Mercy 6 (24 page)

“Yeah? And how does that work?” Mendenhall stared at the syringes in her hand.

“It's something I do with my older brother. The one who doesn't do anything wrong follows the one who does, knocks stuff around.”

“Stuff.”

“People and stuff.” Kae smiled at the hand holding his, strapped to his. “My escape trail messes up yours.”

“How many did you leave out there? In your—our—trail?”

With tiny eye shifts, he counted. But didn't answer.

Mendenhall recounted. One during escape. One in Covey's lab basement—“the second guy.” Two in the bar.

“Four,” she said.

He counted with his eyes again, barely breathing. Then: “Six.

Yeah. No. Seven.”

“They had cells.”

“I took those.”

“They need ambulances.”

“Maybe the one.”

She held up an orange syringe. “What other colors? What other colors did you stick in them?”

“Some purple ones.”

“They need ambulances.”

Covey leaned into the drive, kneaded the wheel. Mercy

General was visible from the freeway, windows aglow against approaching dusk. “It looks like a night factory,” she said. “How do we get in?”

“We?” Mendenhall checked Kae, Patient X, Covey.

“I still have things to show you.” Covey shifted as Mendenhall remained silent. “I didn't tell them where you were going. I didn't. .

. . Maybe they followed.”

“You showed, they showed.” Mendenhall looked back to Kae.

“How would
you
add that up?”

“One plus one equals blue.” He was looking at the hospital.

“How high are you?”

Kae flattened his free hand, measured it to his chin, up to his nose.

“The stuff I gave you?”

He nodded, then tilted his head side to side.

Covey was watching in the rearview. “What does that mean?”

“Plus two, give or take,” said Mendenhall. She sighed, trying to breathe away exhaustion and frustration. She was in a car with two high patients and one free radical. She was taking them into a world that would be twice as mad as when she left it.

“My line,” she said to Covey. “My crush line. Is your crush line.”

“It's not that simple.”

“Don't give me that. I'm a physician. I say that all the time.”

“Okay. Yes.”

“What happens now? What is happening?”

“Nothing that hasn't happened before. This city—the world—

has changed toward it, grown. You know?”

Mendenhall made a fist.

Covey shrugged over the wheel, changed lanes to approach the exit. “I'm not being evasive. I'm not sparing you my expertise.

The molecules are too small to have impact. They wouldn't really function in the larger world. They wouldn't be involved. Or we certainly didn't think so. There were times I imagined them passing through me. As I bent over the collecting dishes.”

“What about those collecting dishes? The ones in your basement?

Those splash-looking things you showed.”

“They look like splashes, but they're not. Just like constellations look like they're grouped together, but they're not. Galaxies are not pinwheels; they're more like whirlpools, drains. The universe is not dark and limitless. It's full of light and finite and intricately shaped.

We design the surfaces of those dishes to indicate the slightest disturbance, the tiniest spark.”

“Fine, but what about the people? Bodies?”

“I didn't know about that until you came.” Covey paused. “ I work in the crush line all the time, believing they pass through me, wanting that. These must be different. There's a strange amount of sameness in the universe. The periodic table, you know. Everything that's been gathered fits within the table.”

“I thought you said velocity was the only factor,” Mendenhall said.

“A particle and its velocity can't be divided. The velocity is the particle. And vice versa.” Covey eased onto the exit. “It really isn't simple. This time. The line is intricate, in flux, more weave than mere stitch. Calling them particles isn't accurate. For you, maybe, think synapse.”

Mendenhall felt drained, hopeless. It would always show virus.

Calling it, predicting it would just make her look the good doctor.

Her guessing the occlusions for Claiborne. The same population densities that proved her case also proved Thorpe's. She was right; Thorpe was wrong. But people were still dead; more people were still going to die.

“So.” Covey eased the car along the base of the hill, choosing an entry, “back or front?”

Mendenhall pressed her lips together, put the corner of her fist there. She envied Covey's—what?—coldness, compression, precision. Her perception, the scatter and gather of it, the way she looked certain while on the run, on the loose. The peridot in the
V
of her blouse rested in the top dimple between her breasts, neat against pale skin, pure.

“South parking,” replied Mendenhall. “Kill the lights and slide the car into the back corner. By the scrub.”

“What do you have? A rabbit hole?”

“Something like that,” said Kae, before Mendenhall could. “But don't drive on the roads. Use the running trail. We come up that canyon.”

When they reached the trailhead at the canyon bottom, Mendenhall became disoriented. The near hill obscured Mercy. She saw two sunsets—one to the west, where the canyon opened into housing tracts; one to the east, where it folded into hills. The one in the east had more glow and color. It spread along the horizon, lifted into thicker clouds. She almost told the others to go on without her, to go wherever they wanted to go. Covey got out of the car first. She stood and arched her back as she watched the eastern sky behind the near hills. Her skirt lifted and made her look very young. She let her bare waist and stomach show, cool. Kae climbed out next, tugging the woman along with him.

“Snow,” said the woman. She held her palm up.

Mendenhall watched from the passenger side, thought about shooting up some Trapanal and waiting for DC to come get her, claim her. If she got herself back in, they might not claim her. They would at least have to think about it. If they got her outside, she was theirs.

She saw the snow. It caught in the woman's brown hair, dusted her palm, clung, stuck, smeared into powder where she rubbed it.

The horizon reddened; the overhead sky grew dark except where clouds caught edges of light. Distant sirens made whale sounds over the city. They could have been in Reykjavik.

“Ashes, ashes, we all fall down,” someone sang as they climbed the trail.

Returning was a matter of physical effort, pulling. Mendenhall led. In the vent she used her penlight sparingly, blindness giving them all a single goal. In the bomb shelter she found a note from Ben-Curtis:
This place is nuts
.

“Does he mean
this
?” asked Covey when given the paper. She motioned to the shelter. “Or the whole hospital?”

“You chose to come.” Mendenhall took back the note. Had he left? Was this warning or resignation?

She noticed something about Kae. He was still holding hands with the woman. The K-cuff was gone.

He winked, raised hands with Patient X. “You need me. To get her up there.”

At the base of the dumbwaiter shaft, he cleared the broken vent and crumpled cubicle, then fashioned himself as a human climbing base, planting his hands against the shaft wall, flexing his knees and spreading his legs.

“Climb,” he told them. He appeared fragile, a boy.

“Don't step on his left shoulder,” said Mendenhall.

The three women left him alone down there after hoisting themselves into the subbasement.

“Go home,” Mendenhall whispered into the shaft. No sound returned. She waited, and nothing rose, not one breath or shuffle.

She wished she had thought of something to say that wasn't a placebo, something with no prescription to it.

They set up Mendenhall's patient in the room Silva had used for napping. Covey made a good nurse. She found an old stand and helped run the IV. Mendenhall fetched a broken EMT cart from subbasement storage, from near the cold cases that held expired saline and glucose kits. The cart still had air function. She recognized the thing from the ER, a heavy roller Pao Pao had named the Beast. Mullich must have decommissioned it. Covey held the patient's hand, folded fingers together, spoke in a plain voice: “What's your name?”

“Julia.”

When Covey started to press for more, Mendenhall put a hand to her shoulder. Then she started her chart. Julia Doe, thirty-five.

“What are you—we—doing?” Covey held Julia's hand, curl to curl, thumb stroking her knuckles.

Mendenhall continued making chart entries. It felt good to be working. “Treating her for shock. Oxygen and glucose. We won't really know how she's doing until the Trapanal wears off some. It wasn't the best thing to hit her with.”

“That and the cuffs.” Covey stroked Julia's wrist.

“Let's forget about those.” Mendenhall waited for Covey to look at her. “Okay?”

Covey considered the green exit sign, its glow exaggerating her pale complexion. The only other lights were those of the Beast, tiny yellows, reds, and blues. “What's a virus?” she asked.

“Not this.”

“Why not this? That colleague I have who defines these particles—my particles—as a-life. He argues that they have destiny, that they're acting out synapses, that they have molecular structures adapted to carry out both. That they infect solar systems.”

“That's just metaphor. Weak, easy metaphor. Following even reasonably accurate metaphors is a fallacy.”

With her fingertips, Covey brushed Julia Doe's hairline, fitted a wisp behind her ear. Julia gazed back at her, eyes glistening above the oxygen mask.

“We give her air, fluids, glucose. We allow her organs to function as best they can. If the shock has already cut off oxygen to the vital organs, then we're giving her the best chance possible. Sleep will shift blood flow in the hippocampus. The limbic system will operate on a structure of reality, shifting from a structure of defense and delay.”

“How do you know she has it?”

Mendenhall gave Covey a hard stare.

Covey corrected herself. “How do you know she's been . . .

struck?”

“In a little, we get someone here who can verify. With me.”

She decided to face Claiborne alone. Covey stayed with the patient. Covey's sympathy for Julia Doe remained suspicious. She had to be fascinated by the path, the trajectory and velocity of the Jude particles and all the effects of being stricken by one. The involvement of cells, of specialized cells. And Mendenhall couldn't know whether Covey was risking her health because she believed what Mendenhall had shown her or because she was simply fascinated. If she had betrayed Mendenhall and brought the guards to her, had she acted in goodwill, belief in the virus, or only that same scientific fascination? Mendenhall couldn't read Covey—not the way she could read incoming patients. She was looking into a mirror, trying to see herself, staring and waiting for objectivity, that objectivity staring back.

But now she was moving from this to Claiborne. She was guessing he knew.

He didn't know. When she entered his lab, he nodded a greeting.

His tie was loose, his lab coat off, his sleeves rolled above his elbows.

“Thanks for the last text. I haven't had the chance to reply.” He wiped his eye with his shoulder, his hands remaining above the keyboard. The overhead screens showed six scans: three occlusions and three incipient kidney hemorrhages. The laptop showed an MRI of a hippocampus. “Good to see you've changed clothes. At least.”

She looked down at herself, dusted the hem of her skirt. “A little dirty. But different.” Her feet appeared not hers, the Mary Janes surprising.

“Thorpe forwarded the new cases to us.”

“‘Us'?”

“Five not far from County. All outside the same office building.

The building's under quarantine. Three from inside the Marriot by the park, packed with conventions. Also quarantined.”

“The five?” she asked. “Were from the building?”

He nodded. “All five collapsed within the same hour. Close together.”

“No.” Mendenhall felt for the necklace that was no longer there.

“All together. They all fell together. They weren't necessarily from the same building. They were just walking. In the crowd.”

Claiborne was distracted by something on the laptop. He double-tapped a key. “You got the same message. Unless there's a new one.” He motioned to the overhead screens. She didn't know what she was supposed to see.

Fatigue had her nauseated. She steadied herself, fingertips to desktop.

“You don't look like you just took a nap. You look like you need one.”

She pushed her hair back, felt how dirty it was.

He nodded to a far door. “You're welcome to the shower in the chem lab. It's pretty good, but you have to keep the chain pulled down. It'll wake you, at least.”

Claiborne returned to his task, not shutting her out but, rather, comfortable in her presence. She thought about keeping it like this, living under whatever Silva had constructed between them, operating under Thorpe's construction as well, forgetting what she had seen, what Covey seemed to know. But she knew she had eliminated all those possibilities when she had touched Julia Doe, taken her, injected her. In those few minutes she had committed herself to a split world of truth and lie.

“You're not as happy as you appear,” she said.

Claiborne went still, fingers hovering above the keyboard. After a moment he turned his head to face her, looked at her shoes.

“I mean,” she curled one foot, “you're still trying to convince yourself.”