Mercy 6 (16 page)

Mendenhall released the lock of hair. Silva blinked, focused, appeared only slightly perplexed. She lifted her head, raised herself to one elbow, her lab coat falling away.

“Dr. Mendenhall.” Silva checked her watch. “I overslept.”

She started to hurry. Mendenhall touched her shoulder. “You're fine. Everything's fine.”

Silva blinked some more, let her stare go blank. “No.” She made an
mm
sound. “No. It's not.”

Mendenhall pressed her palm to Silva's forehead, then drew a pulse. The tech's eyes appeared clear, remarkably clear. “You feel something? Something off ?”

Silva stared straight ahead. “The only time I think clearly is just before waking. Dreams, you know? What they seem to do?”

Mendenhall nodded.

“I'm not off.” Silva finally looked at Mendenhall. “You're the one. You.”

“I've been scanned. You have my blood. I'm good.”

“Still. Something.” Silva gathered herself into sitting position, opened a space on the edge of the bed for Mendenhall. “You. You're not the same.”

The same? Mendenhall almost felt she was the one trying to wake.

“Not the same as what?”

“The person you were before all this started. Before you called containment.”

“You didn't know me then.”

“I did. Dr. Claiborne spoke of you often, your work, your charts.

He sent me up there often, usually to gather data, sometimes just to observe, to maintain connection.”

Mendenhall didn't know why this bothered her. She fought her temper, sat on the edge. “Look. I'm ER. We change for each arrival. We move on. We turn it over to the specialists and move on. Trauma. Think about it. Everything can cause trauma. We can think ourselves into it,
dream
ourselves into it. I surmise and tend wounds.”

“While I slept, what did you do?”

“I sutured a wound, reset a shoulder, stole some milk from caf. I told off Mullich and made nice with your boss.”

“You shouldn't have done those.” Silva swung herself off the other side of the bed, gathered her hair into a ponytail. “Those last two. Those. I could see it in your face.”

“You didn't even look at my face.”

“I saw it before I woke up.”

They faced each other across the bed. Silva fastened her hair, slipped on her lab coat, and pushed sleep from just below her eyes.

“I saw you faking.” She bowed her head and gave Mendenhall an apologetic glance. “It's not a virus. I do everything I'm supposed to do. Everything I'm told. But it's not a virus. You're the one who's right.”

Mendenhall shook her head. “Saying it's not a virus is saying nothing. Saying it
is
a virus is nothing. In ten years we won't even use the term anymore. Not in medicine.”

Silva appeared confused.

“We have to operate under a theory. Or we can just go along blind like most, not see the theory.”

“Or you can form your own.” Silva's arms hung straight.

Mendenhall shook her head again. “It doesn't work that way.

Science can't work that way. You have to work off the existing premise, the dominant one, the one that's saving lives. Virus theory.

Thorpe's. Claiborne's. DC's. Yours.” She opened her hands toward Silva. “Mine.”

“I don't see that. I don't see that at all. I see that I must do what Dr. Claiborne says because he knows more than I, has seen much more than I. I'm just an instrument, nothing more—and that's how it should be. But I don't have to believe. In fact, I work better believing you. You and your gel blocks and your ability to see inside without scans.”

Mendenhall leaned forward and placed her hands on the bed.

“Then maybe understand this. We used to believe in miasma. That disease wafted over our bodies, was born in swamps and bogs.

Before that, it was the four humors. We can smirk, but those kind of worked. Humoral theory, miasmal theory. They're not wrong.

They're just incomplete. We push their definitions and we find our way.”

Silva moved her arms. “Unless the working theory obscures.

Regresses. Damages. Tells us to bleed the anemic.”

Mendenhall pressed her thumb to her forehead, fending off a headache.

“What do you want from me?”

Silva raised her chin. “I want you to take me with you when you go.”

Mendenhall smiled. “Even if I wanted to go, there's no way.

Mullich's built this place for containment. Even the windows don't break. Outside, there are white trucks and helicopters. Inside, there are goons who won't even let me snitch a bottle of water.”

“Then you've considered it.”

Mendenhall shook her head. But wondered.

Silva moved to the foot of the bed, fiddled with the empty clipboard dangling from the frame. “I saw Dr. Claiborne taking notes—paper notes—after he looked at Cabral's amygdala. He saw something. He even sketched something.”

Mendenhall rested her gaze on the green glow of the exit sign. Silva motioned with her arm for Mendenhall to lie down.

She pressed her eyes with the heels of her palms, pictured the gray-and-black strokes of Claiborne's sketches, the almond shape of amygdalae, their graceful connection to the hippocampus, a connection too ephemeral-looking to accept its charge.

Then she was lying down. Silva removed Mendenhall's shoes and fitted a pillow beneath her Achilles. She grasped both feet and drove her thumbs along the arches, firm enough to ply the longus tendons. The strength of Silva's hands surprised her, but the warmth did not. Mendenhall relaxed her neck and closed her eyes partway, let the green light of the exit sign blur around Silva's silhouette.

Silva hooked her fingers between the toes, spread them, a delicate force. As she pulled her fingers free, she pinched the web between each one.

“Take better care of your feet, Doctor.” She blew a cooling breath then, using both hands for one foot, twisted the left metatarsals together, close to pain, holding there for three long seconds, which she counted in a whisper. Then she did the same to the right.

“They're farthest from our minds, the plantar nerves, all the way out here.” Silva ran a fingernail along the oblique arch of each foot.

“Firing from here, traveling the length of the body.”

She hooked her thumbs over the navicular and dug her fingertips between each metatarsal, counting three for each palpation. All the while Silva pressed the base of her rib cage to Mendenhall's toes, stretching them back.

“From down here,” she said, “I could stop your heart.”

Mendenhall let her eyes finish closing. She thought of her dog, Cortez, the last time she had taken him to the observatory, let him rest in her lap, placed her palm between his ears, called him “Killer.

Hey, Killer.”

“Take me with you when you go.”

Mendenhall crouched in the boiler relic where Meeks had fallen. The heat bubble created by the metal bowl felt soft, something about the copper, the stilled drip of the weld lines.

With a laser pen stolen from Mullich's desk, she fired the red beam.

The air inside the relic was humid enough to illuminate the line, pink in the mist, almost not there. She positioned herself as Meeks before collapse, given his final pose. She held the pen to her left shoulder, just above the upper lobe of the lung. She imagined the shattered fluorescent above the copper lid, aimed there. Retraced the line.

The line of Mullich's god particle. Not the elegant God Particle, the math of subatomic forces, but the blatant straight line of an architect. On Seven, a fluorescent tube explodes above Enry Dozier as he reaches down from his ladder perch. He collapses over the top step, dies, his shoulders and arms posturing from the pulse that disconnects his brain stem. Within the same second, the same pulse, on fourth floor recovery, Lana Fleming falls across the body of her roommate, dies, her fingers holding a cup of tea, her last breath a dead breath, a residual puff from the spasm in her bronchus. On third floor ICU, Richard Verdasco stares at the ceiling and dies, pretty eyes open, nerve endings just beginning to fizz and break the thinnest of capillaries in the softest organs. In a storage closet on second floor surgery, Marley Peterson holds her last cigarette and dies, the neuropaths throughout her entire body firing.

On the first floor ER—her ER—Albert Cabral crouches near a bed curtain, practicing shadow puppets on the gauzy surface. What does he feel? Is it an emotion? A sudden sadness? A loss of heart?

Of meaning? The butterfly silhouette on the curtain reduced to nothing more than the shadow of his hands?

In the subbasement boiler room, she is Lual Meeks. The fluorescent above the boiler relic explodes, and she is struck through her shoulder and left lung. Her last instinct is to slide into the warm copper palm beneath her.

To Mullich's microscopic God Particle, surfaces are liquid or gas, the first state of matter irrelevant due to velocity. Cinder block and bone are hollow matrices. Metal, glass, skin, and vessel walls part and collapse, ripple and recompose. Water. She knows there is a fourth state of matter. And a fifth. But she is ER, trauma, molecular, as rough in matter as the architect's line.

Mendenhall released the button on the laser pen. She backed out of the copper relic, sought distance, looked at the dark panel covering the dead fluorescent and the hard surface of the boiler tank.

A virus is not the thing we see in the electron microscope, hiding in protein folds. That is a virion, a first and necessary cause, a particle that is neither alive nor dead. It is a-life. Other causes and conditions must occur to create the virus. A virus is an event, a collection of actions and reactions between the virions and the involved cells. You do not
have
a virus. You experience it. You can't see it; you see its effects. You adjust. You try. You live. You die.

She aimed the laser at the dark half of the fluorescent panel. The red beam sparkled into thousands of pieces as it refracted through the shards of the shattered tube. They lay scattered across the inside of the translucent panel, reminding her of a kaleidoscope.

“I'm no crazier than Thorpe,” she said, firing the stolen laser pen.

She was alone and speaking to the ghost of Lual Meeks.

It had been twelve hours: 0736. Seven thirty-six a.m. on her six-dollar running watch. According to protocol, a meeting had to be ordered. Mendenhall was summoned as the physician who had called containment. She had thought Thorpe would assume this position. She was also summoned as Floor One leader, a position she had thought she had deferred to Dmir, or somebody like him, somebody dressed like him.

The meeting was held in one of the old lecture theaters, a cupped room with stage and podium, used when Mercy had still been a teaching hospital. Years ago, before her time, it had become an informal storage space, its floors and aisles convenient for big equipment and stuffed files, its nooks ready for illicit cigarette breaks.

Someone had prepared the room. The podium stood off center next to a table set up for a panel. An old surgical light cast a serious yellow glow over the stage. The aisles remained dim, a single thin light high above, seemingly unattached in the darkness up there.

Old equipment had been pushed toward the ends and rear, looming, craning, containing. Mullich.

She spotted him in the back row, in a lab coat along with the rest of the audience, laptop glowing blue. In the rest of the scatter—

no one sitting side by side, no one in the first two rows—she recognized only Claiborne and a guy from Surgery. On the panel, she recognized only Dmir. The panel chair closest to the podium was empty.

Mendenhall was terrible at meetings, never ready when she was supposed to speak, always speaking when it was best to hunker down and shut up. She climbed past old equipment—a steel X-ray with sharp joints and snagging wires—and took the seat next to Mullich. If not for the blue of his laptop, she would have been invisible.

She returned his laser pen, cuffing it back to him, a passed note.

He raised an eyebrow at the pen, slid it into the pocket of his lab coat. “I think you're supposed to be down there.” He spoke softly as he nodded toward the stage.

On the panel with Dmir were two other men she did not

recognize. One had broad shoulders and did not fit into his lab coat. Some kind of security head. Mendenhall would leave before it was his turn. She eyed her exit path, over and around Mullich, back into the darkness. There would be clanking.

“I figured that chair was for Thorpe,” she whispered. “Where is he?” She scanned the paltry audience, all of them mere silhouettes in front of their laptops and handhelds.

Dmir rose from his panel chair and took the podium. Mendenhall suppressed a groan. She took a granola bar from her coat pocket.

The paper wrapping crackled. Heads turned. She put the bar back in her pocket and slid lower in her chair, imagined herself hidden beneath Mullich's tall shadow.

Dmir began. “Six demises in twelve hours.”

She whispered to Mullich. “Six deaths in one second.”

The architect straightened. Onstage, Dmir paused and peered into the audience. Mendenhall slid lower.

Dmir cleared his throat and continued, “We have reports of other possibles. From the Boston area and Reykjavik.”

“The hell?” She looked at Mullich.

Dmir paused and peered. Silhouettes moved.

Mullich turned his screen to her. There was a page set up for this meeting. The first line was about Boston and Reykjavik. She looked at all of the other screens, all on the same page. Her name was all over it.

Dmir proceeded. “Dr. Thorpe is speaking with the Centers for Disease Control.”

With DC?
With
them?
Outside
? She resisted another whisper.

Mullich was looking at her, the blue light carving the side of his face into angles. Mendenhall's hands felt empty, the space in front of her gravitational.