Laurell Hamilton - Affliction

‘I’m Dr Rogers; you must be Mike.’ He held his hand out toward us, but mainly at Micah. He looked enough like his dad that there was no guesswork between him and Nathaniel.

‘Micah. I haven’t been Mike in a decade.’ He let go of us enough to shake Dr Rogers’s hand.

He turned to us, and I said, ‘Anita Blake.’

Nathaniel shook his hand, too, and said, ‘Nathaniel Graison.’

Rogers nodded and said, ‘I’m glad you got here.’

Micah gave him very serious eyes. ‘My mother told Anita that it was only a matter of time; is that true?’

‘We’ve slowed the disease, but we have no way of curing it. I’m sorry.’

Micah nodded, looked at the floor, and reached back for our hands. I gave him my left hand, and Nathaniel hugged him on the other side, like I’d been doing when Rogers entered the room. The doctor’s gaze flicked to the two men and me, then back up to the men. I thought he was going to say something unfortunate, but he was all professional.

‘How long?’ Micah asked.

‘I can’t answer that for certain.’

‘Guess.’

‘Excuse me?’ Rogers asked.

‘Guess, give me an estimate how long my father has,’ Micah said.

Rogers shook his head. ‘I’m not comfortable doing that.’

‘All right, then tell me what you’re doing to treat my father.’

Rogers was comfortable discussing that. There had been a few cases on the Eastern Seaboard that were similar, but not identical. ‘Those patients died within hours, but I used their protocols on our patients here and it slowed the spread of the … infection.’

‘Is it an infection?’ Micah asked.

‘Yes.’ He sounded very sure.

‘What kind of infection is it?’

‘It’s close to necrotizing fasciitis, and we’ve treated it the same way, with removal of the necrotic tissue, massive antibiotics, and time in a hyperbaric chamber.’

‘How much … tissue have you removed?’ Micah asked.

‘As little as necessary.’

‘That’s not an answer, that’s an evasion.’

‘If you insist I can show you the wound, but I wouldn’t recommend it.’

‘Why not?’ Micah asked.

‘It won’t change anything and it won’t help anything. It’s just an unnecessary visual for you.’

Micah shook his head. ‘I need to know what you’ve done to my father.’

‘I haven’t done anything to him, except the best I could under the circumstances.’

Micah let out a slow, even breath.

I said, ‘This isn’t my father, but you’re scaring me. Where was the bite?’

‘His left arm.’

‘Does he still have his arm?’ Micah asked.

Dr Rogers made a face. ‘Yes, but if we can’t get it stopped we may try amputation, though honestly I think it will just slow it down, not stop it.’

‘Did you try amputation with any of the other victims?’ I asked.

‘Yes, but either we didn’t do it soon enough, or once the infection is in the body it hits the bloodstream almost immediately and that takes it throughout the body.’

‘I have to see,’ Micah said.

Dr Rogers didn’t understand immediately, but I did, and Nathaniel did, because he said, ‘Micah means he needs to see the wound.’

‘Really, I wouldn’t …’

‘Would you really not look if it were your father?’ Micah asked, studying the doctor’s face. ‘I’m betting you would insist on seeing it.’

‘I’m a doctor; I would want to see it from a professional standpoint, to understand what was happening.’

‘I’m not a doctor, and I’m hoping that what I’m imagining is worse than what you’ll show me, but either way I need to see.’

Rogers made a soft, exasperated sound. He got fresh rubber gloves out of a little box that was beside the bed and walked to the far side of the bed with its tented sheet. ‘Anything touching the wound site seems to be extremely painful, so we raised the sheet above it.’

‘Like for a burn,’ I said.

‘For some burns, yes,’ he said. He unhooked the sheet from the metal framework and looked across the bed at us. ‘I honestly don’t recommend this.’

‘Please, Dr Rogers, I just need to see,’ Micah said, his voice low and even. He had a death grip on my hand, and I assumed on Nathaniel’s, too.

The doctor didn’t argue again, just pulled back the sheet enough for us to see the left arm and part of the chest. I couldn’t tell what the original bite had been like, because flesh was missing from the outer part of the lower left arm in a neat oval almost as big as both my fists side by side. The wound placement let me know what had happened. Sheriff Callahan had been attacked and he’d put his left arm up to defend himself and something had bitten him. I had my own share of defensive wounds like that, but none as deep. Even if he lived, I wasn’t sure how much use he’d have of the arm. It was an awful lot of muscle and ligament to lose.

Micah’s hand tensed around mine, his eyes narrowed, but other than that he showed nothing. His stress sang down his arm into his hand, but it showed almost nowhere else. God, he had such control in that moment. It was impressive and made me proud that he was mine.

He started to say something, swallowed hard, tried again, and just shook his head. I hoped I was about to ask the questions he wanted to ask. ‘The edges of the wound look darker than they should, and there’s discoloration in the wound itself; is that from the treatment?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘It’s starting to rot again,’ Micah said, his voice sort of hollow.

‘Yes, there are some bacteria in the mix that we’ve never seen before and they’re not responding to the antibiotics.’ He started refitting the sheet back over the framework without asking if we were done looking. Micah didn’t say anything, so I let it go.

He looked at me and there was such pain buried in the green-gold depths of his eyes. In a voice that was only a little thicker than it should have been, he said, ‘Ask.’

‘Ask what?’ I said.

‘Anything you want to know.’

‘Not as your girlfriend, but as me?’ I asked.

He nodded.

I raised an eyebrow, but I wasn’t going to question it. I wanted to know what the hell was going on. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘what attacked Sheriff Callahan?’

‘We’re not sure.’

‘I heard it was a flesh-eating zombie.’

‘Someone’s been talking,’ Rogers said.

‘I am a U.S. Marshal with the Preternatural Division. This is kind of what I do.’

‘The local police were worried you’d do just that and take the case away from them.’

‘I don’t want to take anything away from anyone, but I also don’t want people to hoard information between different police agencies. That’s a good way to keep the case from being solved and guarantee more victims.’

There was a faint flinching around his eyes when I said that. The other victims had been bad, for Rogers to react like that. If Micah’s dad hadn’t been the latest it would have been interesting, but now … it was scary and interesting.

‘You don’t want other people hurt like my dad,’ Micah said, and I knew he’d seen the flinching, too, and that he’d used ‘my dad’ deliberately. We both wanted more information and we’d sensed an opening; we’d double-team Rogers. Individually, Micah and I could be relentless, even ruthless; together we were more.

‘Of course not,’ Rogers said.

‘Then help us,’ I said.

‘You are police, but right now you are the fiancée of a patient’s son. That means that you are a civilian, as the police like to say.’

I had a thought. ‘Has someone been treating you like a civilian and hoarding information from you, too?’

He looked away from us for a moment. I was betting he was both working to control his expression and debating what to say, or how much to say.