Читать книгу The Immune - Doc Lucky Meisenheimer - Страница 13

John’s mind was swirling as he tried to digest all that happened. He scribbled notes on a paper attached to a white plastic clipboard. As he walked back to the triage area, the local news interrupted programming with a special report. Hospital monitors displayed news teams tracking airwar attacks near the hospital. As he looked at the screen, he realized several reports were emanating from Cassandra’s neighborhood. His pulse quickened as he remembered her comment of spending the day packing at her apartment.

He pulled his cell phone. An unplayed voice message from Cassandra popped on the screen.

“Play message,” he commanded the phone.

Cassandra’s screaming voice came over the speaker, “Get back. I’ve got a knife; get back. They’re breaking down the door. Help, John, help!” Then the message cut off.

John hollered at the head triage nurse, “Cassandra is being attacked by an airwar.” He tossed the clipboard on the nurses station. It slid off, hitting the floor, shattering in several pieces. “I gotta go.” He bolted toward the parking lot exit.

On John’s arrival at Cassandra’s, everything was in chaos. Police, ambulances, injured, dead, and grieving surrounded the apartment complex. A policeman told John three airwars attacked the area. Several residents managed to outrun or otherwise escape. Those who had stings were sitting or lying on the curb of the street, attended to by emergency personnel. Bodies of victims who hadn’t survived were lying side by side farther down the road. Gray blankets borrowed from nearby ambulances covered the distorted and swollen faces of the deceased.

John scanned the injured for Cassandra, but she wasn’t there. He then jogged over to the dead victims. A police officer started to stop him, but he deferred to John’s white coat and his ID badge from the hospital. John could feel the palpitations of his heart as he lifted each blanket from the faces of the ten dead, but Cassandra’s wasn’t among them.

He sprinted up to her apartment. The threshold was splintered as the door was busted from its hinges. There were obvious signs of a struggle in the living room. Several partially packed cardboard boxes were overturned; their contents strewn over the floor. A kitchen carving knife lay on the floor next to wet streaks of blood. He called her name and checked the entire apartment, including the closets and cabinets. She wasn’t there.

John noticed a thin man with stringy long hair and a shaggy beard staggering by the open front door. The man was drenched in sweat. John recognized the man as a resident of one of the apartments near Cassandra’s.

“Hey,” shouted John, “have you seen the woman living in this apartment? Her name is Cassandra.”

The fellow seemed to be in shock.

“I hid . . . all you could do was hide,” he babbled, “I heard her scream . . . nothing I could do . . . I was hiding. They would have got me too . . . Must have been a hundred of them.” He waved his arms wildly in the air. “They carried off so many . . . I heard her scream . . . yes . . . yes . . . nothing I could do . . . I was hiding.”

John grabbed the man by his shoulders and shook him. “Did you see Cassandra?”

The man wiped his forehead on his sleeve and seemed to calm down.

“No,” said the man, “I only heard her screaming.” He surveyed the mess in the apartment and shuddered, “One of them got her, I’m sure. Airwars carried off twenty or thirty people besides those dropped left for dead.”

Then he began to rant about Mad Mike’s Liberty Fighters.

“It’s their fault. None of this would be happening if we were just to leave them alone. I’m in the Love the Airwars League, for God’s sake. I mean them no harm. The government was here. They shot at terrorists and captured at least one. That’s why airwars were here! The government needs to protect us from those terrorists. The airwars are gentle animals just wanting to be left alone to live in peace.” He stopped his tirade and began sobbing. John, with a dark black hole sucking on his heart, headed back to the hospital.

John waited by the posting wall and kept checking his cell phone. He called in every favor he had with staff and administration trying to locate Cassandra, but her status was unknown. John walked to the temporary morgue, which in reality was a converted gymnasium near the hospital. It had no listing for her.

John tried to talk his way into the morgue, but even as a doctor, the stocky, gray-haired guard denied him access. No deceased relative, no entry, was the policy. The guard at the door was empathetic, but firm.

“Doc, I understand you wanting to search,” said the guard, “but there’re hundreds of bodies, and even more missing people. We can’t handle everyone looking for a loved one prowling around. I assure you every body has a confirmed identity before they’re accepted at this morgue. If your friend isn’t on the list, then she isn’t here.”

From the chaos John observed looking through the gym’s glass doors, he had little confidence in the precision of the morgue records. John understood the policy, though. Yet, he didn’t relish the idea of looking through hundreds of dead bodies. He also maintained hope Cassandra was alive. If she showed up injured at the hospital, he wanted to be there, so he returned to the posting wall. The hourly postings passed one by one, then on the fifth posting, Cassandra’s name appeared. Deceased; ID confirmed. Darkness closed in.

John awoke to the grim face of Dr. Lee, a new ER doctor just out of residency. His employment at the hospital began a mere six months previously. John was one of the medical personnel who had done his staff appointment interviews. Dr. Lee spoke with some reverence to the more senior staff member he was tending.

“Dr. Long, you went vasovagal on us.”

Great, I fainted, thought John, then he remembered the posting and became nauseous.

“Someone bring me an emesis basin STAT!” shouted Dr. Lee. It was too late. John vomited over the side of the gurney. Dr. Lee called out with less intensity, “We need custodial services.”

“Sorry,” John groaned. His head flopped back on the gurney.

“Nothing a mop can’t fix, Dr. Long,” said Dr. Lee and put his hand on John’s shoulder, “I’m sorry. The entire staff extends their deepest sympathies. Whenever you feel you’re up to it, you can leave. We just pulled you straight back, no testing, no paperwork involved.”

John nodded understanding. Paperwork had become 95% of medicine these days. ASC just added another level of paperwork with the airwar toxicity swab. Every patient who came through the hospital received an oral swab; if positive, quarantine officers took them to offsite holding stations. It was the most stupid ASC edict. A five-page form was required on every positive. In John’s experience, the extremely rare positives for the toxicity test always appeared the healthiest. If they wanted truly toxic people, they should check the morgue.

Several screams from down the hallway interrupted John’s thoughts. A small mob rushed in through the triage door and knocked a man off his gurney. The man writhed on the floor as the newcomers shrieked for help.

“Dammit!” said Dr. Lee, “Dr. Long, I’ve got to run. New batch of victims.” He paused, then added, “Oh, by the way, Goldman in administration said take all the time off you need, but the S.O.B. also asked if you could keep it to one day, since we’re in crisis mode.” Dr. Lee darted down the corridor.

John, with his head in a dark fog, stumbled back the two blocks to the morgue. The same stocky guard was there. John showed him a copy of the posting. The guard glanced at John’s name tag on his white lab coat.

“Says here the deceased’s last name is Shelly,” said the guard, “Your name is Long. You related?”

John tried to speak, but the grief was overwhelming. Words wouldn’t come out. The guard appeared to soften as he saw the anguish on John’s face.

“Never mind,” said the guard, “go on in.” He pulled the door open for John to enter.

Inside, John was almost overcome with the smell of decomposing bodies. Clearly some had resided in the morgue too long without embalming. A squirrelly, short man wearing a long lab coat and safety glasses approached him. The man held a clipboard binding hundreds of pages. He looked at John and said in a mechanical voice, “Morgue concierge . . . sorry for your loss . . . name of victim?”

John couldn’t speak; he just pointed to Cassandra’s name on the posting he held.

The man shuffled through his papers, saying to himself, “Not here . . . not here . . . not here either . . . She doesn’t seem to be on the log in list.”

He paused for a moment, looking somewhat perplexed; he checked the name again on John’s sheet.

“Great, this is putting me behind,” he mumbled.

Then his face brightened and he pulled out some blue papers rolled up in his back pocket. He thumbed through the new papers and his face lit up in a beaming smile.

“Ah, here she is, on the ASC autopsy list,” he said, “Thought I’d have to do a manual check. Takes forever, you know. Dodged another bullet, I did.” Then he laughed.

John didn’t see the humor in his situation. He gave the concierge a hard glare.

The concierge returned to his mechanical voice, “Row twenty-three, gurney K, do not remove items or body parts without an attendant.” He turned abruptly and walked to a crying woman who had just arrived, “Morgue concierge . . . sorry for your loss . . . name of victim?”

John began moving down the many rows looking for row twenty-three. The rows, in keeping with current government efficiency, had no visible numbers, so he began counting. When he came to the twenty-third row, he went down to the gurney with the letter K. He couldn’t help but notice he was standing under a basketball goal. Black sheets of plastic looking like over-sized garbage bags covered all the bodies on the gurneys. John took a deep breath and pulled the covering back. Underneath laid the naked body of a large, bloated African-American male with a full beard and a number of tattoos. John began cursing loudly.

A young male attendant wearing a short white lab jacket ran up to him.

“Sir,” he said in a nasally voice, “I empathize with your loss, but please, no profanity here. Others are in mourning as well.”

“Sorry, I lost control,” said John, looking around at the scores of other mourners. He felt bad about his outburst.

The red-headed, freckle-faced attendant smiled and said, “That’s okay. I understand.” He looked at the man on the table and said to John, “Was he your significant other?”

“No,” responded John curtly, “I don’t know who this is.”

“Well, it can be difficult to identify loved ones after airwar stings,” said the attendant, smiling empathically, “You may want to look for a familiar mark or perhaps a piece of jewelry you recognize.” He pointed to a flaming snake tattoo in the man’s genital area, “Do you recognize this?”

“No!” John angrily replied, “I’m looking for my fiancé.” He paused and added with emphasis, “A woman.”

The attendant looked confused and said, “Sir, this is a man.”

John bit his tongue and said in a slow steady voice, “I’m trying to find my fiancé who’s supposedly in row twenty-three on gurney K, a woman.”

“This is row twenty-four,” said the attendant with a knowing smile, “You need the previous row.”

John was sure he counted correctly, “Are you sure? I took great care in my counting.”

“Yeah,” said the attendant, still smiling, “but you probably counted row thirteen, and we have no row thirteen. Our senior administrator thinks it’s bad luck. Don’t know why; people in this place are just as lucky on row twelve as thirteen. I think—”

A shriek of anguish interrupted him. Three rows away a thin middle-aged woman had just located her son.

The attendant continued to rattle on undisturbed. “I think he does it so people are always begging for more attendants. The more attendants under him, the more power he has. Two days ago, Pete advised him he could reduce attendants by eighty percent if the rows got numbered and added a row thirteen. He fired Pete. So I guess, indirectly, row thirteen is bad luck. Anyway, it’s job security for me,” he said and smiled a big grin.

John got a feeling he was in a horrible, surreal dream. He wanted to scream, but he held his composure. He looked at the attendant and asked, “Could you please take me to my Cassandra?”

John stood with the attendant at row twenty-three, gurney K. He reached and pulled back the black plastic cover over the body. Lying before him was a badly bruised and swollen body of a female. John knew if he hadn’t been a physician and hadn’t experienced multiple autopsies in the past, he would have probably passed out again. During an autopsy, pathologists remove the brain by cutting the scalp and peeling it back over the face. Then a saw slices the skullcap, which is popped off, exposing the brain. They hadn’t bothered to pull the scalp back or to replace the cutoff skullcap. John reached to pull the scalp back off the face, but the attendant grabbed his arm. John stopped, looked at the attendant, and said, “I’ve got to be sure,” and the attendant released his grip.

The face revealed was grotesque and twisted from bruising and swelling. He looked at the misshapen body. It looked like Cassandra, but the numerous contusions made it difficult. He was trying to think of identifying moles or marks, but then he noticed a shiny object on the ring finger. It was a heart-shaped diamond sandwiched between two rubies. It was the engagement ring given to her on their trip. John’s heart sank. He again felt a dark hollowness in his soul as the last bit of hope expired.

John started to remove the ring, and the attendant cleared his throat, “Ah, doctor . . . umm . . . you need to leave the ring. I’ll need it in the future . . . umm, I mean . . . for further ID.”

John noticed the attendant slip his hand into his lab coat pocket as he was saying this, almost as if he was reassuring himself something was there. John thought he heard high-pitched sounds of metallic objects bumping together.

John stopped and moved slightly toward the attendant, who had now removed his hand from his pocket. John suddenly shoved his own hand in the attendant’s lab coat pocket and retrieved several rings, necklaces, and other small jewelry items. John defiantly held the jewelry up in the face of the attendant, then put them back in the attendant’s pocket. He then went back to Cassandra’s body and began removing the ring. The attendant started to back away as if he was leaving.

“Wait!” said John brusquely, “I’m not finished with you.”

The attendant stopped and looked like a dog caught crapping on the living room rug. John resisted the urge to slug the fellow in the gut.

“Why was Cassandra autopsied?” demanded John.

“Are you going to tell?” said the attendant with his head hung low, “I only borrow from those without families. I didn’t know she had a fiancé. That’s not listed in the records. The others will take from anyone, not me.” He lifted his head and stuck out his chest, giving it a thump, as if he were proud of his disclosure.

“So you believe your ill deeds are excused by more wicked actions done by others?” John said with a steely stare.

The attendant looked at him blankly.

John, frustrated, angry, and not at the moment interested in getting in a discussion of morality, said, “Forget it. Tell me what I want to know about Cassandra.”

The attendant looked around to see if anyone was within earshot. The middle-aged woman was three rows away, but she was weeping so loudly over her son, she presented no danger of hearing their conversation.

“Some bodies come in tagged airwar death,” said the attendant in a low voice, “and they’ve all been autopsied by ASC as part of a study. ASC wants to avoid any public backlash from the random autopsies, so we can’t mention them. She must have been logged in through the ASC receiving room because she still had a ring on.”

“Her engagement ring,” said John as his eyes started to water up.

“Whatever,” said the attendant with a shrug, “If she came through the standard check in, I assure you she’d have been divested of her ring long before she got to this main holding area.” He patted the pocket of his lab jacket containing the stolen items. “The ASC bodies like your fiancé are always the worst. We leave the jewelry items on just in case a relative shows up for ID, but we always remove them on checkout before burial. You won’t find any report on her death other than the tag on the toe.”

The attendant bent and read the toe tag aloud, “Airwar Death,” and he glanced back at the body, “The bad ones look pretty much the same.”

John was acutely aware of this fact as he sent many a victim to this very morgue. He wiped his eyes with his hand and appeared to have regained his composure. “Okay, what about the study? What was ASC looking for?”

“How the hell should I know?” said the attendant, “I’m just a minimum wage dead body clerk,” and he sarcastically added, “ASC doesn’t report to me on a regular basis regarding their classified studies.”

John frowned at the attendant. The attendant assumed a cowering stance, realizing he over-stepped the line.

“Leave me!” ordered John, and he dismissed the attendant with a flick of his hand. John figured at this point it didn’t matter what kind of autopsy data ASC was collecting. He only hoped their findings would help end the crisis.

John proceeded to a large window counter at the back of the morgue. A sign above it read Gym Equipment Check out and Towel Return. A notice on white poster board was taped below the sign. Victim Deposition was handwritten in black marker. Behind the counter working on a computer was a short, obese woman in her late forties. Her blonde hair was done in a bee-hive hairdo. She looked at John over her reading glasses and motioned for him to hand her the posting.

“I’m here to make arrangements for my fiancée,” said John, handing her the death posting.

Without a word she looked at the posting page and began typing on the computer.

“Deposition has already been arranged,” said the clerk without looking up from the monitor,“ the body is to be cremated tonight.”

“Who made the arrangements?” John said with surprise.

The clerk glanced at John’s hospital ID badge, then looked back at the monitor, “Are you her stepbrother?”

“No,” said John. “I’m her fiancée.”

“Well,” she said with a slight annoyance in her voice, “her stepbrother, who is listed as next of kin, made the provisions already.”

“Could you give me his contact information?” said John, “The number I have for him doesn’t work.”

The clerk frowned as she saw the line forming behind him.

“Look, doc,” she said, now clearly irritated, “all my records say is, arrangements by stepbrother. There’s no contact information listed. Your name is not on her file, so I couldn’t give you contact details even if I had them. Now, if you don’t mind, others are waiting.” The clerk motioned to the lady behind John to move forward.

John stepped aside and pulled out his cell phone. He tried the one number he had for Chunky. An out of service signal was all he could get. In a way, John was relieved he didn’t have to inform Chunky. Although John wanted to arrange a private funeral and burial, he didn’t feel like fighting over the deposition of the body. At this point it wouldn’t make a difference to Cassandra. He shuffled out of the hospital in the black shroud of night, not caring what he might meet in the darkness on his way home.