Infectious Love: An Mpreg Romance (Silver Oaks Medical Center Book 1) Page 2

  Ken shrugged. Okay, maybe he hadn't necessarily needed to wave the shotgun around the ER. And maybe he hadn't remembered he had it in the first place. That didn't change the fact that someone had released a disease at Le Moyne, just because they felt like it. "Well, unusual or not, that's what they did. I never do meet the smart criminals."

  The shorter doctor flinched at that. What was his story? What was he guilty of that caused him to flinch when Ken brought up dumb criminals? He was pretty enough, for a City guy. He might have been a little on the short side, but that slim body and those narrow hips more than made up for it. "Do you have the lab report? And do you know whose belongings the vial was found in?" He blinked. "Why were the police going through someone's things, anyway?"

  Ken ground his teeth for a second. He had to remember that other cops, in other places, had been doing things that called everyone's integrity into question right now. That made it fifty times harder for everyone to do their jobs. "We weren't the ones that found it, initially," he said, once he'd forced his initial angry response down. "His roommate was looking for some of his things to bring to him here in the hospital and found it. He called us, which is how we got entry to the room. We followed protocol. And we documented it, if you want to get the ACLU or whoever involved."

  Hot Doctor shrugged. "Okay. Well, if you documented it, it must be on the up and up, right? Anyway, I can't think of a single incident of anyone trying to weaponize meningitis. And I did intern with the CDC, so it's something I'd have looked at."

  Taller Doc smirked. "Allow me to introduce Dr. Dave Stanek, our head Infectious Disease Specialist."

  Ken refused to be impressed. "Ken Sykora, Sheriff's Department. So why hasn't anyone tried to weaponize meningitis? It seems like the kind of disease that well and truly sucks." He crossed his arms over his chest.

  "Oh, it does." Stanek managed a tight little grin. "It can kill within twenty-four hours, sometimes. No fun at all. But it also requires certain conditions to thrive—specifically, crowding. When you're going for terror, you want a disease that passes easily from person to person. Meningitis is highly contagious, sure, but you need close, extended contact with an infected person's effluvia to really get an outbreak going. It's not like, say, smallpox or anthrax."

  "Okay." Ken couldn't see the difference, but he didn't ask. The doctor might tell him, and Ken didn't care. He didn't have time to be there all night. He needed to get to the bottom of this and work on finding the culprit. "What matters is that someone very clearly did decide to release the disease, into a population of college students. Can you think of anyone who would have access?"

  "To a vial of live meningitis?" Stanek laughed, and his smile took ten pounds of weight off Ken's shoulders. "Sure. Plenty. I teach a class over at the university on epidemiology, and one of the viruses we use is meningitis. It doesn't mutate all that quickly. We can go over there and check to see if the samples are all accounted for, but any of the grad students in that class would have access.

  "We have two pharmaceutical companies left in town. Both of them work with meningitis. One of them has been working with meningitis for decades. The other is a start-up, and I'm not sure exactly what it is that they do." Stanek smiled at him again. "I'm happy to go with you, if you're concerned."

  The taller doctor turned to give Stanek a long, measuring look. "You want to go follow Officer Eddie Eagle here around to different labs when we're in the middle of an outbreak?"

  "We could send one of my students with him too." Stanek's dimpled cheeks turned pink. "Folks from that industry can use a lot of jargon, or just plain refuse to cooperate. If I can help, I'd want to do that obviously." He looked down and away.

  Ken opened his mouth to defend himself. He didn't need some shiny New York City doctor "translating" for him. That wasn't what he said though. Maybe it was the earnest desire to help in those hazel eyes. Maybe it was the way Stanek blushed. "Thanks, Doc. I might come back to ask for help, but for now I'll try it on my own. We do need you to be with the patients, after all. If you wouldn't mind coming over to the lab with me, on a purely voluntary basis of course, I wouldn't mind ruling that out."

  "Not a problem. Do you mind if I do my rounds, first?" He frowned then. "Have you been vaccinated for meningitis?"

  "I'm not sure. If I was, it was a long time ago. Why?" Ken scratched his head at the non sequitur.

  "If you're investigating an illness that can actually damage your brain, it's probably not a bad idea to take steps to limit that disease's ability to hurt you." Stanek raised an eyebrow. "Do you have any moral objections to vaccination, Deputy?"

  Ken's cheeks grew hot. "Not at all. I just—"

  "Then let's do this." He gestured to Ken, and Ken found himself following the doctor out of the office and through the ER.

  The taller doctor, who had to be the director since it was his office, followed with the shotgun.

  Stanek paused to speak with a nurse on his way into his office. The maroon-clad woman nodded once, turned on her heel, and headed back in the same direction she'd come from. Then, all three of them walked into Stanek's office. It was a little small, and the desk was covered in files and paperwork, but Ken could hardly complain about that. His own wasn't much better.

  "I should be doing this in an exam room, but they're all busy right now." Stanek grabbed a tablet from his desk and took a look at it. "Ooo. That's not great. I'm going to want to go check on a patient before we go to the lab, if you don't mind."

  "Of course." Ken wanted to squirm, but he held his peace. A doctor wasn't going to abandon his patients, especially not patients who were dangerously ill, in favor of a field trip to a lab.

  Wade, the department head, smirked and took off. Stanek eyed the shotgun. "Does the armory need to come with us?" He wrinkled his nose at Ken.

  "Well, I'm not leaving it in the office." Ken frowned. "I wasn't about to leave it in the car either. Not after that cop's car got broken into on the North Side last week."

  "I guess that makes sense. I'm sorry. I can't quite be comfortable with it just looming there, you know?" He rolled his shoulders and jerked his head toward the door. "I guess there's no place else to put it though. They won't let Rick keep a gun safe on site anymore, so I guess it's got to stay with you. "

  "Not a big fan of guns, are you?" Ken followed his escort to the elevators.

  "Not really. I'm from New York. They're not a fashion accessory down there." He looked Ken over. "It doesn't generally mean good things when they come out."

  Before Ken could find a polite way to express his outrage, the elevator stopped. Stanek led him through a set of doors and into a floor full of patient rooms, where nurses, orderlies and visitors all eyed Ken and his gun with suspicion. Could they not see the badge pinned to his vest, for crying out loud?

  Their first visit of the evening was to a small private room labeled Barrett. This, Ken knew, was their Patient Zero. Nick Barrett, a freshman, had been the first person diagnosed in this outbreak. The vial of disease had been found in his belongings. Ken had hoped to be able to question the kid about that.

  He didn't need a degree to know that wasn't going to happen anytime soon. Barrett had a mask over his face, and his eyes might have been open but they were more glazed than a donut. He'd already soaked through his thin hospital johnny and the thin white sheet that covered him, and little sores had broken out all over his right hand.

  Stanek frowned when he saw those sores. He looked over at the monitors that blared out numbers that told the kid's story, and Stanek's frown deepened. "Deputy, I'm going to ask you to step outside as an abundance of caution. You were only just vaccinated a couple of minutes ago. It shouldn't be a problem, but why take a chance?"

  Ken looked at the sweat-soaked sheets. He looked at Stanek's face and stepped outside.

  An array of nurses surged in after about thirty seconds, armed with medicines and equipment instead of guns and body armor. Ken heard Stanek giving instructions in a low, calm voice. He couldn't be sure what exactly was being said, but it couldn't be that bad if Stanek sounded so chill about the whole thing. Could it?

  Stanek emerged after another ten minutes. His pale hands had gone red, probably from scrubbing. At least Ken hoped it was from scrubbing. "Alright, let's check on the others." His generous lips had flattened to a thin, tense line.

  "What's wrong with that kid in there?" Ken jerked his head back toward Barrett's room. "When am I going to be able to question him?"

  Stanek barked out a quick, humorless laugh. "At this point, he'll be lucky if he can hear you when he comes out of it. He's in bad shape. The ICU is full up. As soon as a spot opens up down there, I've given orders to move him. He's going to have some lasting complications, and that's assuming he survives."

  Ken stopped in the middle of the corridor. "Wait, I thought you expected them to make a full recovery?"

  "I did." Stanek leveled Ken with a cool gaze. "Barrett took an ugly turn pretty quickly. Even if we do everything right, ten to fifteen percent of patients with meningitis still die. That's assuming we get to treat them right away. And assuming they didn't chalk it up to being just the flu, or just a hangover, or just sleeping wrong on their neck. So, my guess is we didn't get antibiotics into Barrett right away." He closed his eyes. "I'm not blaming him," he said, when he opened them again. "Really, I'm not. I'm frustrated by a bad outcome." He sighed and turned on his heel. "Come on, we've got two more patients to see."

  Those patients seemed to be responding better to treatment than Barrett was. Apparently Barrett hadn't spread his disease much. Maybe he was a loner, or maybe the vaccine worked. Maybe students at Le Moyne had the sense to stay away from students who were showing signs of being sick. What did Ken know?

  Once Stanek had checked
on those patients and left clear instructions for some resident with soft-looking hands, he was free to bring Ken over to the lab. They took Ken's car, because a sixteen-minute walk might be pleasant enough in May or June but it wasn't going to cut it in February. Ken figured he could probably handle the sub-zero temperatures, but the wind was a bitch and motorists couldn't see around the six-foot snowbanks.

  Stanek looked the car over and hesitated before getting inside. "This is the first time I've ridden in the front seat of a police car," he said with a smirk, sliding into the front passenger side of the cruiser.

  Ken rolled his eyes. If he had a dime for every time someone tossed him a line like that, he could retire. Of course, most of those guys didn't look like Stanek. "I'm sure a med school guy like you spends a lot of time in police cars."

  Stanek huffed out a little laugh as he buckled his seatbelt. He fell silent until they got to the medical school.

  Once there, Stanek led him at a brisk pace through the halls until they got to the Public Health department. There was Stanek's name on a door, bright and shiny. They brushed past it, however, in favor of heading to a lab. "So you're on staff full time at the hospital," Ken said, trying to get a better picture of this guy in front of him.

  "Yeah. I'm the head of Infectious Disease, which is part of Emergency Medicine. I pitch in with ER patients when we don't have anything exciting and catching in the area." Stanek used his key card to open a lab labeled "Epidemiology: Authorized Access Only."

  "And you teach, too?"

  "Sure do. I teach about infectious disease and epidemics over here at Upstate."

  Ken scratched his head and looked around the lab. The place looked like something out of science fiction. If Sharknado appeared, he was running, serve and protect be damned. "Where do you find time for fun?"

  Stanek chuckled. "This is fun." He gestured to the lab. "The part where people suffer and die? Not so fun. The part where we can study how we affect diseases, and how diseases affect us? Awesome. I've got a book you might like."

  "I highly doubt it." Ken couldn't help but grin.

  "Trust me. Rats, Lice and History is a classic. The author wrote it like a biography, and it's pretty accessible for non-academics. But the real value is in the footnotes. He goes off on these little rants in the footnotes that have people howling for days. We can stop by my office." He blushed, just a little. "I've got a copy I can loan you."

  Ken was on the cusp of declining, and then he changed his mind. "I'll give it a shot, I guess." He could use it as an excuse to catch up with the hot doctor again, and it wasn't like he could do much else in February. "Thanks."

  "First things first." He walked over to a glass-fronted refrigerator, unlocked it and pulled out a tray of carefully labeled glass vials. "These are our meningitis samples. We were working with meningitis last week, so students could recognize it under a microscope."

  Ken looked. "It looks like all the spaces in this rack are accounted for."

  "They are." Stanek put the samples away and locked the door behind him. "I'll write you up a list of other places that might be working with meningitis."

  "That would be awesome." He followed Stanek back to his office to get the book and to leave his card.

  Chapter Two

  Dave would have loved to convince Hot Cop—Deputy Sykora—to stay a little later, maybe grab a drink or a bite to eat. For that matter, Dave would have loved to be able to go home, take a long, hot shower and try to sleep off the frustrations of the day. Either way, a nice glass of bourbon should have been involved.

  None of those things were going to happen. Rick was working a late shift, sure. Rick wasn't a morning person, and he liked to work later hours. That didn't change the fact that Rick was a surgeon, not an infectious disease specialist. If some freak was out there deliberately infecting people with bacterial meningitis, Dave couldn't justify going home. He wouldn't have been able to sleep anyway.

  He headed back to Silver Oak and did some more rounds, and then he saw some patients in the ER. Thankfully, the Sheriff's Department hadn't seen fit to announce the source of this outbreak. Dave hadn't thought Sykora, for all his good looks, was all that interested in epidemiology. He guessed if any group of people understood about not causing a panic, however, it would be cops.

  Then again, if Hot Cop was all that worried about not causing a panic he probably wouldn't have shown up in the ER lugging a shotgun around with him.

  Dave shook his head. He didn't have time to worry about whatever might have been going through Hot Cop Sykora's head. He had plenty of things to worry about right here at Silver Oak.

  The night went on without too much drama. These things were relative in his profession. He got a pretty good cross-section of humanity, if that cross-section were taken from a pyramid. Some of his patients came in to the ER on advice from their family doctors, but those folks usually came in during the day. Others came in through the Pediatric ER, and those came from all walks of life. Not many folks were interested in waiting until Dr. Jones opened his doors at nine when their kid was running a fever of a hundred and five, nor should they.

  The vast majority of his patients had no primary care doctor at all. Some were sent in through Urgent Care facilities, and had at least some kind of insurance. Many had no insurance at all. The ER was their only source of medical care. They were poor, sometimes addicted, sometimes homeless. They might never get follow-up care. The specialist in him knew they were the ultimate breeding ground for his kind of work.

  The man in him who'd wanted to try and balance out his family's misdeeds just wanted to help, to whatever extent he could.

  He saw ten patients he could diagnose with influenza, four of whom had to be admitted because they had no place else to go. One of those, a woman in her nineties with a series of faded numbers tattooed onto her forearm, had an apartment but no one to look after her. Her children had moved away long ago, chasing jobs, and no one had stepped in to fill the gap.

  Dave would probably have wanted to admit her anyway, given her age, but the situation still ate him up with guilt.

  They got two cases he thought he could diagnose as Hepatitis C, although he'd have to wait for lab work to confirm his suspicions. He tried to counsel those patients without judgement. They had enough judgement for themselves. He didn't need to add to it. Sometimes he wanted to scream.

  "Sure, there are ways to get this particular illness that involve lifestyle. That doesn't make you a bad person, and that doesn't mean it's your fault you caught this," he told the second patient. "It's not for me to sit there and pore over your life and say, 'Oh, this was worthy behavior, this was unworthy.' That's absurd, okay? You get treatment, just like everyone else. This is a manageable illness, and with any luck it's an illness we can even beat. Those are the only things that matter. Save your energy for fighting, not for blame." He winked at her and went to check the lab results.

  He worked on other patients too. They had fifteen overdose patients come through the doors, all opiates. He put stitches into four trauma victims, and he admitted three cases of kidney stones.

  Dave's primary job, however, was keeping an eye on his meningitis patients. A spot on the ICU ward opened up at four in the morning, when a patient died. It wasn't good to feel relief when someone passed on, but Dave knew that patient hadn't been expected to survive anyway. Barrett's prospects for survival were still iffy, edging closer to doubtful, but the ICU ward would help.