Chapter Six
7:45 p.m.
Ava stared at River with the widest brown eyes he’d ever seen. “Kicked you in the head?”
She had an incredibly expressive face. Every emotion transformed her features into a canvas that spoke with more eloquence than words could ever convey. At the moment, shock and concern dominated. He could watch her for hours and never get bored.
“Yeah, with his combat boots. Asshole. Gave me a hell of a concussion, which turned out to be far worse than the bullet wound he also gave me.”
“A friend of yours did this?” Her voice rose with enough righteous anger that he almost laughed.
“Ex-friend. He turned mercenary after he left the Army.”
“In more ways than one,” she muttered.
“Pretty much.”
“Any lasting brain damage?” she asked, then paled and sucked in a breath. “I’m sorry.” She covered her mouth with both hands. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have just blurted the question out like that.”
Fuck, she was cute.
River laughed and mussed up her hair, mostly because he wanted to see if it felt as silky as it looked. “Don’t worry about it, Mouse.”
Soft, satiny strands flowed over his fingers in a tactile tease. She stared at him, her cheeks going from pale to red.
He dropped his hand, cleared his throat, and asked, “Henry?”
“Right.” She squared her shoulders and led the way, muttering, “Idiot, just keep your mouth shut from now on.”
River leaned down to whisper in her ear, “I like your mouth just the way it is.”
She whipped around to stare at him, her luscious mouth hanging open. “What?”
“You heard me.” After this shit was over, he was going to make a point of spending time with his mouse.
Quality time.
Sexy time.
“Henry?” he asked again, letting his gaze rest on her lips.
She snapped her jaw closed, narrowed her gaze into a glare, then turned on her heel and marched over to the camera again.
She was fun to poke at and tease. All prickly and pretty and ruffled up.
“Henry,” Ava shouted at the piece of electronics. “We’re here, hurry up.” She turned her back on River as if he’d insulted her entire family history.
Adorable.
A minute later, Henry came out, frowning. “Where’s the fire?”
River stared at him. He’d seen this guy before. Or his twin.
“An outbreak is worse than a fire,” she said tartly. “Haven’t you identified the pathogen yet?”
“Sort of.” He waved her off her next question. “You know how this works. Dr. Rodrigues will give you the details.” He pulled a couple of long, plastic cylindrical tubes out of his pocket. “I need nasal and throat samples.”
She opened her mouth.
Henry stuck the swab down her throat, put it back inside its tube, then got a second one and repeated the procedure with her nose.
“Now you,” the tech said to River.
He obediently opened his mouth, and watched how Henry moved. Precise and controlled. The edge of a tattoo became visible on his left arm as the man shoved a swab up River’s nose.
Bingo.
“Henry Lee?” River asked when the other man had finished. “Special Forces medic?”
Henry froze for a long second, and then his expression turned deadly. “I was discharged ten years ago. You want to tell me how you know that?”
It wasn’t a question.
In his shoes, River would probably have a similar reaction.
“I’m good with faces. There are a couple of entertaining stories about you still in circulation. One guy has pictures.”
“I know that guy,” Henry said with a grin so menacing it would have scared the shit out of a civilian. “He’s an asshole.”
River returned the smile. “That guy is a general now.”
“That just makes him a bigger asshole.” Henry’s face went blank and so cold it froze River’s bone marrow. He’d seen that expression on a few faces before. Most of those men were dead.
Henry pointed at the hospital. “Dr. Rodrigues is waiting for you in the ER. Wear a hazmat suit.” He went into his lab in a box through the canvas air lock and slammed the door.
Interesting place to find a man who reputedly killed three Taliban fighters in hand-to-hand combat while himself wounded.
River glanced at Ava. She rolled her eyes. “Come on.” She headed back to the tents where they’d both been cleaned to within an inch of their lives, her spine as stiff as a steel rod.
“Grumpy much?” he asked.
She didn’t even glance at him. “I don’t like it when people have secrets.”
What planet did she live on? “Sometimes secrets can have you by the balls.”
“What?” She shook her head. “No, that’s not what I’m talking…” She stopped walking and pinched the bridge of her nose. “He knows what’s causing this infection, but didn’t share it with us.”
“If the information is sensitive or destructive, it needs to be handled or delivered by the correct person, right? He’s a tech, right, not a doctor?”
“I understand the reasons why he’s not allowed to tell anyone but Dr. Rodrigues. I just don’t always agree with it. I’m a doctor, too, and it’s not like I’m going to panic or blab.”
“Someone else might.”
“Stop making sense,” she growled at him as she resumed her fast, jerky stride toward the tents. “You’re pissing me off.”
River laughed again.
Adorable.
The techs at the decontamination area were waiting with new hazmat suits. As soon as Ava got into hers, she started for the hospital.
Considering everything they’d learned about the situation so far, River followed without comment.
An outbreak had begun that morning at an outdoor coffee shop near the university. Three bombs had exploded in different locations in and around El Paso, including the nearby military base. The only clue they had regarding who was responsible and why they were doing it was from the ramblings of an ill, young American man. A twenty-year-old willing to blow himself up for some kind of cause.
Now, at eight o’clock, the outbreak had appeared to pick up steam, infecting and killing greater and greater numbers of people.
He didn’t blame Dr. Rodrigues one bit for keeping a lid on information.
Noise smacked him across the face as they entered the hospital. The sound of a lot of people talking, yelling, and crying was underscored by the mechanical sounds of heart monitors, intravenous sets, and respirators.
Ten feet inside the doors, patients in gurneys lined the hallway, the trail leading all the way back to the registration/triage desk.
Ava never deviated from her course toward the desk, and River followed in her wake, dodging ambulatory patients, family members, and hospital staff.
Someone grabbed his arm from behind.
For an endless moment, he wasn’t in a hospital hallway. He was trudging on sand, the sun burning his eyes, a hot wind scoring his face.
Pain exploding through his head.
Fuck.
He wasn’t going dark a second time.
No fucking way.
River spun, twisting out of the hold to find himself face-to-face with a weeping woman. It took more effort than it should have to stand down, to stuff the violence back inside him where it couldn’t hurt anyone else.
Her hands clutched at him. “Please, Doctor, help my son. He can’t breathe.”
Well, shit. “I’m sorry,” he said, glancing at the gurney she was trying to tug him toward. “I’m not a doctor.” The kid on the gurney was adult tall, but with a teen’s underdeveloped musculature. River could hear his panting wheeze from several feet away.
That wasn’t good.
“He can’t breathe!” she shouted at him, jerking on the plastic of his suit.
Ava appeared next to him, taking the woman’s hands in hers. “We’ve just arrived,” she said with calm confidence. “We’ll talk to his nurse. The last thing we want to do is the wrong thing.”
“Oh…okay,” the woman said, letting go of Ava with obvious reluctance. “Please hurry.”
“I will.” It was nothing less than a vow. She angled her body toward him and said in a voice that carried, “Follow me, Sergeant.”
No one else stopped them as they made their way to the triage desk.
Ava leaned down and asked quietly to the nurse, “Dr. Rodrigues?”
“In the back,” was the equally quiet reply.
“Who’s looking after the teen in the second gurney along the right wall?” Ava asked. “He’s in respiratory distress.”
The nurse’s face reflected unwanted surprise. “We’re operating under crisis management protocols.” She glanced over her shoulder into the core of the ER. “All patient care plans are on the team care board.”
“Thanks.” Ava was off like a shot.
A short hallway led them to a bull-pen style setup with a double crescent of desks facing a perimeter of rooms arranged like spokes in a wheel around them. At one end of the desks was a narrow wall covered by a dry erase board. The board had been divided into a table containing patient, diagnosis, and treatment information. A diagram of the ER with room and gurney positions tagged with position codes had been propped up next to the board.
There were a half-dozen people, all in hazmat suits, inside the crescents, fully engaged in their jobs. River recognized Dr. Rodrigues, but not the two men she was speaking with.
No one seemed to have noticed Ava or him arrive.
“Patient G-four is in respiratory distress,” Ava said loud enough to catch the attention of several people.
“Dr. Lloyd,” Dr. Rodrigues began, speaking to the two men next to her, “collected all the possible location-zero samples. She’s a microbiologist and recently came to us from the World Health Organization. She has a knack for untangling outbreak patterns.”
“I thought there’d been an explosion at that location,” one of the men said. “There were casualties.”
“Not precisely,” Ava replied. “There was an explosion, but the only death occurred a few minutes before the actual blast.” She paused, then asked, “Patient G-four?”
“I’ve got him,” a nurse said, with a grim smile. She rushed out, stethoscope in hand.
“Please give me a few minutes to catch Dr. Lloyd up to speed,” Dr. Rodrigues said to the men, then slipped out from behind the desk. She waved at Ava to follow.
River prowled right behind them. No way was he letting his mouse out of his sight in all this chaos.
Rodrigues found an empty consultation room, directed them into it, then closed the door behind herself.
She let out a deep breath. “We’re currently at one hundred and thirty infected, that we know of, with eighteen deaths.”
That was shitty news.
Ava stood a little straighter. She got down to business, didn’t complain, blame, or comment. Fuck, that was hot. “What’s the pathogen?”
“Neisseria Meningitidis.”
“Why is that a surprise?” Ava asked. “It was at the top of our suspect list when we first got the call.”
“This one is different.” Rodrigues pressed her lips together until they were a thin white line. “It’s resistant.”
Ava frowned. “Resistant to what?”
“Everything.” She swallowed. “Henry tested it against ceftriaxone, ampicillin, chloramphenicol, and ciprofloxacin. Nothing works.”
Holy shit, none of the antibiotics worked? Was this some kind of superbug?
“That…” Ava shook her head. “That’s not possible.”
“We just sent samples off for multilocus sequence typing and serosubtyping an hour ago.”
“A new strain?”
“It would have to be to behave like it does. It’s killing people in just a few hours, causing high fevers, brain swelling, and respiratory arrest. Sometimes the swelling kills the patient, sometimes the respiratory distress kills them.”
“The first case arrived in the ER at eleven this morning,” Ava said, staring at nothing. “Six people arrived with the same symptoms within minutes of each other.”
River watched her talk and could almost hear the gears turning in her head.
“The first death was at two in the afternoon. The count is now eighteen. Sixteen people in six hours? That’s a hell of an escalation.”
Wow, she said hell. He’d have used stronger language. This situation was rapidly evolving into a catastrophe of monumental proportions against an enemy he couldn’t even see, let alone fight.
“That’s why the state of emergency was declared. The governor is scared shitless. He didn’t even blink before giving the CDC the power to investigate, including directing law enforcement.”
“So,” River said, thinking out loud. “If things continue to worsen, the CDC can take faster action and issue orders to all those law-enforcement agencies?”
“That, too,” Rodrigues said, swallowing as if she’d eaten a mouth full of shit. “But it’s not going over well with Homeland Security or an interesting variety of politicians and government officials. I’ve never seen so many different people try to tie my hands. If the governor hadn’t given us the powers he did, I’d be hard-pressed to get anything useful done.”
“Got any names?” River asked her.
When she frowned at him, he grinned and said, “I like to keep score.”
“Writing something like that down would be stupid,” Ava said.
“I’ve got an eidetic memory,” he told her. “I don’t need to write it down.”
“Useful,” she said, as if she admired his talent.
“Yeah, you’d think so, but there are a few drawbacks.”
She actually appeared to consider what those drawbacks might be, frowning at him, but shrugged after a moment before turning back to Rodrigues. “How is the infection transmitted?”
“Coughing, we think. It’s not airborne for long, but long enough. It’s in every mucous sample from every patient we’ve tested. It’s extremely aggressive.” Rodrigues paced away, then returned. “I believe its pathogenicity was engineered.”
Ava took a step back. “A biological weapon?”
“The extreme rapid onset of symptoms and subsequent death can’t be an accident of nature. In a virus, yes, this kind of natural biological leap is possible, but in a bacteria…” Rodrigues shook her head. “Resistance develops over years, not months, and not to every antibiotic we’d normally use to treat it.”
“There are a lot of crazies out there who’d love to let something like this loose on America,” River said. “A colonel with the Biological Response Team took out a terrorist last year whose goal was to wipe humanity off the face of the earth. Unfortunately, the nut job shared what he knew about weaponizing viruses and bacteria with at least five men who are still at large.”
Ava stared at him as if he were the boogeyman. “I hadn’t heard about that.”
“That information is confidential,” Rodrigues said with a sour expression for him.
River crossed his arms over his chest. “Since you’re about to send us on a wild terrorist chase, she should know.”