The Serophim Breach (The Serophim Breach Series) (40 page)

“So the people outside in the street have this stuff in their systems, and it makes them immune to pain. Or at least able to tolerate a great deal of it,” she mused. It was a leap, she understood, but it was another piece to the puzzle that might make a difference for them.

Thad’s monitor came on at that moment, and she rolled herself forward with her good foot. Her blood, magnified, was displayed on the screen; the red cells floated, almost static, fairly well rounded and indented in the center, as they should be. Thad shifted the microscope, searching the sample for her white cells. Karen felt her stomach tightening as she watched, until finally he found one of the round, fuzzy cells, vibrating in between clumps of the red.

And the sample was not pulsing. This alone sent a wave of relief washing over her; their experiment had worked, at least on her. When she pointed this out to Thad, saying that they might have at least the beginnings of a cure, he reminded her carefully that their survival rate at this point was only 50 percent. She shrugged.

“That’s better odds than lung cancer,” she retorted.

Thad ignored her and began laying out a plan to draw samples of her blood every two hours, checking her white blood cell count, and to pull tissue samples, when the overhead speaker crackled to life for the first time in hours.

“Dr. Lau to Ward Four. Dr. Lau to Ward Four. Code Green.”

She caught Thad’s eye. The call was summoning her to the psych ward, and quickly. The code was not an emergency, but high priority. She wondered if someone had finally noticed her missing and they were simply trying to locate her, or if something else was going on.

“You have a wheelchair near here I can use?” she asked.

Fifteen minutes later, she rolled to a stop at the nurse’s station outside the psych ward and pushed herself up out of the chair. On the other side of the desk, an older woman in scrubs waited impatiently, her long yellow nails tapping on the keyboard in front of her.

“Dr. Lau responding,” Karen stated simply.

“Oh, Dr. Lau, great,” the woman responded, a wan smile spreading across her face. She stood and leaned over the other side of the L-shaped desk, looking down the opposite hallway. She gestured at someone that Karen could not see, then plopped back into her chair. Seconds later, two men appeared from around the corner.

They both wore vaguely utilitarian pants, sporting several large pockets and loops, as well as long-sleeved black shirts buttoned up to their chins and down to their wrists. The man in front was large, blond, and strikingly handsome. Behind him, another man followed, this one slightly smaller, sinewy, and strong. His hair was a nondescript brown, his features somehow both unremarkable and dangerously sharp.

The man in front extended a large hand.

“Hello, Dr. Lau. I’m Agent Marks, and this is my colleague, Agent Strimmel. We appreciate your quick response, especially with so much going on.”

She nodded and shook his hand, careful to keep her face neutral.

“Of course. What can I do for you?”

“We’re here to pick up a patient of yours, which I’m told is impossible without your sign-off, as he’s currently in this ward,” Marks explained, gesturing toward the secured door that led into the psychiatric unit.

“Are you family?” Karen asked, working to keep the alarm bells sounding in her brain from translating into her voice.

“No, ma’am, we’re with the CDC. And we’ve been authorized to remove this patient from the hospital by his father. We have a signed release form, as well as paperwork from the agency,” Marks answered her, his voice even, his smile reassuring.

The hair on her neck rose slightly as he spoke, identifying himself as an agent with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Karen was certain that she had heard the young man tell the hospital director that they had been without contact with the CDC since the arrival of the Marines, which had been nearly eight hours earlier. Marks and Strimmel both produced badges, which she glanced at casually.

“Can I see the release form?” she asked. “It’s a fairly unusual request, you understand.”

“Of course,” Marks answered good-naturedly, pulling an envelope from his pocket. She removed the release form and read it carefully; she was stalling, and they would know it soon, but there was no way she could comply with their request. Karen wondered why she was so concerned about that fact; aside from it simply being against the hospital’s policy, she herself was an authority figure, and someone whom most people didn’t think to challenge. Something about these men intimidated her, though, and so she steeled herself to refuse them. And then she saw the patient’s name.

“You want Brandon Kavida?” she asked.

Marks made a show of looking over her shoulder at the paperwork as if to confirm the name.

“Yeah, that sounds right. Uh, yes, Kavida,” he said as he searched the page. Karen felt sure the gesture was entirely for show.

“And this is coming from the CDC?” she pressed.

“Right,” Marks responded, offering nothing more.

She chewed her lip for a moment.

“This is a difficult request, you see,” she said finally. “Brandon has been the victim of a serious attack, and he’s in extremely unstable condition. Where are you planning to take him? And how are you planning to transport him?”

“Well, ma’am, we’re taking him to a secure location at the Marine Corps base. We’ve got a helicopter on the roof. The trip should be no more than twenty minutes, thirty at the most. I’m sure he’ll be fine,” Marks answered, his voice still flat and calm.

Karen watched his face and felt the hair on her neck stand up again. She was sure that this man was not with the CDC and that his story was a blatant lie.

“Well, I’ll have to clear it with the director—”

“We’ve already spoken with him,” Marks declared, smiling. “He said it was in your hands.”

That was the confirmation Karen needed. The previous director of the hospital, Adam Koaluna, had transferred to another hospital on the Big Island a month earlier, and Manaia Freshwater had transitioned in as his replacement. But the new director had not yet been formally introduced to the press, nor had any changes been made to the hospital’s website.

Tread carefully, Karen,
she told herself.

“I’ll need to check him before I can authorize the release. If he’s in any condition to be transported, I’ll be happy to sign off. But I can’t do it without at least a brief evaluation,” she explained, trying to make it sound as though she was both apologetic and embarrassed by the need for procedure.

Marks didn’t react for a brief second, and then he smiled thinly.

“Of course. We’ll wait in the hallway,” he said, and moved away, his partner following.

She fought the urge to tell the nurse to call for help, and instead swiped her ID card to open the door into the ward. Once inside, she waited for the lock to reengage before she headed down the hallway for Brandon’s room, her mind racing. She would have to call Thad from the room and tell him to get some kind of security up to her immediately. She hoped desperately that there would be enough people available to answer such a call.

She found Brandon asleep on the gurney in his room, his arms, legs, and waist still restrained. He was breathing peacefully, but his skin was a sickly, pallid shade of yellow. A small part of her thanked the men in the hallway for calling her here, as it was clear her patient was in need of treatment. A twang of guilt hit her as she realized how long it had been since she had even thought about Brandon. She checked his pulse and found it beating slightly too fast, and weakly. He didn’t wake at her touch.

She picked up the phone and held it to her ear, dialing the extension for Thad’s office.

“Oh . . . hello?” A female voice came through the speaker.

“Hello?” Karen responded, confused.

“Dr. Lau, this is the nurse. I was just calling in for you.”

“Oh. What is it?” Karen felt her authoritative doctor persona reemerge as she waited impatiently for the nurse to respond.

“Well, I’ve got a call from triage for you. They’ve been trying to find you, because a new patient is making things difficult for them down there. He keeps asking for you.”

“Who is it?” Karen snapped.

“Um, they said Kavida,” the nurse responded. “First name Kai.”

Before Karen could respond, the sound of a gunshot blasted through the speaker, and the phone on the other end of the line clattered to the floor.

Mike had pulled the car off the side of the freeway to check the map, driving carefully into the dirt and coming to rest near a clump of smallish trees and bushes. With the headlights off, Sarah was able to see the line where the storm clouds hugged the dark island far off in the distance. The rain fell steadily against the roof of the car, drumming constantly in her ears.

They had not passed many cars on the roads since backtracking from Honolulu, where both sides of the freeway had been jammed with vehicles trying to get into and out of the city. Many were abandoned, as people had opted to leave them behind and make for an emergency center on foot, although others sat waiting, the engines running, the windows slightly fogged. Before they had gotten close enough to get snared in the mess, Mike had crossed the median and headed back toward Pearl City.

The traffic thinned as their distance from Honolulu increased, and soon Sarah only saw another car every few minutes. One truck materialized out of the night, its headlights off, screaming down the freeway at breakneck speed. Heather had cursed as it buzzed past their car, then looked immediately at her father, embarrassed. After a few seconds of looking stern, the smallest of smiles crossed his face.

Sarah wasn’t sure how they were handling the horrific death of Heather’s mother, Mike’s wife, but no one had spoken a word about it since leaving the neighborhood. She felt sure they would grieve at another time, when the world around them didn’t seem to be crumbling to its very foundations. Even so, there was a new edge to Mike, a hardness in his face and voice when he spoke that she knew must indicate the level of pain he was experiencing.

As she sat and waited for Mike to get the car moving again, she suddenly remembered Lani. She closed her eyes slowly; somehow, the terrifying reality of her friend’s death seemed too far away to impact her as intensely as it had earlier in the day. Everything she had seen and heard put a strange kind of distance between that trauma and herself, so that now all she felt was the soft, nagging pull of nausea in the pit of her stomach, mingled with a small, guilty kind of gratitude that she had survived.

She opened her eyes again, looking out over the dark landscape, watching as another truck passed on the freeway, heading in the direction of Honolulu.

“Where do you think everyone is?” she asked in a quiet voice, looking at Heather.

The older girl looked tired, dark circles blooming under her eyes as she sat looking out the window in a haze.

“Well, probably most people are trying the evacuation centers first. But if what Kai said is right, those might not be reliable. And if that’s the case . . . I don’t really know. If it was me, I’d probably—”

Heather’s voice caught in her throat for a moment and thickened with emotion.

“—I’d probably go home first. Someplace I knew and felt safe. And I’d try to wait this out, whatever it is.”

Sarah leaned her head against Heather’s shoulder. She knew what Heather must be feeling—that her home was not safe, that it had been corrupted by a horrifying act of violence, and she would never feel safe there again—because she was feeling it too.

“I just want to get to Kai,” Heather whispered. And for the first time, Sarah realized that she was not the only one worried about her brother.

They watched together for a few more minutes while Mike looked over the map. Out in the night, a small fire blossomed, the smoke rising up to meet the storm clouds, and then they heard the gunfire. At first, Sarah thought it was heavier rain, but as she listened to the sporadic bursts, she realized she was listening to some kind of firefight.

“Mike,” she said, but when she looked, she realized he was already staring intently out of the window toward the growing flames.

The fire provided enough light to allow them to see the street immediately surrounding the building that burned. There was no way to know what the building had been; it might have been a grocery store or a retail shop of some kind. Outside in the street, a group of figures—Sarah counted five—moved into the firelight from out of the darkness, their shadows grotesque and shifting on the asphalt. They stalked forward in coordination, crouched and holding what appeared to be rifles, the butts tucked into their shoulders, the muzzles aimed at the burning building.

“Are they looters?” Sarah whispered. No one answered her; they waited together, watching silently as the small group fanned out in front of the smoldering building.

The fire had found some kind of fuel, because it burned suddenly brighter, more intensely, and the group in the street stepped back slightly, shielding their faces from the heat. In the same moment, a man burst out of the building, shattering a plate glass window as he came. The fleeing man’s clothes and hair burned fiercely, but he did not move as Sarah expected him to, flailing his arms or dropping to the ground. Instead, he charged immediately at the nearest member of the armed group, his arms outstretched and swiping at the air as he ran. Immediately, the street was alive with the
chuk chuk chuk
of automatic fire, with round after round finding its mark in the man’s chest, arms, legs, and neck. Still he charged, and in seconds he was on one of the group members, throwing him to the ground and pouncing on him. The others in the group scrambled forward, trying to pull the man off their comrade, when another figure burst out of the building. The second burning man charged the group as well, and Sarah thought she could hear a distant scream filled with rage and pain.

The first burning man was still wrestling with his armed foe when a shot from somewhere struck him in the side of the head, and he collapsed to the street immediately. His victim shoved the body off and scrambled back into the street, grasping for the rifle he had dropped in the scuffle. The second burning man was locked in a brawl with another member of the group for a few seconds before another headshot sent him sprawling to the pavement as well.