Scourge - A Medical Thriller (The Plague Trilogy Book 3) (24 page)
Read Scourge - A Medical Thriller (The Plague Trilogy Book 3) Online
Authors: Victor Methos
47
Sam walked back into the BS4 lab. Hank looked at Jason and said, “Go with her.”
Hank’s phone rang, and he answered, walking away so no one could hear. Samantha continued into the lab. She swallowed, forcing herself not to look at Jason. She got down a spacesuit and began putting it on.
“What’re you doing?” he said.
“I need to gather the samples. I might be able to synthesize a pure vaccine rather than infecting us with camel pox. I can purify it, turn it into a spray mist, get it to work quicker.”
He eyed her. “And you’re just doing this out of a sudden change of heart, huh? I don’t buy it. You’re going to try to betray Hank. I know. And I’ll be there to snap your neck when you do.”
“Like your wife’s?”
“She made her choice,” he said. “She abandoned us and scurried off to hide in the
jungle like a rat.”
“She discovered a vaccine.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t her. She had microbiologists, too, some of the best in Eastern Europe. They probably did the work and then she had them killed. She didn’t want any connections to her former life.”
Sam
pulled the suit over herself. In the BS4 labs at the CDC, all a person could wear underneath the blue suit was scrubs, socks and gloves. Underwear wasn’t permitted. She pulled the suit over her jeans. She had no intention of following procedure right now.
Snapping her helmet into place, she began a slow check over the suit, pretending to search for any tears. Suddenly, she heard Hank shouting into the phone. Jason’s head snapped in that direction. Something was wrong; Hank was ranting and cursing
, saying something about a fire. Jason headed that way.
Sam quickly entered the lab. Bolted to the counters were a series of Meker burners
, an advanced type of Bunsen burner that was soundless and reached temperatures of two thousand degrees. The burners typically ran on methane or liquefied petroleum gas. Some of the more antiquated ones used natural gas. She checked the cupboards underneath the counters and found large white cylinders marked as LPG, liquefied petroleum gas, a volatile mixture of propane, butane, and other flammable gases. She looked back at the three men. Hank was still on the phone shouting, while the other two stood around, waiting for orders like lemmings.
Sam grabbed the needle valve that adjusted the level of gas and opened it fully
on all three burners. The gas had a smell that not entirely noticeable until higher levels were reached. When the gas was pouring out, filling the lab and the house, she walked over to the microscope and began slowly gathering supplies from the experiments she’d conducted.
The three men were
discussing something, and then the young man ran out. Jason and Hank remained. Sam searched the lab for anything to ignite a flame and found a thin lighter in one of the cupboards near the burners. The Kevlar gloves made moving less than easy. She took them off and just wore latex gloves.
It took a good five minutes to gather everything, and then she exited the lab, bypassing the showers and leaving her spacesuit on. She got out to the
room where Jason and Hank stood and took out the lighter. Neither of the men spoke for a moment, and then Hank chuckled.
“Well
, would you look at that,” he said. “I thought I smelled gas. Interesting. I was going to kill you at some point soon. I knew there was no way you’d ever work for me. But I have to say, I didn’t think you’d betray me this quickly.”
“This ends now,” she said, her voice echoing in her ears inside the suit.
Hank shrugged. “So do it. We’re both here. No one’s stopping you. Kill us both.”
Sam lifted the lighter.
“But you die, too,” Hank said.
Sh
e looked at Jason. “Your daughter. Was that true?”
He shook his head. “No.
I thought you’d be more sympathetic because you lost your mother.”
She looked down
at the lighter. It was actually lovely, appearing to be made of smooth steel, without blemishes.
“You won’t kill us,” Hank said. “You can’t kill. You’re a doctor. You’ve devoted your entire life to healing people. So cut this nonsense out and get what you need so we can go.”
The movement was almost imperceptible, but Samantha saw it. His left hand had fallen and reached behind him.
She struck the lighter just as the
knife came out, and Jason rushed forward, his hands wrapping around her wrist.
Hank
came at her with the blade, but the lighter had already ignited. A loud hissing followed, and then Sam saw a flash.
The flash was beautiful, white and then red. Pain echoed in her body
, but it was distant, happening to someone else. She felt heat and the sting of the suit melting to her body as the house burst into flames, the fires raging across the ceiling and floors, beams of wood collapsing around them.
She was still conscious, and she was on her back. The explosion had flung her into the wall and she’d broken ribs. The agony was nearly unbearable
, so much pain that she wanted to lie there and not get up, to let the flames consume her, but something inside kept pushing, an image of her mother.
She saw her mother in her last days, confused and in anguish
yet not willing to give up. Her mother had fought until her last breath. Life had been precious to her, even a life of pain. Sam turned toward the stairs and crawled. The suit, with its air pressure inflating like a bubble, had saved her life.
As she
made each painful movement, fully aware that the burns covering her body would be deadly if not treated soon, she kept thinking of her mother, the sweet smile on her face even in the face of imminent death, and of Jessica growing up, getting married, and having children of her own, and Sam would pull herself up one more step. Her hands were burned so severely she couldn’t use them and had to use elbows and forearms to climb.
When she reached the top of the stairs, she saw the building eaten alive by the fire. She glanced back and saw two charred bodies. Hank’s face had been burned nearly completely off. Jason lay in a mangled heap, his legs and arms shattered and going in different directions.
Sam turned back to the door and crawled through.
Samantha lay in the hospital bed, staring at the ceiling. She had placed a call to the director of the CDC and informed him
of the anthrax in the drones. Many of the drones were falling out of the sky. Ciprofloxacin, if taken soon after exposure, could prevent the onset of anthrax. The CDC was developing huge quantities of the drug and shipping what they already had out to those cities that were affected. The public was told to stay away from any drones or debris from drones that plummeted to the ground.
She had also informed him of the vaccine, and Ngo Chon was busy at work synthesizing a mist spray. The people already infected wouldn’t survive, not in huge numbers, but billions would be vaccinated and live. Humanity, ultimately, would go on.
The burns were primarily first degree, but on portions of her back and thighs, where the plastic from the suit had melted to her skin, she had suffered second- and third-degree burns. She was in an isolation unit now, the burn unit of Saint Joseph’s in Johannesburg, a transparent plastic sheet covering her bed. Every three hours, a nurse would come check on her, and immediately afterward they would sedate her, but she would live.
She had heard from the CDC that the Russian government had completely disavowed the work of Hank Kraski and proclaimed him a terrorist working without approval. Whether it was true or not, at this point, didn’t seem to matter. What mattered is that his connections, his money, and his men were gone. Once the disease ran its course and everyone
was vaccinated, the world could begin to heal and rebuild.
Right now, she was in that dreamy state where she’d been given the sedative but wasn’t unconscious. In fact, over the past
seventy-two hours or so she’d been there, she felt she already required more narcotics for the same effect.
The pain, initially, had been itching and discomfort. Now, even with morphine and Vicodin, it still felt like her skin was being pulled apart. Between the analgesics, the anti-inflammatory steroids, the antibiotics
, and the cleanings and dressing changes, she felt as though she would never leave, as if her life was now as a trauma patient in the hospital and no other options were open to her.
A moment of panic overtook her
, and it required a sedative to calm her. Now she lay there, waiting for the inevitable sleep that would have to come. Then something happened. A nurse walked in and said, “We have a phone call for you, Dr. Bower.”
The nurse held the phone
close to the plastic that shielded Sam. “Hello?” Sam said, her eyes nearly shutting from the narcotics.
“Sam? It’s you! Are you okay?”
“Jessica…” she said with a weak smile.
“Don’t ever leave, okay? I don’t want… I don’t want you to leave again. Just hurry up and come back.”
“Jessica, I’ll be home soon. And I promise, I’m never going to leave you again.”
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