Amanda's Story (17 page)

At first Amanda was shocked as the door opened and Colonel William Bennett walked in without the now-ubiquitous white isolation suit. He was a good-looking man in his early fifties, his attractiveness enhanced by the fact that Amanda hadn't seen a human face not wrapped in plastic in seven weeks.

“You are being moved to one of our wards, and as you are the only patient in the entire facility, my guess is that you will get first choice in beds.” He smiled and Amanda found him even more attractive.

“How long have I been here?” she asked as he sat in one of the now well-worn plastic chairs.

“About seven weeks.”

“Seven weeks,” she repeated. “I thought it was longer.” She dropped her eyes so Bennett wouldn't see her face.

The last month of near-complete isolation, locked in the same ten-by-twelve room, had taken a heavy toll on Amanda's mental stability. The first two weeks she had been at Tellis had been relatively busy, filled with daily physical exams and lengthy medical interviews, which were tedious, but innocuous. Then came the biopsies, which were uncomfortable, and occasionally worse. They had inserted needles into a variety of body parts for seven straight days using only minimal amounts of anesthetics, but the discomfort was a small price to pay for the chance to be free of her cell and to interact with someone besides herself.

It had been a month since they completed their procedures, and Amanda hadn't been out of her room since. For the first few days she appreciated the solitude, but the last few weeks had taught her just how effective isolation could be as a technique of torture. Deprived of external stimulation, the brain's defenses weaken and it begins to create its own reality. She had started to hallucinate about the world beyond these three solid walls and the mirror that watched her incessantly. She created complex and well-formed visions of the control room behind the glass and of the stairs that led to a larger control room, manned twenty-four hours a day with monitors for each of the cameras that tracked her. Sometimes she imagined that she was sitting in one of the black leather chairs, watching herself sleep, read, or watch television. But the visual hallucinations, although increasing in both frequency and complexity, were still relatively rare compared to the voices in her mind. These were with her every waking moment and hounded her even as she slept. Random thoughts, usually only peripherally related to her, seemed to be broadcast straight into her mind. Before, during, and after nursing school she had cared for mentally ill patients, and now she began to relate to them. Hallucinations and the broadcasting of thoughts were symptoms universally seen in patients with major psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia. She was in the appropriate age group for it and had a family history of major depression, which made her more vulnerable to mental illness. Certainly she had had enough life-altering events to act as a trigger for almost any form of psychiatric illness.

A week earlier, her resistance had weakened enough that she almost asked to see a psychiatrist. Late in the afternoon, a technician had appeared with a needle and a handful of specimen tubes; after drawing her blood he paused and asked her if she needed anything. Without thinking, and a little too forcefully, she answered, “No.” He took a step away from her and backed his way into the airlock. She watched him leave with half her mind chastising the other half for being weak.

Later, after counting the ceiling tiles and confirming that none were missing, she made peace with herself. The visions and voices were a problem, but they were benign and non-threatening; in fact, they rarely addressed her. So long as they remained as background noise, and nothing more, she resolved to keep them to herself.

“Don't worry about your things.” Colonel Bennett looked around the small room and it was obvious that she didn't really have any things. “Well,” he said, slightly uncomfortable. “Just follow me.” He led her out of the airlock and into the small control room behind the glass. Amanda stood and stared, her mouth open. “Glad you're out of there?” he asked, misinterpreting her hesitation.

She scanned the very familiar room. She had passed through it several times before, but with each trip she had worn the isolation suit and had usually been on a stretcher with its rails up. She had never really seen this room, except in her hallucinations, which had been exactly correct down to the small crack in the porcelain sink in the corner. “Yes,” she said, hiding confusion mixed with excitement and wonder. “Those stairs lead to another control room, only that one has monitors.” She asked and told him.

He nodded and his smile returned. “Good guess. We won't need the monitors, or the cameras.” He reached for a panel that contained several switches and began to flick them off. “Or these microphones.”

She followed him up the stairs and found an exact replica of the room from her mental images. Her imagination had even supplied the correct smells: a mix of leather, coffee, and just a whiff of cigarettes. The three monitors were now dark, but she was certain that if they were on she would have seen her cell. She did a full circle in the dark room while Bennett patiently held a door for her. Her startlingly prescient hallucinations had never gone beyond this point. “Oh, I'm sorry. Thank you,” she said, passing under the arm that held the door open.

“No problem. I can only imagine how good it must feel to be out of that room.”

“The cell,” she said softly. “Can I ask you a question?” They were halfway down a long, dark, and deserted hallway. “I would like you to be completely honest.”

“Uh oh, I never like being COMPLETELY honest.”

“Did you or someone else put something in the air or my food, or even the water? Maybe to sedate me?”

“No. Absolutely and completely, no.” He stopped inside a doorway that led to a large, darkened hall. Voices from the opposite side echoed loudly. “We are not in charge of your care and are only peripherally involved with the investigation of the virus that killed your friends. This entire situation is being directed by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. I and others have had disagreements over the approach and course of this investigation, but if anyone had gone as far as poisoning you, or drugging you without your knowledge and agreement, I would have known and been able to intercede.”

The sudden change in his demeanor told Amanda that those disagreements had been substantial. “You're taking quite a risk telling me this.” She said it as a statement, not a question. “In fact I would guess that you have been ordered not to tell me this.”

“Tell you what?” He feigned ignorance and resumed his walk down the dark corridor and into the bright light beyond.

“What do you do here?” she asked after several more turns.

“Anything we want,” he said as a joke. “Actually, we provide medical support to all branches of the military. We generally take their more unusual cases.”

“Which makes me unusual,” Amanda teased, with just a trace of a flirtatious tone.

“As strange as they come,” he smiled down at her. “When we aren't playing Doctor House, we provide laboratory support.”

The voices in her head were remote, except for one that quietly projected a sense of intrigue and uncertainty. She followed him through another dark hallway, then into and out of a brightly lit kitchen. He descended a set of stairs and into a short corridor lined with doors on each side. “Take your pick,” he said. “They're all the same, though.”

She opened a door and said, “This one will be just fine.” There was a bed, a chest of drawers, a door that she surmised led to a shared bathroom, and a television hanging from the ceiling. “Cozy,” she said. “Where are the cameras?”

“No cameras; you now have complete privacy. Which reminds me.” He reached in front of her and closed the door. “Can I show you one more thing?”

He led her up the hall to a large recreation room, where ten soldiers were lounging, reading, or watching what looked like a NASCAR race on television.

“Officer on the deck,” someone yelled, and everyone stood and immediately came to attention.

“As you were. Mr. Lambert is from the Navy, and believes that we are aboard a ship at sea. Please excuse his delusions.” The ten young men turned to face Amanda, and she could feel the hormone level soar through the roof. “From this moment on, no one may use the south hallway. It is reserved exclusively for our guest. This is an order, gentlemen. Any infractions will lead to immediate reassignment. Am I clear?”

“Yes, Colonel,” they said in unison after most of them had returned to an attention posture.

Amanda looked at their young faces and realized with a start that she recognized at least four of the ten by name, and another three looked very familiar. She must have met them a month ago during her many trips back and forth from the CAT scanners and procedure rooms. She was surprised by how intensely familiar they were. “Mr. Lambert just became a father—about six weeks ago?” she asked the muscular red-haired young man to her left.

“Yes ma'am,” he said with surprise.

In her mind she saw a pretty, young red-haired woman who had yet to fully lose her baby fat, and then a small bundle of baby wrapped in a blue blanket with hair the color of new carrots. “A boy, right?”

“Yes again, ma'am.” He looked even more surprised.

“Mr. Lambert, I am only a few years older than you and if you keep calling me ‘ma'am' I will be forced to reveal how you get little Carl to go back to sleep.” A vision of Cameron Lambert singing “I'm a Little Teapot” while acting out the lyrics with his newborn son in his arms burst before Amanda's eyes. She felt light-headed, and while the chorus of male voices assailed Cameron Lambert she grabbed the door jam to steady herself. “Colonel, thank you for showing me the way, and everything else that you did on my behalf.” The words were flying out of her mouth, and only after she heard them did she understand them. An image of Bennett arguing with a man who could only be Nathan Martin, the man who had lied to her weeks earlier, now filled her mind. “I need to lie down,” she said, turning away quickly enough that Bennett reached for her arm. A small burning sensation ran from his touch up to her shoulder, and she reflexively recoiled.

“Whoa, sorry, Mrs. Flynn. I didn't mean to grab you so roughly.” He hadn't grabbed her roughly, and he knew it, and now she knew it. A strange and familiar sensation seemed to pour through her body.

She began to shake as images and voices flooded into her mind faster than she could make sense of them. She stepped away from the officer, who watched her back down the hall, his arm partially raised. “I'm all right, Colonel; just a little dizzy. All this activity after a month of isolation,” she explained unconvincingly.

She picked a door and slipped inside, maintaining eye contact with Bennett, holding him in place. She locked the door and quickly checked her arms for the lesions, and then stripped off her clothes and searched the rest of her body. Finding nothing, she began to dress. The déjà vu feeling that had overwhelmed her in the recreation room was beginning to pass, leaving clarity in its absence. She had experienced it before. She had been lying in a dirty cot in Honduras, watching her father and brother walk past her, as an eerie sensation overwhelmed her. She wasn't free of the infection; she hadn't miraculously beaten it. It was still with her, hiding in her brain.

“In some people it has a bimodal course, resurfacing after a short interval.” They were her words as she described the infection to one of Martin's minions over a month ago. Soon—minutes, hours, maybe a day—the blisters would return, the madness would intensify, and she would die. She was a danger to everyone around her. It was possible she had already infected the colonel, and through him everyone else in the recreation room. She opened the dorm room door and found the hall empty. Voices, laughter, and life poured out of the rec room, but she turned the other way and stole her way back to the hated cell. She opened the outer airlock and a faint rush of air brushed back her hair. She paused, went back to the control room at the top of the stairs, and found a phone exactly where she knew it would be. A shiver of déjà vu struck again. The phone had a dial tone, and on an impulse she dialed Lisa and Greg Flynn's number, but an automated voice immediately warned that outgoing calls were not allowed. She tried zero and after a second a male voice answered.

“Operator.”

“This is Amanda Flynn,” she said in a rush.

“Yes, Mrs. Flynn?”

“I need to speak to Colonel Bennett; he's in the hematology lab.” Once again the words were out of her mouth without conscious thought or awareness of their origin.

The phone began to ring and then a voice answered. “Hematology.” It was the same disinterested tone that she had experienced since arrival, and its normality almost made her cry.

“I'm looking for Colonel Bennett,” she said quickly.

“Just missed him, by about two seconds. Oh, how about that? Here he comes again. Sir. Sir, it's for you, I believe that it's Mrs. Flynn.” She heard the phone exchange hands.

“Colonel, I need to see you in Control Room Seven.” Once again she had no idea where her thoughts originated. The words were being squeezed out of her brain without her permission or control.

“Control Room Seven?” He sounded confused. “I'm not sure where that is, Mrs. Flynn.”

“I don't know either.” An edge of panic filled her voice. “The room above my cell, with all the monitors.”

“Okay, now I'm with you.”

“Come alone,” she added before hanging up and cutting off his question.

Two minutes later, she heard his soft footfalls, and then he appeared at the doorway. Amanda had slid one of the black leather chairs against the console, as far from the door as possible. “Don't come any closer. I need to be back in isolation.”