A Heartbeat Away

CHAPTER 10

The guard’s riot stick, slamming against his cell door, intruded into Griffin Rhodes’s nightmare, but failed to drive it completely away.

The recurring dream was especially vivid this time, intense sounds and colors … and pain, like daggers thrusting through his eyes.

The dreadful ache was in his abdomen, too—a powerful cramping as if his intestines were strangulating. Griff felt his bowels let go, and knew the gush beneath him was blood.

Marburg virus! I … have … Marburg virus. Let me die! Please just let me die.

He tried to cry out the words, but there was no sound—only the terrible cramping.

Griff pounded impotently on the wall by his head.

“Dr. Rhodes.… Can you hear me?… Dr. Rhodes?”

The voice in the dream was a woman’s—a Kenyan physician named Marielle—Dr. Marielle. She had been incredibly kind to him.

How long had it been? How many days? How many weeks?

More of the slamming against the steel cell door. It was one of the guards’ favorite ways of tormenting him.

He was standing in front of his bathroom mirror now, supporting himself on the edge of his rusted sink, staring at the expanding bruises on his face and at his eyes. It was Marburg. His horribly bloodred sclerae told him so. He had feared becoming infected from the day his fascination with deadly viruses began. Now, it was happening. Marburg—most likely the Ebola variant. Hemorrhagic fever. Sweats. Unimaginable muscle aches. Blood spewing from the nose and GI tract. Blood in the tendons and the skin. Blood on the brain.

Eighty percent death rate.

Blood.

For years he had been fearing this encounter, waiting for this attack, or something like it. For years he had anticipated the moment when his precautions would not be enough, when living on the edge would prove disastrous—when he would go from being the hunter to being the victim.

Finally, because of a stupid miscalculation outside of a jungle cave not far from Kisimu on the eastern rim of Lake Victoria, he was going to die, and die viciously. The best he could hope for before he was gone was to have the cave sealed, and to have Level 4 precautions instituted at all the surrounding hospitals … provided he survived long enough to do so.

The devastating cramps intensified. Now he was on his hands and knees in a field. Blood was pouring in two steady streams from his nostrils, falling to the parched ground in thick, angry drops. In the distance he could see the outline of his lab, a sprawling, cinder-block monolith, cutting a broad, rectangular chunk from the azure African sky.

Overhead, airplane-sized vultures circled. One of them glided to the ground, landing awkwardly and waddling across toward him, intent on pecking at his flesh.

Not yet, dammit! Not yet!

Once again, his eyes began to throb. Griff had always wondered what Ebola infection would feel like. Now he knew. His imagination had hardly done the virus justice. Praying for death was about the best he could do.

“Dr. Rhodes … Dr. Rhodes, can you hear me?… It is Dr. Marielle.… I swear he opened his eyes.… Did you see that?…”

The clanging on his steel door resumed, echoing through the cinder-block hell of his solitary confinement cell.

Which was worse, the nightmare or his reality?

The vulture was joined by another, then another—huge black shadows with fiery eyes, drifting down to gnaw on him. Each bite brought pain—pain and more blood. Griff thrashed on his cot and tried to bat them away.

Help!… Help me!

The vultures were unrelenting now, tearing away huge chunks of his flesh, challenging him to wake up.

Facedown on the blood-soaked ground, Griff continued flailing at the mammoth birds.

The sudden clang of his cell door finally caused the nightmare to loosen its grip. Reluctantly, the lurid images receded.

“Rhodes … Rhodes … Hey, asshole, wake up!…”

Donald Spinelli, the huge, heavy-lidded guard, stood across the room, by the naked toilet bowl, impatiently smacking his riot stick against his own thigh.

Griff rubbed his eyes, turned away from the unadorned cinder-block wall, and peered briefly across at the man. Then he rolled back onto his side, again facing the wall, utterly drained. The nightmares arising from his battle against Ebola weren’t an every night thing, but even after a decade, they still occurred frequently enough, and as vivid and inexorable as ever.

The guard moved to the side of Griff’s institutional cot and slapped him with force on the bare sole of his foot.

Unwilling to give the brute the satisfaction of hearing him cry out, Griff clenched his teeth against the stinging and gripped his heavy beard. He had practice dealing with pain. It would take more than a smack on the foot to get a reaction from him. Much more. Over the nearly nine months he had been in solitary confinement, all of the prison guards had been abusive to one extent or another. But Spinelli had been the worst. If physically possible, there was no way he would give the sadist any satisfaction. Still, it wasn’t worth provoking him.

“What do you want, Spinelli?”

“Put on your Sunday best, Rhodes. You’re leaving.”

“What?”

“Just what I said. You’re out of here.”

“Nine months in this cell with an hour a day walking in the yard alone, and all of a sudden, just like that, I’m out of here? This your idea of funny?”

“I wish. It’s real. Straight from the warden.”

“What’s going on?”

“I got no idea. When you get out there—” he motioned to the small barred window overlooking the exercise yard, “why don’t you ask the guys in that chopper?”