

“You and Thorpe are still going the same way. He’ll like that. I think.”

“Assuming the virus is horizontal,” she replied. “In us. Then the other factor has to be vertical.”

“They’ve taken all the air filters. All disposal receptacles.”

At first she felt a sense of headway, almost a rush. She examined the overhead scans, briefly hers, focusing on Mullich’s form, sublimate to profile. That could take forever, to search and test for the vertical factor. It would split resources. They could never find it.

As in Reye’s Syndrome. We just know it’s there. We just know the two ends of the equation: pox plus aspirin plus childhood times y equals sudden death. Remove any one additive and we’re okay; damn that unknown variable.

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