The ambulance was so old it had no GPS, and even the odometer was stuck, so it was hard to keep track of how much farther she had to go. She had to rely upon the infrequent signage. But there was no point in worrying about it, she thought, and less point in turning back. “You’ll get there when you get there,” her grandmother used to say. Back then, she’d thought it was pretty dumb. Right now, it seemed like the height of wisdom.
Taylor Swift — now there was someone she did recognize — came on, singing an old hit she’d written about some guy who’d treated her badly (who was it, Nika tried to recall, the tabloids said there were so many) when she was surprised by a voice from the ambulance bay saying, “Enough … enough.”
She quickly turned her head to see Frank stirring on the gurney. The covers were still tucked around him, the stocking hat dusted with snow.
“No more … country music.”
His voice came out like a frog, croaking, but it was music to her ears. He angled his head so that their eyes could meet — deep bruises were already forming all around his sockets, making it look like he’d just been punched — and she fumbled to turn off the radio.
“Are you okay?” she asked, alternating between looking at Frank and watching the road.
“Where are we?”
“On the way to the hospital, in Nome.”
He closed his eyes, as if mulling it over.
“Should I pull over? Do you need my help?”
Opening them again, he said, “What happened, at the bridge?”
Unsure where to begin, she started to describe the patrol car’s blocking the entrance, but he shook his head slightly and said, “That much I remember. I meant the Vanes.”
She swallowed, and said, “The van blew up. It must have been loaded with lots of extra gas. You were thrown clear.”
His gaze traveled around the ambulance, snow drifting around the interior like the white flakes in a snow globe. Plainly, he had noted no other passengers, and Nika didn’t think she needed to say anything more. He put his head back down, staring at the roof of the cabin, and she studied the road again. In a good sign, the surface seemed smoother and more recently plowed, which meant she was getting closer to the city.
Even with the heat on high, she was shivering in her coat, and had to bend forward over the wheel when another bout of coughing hit her.
“How long has that been going on?” Slater asked, as if suddenly on alert again.
Nika waved it off, loosening her face mask to catch some fresh air; fear was making her hyperventilate. Despite the whirling snow and ice, she could see lights up ahead. Not many, but enough. With both gloves, she gripped the wheel like a captain determined to go down with the ship and steered for the lights.
A roadhouse was dimly discernible on her left, and the sign above the seawall on Gold Beach. She was driving along the Norton Sound, the wind thumping at the sides of the ambulance like paddles. The new hospital wasn’t too far off. On a clear night, she might have been able to see it by now; only four stories high, it was nonetheless the tallest structure in town. The mariners, who had once used the church steeples as their beacons, now looked for the lighted antennae atop the hospital.
When she finally entered the concentrated network of streets that comprised downtown Nome, she felt like a marathoner running on shaky legs toward the finish line. As if to bring the point home, she saw off to her left the wooden archway that marked the end of the Iditarod race … and then the wooden sign festooned with placards showing the distance to places like Miami and Rio. The streetlamps swayed and bobbed, casting a wild yellow glow on the bingo parlors and bars, but not a soul was out on the windy, snow-choked streets.
At the corner of West Fifth Avenue, she turned too sharply, and the ambulance nearly slid into a hydrant before she could straighten it out again.
Take it easy, she told herself, you’re almost there.
Just ahead she could see the lighted sign that read NORTON SOUND REGIONAL HEALTHCARE: EMERGENCY ENTRANCE, and blowing the horn the whole way, she piloted the car down the ramp, under the covered portico, and into the heated garage.
Several members of the hospital staff came charging out through the sliding glass doors — all duly warned, and garbed in hazmat suits — and while two of them jumped into the back of the old ambulance and started trundling Frank, still on the gurney, into the receiving area, a third yanked open the driver’s side door. Melted snow and slush slopped out, and Nika felt as if she was about to slide out onto the floor, too. A burly male nurse grabbed her, and escorted her inside, a strong arm wrapped around her waist.
“Quarantine,” she said, through her mask. “He needs to be quarantined.”
“They know,” he said, through a plastic face mask of his own. “The Alaska Highway Patrol called ahead.”
She was guided onto the nearest chair, but when she glanced down at her mask, she could see that there was a pink stain on the gauze. “Me, too,” she said, in a muffled voice.
But she wasn’t sure he’d heard her.
When her gloves were taken off to check for frostbite, she saw in the center of her palm, where the needle had pricked her on St. Peter’s island, a cluster of tiny red lines, radiating outwards like the rays of the sun in a child’s drawing.
“Me, too,” she repeated, drawing away from him and doubling over as a fit of coughing overwhelmed her. “Quarantine.”
The nurse instinctively jumped back, and when Nika’s breath finally returned, she gasped, “Stay away,” before sliding down out of the chair, limp as a rag doll, and onto the gleaming linoleum floor.
Chapter 60
“Let me at least take the tiller!” Anastasia had begged Sergei, more than once, but he had refused every time. His teeth were clenched in determination, his eyes were fixed on the distant prospect of St. Peter’s Island, but Ana feared for his life. He had guarded her, cared for her, loved her, for thousands of miles, and now, just as they were within sight of their destination, his skin was turning blue, and his cough had become rough and constant and alarming.
It had also become familiar.
Anastasia and her sister Tatiana had come down with the flu themselves the winter before, but bad as it had been, they had weathered it. Thousands of others, she knew, did not. In the military hospitals, where the imperial daughters helped to tend to the soldiers wounded in battle with the Germans, Ana often passed by the influenza wards, where she could hear the retching and hacking, the agonized cries and the deathly gurgles of its victims as they drowned in a tide of their own blood and mucus. Once gone, their bodies were hastily wrapped in their own sheets, and rather than being taken through the hospital corridors again, and risking a further spread of the contagion, they were slipped out a window, down a wooden chute requisitioned from a grain silo, and straight onto the back of a waiting wagon. Huge pits, swimming in quicklime, had been dug on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, and the dead were deposited there with no observance or ceremony of any kind. Who would have lingered in such a place to do so?
She should have known when she first heard the pilot Nevsky coughing at the inn. All the way across the continent, she and Sergei had skirted every danger, from random thieves to Bolshevik soldiers, corrupt officials to marauding Cossacks, but this was the one threat that could not be seen coming. And even if they had, what else could they do? There was no other means of getting as far as they had than to bribe a pilot. She wished an ill fate on Nevsky.