It was the first time he’d ever been grateful for that damn mosquito bite.
But even as he was being nursed back to health, he knew that he bore the responsibility for running this quarantine unit. He had improvised it himself — first by commandeering the ICU, then by putting the staff through intensive, on-the-spot training. They were a lot more accustomed to routine problems like heart attacks and hunting accidents, but even as they were wheeling him in on the gurney, he had begun to issue instructions on how to deal with a virus as potentially deadly as this one. He had strictly cordoned off this area of the hospital’s top floor, nearly all communication was done through the intercom system, and only a limited number of personnel, always outfitted in full hazmat gear, were ever allowed in or out. Right now, the unit had just one other patient — Nikaluk Tincook.
And she had not fared as well as he had. Like Dr. Lantos, she had been brought in suffering not only from the flu, but from septicemia, a flood tide of bacteria clogging her bloodstream. The minute Slater had been told about the red lines on her palm, he had personally drained and sterilized the wound site, but it was too little, too late. The flu and the sepsis were like old pals, reunited now and working in deadly concert, and if he didn’t calibrate his responses perfectly, he could lose her to either one. The fear gnawed at him like a rat.
Dr. Jonah Knudsen, the crusty old coot who normally ran the hospital, had advised that she be sent on to the state-of-the-art facility in Juneau, where Dr. Lantos was being treated. Standing outside the door and speaking through the intercom, he had told Slater that Rebekah Vane and her sister Bathsheba had also been sent there.
“Have they presented symptoms of the flu?”
“Rebekah has,” he said, “but then she apparently had greater physical contact with Harley Vane and his bodily fluids.”
“His bodily fluids?”
“She served him tea and toast, and later, after he’d vomited, she cleaned up the mess.”
Then it made some sense.
“Although her condition is otherwise stable, she does have a fractured jaw and other minor injuries, and just so you know, she has named you, in addition to the federal government, in a lawsuit for a host of damages. First and foremost, of course, is the loss of her husband.”
Of course, Slater thought. Even as they were fighting to save her life, from an incident that would never have occurred if her family had not gone on an illegal treasure hunt in the first place, she was lying in her bed concocting lawsuits. It was the new American pastime, and it made him, more than ever, want to find a way to get away from everything that it suggested and implied. He simply wanted to practice medicine again, in a place where his talents and his work would be valued and the bureaucracy extended no further than the usual burden of insurance forms. His days as a globe-trotting epidemiologist might be over — Dr. Levinson had made that perfectly clear — but his efforts to save Lantos, and now Nika, had reminded him of the satisfaction to be had from healing just one person. What was that old Hebrew proverb he’d once heard Dr. Levinson herself say—“If you save one life, it’s the same as saving the whole world.”
Right now the only life he wanted to save, even more than his own, was Nika’s.
All day long, her small compact body, sweating through one hospital gown after another, had been racked with coughing fits and spasms. Her long black hair, tied into a tight braid, had lashed the pillows like a whip. Her platelet count plummeted, her blood gases revealed she had entered into metabolic acidosis, her breathing became so faint that a mechanical ventilator had to be wheeled in; her major organs began to shut down like dominoes falling in a row. Lungs, liver, central nervous system; when her kidneys failed, Slater had had to immediately put her on dialysis.
She’d been young and healthy and athletic, and now it was the very strength of her immune system that was threatening to kill her. It was kicking into overdrive … and throwing her whole body into shock. Many patients, he knew, never came back from it.
The hospital staff, panicking, looked to him for guidance, and he ordered up a fresh barrage of IV antibiotics — cindamycin and flucytosine this time — along with vasopressors to constrict her blood vessels and treat her hypotension, insulin to stabilize her blood-sugar levels, corticosteroids to counteract the inflammation. The diseases were burning through her like a forest fire, consuming her just as her Inuit ancestors had once been consumed, and he had to find a way to sustain her long enough to let the contagion burn itself out.
“Dr. Slater,” one of the nurses said after he had maintained his vigil for hours on end, “why don’t you go back to your own room and take a break? We’ll alert you if anything changes.”
“I’ll stay,” he said, perched in a fresh lime-green hazard suit on the plastic chair in the corner. Every few hours, the chair, like everything else in this section of the old ICU, was sprayed from top to bottom with a powerful disinfectant.
Surrounded by the machines and screens, tubes and wires and IV trolleys, Nika could barely be seen. But every fluctuation in her respiration or temperature, cardiac rate or cerebral activity, was being tracked and monitored by the array of instruments that had been brought into the room. Slater, exhausted, slumped backward in the chair, and felt the ivory bilikin on its leather string swing against his damp skin.
The little owl, with its furled wings. On the island, Professor Kozak had asked about it, and Nika had said it was purportedly from a woolly mammoth.
Impressed, Slater had looked at it even more closely.
“That would make it, perhaps, eleven thousand years old,” Kozak had later informed him.
Slater wondered if it had gained some extra charge, some supernatural potency, over all those centuries it had endured. Although he wasn’t a believer in such things — how could he be? — right now he was ready to accept any help he could get.
Dr. Knudsen appeared, hovering in a white lab coat, through the glass panel in the door.
That was not the help he had hoped for.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Knudsen said, sounding not sorry at all as he bent toward the intercom box, “but I thought you should know.”
“Know what?” Slater said, already dreading the reply.
“It’s about Dr. Eva Lantos. She died one hour ago.”
It was like a hammer blow to his already bruised chest.
“For purposes of public safety,” Knudsen continued, “the official death certificate entered in Juneau is recording it as simply a lethal bacterial infection. But her body was immediately removed to the AFIP labs in D.C. by Army air transport.”
Slater could see that the doctor was holding a clipboard against his chest, and rocking on his heels.
“I’m very sorry,” he said.
But Slater didn’t think he looked any more regretful than he sounded; he looked like a man who didn’t mind telling his privileged guest, the one who had taken over his own ICU, that he wasn’t such a hotshot, after all.
It was the first time Slater had lost a colleague on one of his missions; you could not be a field epidemiologist, in the world’s most deadly and undeveloped regions, and not be aware of the risks you were taking. It was something that lurked in the back of your mind the whole time.