Patient Zero

5.

The medical ship HMS Agatha pitched and yawed slowly in the sluggish rollers that wandered across the Arabian Sea. It was a blistering night in mid-July and the staff had brought some of the more ambulatory soldiers on deck to allow them to get some relief from the sluggish breeze that moved across the wave tops. Some of the men and women were so badly injured that even the breeze gave no trace of relief, and of these the burn victims suffered most. Hot winds, poor air-conditioning belowdecks, and salt spray were each separate tortures.

But the man who sat alone in a wheelchair by the stern rail never voiced a single word of complaint. His face and hands were swathed heavily in gauze and one eye was clouded to a milky whiteness. The doctors had said that it had been virtually boiled in his skull. How the man had made it through the desert was a total mystery. He had no fingerprints left, but a DNA test revealed that his name was Steven Garrett, a medic assigned to a British unit that had been virtually wiped out during a series of suicide raids by insurgents. The burned man was incoherent with pain and once he’d been medivacked to the air station and then shuttled to the Agatha he had lapsed into a total silence. His experiences had broken him, the doctors agreed. Poor man.

The ship steered west toward the Gulf of Aden and then turned northwest into the Red Sea. The burned man watched the sun set over the rocky hills. He closed his eyes and bowed his head.

Next to him sat a slim young man with cat-green eyes and dark hair. He, too, was burned, but not badly. He wore a bandage on his face and one on his neck; and even though his hands were wrapped in gauze he held the other man’s hand, like a father would. Or a brother.

The badly burned man looked at him for a while and then stared back at the setting sun.

“Amirah ” he whispered.

His companion patted his hand again and smiled. “Shhh,” Toys whispered as the ship plowed on out of troubled waters.

The End