OMEGA

by Patrick Lynch

  Ford looked down at the drug. He felt a strong urge to grab the case and make a run for it, get it into the hospital one way or another. Then he looked at West, saw a man who had struggled for years with the question of what to do. It was easy to forget West’s medical background, to see only the politician, but there was something in his expression as he looked down at the bottles: it said the drug meant a lot to him too.

  “I still don’t understand,” said Ford.

  West frowned. Lit by the reflected flashlight, his face looked older.

  “Understand?”

  “If this thing is as effective as you say … Well, then … Well, then all this is wrong. There are people in there…” He pointed away across the car lot to the hospital building. “There are people in there dying. In pain. They are dying, Marshall, and you’re standing here with the cure.”

  West closed his eyes momentarily and then shut the case.

  “Marcus, I don’t think I can make it any clearer than I already have. I don’t think—”

  “I’m not talking about the technical issues. I’m not talking about the resistance question. I understand all that. I share your concern. But this is … this is about right and wrong. I’m talking about … I’m talking about your obligation, our obligation to help.”

  “You mean my sacred obligation not to harm my patients? Is that what you mean? The Hippocratic oath? Is that what we’re talking about here?”

  Ford looked down at the ground.

  “Now you mention it … yes. Doesn’t that mean anything to you anymore? Didn’t it mean something to you when you went to med school? I will prescribe regimen for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone.”

  West shook his head.

  “You always were a good student, Marcus. I’m surprised you still remember it. I seem to recall Hippocrates also said a lot about not screwing the patients, and the importance of keeping secrets that should … how does he put it?—should not be spread abroad.”

  He lifted the case by the handle and stood it on its side.

  “Unfortunately, Hippocrates knew nothing about antibiotic resistance. Nor did he understand the dynamics, the imperatives of the free market. If he had, he’d have taken the view I take.”

  He leaned forward a little, his dark eyes fixed on Ford’s.

  “What is my ultimate responsibility, Marcus? Is it to the people in there, or to future humanity? Because we could be talking end games here. Armageddon.”

  “Oh come on, Marshall.”

  “You think I’m kidding? Forget about the bugs for a minute. I’m talking about the breakdown of the social order. Can you imagine the effect a new plague would have on a city like Los Angeles? Given the tensions, the anger, the volatility? This isn’t fourteenth century Paris we’re living in—with a … with a docile underclass you can throw scraps to. Our poor are armed. Can you imagine the riots, the chaos, the burning?”

  Ford took a step nearer.

  “But Marshall, what … what happens tomorrow…. It’s always been that way. We’ve always relied on our ingenuity. When we run out of ideas we’ll become extinct, we’ll be selected out. That’s the world we live in. But we can’t second guess the future, we can’t sacrifice people for the sake of a future we can’t even foresee.”

  West lifted the case out of the trunk.

  “Well, listen.” He squeezed the water out of his eyes. “Much as I’d love to continue this edifying debate, the time”—

  “That’s your problem, Marshall. You, your people… you never wanted this debate. This debate should have happened six years ago. In Congress. People have a right to know what’s going on. You could have put the argument for restrictive distribution in Congress. That was the forum for it. Not a parking lot, creeping around in the dark. But you didn’t. And do you know why?”

  A band of muscle twitched in West’s check. He was running out of patience.

  “Because you don’t trust the people. You don’t believe the people can make the right choices.”

  West gave a dry, dismissive laugh.

  “Yeah, and remember, I’m a politician. I see it from the inside. If you think Congress is a democratic forum, you’re more of a flake than I thought. Marcus, Congress is where interest groups cut deals. Pressure groups and lobbies—gun lobbies, farmers, distillers, ecologists. What chance would we have had against the pharmaceuticals giants, against Stern, Apex, Kempf ? I’ll tell you: no chance.”

  He held out the case, but Ford made no move to take it.

  “So you conduct policy behind your mirrors,” he said. “Like … like the politicians voting for war from the safety of their fallout shelters.”

  West let the case fall back against his leg, shaking his head, smiling. Then he was laughing, still shaking his head and looking at Ford as if he were the worst kind of fool. Ford felt his shoulders drop. For a moment he had thought he could carry West with him, could appeal to his decency. But it was hopeless.

  “Marcus, I’m sorry, but…” West was still smiling, still amused. “Do you know what you’ve become? Do you know what working in this place has done to you? It has radicalized you. You’re a fucking radical flake. You used to be a liberal flake, but now … And you think you’re just the average Joe. The average decent guy. But you’re right out there on the margin, Marcus, with the dingbats and the goofballs. Do you realize that?”

  Ford stared at West’s smiling face for a moment. Then something inside him snapped. He found himself grappling for the case, clutching at West’s clenched hands, feeling knuckles under rain-slick flesh, the hardness of a wedding band, and then he was pulling back and away, the case magically his.

  He took a step back … and froze. Denman was there, a .38 in his right fist. His rain-soaked clothes were covered in mud as if he’d actually come up out of the ground. He spoke through clenched teeth: “Put down the case, you dumb fuck.”

  West was massaging his hand, leaning back against the car.

  “Fucking flake,” he said with disgust. “You’d stand here arguing your bullshit morality and let your own kid die in that shit hole.”

  Ford started to back away, the case held across his chest.

  “I’m not…” The words came to him as if somebody else were speaking them. “It doesn’t belong to you.”

  Denman took aim.

  “No further, Dr. Ford.”

  But Ford no longer had any choice. He kept walking, a step at a time, because he had to take the drug, he had to take it to Sunny.

  Denman fired.

  Ford was punched backwards, his chest split by intense pain. Red light squeezed his vision as he dropped to his knees, reaching up with the case as he went down, reaching up as if giving it to somebody above him. Denman fired again.

  Deputy Samuel Dorsey turned at the sound of the first shot and, squinting through the downpour, saw the muzzle flash of the second. He raised his own weapon and began to run.

  “Police! Put down your guns,” he shouted.

  From where he stood, Duane Ruddock watched in disbelief as his partner set off towards a line of cars barely visible in the gloom.

  Denman picked out the advancing figure against the lights of the Willowbrook. He took aim. Fired.

  Dorsey was hit twice. Once in the shoulder. Once in the groin. Between the first and second hits, he managed to squeeze off four rounds, one of which entered Denman’s head through the left eye, tearing a dollar-sized hole in the back of his skull.

  There was a car alarm. The sound of running feet.

  Ford heard a man struggling to breathe—a harsh rasping he knew from the emergency room. And there was someone saying, “Get it off me, get it off me”—over and over. It felt as though a steel spike had been driven into his chest. He was drenched in blood. It flushed down into his groin as he sat clutching the case. It came to him that he was going to die now.

  Then there were people, hands, voices,—“Lie back.”… “Are you okay?” …
“Let go of the…” “He won’t let go.”… “We have to see where you’re…” “Let go of the CASE!”

  It was wrenched from his grasp.

  “No! It’s … You have to…”

  He reached after it, but the pain in his chest was unbelievable. He allowed himself to be pushed back. A mask was held against his mouth. He tasted oxygen.

  “No…” he whispered. “The case. I…”

  A mouth was close to his ear. Ford could hear urgent breathing. Fingers probed and palped. First his torso. Then his scalp.

  “Not hit,” said the mouth. “He’s … I can’t find any. There’s no penetration. We’ll have to check stool and urine for signs of internal bleeding.”

  Then Gloria was there.

  “You’re going to be okay,” she said. She was struggling for breath. She must have run all the way. “The bullet went into the case you were holding. Broke a … broke a rib maybe, but you aren’t losing any blood.”

  But he could feel the blood. He was drenched in blood. It wasn’t rain. He could feel it on his hands, viscous, sticky. He could feel it in his clothes.

  Then he realized what had happened.

  “Oh, Jesus, no! Please, Gloria. I have to…”

  He tried to pull himself up, but the hands restrained him.

  “Gloria! For Christ’s sake.”

  “You have to stay still, Doctor. You could have problems inside. You’re just going to tear yourself up.”

  Ford blinked up at the falling rain. He could see the broad moon of Gloria’s face. He breathed for a moment, trying to gather his strength, trying to focus through the pain.

  “Help me up, Gloria. I’m okay. I have to check the case.”

  Gloria gave a snort of impatience and then turned away.

  “Can we have that damned case? What’s in that thing, anyway?”

  “He was holding it when we got here,” someone said. “Didn’t want to let go.”

  “It’s the drug,” said Ford, tugging at Gloria’s sleeve. “When I came into the hospital I thought I had it, but I was wrong. Gloria, you have to listen to me. It’s an antibiotic. You have to give it to Sunny. Forty thousand IU daily. She’ll—”

  Gloria was easing him up into a sitting position.

  “Take it easy,” she said. “Let’s just have a look at this thing.”

  In jerky flashlight Ford saw West leaning against the Pontiac, drinking water, his face spattered with blood. There were paramedics and doctors standing over two fallen men. Ford recognized Ruddock too, looking down at one of the bodies, his gun in his left hand. Somebody switched off the car alarm.

  Then Ford had the case. He struggled with the locks for a moment. They popped open.

  There was a faint woody smell. Of the three bottles, only the one on the left seemed to have survived. The others were just broken glass. Ford pulled the third bottle out of the foam case and stared in disbelief as the last of the serum dribbled through a fine crack in the base.

  He examined his trembling fingers. They had a faint oily sheen.

  Omega, it was all gone. He looked across to West, and West saw what had happened. He smiled.

  Ford brought his hands to his face and felt Gloria pull him roughly against her.

  “It’s all right, honey. Don’t go upsetting yourself.”

  “West,” he said. He started to struggle again. “I have to—”

  Then there was another voice.

  “Marcus?”

  For a moment he thought he must be hallucinating, but then she reached down and touched him. She pushed the hair back from his forehead and tried to smile. Ford frowned. It was his head. It was playing tricks. It had to be.

  “Helen, what … what are you…?”

  She leaned forward and put her mouth to his ear.

  “Marcus,” she whispered. “Say nothing. Say nothing.”

  Duane Ruddock left the Willowbrook just after midnight, having taped Ford’s statement concerning the shooting incident. He had also gone through the events of the past weeks, focusing particularly on Ford’s whereabouts around the time of the Novak and Griffen killings.

  Ford, despite being in considerable pain—he was X-rayed and then treated for damage to costal cartilage on his left side—had been more than willing to cooperate. He had solid alibis: he had been at the hospital watching over his daughter on the dates and times in question, a fact confirmed by several of the medical staff.

  Regarding his presence in Bel Air just prior to Griffen’s death, he explained that he had been following Helen Wray. To Ruddock this seemed promising: it at least indicated Ford’s involvement in unorthodox goings-on, but further questioning created more problems than it solved. Two hours into the interview Ruddock realized he was up to his neck in the biggest can of worms of his long career.

  West stated his belief that his bodyguard, Craig Denman, had clearly mistaken Ford for a mugger and that the whole thing had been a tragic accident. As to his presence in the parking lot, he said that he had simply come to discuss the outcome of the Apex investigation with Dr. Ford, who had a personal interest in its outcome. Asked to verify Ford’s assertion that he had come to bargain over a lifesaving drug, he said that the intense stress of the previous weeks—first his suspension and then his daughter’s illness—had left Ford a little unbalanced. At Ford’s suggestion, the case and the shattered remains of its contents were taken away for laboratory examination.

  Ruddock decided to call it a day. It was written in his personal rule book that when you find yourself in a hole, you stop digging. The only way the truth about that night’s shootings was going to come out, if it ever did, was if a proper investigation was mounted. And that was going to take time. Ruddock cautioned all the parties involved that he would be seeking their assistance in the coming days and weeks.

  He went from the Willowbrook directly to LA County USC Medical Center, where Samuel Dorsey had been admitted to the trauma unit.

  For Ford, the time spent answering Ruddock’s questions was the longest two hours of his life. He struggled to concentrate on what was being asked, but all he could think about was Helen, all he could see was her tearstained face as she told him that it was okay. “Say nothing,” she had said, and there was nothing he could say, except, as the interview came to a close, that he needed to be with his daughter, a fact that Ruddock seemed to understand.

  As soon as Ruddock was finished with him, he made his way to the second-floor isolation room where Sunny was being kept.

  He found Helen sitting alone by the bed, drinking a glass of water. Sunny slept on in her deep sleep of sickness. He paused in the doorway, confused, unable to speak or move.

  Getting to her feet, Helen handed him a small nylon traveling case.

  “She’ll need the next injection in six hours,” she said, trying to avoid his gaze. Then she was pushing past him, trying to get out of the room without another word.

  “Helen.”

  She stopped in the doorway and risked looking into his eyes.

  “Marcus, I know you…” She looked down for a moment, at a loss for words. “I know it must be difficult for you to understand what happened. But I…”

  Then she was pulling her hair back from her face, pulling hard, her fist clenched in the dark curls, her eyes glittering with unshed tears. He made a move towards her, but she stepped back, pushing out her left hand as though trying to placate him, trying to appease his anger. But Ford found that there was no anger, that he didn’t know, in fact, what to feel.

  “I’m leaving,” said Helen. “I’m leaving … I just wanted to tell you … I wanted you to know that Sunny’s going to be okay.”

  She turned and looked back at the bed.

  “I explained everything to Gloria. She injected the drug directly into Sunny’s lower intestine. It’ll be working already.”

  Ford frowned.

  “The drug?”

  He was having trouble taking things in.

  “Omega? Is that what you mean?”
>
  Helen looked back at him.

  “Ribomax.”

  “Ribo…”

  “A rose by any other name,” she said, trying to smile, but suddenly the tears came, and she was covering her face with her hands.

  Ford watched her, understanding now that it was all exactly as he had feared. Helen had used him to steal Novak’s work for Stern. Now they had gone ahead and produced the molecule. It would be packaged and sold, and in time, just as West had predicted, it would be copied.

  But beyond that he remained confused. Here she was, after all. And with the drug. Suddenly he had to know everything.

  “Helen…?”

  She lowered her hands.

  “I don’t…” Ford clutched at the air. “You’ll have to … What did you do, for God’s sake?”

  She looked at him for a moment, before speaking.

  “I went out to the Stern laboratories today. I went to see the director of research, Kernahan. He showed me the drug. They’re not ready to mass produce yet. But they’d made some up on the bench. He had it in his office. In a carton, for God’s sake. He showed it to me like a bottle of fancy wine. I knew he was going to be occupied elsewhere. So I went into his office, and I took a bottle.”

  She shrugged, still dabbing at her eyes.

  “That’s all there is to it. I stole the drug.”

  “But…” Ford pushed his hand into his hair. “I’m trying to understand why. After the past few days, I…”

  Helen looked at him. He could see that she was as confused about this as he was.

  “You know,” she said, “that’s harder than you’d think. To answer I mean. I…” She gave herself a shake. “Look, suddenly it was clear to me. I was driving along and suddenly it was clear. I couldn’t stand by and let … let Sunny’s life be ruined.”