She hesitated. “You mean ALL of our clothes?”
“Yes. Of course,” he added quickly, “I’ll turn my back and face the other way.”
Lauren heard someone chuckle over her headset and she knew some of the other doctors were listening to their conversation with more than clinical interest.
Mason said, “I apologize for this, but the Cytotec BL Four isn’t engineered for privacy, only for safety from infection.”
He addressed Dr. Johnson quickly, as though wishing to change subjects. “Lionel, bring Dr. Matos to the lab and take him through the procedure step-by-step.”
Lauren smiled to herself, liking Dr. Williams for having the grace to be apologizing for their situation, to be worried about her dignity even in the face of what was going on around them. In truth, she wasn’t too concerned. She was, after all, an adult and he was a doctor. But then why, she wondered, was her pulse suddenly beating faster at the prospect of disrobing in a small room with him?
“I’ll bring Dr. Matos,” a distant voice replied. “I suppose if you’re the boss, you get the best assignments.”
Another soft chuckle came from a different member of the group.
The disinfecting shower was a little scary at first, with a spray of chemicals splattering against her face mask. Lauren had fewer concerns about disrobing in front of Mason with both their backs turned. However, when they stepped into a shower that was barely big enough for both of them, all thoughts of modesty were banished. For his part, he tried his best to keep his eyes focused on the wall of the shower and not her naked body.
Once the shower stopped, she put on a pair of green scrub pants and a sleeveless top.
“Ready?” he asked, still with his back turned.
“My word, Doctor, but you’ve got a cute butt,” she said mischievously.
“What?” he exclaimed, pulling a towel tight around his waist.
She laughed, trying to relieve the pressure of what she’d been through all day. “Just kidding, Dr. Williams, just kidding. I kept my gaze averted like a good little girl.”
He turned and saw that she was already dressed in her scrubs. Whirling a finger in a circle, he smiled and said, “Then please turn back around while I dress. I am very shy, you know.”
She grinned and dutifully turned her back. “But, I’ll bet it is cute, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know, not being able to see myself from behind,” he answered with a chuckle.
Once dressed, he opened a tightly sealed door leading into a room where everything seemed miniaturized: a small table and chairs, a sink, and a refrigerator like the ones found in travel trailers.
She was immediately aware of the wash of cold air against her skin and heard the hum of air-conditioning coming from the roof.
“This is better,” Lauren sighed, sinking into a tiny plastic chair at the table, resting her chin in her palms as she watched Mason open the refrigerator. Even as tired as she was she found herself noticing his good looks again, and the ease with which he seemed to accomplish any task. He had, she realized, economy of movement. Everything he did was accomplished without any wasted motion.
Mason prepared a large pot of coffee, “a doctor’s lifeblood” he called it, and placed a tall bottle of Gatorade on the table. “Try to drink some of this,” he said, offering her a paper cup. “The heat and sweating inside a Racal causes you to lose a lot of sodium and potassium. This electrolyte solution will replace it and hopefully keep you from having muscle spasms and cramps later.”
“I won’t need much encouragement to drink the whole thing,” she said, filling the cup to the brim and taking a swig. “By the way, Dr. Williams, what does the name Cytotec BL Four mean?”
“First,” he said, turning to look at her over his shoulder as he fussed with the coffee machine, “I think it should be Mason and Lauren from now on. We don’t stand much on formality here in the lab,” he added in a matter-of-fact way.
“The quarters are too small and, as you’ve already seen, personal privacy is almost nonexistent.”
Lauren smiled weakly and nodded her agreement. “It’s Mason and Lauren, then,” she said, gulping more fluid, aware of a slight tremor in her hands, probably from exhaustion and the dehydration he mentioned earlier and not from any excitement to be in such close quarters with a very attractive man.
“As for the name, it comes from the term Cytology Technologies, the company that manufactures the lab and equipment we use to do studies on tissue and blood samples,” he continued, interrupting her reverie. “The BL Four stands for Biohazard Level Four, the highest level, meant for study of the most infectious, dangerous organisms in the world.”
“And that’s what you think you’ve found here?”
“In a BL Four we can study the filoviruses, like Ebola, Marburg, and Lassa, and also anthrax, dengue, and rabies. All organisms that are lethal and for which there are no effective treatments or vaccines. We don’t know what this bug is yet, but it looks to have almost one hundred percent infectivity and one hundred percent mortality, so that makes it right up there with the worst I’ve ever seen.”
As Dr. Johnson and Dr. Matos entered the shower room, Mason asked her, “Would you like a quick tour? The lab is so small it won’t take long…”
“Why not?” Lauren hadn’t wanted to leave the comfort of her chair, but when he asked so gently, with a curious quality to his voice, some inner urge gave her new energy.
Mason took her through various rooms, almost all of which had strange, futuristic equipment with myriad dials, computer screens, and printers attached to the walls.
“Since this is a so-called mobile lab, we try to make use of every nook and cranny to stuff as much diagnostic and communications gear in as we can,” he said as he opened a door to a tiny cubicle containing both a commode and a handheld shower hose.
“I guess there’ll be no soaking in a luxurious hot bathtub to soothe my aching muscles,” Lauren said. She was amused when her remark appeared to embarrass him, as if it were somehow his fault things were so cramped. Or could it have been the mental picture of her soaking in a hot bath that had him flustered, she thought. Hmmm… she’d have to think about that.
Mason cleared his throat. “Hopefully, we’ll be able to get you out of here and back to Mexico City before too long. Now that you’ve identified all the… all your friends, I’d like to get you out of the danger zone as soon as I can.”
Lauren offered no reply. A part of her wanted to stay now until someone provided some answers to what had happened here, but another part wanted to fly away home and leave all the gruesome images of decaying corpses and lost friends far behind her.
The problem, she knew, was she would never be able to get those scenes from her mind — no matter how far she flew or how long she lived.
The last chamber he showed her was adjacent to the shower room. It had a metal door with thick, double-paned glass, and could only be entered from the room where the Racals hung. She peered through heavy glass at a row of empty orange suits, hanging like discarded carapaces of obscene insects after they had broken free.
“That’s the laboratory where all of the tissue and blood samples will be examined and tested. That work has to be done while wearing Racals, since we have to assume the specimens are still infective.”
He pointed to the ceiling where she could see several air vents. “The room is kept at negative pressure so that any bugs that escape into the air are sucked up through the vents and bubbled through a chlorine solution to kill them.”
She could see several cot-like beds surrounded by monitoring equipment similar to what she’d seen in a hospital intensive care unit when her father died.