Plague Ship (A Ballineau/Ross Medical Thriller)

by Goldberg, Leonard

  “Good,” David went on. “I want you to gather up some deckhands who you trust and all the white paint and brushes you can find. Then go level by level, looking in each cabin. When all the occupants in a given cabin are dead, lock the door and paint a big white cross on it. You’ll notice that some doors already have a red splash on them. Ignore the red paint. Got it?”

  “Got it!”

  “Then go!”

  He watched Chandler sprint for the elevator, thinking that the young crewman could be trusted. Maybe not absolutely 100 percent, but close enough, and that could be very important later on. He gave the corpse a final glance and left the spa, closing the door behind him.

  As he turned away, he heard a cacophony of sounds coming from the sick bay. Furniture was being moved, boxes overturned, metal objects hitting the floor. Someone was searching, he decided. They were probably scavenging for oxygen tanks or maybe antibiotic tablets or perhaps narcotics, if the person was an addict.

  David released the safety on his shotgun and silently moved to the sick bay. At the door, he peered in cautiously before advancing through the reception area. All the noise was emanating from the examining room. He glimpsed in and saw Marilyn Wyman on her knees, rummaging through boxes and cartons.

  “Hey, Marilyn,” he called over.

  “Hello, David,” she said, now looking under the examining table.

  “Did you lose something?”

  “Not me,” she replied. “It’s something of Will’s. I noticed that one of his shoes was missing and I thought it might be in here. It’s so important that I—” She paused to choke back her tears before continuing. “It’s very important to me. I want to hold on to everything he owned, particularly his clothes and books. And I couldn’t stand the thought of Will having only one shoe on. I simply couldn’t. I had to find the missing shoe. You—you probably don’t understand all this.”

  “I understand,” David said softly and thought back to Marianne. When his wife passed away, he wouldn’t let anyone clean out her closet or chest of drawers or remove any of her personal items. To do so would have meant she was really dead, and he couldn’t accept that. Not for a very long time. At length, David asked, “May I help you look?”

  “Thanks, but there’s no need,” Marilyn replied and held up a small brown shoe. “I found it.”

  “Good,” David said. “Now I’m going to ask you to accept my apology. I know I promised to stop by and chat with you, but I never got around to it, and I’m sorry for that.”

  “Oh, I realize you’ve been very busy.”

  “But I’m not busy now, so let’s talk.”

  “I don’t have much to say,” she said quietly as her eyes again welled up with tears. “All I keep thinking about is that I have no reason to live. Everything I loved and cherished is gone. My son, my husband….” Her voice trailed off while she dabbed her eyes with Kleenex. “I wish I would have died with them. But it wasn’t to be. They caught the terrible flu and it killed them. All I got was a hacking cough and a little fever that lasted a few days. And so I’m here and they’re not.”

  David blinked. My God! Another female survivor! That makes four! And Marilyn should have been the least likely to survive. She’d had close intimate contact for hours on end with Will and Sol, who were both heavily infected. She must have inhaled a massive dose of the virus, yet she was barely affected. Why?

  “There are moments when I just want to jump overboard and end it,” Marilyn went on, after blowing her nose. “There’s a sad irony to all this. As you may have guessed, Sol was a millionaire many times over. So now I can have everything I want in the world. Everything except the people I love the most. All that money and nothing to live for.”

  “Live for Will,” David said gently.

  “He’s dead, David.”

  David shook his head. “Will is alive in your heart and mind, and he’ll be there forever.”

  Marilyn nodded and smiled faintly at the memory of her son. “Every time I see his goldfish or hold his books, he comes back to me.”

  “As he should,” David said, suddenly thinking of a way to boost Marilyn’s spirits. “Say! I’ve got an idea that Will would really like. Why not use Sol’s money to establish a veterinary center to look after sick and stray animals? You could name it after Will.”

  “He’d love that,” Marilyn said, perking up.

  “You bet.”

  “And there’s a university not far from our house that has a very fine veterinary school,” Marilyn continued on. “They could advise me on how to establish such a center.”

  “It’s a perfect place to start,” David said and reached out to help her up. “Come on. I’ll walk you back to your suite.”

  They rode the elevator up two levels, then strolled to Marilyn’s cabin in silence. But at the door, she turned and spoke. “I should tell you that I opened Will’s body bag so I could still see and touch him. I probably should close it, eh?”

  “That would be best,” David said.

  Marilyn nodded as the awful sadness returned to her face. “In a little while, if that’s all right.”

  “That’ll be fine.”

  David decided to take the stairs up to his cabin. He wanted time alone to think about Marilyn and the others who had survived the deadly avian influenza. All were female, all sick with the illness to varying degrees. And the sickest should have been those exposed to the heaviest dose of the virus, like Kit. But Marilyn Wyman had also received a large amount of the virus and for a much longer duration. So survival wasn’t dose dependent. Nor did age seem to matter. Kit was twelve, Juanita sixty-five. Thus, the only common feature the survivors shared was gender. They were all female. But there was no known infectious disease that tended to kill men and spare women.

  The elevator door opened and David came face to face with Edith Teller, the librarian from Ohio who had suffered an oculogyric reaction to Compazine. She appeared much more attractive now, with her perfectly applied makeup.

  “How are you, Mrs. Teller?” David inquired.

  “Fine, doctor,” she reported sprightly.

  “No more facial contortions, eh?”

  “None at all. My only problem is this nagging cough that won’t go away.”

  “Oh?” David’s brow went up. “Did you have any fever or chills?”

  She nodded. “I had that a few days ago, but it’s gone now. This cough just hangs in though. Is there anything I can do for it?”

  David was about to say It’s only a virus, but wisely decided not to. “It’ll pass,” he advised. “Just drink plenty of fluids.”

  “Should I continue taking my cough drops?”

  “If they’re helping.”

  David walked on, shaking his head in wonderment. Another survivor! Another female! Hundreds of passengers were dead, hundreds more dying, yet five females survived and returned to health. Something must have protected them. But what? Was it something they did or didn’t do? Was it something in their blood? He concentrated his mind and searched for an answer, but drew a total blank. David decided to present the problem to the CDC on their next teleconference call. Maybe they could figure it out.

  David entered Kit’s cabin and found Carolyn asleep on the sofa in the sitting room. He walked over quietly and kissed her forehead, then watched her eyes open.

  “Hi, beautiful,” he said lovingly.

  “Hi, handsome,” she said and sat up. She brought up a hand to stifle a yawn, then stretched her arms out wide. A moment later she was patting her hair into place. “I must look like hell.”

  “You look great to me.”

  “You say that to all the girls.”

  “Nah! Only to the pretty ones.”

  Carolyn smiled. “You should see your daughter now. She’s talking a mile a minute between spoonfuls of soup that Juanita is feeding her.”

 
David hummed happily. “That’s music to my ears.”

  “But she’s worried about you.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s worried you’ll get the flu from all the sick people you’re looking after.”

  Kit was just like her mother, David thought yet again. That natural caring and sweetness must be in her genes. “Did you reassure her?”

  “About a thousand times,” Carolyn said as she studied David’s face. The lines seemed deeper, the circles under his eyes darker. “You look like you could use some sleep.”

  “I guess.”

  Carolyn’s smile returned. “That great performance you gave up on deck must have tired you out.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “It was outstanding!” Carolyn enthused. “You had me completely fooled until those damaged lifeboats came down. That’s when I put two and two together. You used the hatchet to scuttle the boats, but you know you weren’t tall enough to reach them, even on your tiptoes. That’s why you needed a stepladder or metal stool. Right?”

  “Right.”

  The smile left Carolyn’s face when she asked, “Did you know you would use the hatchet to take off Choi’s head?”

  “Pretty much so,” David said without a hint of emotion.

  Carolyn hesitated before asking the next question. She thought she already knew the answer, but she still had to ask. “Would you have really shot the crew with those shotguns had they rushed you?”

  “Oh yeah,” David said at once. “When the choice is between my life and theirs, I’ll choose mine every time.”

  “But you could have killed a dozen men.”

  David shrugged. “When your survival is at stake, numbers don’t matter. You kill as many as you have to.”

  “And you could still sleep after doing that?”

  David nodded. “Except for the nightmares and flashbacks. But on the positive side, I’d still be alive.”

  Carolyn stared out into space for a long moment before coming back to him. “You’ve got to be the most unusual person I’ve ever encountered.”

  “Why so?”

  “Because you’re a chameleon. You can go from sweetness to savagery in a split second.” Carolyn paused to snap her fingers. “It happens that fast, in the blink of an eye. Do—do you actually feel the change coming on?”

  “Sometimes,” David said, but that was a lie. He never sensed the change. He simply went on automatic pilot. “Yeah, sometimes I do.”

  “Jesus! It’s as if you’re a mixture of contrasting personalities,” she went on. “Do you have any idea how many people you are?”

  “A lot.”

  “That’s not a very good answer.”

  “All right then, five.”

  “Where did you get the number five from?”

  “A Somerset Maugham novel,” David told her. “In it, one character asked another the question you just posed. The answer was five. Then the questioner asked how one individual could possibly be five different people. The response was ‘You tell me the situation, and I’ll tell you who I am.’”

  From the bedroom, Kit coughed, wet and loud, then coughed again before clearing her throat.

  David helped Carolyn to her feet and grinned wryly. “I just turned into a father, and in ten seconds I’ll be a doctor.”

  “I should write a book about you,” Carolyn said. “The only problem is no one would believe it.”

  They walked into the bedroom and saw Kit sitting up in bed, coughing between spoonfuls of soup that were being fed to her by Juanita. Her color was much improved, her raven hair carefully combed and held in place by a yellow ribbon. Juanita was nicely dressed in a pink blouse and skirt. She looked like her old self.

  “Hey, sweetheart!” David called out.

  “Hi, Dad!” Kit called back and gulped down more soup.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Better,” she said and coughed loudly. “Except for this cough.”

  “It’ll pass.”

  “When?”

  “In a couple of days.”

  “Darn virus!” she said and shook her head to more soup. “How could I catch the stupid thing? I got all those shots for the regular flu and swine flu.”

  “This is a different virus,” David explained. “Those shots didn’t give you any immunity against it.”

  “I’m living proof of that,” Kit said sourly. “And so is Juanita. She also got both shots and ended up sick with the virus too.”

  David’s brow shot up. And both of you survived, he thought immediately. And Carolyn and I and probably Karen, like most healthcare providers, took both shots and never became ill, despite being exposed to God-only-knows how many people infected with the avian flu virus. Jesus! Could that be the answer? Could the combination of vaccines against the regular influenza and swine flu viruses give the individual enough immunity to protect against the avian flu virus? Did the three similar viruses share enough common antigens so there’d be cross-reactivity between them?

  Kit saw the strange expression on her father’s face and asked, “Dad, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” David said hurriedly and continued his thought process. Is that really the answer? If so, why did Kit and Juanita come down with such a severe form of the disease? Why? David blinked as the answer came to him. Because Kit was exposed to a massive dose of the virus when she was with Will. The huge virus load overwhelmed her immune system. And Juanita was a senior citizen who, like most with advancing age, had less resistance and a weaker immune response to all invading microorganisms.

  “Dad,” Kit broke into his thoughts, “did I say something wrong?”

  “You said everything right,” he replied and kissed her forehead.

  David’s mind was now concentrating on Kit’s survival, despite the enormous load of virus she’d been exposed to. Somehow she survived, but poor Will, who also received a huge dose of virus, didn’t. Maybe Will was exposed to even more of the virus than Kit. Yeah. That would explain—

  David’s eyes suddenly lit up. Maybe, in Will’s case, it wasn’t a matter of viral dose, but rather a matter of immunity. Quickly he came back to Kit. “Sweetheart, do you know if Will had gotten the same shots as you had?”

  “I don’t know,” Kit said through a cough. “But Will told me, after you got that gumball out of his throat, that he was glad nobody had given him a shot because he was allergic to eggs or something like that.”

  Eggs! David thought at once. The flu vaccines are produced in incubating chicken eggs! The manufacturing process is egg-based! People allergic to eggs can’t receive the vaccine. Will never received the flu shots. He had no immunity to the avian flu virus. “Was anybody else in Will’s family allergic to eggs?”

  “I think so,” Kit replied and reached for her diary. She flipped through pages until she came to the one she was looking for. “Yes, here it is. His stepdad, Sol, was also allergic, but his mom wasn’t.”

  “I’ll be damned,” David muttered as all the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. “It’s so straightforward it’s unbelievable.”

  Kit misinterpreted his remark and proffered her diary to him. “Here, Dad. You can see for yourself.”

  “No, no,” David said hastily. “Your observations are perfect and right on.”

  “Good,” Kit said and closed the diary. “Accuracy is important, you know.”

  “I know,” David leaned over and kissed his daughter’s cheek, loving her with every ounce of his body and soul and then some. “How did you get to be so smart?”

  “I got it from my dad, I think.” A smile came across Kit’s face, but it was interrupted by a coughing spell.

  Juanita moved in rapidly, with a steaming bowl and spoon. “You must eat more soup to dampen your cough.”

  “We’ll be back,” David said, taking C
arolyn’s arm and guiding her out to the sitting room. While he waited for Kit’s cough to abate, he rethought his scientific reasoning. All the facts fit, but the numbers bothered him. He was basing his conclusion on a small sampling of people, and that was always dangerous. Finally he said, “I may know how to stop the pandemic.”

  “How?” Carolyn asked promptly.

  “This is how.” David went over all the facts in detail, explaining why some had survived and others hadn’t. He paid particular attention to the vaccines against the regular influenza and swine flu viruses, and how the combination could protect against the avian flu. “It’s the only logical explanation, but I can’t be sure until we do a survey of everybody aboard the ship. If the surviving passengers received both flu shots, we’ll have the answer.”

  “Jesus!” Carolyn breathed. “Let’s hope you’re right.”

  “If I’m not, then God help us,” David said grimly. “Because this virus will eventually get to land, and when it does, a pandemic is an absolute certainty.”

  thirty-seven

  Chandler heard the whispers coming from halfway down the passageway. The words weren’t meant for his ears, but the people uttering them didn’t know that Chandler had supernormal hearing. Sounds that others could barely detect were crystal clear to him. It was an unusual trait that he had possessed for as long as he could remember, and it had always served him well, but never more so than now. The voices thirty feet away were talking mutiny! Not a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants–type mutiny, but one that was planned by experienced crewmen. They wouldn’t make the same mistakes that the civilian mutineers had. Chandler pricked his ears, not wanting to miss a word, while he painted a white cross on the door in front of him.

  “With a knife at the little girl’s throat, that doctor won’t dare use his shotgun,” a burly, tattooed crewman was saying.

  “Right,” the other crewman agreed. “That’ll hold him until we can run this bloody ship aground off Cozumel.”

  “Have you been to Cozumel before?”

  “Aye. It’s a nice little island with fancy hotels and lots of tourists.”