08
Motol Hospital, Prague, Czech Republic
November 28
Dr Fanta Anouma adjusted the stethoscope on a frail, pocked arm, and checked her watch with a frown. A drip of sweat trickled down her ebony skin, and she brushed it with her free arm, careful not to touch her sterile gloves. The sound of the heaters all around the room was hard to overcome; she strained to hear, wrinkling her brow with concentration.
“Know what you’re doing?” asked Mr Vecera, his voice raspy and coarse.
“Shh,” Anouma scolded. “or I’ll have to start over.”
Mr Vecera smiled at her, his patchy white beard a sharp accent to the gaps in his teeth, brown and black. His hospital gown hung on him loosely, dried blood down the front. An IV hung behind him, dripping saline slowly.
Anouma flung the stethoscope round her neck, jotted on his chart with a too-short pencil. She scratched underneath her surgeon’s mask with the bunched-up wrist of her glove, sighing.
“Bad news?” Mr Vecera asked, half-serious.
“No worse than before,” Anouma replied. “continuing this way, you will live forever.”
Mr Vecera laughed loudly, and two of the patients nearest him grunted and tried to roll themselves so they’d be facing away from him. He patted Anouma’s hand kindly.
“You lie badly,” he said. “but thank you.”
Anouma didn’t answer, kept her expression the same. She looked down at his chart, and he squeezed her hand to get her attention back.
“Miss home?” he asked sincerely.
Anouma shrugged.
“I am liking it here,” she said.
“Your language is better. Give it another month and we won’t even know you’re not Czech.”
Anouma laughed this time, patted his arm and put his chart back at the end of his bed.
“What’s it like where you come from?” he asked her.
“The place I lived in Côte d'Ivoire, they call it the hot country,” she said, her eyes alive, remembering. “We in the north are teased for poor constitution, how we cannot survive in but a peaceful, sunny clime. But you know, after all these years up here, in your city, Mr Vecera… well, my friends in the south, near the ocean, they have no idea what cold really is. Having a nice breeze off the water is nothing like a day such as today.”
“Ah! So you like it here, then?”
She smiled, her mask tipping to the side.
“How could I not like a place that gives me patients like you.”
He beamed happily, waved her off with a shaky hand.
“I’m glad you’ve stayed with us, doctor,” he said. “You’re tougher than those southerners could ever hope to be.”
“Thank you,” she said with a nod. “I will be back to check you again. Soon.” She pulled the curtain round his bed back, letting in the full sound and sight of four hundred sick and dying patients.
They were grouped and partitioned by type and severity of disease, and though there were signs up to help pinpoint whichever strain you were after, anyone with a passing familiarity of modern plagues could get their bearings at a glance by the particular skin tones or the stains on the bed sheets. From the middle of the floor, the sounds of different species of moans swept past Anouma as she stood alone, the tallest thing in the rows of beds.
She felt a calm breeze blow her hair across her forehead, and for a moment she swayed, smiling at the sensation, calming, quiet. But then her eyes opened and she stared up at the ceiling, at the large fans up there, swirling slowly, picking up speed, and her breath left her.
She turned quickly to the far end of the room, down by the generators, and saw a nurse playing with a long row of switches, trying to see which one powered the old X-ray machine. Anouma started to call out, but clipped herself off, clenched her fists and made a quickly dash to the nurse.
She slammed all the switches down, with a furious hand, grabbed the nurse by the collar.
“What do you think you are doing?” she hissed.
“I can’t figure which one turns on the—”
“Take a look at the ceilings!” Anouma whispered. “You’ve been running the fans! How long have you been at the switches?”
“I… I don’t know,” fumbled the nurse. “A minute? Maybe more?”
Anouma shook her head, squeezed back a head ache.
“Air flow must be restricted in this room,” she said. “Our partitioning is not good enough to stop cross-contamination.”
“I know, I—”
“You must be more careful,” Anouma said, her tone softening. “If Dr Bastien noticed this, you would be—”
“Help!” came the call from the old foyer, across the sea of white linen. Anouma glanced back, then abandoned her warning and started running, stethoscope slung into her ears in mid-stride. Across the hall, Dr Bastien was running too, tearing his gloves off urgently.
A man in a work suit was leaning against the wall, a small child in his arms, wrapped in a blanket and drenched with rain. The man was panting, wheezy breaths, and looked like he’d been crying. The girl coughed loudly, and he nearly dropped her onto the ground.
“Help her… I don’t know what’s wrong…” he gasped, then collapsed down in a heap, barely keeping her frail body from slamming into the floor. Anouma slipped on a new pair of gloves, crouched down and pulled the blanket away from the girl’s face. It stuck, glued with dried pus to the face, and the girl cried out, then coughed again… a terrible, hacking cough.
“Kiev-5,” Bastien muttered grimly from behind, blasting his stethoscope with disinfectant and pushing it against the girl’s pocked chest. “How long has she been sick?” he asked the man.
“I… I think three days,” he muttered, his eyes rolling back in his head.
“Catch him,” Bastien said, snatching the girl as Anouma gently lowered the father’s head to the ground. She pried open his jacket and shirt, saw the smallest of blisters on his chest.
“Cover his face with a mask and help me get the girl outside,” Bastien said, pushing his white hair from his eyes.
“Outside?”
“We need open air,” he said sternly.
“She needs a bed!” Anouma whispered urgently. Bastien stared at her seriously, spoke in hushed French, darting quick glances back to the sick room.
“Kiev-5 is airborne at this stage. Half the people in this room would die tonight if they caught it. Even with the fans off, we cannot take that chance.”
“She will die out there,” Anouma replied, unfazed.
“She’ll die in here too. Don’t let her take the rest with her.”
A loud cry came from inside the room, weak but hysterical.
“I can’t die!” a woman cried in French. “I can’t die here!”
“Shit,” Bastien muttered, then called out to her: “If you say one word of Czech about this to anyone, I’ll make this girl your bed mate, do you understand me?”
There was a long silence.
“Y-y-yes,” came the reply.
Bastien nodded to Anouma.
“Grab the ultrasound and meet me on the steps.”
Anouma quickly draped a blanket over the girl’s father, a mask securely over his face, and ran back into the treatment room, to the cupboards near the crash station, and pulled a small, stained ultrasound out. She pushed the battery check as she ran, slowed when she saw it had half power. She stopped by the drawers at the door, rummaged around for some gel and a spare battery. All she found was a half-used bottle and an empty battery package.
Bastien had the girl on her back on the steps to the hospital, checking her airway. He motioned for the ultrasound, and Anouma handed it over, squirted gel on the girl’s stomach, the greenish colour mixing with thick yellow. Bastien pushed the sensor down, and she lurched up, gasping.
“Hold her,” he commanded, squinting at the screen.
Anouma angled down on the girl’s shoulders, watching the poor swollen eyes twitching in a pained sleep. She looked away, to the monitor, squinted at it, then glanced at where Bastien was pointing.
“Her liver…” she said tentatively.
“Kidneys too,” he muttered. “Her lungs are going now.”
“Should we…?”
“No,” he said, snapping the machine off, wiping it clean. “once the liver’s gone, so is the patient. Her father got her here too late.”
Anouma blinked, looked down at the beautiful blonde hair round the distorted face, brushed it with a gloved hand. When she looked back up, Bastien was preparing a shot.
“What is…”
“For the pain,” he said, pushing it through her veins. “whatever good it might do her.”
Anouma nodded, watched the girl calm suddenly, her breathing watery and slow. Bastien handed the ultrasound over, checking the rain that was blowing onto their temporary operating room.
“Get that inside,” he said. “we’ll have to move her to the back until it’s over.”
Anouma nodded, pushed the heavy wooden doors in and paced back to the crash station, setting the machine atop the counter absent-mindedly.
“Are we dying?” asked the lone voice, in French, nervously.
Anouma turned back to the room, curtains and beds and drip bags everywhere, and had no idea whose voice it was.
“You are fine,” she lied. “The girl was fine. It was just a cold, nothing more.”
No one answered.
As she made her way to the front, she heard the sound of Dr Bastien shouting. She ran to the door, pushed into the cold, wet air, and saw the old man yelling into the rain. There, in the middle of the ambulance bay, was a dark figure wrapped tight in leather and metal, and Anouma gasped.
A Healer.