Mercy 6

“Then you go in first,” she told him. “Set things up for me, let me in. That will be most efficient. I need to make an appearance on my floor. I don’t want to look like a runaway.”

23

The building continued to shift. Arriving from the subbasement, Mendenhall sensed a gathering and sliding of weight in the important floors above, the strides of those assuming charge and knowledge. Others, she imagined, lingered close to doors and windows, false exits. Her own floor was escaping her. Her nine patients appeared pushed aside, separated now by a blank slot along the wall. They didn’t look at her as she passed them, did not offer that expression of salvation reserved for the doctor. At the nurses’ station, two dressed in ID purple had sequestered counter space.

Both were focused on their notebook screens.

Mendenhall slipped into her cubicle. Someone, probably Pao Pao, had left her an orange juice. She drank it, felt the physical need rush through her. It was proper medicine to treat the Meeks case as evidence for further containment. She knew this, but she did not feel it. She was beginning to fear she couldn’t trust her instincts, wondered how much they were skewed by what she sensed from the floors above and what might be happening outside.

On her screen, she entered the trauma forum and started a discussion thread for the five cases. She usually enjoyed this part of her profession. Rarely did ER specialists get to partake of such deliberation and exchange. Even in a worldwide exchange, their cases almost never lasted long enough for true discussion, ending in demise or reassignment to the real specialists.

She kept her information blunt and scientific, using Claiborne’s summations, reserving her doubts. She merely asked for similarities.

She knew Thorpe — one of his techs anyway — would monitor this exchange. She liked to imagine that her mentor checked them. She used that for control.

Within the moment it took her to rest her eyes on the bay, the Thorpe tech added corrections and extensions. Good wishes and promises came from ERs in Calcutta and Dublin. Then one more from Montreal, who had heard.

What usually emerged from these forums were strange ways that people died or didn’t die. Patients hauled from the bottom of frozen rivers who were revived after several hours, unharmed, relating dreamy visions of the underside of the ice. Or the Phineas Gages of the world, those who staggered from death, dazed, changed, alive.

24

Mullich let her into Pathology. Claiborne was not there. Silva stood facing the far wall, the screens showing the hollow body outlines above her. There was already one for Meeks, showing the same trauma pattern, his passing through the left torso, the upper lobe of the lung and shoulder muscles. All five body patterns were gridded, set in sublimate position, arms and legs slightly spread, hands turned and open. She thought of the Da Vinci sketches. Silva said nothing, did not acknowledge Mendenhall’s arrival.

Mullich stood before the adjacent wall, his screens showing floor and building diagrams, points of discovery marked by red dots. Mullich, at least, was facing her.

“I blame you,” she told him. “Mostly.”

He offered a confused expression.

“You and your building,” she said, “for taking me away from my medicine. Away from where I should’ve stayed. Inside the bodies.

Inside what I know.”

“You don’t strike me as the blaming type.”

“I’m trying to be different.” She turned to Silva, who remained facing her work, manipulating the overhead screens. “And you, too.

For calling me out.”

Silva did not turn around but flexed her shoulders. The black line of her ponytail remained still and straight down the middle of her small back.

Mendenhall gazed at the digital bodies, the tornadic patterns passing through them, the peripheral smudges marring the grid lines.

Mullich started discussing floors and then the bodies. Fleming, Verdasco, and Peterson, he said, were particular to single floors: Four, Three, and Two. Dozier and Meeks, by occupation, roamed all floors and subbasements.

“According to precedent, that indicates something airborne, the progression being strictly vertical despite the free roamers. Like Legionnaires’.”

But it was as though she heard the outside of his words, only the echo.

“The odds,” said Mendenhall. “What are the odds? That Meeks and Dozier happened to be on different floors? From each other?

From the others?”

“Three to one,” replied Mullich. Again the echo.

She had moved on. She spoke to Silva’s back. “Can you shift the bodies to their found positions?”

From a laptop below the screens, Silva curled each body into its found position. Verdasco was the only one who hadn’t moved, who hadn’t fallen or collapsed. She studied the tornadic pattern across his bronchus. She looked away to refresh, caught Mullich’s blueprint, felt her heart rate increase but did not know why.

“Move all the bodies into their positions before collapse.” Her own words registered as echoes.

“We don’t have the new one yet.”