The Immortalist (43 page)

“Bingo, Doc!”

Gifford floored the accelerator. With all the cops looking for him, Acadia Springs was the most dangerous place in the world for him at that moment, but he had to take a chance. If Loscalzo was telling the truth—if there really was a second set of Vector stocks—the Lottery would be back on track. That was the only thing that counted.

He turned onto a rugged dirt lane, scarcely visible amid the overhanging trees. No one but park rangers ever used it, but it would get him to the back of the campus, near the Rensselaer Building, without going through the main gate.

He looked at his wristwatch: 9:00 p.m.
I have time, I have time
. He could scarcely contain his joy.

Still fifteen hours to go. . . .

Thirteen

WITH NIEDERMANN AT
HER SIDE, CRICKET
hit the intercom button for Bay 2. “How is she?” She almost dreaded the answer.

The taller of two helmeted and blue-safety-suited figures turned away from the plastic tent in the middle of the room and looked toward the window.

“Cricket!” exclaimed Hank. “How did you . . . the jail—”

“Never mind me. How is Emmy?”

Hank seemed already to be in mourning. “I . . . I . . . we . . . we've done everything we could think of. She's going . . . fast.”

At least she's alive
.
Thank God, she's still alive
. “Where's Wig? Is he here yet?”

“No. Why?”

Cricket heard the front door being buzzed open. “Wait! It's him!” She ran toward it.

Waggoner and Freiberg came through the entryway, Waggoner carrying two large IV bags filled with clear fluid.

“Is that it?” asked Cricket.

“It's all I could extract,” said Waggoner in his usual monotone. “The affinity purification columns were still set up from this morning, so I only had to spin down the blood, pull off the serum, and load it for purification. There wasn't time to concentrate it, so it's in a couple liters of buffered saline. The yield wasn't as much as I had hoped for, but, mind you, we're talking about blood of a dog that was dead and buried. Four point two liters of blood yielded just over fifteen and a half grams of purified antibody.”

“Is that enough?” Cricket's voice was sharp with impatience.

Waggoner shrugged. “Getting the dose right is guesswork. This is nonselected polyclonal stuff—the whole gamut of antibodies that were circulating in Hannibal's system. That includes antibodies to distemper, rabies, parvovirus, maybe even pollen and cat dander. Probably seventy-five percent of it targets the acute Nemesis infection itself. Estimating the total number of viruses in Emmy's blood as a few trillion, and the antibodies' affinity constants as lying in the range of zero point five nanomolar—then my best guess is that you need between ten and twenty grams of dog antibodies to achieve a clinical result. Bottom line: we have enough antiserum for one patient.”

“No,” said Cricket. “Divide what you have in two. Administer half to Emmy and half to Mr. Niedermann.”

Waggoner gave Niedermann a curious look. “Niedermann? What for? He's not even sick.”

“I've made a deal with the devil, and I have to pay.”

“I'm not the devil,” protested Niedermann. “I'm the best ally you have at this moment.”

Cricket turned her back on him—coldly, pointedly. “Erich, bring me a crash cart and an IV pole.”

As Cricket dragged a chair to the viewing corridor outside Bay 2, Freiberg hastily rolled up a chest-high, red metal cart that had been stored next to the security office. From the top drawer of the cart, Cricket pulled out a pair of gloves and an IV kit. Ordering Niedermann to sit down and roll up his left sleeve, Cricket snapped on the gloves and roughly swabbed his inner elbow with iodine. Then she tied a rubber tourniquet around his arm and poked a needle into the first vein that showed itself. Niedermann winced. A moment later, Cricket had attached the needle through a plastic tube to an IV bag, yanked off the tourniquet, and watched the first drops of antiserum begin to fall.

“Satisfied, Mr. Niedermann?”

It was a declaration, not a question. Taking Waggoner's second IV bag, she stormed through the portal of the containment suite and hastily donned a biosafety suit. She could barely endure the succession of air locks to her daughter's bedside.

As she charged into the lab bay, Hank and Jean greeted her with amazement.

“Jean, what do you have running from that IV pump?” asked Cricket.

“Saline, with Lasix for her kidneys.”

“Disconnect it and start this instead. It's the antiserum from Hannibal. Use a large-bore catheter. Eighteen-gauge. Set the flow rate as high as you can go.”

“That'd be one hundred cc per minute.”

“Good. Then the infusion will be complete in ten minutes.”

“Are you sure it's not too late?” Hank's voice sounded forlorn.

“I don't know, Hank. Maybe it is. Maybe nothing can save her. But we have to hope.”

“I have hope,” said Jean.

After a few seconds the precious fluid started its journey into Emmy's veins. Cricket was breathless, watching the monitors in dread silence. Minutes went by with no change.

Through his visor, Hank's face looked haggard and pale.

“Why don't you take a break, Hank?” said Cricket. “Jean and I can manage here.”

“Okay, I'll be in the office.” His voice had the wobbly tone of a guitar string stretched almost to the breaking point. He took one last look at Emmy, then tottered through the air lock.

Almost immediately, Cricket heard Niedermann over the intercom. “Dr. Rensselaer-Wright, I would like you to witness this.”

Half a dozen security guards stood around Niedermann's chair.

“These are all employees of Eden Pharmaceuticals,” explained Niedermann with a sweep of his hand. “They answer directly to me.” Turning to the men, he raised his voice. “Gentlemen, as of this moment Acadia Springs is under emergency quarantine. I'm sure you've heard the rumors about a mysterious virus. Those rumors are, unfortunately, true. I'm setting up a new chain of command. You, Mike, will be the acting security chief. You will answer not to me, but to Dr. Rensselaer-Wright, who, by her authority as an officer for the Centers for Disease Control, is assuming direct control of the institute. Her word is law.”

“What about Dr. Gifford?” asked Grasso.

Niedermann threw Cricket a glance.

“Dr. Gifford is incapacitated,” Cricket said. “He's been infected with the virus and needs to be in isolation. But be very careful if you find him. Avoid physical contact. If he refuses to come along willingly, call me. I'll bring a biohazard team to deal with him.”

“I have no idea how to set up a quarantine,” said Mike. “What do you expect us to do?”

“Seal off all gates and access roads. No one is to enter or leave the campus without my authorization. Call for backup from the county sheriff's department. A few real badges will tell people we're serious. Then make a sweep of each and every person on campus. Go through all apartments, guesthouses, and labs. We'll set up a screening station in the Commons, right on the Quad. Everyone gets examined for symptoms, everyone gives a blood sample. Dr. Freiberg will supervise. I'll join him as soon as my daughter's condition becomes stable.”

Mike scrunched up his eyes. “It's almost midnight. Do you really want us to drag people out of bed?”

“Mister, I can assure you the Nemesis virus will not be sleeping.”

“You heard the doctor,” said Niedermann, clapping his hands to cut off discussion. As his crew filed out, he stood up and nodded toward Cricket. “Very well, Dr. Rensselaer-Wright. Are
you
satisfied?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” Niedermann squeezed the last drop of antiserum from his IV bag before yanking the IV needle from his arm. “I'm done here. I'm going to my office now to call Phillip Eden. It's going to be the worst phone call of Eden's life.” Niedermann rolled down his sleeve, slid his suit coat back on, and headed down the corridor.

Freiberg and Waggoner bumped shoulders with him as they came in. Freiberg turned on the intercom. “How is she?”

Cricket rechecked the monitors. “We've stopped the free fall in her vital signs,” she said, astonished to see the improvement. “Her heart rate is coming down. The oxygen saturation of her blood is almost normal.”

“Is it working?”

“I'm afraid to hope.”

“Well, we know the virus mostly attacks the small blood vessels. That's the first place the antibodies go. So they could work pretty quickly. Plus, Emmy is young, Cricket. The young have God-given vitality.”

Cricket thought of the two houseboys in Bays 4 and 6. They weren't as sick as Emmy yet, but they were fast on their way. “Wig, is there any way to extract more antiserum from Hannibal?”

“No, I used the last cubic centimeter of blood.”

Freiberg chided him. “Don't be so unimaginative, Wig. Think beyond blood.”

Waggoner cocked his head. “Meaning what?”

“Bone marrow. Marrow and spleen. Lymph nodes, too. Plenty of B cells there. Where there are B cells, there are antibodies.”

Waggoner raised his eyebrows. “Theoretically.”

“Make it happen, Wig. Be the hero.”

Waggoner moved hesitantly toward the door, then stopped and looked around as though he had lost something. “Okay, I'll do it,” he mumbled. “There'll be so much cellular crap it'll play hell with the columns. But I can get around that.”

Waggoner appeared to be speaking to himself. Freiberg and Cricket left his train of thought undisturbed as he shuffled away toward the exit.

“Erich, we're going to need more than Wig can produce that way,” Cricket said. “Lots more if we don't get Nemesis under control.”

“Ideas?”

“Make new Hannibals. There are a dozen dogs in the animal facility that could be housed in strict isolation. What if we inoculated them with the virus strain we recovered from Hannibal? It wouldn't kill them, just make them sick enough to mount an immune response. In three or four days they would begin producing antiserum that we could harvest.”

“Good suggestion. I'll put someone right on it.”

Freiberg was about to say something more when the alarm from Emmy's monitors began to beep. Cricket anxiously scanned the displays. The oxygen saturation of Emmy's blood was plummeting. Her pale, swollen body was jerking against the restraints.
A seizure?
Am I losing her?

Cricket saw a froth of bloody mucus percolating inside the plastic tube taped to the side of Emmy's mouth. “The airway's plugged,” she shouted to Jean. “We have to remove it. Get a fresh one stat.”

As Jean rifled through the crash cart for an endotracheal air tube of the right size, Cricket disconnected the old one from the ventilator and drew it out of Emmy's mouth, like a slimy, bloody snake. Emmy erupted in a spasm of coughing.
She shouldn't be doing that. She's supposed to be heavily sedated.

Jean found a 7.5 mm tube and peeled the plastic wrapper open, holding it so that a loop of the sterile air tube protruded for Cricket to take. By then Cricket should have been ready with the metal laryngoscope in Emmy's mouth to guide the insertion of the tube. But she had frozen, with her hand in midair and her eyes on the monitor.

“Look! Her oxygen sats are going back up. She's breathing on her own.”

As Emmy's coughing subsided, the display moved back into the normal zone. Her body stopped jerking, too. But her eyelids were now twitching.

“She's seizing,” exclaimed Jean.

“No, Jean. She's waking up. She's trying to open her eyes, but the light hurts.”

Jean dimmed the switch. Emmy opened her eyes. For a moment, she looked confusedly about her.

Her lips were moving. Feebly.

“What's she saying?” asked Jean.

“I don't know,” said Cricket. “I can't hear.”

“ ‘Stay'? Is it ‘stay'?”

Cricket leaned up against the isolation tent. In the dimmed light, it was impossible to read Emmy's lips. Through two layers of plastic all she could hear was a single word:

“Afraid . . . afraid . . .”

Frustration enraged her.
Nemesis be damned.
Tearing her helmet from its Velcro fastenings, she shoved her head through the vent in the isolation tent. Lowering her ear all the way to Emmy's lips, she strained to listen.

What she heard was like the voice of a ghost. “Don't be afraid, Mom,” Emmy gasped. “Don't be afraid. I can . . . do this.”

“Yes, you can,” Cricket whispered. Then she repeated it, only this time not whispering, but out loud, like the command of a drill sergeant:
“Yes, you can!”

Cricket recoiled from the tent and bit her wrist, her incisors slicing through the bitter-tasting latex glove. Her vision went blurry, as if she were underwater. She shook all over. It was like the worst of her panic attacks. For two days, she'd held herself together as always, by steeling herself for the worst, like a boxer anticipating a killer blow to the midsection. What she did not prepare for was the possibility of joy. Now, it came to her like a sucker punch. She was on the point of passing out.