The Deep Zone

ELEVEN

“YOU OUGHTA BE WEARIN’ A HOT SUIT, DOC.” THE SPEAKER was a young black sergeant.

Lenora Stilwell glanced up from her clipboard. The sergeant’s name was Dillon. Marshell Dillon.

“Can’t get anything done in those body condoms.” Stilwell winked, prompting a pained grin in return. “Can’t hear, can’t talk, can’t touch. Heck, you can barely walk in one of those. As for going to the bathroom…” She shook her head. “What kind of doctor would that be?”

It was early evening. Terok’s field hospital was now fully quarantined and isolated from the rest of the combat outpost. From the rest of the world, for that matter. The NBC—Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical—guys showed up the day after the presence of ACE was confirmed. They sealed the unit, installing one biosecure air lock for ingress and egress, and distributed Biosafety Level 4 suits. The “hot suit” Dillon had referred to was the sky-blue Chemturion Model 3530, made of a twenty-millimeter impervious plastic called Cloropel. It weighed ten pounds. The personal life support system backpack (PLSS) added another ten pounds to the total weight. A BSL-4 felt, when zipped and clipped, like a diver’s heavy dry suit, but even stiffer. Every movement required extra effort, and the plastic popped and crinkled continuously. Then, too, they were so hot that it was possible to sweat out two pounds during an eight-hour shift, even with the little ventilator fan blowing.

Air from the PLSS backpack or an external supply kept the suits inflated to positive pressure, so that no pathogens could infiltrate even if a suit was breached. The integrated, bucket-shaped hood was made of thicker plastic that was clear enough when new but never remained so for long. It scratched and marred easily, so that seeing through one more than a few weeks old was like looking through a windshield spiderwebbed with cracks. After the antifog chemical wore off, which it usually did within a month, the plastic fogged up, making it even harder to see. The suits’ sleeves ended in heavy, double-layer hazmat gloves that allowed only slightly more manual dexterity than winter mittens. Since the suit, when inflated, effectively doubled the wearer’s volume and added a foot of height, it required constant mental recalibration to keep from blundering into equipment, other people, and containers holding pathogens so deadly that a thousandth of an ounce could depopulate the planet. Stilwell thought it was like driving an eighteen-wheeler after a lifetime of Hondas.

BSL-4 Chemturions were designed to protect laboratorians against nightmares from the invisible world, monsters like Ebola Zaire, superpox, pneumonic plague, and many others, including ACE, and they did that job well enough. But they were not designed to help an overtasked doctor in a combat zone do her work, and Stilwell had refused to wear one from the start. Since no one outranked her at Terok, no one could order her to wear one of the clumsy suits, and that suited her just fine.

“You don’t wanna catch this stuff, Doc. It’s amazing you don’t got it already.” Dillon was twenty-three, slim, his head shaved. He wore a wedding band and, Stilwell knew, had two young children back home in Atlanta, Georgia. He’d enlisted at eighteen, loved the Army, planned to make a career of it.

“Hey, you know about us doctors. We build up immunity. I’ve been exposed to so many bugs over the years, I’m probably immune to everything.”

“I’m sayin’ prayers for you, Doc.” Dillon gasped, his face collapsing into a clutch of pain as Stilwell lifted the dressing from one of the red, suppurating patches on his torso. The infection had not progressed as far as those that had killed Wyman and Washington and the others. IV colistin was slowing it down. That was the good news. But it was gaining on the colistin, despite steadily increasing dosages.

“Sorry,” she said. “Hey, tell me something, Sergeant. Did you ever hear of a TV show called Gunsmoke?”

“Only about a hundred million times, ma’am.” Dillon’s voice contained pain again, but of a different kind.

“So you know about Marshal Dillon? The character James Arness played?”

“Oh, do I ever, ma’am. Forget bein’ a boy named Sue. The ’hood I come from, you named for a cop, that’s two strikes right there.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, why would your mother do that?”

“She didn’t, ma’am. It was my aunt.”

“Oh? And how was it that she did the naming?” Stilwell was still probing, examining. Keep him talking.

“My mother booked soon as she could get out of the hospital, ma’am. I never seen her. My aunt and uncle raised me.”

“I see. Well, why did she do it, then?”

“They never had a TV when she was growin’ up. She didn’t know anything about that show. Just liked the sound of the name.”

“I guess it could have been worse.”

“How so, ma’am?”

“She could have named you Festus.”

He gave her a blank look. Too young, she realized. “Another character on that show.”

“Oh yeah.” Dillon nodded, his face screwed up in distaste. “That woulda been worse. Sounds like a disease. ‘You got a case of acute Festus.’ ” He smiled briefly, but then his expression changed. “Ma’am, what’s that stuff doing now?”

She never lied to her patients. “It’s growing. But more slowly now that we’re getting the antibiotic into you.”

“So that drug’s helpin’ some, then?”

“It appears so, yes.”

“I’m glad, ’cause it fu—um, it messed up my stomach big-time. Can’t even keep water down.”

“The other IV will keep you hydrated. We can feed you that way too, if we have to.”

“Doc… you talked to my wife yet?”

“Not yet, Sergeant. Battalion has clamped down. No outgoing comm. I haven’t talked to my own family for five days.”

“They don’t want to freak people out, right? I can understand that. But, Doc, if you do talk to her?”

“Yes?”

Dillon had been in more firefights than she could count and seen more horrors than she could imagine. He was one of their best, career Army, a cold-eyed, efficient killer but a sensitive leader of men. Rare combination, that. Now his eyes filled with tears.

“Doc… look. No bull now. I don’t think I’m gonna make it. I know ’bout Wyman and Angel and the others. You’re good at hidin’ it, but… not that good. So, please don’t tell her how bad I am, hear? She got enough on her plate, dealin’ with the kids an’ all. Who knows? Maybe I’ll have one of them miraculous recoveries.”

She looked down. There were no lesions between the elbow and wrist. She gave his arm a long, firm squeeze.

“Marshell Dillon, you listen. There’s no way I think you’re going to die. I don’t want to hear you say that again. Roger that?” She delivered that stern-voiced, like an order, but her eyes were kind.

He smiled up at her, his own eyes still glistening. “Roger that, ma’am.”

Stilwell finished examining the eight cases in Ward B and headed for the four in Ward A. In the hallway between the two wards, a nurse in a Chemturion approached. Stilwell laid a hand on her plastic-covered arm.

“Pam.”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“What day is it?”

“What day? Tuesday, ma’am. Evening.”

“Thank you. I sort of lost track.”

“Um… ma’am? Permission to speak?”

Stilwell patted the nurse’s arm, smiled. “You always have that with me, Pam.”