Isolation Ward

by Joshua Spanogle

  I pulled myself to a standing position. The adrenaline and nausea made me unsteady, and I nearly fell as I hopped to the door of the OR.

  As I staggered past her, Brooke gasped. “We need to get you to a hospital.”

  I opened the door to the OR and hopped through the small entryway to the observation room. I stumbled when I reached for the door, and fell heavily on my numb hand, smearing the tile floor with blood. With the handle in front of me, I was able to pull myself up. I got scissors and my wallet and cell phone from the observation room and cut the cable tie around my ankles. Quickly, I walked back to the OR and cut the ties that bound Brooke’s feet. I helped her to stand.

  “Let’s go,” I told her.

  “Get gauze and bind that hand.”

  “We don’t have—”

  “Now, you asshole!” Her eyes were red and wet.

  So, I went to the metal cabinet and found gauze. I wrapped the hand, the cuffs on my right hand looping widely as I twirled the gauze around my left. I pulled it tight to keep the skin near the blood vessels. There was a good chance I was trapping infection in there, but I wanted to keep the skin nourished so that maybe, just maybe, it would live for a few more hours. “There,” I said.

  We moved quickly through the scrub room. I turned toward the observation room when Brooke stopped me. “Where are you going?”

  “We can’t leave.”

  “What?”

  “Just wait here.” I walked into the observation room and pressed my ear to the hallway door. I heard nothing, no heated conversation between the Surgeon and whomever.

  “Let’s go!” Brooke hissed.

  I turned to her. “You go, then, Brooke. I need to get something. I didn’t tear all the fucking flesh off my hand just to walk out of here and have nobody believe what I’m saying.”

  “They have to believe it.”

  “No they don’t. You know that.” I took a scalpel from the table and broke off the plastic covering. The blade was polished, mirrorlike. Just the thing. “Stay here if you want. Leave if you want.”

  Cautiously, I cracked the door to the hallway and slipped the scalpel out. Maneuvering the blade up and down, I could catch a reflection of most of the hallway in front of me. I saw no one. I opened the door.

  Quickly, I walked toward the path labs. Brooke, her arms still cuffed behind her, followed.

  Every ten feet or so, I stopped and listened. Hearing nothing, I continued. Finally, I ended up at the door to the lab. No voices, no movement. I opened the door slowly.

  The lights were on, and the door to the freezer room was propped open. Again I listened and heard nothing. I made my way around the lab tables to the small room, Brooke behind me.

  “Nathaniel,” Brooke said.

  I stopped. She pointed her chin at a glass-faced cabinet of reagents to my right. In it was, among other things, a bottle of concentrated nitric acid. As carefully as I could, I opened the case and took out the small bottle. Still, I made a racket. “There’s no one here,” I said.

  As I looked into the freezer room, I saw, indeed, there was no one there.

  “Oh, no,” I said.

  “What?”

  The two file boxes with the biopsy reports on Abby the pig and Janet the human were gone. And with them, any shred of evidence I might have overlooked, any shred to help us out.

  “It’s gone,” I said. “Everything is gone.”

  I put the nitric acid down on a lab bench.

  “Take it,” Brooke said. “Just in case.”

  CHAPTER 90

  I led Brooke down the hall, back through the OR observation room, to the scrub room. A black plastic panel was next to the door. I tried the door. Locked. I swore.

  We went back into the hallway, this time heading in the opposite direction. I saw a green exit sign ahead. We followed the signs until we came to another door. This one, too, was locked.

  “No—” Brooke said. “No, no, no.” She kicked at the door, sending herself off balance and almost into a fall. “No!” She kicked again.

  “Stop,” I said.

  A few yards down the hall was a red fire alarm. I remembered what Bill Dyson, the vet, had said about the system; I hoped it wasn’t overridden by the security.

  I put the vial of nitric acid in my pocket and grabbed the lever on the alarm. The small glass rod in front of the lever broke, and, almost immediately, the cacophony began. A sharp buzzing sounded through the building as bright white strobes flashed up and down the hall. The sound was deafening.

  “Let’s hope—” I said as I tried the handle on the door and pushed.

  We were outside.

  Though not as loud as inside the building, the alarm cut through the purple California evening. Strobes around the building blinked, their light dying in the gloaming.

  I glanced around. There was an old outbuilding to the side of the far hog pen. From the look of it, this was one of the few structures that had survived Chimeragen’s homestead—loose shingles, paint faded on the wooden planks that made up the walls. From my days growing up in Pennsylvania, I recalled that these buildings often housed vehicles, and most times, the vehicles had the keys in them. I hoped I wasn’t fantasizing. I hoped the vehicle wasn’t a tractor.

  “Let’s go,” I said. We moved quickly toward the old structure.

  Luck was with us, and there was an old pickup parked in front of the building. The keys were there. Contamination might have been a worry for Chimeragen, but not car thieves. I opened the door for Brooke and helped her into the cab as best I could. I circled to the driver’s side and climbed in. The ancient Ford engine turned over.

  I put the truck in gear and tore out of there.

  “Nathaniel!” Brooke screamed.

  Behind us, I heard the pops. They came fast, sounding almost like a single peal. The front and rear windows of the truck spidered as small holes appeared in the glass. Both of us ducked. There was a pause, and I raised my head to make sure we weren’t headed for a wall or something. When I glanced around, I saw the Surgeon coming out of a shooter’s stance and working with his gun. A clip fell to the ground. He slapped another into the pistol.

  I braced for another explosion of gunfire, but there was none.

  “You okay?” I shouted.

  “Uh-hunh.”

  As we pulled onto the dirt road that led away from the buildings, I could see the strobes flash in a rhythmic pulse. Ahead of us, just off the side of the road, a small bonfire flickered.

  Brooke craned her head backward. “He’s walking away,” she reported. Then, turning to the front, she said, “What’s that?”

  I didn’t answer her, but I knew what it was: the last anyone would really know about Janet Margulies and the pig.

  As we passed the fire, I saw something silhouetted against the flames. A white box.

  CHAPTER 91

  I swung the car toward the bonfire.

  “What are you doing?” Brooke demanded. “Nathaniel? What the hell are you doing?”

  I ignored her. To my left, I saw the Surgeon break into a run. He was at the far end of the building, a hundred yards away or more, moving fast.

  “He’s coming. He’s coming! Get out of here! What the fuck are you doing?” It was a good thing that her arms were cuffed behind her back, or I bet she would have taken a swing at me.

  In a few seconds, I’d brought the truck to a skid next to the white file box, putting the bulk of the vehicle between us and the Surgeon. The box was half-full. I opened the truck door.

  Brooke continued to screech at me.

  My hand looked and felt like a piece of meat at the end of my arm—flaccid, dead, heavy, soaked in blood—and every action took twice as long as it should have: opening the truck door, grabbing the box, heaving it into the cab, where it fell on top of Brooke, who was lying on the bench seat, cursing. Its contents spread across the floor, the pages streaked with blood from my hand.

  Gunfire pealed, and I heard the bullets smashing into the back
and side of the truck. I jumped into the cab, not bothering to close the door. Brooke yelped, a different sound from the obscenities pouring out of her mouth before. I slammed the truck in drive and pushed the accelerator to the ground.

  “What happened? What happened?” I yelled.

  In the rearview, I could see the Surgeon switch directions and head toward a waiting car.

  “I’m shot,” she said.

  “Where?” Brooke didn’t answer. “Brooke, damn it! Where are you shot?”

  “I don’t know.” She groaned. “My ass, I think.”

  “Bullet hit an artery?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Bone?”

  “Jesus, Nate, I don’t know.”

  I shut up.

  Five minutes later, we were at the gate to the Chimeragen Farm, having bumped over a few miles of dirt road as fast as I dared go. Brooke had quieted down, now just gritting her teeth and letting out small grunts of pain as we vaulted over the old road. I didn’t wait for the gate to open, and plowed through the thing as it began its slow trundle. It was getting darker; I saw that I’d managed to blow out one headlight.

  We’d covered the distance from the Farm to the main road quickly, and I asked Brooke what kind of car the Surgeon had. She said some sort of rental, and I was relatively sure that we’d gained more than a few minutes on him with the truck.

  “Where’s the closest hospital?” I asked Brooke.

  “I don’t know,” she said. As we passed under a lone streetlamp, I looked over at her. She was lying in a half-fetal position—her legs in the foot well, her torso stretched on the seat, facing the back of the truck. The passenger-side door had a few ragged holes in it. The inside of the door was slicked with blood. “There’s one in Gilroy, just off the 101.”

  “We’ll go there.”

  “He’ll find us there,” she said. “It’s the most obvious place.”

  “We don’t really have a choice.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Right. There’s a lot of blood, Brooke.”

  She sighed. “Okay. You’ll see the hospital from the highway.” She was quiet for a moment. “It hurts.”

  “You didn’t get the lidocaine. Of course it does.”

  Wind from the broken windows stirred the papers that lay scattered in the cab. Brooke fidgeted.

  As for me, well, if I didn’t get pain medication soon—something that lasted longer than the lidocaine and adrenaline—let’s just say I’d be bearing the pain with a lot less equanimity than Brooke Michaels.

  After twenty minutes driving the truck as fast as I dared, I turned onto the 101 and pushed the pedal to the floor.

  I saw the flashing lights before I heard the siren—they lit up the fractured back window in whites, blues, and reds.

  “Oh, shit,” I said.

  CHAPTER 92

  Brooke had been quiet, which worried me. She was losing too much blood, but managed a woozy “What?”

  “Shit, shit, shit. Police.”

  “Good.”

  “Not good.”

  I didn’t stop the truck as the police vehicle pulled close to my tail. A voice cracked over the cruiser’s loudspeaker, but I couldn’t make it out, because the holes all through the cab whistled. I assumed the officer wasn’t telling me to keep up the good work.

  Still, I didn’t stop. He rode inches from my bumper for a few miles; then another cruiser joined the chase, pulling up along my left side. I looked into the police car and saw the cop’s arm jutting out toward the shoulder, directing me to pull over.

  “This is not good, Brooke,” I said quietly. She didn’t respond. “Brooke!”

  “Yeah?” she said lazily.

  “Stay with me. Please, okay? Just hang in there.”

  The situation with Brooke was decaying. I wasn’t really worried yet, but if things continued to drag out . . .

  I pulled the truck over to the side of the highway, the two police vehicles falling in behind me. I watched the cops get out of the cars in the side mirror. Their guns were drawn. Not a typical traffic stop, I guess.

  One of the officers walked slowly toward the truck. The other stayed back, his pistol trained on the cab.

  I noticed a lump in my right pocket. The bottle of nitric acid. I pulled it out and dropped it between my legs.

  “This is definitely not good,” I said quietly.

  “Step out of the vehicle!” the policeman called.

  “I’m injured,” I called back. “I have an injured person here with me.”

  “I don’t give a fuck! Step out of the vehicle!”

  The cop from the first car, the profane one, walked an arc around the driver’s side of the truck. He was almost on the highway, but still, that only put two feet between my head and the end of his pistol.

  “Put your hands where I can see them, on the top of the steering wheel.”

  I did. He saw the bloody lump on the end of my left arm.

  “What happened?” The guy was older—midforties, maybe. And he wasn’t jumpy, which was a plus, all things considered. The last thing I needed now was a state-issued .38 slug through my head.

  “Take us to a hospital now, and I’ll tell you.”

  “Nathaniel?”

  “There’s someone in there with you?”

  “I already said there was. She’s injured.”

  “Ma’am,” he shouted. “I want you to sit up and put your hands where I can see them.”

  “She can’t sit up.”

  Confusion flashed across the officer’s face. It was gone almost as soon as it appeared.

  He yelled to the other policeman, “Robbins, we have an injured woman in the passenger side.” The other policeman slowly rounded the truck, gun fixed on the cab.

  I was beginning to get really anxious now, not about Brooke’s losing blood, or about my losing blood, but about how long we were being delayed. I said, “Look, Officer, we are both injured. The man who—”

  “Shut up.” The other policeman was now near the passenger side. There was a sound to my right, and the door at Brooke’s rump swung open. She let out a yelp.

  “Jesus!” the second officer said. “Mike, we got a woman here, handcuffed and injured. It looks like she’s—”

  “I’m shot, you idiot,” Brooke said. That’s my girl.

  The officer to my left began screaming at me, “Get out of the car! Keep your hands where I can see them!”

  How I was supposed to open the door and keep my hands where he would see them I didn’t know, but he solved that problem for me when he jerked his hand toward the door handle and pulled. I could hear the other officer calling for backup.

  “Officer, with all due respect, we do not have time for—”

  “Shut up!”

  “The person who did this—”

  “Shut up!” He was braced in a shooter’s stance, finger on the trigger, ready to scramble my brains.

  “I am a physician with the Centers for Disease—”

  “I don’t care if you’re with the fucking White House. Shut up! I’m counting to three, and I want you out of the car by three or I will shoot you, motherfucker.” Boy, such language.

  The gentleman with the gun in my face began to count, “One.” I looked to my right and saw the other cop with his gun on me, moving his eyes between Brooke and me. He was younger than the first cop and looked more agitated. Now, to put myself in the cops’ place, I could see why they were nervous. A guy in an old truck riddled with bullet holes, he gives them a good little chase before pulling over; then there’s this woman who’s cuffed and hurt, lying on the seat with him. On the whole, it didn’t seem totally benign.

  “Two.”

  “Officers,” Brooke said, “we are both physicians, working on a case. We—”

  “Three.”

  I’d begun to move my legs out of the cab, hoping the guy wouldn’t pop me if I showed I was beginning to comply. The bottle of nitric acid shifted and I was content to let it fall to the
floor, when I noticed something. I stopped moving.

  “Out of the car now, or I will—”

  “Shit,” I said.

  The cop followed my eyes along the highway. A dark-blue sedan had pulled to the shoulder and was rapidly reversing toward us. As it got closer, I noticed the license plate began with a P. Though I’d suspected it, this was final confirmation that the Surgeon’s car was the same one I’d seen, days before, scurrying away from Dr. Tobel’s house.

  “Get out of here now,” I said to the officer. For the first time, I could see that the guy really didn’t know what to do. “Get out of here! That’s the guy who shot—”

  “Robbins!” the older cop yelled. “Go deal with that. I’ll take care of these two. You called backup?”

  Robbins nodded and started to walk stiffly toward the blue car. His gun was drawn.

  “Out—”

  “Officer, please.” I was getting desperate. “That is the man who attacked us.”

  I saw the door to the car open, and the Surgeon stepped out, his hands down at his sides.

  “Put your hands in the air,” Robbins said to him.

  The Surgeon seemed not to understand. The older officer cut his eyes quickly from me to the scene in front of us, then back to me.

  The Surgeon kept walking toward us.

  “Hands in the air!” Robbins shouted.

  The older officer backed up a step, and though his gun was still on me, his eyes kept cutting toward his partner and the Surgeon. Perhaps the guy was realizing I wasn’t full of shit. Perhaps he thought the Surgeon and I were in cahoots.

  “Stop right there!” Robbins shouted. Unfortunately for the young policeman, the Surgeon did.

  The Surgeon paused on the shoulder; then, faster than I could follow, he dropped to his knee. As he did so, he produced a gun from somewhere. A shot rang out and Robbins fell. Half a second later, the gun was pointed at the officer next to me. Another shot, and the back of the cop’s head exploded.

  Brooke yelled.

  I pulled my legs—now half out of the cab—back inside and began to unscrew the cap of the nitric acid. I was saying something—I don’t know what—but it was probably something like “Holy shit, holy shit.” Brooke kept asking what was happening.