Pestilence

43

Samantha froze. She didn’t take the test results out of the hematologist’s hands for a moment, and the doctor pushed it closer to her. She lifted it and read the page.

Negative.

She let out a sigh and felt weak. The results fell out of her hand, and the doctor appeared perplexed. He bent down and picked it up, then returned to the lab before she could thank him. She stood staring at the door, unable to speak, until Duncan roused behind her.

“What’d he say?”

“Negative,” she said after a long pause.

“Wow. Thank the Lord,” he said.

“I don’t think the Lord has anything to do with this, Duncan.”

She turned away and collapsed in the chair next to him. Every muscle ached, and her entire body was pulling at her to sleep. Though she’d been only a day without sleep, she felt as if she could pass out at any moment. Her eyelids drooped, and her mind was a slushy mess.

“Probably a reaction to the weakened virus,” Duncan said. “We need to run the blood for antibodies and see if she’s developed immunities.”

Sam nodded. “I need to sleep.”

“Do you want to get her out?”

“Not yet. Until she recovers, she’s probably the safest here.”

“They’d booked a hotel for us. You wanna go back there?”

“Yeah. Lemme say bye to her and let her know. Can you call Olsen and have him pick up the blood for testing?”

“Sure.”

Duncan headed downstairs as Sam went back to the quarantine zone. She opened her sister’s door, and Jane was asleep in the darkness, a slight snore escaping her lips. Sam woke her softly and told her the news. They both cried and held each other.

Deciding to take the stairs to help wake up, Sam felt her legs more acutely than she had in a long time. She felt almost as if they were letting her know they were about to abandon her, and she could no longer rely on them. She placed her hand on the banister for balance.

As she headed downstairs, she heard the swoosh of papers flying onto the floor and then the thump of something heavy hitting the linoleum. Down the corridor, a man in a pinstripe suit stood over the body of a hospital security guard. Behind the desk, a nurse was leaning far back in a chair, a single hole in her forehead; blood oozed out and down her temples.

The shooter kicked the officer to make sure the man was dead, and then his head came up, and her eyes met his.

She didn’t know how she knew, but she did. He was there for her.

As she darted up the stairs, two slugs embedded into the wall where she had been standing, spitting drywall and dust into her face. She pushed her legs as hard as they would go, but she felt as though she were running through sand. Another shot rang in her ears as the round bounced off the metal railing and ricocheted somewhere below.

She opened the first door she came across and ran down a corridor with patient rooms on either side. She sprinted past a nurse’s station, where a single nurse was sitting behind a computer. The nurse yelled something to her, but Sam couldn’t hear.

Sam turned to her, still running, and shouted, “There’s a man with a gun!” She couldn’t think of anything else to say that would convey the urgency of the moment. But she ran a bit, and when she glanced back, the nurse hadn’t moved. The door at the end of the corridor opened, and the shooter stepped through.

Sam ran to the elevators and pushed all the buttons. Out of breath, with panic slowly closing in around her, she wasn’t there. She was back in her house with a man named Greyjoy standing above her, telling her she was about to die. Samantha felt as though she were breathing through a towel.

One shot, nothing more than a spit, sounded like a plastic cup falling onto linoleum. It zipped past her, close enough that she sensed the wind from the shot. The round exploded the window behind her as one of the elevators opened, and she jumped on. The shooter chased her at a full sprint.

She pounded the button for the top floor, her injured arm aching beneath the cast, and the doors slowly closed as the man leapt to get his hand in between them. The pull of gravity made her stomach roil as the elevator lifted her higher into the building.