X the unknown, p.7
X the Unknown, page 7
‘One or two others were feeling nauseous, apparently. But only these seven developed symptoms so quickly and suffered so acutely,’ Briscoe replied.
Royston paused and then walked across to one of the soldiers, glancing first at the clipboard that hung at the bottom of the man’s bed. The name at the top was COULSON. Royston looked down at the sergeant who was drifting in and out of consciousness.
Coulson’s skin was deathly pale apart from the blotchy red marks on his face and neck. There were more of them on his arms and at the top of his chest, visible when Royston pulled back the covers slightly. Coulson’s lips trembled as the American scientist ran an appraising gaze over him.
‘What about temperature?’ Royston asked.
‘Every one of them was running a high fever when they were brought in,’ Briscoe explained. ‘Most seem to have stabilised now.’
‘It certainly looks like radiation poisoning,’ John Elliot offered.
‘We’re still waiting for the blood and urine tests to be completed,’ Briscoe explained. ‘It all happened so suddenly that it took us by surprise, to be honest.’
‘Have any oncology tests been ordered?’ Royston asked.
‘Why would we test them for cancer?’ Briscoe enquired, a look of bewilderment on his face.
‘Would it be possible to do that as soon as possible?’ Royston persisted.
‘I can ask the lab to check their blood work for that,’ Briscoe told him. ‘But why?’
‘Just indulge me, Doctor Briscoe,’ Royston murmured, passing along to the next bed.
The man who lay there was in a similar state, his pale skin dotted with livid red marks that looked like weals or friction burns. They were concentrated around his neck and cheeks. As he turned his head Royston saw a large clump of hair come away from his scalp, leaving a bright red patch of exposed flesh.
‘Hair loss doesn’t usually result as rapidly as this, even in the most severe cases of exposure to radiation,’ Professor Elliot commented. ‘The nausea, vomiting, headaches and diarrhoea would begin fairly soon after exposure.’
‘But only if these men had been exposed to severe levels of radiation,’ Royston added. ‘I’m talking about between eight and ten grays or higher and even then some of the symptoms wouldn’t kick in for up to a week. Not as acutely as we’re seeing here.’
‘So the source of radiation is even more potent than we first thought,’ the professor mused.
‘And yet there’s no trace of it at the site of the exercise,’ Royston reminded him. He shook his head and sighed. ‘Signs and symptoms of radiation sickness usually appear when the entire body receives an absorbed dose of at least one gray. As I said, these men look as if they’ve been exposed to more than eight grays.’
Royston and the professor exchanged a look that Briscoe wasn’t slow to catch.
‘Meaning?’ he demanded.
Royston stepped away from the beds and lowered his voice.
‘Levels that high are normally untreatable,’ he said quietly. ‘Unless there’s some improvement within the next twenty-four hours it doesn’t look good for any of these men.’
‘And what about those who are still out at the site?’ Briscoe protested.
‘Until we know the source of this threat we have no way of knowing who is and who isn’t at risk,’ the American told him.
‘Whatever it is seems to be behaving more like a virus,’ Professor Elliot offered.
‘Let’s pray to God it isn’t,’ Royston said. ‘If it’s communicable then I don’t even want to consider the possible dangers.’
‘Is that likely?’ Briscoe enquired.
‘No,’ Royston told him. ‘But just because it’s unlikely doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Nothing that’s happened around here in the past twenty-four hours has been predictable or expected but it’s still happened. We have to consider every single eventuality.’
The trio of men made their way to the end of the ward where Royston paused briefly and glanced back at the men lying in the beds.
‘The other men who were on that exercise last night will have to be monitored,’ he said.
Briscoe nodded.
‘We could run routine tests on them,’ he suggested.
‘That’s a good idea but we don’t want to cause any alarm if we can help it,’ the American said.
‘One man has died, seven more may well be fatally ill and there’s a split in the earth out there that looks as if it’s been caused by an earthquake,’ the professor snapped. ‘I’d say that if anything was likely to cause alarm then that is, Adam.’
The two men regarded one another warily for a moment.
‘What happened out there during that exercise last night is the key to this whole thing, I’m sure of it,’ Royston said. ‘That split opened up and all hell broke loose.’
‘Well, whatever caused that split had to have a beginning,’ the professor offered.
‘It had to have an end, too,’ Royston told him.
‘Surely the forces causing these surface rifts just disperse,’ Briscoe interjected.
‘Forces causing a surface rupture don’t burn one man to death by radiation and poison seven others,’ Royston said.
‘What are you getting at?’ Briscoe wanted to know. ‘You said yourself that the damage Lansing suffered was nothing like the effects of radiation.’
‘No effects I’ve ever seen before,’ Royston told him. ‘But that doesn’t mean that radiation isn’t the problem. Let’s just assume that whatever caused this has something to do with that crack in the earth out there. I think that’s where we should be concentrating our efforts. If we find the source of the problem then we might have some way of helping the poor bastards in here.’ He looked once again at the men lying in the beds.
‘And how do we determine once and for all that the seismic activity is to blame?’ Briscoe asked.
‘We have to get inside that breach again,’ Royston told him.
‘It’s already been looked at,’ the professor reminded him. ‘Peter and I investigated it ourselves as far down as one hundred and fifty feet.’
Royston nodded. ‘I know that,’ he said. ‘But we have to look again. We have to find the bottom and see exactly what the hell is down there.’
Sixteen
NIKKI CROSS HATED hospitals.
She hated the smells, the sight of sick people, the ambulances roaring up to A&E carrying their latest victims and the vision of so many white-coated staff going about their business.
Many people saw hospitals as places of healing, care and eventual recovery. Not Nikki. She associated them with suffering, pain and death.
Both her parents had died in hospital when she was younger. Her father in the aftermath of a car crash and her mother of cancer. Both had arrived in an ambulance and left in a wooden box and Nikki couldn’t shake that thought as she sat in the waiting room of Broughton’s largest hospital, St Mary’s. Admittedly she hadn’t heard of too many cases of women dying while undergoing sonogram tests but, nevertheless, she shifted uncomfortably in her seat, glancing around at the other women in the room.
Like her they were pregnant but not all of them were here for a scan as she was. In particular the woman opposite looked as if she would have been more comfortable in the maternity unit itself rather than in antenatal because from the size of her she appeared as if she was going to have her baby at any moment. She kept getting to her feet, rubbing her bulging belly and groaning periodically. Nikki was half-expecting to hear the splash of fluid on the ground as her waters broke but, thankfully, that didn’t happen.
Nikki touched her own stomach through her blouse, the memories of the pain she had felt there the previous night still fresh in her mind. She had been thankful that there had been no recurrence of the pain as the night had worn on and nothing so far today. What she had felt, however, had also left her worried. There had been a kind of warmth enveloping her belly and her pelvis for most of the morning. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, she had to concede but it was unusual and something she hadn’t read about in any of the books on pregnancy which she’d dipped into ever since she’d discovered she was carrying a child. Paul had told her not to read the books. Even a doctor and one of the midwives she’d seen had said that all pregnancies were different and that there were no hard and fast rules for what should or shouldn’t be expected (apart from the obvious problems like morning sickness and things of that nature). But Nikki had sought reassurance on the printed page and also on the Internet and everything bad that she’d read had stuck in her mind like a splinter.
Everything that could go wrong with the pregnancy, the birth and beyond was lodged in her consciousness, stored there in some mental filing cabinet to be drawn upon whenever she felt discomfort or stress. Pregnancy, she had heard and no doubt read, was supposed to be an almost magical time when a woman felt at her most radiant and blooming. Nikki had experienced nothing but stress and worry ever since the first day she’d discovered that she was carrying.
She wanted to enjoy the pregnancy. She wanted the positive feelings she’d read about but she couldn’t shake the uncertainty. Things did go wrong, there was no point denying that, and try as she might she couldn’t seem to focus her mind on anything other than the negative aspects. And now she had this warmth spreading across her pelvis and belly.
Was it a sign that the child was already dead inside her, she wondered? Strangled by its own umbilical cord? (She had read of that more than once).
Across the waiting room another woman a little younger than her flicked through one of the out-of-date magazines on offer and smiled happily to herself. Her shoulder-length brown hair was shining, her pretty face seemed to be almost glowing and when she looked up every now and then her eyes sparkled as if lit from inside by tiny lamps. That, Nikki thought, is how I’m supposed to look. ‘I’m supposed to be blooming, blissfully expectant at the thought of bringing new life into the world.
She glanced down at her belly again and rubbed it, the warmth still spreading across her pelvis and now her lower back. Nikki swallowed hard, becoming more convinced by the second that there was something terribly wrong with either her, her baby or both of them.
The heavily pregnant woman was walking back and forth slowly, the weight of her belly slowing her down. She looked like a python that had just swallowed an antelope and was waiting for the meal to digest inside her before she regained her normal grace, Nikki thought and that idea brought a smile to her lips at least for a second or two. The other woman, still glancing at the magazine on her lap, slipped off first one shoe, then the other and flexed her toes against the linoleum floor of the waiting room. Swollen feet and ankles, Nikki guessed: another unwanted by-product of pregnancy.
She herself now got to her feet and crossed to the water cooler that stood in one corner of the waiting room. She downed one paper cup of the clear liquid then refilled it and drank another before returning to her seat. She’d drunk four large glasses of water before leaving home to ensure her bladder was full as she’d been instructed and the amount of fluid she had imbibed was beginning to make her feel a little uncomfortable. The warmth she had felt across her stomach and pelvis was beginning to dissipate, she was relieved to feel. However, she hoped that wasn’t a sign in itself of some catastrophic change in her body’s chemistry or in the health of her growing child. Nikki was beginning to wonder if there was any state of being that would actually make her feel better. No matter how she felt physically she seemed to be in a state of anxiety about the child’s health or her own.
She decided not to tell Paul about this latest episode. He would just laugh or tell her she was worrying too much as he normally did. She knew he was probably right but she just wished there was some way she could be sure once and for all that her fears and anxieties were groundless. Perhaps after the scan was completed she could relax a little more, she thought.
Nikki leaned forward and pulled a magazine from the piles on the large table in the middle of the room in a desperate attempt to occupy her mind. She flipped open the magazine and saw one of the many pointless so-called celebrities who infested its pages posing there with their latest child. Nikki scanned the headline:
MY PREGNANCY NIGHTMARE
She put the magazine back on the table and wandered over to the water cooler once more.
Barely had she finished sipping the contents of the paper cup than the door at one end of the waiting room opened and she saw a nurse emerge who looked cheerfully in Nikki’s direction.
‘Nikki Cross,’ the nurse announced. ‘Would you like to come through?’
Nikki nodded and walked through the door that the nurse was holding open for her. As she passed, Nikki saw the name badge on the nurse’s tunic: Sandra Morgan.
In the centre of the room there was a couch covered in thin blue paper and surrounded by all manner of equipment and it was towards this that Sandra motioned her. Nikki climbed up onto it and lay back as the nurse scanned her file.
‘How are you feeling, Nikki?’ Sandra asked.
Tell her about the pains last night.
‘Any problems?’ Sandra went on. ‘Anything worrying you?’
Tell her about the pains and tell her about that sensation you had in the bloody waiting room. Tell her.
‘Just aches and pains,’ Nikki said. ‘But I suppose that’s normal.’
‘One of the less enjoyable parts of being pregnant,’ the nurse told her, smiling. ‘I used to get terrible backache when I was carrying my little girl. You forget all about that once you’ve had them, though.’
Nikki nodded, looking around at the equipment surrounding her.
Tell her about the pains last night.
‘This is your first, isn’t it?’ Sandra went on. ‘So everything will be new to you, anyway. But there’s nothing to worry about and once this scan is done then you can relax.’ She scribbled a couple of things on the sheet in front of her, then glanced at Nikki again. ‘The sonographer doing the scan will be through in a minute – she’s got another lady in the other room. It’s like a conveyor belt in here. We’re all overworked. I’m supposed to be on the children’s ward, too.’ She shook her head and smiled. ‘You just lay back and take it easy until she gets here. You can lift your top up for me and we’ll put the gel on ready for her.’
Nikki did as she was instructed, pulling her T-shirt up to expose her belly, which Sandra glanced at before reaching for a pot of clear viscous gel. Using a broad wooden spatula she began to smear it over Nikki’s belly.
Nikki shuddered.
‘I know it’s cold – sorry about that,’ Sandra said as she continued applying the clear gel. ‘I’m sure you know all about these scans but I’ll explain anyway.’
Nikki nodded.
‘This is a real-time ultrasound scan,’ the nurse told her. ‘You’ll be able to see the baby on the screen just there.’ She pointed to a monitor next to the couch where Nikki was lying. ‘Do you want to know the sex? The sonographer will be able to tell you.’
‘We wanted a little girl – well, I did. I don’t think Paul minds,’ Nikki told her. ‘Do you have to tell me whether it’s a girl or a boy?’
‘No. If you want it to be a surprise on the day then that’s your choice. This scan will tell you the sex if you want to know and it’ll tell you when the baby’s going to be born so you can start planning and getting your spare room painted blue or pink, that kind of thing.’ Sandra laughed.
Again Nikki nodded.
Now would be the perfect time to mention the pains, wouldn’t it?
‘There you go,’ Sandra announced. ‘I’ll just nip through and check that the sonographer’s ready and we’ll get going.’
Alone in the room, surrounded by the equipment, Nikki felt a little more confident, her anxiety receding considerably. She looked at the clear gel on her belly and smiled, relieved that she’d had no recurrence of the discomfort or feeling of warmth she’d experienced last night or earlier in the day. The pain was gone, so why mention it? If it was serious then it would still be there, wouldn’t it?
Really?
Nikki glanced at the blank monitor screen and then at her belly once more.
Sandra returned a moment later, followed by a thin-faced woman with short blonde hair who looked as if she was pursing her lips when she smiled at Nikki.
She switched on the monitor and reached for the transducer, moving it towards Nikki’s belly.
‘Now if you’ve got a full bladder – which is what we asked for – you may find this a little uncomfortable to begin with,’ the sonographer said, pressing the handheld unit against the gel and sliding it across. She glanced at Nikki, checking her reaction. Then she adjusted the contrast on the monitor. A black and white picture began to form on the screen and the sonographer now concentrated her attention on that as she moved the transducer slowly back and forth, the equipment sliding easily across Nikki’s belly as it glided over the gel.
Sandra also glanced at the screen, then at Nikki, and smiled.
‘And you’re three months?’ the sonographer said, still peering at the screen.
‘Yes,’ Nikki said, clearing her throat nervously.
The sonographer frowned and Nikki wasn’t slow to spot the reaction. She herself glanced at the monitor but couldn’t make any sense out of the mass of confused images there.
‘Is something wrong?’ she asked, her voice cracking.
The sonographer didn’t answer; she merely pressed a little more firmly on Nikki’s belly with the transducer and looked more intently at the monitor.
Sandra too was gazing at the screen now.
‘The baby could be lying with its back to the camera,’ she said under her breath.
‘Something’s wrong, isn’t it?’ Nikki said breathlessly, trying to sit up, craning her neck to get a clearer view of the monitor.
‘Please keep still,’ the sonographer said. ‘I need to get a clear view.’
The image on the screen finally appeared with razor-sharp clarity.
‘Oh my God,’ Sandra murmured, her mouth falling open, her stare fixed on the monitor.
