DEAD IN BED By Bailey Simms: The Complete Second Book

PART 10, SECTION 6

The only secure, windowless space in the dwellings was a dusty room that abutted directly against the cliff wall. It must have once been used for storing corn.

Now, we used it to hold Doug Bottorff.

He was a huge, blonde grain farmer, and it took six of us carrying him by his overalls to get him through the door. He struggled every inch of the way, lost in whatever frenzy he'd fallen into when he'd grabbed that teen girl. Chris took a blood sample from Doug's meaty forearm while we tried to keep him from biting us. He'd already lost the ability to speak completely. A few of us secured the doorway by stacking loose sandstone slabs like bricks over the threshold. Doug was so big, though, that he may have been capable of breaking through even this heavy barricade. A couple of the guys volunteered to keep a rotating watch until Chris and I could figure out how to get a better handle on this unexpected problem. We'd never had to deal with such advanced TGV symptoms at the dwellings before.

"He hardly has any red blood cells at all." Chris peered intensely into his stolen microscope, examining Doug's blood sample. "I don't understand!" he exclaimed. "How did he progress so fast? While he was on antibiotics?"

I knew what Chris was thinking.

If Doug Bottorff could suddenly leap to stage three under medication, the same could happen to pretty much anyone else.

Chris sat cross-legged on his room's stone floor, surrounded my his makeshift bio-chemistry lab. He'd ventured into Muldoon three or four times that winter to break into hospital store rooms and high school chemistry classrooms. His floor was cluttered with tablet-counting machines, empty antibiotics packaging, stacks of blood-collection bags with butterfly needles, and boxes of venipuncture kits. Ever since he'd gotten ahold of the microscope he was now cradling in his lap, he'd been able to test for TGV visually, eliminating our need for test applicators. Now he looked up from the microscope and leaned against the stone wall.

"The pathogen is becoming resistant to the antibiotics." He shrugged with ominous resignation. "That's the only explanation. We're screwed. All the antibiotics in the world won't help us now."

For a moment I imagined the horror of the entire dwellings population devolving into stage three. Would we have to establish our own self-regulated quarantine areas? At a certain point we might have no other choice. I felt sick just thinking about it.

I tried to stay calm. "Let's just see what we're up against first." I'd been sharing with Chris whatever tacit leadership role we'd fallen into for long enough now to know that he responded best to pragmatism, even with a massive hangover. "We should test everyone," I suggested. "See who's advancing and who's not. Most of the new arrivals aren't even infected . . . or, they didn't come here infected anyway."

Chris closed his eyes and leaned against the wall. "By the sound of things this morning?" He shook his head." Our little creepy-crawlies are happily setting up camp in all kinds of new hosts about right now."

A line of refugees had already formed outside Chris's door, waiting to be tested.

He threw aside the blanket and called out, "We're testing everybody now!" His voice echoed through the ravine. "Everybody line up! Pretty please with sugar on top, and all that. Just line up. We gotta find out who's newly positive and who's progressing. If you're positive already or even slightly at risk, line up!"

Chris asked the first refugee at his door—a librarian type who looked like she'd never even read a book about sex—to hold out her forearm. He gently plunged a butterfly needle into her vein. She winced with pain. The fluid that leapt through the tubing and into the small collection vial wasn't red. It wasn't even close: it was a dull, greasy yellow.

Chris looked at me and shook his head.

"Gonna be a long morning."

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