“Hey, you aren’t supposed to be in here.” A man with a surgical mask pointed at him.
“I, uh…needed to talk to—”
“Not now, Jason.” Dr. LaRue appeared in front of him and Jason was just able to see one of the infected strapped to a table. A man next to him was pointing what looked like a radar gun at the patient. Whatever the machine was, the man was docile, and actually appeared to have a soft smile across his face, his eyes closed as though getting a foot massage.
“What the hell are you doing?” Jason took a step back, his eyes glued to the creature in the center of the room.
“We’re testing Bren’s blood on somebody already infected.” She tried to push him back through the door, but he sidestepped her and slowly approached the patient.
“I thought you kept them sealed up! Why is he out of containment? We’re all at risk!” His voice took on a twinge of panic as worst-case scenarios played out in his mind.
“Stop it!” Vivian grabbed his arm and dragged him back toward the door. “You need to leave. Now!”
Jason threw a hand back and held the door closed. “No.” He stared at her adamantly. “I want to know…I need to know.”
“You are not authorized to—”
“If you’re using Bren’s blood, then I have every right to know.” He clenched his jaw and stared at her.
Dr. LaRue stepped aside. “Very well. But you don’t move from this spot. And if things start to go sideways—”
“Don’t worry, doc. I’ll be out of here so quick it will make your head spin.” He crossed his arms and peered over her shoulder at the infected man that now appeared asleep.
One of the workers approached the pair. “Doctor? We’re ready.”
She gave Jason one last glare, then lifted her own surgical mask. “All right, people. Let’s do this.”
She walked to the examination table and wrapped a rubber band around the man’s arm. She tapped at the bend of his elbow a few times trying to make a vein jump, then placed the needle at a nearly horizontal angle. “Injecting the anesthesia at 1640 hours.” He watched her depress the plunger, then release the rubber band.
The others in the room hurriedly went about their work. One was monitoring the creature’s heart rate, another its breathing. The same man with the radar gun continued holding the device close to the creature’s head.
Dr. LaRue grabbed another, much larger syringe and injected it into a clear bottle. She pulled out a large dose, then nodded to the people on either side of the creature. “Turn him.”
They lifted the nearly nude figure and turned him to his side. She ran her fingers across the creature’s thigh to nearly his hip, then walked her fingers across. She marked the spot, then plunged the needle deep into the creature’s skin. Jason cringed at the action and noted that the creature barely reacted.
She slowly injected the milky fluid, then had to tug to remove the needle. “Give me the other.” She held her hand out flat and another person gently placed a smaller syringe into her grip.
She found the large gluteus muscle and injected the creature with the dose. She stepped back and turned to those monitoring vitals. “Any change?”
They shook their heads and she let her breath out. “Excellent.” She pulled the mask down and began stripping her surgical gloves. “Get him strapped down in a room where you can monitor him, and make sure there’s a generator running inside. I want blood samples every twelve hours, and those results need to be rushed through the lab, got it?”
The man holding the radar gun nodded. “Got it.”
She stepped away as the others began strapping the creature down with heavy leather bindings. She grabbed Jason by the shoulder, and this time he didn’t resist as she walked him out and into the hallway.
“What was so damned important it couldn’t have waited?”
Jason stepped back and his shock was easily noted. She had never spoken so sharply with him before and it caught him off guard.
“I…uh…” He turned away sheepishly. “I don’t remember now.” His voice was barely a whisper and Vivian LaRue had to count to five to get her temper under control.
“Jason, that could have been a very dangerous procedure.”
“I was far enough away that I’m sure I could have—”
“You were a distraction and distractions get people killed.” She stepped directly in front of him and locked eyes. “If you want to risk your life, I can’t stop you. But I will not have you, or anybody else for that matter, putting my people’s lives at risk. Do you understand?”
Jason nodded and looked away. “Sorry, doc. I didn’t think of it that way.”
“Now you know. If I tell you to leave, it’s not just for your own good.”
He nodded slightly, then turned his eyes back to the door. “What did you do to it?”
“Him. Not it.” She cleared her throat. “He’s a guinea pig of sorts.”
“I figured that much. But…what did you do?”
“He’s the fourth test. We think we might have a vaccine…but we coupled it with gene therapy. The first subject got just the vaccine. The second got a variant of the same vaccine. The third got just the gene therapy and this subject, he got it all. We gave him the gene therapy and the two variants.”
“And you’re gonna run with whichever one works?”
She shrugged off her lab coat and dropped it into the soiled bin. “We’re going to monitor them all and pray that any of them improve.”
Jason’s eyes widened. “Oh, I remember.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder and toward the hall. “Bren. She’s not feeling too well.”
Dr. LaRue’s head snapped up. “Not well, how?”
Jason shifted from foot to foot and avoided her gaze. “She was throwing up. And she says her stomach was cramping.”
Dr. LaRue nodded. She pulled another lab coat from the stack of clean linens and snatched a handful of gloves. “Let’s go take a look.”
Jason turned and began working his
