Mercy 6

He was looking at her in a flirty way. He was high on the stuff she had given him. His black hair fell over his eyes, and he smiled with one side of his mouth. He peeked once at his shoulder, at the dressing she had applied.

“Can I have the bullet?” He had a smooth, low voice.

“You do have it.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“I left it in. We usually leave them in. They’re sterile. We only take them out on TV.”

He seemed disappointed.

“I know,” she told him. “The only reason I joined ER was for the bullet. So I could be that doctor who pulled it out and plunked it into the pan. That sound, you know? That finality. That cure. But it doesn’t go that way. It never goes that way. It just melts inside you.”

“Someone could use a nap,” said Pao Pao.

16

In Pathology, Claiborne had the ventilation on full. Mendenhall could tell because the air was especially quiet. The vents did that, hushed the lab. Claiborne had once showed her the effect using a tuning fork he kept on his desk. He struck the fork — A, he told her. There was no sound. Then he fired the vents and struck the note again. The pure note emerged amid the gather of the ambient vents. So now maybe he had the vents on full for the music, which was a quiet violin solo drawing long single notes. But the lab was chilled, and the bodies remained on the steel, death grins forming.

Claiborne stood over Verdasco, looking from the young, beautiful body to an overhead display, then back to the body. Mullich was absent, but Mendenhall could see that he had set up shop in one of the lab’s corners. Charts hung over his table, four showing drawings of the bodies in their respective found positions, floating.

Four others appeared as blueprints of the spaces; one displayed the entire hospital cut into floors. The building had three basements, two more below this one. The one just below she had been to once or twice. The third was new to her.

Silva stood at Mullich’s desk, bending slightly to make entries on the architect’s laptop. The drawings of the bodies had lines through them. The drawings of the rooms and hospital had faint spirals on them shot through with blue dashes. A large chart beside the laptop was scrolled out on the desk.

The cold, thin air. The silent motions of Silva and Claiborne.

They could have been on the moon.

Claiborne straightened to face Mendenhall. His mask was down. She started to speak, but he checked her with a look. She snapped on fresh gloves, exaggerating the last pull of elastic.

“I was right,” she said. “Wasn’t I? Trauma through the bronchus in Fleming. In Verdasco,” she nodded toward the body, “through the brain stem and thorax.”

“More or less,” said Claiborne.

She sensed Silva’s approach.

“Trauma,” said Mendenhall. “So, trauma.”

Claiborne shook his head. “Viral. Everything points to viral.

Maybe fungal. I never rule that out too soon. But viral is the way to go. Hemorrhagic and sudden. Thorpe’s fear.”

“Thorpe’s hope, you mean.”

Claiborne closed his eyes and took a breath. There was a draw on the violin. “I want you to be right, Dr. Mendenhall. Like I want to be eating Thai with my wife. But he is right. You know it, too.”

She thought, searched past the fatigue. She looked at Silva’s face, relieved to find the tech’s mask down, furtive lips and nose, eyes lifted. “No. I don’t know it.”

“Look, Doctor.” Claiborne opened his hands, his arms. “You are very good at what you do. You made the call right away. You saw it.”

She looked at the clean bodies, their skin reflecting the aimed light. “There should’ve been more bleeding, less isolation. Even in something fast. Dengue fever, even. Any VHF.”

“That’s what I thought. After you sent your predictions. So I searched…. I found this.” Claiborne changed Verdasco’s overhead to show a scan of his brain. Mendenhall saw a faint cloud along the edge of Verdasco’s frontal lobe.

“And this.” Claiborne changed the scan to Verdasco’s left kidney.

Another cloud.

“Those are pretty vague.”

Claiborne shook his head. “They just got started. Then he died.”

Silva stepped closer, almost getting between them. Mullich would have found that interesting, would have drawn the triangle, noted its slightness.

“We found similar hemorrhaging in the others,” Silva said. “In other major organs. Dozier’s liver and brain, Fleming’s kidneys and brain. Thorpe confirmed something similar in Peterson’s brain and lungs.”

“You mean incipient hemorrhaging.” Mendenhall eyed Verdasco’s display as she spoke, trying not to lessen her tone.

“Don’t fight this,” said Claiborne. His gaze was that same look again, the one he gave her on the trail before he increased his pace.

“You are the one giving us — including Thorpe — some of the best anticipations. Use them right.”

He motioned to Verdasco’s brain scan, then continued, “We most likely have a virus that produces trauma. We know viruses that do that — induce trauma, shock. This is new, yes. But it’s in the continuum. New means nothing more to me than indication.