Noah's Ark: Contagion (29 page)

Janice smiled. “Finally, he gets it,” she said.

“Immune system inhibitors?” Mandy asked.

“Of course,” Janice said. “Stop the T cells from doing their job, and they won’t be able to feed the virus.”

“Isn’t there a risk of massive side effects? If we pump everyone full of immunosuppressives, aren’t we running the risk of other illnesses running rampant?”

“No!” Vardy said. He was pacing again, but not out of frustration this time, more out of excitement at seeing a way forward. “It’s not like treating transplant patients where we give them a course of drugs to stop their bodies rejecting a new organ. We only need to give people one dose, perhaps two. We only have to
pause
the immune system, not stop it indefinitely. Just long enough that the virus dies.”

“Precisely,” Janice said. “Of course, we’ll have to try and treat everyone together. We need enough drugs to administer them to every person on board this ship and the submarine at the same time over, say, a twenty-four-hour period? To be sure to wipe it out.”

Vardy nodded his agreement.

“And where are we going to get thousands of doses of immunosuppressives?” Mandy asked.

“We have to hope to high heaven that someone on board this cruise ship has had transplant surgery. If we can find a few doses, I’m hoping Surgeon Lieutenant Vardy’s machine here can fabricate more?”

“That it can,” Vardy said, but his face had fallen. The temporary excitement had gone. “Just not in the quantities and timescale we need them. By the time it’s made enough, we’ll have many more fatalities on our hands.”

“I think I can help you with that,” said a voice from the door. “Back in your base there are at least three more of your magic machines.”

Vardy, Janice, and Mandy all looked around. None of them had seen Jake walk into the room. He looked like death; his face was as white as a sheet. Before any of them could speak, he collapsed onto the floor.

Twenty-Eight

“J
AKE
!”

J
ANICE
AND
Vardy rushed to the fallen captain.

“He’s hit his head hard,” Vardy said, examining him carefully. “He may be concussed. We need to move him, but with caution. Mandy, can you go and get a trolley from deck eight?”

Janice looked up at Vardy, wide-eyed.

“What?” he asked.

“Mandy is obviously paralysed, Russell. For a doctor, you’re not very observant, are you?”

Vardy stood slowly and turned to the nurse.

“Is it true?”

She nodded.

“How long?”

“Since shortly after I arrived with the children’s blood.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“Like what?” Her moist eyes glistened. “You needed to concentrate on your work. Anyway, it’s all good. You found a cure, right?”

Vardy didn’t know what to say. Fortunately for him he didn’t need to say anything, as Ewan burst through the door.

“Jake? Shit! I knew he was overdoing it.” He crouched down to get a better look at him.

“What happened?” Janice asked. She was arranging Jake into a safe position, checking his airways weren’t blocked.

“He swam most of the way back from the shore, pulling the raft behind him. It was like he was superhuman or something. But he’s exhausted himself.”

“How…but he has the virus? He was paralysed!” Vardy exclaimed.

“Yeah, but Lucya gave him a shot. That cure of yours is magic. Fixed him right up and gave him super strength to boot.”

Janice and Vardy exchange a worried look.

“The cure?” Janice asked. “The cure! Russell, she took a dose of the antiviral. We missed one!”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing?” said Ewan.

“It is. The cure doesn’t work. It makes things…worse. Shit! We have to find some immunosuppressives right now, before he explodes.”

Ewan went as white as Jake. “If he’s in danger, then so is Lucya. She injected herself too. I’ve just taken her up to deck eight. She’s out cold. Collapsed, hit her head on a rock.”

“Russell, you and Ewan need to get Jake up to deck eight. I’m going to find us some drugs,” Janice said, taking charge of the situation. “Mandy, I’m sorry, you’ll have to wait here for now.”

Mandy nodded. “Of course. Janice, find Grau. There has to be a list of passengers with serious medical conditions and medication requirements somewhere. He’ll know where. If someone on this ship is taking immunosuppressives, the cruise company would have wanted to know for liability reasons.”

“And if nobody has any?” Vardy asked.

“Let’s try not to think about that,” Janice said. “Go! What are you waiting for? Go!”

• • •

There was no reply when Janice knocked at Grau Lister’s door. She tried three times before letting herself in. She was lucky; he hadn’t locked it.

It was immediately obvious that the doctor was in a bad way. He was laid out on his bed, unconscious, and as stiff as a board. Her immediate thought was that he was dead, but on closer inspection she discovered he was still breathing. The virus was ravaging his body, but he wasn’t at the end yet. A trickle of blood came from one of his ears, and he had lost some hair. His face was covered in deep red blotches. There was no telling how much longer he had left. Scott had died prematurely due to heath complications. Kiera’s demise had been spurred on by the lethal antiviral remedy. Nobody knew how long Maryse had taken to die. Grau may have had hours left, or minutes.

Before leaving and going up to the medical centre to search for notes, she had a quick look around his cabin. As a doctor herself, and knowing many other doctors, she figured there was a good chance he took his work ‘home’ with him. As a crew cabin, his quarters were small. A wardrobe contained six shirts and six pairs of trousers, all identical. A chest of drawers was stacked with neatly folded clothes. On top were several back issues of medical journals, one of which she noted with some pride, contained a paper she herself had co-authored shortly before retiring. Alongside the journals were some documents. She rifled through them in the hope of finding something useful, but they were just letters from friends. It was clear that Grau was not the sort to remove important documentation from the medical centre. She checked on him once more, and then turned to leave.

As her hand touched the door handle, she heard a whisper from behind her.

“Janice.”

She spun round. The doctor’s eyes were open, two white slits in a sea of red. It wasn’t clear if he was fully awake or if he was delirious.

“Doctor Lister. Yes, it’s Janice.”

“Janice,” he repeated. “Cure?”

“No, not yet. But we’re close, we’re so close. Doctor Lister, this is really important. Where can I find a copy of the sick list? We have to find someone, anyone, who is taking immunosuppressives. They’re the key, they can stop this virus.”

Grau’s mouth twitched, turning up very slightly at the corners.

“Nine….oh….seven,” he whispered. Each word was a struggle.

“Nine oh seven? What is that, a combination? A file number? What does that mean?”

But the effort of speech had been too much. Grau’s eyes had glazed over, and his sentience had left him.

Janice darted out of the cabin, down the passage and into the lift. As she ran, she repeated the number to herself. Her hope was that once in the medical centre, its meaning would become clear.

The original medical suite up on deck five had the eerie abandoned feeling of a ghost town. It was only two rooms, but since the asteroid it had been a permanent hub of activity. Moving everyone up to deck eight had been done in a hurry, and the rooms looked like the staff had walked out for a coffee and never come back.
 

There was no office as such, but the first of the two rooms contained a filing cabinet, a desk, and a computer. Janice made straight for the cabinet and pulled open the top drawer. It was filled with a selection of fine whiskies. A couple of single malts from the Scottish isles, one bottle of a blended whiskey, and a couple of bottles of Irish.

The second drawer was more promising. It was jam-packed with paperwork. The files were numbered, and her hopes were immediately raised. Her fingers walked over the tops of the files until they reached section nine. There was a folder labelled
9.0.0.
, another labelled
9.0.1.
, and a
9.0.8
. The next was numbered
11.0.0
. She skipped over the rest frantically, searching for a 9.0.7. But there were no more nines, not even out of order.

She slammed the drawer closed and tried the third one. It was similarly crammed full of files, but they were named not numbered. The names looked like those of passengers. It would take her hours to go through each file individually, looking for a passenger who might be in possession of the drugs they so urgently sought.

With hope fading, she tried the fourth and final drawer. It was filled with stationery.
 

“Damn!” she shouted, punching the cabinet and immediately regretting it as her hand glowed red. She slumped into the wheeled chair at the desk and looked around. A dry-erase board covered a large part of the wall in front of her. Documents were stuck to it with magnets, and notes were scrawled across it in a variety of colours. Nothing that obviously related to transplant patients. She stared for a while at the computer, then switched it on. It was past its prime, and took a few minutes to boot up. While it went through its motions, she considered the possibility that there might be drugs on the Faslane base, in Vardy’s lab. He hadn’t suggested it as an option though, and given the state Jake was in after making the crossing back in the howling wind and rain, she concluded it would be a mistake of the highest order to abandon a search of the
Spirit of Arcadia
in favour of a mission to the shore, with no guarantees of finding what they needed over there.

A beep from the computer announced that it was ready for action. She spun round and took the mouse in hand. The screen was blank save for a small box asking for a user name and password.

“You’re kidding me!” she shouted at the machine. “Oh, Jesus….”

Pulling the keyboard closer to her, she thought for a moment, then typed
lister
as the user name, and tried
907
as the password. Another beep and some large red letters informed her she was not on the right track. She tried again, entering the user names
grau, graulister, grau.lister,
and
lister.grau.
After the fifth try, a longer beep accompanied a message telling her that she had exceeded the maximum number of login attempts and the system was going into lockdown for the next sixty minutes as a security precaution.

She looked again at the dry-erase board, hoping for inspiration, and found it. In one corner was listed a shift rota for the week ahead. Grau, Kiera, and David’s names were written in different colours. Between the doctor and his two nurses, they assured an almost continual presence in the medical centre, in normal times. Grau was out of it, Kiera was dead, but Janice had completely forgotten about David. She knew he had been taken to deck eight suffering from paralysis not long after Kiera had gone down with the virus. Since then she had heard nothing. If he was still alive, there was a chance he would know where to find the sick list.

Janice shot out of the medical centre and back towards the lift. The ship was deserted. Everyone was either sick or hiding in their cabins, terrified of getting sick. The lift was waiting for her, unused by anyone since herself.

Cabin 845, the centre of operations, was also quiet. Two of the new nurses occupied it, talking in hushed whispers when Janice walked in. They nodded at her, acknowledging her presence.

“I’m looking for David,” she said without introduction. “The nurse, the guy who worked with Kiera.”

“Oh, right, of course. You’ve come to take him away for the post-mortem,” the older of the two nurses said.

“Post-mortem? You mean, he’s….”

“Dead? Yes. Didn’t someone ring down and tell you? He died half an hour ago. He kind of, well, you know. From what I understand he died the same way Scott did.”

Janice felt the last glimmer of hope evaporate. She knew her only chance now was to return to the medical centre and trawl through the hundreds of paper files one by one on the off-chance she would happen across a transplant patient who was on board this particular cruise.

“He’s in cabin 861,” the nurse said kindly. “I’m sorry. Did you know him?”

Janice shook her head, and left without saying another word.

She walked slowly back towards the bank of lifts. The spring in her step had gone. The likelihood of her finding a suitable drug before Jake died was now so slim as to make no difference. She had failed him, and probably many others too. If David had died, that meant tens, probably hundreds of others were on the brink of death too. The nurse had suffered no complications, and he hadn’t been injected with the antiviral. He was potentially the first regular victim of the virus.

Shortly before reaching the lift, she glanced up and saw she wasn’t far from cabin 861. She considered stopping by and seeing the corpse. It probably couldn’t tell her anything new, but her professional curiosity was strong. It would only take a minute to pop in and see how the first patient to die solely from the virus itself had passed away. She counted down the cabin numbers, looking for the right room.

And that’s when it hit her.

“907!” She shouted the number out loud. “It’s a cabin! It’s not a code, it’s a cabin!”

• • •

Deck nine looked an awful lot like deck eight. Some of the accent colours used in the decor of the public areas were different. More yellows and oranges made it seem brighter than the dull shades of brown and beige used on the level below.

The place was just as deserted as the rest of the ship. There were only staterooms up there. Like deck eight, these were accessed by two passageways that ran the entire length of the ship. Most of the inner rooms had balconies overlooking Palm Plaza, the huge open park space that occupied the centre of the
Spirit of Arcadia
.

Cabin 907 was towards the front, an outer room with a seaward-facing balcony. Janice stood at the door, drew in a deep breath, and knocked.