Plague: A gripping suspense thriller about an incurable outbreak in Miami

I brought Jackson and Firenza down here, and let them see for themselves.’
‘What are they going to do?’
‘Wait and see. Firenza said he thought it was probably an isolated outbreak.’
‘Wait and see? Are you kidding? What makes him think it isn’t going to spread around the whole damn city?’
Dr. Selmer shrugged. ‘Precedent. The worst outbreak in American history was New Orleans, in 1920, when eleven people died. Firenza doesn’t believe that we’re going to lose more than twelve.’
‘Didn’t you tell him you’d lost five already? Jesus, Anton, this thing is far worse than bubonic plague. Doesn’t he understand that?’
Dr. Selmer pulled his surgical cap on again. He looked at Leonard Petrie with his pale, worn-out eyes, and when he spoke his voice seemed hollow with tiredness.
‘I think he understands that, yes. But he’s like everyone else. They watch Dr. Kildare and Ben Casey, and they don’t believe that American medicine can ever be licked. They don’t understand that we can make mistakes. Officially, we’re not allowed to. Officially we’re not even permitted to be baffled.’
Dr. Petrie looked serious. ‘Anton,’ he said, ‘how bad is it really?’
Before Dr. Selmer could answer, his nurse came out of the emergency ward door and said, ‘Doctor, he’s almost gone. I think you’d better come.’
‘There’s a mask and a gown spare, Leonard,’ Dr. Selmer said. ‘Come inside and you can see for yourself how bad it really is.’
They pushed their way into the emergency ward. Dr. Petrie tugged on a tight surgical cap and laced a mask over his nose and mouth. The nurse helped him put on green rubbers and a long gown. She gave him transparent latex gloves, and he pulled them on to his hands as he followed Selmer into the glare of the surgical lamps.
It was the middle-aged man that Herb Stone and Francis Poletto had picked up in Alton Road. His face was drawn and lividly pale, and his eyes were rolled back into his head so that only the whites were showing. Beside the couch, on the luminous dials of the diagnostic equipment, his respiration, heartbeat and blood pressure were slowly subsiding.
The nurse said, ‘His breathing is failing. Dr. Selmer. We can’t keep him much longer.’
Dr. Selmer, helpless, stood at the end of the couch and watched the man gradually die.
‘This is how bad it really is,’ he said to Dr. Petrie, in a hushed voice. ‘This man’s wife told us that he felt sick just after lunch. By the evening, it had gotten so bad that he decided to go and look up his doctor. He was on his way there when he was picked up by the cops for drunk driving. He wasn’t drunk, of course. He was dying of plague. Twelve hours from first symptoms to death.’
Dr. Petrie saw the pulse-rate drop and drop and drop. The luminous ribbon of the cardiac counter was barely nudged by the man’s weakening heart.
‘Is his wife here?’ Dr. Petrie asked.
Selmer nodded. ‘We’re keeping every relative and friend in the waiting-room, under observation. The way this plague seems to develop, you show your first symptoms three or four hours after you’ve been exposed to it. We had a young girl brought in about three-and-a-half hours ago, and her father’s showing the first signs. Dizziness, sickness, diarrhoea, shivering. It’s the fastest infectious disease I’ve ever seen.’
Dr. Petrie said nothing as the man on the couch died. Whoever he was, whatever he did, his forty-five years of life and memory and experience dwindled to nothing at all, and vanished on that hard, uncompromising bed.
Dr. Selmer motioned to the nurse and they drew a sheet over his face and disconnected the diagnostic equipment. One of the doctors called for a porter from the mortuary.
‘Poor guy,’ said Dr. Petrie, ‘He never even knew what it was.’
Dr. Selmer turned away. Though an emergency ward doctor he was tom apart by losing his patients. He was skilful and talented and he never lost his enthusiasm for other people’s survival. What was happening here today was, for him, relentless and unstoppable agony.
‘There’s one consolation,’ said Dr. Selmer hoarsely. ‘It looks as though we’re not going to get it ourselves.’
‘We’re not? I always thought doctors and nurses were first-line casualties with plague.’
‘Maybe they are. But it was nine o’clock this morning when you came into contact with David Kelly, wasn’t it? And are you sick yet? I came into closer contact than you, and I’m okay. Perhaps we’re going to get lucky, and stay alive.’
‘I still think you ought to call Firenza. Tell him again how bad this is.’
Dr. Selmer shrugged. ‘It’s not that he doesn’t believe me. It’s his reputation. I don’t think he wants to be known as the health official with the highest mortality rate in the history of Florida.’
‘That’s absurd,’ said Dr. Petrie.
‘You think so? Go and talk to him yourself. Meanwhile, you can do me a favor.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Tell this guy’s wife that he’s gone. Her name’s Haskins. She’s waiting by the water fountain, just down the corridor.’
Dr. Petrie lowered his head. Then he said, ‘Okay,’ and went back to the wash-up room to take off his mask and robe. He glanced at himself in the mirror as he straightened his jacket, and thought that he looked tall, tired, handsome and helpless. Maybe Margaret had been right all along. Maybe it was futile, caring for rich and hypochondriac old ladies. Maybe his real work was here, in the thick of the blood and the pain, the failing hearts and the teeming bacteria.
He opened the door and peered down the crowded corridor. Mrs. Haskins was standing on her own – a gray-haired woman in a cheap brown print dress, holding a plastic carrier bag with her husband’s clothes and shoes in it. She seemed oblivious to the bustle of medics and porters, as more and more sick people were wheeled swiftly into the hospital. Outside, as the doors swung open, the ambulance sirens echoed through the warm night streets of Miami. Mrs. Haskins, alone by