“Nothing super great on this end, but a few things that may be sort of promising. First, how’s Alex?”
She heaved a sigh. “Not good. I just had him up for a walk, meds, food. He barely made it back and forth once, ate four crackers with spray cheese, then went right back to sleep.”
“Well, sleep is a good thing for him right now. How’s the fever?”
“Hovering between one hundred and one-oh-one,” she reported. “Which means if we let the meds wear off, it’s going to go higher.”
“That’s why we don’t want to let the meds wear off,” Kyle answered.
“Right,” she said with a nod, silently calculating when the next doses needed to occur.
“How about his breathing? Any signs of distress?”
“No, he’s breathing okay. He wasn’t puffing for breath or anything when we were walking.”
“Good, those are all good signs, Ava.”
She nodded, her fingers twisting around the comforter as she tried to take solace in the words despite her worry.
“Now, we may need to transfer him to the hospital?—"
“Hospital?” Her voice went an octave higher as panic set in. “Why? What’s wrong?”
“Easy, Ava, it’s only so that he can be monitored.”
“I’m monitoring him, Doc. I take his temperature every hour, sometimes twice an hour. I’m watching his breathing?—"
“Ava, Ava, Ava,” Kyle said, his voice soft and soothing, “no one is saying you’re doing a bad job. But there’s news.”
Her heart skipped a beat, hope blooming. “You found something that works?”
“No,” he answered. “Nothing is touching this, but something feels off to me about this whole thing.”
She furrowed her brows. “I’ve been having the same feeling.”
“Yeah, this is…pretty dangerous. The spread, the death rate…all of this has a level of unpredictability to it, right? I mean, if even one person slips out of the noose here, we could have a world-wide pandemic.”
“I think that’s the point,” she answered.
“But is The Board willing to lose some of its own?”
She sat straighter, her head bobbing. “That’s exactly what I have been thinking. Unless they have some sort of bunker where they will all stay until this all blows over.”
“No…what if someone comes into the bunker infected? It’s a recipe for disaster,” Kyle answered. “There has to be something else.”
“Like what?”
“Like a cure or a vaccine–something to stop them from either getting it or dying from it.”
Her mind worked through the scenarios. “A failsafe.”
“Exactly. I’ve got Shadow checking into that, and I think he’s getting close to a lead. Thing is, it’s looking like we may have to travel. Somebody needs to stay here and hold downthe proverbial fort. I should go because I’m a doctor, I can assess this on site.”
“That makes perfect sense.”
“Then, it’s you or Shadow who has to come with me.”
Her mind spun through the options. She hated to leave Alex, but she also couldn’t sit here and do nothing. “I can go with you if that’s what it takes. We need to find a solution to this, Doc. We can’t let anything happen to Alex.”
