by Howard, Bob
“Don’t turn around,” she said in a low, even voice. “Do exactly as I say, and I won’t have to put a bullet in you.”
The man was too sick to be startled, so he hardly reacted at all, but he didn’t want the owner of the voice behind him to shoot him when he knew he hadn’t been bitten. He turned around despite her warning, and when he saw it really was a security officer with a Glock pointed at his head, he dropped to his knees and began to beg.
Cassandra could see how sick he was, but she couldn’t see a bite anywhere. He was only wearing a pair of jeans and a short sleeved tee shirt, so he had likely places for bite marks clearly exposed. As if he knew she was looking him over for the telltale death mark, he held his arms out where she could see them.
There were tears streaming down his cheeks, but he looked like he had a fever besides the problem with his stomach.
“Please, officer. I haven’t been bitten,” he managed to croak out through a raw throat. “I don’t know why I’m so sick, but I haven’t been bitten, and I haven’t seen any of my friends looking sick.”
Cassandra wasn’t sure what she was going to do, but she couldn’t bring herself to just shoot him despite her earlier thoughts. In the end she knew the best thing to do was get him examined by the doctors.
“You’re sweating a lot,” she said. “Do you have a fever?”
The man’s answer surprised her a bit because she hadn’t given much thought to her own appearance lately. She was attractive, and she took pride in her smooth, dark skin. She liked wearing the security officer uniform because she had been told more than once it fit her like a glove, so she wasn’t ready for him to respond with anything about her.
“You’re sweating a lot, too. Are you sick?”
She kept the gun pointed in his general direction, but she glanced down at herself and realized he was right. She hadn’t been getting much sleep, so she certainly hadn’t been showering or doing her hair as often as usual.
She snapped out of her thoughts and locked her aim on the crewman again. He put his hands up out of reflex and was sure she was going to shoot him.
“Keep your hands where I can see them, and start walking toward the port side gangway down to the medical bay. I need for the doctors to take a look at you.”
The man got an even more frightened look on his face.
“The doctors…they will think I was bitten. I don’t want to be strapped to a table in the same room with those things. Please just let me go back to my bunk and let me get some rest. I’m just a little sick.”
Gibbs didn’t answer. She just gestured with the Glock toward the gangway down to the next level. The look on her face must have been serious because he started moving. She followed as he accepted his fate and went down to the next level. The medical bay was below them at the next gangway, and he kept looking back at her as if he could think of something to change her mind. His hair was wet and matted to his head, and the big stain on the back of his shirt made her sure he was burning up.
When they got to the bottom of the second gangway, the medical staff saw them coming and immediately assumed the same thing as Cassandra when she had first seen the man. Every one of them thought he had been bitten.
Even though Cassandra was still behind him with her gun, he focused all of his efforts on them and started pleading, saying that he was just sick. If things had been normal, this highly skilled staff of medical experts would have been rushing to his side to help him, but things were far from normal.
The sick bay doctor on duty took over and started giving orders to the staff as he chided them for treating the man with so little empathy. He directed the crewman into a small examination room and told the nurses to get the man onto an IV as quickly as possible. He was obviously dehydrated and needed help to get his fever down.
Cassandra watched for a few minutes and slowly began to feel foolish about her own behavior. The man was sick, and she had treated him badly. As the nurses got the man into a hospital gown and onto a bed, she relaxed and decided her work was done in sick bay.
She quietly slipped out of the room and crossed over into the part of the medical bay where Doctor Sellers and Doctor Nkrumah were still getting nowhere with there tests. Cassandra glanced once at the plastic curtains and saw the shadows on the beds were still moving. She wondered how the doctors could go in there with those things for tissue and blood samples. Doctor Nkrumah seemed okay to her, but Doctor Sellers had creeped her out when he had gotten so excited about his little discovery.
“Was that a bite victim?” asked Sellers.
“No, just sick. Looked like some kind of flu bug,” she said.
“Are you sure?” he pressed her just a bit more than she liked.
Cassandra snapped back at him, “I didn’t inspect him for bites. That’s your job.”
Nkrumah reached over and took Sellers by the arm to stop him from asking another question.
“Thank you for bringing the man to sick bay,” said Nkrumah. “I’m sure the staff will let us know if they find a bite mark. People are bound to get sick, and we can’t be expecting the worst every time.”
“I’ll be outside,” she said.
Cassandra appreciated the kind voice of Doctor Nkrumah, but she wanted to tell Doctor Sellers to stop looking so eager to find another infected crewman. She stepped out into the corridor and pulled the door shut behind her. It was usually open, but everyone had gotten used to closing doors as a precaution. She immediately felt relieved to have the door between her and those things behind the plastic curtains.
In the sick bay examining room the nurse was still taking the crewman’s vital signs, and an IV bag was being connected by another nurse. As they worked, they were asking him routine questions such as when he had first gotten sick, had he eaten something that might have been bad for him, and did he have any allergies. They wrote down all of his answers, and as far as they were concerned, there was nothing remarkable to explain his fever.
The doctor came in and looked at the nurse’s notes. He checked the man’s eyes with a penlight and saw normal response, but the crewman complained that it made his head hurt. The nurse taking his vital signs showed the doctor the body temperature reading without saying anything, and the doctor could understand why the penlight hurt his eyes. His fever was just under one hundred and five degrees. He told the nurse to pack the man in ice and went to call for assistance.
He was on the phone when the nurse asked him to come back, and he saw that the man had gotten out of bed and was trying to leave sick bay. He had the IV tube dangling from his arm and was pushing to get by the nurse, but the thing that made him most upset was the man’s eyes. They had rolled so far back in their sockets that all he could see was white with red rims.
Doctor Sellers and Nkrumah rushed into the room just in time to help gain control of the man as he was about to get by the nurse. They each grabbed an arm and pulled the man back into the small examination room. A nurse’s aid appeared with restraints, and they strapped the man down. Cassandra had followed them in, but she stayed back and watched as they got the man under control. She needed room to shoot if it came to that.
There was blood on the patient’s hospital gown, and Doctor Nkrumah looked around at the medical staff to see where it had come from. He saw a trickle of blood running down a nurse’s arm. Not wanting to cause everyone to panic, he didn’t say anything immediately. He watched the nurse as she inspected the source of the blood herself and stepped over to a sink. She poured antiseptic on the wound to rinse it and looked again. She had a confused look on her face and seemed to be trying to remember something.
“Nurse, did he cut you or bite you?”
She hadn’t noticed him watching, and it seemed to startle her. Her voice was shaking as she said it was a cut.
“I’m trying to figure out when it could have happened. I think he dug a fingernail into my skin when he grabbed me.”
“Let me take a look.”
Nkrumah examined her wou
nd and to her relief he agreed it wasn’t a bite.
“I would still like for you to stay here in sick bay under observation,” he added. “We don’t know what this man has, so we don’t know if it’s contagious.”
Everyone looked at the man strapped to the bed as he started making that groaning sound they had all heard in the other room.
“I think that answers your question,” said Cassandra.
“But how did he become infected?” asked the nurse in a voice that was begging for them to be wrong. “He hasn’t been bitten.”
Doctor Sellers had acted quickly to get blood samples. Instead of trying to hit a vein with a needle, he simply cut the intravenous tube that was still connected to the man's arm and had let the blood come from the vein they had been using. He was filling and capping vials as fast as he could. Cassandra Gibbs watched him as if she were watching a real life vampire and wished she had let the crewmen throw him overboard.
The sick bay doctor and Nkrumah worked together to keep control of the rapidly deteriorating situation. The first thing they had to do was isolate the nurse who had begun to cry as she scrubbed at the fingernail cut. They had two other nurses take her to another examination room where they could clean and dress the wound, then they turned back to the crewman.
“Help me with his gown,” he said to the other doctor. “We need to inspect him for bite marks.” By now he was desperately hoping to find that he had been bitten.
They worked together as Doctor Sellers hurried off to his microscope with a rack full of blood samples. Cassandra held the door for him, but only because she was glad to see him go. When she turned back to the two doctors, she saw they were standing on both sides of the bed just staring at each other.
With concern she didn’t try to hide, she said, “Well?”
Doctor Nkrumah didn’t look at her as he answered, “No bite marks.”
“Does that mean what I think it means?” she asked.
Both men turned their heads to look at her at the same time. They all knew what it meant without saying it. The infection was spread by another means of transmission.
“We still don’t want to jump to conclusions,” said Nkrumah. “We have no idea how patient zero, the first person to be infected, had contracted the disease. We just know that the infected try to bite the living, and when they do, it’s always fatal.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better,” said Cassandra.
Doctor Nkrumah was just about to answer when there was a commotion at the sick bay door. It had burst open with force as several men came in carrying friends who were all showing the same symptoms as the first patient.
For several minutes sick bay was a beehive of activity as nurses and doctors all got the new patients into their beds and restrained. The men who had carried the men into the room were confused by the restraints, but they didn’t object. There was too much fear that the infection had somehow spread through the crew.
Once everything began to quiet down, Doctor Nkrumah took Cassandra aside and told her to find the Captain and tell him they had one, and maybe more, confirmed cases of the infection that didn’t involve being bitten.
Cassandra left sick bay in search of the Captain, but she made a stop along the way. She stuck her head into the isolation ward and got Doctor Sellers’ attention. She had to admit that even he looked afraid when she told him they had five more men strapped to beds who had the same symptoms as the first man.
When she left the medical bay, Cassandra went up to the vehicle deck again and went to a spot that gave her a good view of the ship and the wide expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. She turned in a circle and took in the view. In all of her years at sea, she had never really felt isolated because there was always the crew. This was the first time she had ever felt completely alone with so many people on board.
She found the Captain and the Chief of Security together in the Captain’s dining room. Although they generally ate the same meals as the crew, they were never seen eating in the galley with the rest of the crew.
They both looked at Cassandra as if there had to be more to the news she had brought them, but there wasn’t anything else to say. Doctor Nkrumah hadn’t speculated about how the crewmen had become infected.
The quick tempered Chief of Security knew Petty Officer Gibbs was just the messenger, but he took it out on her anyway.
“Did you even think to ask him how he thought the infection was spreading if it wasn’t from bites?”
“No, he just said to tell the Captain, Sir.”
Cassandra tacked on the last word as if it wasn’t a sincere sign of respect. The Chief of Security didn’t miss the sarcastic tone and started to say something else, but the Captain interrupted.
“Did Nkrumah make any recommendations about how we should proceed?”
Cassandra just gave him a shake of her head and said in a low voice, “There was nothing more Doctor Nkrumah asked me to report, Sir. I got the impression he was asking me to tell you that we’re in really big trouble, Sir.”
“Did the Captain ask you for your opinion, Petty Officer?”
Cassandra was ready to reply with something really sarcastic when she saw the trickle of sweat running down the officer’s forehead. His hair looked wet, and his face was red. He was either really angry, or he was running a fever. She glanced at the Captain and saw that he was looking at the man too.
“Petty Officer Gibbs, will you please escort your superior officer to sick bay?”
Cassandra didn’t want to touch the man, and she hoped he would take the request as the order it was intended to be. She stepped back out of the dining room doorway to give him room to pass, and when the Chief of Security looked at the Captain, he gestured for the man to go. He took it as an order and followed her from the room.
They were only a few feet from the door when the Captain called her to come back.
“Petty Officer Gibbs, you’re in charge of ship security until he’s ready to return to duty.”
Cassandra Gibbs doubted that would be any time soon.
If she never had to go back to the medical bay again, it would be fine with Cassandra Gibbs, but after she had escorted her former boss to sick bay, and she really did consider him to be a thing of the past, she found herself escorting six other crewmen to the doctors. All of them were restrained, but only the first had died. She decided to check in with her least favorite doctor and found he and Nkrumah both looking at the blood samples.
“Have you made anymore discoveries?”
The question came out more sarcastic sounding than she had intended. It was obvious that they would all be pinning their hopes on these two doctors in the days ahead, and she really prayed they would make some discoveries that were useful.
Doctor Nkrumah answered for both of them.
“We were looking at the wrong things. We were so sure that the only answers would be in the blood that we ignored some lab results. The blood doesn’t need to be alive for us to analyze its contents. We were so excited about Doctor Sellers’ discovery that blood cells were attacking each other when mixed with the cells of other victims that we forgot about the fact that every victim had been eating mangrove oysters and ghost crabs.”
The statement hung in the air almost as if it had a question attached to it. The question they all wanted to ask was who else was going to get sick and turn into an infected dead.
“Are you both saying that anyone who ate mangrove oysters and ghost crabs is infected?”
The doctors looked at each other first and Doctor Sellers nodded at her. It was a sad look on his face, and she knew they had been eating the same meals as the crew. She hadn’t, but they had.
“Have you been eating the oysters and crabs, Petty Officer Gibbs?” asked Doctor Sellers.
“Not me. I’m allergic to shellfish, so I stay away from the galley when those are on the menu. I can’t stand to be in the same room when they’re being served.”
“Lucky you,” said Sellers. He wanted to
be happy for her, but it wasn’t easy since he had been a big fan of the shellfish when it was served.
Nkrumah had joined him for those meals, and it was quite possible that Petty Officer Gibbs was the only person on the Mercy Mission ship that hadn’t been eating the mangrove oysters and ghost crabs.
She felt her hand tighten its grip on her M4 when the realization hit home. She was on a ship with hundreds of people who were going to start showing signs of infection. It was already starting, and they had run out of beds fast. Pretty soon there wouldn’t be anyone left to strap the infected to the beds even if they had enough beds for everyone.
“Any idea how long it takes for the infection to show up in people who’ve been eating the shellfish?”
“From what we can tell,” said Doctor Nkrumah, “it’s different for everyone. They’ve been serving mangrove oysters and ghost crab meals since we arrived in Cameroon. It was one of the main ways that the people found to pay us for our services. Since we don’t accept money, the locals donated food.”
Cassandra had a horrible thought. Not only was she thinking ahead to the day when she would be the only person who was uninfected on the ship, she was thinking of the past when they had met with the US Navy carrier group. She wasn’t sure, but she thought they may have traded some of their large supply of shellfish for fuel. She hoped she was wrong.
******
Petty Officer Cassandra Gibbs never thought she would ever need her training more than she did now. As the days turned into weeks, more and more people became ill, and as she expected, there came a day when there were more infected on board than uninfected. After being violently ill for a day or two, they died and then got back up. When they got up, they would find someone to bite.
The ship became a graveyard and zoo full of vicious creatures, and Cassandra was forced to sneak from one compartment to the next, often killing several of the infected dead as she moved. Sometimes she killed them for a place to hide, and other times she killed them to reach supplies. She found herself killing them because she was very angry, but there were also those times when she killed them because she was on a Mercy Mission ship. If she didn’t kill them, they were a danger to the living, but she wasn’t so sure there were any more of them on the ship.
