by Mark Kelly
Simmons frowned. Mei had made it sound like the clinic was overrun by desperate survivors, yet this didn’t look any worse than the queue for coffee at the Georgetown university bagel shop. He was about to say something when Dines cranked hard on the steering wheel, sending the jeep off the road and into the field where the clinic was located.
“There it is,” Mei announced proudly as they drove across the uneven ground.
Simmons leaned sideways to look out the jeep’s front window. A huge khaki-colored tent with a large red and white cross painted on its roof and another cross above its entrance filled the area in front of them. Further back, near the far end of the field, an equally large but otherwise unremarkable black tent sat by itself. Simmons knew the closer tent was the clinic proper, but he was clueless to the purpose of the black one.
Dines steered the jeep towards a pair of soldiers guarding the clinic’s entrance. She slowed the jeep to a crawl, parked next to them and shouted out the window, “Honey, we’re home.”
The two men rolled their eyes. “Jesus, Dines,” one of them said, “how many times do you have to be told not to park in front of the entrance. We need to keep it clear.”
“Visitors,” Dines said, using Mei and Simmons as an excuse.
The soldier leaned in the window. He nodded respectfully to Mei, and then Simmons. “Are they disabled?” he asked Dines sarcastically.
“No.”
“Then park your fucking jeep over there.” Finished with the conversation, he stepped back and pointed at a row of vehicles off to the side of the tent.
Dines threw the jeep into gear and hammered the accelerator as she cranked hard on the steering wheel. The jeep spun around, its rear wheels throwing mud and chewed-up grass into the air. Expecting she would do something like that, the two guards jumped sideways out of the way and gave her the finger.
After the jeep was parked, Simmons grabbed the handle of the small box at his feet and climbed out. The box held a flask containing every bit of biotherapeutic he had been able to produce. Mei followed him out of the jeep. She had barely slammed the door shut when the two boys from earlier bound across the field towards her.
“What did you bring us, Dr. Mei?”
She opened her doctor’s bag and fished around inside it. “Oh no, there’s nothing here. I think I forgot,” she said, teasing them.
“No, you didn’t,” the boys shouted. They hopped up and down as they tried to look into her bag. “You always bring us something. What is it?”
Simmons smiled at their exuberance. He recalled the last thing she had given him from that very same bag and hoped the boys would get something other than a ham sandwich made from potato bread.
“Did you bring us M&Ms,” the boys asked in unison.
“Not today, but I have something else.” She stuck out a closed fist, then opened it. Two plastic-wrapped Tootsie Rolls sat in the palm of her hand. The boys took them, but to Simmons’s surprise both of them stuck the candy into their pocket instead of eating it.
Mei noticed the look on his face. “They never eat it.”
“Why?”
“They save it for other children who are cured. They call it Welcome Back Candy.” She gazed affectionately at the boys. “Those two are special. They’re my angels.”
Simmons watched the boys run down to the road where they tried to coax a couple of soldiers into a friendly game of keep-away. One of the soldiers, a stout but by no means overweight middle-aged man, gave in to their demands and chased after the boys, who quickly made him look foolish as they dodged his awkward attempts to gain control of the ball.
Exhausted from the effort of running after them in his combat boots, he put his hands on his knees and bent over, wheezing.
“Come on, you fat bastard,” Dines yelled at him. “Don’t let those little buggers get the best of you.”
The soldier sucked in a deep breath of air and straightened up. “Let’s see you give it a try, Dines.”
Dines shook her head. “Fuck that. Soccer’s for pussies.”
“No, it’s not,” he yelled back. “It’s the most popular sport in the world.”
“Not anymore, it ain’t,” Dines said.
Mei tapped Simmons on the arm. “Come on, Tony, Let’s go inside before this erupts into a fist-fight.”
“Coming through,” a voice announced from inside the clinic door. Simmons stepped aside as a pair of soldiers wearing translucent surgical gowns over their fatigues came through the opening. Each man held one end of a stretcher with a green body bag on it. Not one, but two bags, he realized. Tied together with a cinch strap.
“Where are they going?” he asked Mei as the men disappeared around the corner of the tent with the stretcher.
“To the morgue—that’s the black tent at the back. There’s an area behind it where they bury the bodies.” The corners of her eyes crinkled with worry. “Are you ready to go in? It’s not very pleasant.”
He nodded and reached for the tent flap, but she stopped him. “Here,” Mei said, handing him a surgical mask she had pulled out of her bag. “Put this on before you go in.”
He gave her a quizzical look. He was immune. They both were. And even if they weren’t, the masks would offer little in the way of protection.
“You’ll be glad to have something to hide the smell,” she said.
They stepped inside. The tent was brightly lit by floodlights on ten-foot high poles. It was also warm and surprisingly humid thanks to an industrial propane heater. A curtain ran through the middle of the tent, dividing it in two.
On the side they were on, a few patients, most of them moaning in pain, lay on hospital cots lined up in a neat row. Every patient was hooked up to an IV-drip. One was receiving an FMT treatment from a soldier-nurse.
A voice called out from behind Simmons, “Excuse me, coming through.” He moved out of the way and a refreshing blast of cool air blew in from outside as the two soldiers, with their now empty stretcher, returned. They slipped through an opening in the curtain to the other side of the tent and he followed them.
A single light hung from a pole. Simmons’s breath hitched at the sight in front of him. The dimly lit space was filled with dozens of cots covering every square inch. Some cots were occupied by patients, moaning and writhing in pain; others held lifeless bodies. It was all too much; the limp corpses, the warm humid air, the cloying smell of the perfume-scented mask.
A claustrophobic wave of nausea washed over him. He yanked the mask from his face and gulped for the cool fresh air he had felt a second ago—and gagged. The stench in the tent was ten-times worse than his lab. It was the smell of death, and bleach, and chronic diarrhea.
“Tony, are you okay?” Mei asked, grabbing his mask and placing it back over his mouth and nose.
“It’s pretty bad,” he said in an embarrassingly weak voice.
“It’s not great, but we make do with what we have.”
“I meant the smell and the bodies and the—”
She stared at him for a second, inspecting him with her doctor’s eyes.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“How do you stand it?” he said, weakly.
Her eyes crinkled sympathetically behind the mask. “I’ve lived this life once before at Bellevue, so it isn’t new for me. But for everyone else here, it’s a new experience. They’re the ones you should ask. They’re the real heroes.”
He gazed at her, unable to even imagine what it was like to spend an hour in the clinic—never mind coming here day after day. He steadied himself and spoke in as strong a voice as he could muster.
“Why don’t you show me around, and then we’ll get started on the trial.”
She gave him a quick once over before drawing the curtain closed. Then she took him by the arm and guided him back to the well-lit section of the tent.
“There’s not much to show, but I’ll give you the ten-cent tour. This is where we treat the ones and twos.”
“Ones and Twos?�
��
“That’s the triage system we use. Ones and Twos are patients in the very early stages of the infection. Most of them come from the refugee camp. The soldiers there have been trained to identify early signs of the infection. If they suspect someone is infected, there’s a medical corpsman who administers the quick react test. Then the patient is brought over here to be triaged if the test is positive.”
Shivering at the memory of the thermometer he had stuck in his mouth at the roadblock, Simmons asked, “Where did you get the test kits?”
“Lucia and Baker found them at the hospital in Deep River. We have a six-month supply.”
He nodded and looked around, counting the patients. There were ten.
“What about over there?” he asked, pointing to the other side of the curtain where there were five times as many bodies.
“That’s where we put the threes and fours—and the zeros,” Mei said. “Threes are patients at approximately the same stage Kateri was when we first started to treat her. Most of the threes and some of the fours would survive if we could administer more FMTs. They’re curable, but it requires much more of the material—and we can’t spare that amount on any single patient.”
“And the zeros?” Simmons asked, afraid he already knew the answer.
“They’re the DOAs,” Mei said in a quiet voice. “Sometimes, the patient doesn’t even survive the trip from the camp.”
He looked around, taking it all in. The clinic was overwhelming. It was like being in the middle of an ever-rising flood with a limited supply of sandbags; no matter how hard you tried, you’d never stop the water. Now, he completely understood Mei’s frustration and hopelessness from a few days earlier.
“Should we get started on the trial?” she asked. “How much biotherapeutic did you bring?”
“All of it. Every bit.”
Feeling utterly useless, he opened the box he was carrying. “There’s three hundred milliliters here,” he said, handing her the flask. “But I have another—”
“Tony, that’s barely enough for one treatment.”
He swallowed the lump in his throat. “We’ve been having a lot of problems getting the bioreactor to scale up.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” he said lamely. “I’m still trying to figure it out. In the meantime, I started work on something else. That’s the new approach I was talking about.”
“What approach?”
“It could be incredible, Mei. It has the potential to make a huge difference in how you treat patients.” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the plastic jar and showed it to her.
“Multivitamins?”
“What? No, that’s just the container I used.”
He uncapped the jar and showed her what was inside it. “Each pill contains beneficial bacterial endospores; hundreds of thousands of them…maybe millions. We extracted and purified them into a highly concentrated dose.”
Mei gave him a disapproving look. “Tony, this is ludicrous. How are spores going to help anything?”
“Think about it,” he said, trying to ignore the negativity in her voice. “When you treat a patient with an FMT using material from Saanvi, you’re effectively replenishing their intestinal microbiota. This is an alternate method of accomplishing the same thing. Some of these spores will be from the immunity bacteria, and when the spores are ingested, they’ll germinate, forming bacteria that will colonize in the patient’s intestinal tract.”
“How did you get spores from Saanvi?”
“They’re not from Saanvi, they’re from me—from my stool.”
Mei crossed her arms and scowled at him. “Yours? You know the FMT treatments only work when we use material from Saanvi.”
“I know, but this isn’t an FMT. This is different. From the very beginning, we’ve struggled to understand what the immunity mechanism is and why it can be transferred from Saanvi but not from anyone else. I still don’t know what the exact mechanism is, but it probably doesn’t matter.”
“Why?”
“Because Bennet gave me an idea on how we might transfer immunity in a different way.”
Mei snorted in disbelief. “Are you telling me an eighteen-year-old private unravelled a medical mystery that eluded the world’s greatest scientists—including you, I might add.”
“He didn’t really figure it out,” Simmons said defensively. “It was more like he gave me a hint. He got the idea from his grandmother’s tomato sauce. It has to do with the concentration of material.”
“Tony, are you out of your mind?”
Dines burst through the clinic’s door, a worried expression on her face. “Come on you two, we have to go.”
“We just arrived. I’m not going anywhere,” Mei said, frowning.
“General’s orders. I need to get you both out of here immediately.”
“What’s going on?”
“Bikers—there’s a gang of them a couple miles from the camp and they’re headed this way.”
Mei shook her head. “I can’t go. They need my help here.”
“You ain’t gonna be helping anyone if those assholes get a hold of you.” Dines looked at Simmons and said, “Talk some sense into her, Professor.”
Simmons took a hurried step towards Mei and grabbed her arm and pulled. “She’s right. We need to go.”
While he ushered Mei to the door, Dines addressed the soldiers inside the clinic. “Listen up. There’s a gang of bikers headed this way. ETA less than five minutes. I’m taking these two back to the base.” She ran her eyes over the group that had gathered around her. “Who is the OIC here?”
A woman wearing a surgical gown and mask stepped forward. Simmons recognized her as the base doctor. Dines snapped to attention and saluted smartly.
“Beg your pardon, Captain Doggard. I didn’t recognize you in that get-up.”
“At ease, Sergeant Dines. Did I hear you correctly, five minutes out?”
“Yes, Ma’am. General’s orders are not to engage unless they start something first.”
“Roger that. Take Dr. Ling and the professor and get out of here.”
27
Do you think I am stupid?
Chenney, the soldier who had sat beside Simmons on the ride to the clinic was waiting outside.
“Ready to evac, Sarge?”
“Let’s rock and roll, Dines said, already moving towards the jeep with a pistol in her hand. “I’ll take point.”
Chenney and the two clinic guards fell in behind her, forming a protective cocoon around Mei and Simmons.
“Eyes open, gents,” Dines shouted. “The general will have our balls if anything happens to these two.”
“Didn’t know you had balls, Sarge.”
“Big and brass,” Dines grunted. “Nothing like those little mouse nuts of yours.”
They reached the jeep and Dines yelled out commands to the soldiers. “Connelly, you’re staying at the clinic. Check in with Captain Doggard and see what she wants you to do. O’Reilly, you’re in the back with the professor and Dr. Ling.”
“And you’re up front with me, but I’m driving,” Dines said, thumping Chenney lightly on his chest with her fist.
“Why can’t I drive?”
“Because the last time you drove, we almost rear-ended Abrams.”
“But that wasn’t my fault, Sarge. Abrams slammed on the brakes without—”
“Doesn’t matter. You’re both shitty drivers. Get a move on, now!” She ran around the front of the jeep and jumped in the driver’s seat. Mei climbed into the back, followed by Simmons, who squished up next to her as O’Reilly and his fifty pounds of body-armor squeezed in, taking up what little space was left.
Simmons glanced out the window towards the road. The line of refugees waiting to see a doctor was gone. He caught a flash of movement as one, then another, and yet another figure disappeared between the rows of seven-foot high golden-brown corn drying in the next field over. The refugees were survivors. They’ve alr
eady made themselves invisible. He nudged Mei and pointed.
She nodded and then cried out. “Where are the boys?”
Simmons craned his neck searching for the two kids. He spotted them standing by the side of the clinic, appearing confused by all the action unfolding around them. Damn it, no one told them to run and hide. He opened his mouth to shout at Dines when suddenly the jeep skidded to a halt a few feet from the road.
“Shit!”
Shit was right.
Coming down the road toward them on big Harley-Davidson motorcycles was a procession of bikers numbering in the low hundreds. Dines slammed the jeep into reverse and zig-zagged backward across the field towards the clinic.
“Out…Out,” she shouted as they skidded to a stop. “O’Reilly, get the doc and professor behind the jeep. Chenney, keep me covered while I radio base, but for Christ's sake, hold your fire unless they start something.”
O’Reilly threw open the rear door and climbed out. He waved his arm furiously, motioning at Simmons and Mei to follow him. When they didn’t move fast enough, he yanked them out, one by one, depositing them ungracefully in the mud.
“Over there,” he said, pointing at the front wheel. “There’s more metal between you and them.”
By them, Simmons assumed the big soldier meant the flurry of bullets that would pummel the jeep any second now. He grabbed Mei by the hand and pulled her tight against the wheel. She landed on her rear-end and tucked the flask of biotherapeutic that was in her hand safely between her legs.
Dines grabbed the radio. “Charlie-One to Base. This is Charlie-One to Base.”
“Go ahead Charlie-One, this is Base, over.”
“We have bikers at the clinic,” Dines yelled into the radio. “Unable to evacuate Doctor Ling and Professor Simmons. Repeat, we are unable to evacuate.”
“Roger that, Charlie-One. How many bikers at your location?”
“A shit-load,” Dines replied, “and I’m not about to stick my head up to give you a more accurate count.”
“Charlie-One, hang tight and we’ll send a chopper. ETA approximately two-zero minutes. I repeat, ETA twenty minutes. You’re on your own until then, over.”
