were about thirty cots set up in rows with about ten feet between cots. Already half of them were filled with patients. Liz saw everything from heart monitors to IV drips to defibrillators.
How could so many different illnesses spring up at the same time? she wondered. She took a deep breath and took stock of her own sickness. She was feeling better, she thought. The tiniest sounds still seemed really loud, but it was almost as if her ears had adjusted to it and it now felt normal. More likely, my brain adjusted to it somehow, she thought. The same was true of her heightened vision. The lights no longer seemed too bright. Even her oversensitive skin felt normal now.
But still there was some part of her that knew… that was absolutely positive… that her body couldn't withstand these changes for long. Whatever was going on, she had to find a cure for it. Fast.
More stretchers were being wheeled by every few minutes. On the latest one, she saw a familiar face. 'Kyle!' she called.
He turned toward her, and his eyes lit up.
'Hey,' she said to the nurse pushing Kyle's gurney. 'Can you put my friend next to me? Please?'
The nurse shrugged and steered Kyle over to the empty cot next to Liz. Two other nurses helped lift him from the stretcher onto the bed. After they left, he lay there quietly for a moment, recovering.
'Kyle, can you hear me?' Liz called.
He recoiled. 'Yeah, you sound like an air horn.'
Was I talking that loudly? she wondered. She lowered her voice to a whisper. 'Can you hear me now?'
'Yeah, that's better,' he said.
Liz narrowed her eyes at him. His cot was ten feet away. How could he hear her if she was only whispering?
Kyle turned slowly onto his side to face Liz. 'So what are you in for?'
'I don't know,' she replied, still talking in a whisper. 'I started feeling weird this afternoon. Noises seemed too loud… '
'And lights seemed too bright,' Kyle finished for her. He was whispering too. 'Did your skin feel weird? Tingly?'
'Yes!' Liz said excitedly. 'Exactly! Kyle, do you think everyone in here feels that way?'
Kyle shrugged. 'It doesn't look like it,' he said. 'Seems as if most of these people have really serious stuff.'
Liz thought about it. 'Your hearing is as sharp as mine now, right?' she whispered.
'It's practically bionic,' Kyle replied.
'So let's just listen for a bit,' Liz suggested. 'Concentrate on hearing what the nurses and doctors are saying. I want to find out what's wrong with all these other people. I want to know if they feel the same way we do.'
'Right,' Kyle said. 'Because if they do, I have to assume there's some alien connection. This is too freaky to be an Earthly disease.'
Liz didn't answer. For a while they both lay quietly. She closed her eyes and concentrated on listening. It was hard to do. Liz felt as if she had to pull strength from the rest of her body in order to focus it all on her heightened hearing. But after a few minutes, she began to pick up conversations from around the room. She couldn't be quite sure where they came from, but that wasn't what mattered.
'Cancer,' one male voice said. 'Full-blown lymphoma, even though yesterday she had no sign of it.'
'Maybe it just hadn't been noticed yet,' another man suggested.
'That's what I would think,' the first voice answered. 'But she'd had a complete physical a week ago for her life insurance company. It can't begin and spread that quickly.'
The voices were interrupted by a woman talking more loudly. '… mother's brother had diabetes,' she was saying. 'But it's never been in my branch of the family. How can I have it now?'
'We're trying to find out,' another woman's voice answered her. 'Just be patient.'
She's a doctor, Liz thought. She decided to try something new. She would mentally attach herself to this particular voice, she'd follow the sound of it. Then she'd be able to
hear everything the doctor said to her patients or to other doctors.
'How are you feeling, Mr. Sharoff?' the doctor's voice asked. The sound of it was fainter now, and Liz had to focus all her energy on listening to that one voice, mentally blocking out all the other voices in the room. It was a little like tuning a radio to the right frequency.
'I feel okay,' a man's voice answered. 'But I just can't seem to walk straight. It's like my left leg doesn't have any muscles in it.'
'And you never noticed this before today?' the doctor asked.
'No, never.'
'Mr. Sharoff, is there any multiple sclerosis in your family?' The doctor sounded worried, Liz thought.
'No.' Now the patient sounded worried too.
A wave of exhaustion passed over Liz, and she had to stop listening while she rested for a minute or so. When she tuned back in, the doctor was talking to a nurse.
'… woman's symptoms are consistent with Marfan's syndrome. But how can that be? She felt fine up until today.'
'It's the same thing all the patients are saying,' the nurse replied.
'I've been with the CDC for ten years,' the doctor said. 'I've never seen anything like this. It's as if something just activated every illness lying dormant in these people's genes.'
'Kyle!' Liz whispered, turning her head to look at him.
'I'm here,' he whispered back. 'What did you find out?'
'All these people have hereditary diseases,' Liz told him. 'Except they're suddenly full-blown cases. In patients who have never even had symptoms before.'
'So they had these diseases in their genes but they wouldn't necessarily have gotten sick?' Kyle asked.
'Right,' Liz replied. 'It's like something happened that just turned on all these inactive genes.'
Kyle was silent for a moment. 'Then what dormant genetic disease do we have?'
'I don't know,' Liz admitted.
'There's something else,' Kyle said. 'Do you know where we are?'
'No. It was too bright while they were moving me… I had to sort of shut down,' Liz said. In fact, she could barely remember anything that had happened while they'd moved her. All she remembered was a barrage of sensations that had made her feel like passing out. One heightened sense at a time, she could handle. But sound, light, and movement all together? It had been awful.
'I couldn't take it either,' Kyle said. 'I sort of cocooned all the way here. But I heard some of the nurses talking about it, because they think it's odd.'
'What's odd?'
'The fact that we're at Meta-chem,' Kyle said.
Liz felt like she'd been slapped. Meta-chem… where she'd found the alien cells. Could there possibly be a connection?
'Liz, didn't you say there was a chemical spill here this morning?' Kyle asked.
She nodded. 'Some test tubes got knocked over.'
'Do you think there could be any connection between that and this disease outbreak?'
'I don't know,' Liz whispered. 'But if there is, then this whole thing is my fault.'
Maria pulled the Jetta into the driveway and turned it off. She rested her head against the steering wheel for a moment, trying to collect her thoughts. She was worried about her mother, but there didn't seem to be anything she could do about that right now. And in the meantime she'd left Sadie here with Michael hours ago. She'd needed to get Amy to the hospital quickly, so she'd been able to ignore the Sadie dilemma for a while. But she had to face it eventually: She had a half sister. And a half brother, for that matter. And a stepmother. And the worst father in history, she thought bitterly.
But the main problem at the moment was Sadie. Her sister was only a kid, and she'd run away from home. Maria had to get her back to Phoenix somehow, and she had to do it quickly.
With a sigh, she opened the car door and climbed out. Before she had a chance to close the door behind her, Michael came running from the house. 'Maria, don't freak out,' he said.
She looked him up and down. 'You don't even know what's going on,' she said. 'At the hospital… '
