by Melissa Yi
CHAPTER 27
Meanwhile, Tucker called from the bed, “I’m all done.”
He probably wanted to distract Bastard, but Manouchka responded first. “Is everything okay?”
“Yes. Your body will heal nicely. You did very well under...difficult circumstances.” Even Tucker’s tact was under strain.
“Merci, Docteur,” she said, with deference I hadn’t noticed with me, but that’s par. Guys are still automatically given a plus one (or ten), even in the 21st century.
“I’d better see if Dr. Tucker needs help,” I told Bastard, taking a step toward the doorway. I held the placenta bowl in front of me like it was my own pregnant belly.
Bastard snorted. “I don’t know why you two need so much help. Buncha losers.” But he and his gun swung sideways, into the main room, to give me enough room to get out.
Placenta power.
Across the room, Tucker met my gaze before his eyes dropped to the steel bowl that most people would have abandoned in the bathroom. Say, inside the shattered shower that no one was going to use.
Would he understand the method to my madness? Maybe I was overplaying. Well, probably. But I didn’t want to molder here forever, or until Bastard got too bored or edgy and started firing again. I’d mapped out only a few weaknesses for him. Better exploit them sooner rather than later.
Say, right now.
I advanced toward the bed, willing Manouchka to look at me. She was resting her cheek against the top of David’s fuzzy head, but when I waved the magic placenta bowl, the movement caught her eye, and she glanced upward.
I mimed at her to cough. Meaning that I moved a hand to cover my mouth while I silently jerked my abdominal muscles and expelled a silent breath while Bastard was still fixated on the placenta slopping around in the bowl.
Manouchka stared at me like I was plum crazy. Maybe placenta crazy.
“Be careful with that, bitch. Jesus Christ.” Bastard pushed the gun at me, but he was clearly eyeballing the flesh swilling in front of me.
“Sorry!” I said, and switched the bowl exclusively to my left hand—the hand closer to Bastard—while I explicitly pretended to cough, fisting my right hand in front of my mouth.
Then I jerked my chin at her and widened my eyes, willing her to join in. If she didn’t play along, all was lost.
Manouchka grimaced.
Please, Manouchka. Pretty please with freedom on top.
At long last, she cleared her throat and gave an unconvincing ahem.
I blinked at her, raised my eyebrows, and ventured a small but definite nod, mentally urging her, Encore! Encore!
A plea that works in both English and French. Maybe bilingualism would help. Couldn’t hurt, anyway.
Tucker, the most multilingual of us all, watched the drama silently while he gathered his sharps together and told Bastard, “I need to get rid of these.”
“Hurry up, Blondie.”
With the back of my brain, I realized that somehow, Tucker had managed to get Bastard’s permission to use anaesthetic while I was in the bathroom. And if I knew him, he’d dispose of the other syringe at the same time. Brains, I tell you.
But in the meantime, I had to get Manouchka on board. I raised my eyebrows at her, pleading.
This time, she managed to cough enough that her upper body jerked, made more obvious by the fact that David’s tiny body jumped with hers, like he was a ship rocking on the ocean of her body.
Still, David kept sleeping. Only a baby could sleep through a hostage-taking.
“Are you okay?” I said loudly, in French. “You look a little short of breath.”
“What’s going on?” said Bastard.
“It’s amazing how well Manouchka is doing, considering her...health problem,” I told him in English, before switching back to Manouchka in French. “You lost a lot of blood. We’ll have to clean it up, since we don’t want anyone else to get infected.”
“What are you talking about?” Bastard’s head whipped up at the word infected. He didn’t need any translation on that one.
“I really couldn’t say,” I said, in my blandest tone.
“Tell me, bitch!” He took a step toward me, his hand lifting like he wanted to smack me, but I accidentally-on-purpose raised the placenta bowl as a buffer, and he dropped back two feet.
Bastard’s eyes darted wildly around the room before locking on Manouchka. More specifically, his gaze dipped toward the bed sheets, twisted and saturated with blood. Tucker had done the best he could, and had thrown away the disposable piqué pad already, but the blood stains remained.
Fortunately.
I tried to meet Manouchka’s eyes in a trust-me-I’m-a-doctor way.
She glared back at me.
This would have worked better if Tucker were engineering it, with his charm and his hail-old-buddy ways, but I’m the only one crazy enough to dream these things up. If he caught on, though, we could work as a team.
“We do have patient confidentiality,” I told Bastard. Too late, I remembered how Stan had died, and I stumbled over the last word. Bastard didn’t care about the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. He cared about the shortest line between him, his woman, and his baby.
I changed tactics. “More importantly, you know that Canada is a country of immigrants who have helped make our country great.” I must’ve ripped that line off of the politician of the week, but I soldiered on. “Unfortunately, the cross-migration sometimes means that diseases can spread more effectively through all parts of the world.”
“What are you talking about?” Bastard said slowly. It was the first time he’d spoken in a measured way and quite possibly the first time he hadn’t sworn at me.
He didn’t want to hear another word. So naturally, I had to deliver it.
“Have you ever heard of Ebola?” I asked.
Manouchka swung forward in the bed, her entire body stiffening. Her mouth opened in protest.
Tucker took two quick steps back to my side, but I couldn’t spare either of them a glance.
I laid my hand on the bed’s footboard, trying to reassure Manouchka non-verbally, while my eyes lasered in on Bastard’s.
I was gambling here. The only blood-borne diseases I usually discuss in detail with patients before transfusions are HIV and hepatitis.
But HIV is treatable right now—not curable, but treatable—and hepatitis C is common among IV drug users. Hep C is more transmissible than HIV, so I’m always careful to glove up among hep C carriers, but it wouldn’t surprise me if one of Bastard’s cronies had it. Hell, he might test positive himself. You can treat hep C with some antivirals, although I’m sketchy on the details.
Neither disease carried the same pound-for-pound terror-weight as the unknown and brutal menace of Ebola.
“No fucking way,” snapped Bastard, but he was hyperventilating.
Ah. He had heard of Ebola.
I’d read The Hot Zone as part of my med school keen-ness, which gave me a little background. Not much, and not rigorously based on evidence, but a spoonful. Enough to make Bastard’s flesh creep. “I’ve never heard of another disease where you cry blood,” I said conversationally. “And your intestines can liquefy inside your own body. Can you imagine?”
Bastard’s gun zoomed toward the bed, aimed between Manouchka’s breasts. She stared back at him in mute panic. He could kill her and David in the next breath.
Shit. He might shoot now and ask questions later, especially if I got him too revved up. Time for damage control in my most impassive voice. “So the last thing we need around here is more blood. You definitely can’t shoot them.”
Bastard’s gun arm raised and lowered again. He could make the same calculations I had: spraying the Beauziles’ insides all over our small area would definitely contaminate us all.
“We should isolate them,” I said. “And I should get rid of this placenta. It has a gigantic blood supply from both the mother and the fetus. Like, 650 cc’s every minute.”
“Jesus,” said Bastard. He licked his lips, and I could practically hear his neurons synapsing: black person. Scary. Bloody. Must have Ebola.
“We should stay calm,” I said. “Just because someone’s visited Africa doesn’t mean she has Ebola. But of course, she already has a fever of 38.1 degrees Celsius and abdominal pain”—never mind that the pain was because she was in labour and had ripped herself open—“and a bit of a cough.” Coughing isn’t how you usually spread Ebola, but he didn’t need to know that. “If she develops vomiting and diarrhea, especially if it’s bloody, well...the virus can live inside blood at room temperature for days at a time.”
Tucker stepped beside me. I didn’t look at him, but his hand dropped to the foot of the bed, beside my own. His skin was paler than mine, but his hand was steady and his voice was firm when he spoke. “Yeah. Ebola is horrifying. You can bleed to death just through your IV site.”
I wondered how he knew that, but then again, most of the time, I wondered what was going on inside Tucker’s brain. In a good way.
Bastard licked his lips again. He was scanning the room, as if he could see the virus haunting him.
I had to bite the inside of my cheek to stop myself from laughing inappropriately. The Ebola virus is so small that if you blew it up to be as thick as a piece of spaghetti, a single strand of human hair would be the width of a gigantic redwood tree, or twelve feet.
If I laughed now, Bastard would reward us with a skull and crossbones.
I managed to squeeze back any giggles by staring at a bit of dirt under Tucker’s left thumbnail before my face stilled and I made eye contact with Manouchka.
“Have you travelled recently?” I asked her in French. I added, in English, “Say, to West Africa.”
Her lips rounded. She watched my face and Tucker’s for a beat too long. My heart contracted before she slowly nodded.
“I hope your fever hasn’t gotten any worse,” I said. “Now that you’ve finished labouring, maybe you wouldn’t mind wearing a face mask. Do you think you could handle that?”
She stared at me.
Of course. I’d slipped back into English.
“We don’t have any masks in the room,” said Tucker. “They’re at the nursing station. I could go get one.”
“Shut the fuck up,” said Bastard. It sounded like the words were being squashed out of him, one at a time.
We obeyed. We waited, with me looking at Manouchka and thinking, That’s it, you’re doing it perfectly, keep it up.
“Are you shitting me?” Bastard finally managed to drag out.
“Everybody stay calm,” I said. “We don’t know if she has Ebola or not. But she does have a fever, with a cough, and she recently came back from West Africa.”
Out of the corner of my eyes, I could see Tucker nodding thoughtfully before he said, “Ebola is spread through direct contact with vomit, diarrhea, and saliva. If we’re going to be stuck together, we’ll have to do our best to isolate ourselves.”
“Ebola!” said Bastard. “They took care of that. It’s gone now.”
“I just read about it in the Lancet,” I said. “I’m happy to show you on my phone, if you want. It’s also called enterohemorrhagic fever. People vomit up blood—”
“I get the idea,” Bastard snapped. “Shut the FUCK UP!”
We did.
It was so quiet that I could hear Bastard breathing before he started pacing his half of the room, muttering and swearing to himself.
It was a very delicate balance.
The next biggest wild card was Manouchka. If she screamed, “I don’t have Ebola, you racist whore!” it could launch a catastrophe.
The third unknown was David. He could wake up wailing and set Bastard off.
I held my breath.
Manouchka didn’t speak. I could feel her eyes on me and Tucker. I could hear her breathing, and the groan of the mattress as she shifted in bed.
She coughed again. A good, loud one this time.
Bastard started to wheeze.
CHAPTER 28
At first, his wheezing was subtle. Mostly, he was struggling to exhale.
In medicine, we call this prolonged exhalation. When the airways seize up and clamp down, it’s hard to move air around. Sometimes, to try and make parents understand their child’s constricted airways, we ask the caregivers to try exhaling through a straw. It takes them longer and they have to put out ten times the effort, so they feel first-hand what their kids are going through. Especially if they try and inhale through the straw like I did.
I glanced at Bastard out of the corner of my eye, not wanting to make a big deal out of it. Guys, especially, don’t want you to leap up and down on them and yell, “Are you okay?” In guy-speak, I think that translates into Are you such a wimp that you need me to help you?
I did feel a little bad. The first line of the Hippocratic Oath, which I swore at med school orientation, is “Do no harm.”
But that wasn’t enough to stop me. Because we were fighting for our lives here, and I’d use every weapon possible to save me and Tucker and Manouchka and David.
Right now, my weapons were my ears.
I wanted to gauge the severity of his asthma attack.
Tucker didn’t make a sound. He was waiting for my cue. And I was watching Bastard.
When I started medicine, I was surprised that some of the best wheezing you hear is with your ears, without a stethoscope. Right now, I still had my stethoscope wrapped around my neck. It’s almost become a part of my body when I’m on call, like my glasses.
But I didn’t whip the rubber tubing off my neck. I was concentrating on the high-pitched squeal of Bastard’s breathing.
Another big part of med school is listening. Instead of jumping in, jabbering away, thrusting your cold stethoscope on a patient’s chest and ordering a dozen expensive tests, they steer you toward paying attention to what the patient has to say. Revolutionary concept, I know.
Subtlety is not my strong point. I’ll tell you what I think, without blinking and without sugar coating.
But I can listen.
I wanted Bastard to feel like he was in control here. He was the big man, the big cheese, the one literally calling the shots.
The one who could hang himself, if he offered himself enough rope.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noted his chest starting to heave underneath his disguise.
He rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand, but I could tell he was just smearing the burqa around, trapping the sweat under the material as he gasped.
Perfect.
He gripped the material around his waist and wrenched it upward to rip off his burqa. “It’s too fucking hot in here.”
Since he still had the gun in his right hand, he struggled to strip one-handed. As a guy with probably zero experience ridding himself of floor-length clothing, except a bed sheet on a long-ago Hallowe’en, he managed to expose his bulging gut, hidden by a black shirt, and well-worn jeans, but couldn’t get his gun arm’s elbow out. “Shit!”
You know, I could assist him.
Nah. I watched him flail, unwilling to relinquish his gun and too proud to ask for help.
It felt better than a dozen kitten videos on YouTube.
Who’s the bitch now?
However, all good things must end. Once he managed to get the gun arm out, it wasn’t such a stretch to pop his head under and unroll the burqa inside out over his left arm.
Bastard flung the material on the bloody floor and got enough breath together to boss me around. “Clean that...shit up.” He paused to wheeze, “You can use this.”
I hesitated. Transforming myself into Cinderella, pre-prince, mopping blood with a burqa instead of sweeping ashes, hadn’t been at the top of my menu.
Still, I kept my head down and staring at the garment rippled on the floor, as if I was considering his generous offer, but mostly avoiding an accidental glance at Bastard’s naked face. I’ve heard that when the kidnappers
don’t worry about you identifying them, it’s because they’re about to kill you.
I said to his black boots, “What we really need is a disinfection system. With bleach. Otherwise, we’re just smearing blood around. And I ought to dispose of this.” I swung the placenta toward him, only a few small inches of movement, but enough to make Bastard take a step back and shout, “Watch it, bitch!”
“Sorry,” I said, lowering the bowl. “It’s kind of heavy. And slippery. Where would you like me to put it?” I took a step toward him, even though Manouchka’s bedside table was to my diagonal right.
“Fuck...you!” he snapped, although now he was gasping between words. “Get. That out. Of. Here!”
“Does that mean I can open the door to deposit it outside?” I asked. Really, I wanted to bolt, but I wasn’t that stupid. He was in the mood to shoot.
“No!” he hollered, and sucked his breath in.
I stopped. And waited. While he wheezed.
I didn’t tell him to take his inhaler. He was a big boy. And honestly, if he had to concentrate on staying alive, we could probably get the gun away from him.
Tucker stirred beside me. I wondered if he could migrate behind Bastard. If I kept Bastard’s concentration on me and the magical placenta, Tucker could jump him.
But how long should we wait?
Emphysematics are usually old, skinny smokers or ex-smokers, sometimes oxygen-dependent, often north of sixty years old. They get a lung infection and slowly crumble over days to weeks (often, they’ve been in hospital so many times, they try to avoid coming back, but that just means they’re sicker when they cross the emerg doors). We hit them with bronchodilators, steroids, and antibiotics for secondary infections.
Asthmatics are usually much younger. Often still smokers. They’ve got more reserve. But if it’s bad enough, a severe cat allergy can unleash a tsunami of an attack that kills them.
However, chances were that Bastard was a regular asthmatic. It would take a long time for an asthmatic to tire. Like, hours if not days. They weren’t sick to start with.
And most of them had the sense to take their puffers.
Bastard coughed, wheezed, and coughed again.
