Alien Infection Read online

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  Double Dragon Publication

  www.double-dragon-ebooks.com

  Copyright ©2005 by Darrell Bain

  First published by DDP, January 2005

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  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in Canada by Double Dragon eBooks, a division of Double Dragon Publishing Inc. of Markham Ontario, Canada.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  Layout and Cover Illustration by Deron Douglas

  ISBN: 1-55404-213-5

  First Edition eBook Publication January 14, 2005

  To Lida Quillen. Thanks for all the support and help.

  CHAPTER ONE

  It could have happened to anyone. I just happened to be on duty in the lab that night when the accident victim came in.

  "Laboratory. Mister Brandon speaking,” I said very correctly, when the phone rang, already guessing what it would be. Most calls to the lab at that time of night were from either the emergency room or the intensive care unit and I had been to intensive care already just a few minutes ago. The blood from that patient was already in the chemistry unit being analyzed.

  It was the Emergency Room. I picked up the tray containing all the phlebotomy supplies by its handle, automatically checking to be sure I had enough of everything; needles, vacutainers, syringes for hard to get veins, special needles for the syringes, alcohol sponges, cotton balls, band-aids and so forth. Everything was there, as I knew it would be. Checking the phlebotomy tray was always the first thing I did when coming on duty; that and getting a fresh pot of coffee going. I'm a caffeine addict.

  Most small hospitals try to have the lab and X-Ray departments close to the emergency room but with Lamont Memorial in Lufkin, that wasn't the case. The building had grown in fits and starts as medical care changed and technology advanced. The lab was up on the second floor and down a long hall from the elevators. Most of the time I didn't wait on the elevators; I was getting old and needed to exercise. Taking the stairs when I got called was one way of getting it.

  "Hi Mike,” Sandy Jervis, the charge nurse said. “Room one."

  "Thanks,” I told her, not bothering to ask what the problem was. It really didn't matter to me. As long as I had been in the game, I had seen it all. Or thought I had.

  The patient was lightly strapped to the gurney, with the ER doc and another nurse busy working on him. Carla, one of the nursing students, handed me the lab request forms. I glanced at them, then at the patient, and wondered what they wanted me for. The man on the gurney looked as if he were already dead. His face had that whitish gray pallor of death and I couldn't see his chest moving. His clothes had been cut away and a bloody sheet was pulled back up onto his chest, showing a massive trauma to both of his legs, as if he had been run over by a vehicle. The doc and nurse both had blood on them, a no-good way to be working in this day of AIDS, Hepatitis, Avian Pneumonitis and God knows what else the terrorists might be cooking up. The wounds had stopped bleeding and simply gaped open. I could see both the tibia and fibula, the lower leg bones of one of his legs. Both were shattered like someone had gone in with a big nutcracker and purposely crushed them.

  "Is he still with us?” I asked.

  "Barely,” the doc said, then looked puzzled. “It's not typical shock trauma, but damned if I can find anything else wrong besides his legs. Witnesses said it was a high speed vehicle accident.” I didn't know the doctor's name. The hospital used contract docs for the ER and they came and went oftener than new Medicare regulations.

  Looking at the patient, I doubted there was much blood pressure and figured his veins would be hard to get into. I decided to go with a 20 cc syringe and 21 gauge needle rather than vacutainers or a butterfly. Hardly any of the younger techs even know how to use a syringe, but I think I mentioned earlier that I wasn't a youngster, not by a good many years.

  The patient's vein popped up when I put the tourniquet around his arm, much more visible than I had expected. I had just gotten all the blood I needed and withdrawn the needle when the patient gave a sudden spasm. Both of his arms jerked upward at the same time as his feet began thrashing, as if he wanted to run somewhere. The leg with the broken bones bent at an angle that was normally impossible, making it look like it had been torn off and stuck back on with glue-but I wasn't noticing that. His forearm hit my hand where I was still holding a piece of gauze on the puncture site and knocked it up into my other hand, the one holding the syringe of blood. I felt the prick of the needle entering my wrist.

  "Oh Goddamn!” I cursed loudly, jerking my hand away. The needle pulled out of my wrist but it was already too late, of course. If the patient had an infectious disease that could be transferred by blood, I probably had it now too. I had been holding the damn syringe at just the right angle for the force of the patient's arm to cause me to press on the syringe plunger, injecting a bit of his blood into my system.

  The doc and the nurse were busy trying to keep the patient from falling off the gurney and at the same time realigning the broken leg with an air cast. They couldn't spare me a glance and I knew they were assuming my curse was simply a reaction to the sudden movement of the patient.

  It had been a long night. I was tired and my feet were hurting and I didn't feel like filling out an incident report with all the time and paperwork it would entail. Besides, paperwork wouldn't do me a damn bit of good if I had caught something. I quickly transferred aliquots of blood to three different vacutainers, then removed the needle from the syringe, all the while concealing the dot of red on my wrist where the needle had hit me. I dropped the used needle into the disposal box, stripped off the disposable gloves and got out of there still cursing but silently. It had been a long while since I had gotten stuck by a contaminated needle, but it certainly wasn't the first time. That sort of thing is an occupational hazard for a lab tech, and a very dangerous one in this day of AIDS and Hepatitis C and all the other deadly diseases, but I'm a fatalist; I figured if I had caught anything, filling out an incident form wasn't going to make it go away. Later on I could run some tests on myself and see whether I had lucked out again-or hit the bad end of the jackpot.

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  Back in the lab, I set up the runs for a blood count and a chemistry panel on the patient with two of the tubes of blood, dropped one in a rack to begin cross-matching some blood for him and set the last one, the spare, in a rack in the back of the big refrigerator. The panel would take a while, but the blood count was finished in only a minute or two, a far cry from the old days when I was a youngster. Back then instruments were already in labs that did the numerical count of red and white blood cells, but the techs had to stain a slide and examine it under a high powe
r microscope to differentiate the white blood cells into separate categories that told the doctor whether and what type of disease might be present. That was hardly ever done these days except when the instrument gave odd results. Like right then.

  The blood analyzer dinged and flashed a light at me while it printed out the results. Not to get technical, but the counts were all screwed up, red and white blood cells alike. None of it made sense to the electronic sensors. The results didn't make sense to me, either.

  Either a cold agglutinin or advanced leukemia of some sort was my first thought. I glanced at my watch. It was almost time for the morning shift to begin showing up, but I still had time to make a slide and take a gander at what the blood looked like to the human eye. I began the preparations and that's when all the weirdness started.

  I heard the entrance door swing open and almost immediately there was a shout. “Stand where you are! Don't move!"

  I moved of course. When I turned around there was the ER doc, being shepherded by two grim looking men in suits. One of them wore a thin little mustache that didn't match the shade of his blond hair. The other was dark colored and had black, swept back hair. Both were wearing suits but what they also had in common was a scared but determined look on their faces.

  "Where's the blood? We want it, right now!"

  I had no idea what in hell was going on, but the muzzle of the gun one of the men was pointing at me got my attention quicker than seeing one of the nurses walk in naked would have.

  "What blood?” I asked, rather inanely, then said a little more forcefully. “Who the hell are you, anyway?"

  "Are you Michael Brandon? The lab tech?” The guy with the gun asked.

  "That's him,” the other one said after glancing at the name tag on my jacket. He was gripping the upper arm of the doc with a pressure so tight I could see him grimacing, but he wasn't making any attempt to get loose. As a matter of fact, he looked as scared as a whipped dog. For all my bravado, I probably didn't look much different.

  "The blood, mister. We want that blood you just drew in the Emergency room."

  "Give it to them!” The doc said. “They're from the government.” His voice trembled, matching the quiver of his body.

  I didn't see what that had to do with it, not then, but I wasn't going to argue with a gun. “It's in the rack there,” I told them, pointing to the rack by the blood counting instrument.

  Still keeping me covered with his weapon, the putative government agent strode over and plucked the tube of blood from the rack. He checked the name on it and dropped it into his pocket. “Is that all?"

  I walked over to the chemistry analyzer and gave him that tube of blood, too. “What's wrong? Does that patient have some bad disease?” I was remembering the needle sticking me in the wrist and felt my heart skip a beat.

  "None of your business,” the one holding the doc said. He turned to his companion. “We'll have to have these machines sequestered as a precaution. Get the results, too."

  I didn't wait. I picked up the card with the weird results from the counter where I had dropped it and handed it to the armed man. Just then, the chemistry run printed out and I gave him that report, too. I also asked again, “What's wrong with that patient?"

  "He's a terrorist,” the other agent, the one holding the doc said. “That's all you need to know."

  That was enough. If he was a terrorist, and given those badly abnormal results, along with the totally paranoid actions of the government men, it followed that he must be infected with a communicable disease and intended to spread it as far and wide as possible. I felt my heart jump again when I reached that conclusion, knowing that whatever he had, it was almost certainly a very bad bug-and now I had it, too.

  I think that the government men were planning on taking me into custody or question me some more. As vulnerable as I was feeling at the moment, I probably would have gone along with them, but just then one of their phones rang. The one with the gun pulled out his phone, thumbed it, listened for a minute, then cursed heatedly. “Come on!” He yelled to his companion. “That fucker got loose again!"

  The doc was shoved out of the way so rudely that he fell to his hands and knees. Both men rushed out of the lab, leaving me staring down at the doc and wondering whether I was having some kind of bad dream. Right then I wanted it to be a dream, believe me.

  I reached down and helped the doc to his feet and asked him “What in hell was that all about? Was that patient really infected with something?"

  He shook his head. “Damned if I know. Three of them burst into the ER and said that patient we were working on was an escaped terrorist and that they were taking him into custody. When I told them he was too hurt to move and that we were doing some blood tests on him, they grabbed me and manhandled me down here.” He shook his head. “They're lying. You don't take a man hurt that bad into custody; the most they would do is make us isolate him until he was stable, no matter what he had. I think he was zonked on something too, and that's what caused him to crash his car.” Then he got a puzzled expression on his face. “But they just said he got loose. I would have given odds that he couldn't have walked, much less gone anywhere."

  I remembered how he had spasmed when he knocked that blasted needle into my wrist. And I guess the doc either wasn't very analytical or maybe he was just tired from the tag end of his twenty four hour shift. What they had said was that he had gotten loose again. That told me he had already been in their custody. But what the doc said gave me a bit of hope. If he was all doped up, maybe that was why his blood count was so badly skewed from normal-though I didn't know of any drug right off hand that would cause the type of abnormalities I had seen.

  "So what happens now?"

  "I've got to go report this to administration if the nurses haven't already. Can you believe it? Pulling a goddamned gun on us?” He left, building up a good mad to berate someone with.

  I could believe it about the gun. In these times, with all the anti-terrorist legislation on the books, the government had gotten arrogant believing it could do almost anything it wanted to. That has its ups and downs. If those guys had acted a little less imperious, I might have volunteered to give them that other tube of blood I had stuck in the back of the cooler once I remembered it. Ordinarily I discarded them within a day or so, usually sooner. Once a patient is admitted and on the wards or in a unit, there's not much call to save extra blood unless it has been drawn for a transfusion, which is a different matter and wasn't applicable in this case; I already had other blood set aside for the cross match.

  I guess I don't have to mention that I was very late getting away. Some more government men arrived, purportedly from the office of Homeland Security. They questioned me but there wasn't much I could tell them, and by then I had almost forgotten about being pricked by that needle. I did mention that I had gotten some strange results on the blood count but none of them seemed to care about it. One of the Homeland Security guys tried to fob it off as a reaction to the disease they claimed our patient had been trying to spread around but I didn't believe that for a minute once I had time to really think about it. You don't get results like I had seen from any contagious disease I had ever heard of.

  I never mentioned that spare tube of blood to anyone during the questioning. Having a gun pointed at me had gotten my dander up and I was sleepy and hungry and just wanted to leave. Besides, I intended to do some tests on it myself as soon as I got a chance. But first I needed to go home and eat and rest.

  Home at that time consisted of an apartment out on the south loop that led back to Highway 59 and the route on down to Houston, a hundred miles or so further south. It was a two bedroom unit. I used the spare room for my books and computer desk and to store things in boxes that I had never unpacked after my last divorce. The little kitchen was separated from the den by a bar in the standard pattern of most apartments built for people who never intended to stay there permanently. The first thing I did was take a bottle of vodka from the cupboard
and mix two good shots with orange juice, my standard come-down drink when I got off in the morning-except that my watch was telling me it was already afternoon. My stomach was telling me the same thing, only it was practically yelling. I scanned the fridge after downing about half my drink, looking for something quick and easy to do me until I could cook a full meal, or more likely, get some takeout and bring it back to eat while reading. An exciting life it wasn't. I didn't have a current girl friend, and truth to tell, sex had begun to drop way down on my priority list, such list as I had.

  Just about the time I decided to just scoff down a bowl of cereal and was reaching for the milk carton, I began feeling woozy. I stood there for a moment but the sensation didn't pass; it got worse. I barely made it to the bed in time to kick off my boots and collapse on top of the bedspread while the room began spinning in dizzy circles around me.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I don't remember much about the next couple of days. The dizziness passed but I was only half-conscious, if that much. I saw the bedroom as if through a film of gauze. I could feel my heart beating. It sounded as if my pulse was very slow but I couldn't rouse myself enough to check it. I could barely feel my chest move when I breathed, and I thought the intervals between breaths of air were far too long. Several times I heard the phone ring, then my recording went into its spiel because I didn't feel like answering it, and probably couldn't have managed even if I did. I was neither hungry nor thirsty and even though I was aware of time passing, I don't think I ever went fully to sleep-nor ever came fully awake. And not once during that time did I feel the need to get up for a trip to the bathroom. That was strange enough in itself, because like many older persons, I usually had to get up and out of the bed two or three times during any given night.

  I think it was sometime during the second day that I began to think I was dying. I knew my bodily demands should have been urgent by that time and I knew that I had lain there going on a day and a half, barely moving other than to languidly shift positions slightly every hour or two. With that realization, I tried to make myself get up, or at least reach for the phone to call for help. It was no use. I simply didn't have either the strength or the ambition. By morning, the thought of dying passed, mainly because I didn't feel all that bad other than being almost paralyzed and unable to comprehend anything other than the most basic sensations.