Rabid (43 page)

Such idle speculations were not like her.

Conroy’s body had lost its fight with entropy. That was all. It meant nothing else.

Leila flipped open Conroy’s lab notebook to his last entry, yesterday. He had written lab notes in that horrible doctor’s prescription scrawl on the alternating pages of white and yellow graph paper. It was a wonder that the pharmacists hadn’t killed him for that handwriting.

He had split tissue culture, passed cells and virus, and done mouse work.

No notes about Danna.

Damn it, where were his notes? Conroy wrote everything down. If he had bought heroin from a drug dealer, he would have written a note about it in his lab notebook: its cost, color and consistency, and effects.

He should have written down what he thought about Danna and what tests he had ordered. 

An experiment was titled:
Rhabdovirus lyssavirus neurovirulence factor 1: glycoprotein targeting and amygdale involvement.

Rhabdovirus lyssavirus?

No one in the lab was working with a rhabdovirus. They didn’t even have any rhabdovirus stocks.

God only knew which rhabdovirus he was talking about, the way a generic herpesvirus could be the virus for chickenpox or genital cold sores or mononucleosis, or a retrovirus could be chicken cancer or horse anemia or HIV.

Basic Virology: Rhabdoviridae is an RNA virus family that includes haematopoietic necrosis virus, hemorrhagic septicemia virus, vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV, a common gene vector for experiments), lyssaviruses, and a weird cow virus.

Maybe Conroy had a VSV vector. Leila flipped through the reference pages, but there was no link to a viral vector, just a lyssavirus strain from the ATCC, the American Tissue Culture Collection, a cell and virus bank.

Their lab didn’t even have any lyssavirus stocks. She turned on his desktop computer and waited for the huge screen to fizz and crackle to life.

Her chest ached.

She launched the web browser, pulled up the PubMed search engine, and typed in
rhabdovirus
and
neurovirulent
.

All the papers cited, listed from the most recent, were about rabies viruses.

The monitor vented desert wind, and Leila felt the first stirring of panic.

Emerging Pattern of Rabies Deaths and Increased Viral Infectivity.

Human Rabies – Iowa, 2004.

Differential Stability and Fusion Activity of Rabies Lyssavirus Glycoprotein Trimers.

All the papers were about
rabies
.

The only neurovirulent rhabdovirus was
rabies
.

Motherfucker.
Conroy had live rabies virus in the lab and hadn’t warned anyone.

Leila smashed the keys with her typing and brought up the ATCC catalog page. She typed the reference number that Conroy had written in his journal into the search field.

Lyssavirus,
the entry read,
rabies virus, isolated from Pipistrellus subflavus (bat), replicates in most strains of Mus musculus and mouse-derived tissue culture. P4 containment required. Restricted access. Submit restricted access order form and supporting documents.

A hot saliva drip gathered at the corner of Leila’s mouth and she snapped her jaw shut.

That motherfucker Conroy had live
rabies virus
in the lab, their lab that was only rated at P2, and the live virus was floating around and growing in cells.

Conroy’s strange-acting mice were
rabid
, and they were in open cages.

And, oh God, oh God, Danna was sick with
viral encephalitis
.

A flush burned Leila’s face like the exhale of a steam autoclave and her heartrate jogged double time. She felt feverish, and that panicked her: feverish meant symptomatic and that meant too late for vaccination.

She was dying. Death crawled up her arms and legs toward her head.

Leila grabbed the lab telephone directory hanging on the wall next to Conroy’s phone and a tape dispenser loaded with yellow biohazard tape and strung the locked lab door with tacky yellow ribbons crawling with red spider symbols before sprinting for the emergency room.

~~~~~

Dante left Bev while she was sleeping and rubbed his stubble-overgrown jaw as he headed through the emergency room to his car. He was exhausted. He needed two hours of sleep, at least, before he needed to pray Terce at nine. He had already missed Lauds, half an hour before, at six. He tried hard to pray the Divine Office every day, at least minimally by going through the motions designated by the app on his phone. During the first few months when he had taken Holy Orders, the Prayers of the Hours had kept him from hunting in the nightclubs.

Dante walked through the hospital, reading the app on his phone, praying, and dodging people. The ER was harshly lit but quiet. Mint-clothed nurses drank coffee. The chairs area was empty but for a man sleeping on the floor. His straw cowboy hat covered his face, and his arms and boots were crossed.

A swinging door slapped open hard behind him. Dante turned.

Leila sprinted past him to the nurses’ desk, skidded on the tile and half-flopped over the desk. Pens flipped. Papers swished.

She said, “I need help.”

Dante had just left Bev’s bed, but if something had happened to Bev, a blood clot or shock, someone not knowing Sloan’s circumstances might have called Bev’s emergency contacts. Leila might have answered Sloan’s lab phone.

Dante ran.

“There’s a problem,” Leila said.

Dante grabbed the nurses’ desk to stop himself beside her.

“I’ve been exposed. Other people, too.” She shook a list of phone numbers. “And the lab. And there’s
mice
. I need a consult from I.D.,
right now
.”

I.D.,
Infectious Diseases?
Dante waited.

“I’ll page the resident,” Luis said.

“Get the I.D.
attending
, not the resident. The last thing we need is a goddamned half-trained resident playing God. And the police. And Danna’s attending, Marlin Pettid, neurology. Why the hell didn’t Conroy
tell
him?”

It didn’t seem to have anything to do with Bev. Dante waited, just in case he could help and because he felt awkward walking away now, when something was obviously very wrong.

He asked, “Leila, can I help?”

She jumped sideways away from him. “Jesus. Why the hell are you here?” She stopped herself and stared at her spread-open hands. “Jumpiness, irritability, my God. I’m sorry.
Oh, my God
.”

She was exhausted and panicking, almost manic.

He asked again, “Can I help?”

Leila’s slanted black eyes widened. “Yes. Nurse! Nurse!” She grabbed a handful of Dante’s black shirtsleeve.

Luis covered the phone and said, “I’m paging the attending I.D. physician.”

“Good. And the police.”

Luis dialed three numbers. “What do I tell the police?”

“Hazmat team,” Leila said. “Biohazard. Get the bioterrorism unit.”

Her slim, ungloved hand clutched Dante’s black shirt. Her hand seemed suddenly malicious, contaminated with something that required a bioterrorism team and an infectious disease consult.

Leila grabbed the nurses’ desk, contaminating it, too.

The nurse gasped. “Airborne?”

Leila ranted, “
Pipistrellus
is a bat. Bat strains can be aerosolized. Yeah, maybe airborne. At least one infectious patient, Danna Kerry, up in neurology, maybe more. I have a phone list. We have to call them all, get them here. Do you have Conroy Sloan here?”

The nurse was solemn. “Dr. Sloan’s remains were taken down to the basement an hour ago.”

“Disinfect everything. Decon everyone. The EMTs, ambulance, surgical staff, the O.R.”

Dante had scrubbed his oily, bloody hands after he had performed Extreme Unction for Conroy, but he was contaminated if there was a pathogen. Blood had seeped onto his shirt sleeve. The brown stain was still there.

Luis set down the phone. “Hazmat team’s on its way.
What agent is it?
”

“Rabies,” Leila said and a tear leaked out her panicking eye. Dante reached over and grabbed her cold hands. Her straining fingers twisted under his and held on. “Rabies virus. I need to start vaccinations
now
. Everyone in the lab does. This is
Dr.
Petrocchi-Bianchi, a physician.” She jiggled Dante’s hands. “He can tell you. It’s infectious. It’s dangerous.”

Ah, so she needed him for his medical knowledge. All right.

“I thought you were a priest,” Luis the nurse said. “You gave Dr. Sloan Last Rites, and said Mass.”

“I am both. This lady is absolutely correct. We need infectious disease consult.” He wrapped one arm around Leila’s narrow shoulders. “And an exam room.”

“Exam two is open.” Luis ran to the door.

He walked Leila to the E.R. corridors and whispered, “Did you lock the lab door?”

Leila nodded. “And taped it with biohaz tape, but it’s been contaminated for months.”

“You did what was right. You are all right.”

“I can’t feel my feet. It’s neuropathy. Paralysis starts at the feet. It’s
already started
.”

“You are panicking. They will start vaccinations. You are going to be fine.”

“Why was he working with
rabies
? What kind of idiot would grow live
rabies virus
?” She dropped her head against his shoulder and sobbed. “He’s killed us. He’s killed us
all
.”

Dante eased her away, and she sat on the exam table. Her slim face pleated into sobs. She reached for his shirt, so he stepped into her drowning arms. Her torso was only skin stretched over her thin rib cage, more waif-like than a fashionable
la figura bella
.

She said, “Even when Danna got sick, he didn’t tell anyone. They might have been able to try something, but he didn’t tell them. He’s killed us all.” Her voice muffled on his shirt.

He smoothed her soft black hair.

Leila clung to his hand even while a gloved, gowned, and face-shielded Luis drew blood, nervously watching her maroon blood fill a tube. Luis said, “We need saliva samples, but they’re going to start vaccinating you. At least they don’t do it in the stomach any more.”

Dante would have held onto her even if he hadn’t already contaminated himself in the operating room performing Sloan’s Extreme Unction.

This felt right, holding someone because they were mortally afraid, even if they were infectious.

Priests had always attended the lepers.

~~~~~

Hours later, after the first of the vaccinations, after Leila had sobbed in the priest’s arms and then insisted that she was fine so he should go home, she dialed her cell phone’s tiny keys with her thumbs and listened to the rattle of Father Petrocchi-Bianchi’s phone ringing.