“Thank you, I really need that, I’m struggling to think straight at the moment”.
Faye came over to help her with locating what she needed and took some of the weight off of her shoulders, by addressing the concerns of passengers, whilst she returned to the cabin.
She stopped before the cabin, mask covering her nose and mouth and requested the door be opened, before stepping in to find three of the on-board doctors inspecting the sick couple and their son. The boy lay huddled into a fetal position on the bed, twitching and muttering something, covered in the blood from his nostrils. His mother sat at the edge of the bed also muttering something under her breath and holding her head in the palm of her hands. She, like her son, was twitching and shaking as though cold, despite having been wrapped in a thick blanket. The father just stood in front of the mirror, refusing to sit down, glaring at himself in the mirror. It was easily the creepiest thing Irini had ever seen and she had certainly seen some creepy shit.
Why wasn’t he responding to anyone? Why wasn’t he moving? She had seen vain before, but this was an entirely new thing unto itself. What the hell was wrong with him?
Young, but experienced on board assistant doctor Riki, accompanied by a fellow assistant doctor, were subordinates to the head doctor in the room and saw to the woman, both wearing gloves and face masks. They shone light in her eyes and as they did so, Irini could see that her eyes were dilated and she was sweating buckets.
It was three that morning when she had called for assistance. Her son had started behaving worryingly and they had attempted to subdue him after a short erratic burst of madness, only to both be bitten by him and since then she and her husband appeared to have deteriorated too. Whatever their son had contracted, they seemed to have contracted too. It looked like psychosis, but it could be just about anything.
The sombre atmosphere in the cabin was definitely putting them all on edge, no thanks to the London news, but even despite that, there was just something Irini didn't like about being in here, even for a virus, this family were displaying tremendously irrational behaviour.
Why weren't any of them responding?
“What do you think is the cause?” Irini asked, “Some of us came into contact with them earlier, will we have to be quarantined too?”
“I can't be sure for the moment, we still haven't established what it is yet”, Dr. Riki’s co-worker replied, “They share some similar symptoms, but also seem to have their own, which doesn't make sense. Surely if they contracted the same virus, the stages would be exactly the same, if not, close enough for us to recognise a trend. They're all experiencing different types of emotional psychosis, the little one, fear, the mother, paranoia and nervousness and him…” the doctor turned to the father and husband “...I don't even know”.
“What is she saying?” Irini asked Dr. Riki.
“I don't know, it's unintelligible, it almost sounds like an entirely different language”, Dr. Riki replied.
Irini crouched down in front of the mother and besides Dr. Riki to see if she heard what the woman was saying.
“Ma’am, what are you saying?”
The woman's dilated pupils darted all over the place and her words were muffled and croaked. Her long ginger hair draped down around her face, concealing her eyes and making her appear more ominous than she really was. The boy had three people attending to him, attempting to coax him out of the ball he had curled himself into. His muttering too was unintelligible.
Irini returned her attention to the woman.
“Ma’am, can you tell us when your boy started showing symptoms?”
Suddenly the woman went silent and whispered something.
“What was that, ma’am?” Irini replied, putting her ear closer.
“Libera nos a malo...”
“What?”
With no warning whatsoever, she arched her head back and began an ear piercing scream, which seemingly startled everyone in the cabin except for the father and son. Irini shuffled clumsily backwards, startled by it.
After momentarily staring in shock, the head doctor ordered them to hold and calm her down. As Dr. Riki and two others attempted to do so, others stood watching, uncertain of the best course of action for a mad woman.
As though having sparked a series of madness, the woman's husband began smashing his head into the mirror with full force repeatedly. Some of the staff gasped and covered their mouths, whilst it took three full sized male staff to subdue the man and just when they thought they had, a female staff member screamed out.
“The boy! He's standing!”
Why had no one noticed? There he stood, pupils darting around, twitching seemingly non-stop now. He growled like a dog, before lunging across the cabin towards one of the men holding down his father, landing on the man's back and sinking his teeth deep into the man's shoulder.
The man yelped and released the father to tackle the boy, but releasing the father only granted the father leeway to wriggle free and the first thing he did was to attack the two men holding him down, biting and tearing off the cheek of one of the men in a grisly scene, leaving him screaming and holding his cheek in agony, before smashing the other man’s head into the cabinet.
Other staff members backed off, unsure of how to intervene and frankly terrified.
The male staff member and two female co-workers, huddled together in one of the corners of the cabin, him shielding his two fellow doctors with his arms.
The father stood up to resume smashing his head into the mirror, whilst the staff member with the boy latched to his back
