Mercy 6

Indication to find and identify. It doesn’t mean panic. It doesn’t mean containment. It means work for me. For us.”

Mendenhall could not help inverting his first premise. It was what she did. It was what she had been taught. It was why she had gone to that abandoned file room. She closed her eyes and went there in her thoughts, just for the moment it took her to think out the inversion. Trauma that produces virulent hemorrhaging.

“I know what you’re thinking,” said Claiborne, “and it makes no sense. Not with what we have. Not with time and placement. It all happened here. Inside.”

Mendenhall looked across the lab at Mullich’s displays.

Claiborne followed her gaze.

“He’s doing it right, too,” said Claiborne. “Using you right.

Finding patterns. Hopefully a center.”

Mendenhall looked at Silva.

“No,” said Claiborne. “She’s doing it right, too. Don’t go there.”

“You’ll get me fired.” Silva returned their looks.

“I want you to keep coming down here, Doctor.” Again

Claiborne opened his hands to her. “Because it will help you up there.” He motioned toward the ceiling. “And it’s helping us down here. But not if you’re going to fight every finding. For fight’s sake.”

Mendenhall rubbed her own shoulders, kneaded them, resisting the urge to press her eyes and face. “When does containment end, then? Assuming no more outbreak. Assuming Thorpe disregards those last hystericals.”

“All early cultures and tests are negative. But he staggered the patients. We’ll go home in the morning.”

She nodded as she looked down, felt Silva watching her.

Mendenhall liked how Claiborne called them patients. His patients were neither dead nor alive. Even the dead ones, for him, kept giving.

“Thorpe’s good,” said Claiborne. “Maybe even a good person.

He’s just intense. How he should be — for what he does.”

Mendenhall disagreed, felt it as the beginning of a shudder but let it go. She stayed there and looked at their scans, all of the clouds and lines and patterns. She found solace in the quiet movements of Claiborne and Silva, in the violin and chill and distilled air. But she went into her own world.

Cause of trauma affects treatment. A stab, a bullet, a toxin, blunt force call for distinct treatments. But only in the in-between, the sometimes long-between. First you treat the trauma itself. You hold a hand, say something, apply pressure, anodyne. Last you make sure to treat the trauma again, try to end it. If you don’t, the patient is damaged forever, dies.

And the inverse of Claiborne’s premise — his sound premise, the one they were all working under — stayed with her. Trauma produces virulent reaction.

17

But circumstance canceled trauma as the first cause. Circumstance allowed for virus as first cause, trauma as result, trauma as cause of demise. Mendenhall needed to do some research, five minutes on her screen. She stood aside in Pathology, still watching Silva and Claiborne. Claiborne, she could see, was getting ready to send the bodies into drawers. He was measuring Verdasco with a laser pen, the numbers scrolling onto the overhead. The thought of returning to her floor depressed Mendenhall.

Silva was starting to close out Mullich’s laptop.

“Wait,” Mendenhall told her, then stepped close.

Silva raised her brow.

“Can I use that?” Mendenhall asked. “Mullich won’t mind. In fact he’d prefer it. So he can see what I’m doing.”

Silva deferred to Claiborne. Claiborne fired his laser pen at Mendenhall’s heart. She touched the red dot.

“I’m not fighting. Look, this way you can see right away what I’m thinking. Please, Dr. Claiborne. It’s nice down here.”

Claiborne returned to his task.

Mendenhall sat before Mullich’s laptop, and Silva went to assist Claiborne. They listened to the single violin. Mendenhall felt her movements slow along with the rest of the room. She breathed, tasted the air as it dried her lips and tongue. The paper scroll beside the laptop was a blueprint of the hospital, a vertical. The ER was the longest rectangle. The roof was two brackets, opened to the sky, the empty blue.

On screen she brought up a recent study of hydrostatic shock.

The accompanying video showed a rectangular block of gel being penetrated by a bullet in super slow-motion. The visual study showed a series of shots, each successive one lowering the caliber of the projectile while increasing velocity. The experiment aimed to demonstrate the value of velocity over the size of the caliber.

The final demonstration showed a missile the size of a shotgun pellet passing through the gel at extreme velocity. On initial impact, a large cone of air instantly expanded the gel block, distorting it into an oval, almost exploding the entire block. Swirls of distorted gel spiraled outward, barely contained by the membrane, forming translucent waves. The pellet exited through a pinpoint at the tip of the cone, and the gel block returned to its original shape, but with coils of air caught along the perimeter and in the corners.