Dooms Day Book

Dunworthy glanced at the monitors. His fever was down a half a point and he seemed more alert than before.

“In infirmary,” he said. “You collapsed in the lab at Brasenose while you were working the net. Do you remember?”

“I remember feeling odd,” he said. “Cold. I came to the pub to tell you I’d got the fix…” A strange, frightened look came over his face.

“You told me there was something wrong,” Dunworthy said. “What was it? Was it the slippage?”

“Something wrong,” Badri repeated. He tried to raise himself on his elbow. “What’s wrong with me?”

“You’re ill,” Dunworthy said. “You have the flu.”

“Ill? I’ve never been ill.” He struggled to sit up. “They died, didn’t they?”

“Who died?”

“It killed them all.”

“Did you see someone, Badri? This is important. Did someone else have the virus?”

“Virus?” he said, and there was obvious relief in his voice. “Do I have a virus?”

“Yes. A type of flu. It’s not fatal. They’ve been giving you antimicrobials, and an analogue’s on the way. You’ll be recovered in no time. Do you know who you caught it from? Did someone else have the virus?”

“No.” He eased himself back down onto the pillow. “I thought—Oh!” He looked up in alarm at Dunworthy. “There’s something wrong,” he said desperately.

“What is it?” He reached for the bell. “What’s wrong?”

His eyes were wide with fright. “It hurts!”

Dunworthy pushed the bell. The nurse and a house officer came in immediately and went through their routine again, prodding him with the icy stethoscope.

“He complained of being cold,” Dunworthy said. “And of something hurting.”

“Where does it hurt?” the house officer said, looking at a display.

“Here,” Badri said. He pressed his hand to the right side of his chest. He began to shiver again.

“Lower right pleurisy,” the house officer said.

“Hurts when I breathe,” Badri said through chattering teeth. “There’s something wrong.”

Something wrong. He had not meant the fix. He had meant that something was wrong with him. He was how old? Kivrin’s age? They had begun giving routine rhinovirus antivirals nearly twenty years ago. It was entirely possible that when he’d said he’d never been ill, he meant he’d never had so much as a cold.

“Oxygen?” the nurse said.

“Not yet,” the house officer said on his way out. “Start him on 200 units of chloramphe nicol.”

The nurse laid Badri back down, attached a piggyback to the drip, watched Badri’s temp drop for a minute, and went out.

Dunworthy looked out the window at the rainy night. “I remember feeling odd,” he had said. Not ill. Odd. Someone who’d never had a cold wouldn’t know what to make of a fever or chills. He would only have known something was wrong and would have left the net and hurried to the pub to tell someone. Have to tell Dunworthy. Something wrong.

Dunworthy took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. The disinfectant made them smart. He felt exhausted. He had said he couldn’t relax until he knew Kivrin was all right. Badri was asleep, the harshness of his breathing taken away by the impersonal magic of the doctors. And Kivrin was asleep, too, in a flea-ridden bed seven hundred years away. Or wide-awake, impressing the contemps with her table manners and her dirty fingernails, or kneeling on a filthy stone floor, telling her adventures into her hands.

He must have dozed off. He dreamed he heard a telephone ringing. It was Finch. He told him the Americans were threatening to sue for insufficient supplies of lavatory paper and that the Dean had called with the Scripture. “It’s Matthew 2:11,” Finch said. “Waste leads to want,” and at that point the nurse opened the door and told him Mary needed him to meet her in Casualties.

He looked at his digital. It was twenty past four. Badri was still asleep, looking almost peaceful. The nurse met him outside with the disinfectant bottle and told him to take the elevator.

The smell of disinfectant from his spectacles helped wake him up. By the time he reached the ground floor he was almost awake. Mary was there waiting for him in a mask and the rest of it. “We’ve got another case,” she said, handing him a bundle of SPG’s. “It’s one of the detainees. It might be someone from that crowd of shoppers. I want you to try to identify her.”

He got into the garments as clumsily as the first time, nearly tearing the gown in his efforts to get the velcro strips apart. “There were dozens of shoppers on the High,” he said, pulling the gloves on. “And I was watching Badri. I doubt that I could identify anyone on that street.”

“I know,” Mary said. She led the way down the corridor and through the door to casualties. It seemed like years since he’d been there.

Ahead, a cluster of people, all anonymous in paper, were wheeling a stretcher trolley in. The house officer, also papered, was taking information from a thin, frightened-looking woman in a wet mackintosh and matching rain hat.

“Her name is Beverly Breen,” she told him in a faint voice. “226 Plover Way, Surbiton. I knew something was wrong. She kept saying we needed to take the tube to Northampton.”