USAMRIID

She should have prepared herself.

“He’s getting a treatment,” Platt told her as he led her through the cinder-block hallways.

Maggie had dressed back in her street clothes. It was amazing how something that simple could feel so good. She had to leave behind the purple-flowered jacket. It had been confiscated early on because of Mary Louise’s vomit. A splatter on her sleeve. The one thing that separated Maggie’s fate from Cunningham’s.

Funny how life was, Maggie thought. As an FBI agent she had come face-to-face with killers, been sliced on, shot at and left for dead in a freezer. But she never would have guessed that life or death could depend on her proximity to a little girl’s vomit.

“How is Mary Louise?” she asked Platt as they continued through the maze of hallways. She didn’t expect any details. He’d already made it clear none of the others’ conditions were something he would discuss.

“She’s good,” he said, glancing back at her. “So far.”

They came to the end of a hallway and he punched in a code then slid a key card through the designated slot. This time the hiss of the air-lock door didn’t make Maggie’s stomach plunge. Platt stopped with his hand on the door handle and looked back at Maggie again. She caught his apprehension.

“You’re not used to seeing him like this,” Platt warned her.

Maggie figured Platt was an Army colonel. It was part of his job to make things sound more dramatic, to take everything at its most serious level. He had to overcompensate especially in life-or-death matters.

She followed him into the viewing room and immediately noticed that all the monitors and equipment were humming, flashing, beeping a steady rhythm. She stayed away from the glass wall that separated this room from the small hospital room. She tried not to draw the attention of the two spacemen working inside the room. They were hanging IVs, double bags, one clear liquid, another possibly blood or plasma. Maggie couldn’t tell, either way, there were enough tubes to warrant something serious. And there was the equipment. Though she couldn’t hear the hiss or whirl or beeps, she saw one of the spacemen pushing buttons on machines and monitors and could see their correspondence to some of the computer screens in the dark outside room where she and Platt stood.

At first Maggie concentrated on the spacemen and their smooth, deliberate movements. They worked together seamlessly, not at all encumbered by the suits but almost as if in slow motion. It was like watching the Discovery Channel, only with the sound muted.

One of the spacemen went to the other side of the room and then Maggie saw the man in the bed.

She didn’t recognize him at first. His salt-and-pepper hair looked thin, his face pasty white. His eyes were closed. Tubes ran from his arms and nose to the equipment beside the bed. He looked smaller than his six-foot athletic frame. Smaller and so vulnerable. She stared at him, watching for something that would connect this helpless figure to her energetic boss.

“Mary Louise hasn’t broken with any of the symptoms.” Platt startled her. She had forgotten he was standing right beside her. “The virus may have been lying dormant inside her. It’s difficult to understand, sometimes almost impossible to explain. It’s a parasite, jumping from host to host, completely destroying one while only traveling in others. It may never show up in her. Just like you.”

They stood there silently for what seemed a long time. Maggie swore she could hear her own breathing, a vibrating force inside a wind tunnel that sounded like staggered gasps. She had to be imagining it. Maybe it was simply one of the machines.

“But Cunningham isn’t so lucky?” she finally said, glancing at Platt. He was looking straight ahead. “He already has symptoms?” And this came in a whisper she hardly recognized as her own. Maybe she was having problems breathing.

“Yes,” he said.

“You’ve already seen it? In his blood?”

Hesitation. A long enough pause that she had to look over at him, again. This time he let her have his eyes and she saw it there before he said, “Yes.”