***
“Kelly? Kelly, can you hear me?” the nurse asked, gently touching her face.
Kelly, lying motionless on the hospital bed, managed to nod slightly, her eyes glassy and her mouth hanging open. Each breath seemed shallower than the last, and her vital signs were dropping like a stone.
“She was absolutely fine an hour ago,” another nurse said. “We’ve tried calling her family, but I guess they don’t answer their phone this early in the morning.”
Dr. Gary Winslow looked down at the young woman on the bed and spied the bandage on her arm. He looked up at the nurse. “She was treated for the bite mark on her arm, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“And all the blood tests came back negative?”
“Yes,” the nurse sighed. “We checked her records too, and her medical history is clean.”
Winslow frowned. “Who bit her?”
“The police told me that a homeless person came into the store where she worked, and attacked her and another girl as well.”
“Is that other girl here?”
“No,” the nurse said. “She went home, I guess.”
Winslow nodded to himself and looked down at Kelly. “What happened to the homeless man that attacked her?”
“He was killed by security guards,” the nurse said, somewhat uncomfortably.
Kelly moved her head and took a laborious breath, looking up weakly at Winslow, who could do nothing but put his hand reassuringly on her shoulder. Since Kelly’s arrival, her condition had steadily worsened. She started complaining of dizziness and weakness soon after arriving at the emergency room, and soon could barely stand up on her own. By the time they got her into a bed and hooked up to the life support monitors, she was too weak to talk. The monitors told a frightening story; her vital signs were all rapidly deteriorating, and no one could figure out why.
Kelly took another slow breath and moved her lips. Winslow leaned over and put his ear directly over her mouth.
“Debra ...” Kelly whispered. “... bit her too ...”
“Is Debra the other girl?” Winslow said, and Kelly managed a barely perceptible nod.
“She was bitten as well?” Kelly did not nod this time, but she blinked. Winslow squeezed her shoulder and nodded himself. “Okay, try to conserve your strength, Kelly. We’re going to find Debra, okay?”
Winslow and the nurse walked out into the hallway. “I want you to contact the police and tell them to find that other girl. Her name is Debra. And find out if anyone else was bitten by that homeless man, or had any contact with him at all.”
“You think he was carrying something?”
“Seems likely. We don’t have anything else to go on.”
Winslow went back to the emergency room lobby to talk with the staff there, when there was the sound of tires screeching just outside, and a few seconds later the doors burst open and a man wearing a security guard uniform ran inside. “I need help here!” he shouted frantically. “I got a real sick person out here!”
Winslow called down the hallway for help, and soon several nurses were running outside to the guard’s car to help the person inside. It was another man in a security uniform, and he was awake but completely unresponsive. They got him onto a wheelchair and quickly wheeled him into the emergency room as Winslow held open the door.
“What happened?” Winslow asked.
“He just started getting sick, man. I don’t know. He said he was feeling kinda dizzy and sick, and then he just got worse and worse,” the security guard babbled. “It happened so quick, I just drove here as fast as I could. I thought maybe he was having a heart attack or something.”
“Did he have chest pain?”
“I don’t think so, he just said he was dizzy. And he got real tired and was like, slurring his words. Some crazy stuff just happened to us and I thought maybe it was too much for him.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We work at Wal-Mart,” the guard explained. “We work security. This crazy guy came into the store and attacked some of the cashiers a little while ago. He attacked us, and we … we had to shoot him. I mean, we killed him. It was just crazy, you know? I never thought something like that would ever happen. I thought maybe Walt was having a heart attack because of the stress.”
Winslow quickly led the guard down the hall as he talked, and brought him to the room where Kelly was. The guard stopped in mid-sentence. “Oh man, that’s one of the cashiers. What’s wrong with her?”
“I was hoping you might know,” Winslow said. “What’s your name?”
“My name? My name’s Kevin.”
“Well, Kevin, the police told us that Kelly was bitten by the man that attacked her.”
“Yeah, I remember. I think he bit both of them.”
“What about your partner?” Winslow asked. “Did he get bitten?”
A shadow of dread passed over Kevin’s face. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, he did get bit.”
Winslow went to the other room, where the nurses were already hooking the wounded guard up to the life support machines. They opened his shirt and placed electrodes on his chest to read his heartbeat, which bleeped weakly on the monitors. The man looked half-dead already, his face pale and his breathing so shallow his chest barely moved.
“Where were you bitten?” Winslow asked him. “Can you hear me?”
Kevin stood in the doorway, his arms hanging at his sides. “It’s on his ankle. The guy bit Walt on the ankle.”
Winslow pulled up Walt’s pant leg and saw a large adhesive bandage on his ankle. He pulled it off and looked at the two semi-circular lines of teeth marks. It looked like any other superficial bite mark, nothing that would indicate how infectious it might be. It wasn’t even a deep bite; it had barely drawn blood.
“It doesn’t even look infected,” Winslow said to himself.
“There’s something else,” Kevin said, still standing in the doorway. “That guy we shot, he was insane or something. Like he didn’t even act like a person.”
“Listen,” Winslow said. “Go out and wait in the lobby. I’ll be out to talk to you in a few minutes.”
“I shot him right in the chest,” Kevin blurted out. “And it didn’t kill him. We thought he was dead, and then he just jumped up and bit Walt’s leg. He was insane or something, he tried to bite him again. He went for his throat, like a wild animal.”
Winslow led Kevin back to the lobby and pointed to a chair. “Take a seat. I’ll be back here to talk to you soon.”
He went back to Walt’s room and the nurse just shook her head as soon as he entered. “It’s got to be the same thing,” she said. “Some kind of infection. His vital signs are all low and they’re dropping fast. We put him on an IV but I don’t know if it will even help.”
“Do whatever you can,” Winslow said, but he knew it was a hollow statement. Without more information on what they were dealing with, any kind of treatment was just fumbling in the dark. “I’m going to call the police and find out about that homeless person. Let me know if anything changes, or if you get a call back about that other girl.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
Winslow paused on his way out the door. “Oh, have you seen Sandy anywhere?”
“I think she went home. She was kind of freaked out ...” The nurse paused and then glanced down at the man next to her. “You don’t think that ...?”
“You better call her house,” Winslow said. “Make sure she’s okay. And tell her to get back here as soon as possible.”
The nurse nodded and then hurried out the door to the front desk. Winslow took a deep breath and glanced between the two rooms, one with Kelly and the other one with Walt. Both of them were bitten by a strange man, and within two hours they were both barely holding on to life. Winslow would have given anything at that moment to know just what in the world that homeless man had contracted.
He walked
into Kelly’s room and looked down at her. Her skin glistened with a thin layer of sweat and her eyes fluttered behind her eyelids, her breath short and raspy. Nothing Winslow had ever heard of, no illness or disease known to man, worked so fast. To become so sick in such a short time was a symptom of poison, not disease. And her range of symptoms was astounding and terrifying. It seemed like her entire body was shutting down all at once.
Winslow looked at the heart monitor and could almost watch as her heart beat slowed down. Her internal organs were suffering; both her liver and her kidneys were slowly failing. Even electrical activity in her brain was decreasing. Her body was working overtime just to keep her breathing at this point. And apparently, all this had transpired in the course of an hour.
Sandy was the nurse that the utility worker attacked. Winslow didn’t blame her for going home early. It was such a frightening experience, being brutally attacked by a man who was pronounced dead just moments before. But as he watched Kelly fade away, Winslow began to wonder if Sandy should have gone home after all. She had been bitten as well.
Kevin mentioned that the homeless man attacked them like an animal and tried to bite Walt in the throat. The utility worker did the exact same thing to Winslow, just after biting Sandy on the arm, just as Kelly was bitten. The utility worker acted like a raving lunatic, growling and groaning, attacking anyone who got near him. Winslow felt lucky at the time that he got away uninjured, but now he felt twice as lucky.
After all, if the homeless man was somehow infected with an unknown disease, then how could he manage to violently attack anyone? Kelly was exposed to it for less than two hours and she was practically on her death bed. And at no time during her stay did she become violent or agitated.
The homeless man, and the utility worker, seemed to be connected. But the utility worker was attacked in the sewer by some kind of animal. Was homeless man attacked as well? Winslow couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow the two events were related.
“Dr. Winslow,” the nurse called out from the lobby. “I called Sandy but no one answered the phone.”
Winslow only spent a second thinking about it. “Call the police. Tell them to check her house and make sure she’s okay. And tell them to find that other girl named Debra.”
He paused then and cast a worrisome glance back down at Kelly. “And after that, I want you to call the Health Department. And see if you can contact Dr. Russell and Dr. Singh. I think we need someone else to take a look at this.”
“Good idea,” the nurse said.
All of the hospital beds and stretchers, even the ones in the emergency room area, came with tough nylon straps that could be used to tie down violent or unstable patients, or just to secure patients who were likely to fall out of their bed. Winslow took out the straps and carefully tied Kelly to the bed. He decided it was better to be safe than sorry.