Deadshifted

“Hi again,” I said, and he nodded, letting us into their room. I looked from him to Claire, who had an expectant look. “I need to ask a big favor of you.”



“What?” Claire asked.



“Can you watch Emily?”



“What?” This time Emily spoke. Her voice rose, and she grabbed for my leg. “Noooooooooooooo,” she began yelling, in an air-raid-siren squeal.



“I’m sorry, Emily. I’ve got to—”



“What’s changed?” Claire asked, with a sideways glance toward my nonshowing belly.



“He said he’d be back by now. He’s not.” I realized that for anyone who didn’t know Asher or me, what I was going to say next might sound foolish, but—“My fiancé. He’s never made a promise he didn’t keep.”



Claire frowned. “It’s probably not safe yet, dear—”



But who was it safe for? Waiting around wasn’t going to change anything, not while people were acting crazy and flinging themselves overboard. And if the captain was really going to do something about it, there’d be a fleet of helicopters overhead by now, airlifting us off.



Somehow Nathaniel was using the Maraschino as his personal petri dish—and Asher’s attempt to stop him hadn’t worked. It was up to me, first to find him, and then to figure things out.



“I’ll be careful,” I said, before she could dear-me again. I held my room key out to her. “There’s plenty of food in my room still. I ordered up at the first sign of trouble.” Emily was still sobbing, sliding down my leg.



“Why does everyone always leave me?” she yelled, each word louder than the last.



She didn’t know the half of it. But I steeled myself. I couldn’t go back in time and bring her family back—I needed to find the other half of mine.



Claire watched Emily’s meltdown then sighed. “All right. I’ll keep the girl here.” She reached out and took the key from me. “But you should take Hal with you. He’s good in a tight spot.”



I was shaking my head before she could finish the words. “I believe you, but I’m sorry—I can’t. I need to do things in a rush. I appreciated your help earlier and your help now, but—”



Claire frowned—she was unused to being told no. All the same, I wasn’t going to take a lumbering elderly man with me who might slow me down on my search. “Your loss,” she warned. “Do you at least have a plan?”



I nodded. As plans went, it wasn’t a great one, but it counted. “I’m going to go volunteer.”



* * *



Emily’s screaming was awful. Even though I knew it wasn’t so much at me as it was at the continuing and escalating unfairness of her situation, it made me feel bad.



Not bad enough to stop and console her, but bad.



I let myself out of Hal and Claire’s room and walked down the hall. Asher had gone down to interrogate Liz—he might still just be trapped down there by the quarantine for all I knew. But given that Emily’s dad had been able to come up somehow, and that Asher was who he was—the chances that he’d been stopped by mere guards was very, very low. Something must have happened to him. The medical bay was as good a place as any to start figuring out what.



I reached the stairway, where two new crew members were stationed outside. “Hi. I’m a nurse. I came to volunteer, like the captain announced last night.”



The crew member nearest me gave me an unsure look. “Why didn’t you come down then?”



“I thought I might have whatever it was. But I’m fine now, it was just allergies.” I tried to give the man a trustworthy smile.



It worked. He smiled back as the other coworker radioed down asking if they still needed help. He leaned forward so his voice wouldn’t carry far. “I don’t want to worry you, miss, but I wouldn’t go down there if I were you.”



The radio in his coworker’s hand crackled to life in response. “Send them down.”



I gave the first man an apologetic smile. “Too late.”



* * *



I walked down the central stair unescorted, although at each landing crew members/guards waved me on, until I reached the third floor.



“The hospital’s down that way,” one of them told me as they let me pass.



I would have guessed from the smell. My stomach lurched, and I pressed a hand to it to calm it. Not now, baby. Luckily no one else was there to see me waver.



There was a chance that in doing this I was making a big mistake. What if I did come down with whatever it was? I’d trusted in my nurse’s immune system before and it’d failed me. I didn’t want to catch anything, and I certainly didn’t want to hurt our child. But if Asher hadn’t come back, something was seriously wrong.



I knew from getting my pregnancy test that the medical office was on the first floor, and I also knew from that short trip that there’d be no way they’d have been able to fit everyone who was ill downstairs. As the smell got stronger, my path became more familiar, and I remembered that the medical staff had commandeered a restaurant. The Dolphin. Where Asher and I had eaten breakfast just two days ago.



The entrance to the restaurant was partitioned off with freestanding curtains like they use in waiting rooms so that people can privately change. They created a small room and blocked the view of the restaurant beyond, but they couldn’t keep out the smells or the sounds of people groaning and crying.



There was a table in the curtain-room, and the doctor I’d seen for the pregnancy test sat behind it, papers scattered everywhere in front of him. He had highlighters and pens out and was making copious notes—he looked like a cop near the end of a serial killer TV show: frantic, about to break.



“Name and room number?” he asked, without looking up.



“Edie Spence, room six thirty-one,” I said.



The doctor found my name somewhere on his list and checked me off with an orange line. “And you’re sure you’re not sick?” he asked, finally looking up at me. His eyes narrowed in recognition.



“Not yet, no.”



“And the results of your test?”



“Negative,” I lied.



He grunted. “Good. Why are you here?”



“To help. I’m a nurse.” There was a groan from the far side of the curtains that startled me. Asher said he couldn’t get sick—but what if he was wrong? He’d said I couldn’t get pregnant, and look what’d happened.



“Well, I hope you got in enough drinking before all this,” he said with a snort. He leaned back, pulling the curtains behind him aside enough for him to shout through. “Raluca!”



A short dark-haired woman wearing a cruise-themed polo shirt emerged through a gap in the curtain-wall. “Did you figure it out?”



He shook his head. “Not yet.” He snapped his fingers at me. “She volunteered to help.”



She looked me up and down. I looked healthy enough, so far. She nodded. “What’s your medical expertise?”



“Clinics and hospitals. I used to be intensive care.”



“Good. What you’re going to see—do not judge us, okay? We are doing the best we can with limited resources.” Her voice was slightly accented in an Eastern European way. I nodded to encourage her. Whatever it would be, I’d have to have seen worse already, back on Y4.



She pulled back to let me through. I realized the curtains were set up so that gawkers in the lobby, if there were any, wouldn’t be able to see in.



As I rounded the bend myself, I realized why.



CHAPTER NINETEEN



The restaurant was like a hospital floor in a wartime film with a big budget, but nothing here was special effects. There was all the chaos with none of the sterility or equipment. It looked like a primitive insane asylum, the kind they’d kept people in up until recently, even in our own “great” United States. People were tied to the undersides of tables with tethers of torn sheets, lashed like so many Odysseuses to masts. That didn’t stop them from moaning, though, or puking, or shitting themselves from the smell.



“Oh, God,” I said, before I could stop myself.



People like me—healthy volunteers—gophered up to see who I was before sinking back down to the tasks at hand. I saw them feeding people carefully, offering sips through straws, passing pills, wiping away the excretia as best they could.



“I know how this looks. Like one of your horror films.” Raluca shook her head. “You probably think us inhumane. But if we did not tie them down, they would run outside and fling themselves overboard.”



It took me a second to be able to answer her, even though I knew she was telling the truth. It was just that the room was so horrible, so far beyond anywhere I’d ever had to nurse anyone before. My head started shaking again. “No—I believe you. I saw a man go over myself.” I could tell my admission relieved her fractionally. “How many people are here?”



“Total? Two hundred. Fifty well, a hundred and fifty sick. A hundred have already passed.”



A hundred deaths on Nathaniel’s hands. “Do you have any idea what’s causing it?”



She shrugged. “Dr. Haddad is working on that still. We’re treating the sick people as best we can in the meantime.”



I wondered if the woman Hal had clocked was down here—and found myself dearly hoping that Asher was not.



“What are you treating them with?”



“Restraints, ice—and Tylenol, Valium, Cipro.” She ticked off the medications starting with her thumb.



Cipro explained all the shit, literally. Nothing like one of the world’s strongest antibiotics to clean out your intestinal flora. And the people underneath the tables couldn’t warn you when they were going to go.



“Where do you put the people who get better?” I asked, still staring around at the horrors of the room.



Her lips thinned into a line. “No one has gotten better, yet.”



A young man moving between the patients lashed to tables stood and waved. “Raluca—we’re out of Valium over here.”