As Adam delivered the bad news to Katie Sanders, he could hear water from the cool-not-cold washcloth in her hand dripping onto the carpet in wet squishy plops. She’d become hysterical, collapsing to the floor, wailing and crying. When the ambulance arrived some five minutes later, Adam spoke with the paramedics, told him he was a physician, tried to explain what had happened, even though he wasn’t entirely sure what that was. Katie and her two children followed the ambulance in their car as it made its way east on Ocean Boulevard toward the causeway, leaving everything behind as if they’d just gone up the road a piece to hit Island Mini-Golf for nine holes under the oversized gorilla and grab a soft-serve cone. He’d stood on their deck, alone, for nearly an hour before he ambled back to the house, a healthy dose of shock wrapped around him like a beach towel.
Adam fixed himself his third cup of coffee, or maybe it was his fourth, and settled back into the Adirondack chair to watch the sun start its daily journey into the sky. Daybreak started as a glimmer of light, as if the morning gloom had sprung a leak around its bottom edge, before exploding into every corner and crevice, every nook and cranny, jolting the East Coast back to life. The ocean air was already swampy and thick with brine; it was going to be a hell of a hot day.
He found it indescribably and ludicrously sad that this terrible thing had happened to the Sanders during their vacation. As if it would have been any easier on them had Terry been good enough to wait until they’d gotten home to drown on his own blood, after the suntans had faded, after the inevitable seafood feast, its newspapers spread out for the mess left behind by the crab legs and lobster claws and shrimp cocktail.
He thought about all the shit Katie Sanders would be facing upon their return to Paramus or Reading or Timonium or wherever it was she said that they were from, piled on top of her excruciating grief. The phone calls to stunned relatives and friends, the planning of a funeral, preparing for a life without Terry, when her biggest concern had once been that Terry’s little bug might put a little crimp in the family’s vacation schedule. Unexpected death was brutal in its assault on the lives of the survivors, the permanent rupture of happiness twinned with the cold machinery of death. It was the ultimate inconvenience.
Adam’s eyelids drooped. The caffeine and nicotine kept his synapses firing, artificial adrenaline, but he didn’t think it was doing much for him, no more good than paddles applied to a non-responsive heart. He felt the exhaustion deep within his core. The stress of the last few days, starting with the letter from the Board of Medicine and capped off with Sanders’ death, was getting to him. He staggered to the bedroom and fell asleep almost immediately.
He woke up around two in the afternoon, amazed he’d slept as long as he did. He was on his stomach, his arm pinned underneath his head, and as he rolled over onto his back, he felt the pins and needles as the nerve endings started firing again. After a quick lunch of a peanut butter and banana sandwich, he decided to get down to the beach for a couple of hours. He could feel it calling to him, the sound of the waves crashing on the shore, delivering the coastline an eternal beating, a salve for what ailed him.
As he changed into his trunks, he couldn’t help but wonder about his own exposure to whatever pathogen had killed the family’s patriarch. But he reminded himself that even if Terry had a communicable disease, he’d probably experienced a rare complication, unique to his particular physiology. It was entirely possible that Terry Sanders died of garden-variety influenza. That he’d just pulled a rotten card, winning the kind of lottery no one wants to win.
He briefly considered driving back to Richmond, but decided against it. Back in Virginia, he’d be stuck in his stuffy house, unable to work, stuck in a no–man’s land between clock-punchers and vacationers, alone with nothing but the memories of what had happened here. As the sun brightened the house with a fresh dose of light, he decided to stick it out.
He went back out on the porch and noticed it was a lot cooler than it had been this morning. The deck was dark with wetness, rain that had fallen while he slept. A bright blue sky extended as far as he could see in each direction, the view unclouded with haze, like a clean windshield. He looked out over his railing toward the sea, calm but for the small waves lapping to the shore, the air fresh and clean. Perfect conditions for a run on the beach. As he scanned the oceanfront, trying to decide which direction he’d head, something about the scene started nagging him, like a phantom eyelash digging in his eye.
After a quick change into his running clothes, opting to go barefoot, he made his way out the front door and curled around the side to the beach access. Although Adam had an unobstructed view of the ocean, he didn’t have direct access to the beach because of the ridge of protected dunes that his house backed up to. He set out up the wooden sidewalk, down onto the sand, and then turned east along the water’s edge.
A minute into his run, just as his muscles had started to loosen up, Adam stopped in ankle-deep surf, the mental eyelash dislodging itself. The beach was virtually deserted. His heart started throbbing, a visceral reaction to a scene that was wrong, all wrong. It was two-thirty on a beautiful August afternoon, and there should have been dozens, no, hundreds of people out here, sunning themselves, splashing in the water, building sand castles, sneaking illegal beers in those little huggies.
There was nobody out here.
The empty beach left Adam disoriented. It was as if his mind was straining to see what should have been there, what he, in his medical practice, would call within normal limits. As the unease grew inside him, his eyes bounced from water to sand to the cottages lining the oceanfront and then back to the water. A bit farther down the beach, he saw a group of empty beach chairs, set up in a semi-circle, but no one around them.
The image of Terry Sanders dying in his beach cottage slammed into Adam’s head like a drunk running a red light. He looked at the houses up and down the oceanfront, from the small cottages to the big ten-bedroom jobs with wraparound decks on each floor and pictured Terry Sanders in each of those houses, coughing up blood, seizing, his organs frying inside his overheated body.
He picked up a flicker in the corner of his eye, and he turned to face it. Maybe a hundred yards away, two people were walking toward him. From this distance, he couldn’t make out their gender, age, or really anything about them at all. Still, it was something. With his heart pounding, he walked, accelerating to a jog before breaking into a full sprint in their direction.
As he approached them, the pair started coming into focus. A heavyset guy, maybe in his mid-forties, a tall, skinny teenager trailing behind him. The older guy wasn’t walking as much as he was staggering across the sand like a drunken pirate who’d forgotten where he’d buried his treasure. The boy, trailing behind, didn’t seem terribly concerned with the older man’s behavior.
“Excuse me?” Adam called out. “Are you guys OK?”
The man stopped and looked at Adam, his mouth opening and closing but not making any sound. He was wearing dark red swim trunks and nothing else, his large gut stretching the waistband of his suit. His arms and legs were deeply tanned, but his chest and neck were fiery red with sunburn. It was quite the contrast, the reddish pink of burnt flesh juxtaposed against the leathery skin of his extremities, brown from years in the sun. That was when Adam noticed the man’s mouth was stained red, almost like he’d been eating a cherry snow cone.
“No,” Adam heard himself saying, feeling his body go weak. “No. This can’t be happening.”
His legs buckled, and he dropped to his knees.
Adam and the man stared at each other a bit longer, up until a coughing spasm grabbed the man in its clutches. He doubled over at the knees as his body fought to clear out whatever obstruction was stopping up his lungs. The first spasm ended, giving the guy a chance to catch his breath before a second one exploded, this one far worse than the first. Blood sprayed from his mouth like he’d been shot in the throat, and he dropped to his knees as well. Adam’s training took over, and he p
ushed himself to his feet.
“You,” Adam said, pointing at the boy, whose face was blank. “Is this your father?”
The boy nodded vigorously.
“What’s your name?”
“Ethan,” the boy said. “Ethan DeSilva.” He was tall and thin and sported a thick mane of greasy black hair. He was fair-skinned, but his current complexion looked much worse, an almost grayed-out pallor.
“And your dad?”
“Robert DeSilva.”
“What’s going on?” Adam asked. “How long’s he been sick?”
“Since last night I think,” Ethan said, stifling his own cough.
Adam helped Robert down to his seat. He looked up at Adam, his eyes virtually pleading for help. Adam ran his fingers along Robert’s jawbone and found oversized glands, engaged in a desperate war to fight off a pathogen. Typically, Adam would listen to a patient’s chest, but that wasn’t necessary here. He could hear the rattling in Robert’s chest even over the small waves lapping at the shore.
“Just you two down here at Holden?”
“No,” Ethan said. “My mom and two sisters. We’re all feeling pretty bad. I’ve got a fever and chills. An hour ago, he just up and bolted out the front door.”
“How far up the beach are you?”
Ethan looked over his shoulder and stared into the distance. When he looked back, his eyes were glossy with tears.
“I don’t remember,” Ethan said. “I really don’t feel very good.”
Adam scraped a nail against his chin rhythmically, almost like a metronome.
“My cottage isn’t far from here,” he said after a minute. “Let’s get you guys to the hospital. I’m going to need your help to get your dad there.”
It took them twenty minutes to cover the two hundred yards back to Adam’s cottage. Robert was unable to stand up on his own, his body ravaged by a series of innard-shredding coughing spells. Ethan was weakening by the minute. He began yelling at children who weren’t there, telling them he knew they’d been the ones who’d TP’d his house.
By the time they’d made it back to his driveway, Adam’s legs were burning, and sweat had glued his shirt to his chest. Adam deposited his companions at the steps and then stopped to catch his breath and check on his patients. Robert looked like he was clinging to life by the slimmest of threads. He’d coughed and hacked for most of the walk, leaving a trail of bright red blood behind them. Ethan was lucid again, asking for water and wanting to know how far the hospital was.
“Let me grab my keys and get you some water,” Adam said. “I won’t be long.”
Ethan sighed and nodded, seemingly content with the brief respite on the stairs.
As he climbed the stairs to the front door, Adam took a moment to acknowledge his own fear, his own biologically programmed survival instinct. Whatever it was Terry Sanders had died of, whatever it was these two perfectly nice people had, Adam did not want to catch it. His primal self, the one lingering deep in the DNA he shared with his ancestors and their ancestors, wanted to run, wanted to leave these guys to die, and his primal self didn’t feel the least bit bad about it. The fear was huge, careening through him like a wrecking ball, and he felt it growing with each passing moment. He let that part of himself have its fantasy, state its case, and then he bottled it up.
When he was in medical school, it had taken him a little while to adjust to the fact that he was going to be frequently exposed to all manner of dread illness. Then, as a first-year resident, doing a rotation in the emergency room one cold December night, he’d experienced every health-care worker’s worst nightmare – an errant needle stick in the soft flesh between his left thumb and forefinger while he’d been treating an HIV-positive drug addict. He underwent the prophylactic drug treatment provided to healthcare workers who’d suffered accidental pokes and submitted to HIV tests every four weeks for a year, all of which came back negative.
Shitty as it was, the experience had made him a better physician. He knew what patients were thinking about while waiting for test results to tell them what was causing the headaches, the vaginal bleeding, the abnormal ultrasound. It expanded his reservoir of patience, something he’d been in short supply of in the first part of his residency. And since the needle stick, he’d been able to compartmentalize the fear, lock it away in a place where it couldn’t overwhelm him. But he always acknowledged it. He didn’t want to get sick. He didn’t want to die. He was no different than anyone else. And there were times, like now, where the fear threatened to break free and paralyze him.
If Robert and Ethan had what Sanders had, then Adam had suffered two major exposures. He accepted that he was scared beyond any plane he’d ever imagined and then crammed two tons of ball-shrinking terror into a five-gallon bag. He thought about Rachel and found himself glad that she was three thousand miles away, far away from this, whatever this was.
He refocused his attention on Robert and Ethan. He took the steps two at a time, but it wasn’t fast enough. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, Robert was in the throes of a massive seizure, his body flopping around the concrete driveway. Like Terry Sanders, a man he presumably had not known and would never meet, Robert DeSilva died, horribly, virtually alone, and far from home.
“Shit,” Adam said to no one. “Shit, shit, shit.”
He looked around for Ethan and noticed the boy had disappeared. Christ, Adam thought, where did he go?
“Ethan?” he called out. “Son, are you there?”
He heard a soft moan coming from behind him, deeper into the carport under the house. He edged his way around his car, his heart pounding. A smear of fresh color caught his eye, toward the back corner of the driveway. Adam followed it to the shed where he stored a grill, boogie boards, half-empty paint cans, the byproducts of life of a beach house owner. It was cool and dark here. The boy was sitting cross-legged in the corner, his back against a stack of boogie boards. He looked up at Adam, a sheepish look on his face, as though he’d been caught breaking into the place.
“Ethan, it’s me. My name is Adam.”
“How’s my dad?”
Adam didn’t lie to patients, and he was not going to start now. He responded with an almost imperceptible shake of his head. Ethan leaned his head back against an old, cracked boogie board, a faded blue thing stenciled with the words Wave Destroyer in a repeating pattern down the surface of the board. The news didn’t seem to affect Ethan one way or another.
“I don’t suppose you knew the Sanders family?” Adam asked. “They were staying next door to my house?”
Ethan shook his head.
“We’ve got to get you to the hospital,” Adam said. “Right now.”
“What about my mom and sister?”
He coughed, a little thing that got away from him, but Adam could tell this poor kid was now in the end stages of this thing. Blood bubbled out onto the fist he’d tried to use to cut the cough off. Adam found himself thinking about Rachel again; this boy wasn’t much younger than her, and that was when the fear began to break through. The box had sprung a leak. He was gripped with the urge to call her right now and tell her to run for the hills until he could get a better handle on what was precisely was going on.
“We’ll call on the way,” Adam said, his spirits lifted by the mere fact that he had a plan to do something. “You know their numbers, right?”
“I think so,” Ethan said, carefully examining his bloodstained hand like it was an unusual seashell he’d found on the shore.
“I’m sorry,” Adam said. “About your dad.”
“Thanks,” Ethan said. There wasn’t much oomph in his response, a testament to how poorly Ethan was obviously feeling. Then: “Am I going to die, too?”
The question buzzed through Adam like a mild electrical shock, but he didn’t answer right away. As he considered Ethan’s impossible query, he helped the boy into his Explorer and they began making their way toward the causeway. A few miles east, he began to hear a car horn honking in the d
istance. He welcomed the sound in all its distracting familiarity. It suggested there was still order here on Holden Beach, and it gave him time to construct an appropriate response to Ethan’s question.
“Let’s get you some help,” he said. “We’ll be at the hospital soon.” Adam stole another glance at Ethan, who was looking absently out at the road ahead of them.
“What’s that?” he asked weakly, pointing a thin finger ahead of them.
Adam’s gaze followed Ethan’s finger east, and he found the source of the car horn as they approached the turn-off to the causeway, which fed back onto the mainland. But it wasn’t one car horn. It was many, and it looked like a parking lot had metastasized in the middle of Ocean Boulevard. There were dozens of cars jammed together, all facing east, people honking over one another, no one moving an inch. Adam slowed to a crawl and came to a stop about a hundred yards short of the intersection. Pockets of people milled about here and there, a few smoking cigarettes, most pointing and talking.
“Wait here,” Adam said. “I’m going to see what’s going on.”
Ethan nodded, and Adam alighted from the car, his heart pounding. It was getting hot again, the freshness of the day passing as another juicy air mass settled in on the area. Adam looked south toward water’s edge, the ocean gray and lifeless. They were in the downtown area of Holden Beach, as it were, smack in the middle of a strip of real estate offices, ice cream parlors, places hawking cheap beach gear, t-shirts, hermit crabs that would be dead before their new owners made it back to Route 17. It was here vacations began and ended, the gateway from and back to real life.
Up ahead of him, a trio, two men and a woman, had gathered at the front bumper of a Honda minivan with Georgia plates. A bumper sticker on the center of the rear windshield exhorted the DAWGS to GO! The sliding doors were open, and Adam could see two small kids, strapped into their car seats in the dim passenger compartment. Both appeared to be asleep.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 6
