"Marcus Eubanks - Selections from the New World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eubanks Marcus)

Eighteen months after we buried Frankie, Dean responded to the Deep South's desperate call for docs to manage the epidemic of Blackwater Shakes. He steadfastly refused to let Jan go along, finally resorting to dumping her cruelly so she wouldn't try to follow him. Dean had picked up a masters in Public Health during his residency and had studied quite a bit of epidemiology. He knew exactly what he was getting into, and damned sure didn't want to subject anyone he loved to it, even of their own free will.

Three days after he left, I took a leave of absence and followed him down, figuring I could finally put my mostly theoretical training in disaster medicine to some practical use. The flight into New Orleans was unremarkable until I woke with a start, realizing how unusual it was to be able to stretch out across three seats to sleep on a morning flight into that city. As the cab from the airport approached the Claiborne Avenue exit, it edged over to the shoulder and stopped.

"This is as close to the city as I get, brother."

I paid him then, and climbed out shaking my head in disgust. Idiot. He probably would have been better off in the city, with the mosquito foggers going day and night.

I hiked three miles to the Garden District, where Dean was staying. Not one of the passing cars even slowed down to look at my outstretched thumb.

Blackwater Shakes, or Mekong Flu as some of the media was calling it, was a strain of P. falciparum malaria the microbiologists labeled Burma IV. So many names for such an old disease. This particular variety had been bred out of the jungles of North Thailand, Laos, and Burma, and was resistant to every anti-malarial drug known. Therapy was mainly supportive, in the hopes that victims would survive initial bouts to gradually bolster their own immunity over the course of several years. That the disease was transmitted by mosquito rather than by casual contact with other people was ignored by the greater fraction of the populace in their panic, as marked by the black X's I saw spray-painted on the entries of several houses.

"We might as well be back in 1907 for all the good we're doing," Dean said one evening as we sat in a French Quarter courtyard bar. The Quarter was strangely quiet, robbed of the tourist traffic that kept it alive. We had worked all afternoon and most of the evening in a vast tent that had been set up in Charity Hospital's parking lot to handle the added volume of patients. "We're going to run out of packed red cells for anemic crises sometime tonight, and that military fluorocarbon shit isn't going to cut it for more than a couple of days."

All I could do was nod. I'd been at the same morning meeting as Dean, called so officials from the Red Cross, the CDC, and the city government could meet with some nervous-looking representatives from the Federal government. It seemed the Feds wanted to know what needed to happen so the situation could be brought under control in the next few weeks. Me, Dean, and the dude from the CDC looked at each other in astonishment. The CDC guy was working desperately to stifle a laugh.

"Have you listened to a single word we've said?" Dean asked.

It was too much of a straight line to ignore. "No man, he's an administrator," I said. "You know better than that. They specialize in talking."

Dean ignored me while the poor bastard from the CDC tried to keep from falling out of his chair in hysterics. He hadn't had any sleep in days. "Let me try to make it simple," Dean continued. "This is going to take years, and that's just to control it locally. The foggers are going non-stop and we already have some of the best water control in the world, but the mosquitoes just don't drop like they used to. This place will never be safe for people who haven't been through it already." The Federal rep tried to interrupt him, but Dean plowed on relentlessly. "There is no medicine now in existence that will kill this parasite. None. Do you understand me now?"

Six weeks later, I figured they had as much of a system in place as they ever would, and took off back north. Dean remained behind, proclaiming his sick joy in being back in New Orleans, crippled though it was.

He had done okay actually, surviving his initial infection and several relapses. He lived to see all the Interstate highways leading out of Florida and Southeast Louisiana blockaded by National Guard reserves and then regular Army troops. The Coast Guard had set up off the Gulf Coast and around the Florida peninsula with air and sea support from the Navy. It was idiocy, of course: the species of mosquito that harbored the parasite couldn't survive outside the affected areas anyhow. The good people of the United States had taken notice, however, prodded by the horror show broadcast daily out of Miami and New Orleans. They demanded the government do something, and damned well do it immediately.

Gibbering politicians, in defiance of every recommendation from the CDC and other groups, responded to the mandate of the people by laying down the largest and most effective quarantine the world had ever seen.

Dean was killed in the New Orleans riots.

My hand has more or less stopped bleeding, but it smarts like hell. The music changer stutters once, and strains of Dvorak's New World symphony pour out into the damp heat.

It doesn't really strike me at first, but suddenly I start laughing and find myself utterly incapable of stopping. Doubled over in hysterical giggles, I reach into the little fridge and grab another beer. I struggle for sips of air, finally managing to stop laughing so I can take a hit from the bottle that leaves it less than half-full.

New World. Christ, that's sick.

I start laughing again.

With Vicram it was almost anticlimactic, lost as he was in the local media hype that surrounded the whole affair. Mucormycosis had somehow found its way into the ventilation system of the hospital he was working in. It used to be one of those fungi that normally only infected people who were pretty badly immunosupressed, like AIDS patients and folks getting chemo for cancer or transplants. But like so many other opportunistic pathogens, it had inadvertently been bred for aggressive resistance to antibiotics for nearly half a century. Candidiasis was bad, but people can live with a recurrent yeast infection on their skin and, ah, other moist places, as long as its not injected into their bloodstream. Mucormycosis, on the other hand, was invasive as hell.

Aggressive as it was, however, investigators later came to the very public conclusion that few if any of the 372 patients and hospital employees who died would have been susceptible had they not been subjected to huge innoculums of airborne spores for weeks at a time. The fact that the same problem was cropping up in other places on a smaller scale didn't seem to sway their judgment in the slightest.

I went to see him in isolation at Pittsburgh General. Vic was dark to begin with, but now he was sunburned from the UV lights they had pouring down on him day and night - PGH's administration was taking no chances on a repeat of the disaster that had taken out their competition across town.

Vicram looked up from a tissue that held a macabre mess of clotted blood and dark fungal hyphae. "What's the matter, triage-boy, you scared of hanging with sick folks?" he asked, laughing. I guess I'd gone pale when I saw what came out of his head. "The Foursome is looking pretty fucking anemic these days, eh?" He turned serious. "This shit's gonna cross out of my sinuses and into my brain in two days max. Listen bro, I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but how about you don't come back upstairs to visit me any more after this, all right?"

As it turned out, he became septicemic that night and died the next day while I was working a shift in the E.R.

The rain is over. I lean back in my chair and look down at the remote.