Death Rounds (44 page)

No
luck.

Maybe whoever it was had led Williams back to the upper floors by another staircase or had gotten far enough ahead of Williams to jump on the elevator, wherever that was; I still didn’t have my bearings. All he’d have to do then, presuming he was in protective gear, was step out on any floor and become one of the fifteen hundred other people now wearing masks, gloves, and gowns.

I’d just about convinced myself I could return upstairs with a clear conscience when I heard a moan coming from far up the dark corridor.

“Williams!” I cried once more. “Are you all right?” No answer, not even another moan. “Shit!” I muttered, looking for something to jam the door open. I ended up using one of my shoes for want of anything else. I then removed its mate and once more resorted to gripping it by the toe, ready to use its heel for a weapon. As prepared as I’d ever be, I peered into the darkness up ahead and went creeping toward where I’d heard the plaintive sound.

I tried not to think of what the Phantom might have done to Williams. I tried to think even less about his waiting by Williams’s body, using the moan to lure me to the same fate.

I kept to the center of the hall for as long as the light behind me illuminated my way. Then I turned a corner and was unable to see a thing. “Williams!” I called again. As before, no answer. But I reasoned he couldn’t be too far off if indeed it was he who had made the sound.

I pressed ahead, my right hand feeling along the wall, the shoe ready in my left, the darkness absolute.

Twenty feet later I literally fell over him.

“Damn!” I exclaimed, going down hard on my knees. But I frantically started feeling with my hands, finding his feet, his legs, rapidly working up to his neck. I palpated around for his carotid artery. He had a pulse. I supported his head between my hands and brought my ear up to his mouth. He was breathing. But when I reached his bald scalp, even through my gloves, I could feel the warmth and slipperiness of blood—a lot of blood. “Oh Christ,” I muttered.

I found the laceration by feel. I could slip my fingertips into it. It was deep, about two inches long, and on the front part of his forehead. He must have turned to face his attacker just before he got hit with something. I gently slid the end of my index finger across the bottom of the wound, feeling for any depressions in his skull or jagged edges of bone. There were none, but that didn’t mean a non-depressed fracture was ruled out.

The main problem was hemorrhage. I couldn’t feel any pulsing of an arterial bleed through the latex of my gloves, but any cut to the scalp could bleed heavily. I wadded up a corner of my surgical gown into a makeshift pad and pressed it firmly against the laceration. I prayed I wasn’t pushing pieces of skull into his brain.

There was nothing else I could do except try to stop the bleeding. I couldn’t drag him out myself and at the same time keep his head and neck stable, his airway open, and his laceration properly tamponaded. As it was, I could still feel his blood flowing through my fingers despite the pressure I was applying. “Help!” I screamed, hoping someone on the stairs would hear me through the door I’d left open. “Help me. I’ve got an injured man here!”

Sooner or later my cries had to attract someone—had to, damn it!

But no reply came.

Then, from away in the darkness far up the corridor, as softly as a breath, I heard what made my blood run cold.

Laughter, a low, easy, rolling chuckle—distorted by the walls, it echoed toward me and was as chilling as ice. Then it ended, cut off by the distant sound of the elevator doors closing.

* * * *

Riley assured me his officers had found us in less than five minutes, but as I sat there in the dark, it felt like hours. Williams had even started to come to before they’d run up to us, but I hadn’t let him move. Once we got him to ER and into the capable hands of Wild Bill Tippet I could see the laceration, though bloody, was a pretty routine affair that would be made right by a bit of sewing. A subsequent CT scan confirmed there was no fracture or evidence of underlying hemorrhage in the brain.

“Do you think I’ll have a scar?” inquired Williams, eyeing the needlework in a mirror before a dressing was put on it.

Tippet fluttered around us the whole time like a nervous hostess— I always seemed to have that effect on him—and reassured me endlessly that the only reason he’d missed the midnight meeting was that he’d felt he should stay with his troops in ER. “Keep them calm, that kind of thing,” he kept insisting, talking at double speed. He actually seemed deflated when I admitted I hadn’t noticed his absence. But I did notice now that he was wearing two surgical masks instead of one. I suspected his own fear of being in close contact with possible carriers from other parts of the hospital was the real reason he hadn’t shown up.

I didn’t hold his fear against him. Everyone was frightened and growing more so by the hour. I think that’s why I didn’t tell anybody, not even Riley, about the laughter. I’d no intention of scaring any of them any more than they already were.

But I couldn’t protect myself from remembering that sound. It had seemed so unforced, as though my cries for help had been a source of real amusement to him. This Phantom might claim to be avenging past cruelties, but that laugh was as sadistic as any I’d ever heard.

* * * *

I did tell Riley about hearing the elevator go up.

Nevertheless, he made his men search the subbasement and walk through the asylum again. As I expected, they found nothing.

“You sure there’s no place someone could hide?” pressed Riley when his team reported back to him. We were standing outside ER, waiting for Williams. “Sewers, passageways, septic tanks?”

The men winced, and I saw one of them wrinkle his nose under his mask. “We didn’t see any sewers or septic tanks,” one of them answered, “but we went into everything a man could easily fit through. Besides, why would he bother to hole up there anyway?”

The officer gestured toward his gown and tugged at his mask with his glove. “What with our costumes, I’ve never seen a better place to hide in plain sight”

“Not if you’re already well known,” snapped Riley.

I interjected. “That’s the point. It couldn’t have been Cam. I already told you I heard him take the elevator. That meant this guy
did
go upstairs to hide in plain sight. Like you said. Cam couldn’t have done that and counted on going unnoticed. He’d have had to stay well hidden somewhere else.”

Riley spun around to face me. “If you’re going to go running after a murderer, Doctor, which by the way, nearly got your friend Williams in there killed, when are you going to learn to consider all the possibilities?” He was fuming, as usual his jaw muscles bulging under the straps of his mask as he pretended to give me a second to come up with an answer. “Think, Garnet! Mackie could have sent the elevator upstairs empty, as a ruse, then tiptoed off in the dark and retreated to his hiding place. Now for God’s sake, leave the physical pursuit of this maniac to me and concentrate on tracking down what your friend Popovitch found. I’ve got enough to worry about besides baby-sitting you!” He swung his fierce stare back to his men. “And one of my many worries, gentlemen, is whether you did a thorough search, given your obvious attitude that he wouldn’t be there anyway.”

At 6:30, still stinging from Riley’s rebuke, I was back in the auditorium, alongside Williams and Fosse, facing the same group of supervisors and chiefs who had been here not four and a half hours ago. This time even Wild Bill Tippet had shown up, double masked of course. Only the board members were absent; they had presumably gone home to bed.

Williams, up and about with a dressing on his head, elicited a little self-congratulatory cheer from the audience when he announced, “Good job, everyone. You’ve kept the quarantine intact so far.” But the mood quickly became somber again as he reviewed the arrangements to eventually relieve them of their duties taking care of patients and transfer them out to external quarantine facilities. “I doubt anything will happen before the end of the day. With the load we’ve already put on surrounding hospitals and medical personnel, it will be a while before we find enough staff to replace you and free up enough spaces to receive you.”

As the meeting broke up, I heard someone mutter, “Where the hell’s Cam Mackie? Shouldn’t he be here?”

Somebody else quipped, “Maybe he’s hiding in the fog, with the army.” The guy got a halfhearted laugh from his colleagues.

* * * *

Though Fosse had blocked outgoing phone calls, no one, it seemed, knew how to block E-mail. At 8:00
A
.
M
. every electronic media outlet in Buffalo began reporting that they had received an anonymous message containing a threat against University Hospital. Bulletins followed about the place already being surrounded by both the police and the National Guard. Within minutes parts of the actual text were being read on air by a half-dozen radio stations.

I
have infected the staff with a bacteria called staphylococcus which I’ve made completely resistant to all known antibiotic treatments. This organism can be transmitted to patients by touch, and once it penetrates the body, is unstoppable, resulting in certain death. The first fifty carriers will become ill in the next twenty-four hours. Protect your loved ones. Evacuate the patients.

At that moment all our plans to save UH came crashing down.

Ten minutes later an assembly of media trucks, reporters, and TV cameras had rushed in to take up positions outside the army and police lines. Beyond them was an ever growing gallery of people— hundreds of them, some still in dressing gowns, some with children, and more arriving by the minute. The gray morning light had thinned out the fog enough that I could see all the way to the edge of the grounds. Past that point the newcomers seemed to materialize out of the mist.

What I couldn’t hear or see from my vantage point—the third floor window I’d been at previously—I learned from the cacophony of all the radios and TVs around me.

“…increasing numbers of people here, all of them calling out names, presumably those of loved ones inside, whether patients or staff...”

“…we are trying to confirm that a terrorist has contaminated University Hospital...”

“...while we have no casualty numbers yet in this fast-breaking story, we’ve learned that it could be a disgruntled employee who has released bacteria into the water supply...”

People near me huddled in small groups, watching and listening to the various broadcasts, their expressions showing more alarm by the minute. I could see all our work to keep people calm coming undone before my eyes.

“It’s not true,” I started to protest. “They’ve got it wrong, all wrong!” But the more I implored them to stay calm, the more it seemed the newscasters pumped up their fears, and the more panicky some of them became.

On the TV screens cameras had zoomed in on patients at windows holding up signs written on sheets saying
GET ME OUT OF HERE ! SAVE US! HELP US!
The effect on the crowd was electric. A roar went up outside that I could hear through the glass in front of me and over the nearby TV and radio noise. The sound quickly organized into a chant. “Get them out! Get them out!” The rows and rows of people weaved back and forth in the mist for a few minutes, seemingly undecided, then surged forward, pressing in on the lines of soldiers. The reporters were caught between the two and didn’t seem to know in which direction to point their microphones and cameras.

“Get them out! Get them out!” The cry became a cadence for the mob’s advance.

The troops started to back up, but rifles were unshouldered and pointed upward, over the heads of the oncoming men, women, and in some cases kids, probably in their teens. I could now hear the cries of the officers. “Steady, men. Steady!”

The inner line of police had linked arms, and more officers were standing firm across the parking lots in front of the hospital as the soldiers backed toward them. Gone were the police hats; they’d been replaced by helmets. And the ranks of officers held their riot sticks out in front of them.

“Get them out! Get them out!”

Most everyone around me grew still as we watched the nightmare unfold below us.

“Someone do something!” murmured a woman at my side.

The lines drew closer together.

“Oh, God! Stop them!” cried a man standing behind me.

From down the hallway came a shriek, “That’s my husband! And my son!”

The PA overhead howled with electrical interference, then boomed, “Your attention please, everyone! For the sake of your families outside, settle down, move away from the windows, and take down those signs! This is Dr. Douglas Williams, of the CDC. I’m about to be patched into every radio and TV station out there, and my voice will be carried over the PA systems on their mobile units...”

As if to give credence to his claim, the excited chatter of the commentators from all the nearby portable radios and screens suddenly gave way to his voice, and Williams was speaking at us from hundreds of sources. More electronic howls filled the air outside, and the man’s message rolled over the grounds like the word of God.

“Everyone stop! Stop now. Your family members and friends in University Hospital are safe. Look up! They’ve moved away from the windows because they don’t want you to rush the hospital and endanger yourselves.”

While he talked, the TV cameras zoomed in on the now dark panes of glass, showing that no one was standing directly behind them. As they held there, new signs began to appear:
STOP
!
DON’T
DO THIS! WE’RE OKAY!
 

The chanting down below was diminishing. Most faces in the crowd were upturned, and people had stopped moving forward. The inner lines of soldiers and police stood fast.

Williams’s voice continued to work its miracle. “First of all, no one is even infected yet. We are simply doing cultures on everyone...”

As I stood by the window I began to breathe again. It looked like we’d dodged another bullet... well, another rocket.