James Tabor - The Deep Zone

“Time to go, Major.” She pushed herself up and headed for Ward A.

They were no longer sending battle wounded into her hospital, of course, nor was Terok releasing any except under the strictest BSL-4 protocols. They had sent out infected soldiers before they understood what was going on, but there was no point in dwelling on that. Done deal. The four cases in A were the last to come in before ACE was identified. Two spec 4s, Ligety and Mayweather; Corporal Dancerre; and Sergeant Bighawk. All admitted initially with wounds—gunshots, fortunately, rather than blast damage—and all subsequently infected with ACE. She always began with the most serious first, and that was Sergeant Dane Bighawk, a twenty-four-year-old full-blooded Sioux from Nebraska. He had taken two AK rounds, one in the big right quadriceps muscle, the other in the right lower abdomen midway between his navel and his hip joint. Both were clean through-and-throughs. The thigh wound was nothing serious, but the abdominal wound was—or could have been. Passing through Bighawk’s body, the bullet had nicked his colon, cutting a dime-sized opening. That hole should have leaked fecal matter, which would have virtually ensured the onset of peritonitis.

But Bighawk had been lucky—if you could call taking two AK rounds lucky. The squadmate who had tended his wounds had stuffed in two tampons, just as DeAengelo Washington had done for Father Wyman. No one knew which soldier first had the idea of using a tampon that way, but one thing was sure—they worked beautifully, being the perfect size and shape for bullet-wound battle dressings, and now every combat soldier carried some. The tampon in Bighawk’s abdomen had stopped serious bleeding from that wound site and had also occluded the breach in his colon. Stilwell had explained that, and Bighawk had thought about it for a second. “So it kept the stuffing in the sausage.”

She’d laughed. “An unscientific but perfectly accurate description, Sergeant.”

That was the good news. The bad was that twenty-four hours after being wheeled in, Bighawk began to show the first signs of ACE infection: spiking temperature, dropping blood pressure, searing sore throat, generalized pain. Lesions appeared about six hours after that, and now, a day later, the raw, red patches were spreading. Colistin was slowing ACE’s burn through the young soldier, but not stopping it.

Stilwell walked quietly to his bedside. Bighawk was sleeping, thank goodness, the IV ketamine still working. She watched, listened to, and timed his respiration, took his pulse—still strong and regular—and felt his forehead. The fever was up. She’d use a digital thermometer, of course, but she remembered exactly how warm his forehead had felt four hours earlier, and it was definitely hotter now.

Bighawk’s eyes opened, drooped, opened again. “Mom?” He blinked, looked at her from far away in a ketamine haze, yawned, then grimaced because that motion stretched one of the lesions on his left cheek. Relaxing again, he smiled up at Stilwell, reached for her hand. “Mom? What’re you doin’?” He dozed off.

I need you awake , Stilwell thought. She put her hand on his muscular shoulder, squeezed softly, and his eyes opened again. This time he recognized her. “Hey, Doc. How’re you doin’? I was just havin’ a dream.”

“About your mom, right?”

His eyebrows went up. “How’d you know that?”

“We doctors have secret powers, Sergeant. We can read minds.”

He chuckled. “You’re kiddin’, I know, Doc. Must’ve been talkin’ in my sleep. But we Sioux know medicine people do have special powers. Some of the stuff I saw as a kid on the rez… Unbelievable.”

He closed his eyes, coughed, and Stilwell heard the pneumonic rattle in his chest. What I wouldn’t give , she thought, for some real special power .

“So how’m I doin’, Doc?”

Bighawk kept a brave face, but she could see the fear in his eyes.

“You’re doing, Sergeant. That antibiotic I told you about is retarding the bacteria’s spread.”

“But you got no cure for it, right?”

“Not now we don’t. But every lab and scientist at the government’s disposal is working around the clock. They’ll find one. Trust me.”

“I do trust you, ma’am. Not much else, but you for sure.”

Bighawk’s words were like a lance through Stilwell’s chest. She was the only thing standing between this good young man and a slow, agonizing death, and despite her reassurance, Stilwell was not at all certain that the government could find a cure for ACE. She wasn’t at all certain of anything just now.

Two hours later, groggy with fatigue but needing to do one more thing, she went to her cubbyhole office, closed the door, and booted up her laptop. She wanted to write an email before catching an hour’s sleep. She had written one to her husband and son during her last break. She wrote in time-saving email pidgin:

Hey ther hows it going Vry cool here and little rain. sorry not been in bttr tuch bt crazy bsy jst now Wld love 2 hear frm u talked to momdad? Shoot me an eml catch me up

It wasn’t much but she had learned, through long experience, what would slip through the censors’ nets. No mention of combat, no specific locations, nothing about casualties or material shortages or morale problems. Just Chatty Cathy stuff. But at least it was something, and maybe her sister would answer this time. It had been a long time since Mary had answered one of her emails, but Stilwell was not the kind to quit trying. She hit the Save button and put this email into her Outbox folder with the others she’d been writing, but could not send, since the ACE horror had begun.

ON THE MORNING OF THE DAY HALLIE AND HER TEAM BOARDEDtheir flight from Andrews to Reynosa, Don Barnard poured coffee in Lew Casey’s office. Barnard took his coffee black and strong, and still he grimaced when he took a sip.

“Toxic sludge,” he said.

Casey, wearing wrinkled chinos, battered loafers, and a plaid shirt with no tie, raised his own cup in a toast. “Navy coffee. Keeps the brain sharp.” Barnard knew about Casey’s affinity for “Navy coffee.” He had gone to Annapolis, done his five years on active, and realized he loved microbiology more than nuclear engineering. Resigned from the Navy, got his PhD, tried private enterprise long enough to dislike it intensely, and came to CDC, where he had been now for more than twenty years. He and Barnard had worked together for most of that time. Toward each other they behaved more like brothers than like supervisor and subordinate. “The hours you’ve got us working, we need it.”

“I know, and I’m sorry.” Barnard took out his cold pipe, fiddled, put it back in his vest pocket. “We’re stretched thin. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better. But we are probably the best hope for stopping this thing.”

Casey waved the apology away. “It’s not often I get the chance to beat up on you a little.”

“How are you holding up, Evvie?” Barnard turned his attention to Evelyn Flemmer, the other person in Casey’s cramped office.

“I’m one of those people who hate to sleep, sir. I can’t stand wasting all those hours unconscious. So thank you for asking, but I’m doing fine.”

Flemmer had called him “sir” during their first meeting, and he had waved the honorific aside with a laugh. She had blushed, giving him the impression, which time had done nothing to diminish, that she was unusually shy. “I’m sorry. It’s a hard habit to break. My parents were big on proper manners, sir,” she had said, flinching as she helplessly pronounced that last “sir.” Barnard, raised in Virginia himself, knew that some southern parents still brought their children up the old way, which included respect for elders and for courtesy, as well—all in all, not such a bad thing. An upbringing like that could make the use of “sir” and “ma’am” virtually reflexive.