Mercy 6

She remembered to eat. The cafeteria surprised her. All tables were occupied. Groups had set up camp at every one, coats and bags saving seats, table surfaces strewn with empty cups, stacked dishes and trays. Clutter from the booths spilled into the pathways. Three workers from physical plant had been sent to help with the busing and sweeping. The restroom doors were propped open. The bleach smell was singular, sharp, a full erasure. The physical plant people wore tool belts, and the leather hung low on their hips as they pushed brooms and gathered litter into bags.

Mendenhall felt a pang, a crawling behind her eyes. Meeks and Dozier would have been down here. They might have been friends with these others. The bleached air stung tears to her eyes. She used the sleeve at the inside of her elbow to press them away.

Food and water supplies that had been trucked in were stacked in plastic-wrapped pallets. The vending machines were empty. The crowd was noisy, bursts of laughter here and there. Mendenhall broke the seal on a nearby pallet and helped herself to a box of granola bars. She started to do the same with a stack of water bottles, but a security officer touched her wrist with a baton. His uniform had the same piping as that worn by her dislocated-shoulder patient in the ER. This guy was even bigger.

She considered the baton on her wrist, her fingers on the bottle.

She maintained the pose, studied his face. His expression was blank, his gaze aimed at her throat. She removed her fingers from the bottle. The baton tip lingered on her wrist. She returned the box of granola bars. The bleach air and the officer’s pale features fit too well and killed her appetite.

“I was gonna pay,” she told him. “I always do it this way. I’m from ER. We have to go here and back. It’s weird, isn’t it, that they put us on the same floor? Food and blood.”

She could have left it there. But there was a downturn in his lips. It wouldn’t have affected her except that it appeared delivered, a rote response, a passing down of judgment.

“I’ve seen the dead,” she told him. “All six, inside and out. I got them first. I have touched them all. I have breathed their breath.”

She spread her hand in front of his face.

He didn’t flinch. His voice was throaty, boyish. “I know who you are. We all do.”

“So what are your orders for me?” she asked. “Like shoot to kill?”

He folded his arms across his chest and centered himself between the pallets, stared at the cafeteria chaos.

“What was it like being sent in?” she asked. She aligned herself next to him, watched, thought of going to parades as a kid. “A thrill, I bet. Telling yourselves you’re being sent in to save people, sacrificing. But really it’s the power and the secrets. The game.”

She studied his jaw. It was shiny, freshly shaved. The bleach scent could have been his cologne.

“Have you ever seen virions? Did they show you pictures?

They look like spaceships. Different types of spaceships. They have geometric capsules — some spherical, some octagonal. They have landing gear, tripods, suction cups, drills. But those are only the ones we can find. They hide. In different ways, in different places, in various disguises. They aren’t alive, but neither are they inanimate.”

She waved a hand in front of his face. His eyes remained still.

“They didn’t, did they? They didn’t show you pictures of a virus.”

She positioned herself in front of him, faced him. “But they showed you a picture of me.”

She backed away. “Think about that. When you think.”

Back in her cubicle, she sipped from a little carton of warm milk she had swiped from a tray. It tasted of chlorine, the chemical still in her nose. She visited the forum. More sympathy from ERs in Mexico City, Denver, and Istanbul. They referred to her cases as the Mercy Six. There were rumors of similar cases emerging. In Tokyo. In Hong Kong. Rumors were to be expected. But Mendenhall had seen the helicopter, and so she worried.

Her mentor had taught her to examine and divide her emotions, especially the surface ones. It was important to learn this in the ER, a way to avoid conflating the stream of patients, injuries, conditions. The worry connected to the helicopter felt new to her, not part of the diagnosis for the Mercy Six. So what she feared was not overreaction but policy. Maybe this was selfish, a fear of losing even more control. Maybe it was objective, rooted in her earliest intuition: not infection, not viral — but we make it so by thinking and acting that way.

A message from the outside invaded her screen. It was a query from a reporter with the Times, a T. Ben-Curtis. The presumptive tone led her to believe it was a man. He assumed she would want to respond, couched his message in her need, hid his sex. He just wanted to know how it had started in the ER, how it looked. He wanted to put faces to the names involved. Following protocol, she forwarded the query to Dmir.