at all.
16
The woman’s bite had been neater, but it had also been in her face, as if the zombie had tried to tear off her cheek. ‘I can’t tell how much damage was bite and how much was excised afterward.’
Rogers answered, ‘The patient wouldn’t sign off on the surgery to excise her wound. It was only after the patient realized that the disease was going to do more damage to her face than the surgery that she agreed to it, but it was too late. The disease had made its way to her brain and there was nothing we could do. I cut away as much of the infected tissue as I could, but when I realized that it wouldn’t save her life, I did what I could to make her comfortable. Once this thing gets into a major organ that is needed to sustain life there isn’t anything we can do, except pump them full of painkillers and make them comfortable until the end.’
I stopped looking down at the woman’s ravaged face and back up at him. ‘Is that why Sheriff Callahan is pumped up on pain meds? Has it reached a major organ system?’ My pulse sped a little, but outwardly I was calm, my best blank cop face forward.
‘No, the disease is also incredibly painful, and since we can only slow it, not stop it, we make the patients as comfortable as possible.’
‘You swear,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘I swear, Rush was lucky it was an arm wound. I was able to take a lot of the flesh. I thought I’d gotten it all, honestly, but it’s as if you can’t cut fast enough to stay ahead of it. If we hadn’t had the earlier patients to treat so we knew to put him on massive full-spectrum antibiotics and use the hyperbaric chamber, it would have spread everywhere by now, but we’re learning more with every patient.’
‘Why didn’t you excise flesh from the man’s shoulder wound?’ I asked.
‘He was the first we found alive. The emergency room doctor tried treating it as less virulent than it turned out to be. In his defense, you see the mess that the wound was. The thing really tore at him, so it was treated as a regular zombie bite, since they carry their own types of infection. By the time the attending doctor called me in it was simply too late. The infection had reached the man’s heart, and there was nothing we could do.’
‘Are you saying that his heart was rotted away?’ I asked.
Dr Shelley answered that question. ‘Yes, it was quite decayed. I’d never seen anything like it. You can see that the flesh on most of the chest is clean and looks healthy, but when I did the autopsy the heart looked more like the area around the initial wound.’
‘Why did his heart rot? Why her brain? Why didn’t it eat the outer healthy flesh first?’ I asked.
‘We aren’t a hundred percent certain,’ Rogers said, ‘but we think that this infection enters the bloodstream through the bite and rides the blood into a major organ system and rots from both ends, so to speak.’
‘So, bad luck about the face bite hitting the brain,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘And if you’d known to excise the shoulder wound on the man, then he might have been able to hold on,’ I said.
‘If he’d been a later victim instead of one of the first, I believe his odds would have been as good as the sheriff’s,’ Rogers said.
I didn’t like the way he said it, not that Rush would make it, but better odds, but we all knew that unless a miracle cure showed up, it was just a matter of time for Micah’s dad. He and I had gotten on the plane knowing that, but still … I shook it off and concentrated on work, clues, we needed fucking clues. If we couldn’t save Micah’s dad, then maybe we could find who raised the aberrant zombies and kill them. Revenge wasn’t a substitute for saving his dad, not even close, but sometimes it’s the best you can do, and it beats the hell out of nothing, or that’s what I was going to keep telling myself until I couldn’t believe it anymore.
‘Where are the earlier victims, the ones who died even faster than shoulder-wound here?’
Rogers and Shelley exchanged a look; it wasn’t a look you see often between doctors, especially when one of them is a trauma surgeon and the other