by Barry Napier
“Don’t know. Just…I feel awful.”
Chen unclasped her seatbelt from her seat in the middle row. She made sure not to bump into a napping Joyce in the neighboring center row seat and came to the back. She knelt clumsily on the floor—an effort made even more difficult because of the suit—and looked him over. With a look of resignation, she took her gloves off and placed one of her bare hands to his forehead.
“You definitely have a fever.”
“Yeah, feels like it,” Paul said.
“Tilt your chin up, please.”
Paul did as she asked and she felt around his glands. Her touch was soft and expert and he wondered how she’d ended up even working a detail like the one back at the facility. She then felt his wrist, checking his pulse.
“Any other symptoms?” she asked.
“Ringing in the ears. A weird taste in the back of my mouth.”
“Achy joints?”
Paul shrugged and then flexed his elbows and knees. “No, not that I can tell.”
“The good news is it isn’t the virus,” Chen said. “The bad news is I somehow did not clean the gunshot wound well enough. You have an infection. I did a decent job if I do say so myself, but given what I had at my disposal…”
“You did wonderfully,” Paul said.
“No, what I did wonderfully was collect a sampling of every sort of drug we might need,” Chen said. With that, she turned and leaned over towards the center console. She picked up the little medical kit she’d taken from the drugstore. When she opened it, Paul saw that she had stocked it with several different medicines, both over the counter and prescription.
“Is he going to be okay?” Olivia asked from up front, her voice deep with worry.
“Very likely,” Chen said, taking two gel cap pills out of her little traveling pharmacy. “But I think it might be best if we get off of the road. He needs good rest. We need a bed, a—”
“It’s okay,” Paul said. “I’m fine.”
“Maybe. But as the only doctor in this van, I suggest we wait until morning. Maybe even another day. You have an infection from a gunshot wound and to properly fight it, you will need the appropriate amount of rest. Fighting your way to Minnesota and having to stop several times a day because you aren’t feeling well is going to make for a tedious trip.”
“So I’ll pull off as soon as I can,” Olivia said.
Paul hated the idea that he was slowing them down but he also knew Chen was right. He’d been a police officer long enough to know how bad an infection for an improperly treated bullet wound could be. If he didn’t heal up, he’d only slow them down.
Chen handed him the two gel caps and a fresh bottle of water from the package they’d taken from the drugstore. Paul was wondering if maybe he was in worse shape than he thought because he thought there were several more packs in the back of the van but he could not remember clearly. He swallowed the pills down and when he lay his head back on the seat, he gulped down more water. God, but he was hot. He looked out the window, watching as a little strip of forest appeared on the right hand side of the road. He watched the greens of the trees blur by, watched the dimming blue of afternoon light fade towards dusk, and slowly fell asleep.
***
He was stirred awake sometime later. The first thing he thought was that he had not been asleep for very long because it looked as if dusk had just fallen outside. It was that sort of warm, glowing dusk of a perfect summer afternoon. But through the glass, combined with his fever, it felt balmy and suffocating.
He sat up and looked up front. Olivia was turning the van off. Ahead of her, through the windshield, he saw a modest two-story house. As Olivia and Chen got out, Olivia nudged Joyce a bit to get her out of the van, the open doors let in a bit of cooler air and it felt magnificent. In front of him, Chen let the seat up a bit and held her hand out to him. When he took it, he saw that she had not put her gloves back on.
“How are you?” she asked as she helped him out of the van.
“Not sure. The same, I think.”
“If it’s the same in two hours, I’ll give you more meds. They should kick in very soon if they haven’t already.”
“Where are we?” Paul asked.
“Still in Ohio. Not sure of the town. Olivia saw this house with a For Sale sign in the yard and another one that says it’s a show-house. We figure there’s no dead bodies inside, so…this is where we’ll be staying tonight.”
Paul nodded and followed the women inside. He saw that Joyce was already falling back into her nap, her head resting on Olivia’s shoulder. When they reached the front door, surrounded by a beautiful front porch complete with a swing, Chen left them for a moment and headed back down the stairs.
“Where are you going?” Olivia asked.
“To the back, to find a way in. Those realtor locks are pretty much impenetrable.”
Paul looked down to the little safe that the realtors kept the key to the house in. In a feverish fashion, he thought of the first home he’d ever bought—a little house in Queens that he and his ex-wife had barely been able to afford. But man, his ex had loved that house, and for the first three months of their marriage, they’d felt like royalty. Of course, they’d both been young and stupid back then and there had not been even a breath or shadow of the sort of harsh reality the world was going to have to face one cataclysmic summer when a boat off the coast of New York exploded and—
The sound of the front door being unlocked and then opened pulled him out of his thoughts. He blinked, taking his eyes away from the little lock box, wondering how long he’d been zoned out.
“Where’d you get in?” Paul asked.
“Kitchen window,” Chen said as he passed by her and into a large foyer with beautiful wooden floors.
Paul walked to the living room and sat down on what appeared to be a brand new sofa. Right away, Olivia was thrusting a bottle of water into his hand. “Drink this. You look awful, Paul.”
“I do try,” he said with a shaky smile as he uncapped the water.
“I’m going to go out and bring our things in,” Chen said.
“I’ll help,” Paul said.
“No, you won’t,” Olivia said. “Sit down. Rest. If you insist on getting up and moving around, find a bedroom and lay down.”
He wanted to make a joke about this, too, but simply didn’t have the strength. He watched the women go out the door and looked to the loveseat on the other side of the living room where Olivia had laid Joyce down. The girl was turning and sighing, an indicator that naptime was just about over.
What a resilient little girl, he thought. If she can make it through all of this—if we can get her to her father—she’ll be…
But the thought went unfinished. Paul’s eyes fluttered closed and he did not open them for another nine hours.
***
As a fairly level-headed doctor, Claire Chen knew how viruses worked. She knew that if she stayed in a mostly sanitized room and stayed away from infected people and did not go outside when there was a rampant virus being spread out there, she should be safe. But this Blood Fire Virus was working in ways she had never seen. Men back at the military facility had caught it while wearing their suits. She knew of two other doctors who had caught it even though they were in an isolated area.
There had been discussions about how the virus might be able to easily travel through air ducts and under doors, and any other number of ways. But the fact of the matter was that no one quite knew how this virus was so adaptable—how it was able to infect people that had taken every possible precaution.
As night fell and the idea of sleep settled upon her, Chen did the best thing she could think to do. After making sure Paul was resting peacefully and that his fever was going down, she’d said goodnight to Olivia and Joyce before going to the smaller bedroom upstairs. Still dressed in her suit, she’d taken towels from the small, adjoined bathroom and stuffed them at the bottom of the door—just in case. She felt foolish doing so but it
seemed to have helped in her meager quarters back at the facility.
Chen then stripped down out of her suit and walked naked into the little bathroom. There was a small shower, a toilet and a sink. She knew there was running water, as it was one of the first things she’d tested. In fact, the little sample house had running water and electricity. Based on intel she’d gathered from working back on the site, she knew that the power outages seemed sporadic. Because she knew there was no guarantee they’d still have these conveniences tomorrow, Chen took a hot shower. She cried the entire time, and had it all out by the time she was out and dried off.
She remained naked when she went to sleep mainly because the suit had made her feel more trapped than she could remember. There had been several times in the van where she had come dangerously close to panic attacks brought on by claustrophobia. To have absolutely nothing covering her skin other than the top sheet of the bed was a tiny slice of heaven.
It was also a bit alarming to wake up naked to the sound of someone knocking on her door. She had been asleep when the knocking started and in her sleep-fogged mind, she thought it was gunfire. She thought some of Ramsey’s men had come for them after all and they were downstairs right now, executing Paul. They’d be up soon to kill her and then Olivia and Joyce, who were sleeping down the hall.
But she finally realized that it was only someone knocking on her door. She held the sheet tight to her, looking over to the very dirty under layer of clothes she’d been wearing under the protective suit for the better part of twenty hours. She then glanced around the room, as if still somehow certain that someone was there, someone sent from the site to capture them. But there was only murky light from the outside, the moonlight barely illuminating the room at all.
“Yes?” she said.
“Dr. Chen?” Olivia’s voice called through the door. “Claire?”
Chen got out of bed and approached the door. “I know it’s silly,” she said through the door, “but I’m not comfortable letting you in just yet.”
“I understand. But…could you come out soon? In your suit. Could you come out?”
“Is it Paul? Is he okay?”
“Yes, I think Paul is okay,” Olivia said. And then she started weeping and somehow, even though she had no real idea of how it might have happened so late in the game, Chen knew what was coming next.
“Olivia?” she asked, hiding the worry in her voice.
“I’m sorry, but…but it’s Joyce. She’s burning up.”
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