Only One Wave by Jenifer Ruff

Author:Jenifer Ruff [Ruff, Jenifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Greyt Companion Press
Published: 2021-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The annoying and repetitive ringing wouldn’t stop.

Madeline’s alarm.

It pulled her from the deep, dreamless expanse of nothingness where her brain was trying to recharge. She woke sprawled across the entire bed in the empty dormitory room. Her first thought—where was Quinn? Had he already adjusted to the major time difference? She certainly had not. If she was home, she’d smack that alarm off and go back to sleep. It took another few groggy seconds for her to remember the tox screen results. Without lingering another moment, she sprung out of bed and got dressed.

The drug test results from last night explained the outbreak symptoms. Despite the many questions still to be answered, that knowledge should have provided a small sense of satisfaction, …but it didn’t. Something specific about the discovery bugged her. It bothered her last night, right up until she fell asleep, and now the troubling feeling had returned full force. Unfortunately, there were plenty of other things to figure out, like determining where the drugs came from.

She brushed her teeth and reviewed her list for the day. The first item was to compare concentration levels across patients to help narrow down the source of exposure.

She set her toothbrush aside absentmindedly. No. On second thought…concentration comparisons wouldn’t work. Not in this situation. Most drugs had a half-life, the time required to reduce to half its initial value as it metabolized. Patients who had been in the containment area longest would show lower concentration of drugs, which would skew her results.

And…wait a minute…wasn’t the half-life of meth less than 24 hours? She was almost positive it was. That’s what bothered her about the tox results! If she hadn’t been so tired, she would have picked up on the discrepancy immediately. Most of the patients had been in containment for more than a day. Why were the drugs still present in such high concentrations?

She sat on the end of the bed and powered up her laptop to check the normal metabolization rates for meth, cocaine, and morphine. Still no signal. She rebooted and tried again, checking her satellite phone while she waited for the computer to reboot. Same result. No way to communicate with the outside world or do research on the internet, which made her feel very alone. Outside the window, flimsy-looking clouds hung in a calm sky. The storm had long passed. So why couldn’t she connect? “Could just one thing here work as intended?” she said aloud.

After taking a few deep breaths to curb her frustration, she opened the photo icon on her personal phone and scrolled between the test results for Martina, Colonel Nelson, and Nate.

What? This can’t be correct.

She checked them again and again.

There must be a mistake.

Martina was the first patient to enter the containment area. The concentration of drugs in her system should be lowest. Instead, they were the highest. The Colonel had been in the containment area for two days. His levels were almost as high as Martina’s. Nate had been there less than twenty-four hours and his levels were the lowest.

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