Blood of the White Bear

by Marcia Calhoun Forecki

  “What the hell?” Rachel mumbled.

  She tapped her brake to get the SUV driver’s attention. He probably didn’t realize he was so close to the Prius. The driver did not back off. If anything, he moved closer. Now, Rachel was afraid to slow down, so she sped up. The SUV increased its speed and stayed right on Rachel’s tail. She could see now that it was a big Grand Cherokee, with windows tinted almost as black as the metal.

  Rachel changed to the left lane, letting the Grand Cherokee pass if that was what the driver wanted. The driver did not speed ahead, but actually moved over to Rachel’s lane. She slowed down, and then the SUV was in front of her to the right. She put on her turn signal, to show that she intended to change back to the right lane, behind the SUV. As she started to move to the right, the SUV put on its brakes. Rachel jerked her Prius back into the left lane, or she would have plowed into the back of the Grand Cherokee.

  Rachel slowed down more. Another car pulled up behind her. She was going much less than the speed limit now. There was plenty of room for the car behind her to pass her on the right side. She put on her hazard lights, so the car behind her might think she was having trouble and go around her. The car moved to the right lane, sped up, and passed the SUV on the left with no difficulty.

  The SUV was now opposite Rachel on the right. He matched her speed whether she slowed down or sped up. Rachel checked her iPhone. Highway 599 continued northeast for several more miles and then curved sharply to the southeast, into town. There was no exit off 599, until she got around the curve. Rachel wondered what the SUV would do if she stopped on the shoulder. She had her phone ready to dial 911, if he stopped and attempted to approach her. By now, the two cars were going only about 40 miles per hour. Rachel decided to try to gun the Prius one more time and get around the SUV. When she stepped on the accelerator, the SUV cut sharply to the left and hit the Prius on the right bumper. Rachel had to pull the steering wheel around to the right, to keep from going into a spin. She took her foot off the accelerator but remembered to stay off the brake. She was driving as she would on icy streets in Connecticut. She had no experience trying to out-drive someone who was apparently trying to hit her. Was this guy drunk or crazy?

  After she straightened out, Rachel looked in her mirror. Rachel kept her foot on the gas. She didn’t know if this nut would change his mind and want to play again, so she wanted to get into town as quickly as she could.

  Rachel looked in her mirror. She could not see the SUV at all. It could not have exited the highway. It had to be in her blind spot. She turned her head and looked over her right shoulder. There he was. He was inching to the left, pushing her off the road. He kept moving closer and closer. Rachel was on the shoulder, going too fast. The SUV was still beside her. She was crossing the median. In a few feet, she would be on the shoulder of southbound 599. The SUV meant to push her into the oncoming traffic. Rachel slowed down and then pushed the accelerator to the floor. The SUV matched her move for move. She considered letting him hit her, but at these speeds, her Prius would be knocked spinning into the oncoming traffic. Her only chance was to drive into the southbound lanes and hope she could keep enough control to maneuver around the sparse traffic. Once on the other road, maybe she could jam on her brakes and let the SUV slide into the oncoming traffic. No, she couldn’t do that either. She couldn’t let the vehicle cause a potentially fatal accident. She had to maneuver her own car and the SUV, as well.

  Her first test came when a small pickup came directly at her. The pickup swerved around her on the left, honking its horn. The Grand Cherokee was still on the right shoulder. He was bumping the Prius on the right. The SUV was big enough that it could push the Prius into an oncoming car. Rachel hoped someone was dialing 911.

  The big curve of 599 was coming up. Both northbound and southbound had to slow down to swing around the curve. Rachel thought if she could get across both lanes and drive off the highway entirely, the Grand Cherokee would follow her, and the lives of the other drivers would be safe. Desert and gray sage lay beyond the highway. Would the SUV chase her across the desert? He had four-wheel drive and high clearance. The Prius wouldn’t go far in this terrain. Rachel did not have time to think ahead to what she might do if the Prius gave out and the driver of the SUV came after her. For now, she had to get across two lanes of traffic and keep the SUV close to her, without hitting anyone head-on. Unfortunately, the curve in the highway made it impossible to see what was coming directly at her, probably very fast. Rachel pulled herself forward in the seat and looked as far to the right as she could. She did not see anything except the hood of the SUV. At least traveling across the lanes of cars, anything oncoming would see the taller Grand Cherokee first. Maybe, there would be time to slow down and get around them on the shoulder. It was now or never. Rachel turned the wheel to the left and raced across the final lane of the highway and the shoulder. She hit the desert with a jolt. Rachel nearly lost control of her car and the desert sage scraped the bottom of the Prius. How long would an oil pan last against this, she wondered.

  Driving on the desert ground, Rachel’s car was soon embedded in a dust cloud. A cloak of invisibility, she thought. She stopped, hoping she had a few minutes to think before the dust settled and her Prius was visible again. When she could finally see behind her, Rachel saw the SUV was stopped. Distances in the desert become distorted, she knew, but the SUV looked uncomfortably close. She watched in her mirror for the driver to open his door, but the door remained closed. The SUV did not move.

  “Okay, if you want to play Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote, I’ll be the Roadrunner,” Rachel said aloud. She gunned the Prius forward and made a tight turn to the left and then a figure eight back to the right. She kicked up another huge dust cloud. Hoping the SUV would not know which direction she was traveling in all that dust, she circled again and drove right in front of it. She turned again and was now behind her pursuers, headed for the highway. As she passed, Rachel tried to read the license plate on the SUV, but it was covered with dust.

  Bumping back onto the highway, Rachel yelled at her iPhone, “Nearest police station.” Every urban woman knows that when a stranger is following her, she drives to the nearest police station. Siri’s calm voice replied, “The nearest police station is on Camino Entrada.” Rachel swung around behind the SUV. It did not move. She drove toward 599. She still had to cross the southbound lanes and median to get back to traveling in the right direction. She maneuvered safely back to the curve and exited at Cerrillos Road. She kept checking her mirror. There was no black Grand Cherokee. Maybe it stalled out, but that was unlikely, because the SUV was brand new.

  Rachel turned at Camino Entrada and went to the police station just north of the intersection. She was not sure what she would tell the police, but one thing was certain. The SUV knew what she was driving. She had to turn in the Prius for a different car. She would need a police report for the damage. In any event, this was the safest place she could be. She gathered her purse and keys, with shaking hands, and walked into the police station. As she waited for the officer at the front desk to acknowledge her, Rachel was aware that someone was staring at her. After the events of the last few minutes, she was understandably afraid of being watched. She swung around to face the man. He was about to receive all the anger Rachel had built up at the Grand Cherokee driver. Fair or not, Rachel had to unload on someone.

  “What are you looking at?” she demanded.

  “Rachel?”

  “You don’t get to know my name!” she growled.

  “I’m John Osborne.”

  John gave Rachel the moment she needed to remember him. Who was this guy? A friend of her Uncle Henry? Rachel was too rattled by the recent car chase for her life to think clearly, but she knew him. The jeans, the plaid shirt, the dusty work boots. Professor Osborne, of course. She had volunteered as an undergrad on a dig he supervised during winter break, when her curiosity about her father and uncle’s work d
rew her to New Mexico. The two connected over her father’s body of study in the area. Maybe connected a little too much. He hadn’t changed at all. The dust on the boots was probably from the dig she had helped with years back. Rachel wondered if he was still hitting on freshman girls. As she thought back, all the tension flowed out of her body. She sat down on the floor and started to cry. The police officer at the front desk was ready to acknowledge her.

  “Is this man bothering you, Miss?” the cop asked.

  “What kind of a state are you running when people can try to kill a person on a public highway?”

  “Ma’am?”

  Osborne helped Rachel to her feet and into the chair next to the officer’s desk. He pulled a chair from another desk up beside her.

  “This is Rachel Bisette,” Osborne said to the officer. “Whatever she tells you is the gospel truth.”

  “Doctor Bisette,” Rachel corrected. “I’m here to do some research at the University Hospital, and some maniacs in a black SUV are trying to kill me.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  A hospital is hushed chaos. Rachel stood in the hallway of the ICU wing, the only still point in the rush of people and machinery in and out of rooms. Four patients were placed in the ICU with mutated Sin Nombre. Rachel knew there were at least that many patients in an isolation unit on an upper floor. These patients were not yet ill enough to require intubation and mechanical ventilation. So far, no patients admitted with the symptoms of the mutated virus had recovered and been released. All of them progressed to the ICU. Two died in the last twenty-four hours, and the fatality rate was still one hundred percent. Rachel knew that rate would not continue. Not even the Black Death of the fourteenth century killed all its victims. At this stage, no one infected but not severely ill had come into the hospital, or been reported by a physician.

  “You can’t be on this floor, ma’am,” said a nurse. Behind a mask, she was breathing as though she had been running a race.

  Rachel showed her identification badge. “I’m CDC,” she said.

  “Your lab is downstairs.”

  “I wanted to see some patients, if that’s all right.”

  The nurse was clearly not happy about anyone on the floor who might get in her way. “OK, but gown up. This floor is in strict isolation.”

  “I understand. Can I help you?”

  “Yeah, stay out of the way, and get us a vaccine.”

  The nurse rushed off, bumping Rachel as she passed.

  Rachel turned and walked toward a room where racks of gowns, gloves, and masks were posted beside the door. After suiting up, she entered the room. The white board across from the bed listed the patient’s name as Rick Nichols. Rachel scanned the computer in the room for the last entry on his chart. The monitor by his bed showed his oxygen saturation was seventy-two percent. He was receiving oxygen through a cannula. Rachel observed dyspnea with coarse breath sounds and wheezes. She hardly needed to use a stethoscope to hear the crackles in his chest when he coughed. He needed to be intubated and mechanically ventilated.

  Rachel went out of the room to find the charge nurse. A nurse was on the phone at the station, and Rachel wrote a note on a napkin and put it in front of the nurse’s face. “Charge nurse?” The nurse shrugged and raised her hand, but continued her conversation. Rachel began writing another note, and the nurse put up one finger for her to wait. When she hung up the phone, she said, “What do you need her for?”

  “Mr. Nichols needs to be intubated right away.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Nichols.”

  “Room number. That’s what we go by.”

  “Um, I don’t remember. He’s down this side, three rooms.”

  “I’ll get someone in there, as soon as I can.”

  The nurse answered the phone. “The VA is sending two ventilators over by helicopter. When they get here, rush them down here stat.”

  Rachel returned to Mr. Nichols’ room. Before she entered, she noticed his room number: 206. The next time she made a request she would remember to use it.

  When Rachel got back into the room, Mr. Nichols was showing signs of worsening pulmonary distress. His lips and nail beds were cyanotic. Rachel called for a nurse. When the nurse at the desk answered, Rachel said, “What’s the ETA on the ventilators?”

  “Five minutes to touch down, then another two or three to get the units down here.”

  “This is Dr. Bisette, CDC. I’m intubating Mr. 206.”

  “Wait for the ventilator,” the nurse instructed.

  “I’ll bag him until the machine gets here.”

  “I’ll try to find someone to help you.”

  Rachel pulled the bag from the wall that held the intubation instruments. She had not put a tube into a patient’s throat since residency. It was a tricky procedure. If the tube was not inserted properly, the oxygen would go into Mr. Nichols’ stomach, doing him no good and wasting valuable time. A doctor or nurse needs practice to do the intubation properly. Rachel did not have the practice, but Mr. Nichols did not have an alternative.

  “Come on, Mr. 206. If you beat this thing, I promise to make you famous.”

  Rachel accomplished the intubation on the first try. She attached the bag and began squeezing it to push air into Mr. Nichols’ rapidly failing lungs. She squeezed for a full minute and felt her hands tighten. Rachel’s upper body strength was exceptional, from years of rowing and swimming, but bagging required strength in the hands, a completely different set of muscles. By the second minute, Rachel’s hands were stiffening. Mr. Nichols’ fingernails were less blue, but they were hardly pink. He was getting oxygen, but he needed more than Rachel was able to push with the manual bag. Where was that ventilator?

  As Rachel continued to breathe for Mr. Nichols, she felt powerful and vulnerable at the same time. This was the doctor-patient relationship she missed. One person giving care to one other person. All Rachel learned, all her intuition, and all her human compassion were mustered for Rick Nichols and for no one else at this moment. The life-sustaining oxygen flowing through Mr. Nichols was supplied directly and exclusively by Rachel Bisette. Not since her residency had Rachel felt such a connection to a patient.

  Yet, there was a feeling of helplessness, also. Mr. Nichols was only one of the victims of the mutated Sin Nombre. There were others around her and more to come. She could not bag them all. She probably could not save them all, but she could save some, patients not even sick, not even exposed. She could save the future victims, if she could isolate the mutation and create a vaccine against it. While she cared for Mr. Nichols, the vital research waited. While she worked in the lab, Mr. Nichols might perish.

  The muscles in Rachel’s hands were cramped and burning. She counted out loud every time she squeezed the bag, and the counting took her mind off the pain in her hands. After counting to thirty, she started over. Finally, a nurse came into room 206 to help her.

  “The ventilator is on the helipad. It will be down in a couple of minutes.” They took turns pushing oxygen into Mr. Nichols until the ventilator arrived. Rachel watched as the nurse removed the bag and attached the tube in Mr. Nichols’ throat to the ventilator. The machine started up with a sort of “thwack” sound. Rachel jumped. It was louder than she expected. She watched Mr. Nichols’ chest expand and checked his nail beds. She turned to smile at the nurse but found she was alone in 206. The nurse could not hang around to bask in the good results of one patient when so many others needed her. Rachel was satisfied with her efforts for this man, but it was not enough. The virus was only getting started. It could mutate many times before it could be stopped and then controlled with a vaccine. Rachel checked Mr. Nichols’ monitor. His oxygen saturation was up to eighty-five percent. In the hall, she removed her gown, peeled off her gloves, and hurried to her place in the lab.

  Chapter Thirty

  Calvin Yellow Horn entered the can
yon he knew as a second home by a rutted dirt road. His mother’s little medicine house stood on one side of a narrow valley of monumental cliffs. High above, on the other side of the valley, was a narrow ledge from where one could enter narrow caves, barely visible from below. The cave entrances were hidden by the shadows of the outcroppings and niches created by millennia of wind and rain. Only one familiar with the canyon would even know of the caves. Calvin spent his whole life in the canyon, first following his mother and later coming on his own.

  For Calvin, the caves were the perfect hiding places for the merchandise he bought and sold: weapons to be sold in Mexico, drugs to be sold in the U.S., and electronics to be sold back and forth. Calvin said that the whites brought capitalism to the Four Corners, and he was just honoring the tradition of the white guests with his various, mostly illegal enterprises.

  John Osborne arrived at the canyon a few minutes behind Calvin. He did not have to follow closely. He knew the canyon nearly as well as the Yellow Horns did. He explored the caves extensively and camped in the canyon often, whenever the need to extricate himself from the civilized world overcame him. Sometimes, he used the canyon as an escape from a student who took his flirtations too seriously. He would have spent part of his summer here, if Dr. Arellano had not found a way for Osborne to distance himself from an ill-advised romance with a beautiful young student. The Antiquities Reclamation Initiative was his rescue from a career-threatening, and much too familiar, infatuation.

  Osborne parked in a place he knew would be hidden from Calvin’s view when he exited the caves. He knew very well what Calvin stored in them. Osborne had followed Calvin’s entrepreneurial career over the years. His students bought cheap jewelry and “ceremonial” mind-altering substances from him. It was possible to know a lot about someone in their desert community without actually meeting them. Osborne drank bottled water from a cooler, until the sun dipped behind the rocks. Then, he switched to strong black Starbucks from a thermos. There was a bottle of José Cuervo in the glove box, in case Calvin decided to spend the night in a cave.