LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter Two

      It seemed only a few minutes had passed before someone touched my shoulder, jostling me awake. Blearily, I opened my eyes and glanced up at Maggie, who stood over me with a half-worried, half-reluctant expression.

      “Yeah?” I mumbled, struggling to sit up.

      “Sorry, Miss Kylie.” Maggie bit her lip. “But, I wanted to let you know, Mr. Johnson just passed away.”

      I sighed, scrubbing a hand over my eyes, grief and anger and disappointment flaring up momentarily. “All right, I’ll be right out. Thank you, Maggie.”

      She nodded and scurried away. Standing, I put my fingers to my temples, massaging the headache pounding behind my eyes.

      Dammit. Another one lost. Another life taken by the plague, and I couldn’t do anything about it. Eric had been right; this was futile. Those people out there, coughing and gagging and fighting to breathe, they wouldn’t survive. Not at this stage of the virus. But I couldn’t abandon them. I’d promised my patients I would fight to the end, and that was what I was going to do.

      Grabbing my coat, which I’d tossed on the desk before falling into unconsciousness, I walked out of the office.

      And ran smack into a large, solid chest as I emerged, yawning and rubbing my face. With a yelp, I stumbled back, looking up into Ben Archer’s worried brown eyes.

      “Sorry.” His deep voice held traces of alarm, and I gave him a wary look. “I need to talk to you. Something is wrong with Nate, and I don’t know what to do for him.”

      My head pounded. The stress, disappointment, and looming sense of pointlessness were starting to get to me, but I put my feelings aside to focus on what I had to do.

      “Walk with me.” I started down the hall, and he followed at my side. The clinic was dark now, as evening stole in through the door and cloaked everything in shadow. I could hear the generators out back, humming away, but we were running out of gas, and not much power was left for lights.

      We reached the spot where Nathan was being kept, one of the smaller rooms that was separated from the main wing, away from the sick. A chair stood in the corner, probably where Ben had been sitting. Jenna hovered next to the patient, looking grim.

      The man on the bed groaned, sounding delirious. He was definitely paler, and blood had soaked through the bandages on his arm. But what was most worrying was the red fluid seeping from beneath his eyelids. It oozed slowly over his cheeks, cutting two crimson paths down his skin, and it could be only one thing.

      I swabbed it with a cotton ball, just to be sure. Yes, it was definitely blood. Ben came up behind me, peering over my shoulder.

      “What’s wrong with him?”

      “I...don’t know.” Though I hated admitting it. Peeling back his lids, I shone a light over his pupils, checking for wounds or scratches. Nothing. “The only thing I can think of is a subconjunctival hemorrhage, or Ebola, as unlikely as that is. Sadly, the only way to know for sure would be to conduct blood tests, but we don’t have any way to do that here. We’ll just have to keep him under surveillance and see what happens.”

      I caught a whiff of something foul, rotten, like the stench of a decaying animal, and my heart sank. Frowning, I shooed Ben out of the way and bent over the wounded man, gently unwrapping the gauze to see the wounds on his arm.

      The wounds were clean. The skin around them was still puffy and red, but the bites themselves looked fine. Or at least not infected. And yet, I could still smell the faint stench of rot and decay that suggested gangrene or wounds that had gone septic.

      Then I realized it wasn’t coming off his arm, but the body as a whole.

      Puzzled, I cleaned and rebandaged the arm, feeling Ben’s worried eyes on me the whole time. Nathan groaned and tossed restlessly, and I finally gave him a shot of morphine to calm him down. As his tortured thrashing stilled and he drifted into a drugged sleep, I heard Ben take a ragged breath.

      “He’s getting worse.”

      I turned to face him, wiping my hands. “There’s no infection, as far as I can see. His fever is getting worse, yes, but we’ve done all we can for him now. We just have to wait and see if he pulls out of it.” Ben sagged, looking lost and hopeless, unsure what to do. Sinking into the chair, he ran both hands over his face and sighed.

      I hesitated. Then, not really knowing why, I walked over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m not giving up,” I told him softly. “And you shouldn’t, either. Why don’t you get some sleep? There’s an extra cot in the office if you need it. I’ll let you know if there are any changes.”

      He looked up with a faint, grateful smile. “Thank you,” he murmured. “But, if it’s all the same, I’d like to stay. I should be here if...anything happens to him.”

      “Miss Kylie.” Maggie walked into the room. The petite intern smiled shyly at Ben before turning to me. “Sorry to interrupt, but Jenna wanted to know if you’d like us to move Mr. Johnson’s body to the back lot now or down to storage.”

      I stifled a groan. “I don’t think Mr. Johnson will fit in any of the storage units we have down there,” I said, aware of how morbid this must sound to Ben. It had become so commonplace to us now, we didn’t even think about it anymore. “If you and Jenna will get him on a gurney, I’ll take him out back.”

      She nodded and padded away, and Ben gave me a worried look. “Out back?”

      “There’s an empty lot we’ve been using for body storage,” I said tiredly. “When the freezers downstairs get full, we move them outside. This place was set up pretty fast, so it didn’t come with a proper morgue. We’ve had to improvise.”

      “You’re going outside? Now?”

      “I can’t leave a cadaver lying on a bed all night.”

      He rose swiftly, his gaze narrowing. “I’ll come with you.”

      I frowned at his sudden change of mood. “There’s no need. I’m capable of handling a dead body by myself. Besides—” I glanced back toward the bed “—I thought you wanted to stay with your friend.”

      “Please.” He took a step forward, not intimidating, but intense. “Let me help. It’s the least I can do.”

      There was more to it than that, I thought. I wasn’t stupid. He was still hiding something, and I was going to find out what. Just not tonight. I was tired, my head hurt and I didn’t want to fight him. “All right,” I sighed. “If you think you can stomach working with a dead body, then I’ll put those muscles of yours to work. Follow me.”

      We walked back to the main room, where Maggie and Jenna were struggling to load the body onto a gurney. In times past, I’d had a couple of the male interns perform this task. But they were gone now; it was just the three of us left.

      Plus Ben. Who didn’t flinch as he hefted Mr. Johnson onto the cart, handling the body like he might a sick calf. His face remained businesslike as he laid the corpse down gently, and Jenna and Maggie gaped at him.

      As I covered the body with a sheet, I caught a faint hint of rot coming off the corpse. What the hell? It hadn’t even been an hour since Mr. Johnson had passed; there was no way the body would start to decompose so quickly.

      “What

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