The Immortalist (15 page)

Cricket let go of Yolanda and gripped the windowsill and the bedspread, fighting to keep from vomiting herself. She wanted to back away, to turn and run out of the house, but her legs felt too weak to carry her. Indeed, she was afraid that if she moved a single muscle, her body would collapse.

“What is it, hon?” called Hank. “What do you see?”

It was Étienne and the Congo all over again. Cricket could scarcely believe she wasn't dreaming it.
She held her breath, expecting a panic attack to hit at any moment. A minute went by, perhaps two. But the panic never came. The clearness of the danger focused her mind. She resumed breathing, slowly and deliberately. She reached out and touched Yolanda's forehead. It was burning hot—a fever so intense that Yolanda's body had shut off the blood to her arms and legs to keep the furnace roaring.

Fever. Purpura. Internal bleeding. Metabolic ketosis.

Few things could do this, and do it so fast. Ebola. Lassa fever. Marburg disease. All of them were lethal hemorrhagic viruses. All of them extremely contagious.

“Don't touch her, Hank,” Cricket warned as Hank crowded over her shoulder. “Leave the room and close the door. Get those two children out of this house.”

“Jeez, Cricket! It looks like somebody beat the hell out of her.”

“She's sick. Really sick. Call Charles—don't touch Yolanda's phone—use your own cell phone.” She almost choked at the mention of Charles's name. But this was more important than her or Charles. “Tell him we have a problem. This house has to be sealed. I need a biohazard suit brought here, with an isolation transporter. We have to move her.”

“Move her? Where?”

It was too soon to tell which virus they were dealing with or how Yolanda had gotten it. But an infection like this could certainly spread by contact, perhaps even through the air. That meant that any unsealed doorjamb, windowsill, or even a chimney could spew the infection to the outside world. She needed a place that was airtight, where every approach was controlled. Someplace self-contained.

“To the BSL-4 lab,” she said.

TUESDAY

Three Days to Lottery Day

One

IN BAY 1
OF THE LABORATORY
for Experimental Virology, Cricket reached up and adjusted the hiss of the valve that fed air into her biosafety suit from a coiled ceiling drop line. Through the broad faceplate of her astronaut-like helmet, she saw worry on the face of Jean Litwack. Jean was one of two nurses on campus credentialed to work with the rigorous protocols of the BSL-4 lab, but she had never tended to a live patient under these conditions, nor ever seen a patient as sick as the one that lay before her now.

“I'm going to draw a blood sample,” said Cricket over the intercom inside her helmet. She had just finished inserting a central venous catheter, a thin tube that ran from the jugular vein in Yolanda's lower neck all the way to her heart. She could use it to administer medications quickly, or, as now, to draw out blood for testing. Unzipping a vent flap in the plastic isolation tent, she reached through the tangle of electrical cables and IV lines with double-gloved hands and screwed a Vacutainer tube holder onto the connector at the end of the central line. Then she pushed a red-topped collection tube into the holder. As the perforator inside the holder pierced the rubber diaphragm in the cap, the tube automatically sucked out 4 cc of blood.

A click in her headset told Cricket that the intercom in the hallway had been switched on.

“Cricket, is she any better?” came a man's anxious voice.

Gifford, wearing a white T-shirt, sweatpants, and a Windbreaker, stood at the window, plastering his hands and forehead against the glass. In the past two hours, he'd asked four or five times for an update. “I thought you were going to wait in the office,” Cricket said. “She's stable, but critical. I would have called you if there were any changes.”

“You've put her on the ventilation machine.”

“Yes. It's brought her blood oxygen sats up to the low nineties. I'm giving her dobutamine to get her blood pressure up, but it's still running dangerously low. She was on the verge of shock when we brought her in.”

“Can she hear me? Can I talk to her, Cricket?”

“She's unconscious.”

“Maybe if I came in there with you . . .”

“No, Charles. We already talked about this. You're out of practice, and you'd just be in the way.”

“Then switch on the intercom in her isolation tent.”

Cricket was losing patience with his interruptions. “She can't hear you, dammit.”

“Please, Cricket. Even in coma, patients sometimes sense more than we know. I've got to talk to her.”

“Fine.” Cricket hit a switch on a small control panel on the side of the tent frame.

“Yolanda! This is Charles,” he blurted out. “I'm here, Yolanda. We're doing everything we can. We're going to beat this, whatever it is. And Bonnie and Chuck . . . they'll be okay. I promise you, I'll take care of them. Don't worry. You need to focus all your strength on fighting this. Fight, Yolanda. Fight like hell. Don't lie down and take this . . . this
shit
 . . .” Gifford's voice broke. “W-what has she got, Cricket? Is it food poisoning? Toxic shock? A stroke?”

“I don't think we should discuss it over the intercom.”

Indeed, Gifford was not alone in the corridor. A janitor leaned on his floor polisher, gazing with morbid fascination at the activity inside Bay 1. “Okay, I agree. Can you come to the office?”

Cricket hesitated. She had fought him off just hours ago in that very same corridor. Two sheets of bulletproof glass between the two of them felt like a good thing. But he seemed genuinely worried about Yolanda. “Let me finish with these samples.” Zipping the vent flap shut, she carefully laid the blood tube onto a bed of gauze in one of two yellow plastic boxes labeled
BIOHAZARD—BIOSAFETY LEVEL 4
.

“One box is for us, Jean,” she said, handing it to the nurse, “and the other goes to USAMRIID in Fort Detrick, Maryland.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

With a last glance at the vital-signs monitors, Cricket headed through the air lock to the decontamination suite. Still wearing her biosafety suit, she entered a four-by-four shower and turned around slowly as half a dozen nozzles sprayed her with Lysol to disinfect the outside of the suit.

She wished Hank were here. He had gone to look in on Bonnie and Chuck at the Freibergs' house, and she had urged him to get some sleep after that. He didn't know much practical medicine, and there was no point letting him risk exposure in the lab bay. But his charcoal-and-musk voice and the rocky way he planted his feet had a calming effect on her. She needed that now—desperately.

As the Lysol nozzles timed off, Cricket moved to the next room and removed her biosafety suit, carefully hanging it up to dry. After throwing her green scrubs into a hamper, she entered a second shower, where she washed her skin and hair.

She had done as much as she could. Stabilized the patient, started a blood analysis, sent for reinforcements. In another hour or two the transport team would be here, and she'd be off the hook. Not a minute too soon, either.

Leaving her hair to drip dry, uncombed, Cricket threw on a fresh scrub suit. Stepping through the outer air lock, she saw Jack Niedermann rushing into the lobby. He looked cheerful, rested, and immaculately groomed, with a light leather jacket draped over his open-necked orange-and-white-striped shirt.

“Dr. Rensselaer-Wright! Dr. Gifford told me you would be here. It's reassuring to know Yolanda's in the hands of such a world-class doctor.”

“Skip the flattery. I don't have time for it.”

“Of course. Have you figured out what's wrong?”

“Not yet. There are tests pending.”

“Right, tests.” Niedermann smirked. “When you docs want to stall for time, there are always more tests, aren't there?”

Cricket's nostrils flared. “Can you follow me to the office? There are some things I'd like to ask both you and Charles.”

“Of course. Anything to help.”

The office, opposite the security station, was a small room containing a desk, a computer, some chairs, and a whiteboard. Next to the desk was a portable rack of vital-signs monitors that were receiving telemetry signals from Bay 1. Gifford had set it up himself, and he sat with his eyes glued to the displays as Cricket came in.

“This . . . this is just a complete shock,” said Gifford without looking up. A neglected lock of gray hair hung over his forehead. “Yesterday Yolanda seemed so healthy and strong.”

“What do you know about her medical history?” asked Cricket.

“History?” Gifford seemed startled. “There is none. She's always been in perfect health.”

Cricket turned to Niedermann.

Niedermann shrugged. “Yes. Absolutely. Very healthy.”

“Did she undergo a medical evaluation when you hired her?”

“Well, sure,” said Neidermann. “For insurance purposes.”

“I need a fax of the report.”

“You've got it.” Niedermann pulled out his cell phone and began typing a text message.

“Had she traveled abroad recently?”

“No. Why?” asked Gifford.

“The symptoms are consistent with an acute hemorrhagic virus infection. It looks a hell of a lot like ebola.”

“Ebola?” Gifford frowned incredulously. “You're a virologist. It's natural that would be the first thing you'd think of. But it isn't possible. No one's been working with anything like that here. Yolanda never goes into the labs, anyway. She's strictly an office girl.”

Nothing was impossible until hard evidence ruled it out. But Cricket didn't need to argue. The diagnosis, whatever it was, would soon be confirmed. “I called USAMRIID, the Army infectious disease center at Fort Detrick, Maryland. I've asked them to mobilize their high-risk containment transport team. Their plane should arrive at the Air National Guard base in Bangor by eight or nine a.m., and they'll helicopter in from there.”

Niedermann looked up from his cell phone. “What did you do that for?”

“USAMRIID has a formal agreement with CDC to deal with highly contagious infections in research personnel.”

“No. Absolutely not. You should have asked us about this first. We can't permit it.”

“
We?
Who the hell are
we
?”

Niedermann slapped his cell phone shut and jammed it back into his pocket. “Your diagnosis is preposterous.
Ebola?
You can't be serious.”

“Are you a doctor, Mr. Niedermann?”

Gifford held up his hand. “Hold on, Cricket. I think Jack may be right. Look at those monitors. Yolanda's barely holding on. She wouldn't survive the helicopter airlift, much less a two- or three-hour flight to Maryland. We'll have to treat her here.”

“
We
, again? And who do you mean by
we
?”

“I mean you, Cricket.” Gifford raised his steel-wool eyebrows and looked fixedly at her. “Even if you're right, there's no one at Fort Detrick more experienced with these kinds of viruses than you are.”

“We have all the equipment you need,” Niedermann added. “The BSL-4 lab bays were designed to convert into isolation wards in the event of an outbreak. There are stocks of ribavirin, amantadine, ganciclovir, interferon, antiretroviral drugs, antisera for everything in the book. I should know. I signed the checks for it.”

“No.” Cricket looked away, at the leaden morning sky that showed through the small window. She had held herself together this far with the expectation that all would soon be over. Now she was beginning to feel trapped. “I . . . I don't think I can do it.”

“Pshaw! What are you talking about?” said Gifford. “Of course you can. Who better?”

“There are things about me you don't know, Charles. I'm not the person I once was. You don't want to have me on this case.”

“Why in blazes not?”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“Goddammit, Cricket. Yolanda means a lot to me. I need you to pull yourself together.”

“I'll stay with her until the transport team gets here. That's it.”

“There will be no transport team,” declared Niedermann.

“I already called them.”

“Uncall them.”

“No.”

Niedermann's face was flushed with anger. Raising his eyebrows defiantly, he grabbed the desk phone in front of him. “USAMRIID, did you say? That's the Army, isn't it?”

“Yes.”

Picking up the receiver, he brusquely punched a five-digit number—a campus extension. A prim woman's voice come on the line. Niedermann addressed her loudly, as if for Cricket's benefit. “Mrs. Walls, this is Jack Neidermann. I'm sorry to bother you this early, but we have an emergency. I'm trying to reach General Goddard. He may be on a flight back to Washington. Could you check, please? I'd like you to have the operator patch into the cockpit radio and ask for the general. I'll be standing by at this number.”