Robert W. Walker (14 page)

"Dr. Cline--"

She began to dress in the protective wear necessary to enter the isolation ward. "Don't you see, Mark? We don't have any choice. There're literally thousands in the city in Leonard's condition now. We've got to act."

"But we should at least get authority to go ahead from someone at CDC."

"No, they haven't any idea what we've got here. Samples we've sent them have just baffled hell out of them, and--"

"What about James Nathan, then?"

"All right ... get him on the phone, Mark. Go on."

"You'll wait until I get back?" He had to go into an office across the hall for a phone.

She didn't wait for Mark. She finished dressing, filled a hypodermic with the serum and called on the intercom to those monitoring the room of zombies to open the air lock. This done, she stepped through, waited the few minutes for the germ-free environment to be maintained and then stepped through the final glass door, going for Leonard's inert form.

"How is Dr. Leonard doing, Anne?" she asked her assistant at the controls.

"Nothing new ... same as before, Doctor."

She nodded behind the heavy glass of her mask, hardly tipping the head covering she wore. She moved in on Leonard, the hypo at her side, hidden from the view of those on the outside. She recalled Stroud's words when she had telephoned him at the Museum of Antiquities moments before talking to Mark.

"Leonard's next of kin ... anyone in the city?"

After a moment's hesitation, Stroud said, "My God, have we lost him?"

"No, no ... nothing
like
that..."

"Not yet, you mean?"

"I just have to know if he has anyone close who--"

"Wiz tells me he has no one."

"He's still hanging on ... fighting, in fact." She mentioned the EKG fluctuations.

Stroud said, "He looks frail, but he's got a strong mind."

"That may be the crucial difference here."

"Is there something you want to tell me, Doctor?"

"Not really ...
no
."

"You want to try something?" he had asked.

"Oh, nothing ... just thought--"

"Leonard is worth any gamble, Dr. Cline. We need him back, and I know that if he could speak, he'd tell you to take the risks, whatever they are."

"You don't understand, I ... I can't."

She had hung up quickly then. And now she was here, standing over the helpless form of a once-vital man.

She lifted the hypo, her hand trembling. She tried desperately to steady herself when suddenly Mark's voice broke her concentration, making her turn and look through the glass at all the people staring in at her. "Dr. Cline! Let's do it properly, under controlled conditions! Nathan has declared martial law in effect, and he says he and the city will take responsibility for any experimentation we wish to do here."

She breathed a full breath for the first time since suiting up, and she relaxed her hand. "Thank God," she said.

"God, god, god, god, god, god!" one of the other comatose men began to chant, rising up and tearing out his tubes and coming with a wild stare toward her, a wild stare that showed no pupils.

"Get out of there, Dr. Cline! Get out!" Mark and the others were screaming.

Cline did so, backing through the door as the zombie rushed toward her but stopped over the body of Leonard, draping itself over him as if shielding him from her.

Once outside, Kendra saw the zombie's inert form slide off Leonard, who remained on his bed. The other man appeared to be dead. At the same time, Leonard's EKG was coming weaker, weaker,
weaker
still.

"No time to lose, Mark! Everyone ready, and Tom, suit up!"

Her aide Tom Logan was frozen in place until Mark shook him hard, snapping him out of it.

"Everything must be readied in IW-2, stat!"

-8-

St. Stephen's, like every other hospital in the city, was being flooded with those stricken by the disease, their numbers pouring in. Leonard would be the test case. All of them knew that he had, from the outset, shown an unusually high resistance to the forced condition, that his mind had struggled back toward the surface of reality. Most of the others with the bizarre disorder had not. So, even if they had a cure for Leonard, it was unlikely that it would be useful across the board. But it would be a start, a chemical answer to the puzzle of the graveyard muck that had somehow insinuated itself on these human bodies.

The stimulant, if further developed, might reach into the black hole that the others had fallen into.

All was prepped now, save Leonard was not in the secondary isolation ward, everyone wary of stepping into IW-1 since Kendra's close encounter with the zombie who had erupted in a screaming chant of God's name.

Kendra saw from the blank screen that had been monitoring this man that his name was Frank
Donaldsen
. His inert form had remained as silent as stone since the outburst. Earlier, her team would have rushed to his aid, but not since the reports of what was happening at other hospitals had reached them, reports that said that such patients were becoming violent.

"We've got to move Leonard out," she told the others. "Mark, Tom?"

The two of them followed her in and they began to kick out locks on the bed, rolling it and the monitors together through the electronically opened entranceway to IW-2. Mark rushed back and took Frank
Donaldsen's
pulse. He looked up and shook his head, signaling that their fears were unnecessary, that
Donaldsen
could hurt no one.

Tom asked Dr. Cline if she wished for him to make the injection. "No, no ... it's my job." Even with Nathan's assurances, she knew that she was ultimately responsible.

Tom backed away, his eyes wandering to Mark, who was in the process of bagging
Donaldsen
, seeing that his remains were removed to a third room where an autopsy would be the man's next fate.

"Tom," Mark called, "give me a hand here."

Tom reentered IW-1, doing what he could.

Kendra approached Leonard, hearing a strange hissing noise as if air were escaping through one of the tubes inserted in the man's body, but the intensity of the hissing increased to what she felt was a deafening noise. "What is that?" she asked those outside, monitoring.

The question made Mark and Tom, holding
Donaldsen's
body in its black wrapper, stop and look back in at her from Isolation 1. At the outer control room, Anne and the others were also watching, raising their shoulders and saying they heard nothing.

"Must be my ears ringing, I'm that tired," she said.

"Let me take over for you, Dr. Cline," pressed Tom.

"No, no ... it's all right," she said, believing it was, since the hissing sensation in her ears had now vanished.

She checked Leonard's pulse and found it was racing and shouted at Anne for not having mentioned this to her, but Anne said the monitor showed no such thing. Shaken, wondering if she was hallucinating, Kendra reconsidered having Mark or Tom do the injection. She saw that everyone was staring at her with grave concern on their faces. They were all thinking the same thing. They were all certain that she had caught the disease
herself, that
she was in the first phase of its awful grasp.

"Stay you from me,"
said a powerful voice that filled the room.

"All right,
dammit
, you heard that, didn't you? Mark? Anne? Tom?" she said through her
comlink
.

"What?" was the reply in
chorus.

"That voice."

"There was no ... we heard no voice, Dr. Cline."

They were all looking in at her as if she were strange. Mark asked her if she'd like for him to give Leonard the injection.

"No ... no ... I'm all right."

Anne frowned from the other side of the glass.

She drew closer to Leonard, whose eyes suddenly opened, displaying green discoloration and no pupils, as they were forced far up into his head. The man's lips were moving like a pair of colorless, eyeless worms, as if moved by manipulating strings. Guttural sounds were emanating from deep within.
Bubbling, gurgling, low-level volcanic noises.

"I don't suppose any of you hear that?"

"Yes," said Mark. "We're picking up some rumblings."

"But the voice was in my head, huh?" she asked when suddenly Leonard's body began to tremble. It was slow at first, but building.

"He's going into some kind of shock! Like
Weitzel
just before he died!" she shouted through her
comlink
and rushed the injection, plunging the syringe into Leonard's emaciated arm. At the same time his other arm came up and tore at her mask, covering it with brown spittle before he attempted to strangle her.

He was speaking a phrase over and over, in Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew,
Chinese
and finally settling on English, and she sensed he had said the same thing in all tongues:
"I will kill you!"
he shouted, but it was an abnormal voice, inhuman, filled with rage.

Leonard had been thrown into a seizure that literally lifted him off the bed. The IV was knocked over along with a tray, cords were snatched and the EKG went dead, but the man was very much alive, kicking, thrashing,
afire
as he came over her, knocking her to the floor. Mark and Tom rushed in. They had to sit on Leonard to hold him still while Kendra Cline climbed to her feet, exhausted and frightened, when suddenly they all heard Dr. Leonard say, "Where am I? Who are you? Please get off me!"

"Dr. Leonard?" She was on her knees over him between Mark and Tom. She saw the brown ooze seeping from his ears, nose and mouth. It was a gummy brown substance, and she knew it was the same as had come out of
Weitzel
.

"Where in God's name am I?" he asked her, his eyes clear and lucid.

"I'm Dr. Kendra Cline, Dr. Leonard. You were in a coma, and now you're back with us. You can let go of him now, Mark, Tom. Help him up. My God, we're on our way to an antidote."

He was weak, dehydrated, nothing like Stroud when he had come around, strong and virile.

"Mark, scrape up some of that spongy substance for the microscope, and take every precaution with it."

She asked Tom to see that Leonard got some nourishment and that he be run through the same series of tests as Stroud had gone through.

"Abraham Stroud, too, was in coma?" asked Leonard.

She confirmed this without telling him more, other than the fact that Stroud had come around and was given a clean bill of health. "I will call him immediately to let him know that you are all right, Dr. Leonard. And sir, you may just have saved the lives of many others. We were not at all sure our antidote would work."

He nodded and watched her leave, taking his cues now from the space-suited Tom.

Outside the room, Kendra Cline had finished decontamination, thinking that perhaps decontamination had saved Stroud and the others, yet the usual decontamination measures were not enough to combat this awful disease. She wasn't even sure any longer if it was a disease. Diseases didn't make comatose people speak in tongues, swear and foam at the mouth.
And how odd that her experience with Leonard should parallel Stroud's with
Weitzel
so closely.
Stroud claimed that
Weitzel
had spoken to him, but that it was
not
Weitzel
. That it was something speaking
through
him. That was the exact sensation she had gotten from Leonard, and no one but her had heard...