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She didn’t like it when things weren’t exactly to plan. Then again, she’d never been in charge of an epidemic before.
He could be doing so much more for her. He could be talking her through all this, helping her out. Liaising more with the team back at the DPA—even if that did mean dealing with Evan Hunter.
He knew all this stuff inside out and back to front.
But he just couldn’t.
It didn’t matter that he was stuck in the middle of all this. There was a line he didn’t want to cross. He had to take a step back. He had to focus on the sick children.
He picked up another disposable gown and mask. “The IV fluids on the kids probably need changing. I’m going to go and check on them.” He paused and turned his head just as he left. “You need to go and make an announcement to all the staff. You need to bring them up to date on the information that you have.” He hesitated, then added something else.
“It’s not only the natives that will be getting restless. We’ve got patients here who’ve been quarantined. They won’t understand what’s going on. They won’t know what to tell their relatives.”
She gave the slightest nod, as if the thought of what she was going to say was pressing down on her shoulders. He almost withered. “There’s a public address system at the front desk—use that.”
His phone beeped and he headed out of the room and down the corridor, pulling the phone from his pocket.
Violet.
He should have known.
No, he should have texted her first. She must be frantic.
He flicked the switch to silent and pushed it back into his pocket. She would just have to wait. He would deal with her later.
Callie could hear the raised voices as she strode down the corridor. “Why can’t I leave? I’m fine. If I stay here, I’ll get sick. You can’t make me stay!”
It was inevitable. People always reacted like this when there was an outbreak. It was human nature.
The hard part was that Callie didn’t want to be here any more than they did. But she couldn’t exactly say that, could she?
The reality check was starting to sink in. She was in a strange city, in the middle of a possible outbreak of a disease that had supposedly been eradicated. She wasn’t ready for this. If she closed her eyes for just a second, she could see Isabel in the middle of all this. This had been her dream from childhood—to work at the DPA at the cutting edge of infectious disease. She wouldn’t be feeling like this. She wouldn’t be feeling sick to her stomach and wanting to go and hide in a corner. Isabel would be center stage, running everything with a precise touch.
But Isabel wasn’t here.
And that was Callie’s fault. Her beautiful older sister had died six years earlier. Callie had been behind the wheel of their old car, taking a corner too fast—straight into the path of someone on the wrong side of the road. If only she hadn’t been distracted—been fighting with her sister. Over something and nothing.
That was the thing that twisted the most. It was the same argument they’d had for years. Pizza or burgers. Something ridiculous. Something meaningless. How pathetic.
She fixed her gaze on the scene ahead. Isabel would know exactly how to handle a man like Sawyer. She would have had him eating out of her hand in five minutes flat.
Okay, maybe not five minutes.
Sawyer probably wasn’t the type.
But, then, Isabel had been a people person. She’d known how to respond to people, she’d known how to work a crowd. All the things that Callie didn’t have a clue about.
The voices were rising. Things were reaching a crescendo.
It was time to step up. Whether she liked it or not, it was time to take charge.
She pushed her way through the crowd around the desk and jumped up onto the reception area desk. “Is this the PA system?”
The clerk gave her a nod as she picked up the microphone and held it to her mouth. Adrenaline was starting to course through her system. All eyes were on her. She could do this. She pressed the button on the microphone and it let out a squeal from automatic feedback. Anyone who hadn’t been listening before was certainly listening now.
“Hi, everyone. I’m sure you know I’m Callie Turner from the DPA. Let me bring you up to speed.”
The anxiety in the room was palpable. The eyes staring at her were full of fear.
“You all know that we’re dealing with two suspected cases of smallpox. That’s the reason why the E.R. has been closed and we’ve enforced a quarantine. The samples have been collected and sent to the DPA lab for identification. The laboratory tests for smallpox are complicated and time-consuming. We should hear back in around forty-eight hours what type of virus it is—whether it’s a type of pox or not—but it takes longer to identify what strain of virus it is. That can take anything up to seven days. So, until we know if it’s a pox or not, we need to stay here. We need to try and contain this virus.”
“I don’t want to be in isolation,” one of the men shouted.
“You’re not,” Callie said quickly. “You’re quarantined—there’s a difference. Isolation means separating people who are ill with a contagious disease from healthy people. The children who are affected have been isolated. Quarantine restricts the movement of people who have been exposed to someone or something, to see if they will become ill. That’s what we’re doing with all of you.” Her hand stretched out across the room.
She could still feel the tension. Anxious glances being exchanged between staff and patients. She could see the questions forming on their lips. Best to keep going.
She tried to keep her voice calm. “The incubation period for smallpox is around twelve days but it can range from seven to seventeen days. Smallpox is spread person to person by droplet transmission. It can also be spread by contact with pustules or rash lesions or contaminated clothing or bedding.
“A person with smallpox is considered infectious when the rash appears, but at the moment we’re going to consider any affected person infectious from the onset of fever. This should help us control any outbreak. It’s important to remember that only close contacts—those who were within six or seven feet of the infectious person should be at risk.”
She was talking too quickly, trying to put out too much information at once. She was hoping and praying that someone wouldn’t pick up on the fact that they could be quarantined together for seventeen days.
“Should? What do you mean, ‘should’? Don’t you know?”
Callie took a deep breath. She didn’t blame people for being angry. She would be angry too. But as she opened her mouth to speak, Sawyer got in there first. He’d appeared out of nowhere, stepping up alongside her, his hand closing over hers as he took the PA microphone from her.
“This isn’t like some disaster movie, folks. A person with smallpox doesn’t walk, coughing and spluttering, through a crowd and infect everyone around them. For a start, most people infected with smallpox don’t cough anyway. And the last data available from the DPA shows that the average person affected can infect around five to seven people. And those would only be the close contacts around them. Let’s not panic. Let’s keep this in perspective.”
She was watching him, her breath caught her in throat. He was doing what she should be doing. He was keeping calm and giving them clear and easy-to-understand information.
Part of her felt angry. And part of her felt relief.
She was out of her depth and she knew it.
The DPA was a big place. And she