Table Of ContentDouble Dragon Publication
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Copyright ©2005 by Darrell Bain
First published by DDP, January 2005
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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
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
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.
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 power 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
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
