Altered Genes: Genesis (11 page)

“Biological warfare, Professor,” Young said in a grave voice. “We believe the North Koreans released the bacteria.”

Simmons’s heart skipped a beat. "North Korea? Why in god’s name would North Korea do this?”

“We don't think they anticipated this outcome. We think they just wanted to force a change in the British Government.”

"By releasing a deadly bacteria?"

“Yes,” Raine replied. “It's quite ingenious...create a health crisis and destabilize a government.”

I don’t know if ingenious is the right word…more like evil,
Simmons thought as he studied Raine with distaste.
He looks impressed by it.

Young looked at his watch and stood. "Time to go, Professor. I'll have someone show you to your room. We'll meet again at 07:00 a.m. tomorrow. There's a briefing. Dr. Mayer will be there as well.”

“Are you coming?” Young asked the CIA man.

Raine shook his head. “No, there’s something I’d like to discuss with Dr. Mayer.”

What’s that all about?
Simmons wondered as he walked to the door with Young.

T
he noise
of the crowd filled her ears the moment Mei stepped out of the elevators. As she neared the ER, it became angrier, almost violent. She paused for a second to ensure her mask covered her mouth and nose before pushing the door open and stepping through it. The area in front of the admitting desk was overrun.
There must be a couple of hundred people here.

“Please help my wife,” a man shouted when he spotted her. She dodged his grasping hands. The woman was sick, one quick glance was all it took to know.

She stopped in spite of her better judgment. The woman’s eyes were dark and sunken, her skin dry. She was ill but not critical. “She’s dehydrated. Get her water,” she said quickly. “It won’t be long, admitting is working as fast as they can.”

He grabbed her arm as she turned to leave, his face was filled with anger and fear. “You have to help her now!”

“I can’t. I have other patients I have to see.” She twisted free from his grip and stepped past him.

“Bitch!”

The crowd surged.

They fed on the man’s anger, their pent-up frustration bubbling over. The insults continued, each one more vile than the one before it. Hands grabbed at her. Her mask began to slip and she panicked. She ran towards the two police officers who guarded the area separating Admissions from the general ER. They stepped aside, allowing her to pass, and then blocked the others from following.

She didn’t look back. She didn’t dare. There was as much pain and suffering in front of her as there was behind. She needed to focus her attention on the patients who had already been seen by the triage team.

As she neared the nurses’s station, a voice called out to her. “Dr. Ling—mandatory staff meeting in a few minutes…the 8N conference room on the 8th floor.” She paused as the nursing shift supervisor ran past with a handful of charts.

“I’ve got patients to see,” she shouted back.

“
So does everyone. Surnames A through L at nine—that’s you, Dr. Ling.”

She looked at her watch—8:55 a.m.
Enough time to make it.

The conference room was nearly full when she joined the crowd at the door. Everyone wore a mask, most wore gloves. A handful of doctors sat in chairs alongside the table. The remainder, orderlies, and nurses mainly, stood in small groups against the wall. Aside from a few hushed whispers, the room was quiet and absent of chit-chat.

Dr. Thomas Dullet, the hospital's Chief of Medicine, stood at the head of the table. Mei had met him once before during her internship interview. She had found him handsome then, distinguished perhaps. Today he was anything but. His blue shirt was wrinkled and untucked on one side. The dark circles under his eyes hinted at a long night of meetings and desperate decisions.

He raised his arms and the room went silent as he began to speak.

“Thank you all for coming on such short notice. I apologize for the chaos downstairs in admitting. We’ll have some more help from the NYPD and possibly the National Guard shortly. I won’t keep you long today, I know you have patients to treat and work to do,” he said. There was a raspy tiredness in his voice. “As you probably know, the city’s crisis response network has been completely overwhelmed by the surge in CDI cases. We’ve had to make some tough decisions.”

“First, all elective surgery and non-essential treatment has been canceled.”

“Second, all staff leave has been put on hold and mandatory double-shifts implemented.”

A handful of grumbling voices interrupted him but quickly died out. He looked around the room. “Those of you that are able, please consider staying at the hospital, at least for a few days until we get the situation under control.”

She scanned the crowd. She could tell from the look on their faces who would stay and who wouldn’t.
About half,
she thought.
I will
.

“Third—I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors but let me allay your concerns, the hospital is not under a general quarantine. However, we will stop taking new cases—of any kind—at noon today”

“What about critical pediatric ER?” a voice from the back of the room shouted.

The chorus of objections grew and he raised his hands, motioning the crowd to be quiet. “Look, I understand your concerns and I share them, but we can’t operate on a business as usual basis.”

He swept his eyes sternly from one side of the room to the other. “We’re in crisis mode. That should be clear to everyone by now. We’re missing nearly a quarter of our staff and every available bed in the hospital is full.”

The shouting started again. Mei felt herself being jostled from one side to the other.
They were scared, looking for answers. She was too. Tony’s email had sat, unread, on her phone until this morning. She didn’t know when he had sent it, access was spotty—on for a couple of minutes and then off for hours. The message was from his student but the writing was his. Hundreds of deaths had already occurred worldwide. He was convinced the bacteria was man-made.

She looked at Dullet as he raised his hands to quieten the crowd and wondered what he knew.

The Chief of Medicine began to speak, shouting over the crowd. “Please…Ladies and Gentlemen, let me finish.” Others followed his lead and raised their hands in the air, pleading with those around them to stop and listen. The shouting quieted to a level where he could be heard.

He began again. “The CDI outbreak is bad, worse than anything I’ve ever seen but we will persevere. This hospital has served the people of New York for nearly three hundred years. We won’t abandon them in their moment of need—Thank you.”

He paused as a smattering of applause broke out. It died just as quickly
.
She watched him push through the crowd to the door, ignoring the questions directed his way.

“Mei...Mei...over here.”

Unsure if she had imagined her name being called, she pivoted her head. The voice called again and she saw Grant, the intern she had helped a few days earlier.

Damn it. He’s nice enough, but needy.
It was too late to pretend she hadn’t seen him. She offered a half-smile as he approached.

“Did you hear about Robinson?” he asked, his fleshy cheeks flush from the exertion of pushing through the crowd.

She shook her head, fearing the worst. Robinson secretary hadn’t been able to reach him and there was no one at his house when the ambulance they had sent arrived.

“Dead,“ he whispered.

Her heart sunk. “When?”

“I don’t know. He was in the parking garage—in his car. They found him this morning.”

Grant’s face went white. “I touched him too you know when I helped Robinson.”

She knew he was talking about the British patient.

“That was four days ago,” she said, calming him. “If you had been infected, there would be signs by now. It’s about one day before symptoms and then—“

“—then what?” he asked.

“A few more until death,” she said bluntly.

“What are you going to do?”

“Do?” she frowned and tilted her head.

“You know…“ He stopped, expecting her to fill in the blanks and then started again when she didn’t. “A few of us are thinking about leaving…what about you?”

She stared at him in disbelief, astonished by the mere idea. Leaving the hospital was the last thing on her mind.
There’s too much to do…too many people to help.

“I have to go now,” she said, brushing past him. “I have patients to see.”

B
ut she didn’t go
to check on a patient, she rode the elevator to the sixteenth floor. She walked past Robinsons’s office. The door was shut, barricaded by yellow biohazard tape that ran in a criss-cross from one corner to the other. That was the procedure now when a room had been occupied by a person infected with the bacteria. The tape would remain until the room was disinfected.

Two doors down, Thomas Dullet’s office door was half-open. She knocked on it. He glanced up for a second before returning his attention to whatever it was he had been doing.

“Dr. Ling, I’m very busy. What can I do for you?”

“I want to know what’s going on.”

He looked up. “Going on?”

“With the outbreak. It’s a pandemic isn’t it?”

He blinked and looked away.

He knows something.
“Is this a terrorist attack, bioterrorism?”

She saw the briefest flash of surprise in his eyes before his poker face returned. “Why would you think that?”

She took her phone from her pocket and found the email from Tony. She placed the phone on Dullet’s desk. He leaned forward and read it.

“Who is Emma Rice?”

“A student of the man who wrote the email,” she answered. “His name is at the bottom. He’s a professor at Stanford University, an expert on bacterial genetics. You can look him up if you want.”

Dullet’s eyes stayed on her. The email was short. There was no need to re-read it. “Shut the door, Dr. Ling.”

When she had, he answered her question. “I don’t know what caused the outbreak and if the CDC does, they aren’t sharing that information. What I do know is that every hospital in the United States has been told to prepare for more cases. The Federal Emergency Preparedness Plan has been activated.”

“What does that mean for us?”

“Nothing good at this point,” he said. His voice was heavy with resignation.

“I don’t understand.”

“The framework is all encompassing. In many ways, it’s like the medical triage system. There are five stages, a few weeks ago, before this all started, Bellevue was at stage one—normal operations. We’re at stage four now—closed to new patients and functioning with reduced staff.”

“What’s stage five?”

“Quarantine.”

“Can they do that?”

“I asked that very same question. The CDC has always had the right to quarantine for international and inter-state travel. Yesterday, the president signed an executive order extending that authority to include intrastate movement.”

“Would they do it?”

He nodded. “Yes, Dr. Ling, I think they would.”

They stared at each other for a few long seconds and then she spoke. “You know some of the staff are talking about leaving, right?”

“Some already have. I’ve seen the duty rosters—What about you?” He cocked his head and waited for her answer.

She bit her bottom lip and turned to leave. “Not anytime soon. I have patients to see.”

T
wenty minutes later
, she stood in the doorway of the ICU. She watched Lucia Sanchez thread a string of rosary beads through her fingers while she looked down at her daughter.

The young girl was oblivious to the noise and pain that surrounded her. The sound of her breathing was labored. The movement of her chest imperceptible. An intravenous tube dripped fluids into her body.

The girl’s brother sat in a chair. He had been by his mother’s side the last three days. The ugly dark lines beneath his eyes were from lack of sleep, but the pallid yellow color of his face was something else.

He coughed a deep hacking sound. His mother turned to look at him. She placed a hand on his forehead. “You’re burning up. I’ll get a nurse.”

He cracked open his mouth to speak but lurched forward instead. Vomit filled his mask and dripped onto the front of his yellow plastic gown.

As his mother yanked the mask off, Mei ran towards them. She searched desperately for something to clean him with. The box of tissues on the counter was nearly empty. She used the few that remained to wipe his face.

The boy’s mother grabbed her arm with a force that nearly yanked it out of its socket. “Alejandro is sick. Please help him.”

Before she could reply, the haunting sound of a flat-line came from the heart monitor. Mei turned and ran to the bed. The little girl was still, her eyes closed. She slammed the code-blue button on the wall and began CPR.

After ten minutes of desperate effort and no crash cart, she placed her stethoscope on the young girl’s chest one final time.