Survivor Song(25)
A nurse raps hard twice on the door and enters, announcing she has vaccine for Dr. Sherman. Though most of her face is obscured by a respirator, she appears to be young, likely under twenty-five years old. Ramola has been recently noticing the decreasing ages of newer staff within her clinic, or more correctly, noticing her own increasing age. Ramola asks for gowns for Natalie. Nurse Partington says she’ll ask at the nurses’ station on her way to the elevators.
Ramola sits at the edge of the bed, removes her coat, and rolls up a sleeve. There is no chatter or banter as Nurse Partington twice tells Ramola to relax her arm, then administers the shot with a tremulous hand. Ramola holds a square of gauze against her shoulder as the nurse prepares a bandage. She wants to ask what’s going on in other areas of the hospital, what’s the morale of the staff. She fears the tightly wound, fatigued younger nurse might break apart at the questions. Or maybe it would be Ramola who would crumble in the face of the answers.
Intent on breaking the awkward silence, Ramola asks, “Will I need a second shot in three days like Natalie?”
“Pre-exposure vaccination follows a different course: a booster in seven days and a final one twenty-one days after that.”
Ramola says, “Seven days.” She cannot imagine what will have happened seven hours from now, never mind seven days. Ramola thanks her and puts her coat back on. Nurse Partington nearly jogs to the door, throwing it open. She almost collides with three people sprinting down the hallway toward the nurses’ station and elevators. Nurse Partington falls in behind them and the door swings closed but doesn’t latch. There’s inarticulate shouting somewhere on their floor. Ramola estimates the source is five to ten doors down from this room. It’s a man, shouting in anger, not pain, and there’s a crash, and more hurried footfalls on the linoleum.
Natalie emerges from the bathroom. Her eyes are red and her cheeks flushed as though she has been crying. “What’s happening?”
A quick message bursts from Ramola’s radio: “Code Gray, third floor. Code Gray, third floor.”
Natalie asks, “What’s Code Gray?”
“It means a combative person.”
A man announces over the intercom: “Paging Dr. Gray to the third floor . . .”
Ramola says, “Same announcement. Sounds less scary for patients when broadcast over the intercom that way.”
“Third floor? Um, sounds like there’s a combative person on our floor. We are on the second floor, right? I’m not delirious yet am I?”
“Maybe he announced the wrong floor.”
There’s a room-shaking crash directly above their heads. Ramola and Natalie drift toward the bed, their eyes on the ceiling as though expecting it to crack open and reveal its secrets. Ramola jumps when her radio squawks again; security personnel speaking in numerical codes with which she is unfamiliar.
“What do you think that was?”
Ramola can only imagine something as large as a wardrobe locker being pulled from the wall and tipped over.
A different voice comes over the intercom. “Paging Dr. Silver to the second floor . . .”
Natalie says, “Silver?”
“A combative person with a weapon.”
“Fucking great.”
Outside their room the shouting continues. Metallic clangs and jolting thuds add to the cacophony.
Natalie asks, “Is our door locked?”
Ramola rushes to the door, but she opens it first, daring to peek down the hallway. From this vantage, only half of the nurses’ station is visible. A short and stout man with a long, thick beard is behind the main desk. The beard (and the distance) obscures most of his mouth but the teeth. The teeth are bared. He brandishes and swings an IV stand. He snorts and shouts as two officers circle, their stun guns drawn. Ten feet away from the desk and at the mouth of the hallway, a young woman thrashes about on the floor. She’s pinned on her stomach, a scrum of security and medical staff grapples with restraining her hands behind her back. She screams and growls, whipping her head from side to side, her long brown hair spraying in every direction. The woman looks up, hair partially obscuring her face. Ramola can see the woman’s eyes though. Her gaze locks onto Ramola and her features soften, eyebrows arching into an everyday expression of recognition, of I-see-you-and-do-I-know-you, but then her eyes roll back, showing whites, and her lips curl into an animal’s snarl, a single-minded statement of purpose. She stretches and cranes her neck, hair pasted to cheeks and chin. Her mouth opens and snaps shut, over and over, teeth clacking. Foamy drool darkens her hair, runs down her chin, pools on the linoleum.
Ramola shuts the door, pressing her weight against it for an extra beat as the woman on the hallway floor barks and shrieks. Ramola attempts to think calmly in clinical terms; her locking the door means they are sheltering in place, which is a rational part of emergency procedure, and not a hopeless act of blind fear.
She walks into the room and announces, “There are two infected patients on our floor but they are being tended to—what are you doing?”
Natalie sits propped with one leg on the bed and the other on the floor. Her opened overnight bag is up against her hip. She holds a white handheld device. The tapered nose is pointed at but not touching her forehead, which is colored with a glowing red dot. A green digital display screen faces out toward Ramola. Natalie is using an infrared thermometer, not dissimilar from ones Ramola has used in her practice.