Death Takes A Holiday
by William Young
Copyright 2011 William Young
Los Angeles, California – Day 1
Dr. Lucinda Bright was escorted through the off-stage corridors of the airport, her mind buzzing at her sudden importance in the scheme of things. As the on-call medical liaison specializing in bloodborne pathogens for the Southern California District Anti-Terror Task Force - a title that was supposed to be little more than a resume enhancer - she'd been called away from her lab in the middle of the afternoon to provide her expert opinion on what to do with a handful of Eastern European tourists who'd been exposed to a passenger's blood on the way to Los Angeles.
She had never really expected to be called by the authorities as a result of volunteering for the task force several years earlier – and she didn’t consider herself among the authorities simply because she had a laminated plastic badge hanging around her neck – but here she was, being escorted by Transportation Security Agency officers to examine a handful of tourists on their way to Disneyland for the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Tourists, not terrorists, she thought to herself, but protocols were protocols and she had volunteered all those years ago to do this job if need be.
The group turned a corner and then banged through a door into a hallway and past conference rooms, exam areas and interrogation cells into which only the unluckiest of travelers were ever escorted. The fluorescent lighting, worn low pile carpeting and dull off-white walls lent a bureaucratic dreariness to the areas which only enhanced their sense of foreboding. It was a décor perhaps intentionally designed to maximize a person’s sense of irresolvable frustration and unrealizable anger: you are helpless, submit.
“Dr. Bright?” said a man in a suit, detaching himself from a small cloud of uniformed government types from a variety of emergency services branches.
Bright nodded and smiled, “Cinda, please.”
The man hesitated a second as he shook her hand, “Cinda, I’m Special Agent Charles Hoffman with the FBI,” he said, dropping her hand and quickly flapping a badge wallet open and closed before slipping it into his jacket. “Come with me, please.”
“I understand we have some sort of issue with a passenger vomiting blood on a plane from Europe,” Bright said as she followed a half-step behind Hoffman, his stride quick and purposeful.
“Oh, yeah, something like that,” Hoffman said over his shoulder.
They passed through the group of paramedics, firefighters and airport police officers and stepped down the hall toward a wall with a long window. Bright felt the presence of the first responders behind her as they trailed silently along, waiting for an expert opinion on what to do next. Bright stopped and stared through the two-way window at a collection of men, women and children.
“None of these people look ill,” Bright said, turning to look at Hoffman. “I was told we had a patient who had been vomiting blood on the plane.”
Hoffman nodded. “Yeah, he was taken to County General a couple of hours ago when the first responders were trying to figure out what to do with him. Apparently the TSA agents told them he would have to be classified a potential terror risk because of the vomiting, but since he was unconscious they let the medics take him out. These guys, though, are another matter.”
“Do we know if he bled on anybody not in there?”
Hoffman shook his head. “Just them. Family members and friends. And an unrelated couple from Italy. The flight crew reacted pretty quickly and moved him to a galley area after he started coughing up blood, but he obviously got a lot of people covered beforehand. According to them, this guy apparently stood up to go to the bathroom and just barfed over two rows of passengers.”
“Was he sick when he got on the plane or was it something he ate?”
“According to is wife, he was coming down with something when they boarded the plane in Sofia, but she said it didn't seem like anything to worry about. She figured he was getting nerves about flying,” Hoffman said. “But it didn’t get serious until after they switched planes in Italy, and he didn't barf on these folks until they were only about half-an-hour out from LA.”
“Well, we’re going to need to keep everyone in the conference room in quarantine until we figure out what this guy is sick from,” Bright said. “If he hadn’t vomited blood on them, we could let them go, but they could be infected so they’ll just have to wait until we know. Get them showered off and find their luggage so they can wear fresh clothes.”
By the time Bright made it to County General the next morning, Hristo Gruev, 37, was dead. His body had burned through with fever and now sat in the air-conditioned morgue in the basement. The blood samples taken from him were currently going through lab analysis, leaving nothing for Bright to actually do other than wait for the results. She sipped on a cup of stale cafeteria coffee while sitting in the pathologist’s office waiting area – an end table and two plastic chairs – when her phone trilled its text message tone. It was her supervisor:
Patient died? Others still in quarantine? Tell staff autopsy is highest priority from highest authority. Probably nothing. Keep me informed of any changes
The door opened and a fiftyish man with thinning hair and a white Van Dyke beard entered, the embroidery on his lab coat read “Yul Ze’ev, MD.” He was carrying a paper cup of Starbucks coffee, the aroma of which quickly permeated the room and dwarfed the tiny coffee-like scent her cup had been offering. Bright suddenly lusted for his coffee. She stood up and unconsciously motioned toward him with her deficient cup of java.
“Dr. Ze’ev?” she asked.
“Yes, and you’re Lucinda Bright from the anti-terrorism task force, no doubt?” Ze’ev said, nodding his head amiably and smiling. “I guess we’ve got something interesting to figure out in short order, which is more than I can normally say.”
“You don’t get a lot of business here?”
“Oh, sure, but it’s all cops wanting me to hurry something or reporters trying to find something out, never an actual mystery that needs to be solved.”
“A mystery? You haven’t seen the body?”
“Had my assistant email the file to my phone, read it over breakfast. First guess is Ebola, though it doesn’t exactly fit all the symptoms,” Ze’ev said, motioning for Bright to follow him as he pulled open the door to the examining room. “Plenty of other diseases to consider, to be sure, but not many that have someone bleed out so quickly. It’s going to be a while, though, before any of the blood tests come out with anything. Holidays and what. But if there’s anything obvious, we should know in a couple of hours.”
“Ebola?”
“Probably not today. A day or two, maybe.”
“I’ve got more than a dozen people in quarantine at the airport in a conference room. A day or two? Really?”
Ze’ev shrugged. “You can move them somewhere, right?”
Bright let out a bitter laugh. “Yeah, according to protocol, the county jail, but that’s already over capacity, so, no.”
Ze’ev sipped his coffee and then laughed. “Yeah, that’s the government for you, it makes all sorts of plans on how to deal with things, but doesn’t do anything to actually prepare for the things it might have to deal with. You have to wonder why FEMA and the rest are surprised and off-guard every time a hurricane hits. I mean, there it is on the weather channel, building up in the ocean, moving slowly toward land, turning and turning and getting closer every day, and then when it makes landfall, everyone in government acts totally surprised at the damage it causes. Idiots.”
Bright had no idea what he was talking about and motioned to the wall of refrigerated storage compartments. “The body’
s in one of those?”
Ze’ev nodded, sipped his coffee. “Yup. Lemme see,” he ran his finger down a roster on a computer print-out lying on a desk. “Seventeen.”
He pulled the door open and slid out the table. Ze’ev checked the identification tag on the body and looked up at Bright, “Hristo Gruev?” Bright nodded and Ze’ev walked over to a phone on the wall, tapped in a few digits and spoke into it. He turned to Bright, “It’ll be a couple of minutes until they move the body onto the examining table. Come, let’s see if we can’t find anything on the preliminary intake report.”
They left the room and went into Ze’ev’s office, a cluttered space with an obsolete desktop PC, a reasonably modern laptop, and manila folders strewn about the flat surfaces of the room. The walls had dozens of photographs in black and white of what Bright assumed were Ze’ev’s trophies from autopsies: an X-ray shot of a steak knife in a skull, a photograph of a keychain in a stomach, an 8x10 of a male with a gag ball in his mouth and a cell phone in his rectum. Bright rolled her eyes.
“Let’s see,” Ze’ev said, tapping on a tablet PC he had pulled from under a stack of papers. “Admitted almost seventeen hours ago, dead for nearly six. One-oh six point three temp, severe