The Serophim Breach (The Serophim Breach Series)

by Tracy Serpa

  “Please!” she screamed, pressing her hands against the glass. “Please, she’s going to kill us!” No one moved in the room. “Help us!” she screamed again, breaking into hysterical sobs. Mike was throwing his elbow into the glass again and again; a crack appeared as he heaved himself against it with all his might. The woman had crossed the asphalt lot and was only a few steps from the stairs. Behind her, another figure emerged from the darkness, running maniacally in their direction. The fear was complete and all-consuming as Sarah watched the dark figures approach, one slowly, painfully, doggedly, the other a wicked black shadow closing the gap between them with the ferocity of a starving predator. She cowered back with a moan and tried to cram herself between Mike and the wall behind them.

  In a sudden burst of movement, a young man inside ran forward, fumbling with a ring of keys; he jammed one into the lock and pushed the door open. Several voices from the huddle rose up in protest, but he shouted, “Get in!”

  The trio fell into the room, and the young man yanked the door closed immediately. Sarah hit the floor and curled instantly into a ball, sobbing and screaming incoherently, the horrible sight of their pursuers overwhelming her. She felt nothing but the racking sobs and absolute terror as Heather tried to pull her into her arms and calm her down; she too had tears streaming down her face. Mike leaped up and bellowed in nonsensical fury at the small group of people clustered around the reception desk, then stood glaring at them, his chest heaving, trying to work the rage out of his veins by sheer force of will. The air in the room was dank and damp with too much breath, and laden with the tension of competing survival instincts. Mike held the group’s gaze until the tension broke and a few of the group looked away, beginning to mutter to each other and glare meaningfully at the young man who had collapsed against the wall across the room.

  Everyone cried out when the injured woman outside slammed her palm into the glass, snarling ferociously. They watched in dumbstruck horror as she crashed her face into the door, once, then twice. Instantly, her nose was broken, and her lips turned to a bloody pulp. Still, she threw herself at the glass over and over, smearing it with her blood, until eventually she collapsed, and her body curled itself into the fetal position.

  Then the only sound in the room was the heavy breathing of its occupants and Sarah’s crying, muffled against Heather’s arm. Mike stood in the center, transfixed by the gory pattern on the glass door; slowly, his eyes began to clear, and he turned to look at the young man who had let them in to safety. He was sitting on the floor a few feet from the door, mouth hanging open at the sight of the woman outside. As Mike stepped forward, the young man jumped, then smiled thinly, embarrassed.

  Mike stuck out his hand and said, “Thank you.”

  They clasped hands, and the young man nodded, eyes blank. “Yeah, of course,” he said flatly. A moment of hesitation passed before he continued, “Was there anyone else out there?”

  Mike shook his head, but from the floor where she lay in Heather’s arms, Sarah responded quietly, “A man. There was a man running for us too.”

  “Oh no,” another person said quietly. Sarah followed the woman’s gaze to the door, and froze.

  At first he was only a darker shape in the dark night, padding slowly up the grass on bare feet, almost as if he was approaching the woman outside with caution. His head bobbed up and down as he moved, like he couldn’t quite make out the body on the ground or the shape of the building. Inside the room, no one moved and scarcely breathed. The air was electric with their collective fear.

  The man outside passed the woman’s body without a second glance, stopping short when his face was only a few inches from the door. Sarah heard a woman in the group breathing, “ah, ah, ah, ah,” and wanted desperately to shush her. They remained frozen, watching as the man outside surveyed the door.

  Aside from a bloody bald patch on the side of his head and a torn T-shirt, he looked relatively unscathed. It was the way he moved, the way he was studying the door, that scared Sarah more than the crazy injured woman who had beat her body against it like a trapped bird. After a long, breathless minute passed, the man outside stepped back on his heel and flung his weight against the door. The occupants of the room screamed and gasped and squealed at the abrupt attack, scooting farther back into the darkest corner of the room—all but Mike. He had not moved since the man appeared outside, and now he watched as the maniac punched and beat against the glass and the spiderwebbing cracks spread out slowly.

  The man outside raised both fists and threw them against the pane a final time with a loud roar. They almost couldn’t hear the sound of the large crack that appeared down the center of the glass, but they saw it appear. So did the attacker. He jumped back to examine the door again. Sarah heard Heather whispering, “Not again, go away, not again, go away.”

  Mike’s voice startled her when he spoke. “Are there guns?” he asked briskly.

  Someone from the group answered, “Yes, back behind the counter.”

  Just as Mike moved to find the weapons, they heard a shot from away in the distance, and the man outside straightened as though a bolt of electricity had coursed through him. He cocked his head, listening. In the room they heard nothing else, but he leaped away from the door and loped away into the dark with a shout that sounded eerily gleeful.

  They waited as Mike crossed the room again and laid a hand on the glass. Even the slightest of pressure caused a low crackling sound and a few spidery cracks to lengthen. He lowered his head, frustrated.

  “Shit,” he growled. “We can’t stay here.”

  Thirteen

  Karen Lau hadn’t said anything about the mugging victim’s lack of heartbeat to her staff, and she wasn’t sure why. After tracking down a resident to order an angiogram, she returned to place a flat palm on the girl’s heaving chest and two fingers on the vein in her neck for over a minute. The pulse in her neck thumped against her fingers over 150 times in that span of time; her heart remained still and silent. Finally, Karen set her stethoscope on the girl’s bare skin, straining to hear past the rasping, ragged breathing for a heartbeat. Still there was nothing.

  She had the girl transferred to the psych ward, where she could be kept restrained and sedated, and Karen knew the wing could be locked down in an emergency. She tried to shrug it off as equal parts caution and overreaction on her part; she didn’t want to cause a panic or get anyone else involved until she had a chance to think, but she was unable to shake the feeling that she might regret inaction. A nurse administered an intravenous dose of Clopixol while Karen looked on; the medication could knock a bodybuilder out in less than two minutes. Only thirty seconds after the dose was administered, the girl’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she passed out. Her limbs drooped slowly to the bed, and her nonsensical ranting died out into childish mumbles, then to a rattling snore. Karen checked her pulse again at her wrist. The sedative seemed to have worked only on the nervous system; the girl was clearly unconscious, already drooling, with her head strapped down to the bed, but Karen still felt a rapid thumping under her fingers as well as the ticking of the girl’s overworked muscles. Not wanting to wait for a nurse to do it, she took blood and tissue samples and then headed for Thad in the lab.

  She had just barely gotten out of the psych ward when she nearly collided with him in a hallway.

  “Oh, Dr. Lau. Sorry; I was heading to find you,” he said hurriedly. “I’ve made a little progress with that blood sample you brought me.” He motioned for her to follow, and she fell into step next to him. To keep up she had to move at a trot as he strode down the hallway.

  “That for me?” he asked after a moment, pointing to the vials she fingered absentmindedly.

  Nodding, she murmured, “I’m not sure what to make of it.”

  “Well . . . wait until you see what I found,” he answered quietly. Looking up at him, she could tell that he was nervous. On the rare occasion that he left the lab, Thad sauntered down hallways with an air of self-importance
, arms swinging casually to match his heavy gait. Now, his hands were stuffed in his pockets, and he was leaning slightly forward, anxious to get where he was going. Karen was unnerved when she realized he was chewing on his lower lip; whatever he had found was bothering him, she knew. When they arrived at the lab, he led her to an oversize microscope hooked up to a computer monitor. On the screen, a tag read “KAVIDA—0188765,” and red blood cells moved in waves, forward, followed by a slight ebb. They watched together in silence.

  Finally, she spoke up and said, “It really is like circulating blood. Like there’s a heart behind it.”

  Thad nodded. “I know. But that’s not all. You see how there’s no white blood cells?”

  “Uh-huh. I noticed that on the slide I looked at.”

  “Okay. Watch this,” he told her. Moving to the desk, he unscrewed the lid on a vial and, with a dropper, added a tiny bead of liquid to the slide he had projected on the screen. Karen kept her eyes on the monitor as he spoke.

  “That’s staphylococcus aureus, introduced directly into the blood,” he said intently as he moved to stand beside her. On-screen, the staph bacteria appeared like tiny grape clusters wiggling through the blood, honing in on the red cells.

  Thad said, “Without the white cells, the bacteria should annihilate the red pretty quickly.” The tone of his voice suggested that this was not what was going to occur. As they watched, the grapelike clusters of bacteria moved between the red blood cells that flowed past without touching them. Karen knew they would normally make a beeline for the closest cells, as if they were magnetized, destroy them, and move on to the next. The process was what caused jaundice, toxic shock, and sepsis, among other things. Once in a patient’s blood, the infection was extremely difficult to stop. But in the sample, the staph behaved like a magnet flipped over; every red blood cell that moved past repulsed the bacteria. She frowned as she observed the behavior and was about to say something when Thad said, “Just watch.”

  Slowly, the clusters broke apart into tiny, quivering spheres. Then their shapes began to change as the edges of the individual bacteria dissolved. To Karen it looked as though they were crumpling in on themselves. Within a few minutes, every bit of the staph had disintegrated before her eyes without a single red cell harmed. The blood continued to ebb and flow across the monitor.

  “Thad . . . what just happened?” she finally managed to ask.

  “Well . . . something killed the bacteria.”

  “But there’s no white cells,” she protested.

  Nodding, he stepped forward to the keyboard and hit a few keys, changing the image on the screen. It was still a magnified blood sample, but a time stamp in the corner told Karen that the image was recorded. Thad explained that he had tried the process on Brandon’s blood with staphylococcus, E. coli, even MRSA and VRE, some of the most resilient superbugs found in hospitals, and every single one had been inexplicably consumed.

  “Not only can I not account for the lack of white cells, but I also can’t figure out what happens to the bacteria,” he said, frowning at the screen.

  Karen realized she was holding tension in her forehead only as the dull, throbbing ache of a migraine made her eyes narrow. The video looped over again, showing the same disintegrating bacteria and the same undisturbed red blood cells. Massaging the bridge of her nose, she plopped onto a stool and closed her eyes against the blaring fluorescent lights overhead. She tried to think, to string something together, but she couldn’t imagine a diagnosis that would fit such symptoms. Nor could she even begin to explain the way Brandon’s blood was behaving.

  Absentmindedly, she called out to Thad, “Did I tell you the patient’s skin blistered where we administered the IV?”

  Thad did not reply, so she looked up to find him, frustrated that he had not joined her in her fruitless search for answers. He was back at the microscope, watching the sample on the slide again. Karen was about to return to her thought process when she heard him mumble, “No way.”

  “What?” she asked anxiously, crossing to stand behind his stool. Then she noticed that he had labeled the vials of blood from the mugging victim and set them on a stand.

  “This sample is from another patient, right?”

  “Yeah, I put the samples with her chart,” Karen snapped.

  Thad ignored her tone. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said in a low voice, and moved aside so she could look into the scope. “It’s the same.”

  Immediately she saw what he meant. The girl’s blood moved in exactly the same way as Brandon’s had, pulsing without the help of a beating heart. And again, the white blood cells were absent.

  “What the hell?” she said under her breath.

  Thad moved her aside gently and prepped the slide for the same bacterial test he had previously done; Karen was left to pace the lab until he sat up and looked at the computer monitor. They watched together as the same staph bacteria disappeared and looked at each other in wonder.

  “So,” he started slowly, “it must be a virus. Something we’ve never seen before.”

  “We’d be able to see a virus on the screen,” she countered. Thad turned back to the microscope and switched out the slides again. It irked her a little that he was incapable of discussing the discovery without watching a sample, so she resumed her pacing with quicker steps. “This means we have to call the CDC. Right now. If we have two people in this hospital with some kind of infection or virus—”

  “Not a virus, remember?” Thad said quietly, grinning with his eyes still on the slide.

  She ignored him and continued, “and this gets out of hand, we’re in deep shit. We have to hand this off, because if it’s killing MRSA, then we can’t even begin to—”

  “Karen,” he cut her off suddenly. She stopped pacing and turned to find him sitting up on his stool, holding one of the slides. He looked up at her with wide eyes.

  “What? What’s wrong?” she said with a sinking feeling in her gut. It’s an airborne contagion, was her immediate thought.

  “The volume,” he stammered.

  She waited as he gathered his thoughts, which took a few seconds. Finally, he was able to speak again. “On the first slide, from Kavida, the volume of material has increased.” Then he sat back down, staring at the slide in his hand.

  “How could you know that?” she asked.

  Pointing to the screen, he explained that the microscope measured the volume of samples to ensure accurate testing during lab and clinical trials. The video from an earlier bacteria introduction was playing, and he highlighted the volume displayed at the bottom of the screen. Then he punched a few keys and replaced the slide on the microscope; the number was slightly higher.

  They were both silent until Thad finally said, “So whatever it is, it’s growing at an incredibly rapid rate. An increase like that should take more than eight hours.” He glanced up at the clock.

  “Maybe the bacteria sped the growth of whatever else is in the blood,” she offered.

  Thad looked as though he was considering this when the speaker in the ceiling crackled suddenly to life. They looked up in unison; the lab paging system was only activated in case of emergencies. A tense female voice sounded from the speaker:

  “Doctor Allcome to Ward Three. Code Gray. Doctor Allcome to Ward Three.”

  Emergency announcements over the paging system were coded to prevent stress or panic among patients and visitors. Karen Lau rarely heard the term “Doctor Allcome” used; it signaled that all available medical staff were needed at the specified location. But it was the combination of code and ward that set the hair on the back of her neck on end. “Gray” designated a combative patient, and they were calling help to the area where Brandon had been assigned.

  “Keep working on that!” she shouted back at Thad as she ran out of the lab. In her peripheral view, she saw a few other nurses and one other doctor jogging down hallways as she passed, most likely headed toward the distress call.

  They all reached th
e area at the same time to find it in an upheaval. Shouts echoed down the hallway, nurses scrambled to move other patients into their rooms or at least out of the immediate area, and everywhere people’s eyes were bulging with fright and confusion. One nurse jogged by with a terrified child clinging to her, yelling for his mother. Karen followed the sounds of confusion straight down the hall and ended up at Brandon’s room, where a small group was huddled at the door. One of the bigger men was holding the door shut, while everyone else was vying for a view into the room. At the nearby nurse’s station, Karen heard a young woman describing the situation to someone on the phone. She approached the door, struggling briefly to push everyone aside so that she could look through the small window.

  “What’s going on?” she asked in a voice more confident than she felt. It caught in her throat when she got to the window. Brandon stood near the far wall with his arms wrapped around his torso, trembling. The wounds on his neck and face had reopened, and with each heavy breath, blood oozed out in thick, semicongealed clots. His face was angled down, but Karen could see that he had mucus and saliva covering his face and neck. Most of the equipment in the room had been thrown to the floor, the gurney tipped over, and smears of blood and fluid covered small patches of the windows and floor.

  Next to her, a nurse whispered that he had suddenly come to and attacked them.

  “He scratched Gerry pretty badly, and I think he took a chunk out of his shoulder,” she continued in a small voice. “We were trying to sedate him, but he just went crazy, punching, kicking, screaming. He even bit Maria and Justin.”

  Shit, Karen thought as a piece of the puzzle fell into place. Kai had been clear that Brandon had been bitten; she had only thought about it long enough to decide on what antibiotics she would give him. The mugging victim had been brought in by EMTs who had reported the gashes in her neck, but no one had thought that they were bite marks. She remembered the way the girl had snapped at her resident, the teeth baring, and the animalistic growls. Whether biting was a symptom of whatever was affecting them or not, the contagion was clearly prominent in the bloodstream, and there was a good chance that it also traveled in the saliva. If that was the case, it meant that at least two of her nurses were now infected.