Dr. Robbins had the urge to bring them up to date right then and there, but the sheer curiosity of the research before him held him back.
“It’s certainly been taxing, but my main concern, as is the President’s, is ending this outbreak.”
“How the hell did it get so out of control so quickly?” Dr. Hosk said, gazing up, astonished. “I mean, I’ve got a sister in Texas right now, she can’t get the hell out of the city. I just don’t understand it.” At the moment, he seemed to be going off on a tangent, but Dr. Hosk stopped himself. “But I digress. I came here at the behest of my good friend, Dr. Crosby, and when he told me of the type of research they were doing, I couldn’t catch a flight soon enough.”
“I know exactly how you feel,” Dr. Robbins said. “I’m excited to see the work you and Dr. Crosby’s students have undertaken.”
“Not a moment too soon,” Dr. Hosk said. “Eventually they’ll place a travel ban throughout the entire country.”
“Too controversial,” Dr. Crosby said. “And with this President’s politics, he wouldn’t dare close off the borders.”
Dr. Hosk tilted his head to Crosby, perplexed. “Mark, have you been watching the news lately? They’re sealing states off, trapping people behind infected borders. I’d say we’re well on our way.”
“Be that as it may, I haven’t been watching the news. It takes my focus off the work we’re doing here.”
“Fair enough,” Dr. Hosk said. “Shall we show our CDC Director here the latest?”
“Absolutely,” Dr. Crosby said.
“Great, let’s suit up.”
Dr. Robbins nodded and followed the men into the decontamination chamber. The door slid up with the push of a button. As they entered, the airtight entryway sucked in the air outside the minute the door slid closed.
There were bins on the ground with protective garments, gloves, hoods, and other standard equipment. Dr. Robbins watched as the two other doctors helped each other put their gear on, including taping their wrists at the opening.
“All right, your turn,” Crosby said to Dr. Robbins from behind his N95 respirator and face shield. Robbins promptly pulled the gear from the bins and began dressing himself. Crosby tied the garment from behind while Hosk helped with the wrists.
“We’re going to go in right through the lab and to the quarantine area,” Crosby continued. “Don’t worry, each room is sealed off. One of our specialists, in full HAZMAT, will administer the treatment to our next patient.”
Dr. Robbins nodded in understanding. His heart beat fast with anticipation, and he could feel himself sweating already. They entered the lab through another sliding door, and people looked up from their work at the three men as they walked inside. There were several people huddled near a microscope in the middle of the room and others placing vials into a storage freezer sitting atop a white sterile counter.
The room was brightly lit from above, and there were flat screen computer monitors sitting along one of the counters displaying numbers, charts, and graphs. Another monitor displayed a microscopic image of the Ebola virus strand, which looked like a lasso.
Crosby introduced Dr. Robbins as the CDC Director to the team of ten people in the room. Dr. Robbins could faintly see their faces beyond the hood and respirator masks they were wearing. By their eyes and face structure, he could see that there were three females and seven males. He noticed one Asian man give him a particularly odd look from behind his mask and surmised that it was Kal Chen—the only person in the room who must have known that he was no longer the CDC Director. He played along, however, hoping that Chen either forgot or would simply keep his mouth shut.
Dr. Crosby explained the importance of Dr. Robbins’s visit and how they were going to administer the experimental strand into a patient simply referred to as “Patient 2.” The team dutifully nodded as two of them went into a separate decontamination chamber where one person got into full HAZMAT gear with some assistance from the other.
Dr. Robbins marveled at all the work going on in the lab and felt confident in his decision to go there. He had faith in their work but still felt an unsettling feeling in his gut, which he simply chalked up to excitement.
Imagine a simple cure to this nightmare, he thought.
The man in the HAZMAT suit walked directly into the quarantine area from his decontamination chamber as his assistant came back into the lab. There were two isolated rooms on each side, and the HAZMAT man went into the second room on the right carrying a small container between his gloved hands. As soon as he entered the room, Dr. Crosby turned to his team.
“All right, it’s time. I don’t want all of us crowded into the quarantine area, so Dr. Robbins, Dr. Hosk, Dr. Roland, and I will go into the observation hall to review the effects of the virus strand into Patient 2.
“We had resounding success with the first patient, and I hope to reach the same results this time around. Through our research, we have no reason to believe that our experiment won’t reach similar results, but science, as we know, is a slow and careful process, full of difficult moments of trial and error. Let’s pray for the best this time around.”
The students nodded in agreement as Crosby led his two specialists and Dr. Robbins into the observation area. Dr. Roland was a much shorter and pudgier man than his counterpart, and he gave Dr. Robbins a knowing nod as the quarantine door slid open and they entered the room. The students gathered around the window, looking into the quarantine rooms from the lab. Their eyes were eager and anxious.
Dr. Robbins stopped at the first room to their right and turned to the men, pointing inside.
“Here we have Patient 1, the first patient to receive the injection. Our research found that by mimicking the Ebola strand and administering it into the body, the infected patient’s body became self-aware of the intrusion and eliminated all virus cells within the patient’s immune system. Patient 1 is Lyndsay Murrow, from Sarasota, Florida, and she’s made some remarkable progress since yesterday.”
Crosby stopped and leaned toward an intercom panel next to the door into the isolated room. He pressed a button and spoke.
“How are you feeling today, Lyndsay?”
They could see a woman lying on a bed shrouded by a transparent curtain. She pressed a button on a console sitting on a stand next to her and spoke.
“A little better today,” she said in a wheezy voice.
“The vomiting has stopped?” Crosby asked. “And your fever has gone down, correct?”
She leaned over again and pressed the button on her console. “Yes, I still feel sick, but it’s a big improvement from yesterday.”
Crosby glanced at the men as if expecting their hearty approval then pressed the button again.
“That’s great news, Lyndsay. We want you to rest for the next few days as we monitor your recovery.”
He said the word “recovery” as if it were a foregone conclusion. Nonetheless, Dr. Robbins was immensely impressed.
“Let’s move on,” Crosby said. They went to the next room and peered in as the HAZMAT man placed a container on a wheeled table near the male patient shrouded behind the curtain. Even with the blur of the curtain, the patient’s skin was noticeably red and covered in sores that looked like boils. A bucket next to his bed was full of a thick red substance. The HAZMAT man opened the container and pulled out a syringe.
From outside the room, Dr. Crosby continued. “Patient 2 is one Neal Matthews, a thirty-five-year-old man from Orlando, Florida, who contracted the disease working as an RN at Orlando Regional Care. We estimated that he only has a few days left to live, but we hope to reverse his condition with our treatment.”
Crosby nodded to the HAZMAT man from behind the Plexiglas, and the man opened the curtain surrounding the patient. The man was a ghastly sight of open sores and bulging crusts over both his eyes. There were tubes connected to his wrist, most likely sending morphine or some other pain medication into his veins. They couldn’t tell if the patient was conscious as the
HAZMAT man put the needle into his arm and injected the serum.
The Ebola patient made no movement. There were machines next to him monitoring his heart rate and breathing.
Crosby leaned forward and pressed the button on the intercom. “That’s good, Daniel. Now we will take a few minutes and monitor the patient’s condition.”
The HAZMAT man nodded and placed the syringe back into its container. He took a step back, held up a small camcorder, and pointed it at the patient.
Crosby turned back to his group. “Now, we wait.”
Several minutes passed as the team watched in heated anticipation. Crosby’s students leaned against the Plexiglas in the lab.
From inside the patient’s room, HAZMAT man continued to videotape. Crosby and the others stood outside the room, looking in with wide eyes, searching for any signs of movement.
Crosby spoke up. “Patient 1 showed improvements within five minutes, so we hope that Patient 2 follows suit.”
Suddenly, there was movement. Patient 2 started to twitch. Crosby his colleagues pushed against the glass, trying to look over one another. The patient opened his mouth and gasped for air. He then jerked forward and screamed in agony.
Dr. Hosk turned to Crosby. “My God, what is he doing?”
HAZMAT man took a nervous step back but kept his camera focused.
“I don’t know,” Crosby answered, keeping his eyes on the patient.
With another agonized scream, the man leaned forward and vomited thick red blood all over the bed in a ferocious geyser or bodily fluids. Everyone watched in stunned silence. They were confused and unsettled. It wasn’t supposed to happen like that.
“I’ll ask you again, Dr. Crosby, what the hell is going on?” Dr. Hosk asked.
Crosby didn’t answer. The patient flailed and continued to violently vomit all over himself. The vomit ran down the bed and spilled onto the floor in a puddle. HAZMAT man moved against the corner of the room, holding the camcorder in his shaking arms.
The patient’s screams were drowned out by red vomit flowing from his mouth. The crust over his eyes exploded as several sacs of pus split open and oozed a slimy, green mess. Fluids burst from his body from every orifice: eyes, mouth, ears, nose, and rectum, and the man doubled over and collapsed on the floor in a heap, as if his mangled insides were screaming to get out.
With the crash of his body on the cold, hard tile, everything went silent. HAZMAT man stuck to the corner of the room, petrified. No one could take their eyes off the patient, but they were next to certain that he was dead.
Crosby continued to stare at the body on the ground in disbelief. A sinking feeling weighed down on his insides, crushing him. Their promising experiment had ended in failure, at least where Patient 2 was concerned. He finally looked at the men around him, their faces pressed against the Plexiglas in abject shock.
“Our results with Patient 2 have proved unsuccessful.”
Dr. Robbins’s hopes vanished in one fell swoop. There wasn’t much else to say.
Recovery
Sergeant Irwin clutched the steering wheel of his beat-up F-150 while trying to deal with the massive pain in his shoulder where the bullet from Greg’s Berretta had lodged. His driving was erratic as he tore through the countryside without care of anything in his path. Fortunately for him, they hadn’t encountered any other vehicles on the road. As he swerved between lanes, clenching his teeth and moaning, his vision grew blurry, and the inflammation from his wound began to spread throughout his body. They only had little over thirty miles to get to Base 42, and at the speed he was going, he hoped to get there in half the usual time.
Veronica sat in the passenger seat, bound and gagged with tears streaming down her cheeks. The shock of discovering her aunt’s mutilated body still consumed her, almost enough to cloud any understanding of her own current predicament. They were in the middle of nowhere, and all she could see outside the window was black desert; there were no signs of civilization.
She felt lost and defeated, crushed with hopelessness. As the truck swerved along the rugged road, she could barely stay in her seat. The seat belt that Irwin had placed around her was the only thing keeping her from hitting her head on the ceiling as the truck bounded up and down over bumps and potholes in their path. She wanted to scream for Irwin to slow down but could only muster a series of grunts because of the handkerchief tied around her mouth, gagging her. She didn’t know if they were going to survive the trip to Base 42, and part of her didn’t want to. If the people there were anything like Irwin, she was doomed, or so she believed.
She could hear his frustrated winces and pain-filled cries and almost took satisfaction in it. He had tied a rag around the wound in his shoulder as tight as he possibly could, but a thick spot of blood still seeped through anyway. He glanced away from the road while taking a tight turn and noticed her looking at him.
“I really think we got off on the wrong foot,” he said with labored breaths. He grunted some more as sweat poured down from his forehead. He looked flushed and pale, certainly in no condition to be driving a truck across the desert at speeds of sixty miles per hour.
Veronica could already imagine the truck barreling over a shoulder in the road, rolling down the hill, and exploding in a fiery ball. Certain death seemed absolute, and there was nothing she could do about it. She opened her eyes after expecting the truck to roll over when he took the next tight curve, but Irwin was still at the wheel, trying his hardest to focus on the road.
“With the way things are, sometimes we have to make hard decisions. I’m sorry about your boyfriend, but he was a liability.” Irwin stopped and let out another series of grunts. “You may be upset now, and things are not going to get much better for a while, but in the end, you’ll be alive, and I think that’s worth something.”
Veronica didn’t even try to respond to his ramblings, but she did have one question on her mind. “Joe,” she said through her gag.
“What?” Irwin said, jerking the steering wheel.
“What did you do to Joe?”
Irwin thought to himself, and then it hit him. “Oh! Joe, the neighbor. You’re wondering how I knew about him, or how I concocted that whole story.” He stopped and grimaced again from the pain, letting out rapid breaths. His lips curled upward, and he attempted a smile. “Well, he was one stop out of many. I’ve been making the rounds, I guess you could say. I’m not much of a scout really. And I’m not actually in the military. Truth be told, I was gathering supplies to bring back to Base 42, and this little soldier get-up helps me get inside these homes.”
Veronica shut her eyes and screamed on the inside.
Irwin continued. “My real name is Jacob. Just a regular man on a mission. I had no intention of killing anyone, but sometimes it just turns out that way. I try to be friendly with everyone, but sometimes they don’t trust me, just like your boyfriend.” Irwin stopped and breathed in harshly, followed by a long exhale. “I’m sorry things turned out this way. I really am.”
His words were like white noise. He took notice of her sudden silence and the anger on her face and continued.
“I’m really not that bad of a guy, you’ll see. I mean before your aunt and her neighbor, I’ve only killed one other person. I’m not proud of that. I’m not proud of any of it.”
He reached down to pick up a bottle of Ibuprofen shaking around in the middle console and poured several pills into his mouth. He washed it down with a bottle of whisky rolling on the floor by his feet.
“It’s survival of the fittest now,” he said, breathing heavily and eyes watering from the strong whisky burning his throat. “I’m not going to hurt you. I need you, just like you’re going to need me. We’ll work together, and I’ll make sure no one does anything bad to you while we’re there.”
Veronica tried to hold back her tears, but it was impossible. They streamed down her already salted cheeks amid thick sobs of anguish.
“I mean, you’re probably going to have to do some things
to earn your keep around there. Just block it out and do what you have to do. In the end, you’ll be alive.”
Veronica felt dizzy. She pulled on the rope tying her hands to her ankles, but it made no difference. There was no escape. The whisky seemed to have an effect on Irwin as his cries of pain became less frequent. He looked at her, eyes glazed, as the searing intensity of his wound soon dulled.
“Beyond that, I can guarantee your safety. It comes at a little price, but we all gotta do our little part, you know?”
Veronica tried to block his words out as every syllable felt like poison to her. She thought of Greg and felt a glimmer of hope. He had been injured, but he was still alive. How would he ever find them though? Her heart sank when she thought of her aunt, a woman who had always been there for her. She wished she and Greg could have gotten there sooner, or that she had made it to her aunt’s house the night she had been stopped by roadblocks that had been placed throughout the city.
She had seen more death in the past two months than in her entire life, and through it all, a spark of defiance came over her. She would fight them all. She wasn’t going to allow herself to succumb to any of the threats that Irwin rambled about. It seemed realistic enough. The minute she got the chance, she would ram a dagger through his throat and do the same to any man who tried to assault her. It was her only hope.
***
Greg awoke on the kitchen floor after a brief blackout. The gunshot wound in his left thigh still throbbed painfully, and he also had a large bump on his forehead to contend with. Nothing was going to keep him from chasing after Irwin and recovering Veronica; at least, that was how he felt. The reality, however, was far different. There was a .22 bullet in his leg, which immobilized him, and he wasn’t going to get very far until the wound was fixed. Though the bullet was low caliber, it was still enough to take him down.
Greg’s mind raced with options. He had first-aid supplies in his van, and he knew exactly what had to be done. He’d remove the bullet, if possible, and then clean, cauterize, and bandage the wound. Everything he needed was in the van, but the problem was in getting there.
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