“Sal, I am so sorry, sweetheart, I didn’t mean to do that to you. Please, come on, honey, come back to me. Breathe. You need to breathe, Sal.”
I had to stop screaming before I could breathe in. That felt like one of the hardest things I had ever done. Raising my head was even harder. The drums were pounding in my ears again, louder than they’d ever been before. “The car,” I whispered, staring at Nathan’s pale, drawn face.
“I know, Sal, and I am
“Okay. Good. I am
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand as I forced myself to sit up. “Okay,” I said, in a small voice.
Nathan started the car and pulled away from the side of the road. We drove on.
The industrial gray San Francisco City Hospital wasn’t built to look imposing or inviting: it was built to house a hospital. It was simultaneously less comforting and more welcoming than SymboGen. Nathan parked in his assigned space beneath the building, gesturing for me to come as he got out of the car and walked briskly toward the employee entrance. I followed. As I did, I realized that I felt oddly unclothed without my shoulder bag, like I was forgetting something essential.
If SymboGen didn’t return my things, I could always replace them and send Dr. Banks the bill. Dwelling on that bitter thought kept me from thinking too hard about where we were going as Nathan led me through the maze of corridors and hallways inside the hospital.
Once we were inside the service elevator bound for the fifth floor, Nathan turned to me and said, “I probably shouldn’t be doing this, but I need to know whether SymboGen has information that they’re not sharing with the rest of us.”
“By ‘doing this,’ you really mean taking me with you, don’t you?”
“I do,” Nathan admitted. The elevator stopped, and he led me to a changing room. “You’re already in scrubs; that’s good. Put on a lab coat and we should be fine.”
I frowned at him. “You’re really serious. You’re not supposed to be doing this.”
“No, I’m not, but I want you with me; you’re the one who saw what Dr. Lo did.” He opened a locker and passed me a lab coat. “Don’t worry. You won’t get in any trouble if we’re caught.”
“I’m not the one I’m worried about here, Nathan.”
He waved off my concern, a grim expression on his face. I usually only saw him looking that serious when someone had died. “I have a clean record, and this problem has been bothering everyone. The worst I’m going to get is a slap on the wrist.”
Somehow, I doubted that his punishment would be quite as light as that, but there was no sense in arguing with him; we’d been dating long enough for me to know when his mind was made up. I shrugged on the lab coat he’d handed me, rolling up the sleeves to keep them from engulfing my hands completely. Nathan smiled.
“You know, there’s nothing in the world hotter than a cute girl in a lab coat,” he said.
I blinked. “With that attitude, I would have expected you to be dating my sister.”
“What can I say? I like what I like. Now come on. We have some protocols to break.”
Nathan led me down the hall, pausing only once, when he ducked into a supply room and emerged with a wand that looked like a more primitive cousin of the one Dr. Lo had used to examine me. He tucked it under his arm, and we started walking again.
At the end of the hall was a large door marked INFECTIOUS MATERIALS: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. There was a large biohazard symbol beneath the sign, in case people didn’t get the point. Nathan ignored it as he pushed the door open and kept walking. I trusted Nathan. I followed him.
The hallway on the other side looked just like every other hall in the hospital… except that there were no people here. The usual mix of doctors, nurses, and orderlies was gone, replaced by the hum of the fluorescent lights, which seemed extremely loud without all the sounds of humanity to muffle them.
“Here,” Nathan said. He turned, walking into a small room, where a heavy green curtain shielded the occupant from view. He pushed the curtain aside, revealing Beverly’s owner. I gasped. I couldn’t stop myself.
Machines surrounded the sleeping man, connected to him by a variety of tubes and wires. A clear plastic tube snaked out from under the covers; they’d catheterized him at some point, probably when they realized that he wasn’t going to wake up enough to take care of his bodily needs. I recognized most of those tubes and wires from my own stay in the hospital after my accident. I’d been wired up just like that when I first woke up. But this man was behind warning signs, in a room all by himself. They didn’t expect him to wake up, ever.
Nathan walked grimly toward the sleeping man’s bedside. “He’s been asleep for the past twenty-four hours,” he said. “He was still moving up until then, but now he seems to have gone into the next stage of the disease, whatever that means. There’s no response to stimuli of any type. His family wants to disconnect life support; the hospital is paying all medical costs from this point on, for the sake of being allowed to keep working with him.”
“But… why?” I asked. “If his family’s ready to let him go…” I felt like a hypocrite even as the words left my mouth. My family had been ready to let go. If I hadn’t regained consciousness when I did, I would have died.
Nathan glanced back toward me, grimacing a little as he saw my discomfort. “This isn’t like what happened with you, Sal. You had an accident. We knew what caused your coma, and no matter how much research we did, we were never going to find a cure for car crashes. This is different. This is something infectious, and we need to find a way to stop the spread.”
A new discomfort curled in my stomach. “Should we be wearing masks or something if we’re going to be in here?”
“No. Whatever causes this isn’t airborne. We’ve run every test we could think of, and there’s nothing.” Nathan bent forward, folding back the blanket that covered Beverly’s owner. “It’s baffling our best people. It’s baffling
“Why are you involved? Shouldn’t this be an infectious disease case?”
“I’m involved because everyone in the hospital is involved. No one gets to sit out an epidemic.” Nathan produced a pair of blue plastic gloves from his lab coat pocket, pulling them on over his hands. I was relieved to realize that he wouldn’t be touching the sleeping man’s skin. “How far above your skin did she hold the light?”
“About an inch and a half,” I said. “She was especially careful with the undersides of my arms and the insides of my thighs.”
“All right,” said Nathan. He clicked on the wand. It buzzed slightly, lighting up with the same purplish glow as Dr. Lo’s wand. Then he lifted the man’s left arm. It came without resistance, utterly limp, and remained limp as Nathan ran the wand along it. Like Dr. Lo, he checked the outside first, and then switched to examining the inside of the man’s arm, where it would have been closest to his body.
Just between the elbow and armpit, Nathan stopped. “Sal,” he said, a sick fascination in his voice. “Come and have a look at this.”
I didn’t want to have a look at anything. I went anyway. It’s always better to understand than it is to be left sitting in the dark; it’s always better to have answers, even when those answers lead to fresh questions.
This answer definitely led to fresh questions. The light from Nathan’s wand made most of the skin beneath it glow a pale purple, unremarkable because it was so consistent. But at the middle of the light, in the center of the man’s arm, was a system of what looked almost like roots that glowed a bright, painful white instead of matching the purple around them. I stared.
The roots moved.
It was just a twitch, barely movement at all, but it was enough to startle us both. I let out a small shriek, dancing backward, away from the man in the bed. Nathan dropped his arm, taking a long, somewhat more dignified step away from him.
“What
“It’s a parasitic infection—I don’t know what type. Whatever it is, it fluoresces under ultraviolet light,” said Nathan. He sounded astonished and sickened at the same time, like he’d been suspicious, but had never wanted to
