Maureen McHugh - After the Apocalypse

He kind of looked at me. He made me think a little of Chris, I don’t know why. Maybe because he was wearing a Ford cap.

“Is that why you’re doing this?” he asked me.

“Hell no,” I said. “I need the money to go to Cancun.”

That made him grin. “Yeah, that sounds good,” he said. He didn’t know what he was going to do with the money. He’s heard about it from his cousin’s girlfriend, who worked somewhere doing some kind of paperwork for medical stuff. He figured he should pay down his credit card, but he was also thinking of saving it toward a down payment on a motorcycle.

The guy with the clipboard started talking, so we shut up, although all he did was tell us the same thing that was in the packet and make us all sign that we understood the risks. It was just like school. I underlined Phase 1 Drug Trial: Ten to twenty healthy adults . Phase two is something like fifty sick people. If the stuff doesn’t seem to be as good as what people get anyway, then they stop. Otherwise they go to phase three. (I wondered what it would be like to have leukemia and find out that the experimental drug you are taking didn’t do as good as what normal people get. I decided I was probably not brave enough for phase two, if I ever got leukemia.) Phase three has a couple of thousand sick people in it. Most drugs never get beyond phase two, the guy with the clipboard explained.

About that time, I admit, I zoned out. One of the fluorescents was in the flicker-before-dying stage, and it was annoying me. We had been there over an hour before the nurse finally started giving us injections.

The guy in the flannel shirt took off his shirt and rolled up his thermal undershirt. Then the nurse wrote down the time and his ID number. She asked me my name and birthdate and ID number but didn’t give me the shot. I asked why.

“We wait two minutes between injections,” she said.

“Watching for green and purple spots?” said the guy putting back on his flannel shirt.

“Purple and pink,” she said.

We all three grinned.

Finally, I got my shot.

Then I had to sit there while they gave the next eight people the shot, wondering if my growing headache was a drug effect or the result of the bad fluorescent light. After the last person had gotten the shot, I thought we would maybe fill out some more paperwork and be told when to come back for follow-up. But we still sat there. I figured we’d been told how long we would sit there some time after I stopped paying attention. I was embarrassed to admit I had, so I sat there, thinking about where I was going to eat when I left.

I finally decided I could ask Mr. Green and Purple Spots. I started to say something just as he said, “I don’t feel so good.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I feel sick,” he said. “Like I’ve got a fever.” He was shaking.

“Hey,” I said, to get the nurse’s attention. “This guy doesn’t feel good.”

He took off his flannel shirt. “I’m burning up,” he said, and rubbed his head, hard.

She came over and asked him to describe how he felt.

“Is this an adverse effect?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Just our luck, I thought. We get a nurse who doesn’t know what she’s doing. But now I wonder if they weren’t allowed to say anything. Or probably she really didn’t know if he just happened to be sick or not.

“Can I have an aspirin or something?” he asked.

“Let’s wait a bit,” she said.

I didn’t know what to do. Everyone else was leaning forward, looking at us. Looking at the sick guy.

“What’s wrong with him?” someone asked the clipboard guy.

“I don’t know,” the clipboard guy said.

After a few minutes, the guy on the other side of me said, “I feel sick.”

The nurse came over and laid her hand against his forehead. I was surprised she didn’t have one of those temperature thingies that they stick in your ear. This guy was shaking, too. “I’m gonna be sick,” he said. The nurse ran and grabbed the trash can and he vomited into it.

My stomach rose, and I looked away. I thought maybe we weren’t supposed to leave our seats, but when the flannel shirt guy threw up, I got up and walked over to the wall.

“Are you all right?” the clipboard guy asked me.

“I think so,” I said, although I didn’t know.

Then the fourth person started throwing up.

“God,” said the first guy. “My head feels like it’s exploding!”

Everybody who wasn’t throwing up was looking at me, or looking at the fifth person, who was the other woman. She was a black woman, maybe in her thirties? She looked scared.

“Can I have something for the pain, please!” said the first guy.

The third guy was lying on the floor now, and the nurse was kneeling next to him. “He’s dizzy,” she said. “I think from spiking a fever.” She pointed to the table where the cotton swabs and stuff were and said to the guy with the clipboard, “There’s packets of Tylenol over there, give him one.”

Clipboard guy said to her, “Should I call EMTs?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “This is your protocol.”

“She’s not sick,” he pointed to the black woman.

“She might be a placebo,” the nurse said. “How many placebos are there?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“God!” said the first guy. “Of, God, please! My head!”

The nurse got him a Tylenol, which by this time seemed a little like pouring a glass of water on a house fire.

“I want to go home,” the first guy said. “Call my girlfriend. I don’t care about the money, I just want to go home.”

“You stay here,” the nurse said. “You’re better here than home.”

The clipboard guy was on his cell phone to someone. “I think you better send a doctor,” I heard him say, and then he saw me watching him and turned his back to us so he was facing the wall.

The black woman didn’t get sick. The guy next to her didn’t get sick, either. And then the guy next to him seemed okay, although I hadn’t been watching the time, so I didn’t know how long it had been. Time was going so slow.

Then that next guy said, “Oh, man, I feel it.”

It was like that story in the Bible, where the Israelites want to leave Egypt and they smear blood on their doors and God sends the angel of death to slay all the firstborn but passes over the houses marked with lamb’s blood. Except we didn’t know who had been marked and who had been saved.

A doctor showed up in about half an hour, but by that time they had called EMTs. Six people had gotten the drug and four were placebos, and we placebos were all standing around not looking at each other or looking at the sick guys. They loaded the sick ones into ambulances. The nurse was standing there in the hallway, holding her fist to her mouth like she was trying not to cry. I wanted to ask her if anything had ever happened like this before, but it was pretty clear no one had a clue.

I drove home.

I stopped on the way home and got a hamburger, but it seemed strange to eat it. I felt like I should be so upset I couldn’t eat. Like that ever happened. When I got home I thought to check my cell phone—I had turned it off when I got to the medical trial because at Cleveland Clinic we weren’t supposed to have our cell phones on inside the building. There was a message from a representative of the company that was doing the study, asking me to call. I called my friend Mel instead and told her what had happened, and she said she’d come over as soon as she got off work.

The phone rang as soon as I hung up, and it was NewsChannel5. I told them I didn’t know if I was allowed to talk, but when they asked me if I could confirm that six people had gotten sick, I said that was true. Then the newspaper called. My cell kept ringing and ringing, until finally I shut it off and turned on the TV.