During
the #coronavirus pandemic, I am regularly posting stories and selections from
my published collections and novels. Read for free! Reading is the best at this
time!
This
is the fourth free offering: An excerpt from “Thunder Rise: A Novel of Terror,”
my first published book and the first volume of the Thunder Rise trilogy..
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
Friday,
October 10
Maureen
McDonald was appreciably worse.
She
was back in Bostwick’s office this morning, two weeks and two days after her
last visit. Her mother was on the verge of panic. Bostwick didn’t blame her. If
she’d been his child, he’d have been there, too.
Because
things didn’t look good. Things didn’t look good at all. Maureen’s temperature
was 103.8, and she was enveloped by a faint, sweaty odor, an odor not
dissimilar to garlic—the exact same odor, Bostwick thought with a chill, that
terminally ill patients get as their days are winding down. She was still
congested, still occasionally experiencing sharp abdominal pains (“like a
knife,” she said, “stickin’ in my stomach.”). Every lymph node he touched was
swollen and tender.
But
he hadn’t needed an examination to conclude there was something really
frightening going on with this child. He’d sensed that the instant she’d come
into his office, shuffling listlessly, her head down, her shoulders hunched, as
if the world no longer held any interest for her. A little more than two weeks
ago she’d been under the weather, but if you peeled back the aches and pains a
bit, you could still see her spirit, alive and well. Now there was barely a
hint of that spirit. Now her eyes had a lifeless, distant glaze to them, as if
she’d grown tired of seeing. The eyes especially bothered him. He’d learned
there was more than a grain of truth to the old adage that eyes were windows to
the soul.
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| The original cover: William Morrow, 1989. |
If
it hadn’t developed so quickly, he would have suspected cancer . . . or AIDS.
He
hated what he had to subject her to, but there was no choice. It was time to go
on a medical fishing expedition.
“Can
you be in Pittsfield this afternoon?” he asked Susie when her daughter had
shuffled back to the waiting room to claim the lollipop her eyes said she
didn’t care if she had or not.
“Yes,”
Susie said.
“Good.
I want you at Berkshire Medical Center at one. I’ll call and make the
arrangements. She’s going to need additional tests.”
“What
kind of tests?” Susie sounded as if she’d just been sentenced.
“Blood
tests. X-rays. Possibly a liver scan. I’ll have a better idea after consulting
with Dr. Miller. He’s an internist at Berkshire Medical. Also a personal
friend. A very capable physician.”
“Doctor?”
“Yes?”
“What
do you think it is?” Bostwick could tell she was close to losing control. His
eyes avoided hers, and the examining room suddenly seemed too small, too quiet,
too warm. He’d been here before. Oh, yes. Ordering tests for suspected leukemia
cases evoked this mood. Getting positive test results back and delivering that
horrible news evoked it, too.
“I
don’t know,” he said. “And I’m being completely candid. I just don’t know.”
“You
don’t think it’s a cold, do you?” Susie said, allowing herself only the
faintest trace of hope.
“Like a really long cold?”
“No.
Not anymore.”
“Is
it a—a virus?”
“It
could be. We’ll know better after this afternoon. I’m ordering her workup
stat.”
Susie
was silent. In the last two minutes Bostwick had seen the color drain from her
cheeks. “You don’t think it’s—you don’t think it’s cancer, do you?” She
pronounced that word superstitiously, as if saying it too loudly might jinx
her.
“I’d
be very surprised if it were. It’s very rare that cancer—any kind of
cancer—develops so quickly.”
“It’s
been two months almost.”
“And
that seems like a long time—and it is, in terms of what you’ve been through—but
disease-wise, two months is a snap of the fingers.”
“Doctor?”
“Yes?”
“She’s
going to be all right, isn’t she?”
In
all his years of medicine—years in which he had had a distressing amount of
practice in delivering the grimmest possible news—he’d never learned how to
answer this question without feeling like the world’s biggest asshole.
“I
hope so,” he said. “Now I want you to get going. The sooner you’re there, the
quicker you’ll be home.”
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| Crossroad Press editions: Audible and Kindle. |
For two weeks he’d been trying to piece things together.
Something’s
going on. Something I’ve never seen in almost a decade of family practice.
That
much was indisputable now. This wasn’t your basic infection taking the scenic
tour through the local youth, a bout of unusually stubborn rhinovirus that
sooner or later would be put off the bus by said youths’ immune systems. It had
gone on too long. On Morgantown’s scale, this was as close to a public health
crisis as anything in Bostwick’s experience.
Because
there were too many sick kids out there. Not a townful, or a schoolful, but
seventeen kids (he’d counted) with no history of chronic disease or unusual
susceptibility who all of a sudden were sick as dogs. Seventeen kids, up from a
dozen two weeks ago, all with a common set of symptoms, all with parents
getting more uptight by the minute. Some—roughly half, Bostwick
calculated—seemed to be getting progressively sicker. A smaller group appeared
to be on some kind of strange disease seesaw: flat on their backs one day,
chipper as you please the next. A couple, Jimmy Ellis among them, seemed to
have recovered and not relapsed—if that was the word. There seemed to be no
rhyme or reason.
For
two weeks he’d puzzled over it, so intensely that his wife and children had
started to comment. For two weeks he’d done his homework. Taken out the case
folders each evening and gone over every iota of information with a magnifying
glass. He’d done follow-ups on every child, which had meant house calls in a
couple of instances. Maureen was the first he’d referred to Berkshire Medical.
He knew she would not be the last.
It
could be almost anything.
That’s
what was beginning to give him chills.
It
could be bacterium. It could be virus. It could be some kind of obscure but
cumulatively lethal poison. It could be something in the water at school. It
could be something in the food. Something in the air. Something well documented
in the public health texts. Something utterly unprecedented.
It
could be the bloody Martians, for all he knew, dropping down to field-test
their latest extraterrestrial bug on the unsuspecting inhabitants of Planet
Earth.
If
he’d been unable to pinpoint the cause, he’d at least uncovered some
potentially valuable common denominators. All the children were prepubescent.
All except for two preschoolers went to Morgantown Elementary, and both those
preschoolers had older siblings who did. All lived on the same side of town,
the side near Thunder Rise. There was something else, too, although he wasn’t
sure how much significance he should attach to it. Nightmares. Each kid had
reported frequent nightmares. Probably the fevers would explain that. Kids with
temps not only had nightmares but could actually hallucinate.
So
could brains poisoned with certain chemicals.
“Will
you call me as soon as you get the results?” Susie asked on her way out.
“Immediately,”
Bostwick promised.
“Thank
you, Doctor.”
For
what? he wanted to say. For telling you in so many words that your kid’s slowly
going down the tubes, and I don’t have a clue why? For suggesting between the
lines that if somebody doesn’t come up with something soon, little Maureen
McDonald could actually . . . die? And as things stand at this very moment
there’s not a blessed thing we can do about it?
“You’re
welcome,” he said, and again he had to avoid eye contact. He felt defeated.
When
she had closed the door, he picked up the phone and called the Boston
headquarters of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
“Epidemiology,”
he told the operator.
(Should
you wish to purchase any of my collections and books, fiction or non-fiction,
visit www.gwaynemiller.com/books.htm)
