Yael Dragwyla and Richard Ransdell First North American rights

email: polaris93@aol.com 5,700 words

The Eris War

Volume 1: The Dragon and the Crown

by Admiral Chaim G. Resh, USN detached

Book 2: This Devastated Land

Part 1: Deep Impact

Chapter 9: Candle of Life

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Jeanie mumbled.
“It’s all right, it’s been a rough time for all of us. Hmm . . .” After looking over the latest entries in
disbelief, Janet asked her friend, “Jeanie, how long was I out there with Tom?”
“Half an hour, 45 minutes at most. Probably a lot less. I wasn’t paying much attention to the time.
Why?”
“How could her status have changed so fast?” Janet asked her, trying to keep her voice low in order to
avoid disturbing the woman asleep in the bed.
Reading her mind, Jeanie said, “I don’t think you’ll disturb her, Janet. She’s out like a light again.
Not surprising, the way her vitals have changed.”
“Her temperature’s 103? Pulse is, what, 70?”
“And thready, yet. Weak. My acupuncturist would shit kittens about now if it were my pulse!”
“Have you ordered up fluids for her, anything?”
“Waiting for you, my tardy friend. You’re the doctor.”
“I’m not a doctor, dammit! Just a wannabe medical student – well, would have been starting this
Autumn if, er, it hadn’t happened.”
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“Yes, well, you’re probably the closest thing to a doctor we’ve got available right now. Did you know
that there is only one MD now in this hospital who isn’t down sick now with something or other – or dead
of it? And that one is Chief of Staff Pearsons, an old fart who, to give the Devil his due, is doing all he can
to help the patients here, but at this point he’s overwhelmed and outnumbered and cut off at the pass,
without a sign of the cavalry that’s supposed to come over the hill and bail us all out.
“We’ve also got Gordon, the Nurse-Practitioner, and he’s so tired he’s about ready to drop. We’ve got
two nurses on duty now, one of which is Yours Truly, and Andy the Gopher, poor guy, this must be giving
the poor man absolute fits,, and a couple of people in Pathology, and some vets down there, too. In fact,
Pearsons managed to recruit something like six veterinarians as acting physicians – as he said, they have to
be knowledgeable about just about every sort of animal, including primates, and we’re primates, and what
they don’t know they’ll be able to figure out quick, so they’re probably better than most MDs at this point.
“Beyond that, sweetie, you are it. You, and Tom, too – he knows almost as much medicine as you do
by now, and you’ve been studying to be a doctor ever since you were a little girl, haven’t you?” she said,
her expression momentarily breaking into a smile. Then, frowning again, she said, “Anyway, there’s
nobody to help here but me and you. I wasn’t about to leave this poor woman alone – aside from the fact
that she’s just about one of the best writers ever born, except for her husband, of course, she’s good-hearted
and has done a tremendous amount of good for this whole state, she and her husband both. I figured she’s
due for a little return on her money about now, don’t you? I’d far rather do what I can for her than some of
the buttheads they’ve got in the other rooms here, or maybe go out where they’re putting the sick to bed in
tents they’re setting up in front of people’s houses and the town library and city hall and not be able to do a
damned thing for any of them but watch them all slowly freeze to death in the snow!”
“You mean there isn’t anyone else who –”
“No,” Jeanie said grimly.
“Oh. My. God,” Janet said, sinking down into her chair, stunned. “It’s . . . really that bad, hunh?”
“It really is.”
Sighing, floundering mentally, trying to think what to do next, Janet asked the nurse, “What medicines
do they have her on?”
“Now? Amoxicillin for the bacteria, and Ribavirin and Amantadine, a couple of antivirals. When they
brought Rachel in, they tested her blood and also did a spinal. They found three types of strange bacteria in
her, one that vaguely resembled streptococcus, another that looked like a variant of staph, and one that
might have been Pillotina, a spirochete, which is weird, because as far as anybody knows, Pillotina only
lives in the style of clams and oysters, or in the hindguts of termites and wood-eating cockroaches,” she
commented as she paged through the first few entries in Rachel’s chart. “There also seemed to be a
possibility of a viral infection. Her spinal fluid contained some odd viral proteins, and they saw something
with the electron microscope – useful gadget, ain’t it? Old man Flournoy did us quite a favor, endowing us
with that and the burn unit after we cared for him while he was recovering from those burns he got in that
explosion down at the plant! Wonder how many kids in Africa could’ve been saved if that money had gone
to buy meals for them? Anyway, they think they found two or three viruses when they did her bloodwork
and checked her spinal fluid, something in her bloodstream that might have been viral hep but wasn’t
exactly like any of the known agents for it, another in the spinal fluid that could have been an agent of viral
meningitis, but again they weren’t sure. – Which doesn’t surprise me any now, considering the downright
weird shit that everyone and his dog Charlie around here have been coming down with these last couple of
days!
“Anyway, that’s when they put her on the antibiotic and the antivirals. Ribavirin is usually used to
treat respiratory syncytial virus, and Amantadine is normally used on influenza A. But Ribavirin also
seems to inhibit the messenger-RNA that viruses use to do their dirty work, using the body’s cells to make
zillions of copies of themselves, and Amantadine interferes with viruses’ ability to get rid of their protein
coats so they can get down into those cells in the first place, so I guess they hoped they’d work like that on
whatever Rachel has now. There’s a note here that they’re thinking of switching her from Amoxicillin to
some other antibacterial if she doesn’t respond well to it, but they haven’t done it yet. They also put her on
an IV drip of hydrogen peroxide solution as well as giving her a massive injection of time-release C and
another one of about the same dosage that wasn’t in the time-release form, 100 grams each, it says here. It
was about then that they discovered that the machine they were using to generate ozone and hydrogen
peroxide was down, and of course no parts to be had anywhere near, and the only ones in Maine over in the
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coastal Hot Zone. – You don’t like that term, ‘Hot Zone’?” the nurse asked the younger woman, seeing
Janet wince at the last phrase.
“I suppose it fits,” Janet told her friend. As they say, ‘bringin’ it all back home.’ All those people over
there . . . and maybe we’re going to be part of that Hot Zone one of these days, ourselves.”
“Honey, I hate to disillusion you, but we are part of that Hot Zone now! Or hadn’t you noticed what’s
been going on around here lately? – Anyway,” Jeanie continued, working her way through Rachel’s chart,
“that was night before last. They gave her Teracillin, the most powerful antibiotic we had on hand, and
Boratin, an antiviral in the same league, and vitamin C, as much as they could – or maybe dared; the doses
listed here are like, off the map! – and several teaspoons worth of colloidal silver between then and early
this morning, when you came in with Adelle and Martin.
“She developed a hellacious case of diarrhea by about 2 p.m. yesterday, but it slowed down and finally
stopped late last night, and seemed to do so in proportion to the amount of C they gave her.”
“So she had something really nasty in her intestines – but it was something that the C wiped out,
wasn’t it? Had to’ve used up all the C in the process, though – C’s acidic, and any excess goes out the
colon, and she’d have had diarrhea from that afterward, otherwise.”
“Good girl!” Jeanie told her with a “that’s my girl, I knew you could!” smile. “Yep, that’s what it
sounds like.
“Anyway, they also got whatever was causing all the blood in her urine cleared up, too. She bled out
over a pint before they got that stopped – they had to catheterize her, because she was unconscious and
wasn’t holding her urine – when she came in here, her temp was so high that apparently it was interfering
with deep-seated, long-term reflexes like that. Adults don’t normally pee themselves in their sleep, so
something was going on there. Anyway, they catheterized her right away, and they collected I don’t know
how much urine before it slowed down, probably thanks to everything they were giving her. Her kidneys
were letting everything leave the body, it seemed like, according to Tet, the doctor on duty at the time. And
that included one hell of a lot of blood. As if those semipermeable membranes had become almost
completely permeable for awhile there.”
“Like what’s happening to poor Martin – Tom’s dad – only his is in the brain instead of the kidneys,”
Janet mused, thinking.
“I’ll bet it’s his kidneys too, sweetie,” Jeanie told her, frowning. “Blood vessels are blood vessels, I
don’t care where they are, and kidney tissue is made of the same basic stuff. Well, not completely, but I
still wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t just one place in his body that’s doing it. Did Tom say what they
thought it was?”
“No, but Tom and I both couldn’t help but think of Ebola and Marburg and other hemorrhagic fevers.
His liver was doing something similar, too.”
“Shit. Well, let’s hope for the best, but expect the worst – I can’t think of anything else that would hit
both the brain and the liver like that.”
“But Rachel’s definitely better, isn’t she?” Janet said, desperately hoping for reassurance. If Rachel
recovered, then there was truly hope.
“She certainly was this morning! Diarrhea cleared up, incontinence gone, fever way down, she’s still
catheterized – you can see the tube and sac there under her bed if you bend down a little – and no more
blood is appearing in her urine, so I guess she’s doing much better – What, Janet?”
Out of reflexive curiosity, Janet had bent down to look for the catheter tubing and sac under the bed.
“Jeanie, look at this.”
“What, the tube – oh, shit!”
The tube from Rachel’s urethra coming down into the sac from the other side of the bed, and the sac
itself, were filled with yellowish-brown fluid heavily streaked with red.
“Oh, fuck, what do we do?!” Janet moaned.
“I – damn,” Jeanie said, putting the chart down on the foot of Rachel’s bed, getting to her feet, and
heading for a cupboard standing against the wall of the room across from the foot of Rachel’s bed. “Let me
see if there’s anything left of the C in here,” she told Janet, pulling open the cupboard doors. “—Hey,
jackpot!” she cried gleefully, holding up a brown plastic bottle.
“What is it?” Janet asked.
“Somebody left some powdered C in here! You know we’re down to nearly nothing on all our
pharmaceutical supplies, including ascorbate powder?” she asked Janet as she walked toward the door of
the room.
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“Where are you going?”

“I’m gonna fix her up an IV drip of ascorbate solution with normal multi-saline,” Jeanie told her,
pausing in the doorway. “She’ll need minerals, too. There ain’t much of this left,” she said, jiggling the
bottle, “but I’ll use what there is on her. It may be the last in the hospital. Be right back . . .”
“So what’s up?”
“Adelle! Oh, thank God, you look great! Or healthy, anyway,” Janet babbled, hastily standing up.
“How’s Mom doing?”
“Not real great, sweetie. I wish it were otherwise, but – well, we’ll just have to wait and see.”
“And how do you feel? Are you all right?” Janet said, starting to get to her feet.
“No, no, please sit down, I’m all right,” the other woman said, smiling graciously at her as she pulled
up a chair and sat down next to Janet. She had brought some of her clothes to the hospital with her, and
was wearing pale blue slacks, a long-sleeved white blouse, tennis shoes, and a warm sweater, an outfit that
looked a lot better than the flannel shirt, blue jeans, and run-down flats Janet had thrown on this morning,
Janet thought unhappily. “I feel a bit ‘peaky,’ you know, but other than that I seem to be fine,” Adelle told
Janet.
Janet thought that the dark shadows under Adelle’s eyes, the sudden lines in her face that were
certainly not those of old age, the hollowness of her cheeks said otherwise, but she hesitated to contradict
her elder. On the other hand, Adelle’s tread was firm, she still seemed alert and strong, and the bloom of
fever was absent from her face, so she may just have been feeling the effects of simple fatigue and the
burden of worry she’d been carrying for the last couple of days. “How do things seem out there in the
halls?” Janet asked her. “I’ve been in here for awhile with Rachel and Jeanie – Jeanie just went to set up an
IV solution for Rachel, she should be back soon – and it’s begun to sound very quiet out there.”
“Well, there aren’t nearly as many people around as usual, I’d say,” Adelle told her. “From what I’ve
heard, more and more people are coming down sick with all sorts of strange ailments, including the staff
here, as well as the two or three patients they had in here for other things from the beginning, such as the
little Frost boy with his broken arm. And there are a lot of people who have died in the last two days – it’s
been very bad,” she said, shaking her head. “Even if all of us – me and Martin, you and Tom and your
parents, and Rachel and John, say – should recover of whatever we have now and survive these epidemics,
I’m afraid that so many people will die that the infrastructure we depend on for our lives and well-being,
our community, the economy, technology, our culture, all of that will be so fragmented by all those deaths
that essentially it won’t exist any more. What it would be like if that happens is something I don’t want to
think about – think of a world with no fire departments, no police, no hospitals or doctors or pharmacies or
pharmaceutical companies, just for starters! Food distribution systems would go, we’d never get our
telephones and electrical power and gas heating back, there’d be no stores where you could buy new
clothes, no stockyards – all gone. It would be a world where the only law was force majeur, the only order
what the will of the strong man, the warlord, could impose on it, a world without indoor plumbing and
modern medical technology – we’d fall right back into the Dark Ages! And we might not ever be able to
come out of them again, this time.”
“Oh, Adelle . . .” Reaching out, Janet put a hand on the older woman’s arm, attempting to comfort her.
Smiling a little, Adelle put her other hand on top of Janet’s and gave it an affectionate squeeze. “Then
again,” she told the young woman who, if luck were with them, would soon be her daughter-in-law, “I am
probably being an alarmist. In fact, I’m sure I am. I’ve heard nothing to indicate that anything like this has
taken place anywhere else, and some people are saying the war, however it got started, may be over now.
So probably the rest of the country, with a few exceptions, is in fairly good shape. In which case we should
soon get a visit from the Army and the CDC, who will help us start getting this situation cleaned up and
putting our lives back together.”
“Oh, I hope you’re right!” Janet sighed.
“ ‘Dear Lord, give me the ability to take care of the things I can do something about, and to not worry
about the things I can do nothing about – and the wisdom to know the difference’,” Adelle told her,
chuckling a little. “—So, how’s our new friend, Rachel?” she asked Janet, changing the subject.
“Back to sleep,” Janet told her.
“That’s not all, is it? You looked very concerned when I asked about her.”
“I – I guess I am. Adelle, look under her bed, there. See that tubing?”
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Leaning down to look, Adelle said, squinting to bring the shadowy realm beneath the hospital bed into
better focus, “Over there on the other side? What – oh! That’s blood, isn’t it?” she said, sitting back
upright again.
“Yes. That’s a catheter they’ve been using on Rachel since she came here. She was a lot better earlier
this morning, fever down, more energy, she was eating, but I went out in the hall to talk with Tom and then
came back in here and when I did Rachel was asleep again, and didn’t look very good.”
“Tom told me you and he had talked after helping Rachel to talk with Steve,” Adelle said. “He came
to my room to see how Elaine and I were doing, mentioned a little of what the two of you talked about. –
Not about anything personal, of course,” Adelle added hurriedly, “it was just that he was very worried for
your sake, above all. Tell me – he didn’t say anything, I just wondered, because he was so worried – are
you pregnant?”
“I – no.”
“I didn’t think so, but I certainly wouldn’t have been angry at you or him if you were,” she said
reassuringly. “It’s been clear for years that the two of you were meant for each other and would be married
and have kids some day, and if the first one came along just a bit early, well, we’d have gotten together
with your folks and had a big wedding for you and then a lovely shower just before the ‘premature’ birth.
That’s the way they do things in this part of the country, and it shuts the gossips up and makes for rejoicing
instead of trouble, which is the way things ought to be, don’t you think?” she asked Janet, smiling. “Tom
was ‘early’ himself, did you know?”
“No!” Janet exclaimed, brightening considerably at the fact that Adelle was sharing such a confidence
with her.
“Yes. He came along three months early, six months after Martin and I got married.” The smile
Adelle wore now was positively mischievous. “A fine, healthy, bouncing 7 pound boy – pretty good for a
preemie, don’t you think?” Adelle asked her with a wink.
Janet, unable to help herself, started giggling.
“Hey, I was young once, too, myself, Janet. I know what it’s like. It’s okay. You’re like the daughter
Martin and I never had, and you’ll be a wonderful addition to our family,” Adelle told her, putting a hand
on her arm. “At any rate, clearly Rachel isn’t doing nearly as well as she was, then?”
“No. What worries me was how fast the change was – she was doing so much better when Tom and I
helped her make that call to Steve, and then he and I had a talk in the hall for a bit, maybe 30-40 minutes at
the outside, and when I came back in here, Rachel was already looking a lot worse. Tom said that they’ve
nearly run out of vitamin C and everything else here, so she probably hadn’t had any of that since early this
morning or maybe last night, and without it . . .” She left the thought unspoken – there was no need to go
farther, given what Adelle knew about ascorbate and other supplementary therapies and their effects on the
human body.
“Are they all out now?” Adelle asked her, frowning in concern.
“It – sounded like it, from what both Tom and Jeanie said.”
“We’re out.”
“Jeanie! Were you able to make up the IV?” Janet asked her nurse, who had just appeared in the
doorway, as she rose to her feet.
“Yeah, I was. Good thing I found the stuff, because there simply isn’t any more to be had at any
price,” the little nurse told her. “Here, gimme a hand with this thing,” she told Janet, stepping aside so that
Janet and Adelle could see the IV stand and the bottle of clear fluid it held that had been behind her.
“Sure. Here, where do we put it?” Janet asked her as she helped the nurse maneuver the stand through
the room and over to the side of Rachel’s bed.
“Right here, where it’s easy for us to tend to it,” Jeanie said as they pushed it into place by the near
side of Rachel’s bed, close to her head. “Adelle, come help me with this IV, will you?”
“What do I do?” Adelle asked her.
“Just hold Rachel’s arm steady so I can get the IV seated properly. – Yeah, like that. – Okay, I think
we’ve got it . . .” Jeanie said, stepping back to look at her work, noting with satisfaction that she had seated
the needle cleanly so that there was no subcutaneous bleeding. “I’ll want to check that every so often, see
if it’s going in properly, but I think that should do it. God, I hope it’s enough! There just isn’t any more.”
“How much C did you give her in the IV?” Adelle asked her.
“All there was left in this bottle I found over there in that cabinet, about two teaspoons. I added it to a
normal solution of multimineral salts. That was about the last of that, too,” she added, looking unhappy.
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“It’s all gone?” Adelle asked her, clearly hoping the case was otherwise.
“I’m afraid so, Adelle,” Jeanie said. “Now, could you hold on to this stand for me, move it when I say
to, while Janet and I move this bed out from the wall? I want to get at that catheter, make sure it’s draining
properly, change the container and all that. I bet nobody’s checked on that since late last night.”
“Why not?” Adelle said. “—Here, I’ve got the stand. Honey, you want to help Jeanie, here, with the
bed?”
“Sure,” Janet said. “Which end do I take, Jeanie? Head or foot?”
“Head. – Okay, here we go . . .”
With Jeanie taking the bed’s foot, Janet its head, and Adelle the IV stand, they got the bed moved
several feet out from the wall quickly and with virtually no problems.
“Hey, we make a great team, don’t we?” Janet said, grinning, contemplating their work.
“Sure do, Jan,” Jeanie told her as she began checking the catheter. “God, just in time, too, this bag is
overflowing! Somebody, go get me another plastic bag and a pair of plastic gloves, there’s a bunch of them
in that same cabinet I got the ascorbate out of, okay?”
While Janet found a plastic sac and plastic gloves in the cabinet and brought it back to Jeanie, Jeanie
told Adelle, “The reason nobody changed her catheter all this time is that there was probably nobody here
to change it. I came in here earlier only because I was worried about Mrs. Yeats and wanted to make sure
she was okay. She’s done so much for this state, she and her husband, and it wouldn’t be right, leaving her
unattended. So I stopped in to see her, and then Janet and Tom came in to set up the shortwave call, and it
kinda went from there.
“When I first came in here,” she told Janet as she began changing the catheter sac, “Rachel was doing
a lot better. After the call, though, she started going downhill. I don’t know why, but I’d bet that it was
because they hadn’t given her any more C or silver or even antibiotics since early this morning, when we
began running out of everything and they started taking more and more of it out to the tent hospitals –”
“What?” Adelle asked her, horrified.
“Yep. They’ve got most of the people left here in town in those tents now. No room for them here in
the hospital. And the only other sources of medications around here are the veterinarians’ offices, and they
didn’t have all that much, either. So we’ve been sharing what we have with the tent hospitals – some of our
people are running those, anyway, and they’ve got people from town to help take stuff from here to the
tents and that sort of thing. Anyway, almost everyone around here who hasn’t already died or headed out
of town is in those tents somewhere. They’ve got the tents set up all over town – in front of the library, the
schools, the fire department, the parking lot of Bailey’s Supermarket, you name it! Plus, they’ve converted
some school buildings into wards, as well. The vets are taking a few human patients, too.”
“Oh, my God – it’s that bad?”
“It’s that bad, Adelle. Haven’t you noticed how empty this place is? The doctors – the ones still on
their feet – are working down in the tents. We’ve got maybe two to take the duty here now, and for all I
know both of them are down sick or dead of plague right now, themselves. One of the vets is helping out
here, plus we’ve got vets working in Pathology, not just on dead animals but on human beings, too, because
the pathologists here want to pick the vets’ brains for whatever microbiological expertise they might have.
– Okay, let me go dump this thing out,” she said, taking the sac full of bloody brown urine into the little
bathroom just off Rachel’s room.
It took the nurse less than a minute to empty out the sac into the toilet, put the sac and the disposable
gloves she’d used into the covered waste can, which was marked with a bright green biohazard sign, and
flush the toilet. Then, after washing her hands thoroughly with antibacterial soap, she returned to the room.
“At least the water lines and sewers are still working,” she told Janet and Adelle when she reentered
the room. “Wonder how long that’ll go on?” she asked worriedly as she went over to check on Rachel
again. “—Hey, our patient looks a little better, I think,” she said, more cheerfully. “Maybe the C is
starting to work. Here, Mrs. Yeats, let’s check your pulse,” she said, a rhetorical and probably automatic
utterance, since Rachel was still asleep. “Ah, good, down to 55, and stronger,” she said, laying Rachel’s
arm back down on the covers. “Now let me get the thermometer so we can take your temp . . .”
As Jeanie took Rachel’s temperature with an ear-clip digital thermometer that didn’t depend on the
patient’s ability to keep it in place, Adelle asked Jeanie, “Who’s taking care of the other patients?”
“I don’t know. Maybe nobody – but I think that you and Jan and Tom and your husband and Jan’s
parents and Mr. Hamilton are the only ones still left here.”
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“Why? Where have all the patients gone? To the tent hospitals? That doesn’t seem right, it’s so cold
out there – what could they do for them there that couldn’t be done here?”
“Not that,” Jeanie told her. “The Frosts came and got their boy early this morning and took him out
against medical advice. Several of the patients we had here on the 16th died. So have some of the staff.
The rooms just sort of emptied out over the last two days.”
“That’s why there aren’t many people here, then,” Adelle said thoughtfully.
“Yes. I’m staying because, frankly, I’ve got everything here I need. I don’t have any pets, my
houseplants can fend for themselves, anything I’m going to need for awhile is either right here or nowhere,
and if I get sick I can just crawl into one of the beds here.”
“But who will take care of you then, if everyone’s leaving or, or dying?” For the first time, Adelle’s
ineradicable poise and assurance was beginning to falter in the face of the nearly inconceivable disaster that
had befallen them all.
“Whoever’s here,” Jeanie said, shrugging. “—Hmm, her temperature’s gone down again by a half a
degree or so. So she’s definitely getting the solution,” she said as she inspected the read-out attached to the
ear-clamp, which had just beeped to announce it had completed the process of taking Rachel’s temperature.
“Okay, let’s let her sleep for awhile, see if this helps her. I hope so – that’s the last of the C, and I think
we’re out of antibiotics, too,” she told Adelle.
“Well, we can still pray,” Adelle said, smiling somehow recovering her equanimity and sense of
humor. “I’ll only really start worrying when we lose that.
“Okay, then, I think I’ll go back to my room so I can see how Elaine is doing, maybe read some. I –”
Frowning, crossing her arms over her chest, she looked around.
“Adelle? What’s wrong?” Janet asked her, alarmed.
“Does it suddenly feel colder to you in here, or is it just my imagination?”
After cocking her head for a moment as if straining to listen for something, Jeanie told Adelle, “It’s not
your imagination. I should have realized it sooner – I can’t hear the forced-air heating system working.
Either the furnace suddenly stopped working, or there’s some kind of problem in the vents or something.”
“The furnace – oh, that’s right, they heat the hospital with oil, don’t they?” Adelle said. “I hadn’t even
thought about it! But that explains why we haven’t felt cold since we got here, even though there’s a
blizzard outside. Which leads me to ask: how much oil they had for the furnace?”
“Couldn’t have been much – this is July, after all,” Jeanie told her. Like Adelle and Janet, she was
suddenly feeling real alarm. Who thinks about the need for heating in mid-Summer? The company that
delivered the oil only started making regular deliveries around the end of September, and stopped making
them again when the warm months began, around May. “As soon as the temperature started dropping, they
must’ve fired up the furnace to keep the hospital warm. By now we’ve run out. Oh, shit!” she hissed,
scowling. “That’s all we need right now! Wonder what’ll go wrong next?”
“I’m going to go back to my room,” Adelle said again. “I’ll see what I can do to cover up the
windows, and scrounge extra blankets somewhere for Elaine and me. Then I’ll go check on Martin and
Fred and Mr. Hamilton –”
“That’s all right, Adelle,” Jeanie told her, rising to her feet, “I’ll go do that, part of my job. Janet, why
don’t you start doing that in here, maybe drape a blanket or two over the window, on top of the curtains?
There’s a linen closet just down the hall from here on the left – has a sign on it, you can’t miss it. Take as
many blankets as you can find in there, sheets, too, bring them back in here and put them in the cupboards
over there where I got the plastic sac and rubber gloves. If they come raiding us for the tent hospitals, I
don’t want them getting the last of our blankets.
“You can help her with the blankets, Adelle,” she said as she headed for the door of the room. “Take
as many as you need for Elaine and yourself, put the rest in the cupboard in your room. I’ll raid the
cupboards over by Critical, which is where they have your husbands and Mr. Hamilton. If you need me,
you know where Critical is . . .”
So saying, she headed out of the room and down the hall to Critical.
Quickly Adelle and Janet got busy locating all the clean blankets they could find close to their own
rooms. The linen closet yielded ten thermal blankets; Adelle took five for her room, Janet for Rachel’s
room. They also found three stacks of clean sheets in the closet, and each appropriated half. Finding
nearby rooms empty, they raided those, as well, finding not only blankets and sheets in the cupboards in
them, but potentially useful things such as hot water bottles, rubber gloves, liners for biohazard waste
 Day of the Dragons
By Yael R. Dragwyla
Page 8 of 8

containers, bags full of unused disposable syringes, and numerous other things which they quickly
appropriated., each taking half of the loot.
Adelle had gone to her room to see about insulating it and making sure Elaine had plenty of warm
covers and Janet was starting to hang blankets over the curtains in Rachel’s room when Jeanie returned.
“Jeanie! What happened?” Janet exclaimed, seeing the look on Jeanie’s face. It was an expression
she’d never seen before on anyone’s face, let alone that of the ebullient, tough-souled little nurse, one so
bleak it seemed that light would never fill that face again.
“I’m gonna need your help with something, Jan. Adelle’s too, if she’s up to it,” the little nurse said,
pulling up a chair and wearily taking a seat on it. “I – I hate to be the one to tell you this, Janet, but your
dad’s dead,” she told the younger woman in flat tones, as if she couldn’t bear to think about them too much
herself. “So is Mr. Hamilton. And Martin. They – they’re all gone. All three. We need to move the
bodies out of here, not far, we don’t need to actually bury them, but we need to get them out into the snow
before they – they – oh, God, Janet, I can’t believe this is happening!” she cried, suddenly losing all her
aplomb. Putting her face in her hands, she began weeping, loud, uncontrolled sobbing that shook her slight
frame the way a strong wind shakes a sapling.