Mercy 6

by David Bajo

  28.

  Silva was waiting for her in the Pathology hall. The tech’s mask hung loose about her throat. She stood before the closed door.

  There was an invitation to her stance, an angling toward the handle, exposing it. She lifted her chin—too high.

  “How furious is he?”

  “You are not to be let in.”

  Mendenhall neared Silva, was careful to relax her expression.

  “He must be curious.”

  Silva looked perplexed.

  “Why not just lock the door? Why not just listen to me push the buzzer, bang on it?” Mendenhall raised her chin, level with Silva’s brow. “Why have you out here?”

  “To avoid unnecessary contact with Cabral.”

  “But right here,” said Mendenhall. “He told you to stay right here, no?”

  Silva nodded once, then twice.

  “Then he’s curious.” Mendenhall wanted to be more graceful, to ease her way through the exchange. Silva—her intelligence, its devotion—soothed her. But she felt a press from above, ID buzzing about the ER, coming down to take Cabral.

  “Ask him to let me in if I can guess the occlusion, its location and position.”

  “I have orders not to do that.”

  “Then go in and tell him. Just walk in and say, ‘Renal membrane to gluteal. Through the pelvis. No major vessels.”

  Silva flinched, a pretty inhale, gathering.

  “Come on, Silva. Just do that. He’ll be disappointed if you don’t.

  If there’s no try.”

  Silva applied her mask, opened the door, which wasn’t locked, and went in. Mendenhall could only hear the sound of Silva’s voice, not the words. She could hear the effort, pulses of forced volume.

  Then silence, nothing from Claiborne.

  Silva came back out, mask still covering her nose and mouth.

  There was hope in this; she was going right back inside. “Which side and which direction?”

  Mendenhall recalled Cabral’s position on the bed. He had rested on his right side. So left, he had been favoring his left, whether he knew it or not. The direction? Up or down? At about seven twenty, when the others had fallen, had he been standing or sitting or lying down or crouching to make shadow puppets on the bay wall?

  “Left side. From renal membrane—but not the kidney, not even grazing the kidney—down through pelvis.” Almost confident of the location, she was guessing the direction, going with her initial claim, which had not been thought out. She guessed that Claiborne was testing her doubt. Mendenhall was all doubt, every word weighted with it.

  “Okay, come in.” Silva drew mask and gloves from her lab coat and handed them to Mendenhall.

  When Mendenhall entered the lab, Claiborne was extracting marrow from Cabral’s left pelvis. Cabral was naked and positioned symmetrically on the steel bed, arms open, legs open. She knew not to speak and took the seat arranged for her, a stool with wheels locked. She was careful with her posture, mimicking Silva’s straightness as best she could, the level shoulders.

  Claiborne continued the extraction as he spoke, mask pumping.

  “Six dead, four at once, maybe one later, one more definitely later.

  What does that indicate?”

  Mendenhall did not hesitate. “Infection.”

  Claiborne nodded for Silva to approach the body. The tech began entering readings on her tablet. The readings appeared on an overhead screen beneath a figure of a digital scan revealing the tornadic occlusion through Cabral’s left pelvis.

  This was what Mendenhall needed most, to see Cabral in this light, caressed by this air, saved from the humiliation in the ER. She saw his first name on the overhead screen. Albert. Albert Cabral.

  Claiborne was scowling as he worked, his dark brow furrowed into his mask, eyes aglare. But maybe that was from the extraction, the precision and force required to needle into the pelvis. From her stool Mendenhall examined the overhead screen. The occlusion appeared in the marrow but not the bone.

  “What are you thinking, Doctor?”

  Mendenhall started. She should have been ready with her phrasing. Maybe this was what she wanted also, what she needed in getting here with Cabral, Claiborne, and Silva. Focus, a hard external counter to her doubt.

  “I’m thinking it . . . the infection . . . burst in all six at the same time—about the same time.”

  Silva stopped entering data, looked at Mendenhall. Claiborne kept working.

  “Meeks collapsed against warm metal, affecting temp and rigor.

  Maybe,” Claiborne said. “But Cabral here? He survived. Why? No major organs?”

  “No,” replied Mendenhall. “He didn’t survive.”

  Now Silva dropped her arms and looked at Claiborne, perhaps awaiting orders to escort Mendenhall out.

  “Explain.”

  “Neurogenic shock. He was walking dead.”

  Claiborne wagged his head as he focused on the final draw of the extraction. He treated Cabral as living, feeling, removing the needle with a graceful push-pull, push-pull.

  “You’ve never seen it,” Mendenhall told him. “Only in charts, written. Neurogenic shock. I’ve seen it. Many times. I should have seen it in Cabral.”

  “You’re stretching again.” Claiborne sealed the extraction in the syringe, carefully snapped the needle into a disposal bag, and handed the sample to Silva. “You’re fighting.”

  “I did see it in Cabral. I just didn’t register it. I should’ve registered it. If I’d known him . . .”

  “Stop.” Claiborne gazed upward. “We’re out of time. You need to leave here before ID shows up. They catch you here, you’re done.

  I’m done.”

  She stood, hesitated. “Close-scan the sinoatrial node. Before they take him. We know there’ll be incipient hemorrhaging in the brain, like all of them. We’ll see that again. But the sinoatrial . . .”

  She hurried from the lab. Before closing the door, she looked at Silva, offered a nod of thanks. What she could muster.

  29.

  Alone in the wide hall outside Pathology, Mendenhall heard the elevator arriving. She turned the nearest corner, found herself atop the ramp to the exit, where they had delivered the bodies to the outside. She pressed herself to the wall, near the edge, turned her head to the sounds. The elevator opened. Three sets of footsteps pattered on linoleum—a leader and two techs. Whom would Thorpe send to confront Claiborne? Maybe himself. She was tempted to look.

  “When we go in,” said the leader’s voice, “remain behind at ease.

  It’s his lab. If she’s in there, call for removal; don’t make me say it.”

  The voice was hollow. They were wearing full hoods and face visors.

  There was no point in looking.

  She had seen Thorpe once, from a distance, from the rear of an auditorium, a doctor sitting in a line of experts onstage. She had stayed only to hear the first speaker, to show her face at a mandatory conference. She hadn’t paid attention to the introductions, never figured out who was who.

  But that was him out there, no doubt. Why? For Cabral, the clear signifier of outbreak? For Claiborne, to lay some claim in Pathology? No, he was there for her. She turned the other way in order to trail silently down the exit ramp.

  A body was there. On a gurney angled toward the sliding door, it was sealed in a white bag. On tiptoe, in a slow-motion sprint, she moved to it. She crouched behind it in case they checked around the corner before going into the lab. She counted to ten, then straightened and examined the bag.

  It was Peterson. Marley. Mendenhall knew this without looking at the tag. Beneath white vinyl the nurse’s arms lay straight along her sides, her chin stiff, her stomach a soft rise, her feet at symmetrical angles. She and the other smokers used to wave as Mendenhall ran by them on the trails, laugh and raise cigarettes, try to get smoke in her face. “That will kill you, Doctor.”

  She adjusted Peterson’s gurney, setting it perpendicular to the sliding door, less abandoned.
Mendenhall was glad that she had found her, could wait with her. Mendenhall was screwing up everything. At least she could do this.

  The slider buzzed and then rattled open. Mendenhall swung to the other side of the gurney and braced herself. The Disease Control truck was ramped open, its portable lab soft and white. Two space-suited figures hurried to the gurney, ignoring Mendenhall.

  Another appeared from somewhere. He was tall, no face visible behind the tinted visor. He looked Mendenhall up and down. She saw her face reflected in the black plastic—wonder, fear, recognition.

  “Mullich?” she said.

  The figure only breathed. He stood guard as the others transferred Peterson to the truck. He slammed the button that dropped the slider, divided her from all of them. The drop softened at the very bottom, whispered shut.

  She heard footsteps from atop the ramp and looked up,

  expecting to be caught by Thorpe and his techs. But it was Silva, her form slight in oversized scrubs. The fluorescent lighting seemed to press her against the wall. She let her back slide down the edge, folded herself into a sitting position. She put her hands to her face. Her black hair fell forward. Mendenhall could tell Silva had been resisting her hands, putting them there.

  She could have been drinking from them, pulling cool water to her skin.

  Mendenhall walked up the ramp and sat perpendicular to Silva, let her legs angle down the slope.

  “If we had cafeteria trays we could slide.”

  Silva opened her fingers but kept them to her face. “We’d need ice.”

  Mendenhall nodded.

  “Rough in there?”

  “I’ve been ordered to rest.” Silva smoothed her eyebrows, blinked, let her hands fall.

  “That’s a challenge,” replied Mendenhall. “To find a place.

  These days.”

  “Not down here. No one comes down here to rest. You can find empty beds in the labs. They’re not all steel.”

  “But you’re here.”

  “I was hoping to find you.”

  “I’m never one to talk to.”

  “You have Dr. Claiborne confused.” Silva looked toward Claiborne’s lab. “Confused and muttering. He didn’t try for slices of the sinoatrial.”

  Mendenhall shrugged. “It was just a stab. Before I had to run.”

  “He sliced the basal ganglia instead. The amygdala.”

  “Did they catch him?” Mendenhall straightened her feet, bounced them a little on the ramp.

  “He didn’t seem to care. He let them.”

  “Thorpe. What did he say?”

  “He just asked why he was doing that to a dead brain. If he had previous scans from when the patient was alive. Then they bagged Cabral and took him.”

  “You found that strange?”

  Silva flexed her jaw, muscles fingering between slender bones.

  “Why not just stay there? Complete the scans and samples there?

  Then take him.”

  “Don’t expect any spontaneity from them,” said Mendenhall.

  “Don’t expect good medicine. From them. Outside their own labs anyway.”

  Silva looked at her, waited for her to turn more to her. Her eyes were almost black, but that was because of the darkness of the lashes, the even brows. Her lips hung in a pretty frown.

  “But me,” said Mendenhall. “You want to know if my medicine is good.”

  “I need to know it.”

  “It is.” Mendenhall took hold of Silva’s foot, squeezed the small running shoe and wiggled it. “I observed Cabral the way I should’ve.

  I reported it. To the pathologist. He exhibited signs of neurogenic shock. Delayed.”

  Silva offered the other foot, and Mendenhall held it, with her thumb palpated the metatarsal slope. Silva lulled her eyes. “What good are scan slices from a dead heart, a dead brain? With no live comparisons?”

  Mendenhall shrugged. “Probably none. But your boss is very good. He sees things in dead tissue the rest of us don’t. I presume.

  Just like I see things in trauma behavior. I’m not as nuts as you think.”

  “Will he let you back in there?”

  “I can only try.” Mendenhall nodded back toward the hall. “Go find one of those dead beds. Sleep for a good hour. Like he ordered.

  You’ll make better decisions, better observations.”

  “How did you know he said an hour?”

  “He’s a man who knows the value of time. Better than anybody.

  He runs miles paced to the second. Bodies are clocks. Dead or alive, they are clocks, more intricate than any mechanical ones.”

  30.

  Claiborne was working the laptop beneath the far wall of the Path lab. Above him were the gridded forms of the six patients, sublimate, occlusions marked as long red triangles. Two screens held three bodies each. A third screen illuminated two stochastic equations: one for continual progression, one for burst. The one for continual had four lines, the one for burst only three. The four steel beds were empty.

  Mullich sat in his corner, below his screens showing the building grids. Had he been there all along? He sat as though he had, a mask hanging loose from his neck.

  “Are they after me?” asked Mendenhall.

  Claiborne turned to her, an elbow to the desk. “I told Thorpe what you said. Suggesting viral burst. He’s on the same page. We’re on the same page.”

  “You tell him about the neurogenic shock? About Cabral and the others being struck close to the same time?”

  “I’m not stupid. I’m not crazy.”

  “It’ll show,” she replied. “Eventually.”

  “Then let it. Let him find it.”

  “He’s a virologist. Everything will show viral to him. He’ll always go forward, seeing everything as progression. Outbreak.”

  “Everything does show viral.”

  “Except there’s no virus.”

  “That happens.”

  “So does delayed demise due to neurogenic shock.”

  Claiborne’s gaze held steady. His unfurled mask hung neatly over his tie and the lapels of his lab coat. “I saved you.”

  Mullich turned to them. “She’s lying.”

  “She’s withholding.” Claiborne kept looking at her, not even glancing toward Mullich. “She’s withholding what she should. For me. For herself.”

  Mendenhall didn’t feel that she was lying or withholding. She just felt open.

  “Thorpe asked me—us,” Claiborne nodded toward Mullich as he continued, “about Cabral coming to ER earlier. With that first wave of fevers. He heard something.”

  Mendenhall returned his gaze. Only Pao Pao knew for certain what had happened. Only she had confronted Mendenhall. Pao Pao would not have said anything to anyone else. But plenty of other nurses and techs had been there, maybe noticed Cabral on that gurney, getting up from that gurney and scuttling away.

  “We told him what we knew,” said Claiborne. “Nothing.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Okay. Now you tell me.”

  Mendenhall stepped closer to Claiborne. “Cabral was on a gurney. I noticed him slip away. I did not start a chart for him. He was healthy. Scared. But fine.”

  “You said yourself he was off.”

  “Later,” explained Mendenhall. “I realized later. Suspected later.

  That’s the truth.”

  “He was with us in the boiler room,” said Mullich. “He was the one who fetched Meeks.”

  Claiborne’s expression remained flat. “Anything else?”

  “I spoke with him after. Alone in a side room. I sent him back down to the boilers. I met him down there.”

  Claiborne stood. He motioned to the first empty bed. “There,”

  he told her.

  Mendenhall removed her lab coat and sat on the steel. The brakes weren’t set, so the bed scooted away from her weight and she had to restraighten it. She composed herself, adjusted her posture, rolled up her left sleeve, pumped forth a vein.
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  “Lie down.” Claiborne tied his mask and snapped on fresh gloves.

  Mendenhall positioned herself, the steel cool against her shoulder blades. She flinched, confused. “Careful,” she said as Claiborne approached with the syringe. “I’m a live one.”

  “I’m doing scans as well,” he said as he swabbed the insertion point. He drove the needle, his grip firm around her elbow.

  “Anywhere I should focus?”

  She watched her blood fill the syringe, was startled, as always, by the darkness of it. Not the color of the wounds she saw every day.

  Not the bright red of movies. “No. I feel fine. You’ll find nothing in me.”

  31.

  Pao Pao called her to the ER. A surgical tech had been injured trying to break through one of Mullich’s windows. One of the security officers who had restrained him was in, too. Mendenhall took solace in the call and the exit it provided. She paused outside the door to the Pathology lab. Claiborne and Mullich were in there with her scans. They would get to see them before she did, turn her, fold her, render her, float her above the room. Thorpe, too, would see them before she did, have them.

  When Mendenhall got to the bay, to her remaining section along the wall, Pao Pao and an EMT were with the injured tech.

  The tech’s complexion was waxy, and he was sweating as he lay back on the gurney. Pao Pao was pressing a wound above his left eye.

  The nurse eyed Mendenhall hard as she approached. Mendenhall donned fresh mask and gloves. One bed back was Ng 23, her gunshot patient. She felt his gaze, too.

  As she neared, Mendenhall could see everything. The position of the wound, the paleness, the quiver in the patient’s fingers. His head had struck a wall, maybe Mullich’s window, shoved there. One bed over sat the security officer, slumped to one side, arm hanging long and low. A separated shoulder, lots of pain.

  She bypassed the tech and swerved toward the guard. “Sterilize and numb the wound,” she told Pao Pao. She looked at the EMT.

  “Ready sutures.”

  The security guard appeared startled even as he clenched against the pain in his shoulder. With a stiff arm, Mendenhall pressed him against the recline. He was big, his chest thick, his groan hollow inside it. She broke the seal on a foam bit and inserted it between his teeth. He seemed to know. His eyes widened. She palpated the inside of his biceps, checking against fracture. Without hesitation she pulled the arm, rotated, and shoved. The guard hummed loudly into the bit, eyes bulging. There was a wooden clunk as the shoulder set and the guard spit out his bit in a hard exhalation. The bit struck Mendenhall’s mask as she closed her eyes against the spray.