“OKAY,” EVA SAID, “MAKE A FIST.”
Cole did, reluctantly. None of them knew what they were doing, but Eva was the one with the needle right now. He thought he would’ve felt a bit better if Dr. Captain was here, doing all this. But she couldn’t be. She’d never let it happen. Oh yeah, Dr. Captain, I might have magic blood and it could cure everybody. They were left with Cole, Brady, and Eva, trying to work their way through this based on the knowledge they’d accrued from Grey’s Anatomy. Eva had made a band out of tied-together hair elastics, and had fastened that around the top of Cole’s forearm. She was pushing around at each of his blood vessels.
“Wow, you’ve got some good ones.”
“Thanks, I think.” Cole had never been complimented on his veins before.
“I think we’re good,” she said. “Are you good to go?”
No, he thought. “Yes.”
Brady handed her the needle and syringe, like she was the surgeon and he was the nurse. She took a deep breath and moved it towards Cole. She did it slow enough that it gave him way too much time to think about it piercing through his skin and sliding into his vein. He pushed her hand away. “Isn’t there any of that stuff that makes this hurt less? That stuff they give patients before sticking needles into them?”
“Alcohol?” Eva looked at Brady.
Brady just shrugged. “Sorry, my friend.”
“Can you just run back and see if you can find—”
“Cole,” Eva said. “Look, I don’t want to argue with you, but I’m just saying, last night you took a huge knife to your chest. I mean, I don’t know if you actually saw it, but it looked like a sword.”
“A samurai sword,” Brady interjected.
“Exactly,” Eva said. “Now you’re up-and-about like you got a scrape on your knee or something. So: knife, needle, knife, needle.” She made motions as though she were weighing the two items.
Cole gritted his teeth. “Fine, just get it over with.”
Eva nodded, and went in again with the needle. Cole looked away. He felt the sharp, cool metal press against his skin and then puncture it.
“There.” Eva took the needle out, and with it came deep red blood. She handed Brady the syringe. He held it in both of his hands like a relic. He walked to the other side of Elder Mariah’s bed, where there wasn’t an IV line sticking out of her arm. He took the band that Eva had made for Cole and fastened it around the Elder’s arm. With two fingers, he patted around at a few blood vessels. He took a long time doing this.
“Do you want me to do it?” Eva asked.
Brady shook his head. “I have to.”
Eva pointed at one thick, blue vein at the top of Mariah’s forearm. “That’s a good one,” she said to Brady. “Use that one.”
“It’ll work,” Cole said to Brady.
Cole looked at the blood in the syringe. It looked like normal blood, nothing special. How was it going to save anybody?
“Okay,” he could hear Brady say. “Here goes.”
“What the hell are you kids doing!?”
Dr. Captain was standing at the door, her hands on her hips. Brady was frozen in place, the needle pressing against Elder Mariah’s skin. Brady took the needle away and stood up straight. Dr. Captain rushed across the room. She held out her hand.
“Give that to me.” Brady handed her the syringe. “What is this?” She held it out to the group.
The friends all looked at each other. It was a mix of confusion. Nobody said anything until Elder Mariah gasped for breath. It startled Cole into saying, “It’s my blood, Dr. Captain.”
“And why are you trying to give it to the Elder?” she asked.
“Because we think it can heal her,” Brady blurted out.
“I’m sorry, what?” Dr. Captain said.
“It’s true,” Eva said. “We think.”
Dr. Captain walked over to Cole. He was still sitting in his wheelchair. She sat down on the bed, right in front of him. She grasped the syringe tightly. It looked like the glass might shatter in her hand.
“Explain yourself. Now.”
Cole took a deep breath and told the long story again. He told her everything he could.
“Where is this file?” Dr. Captain asked.
Great question. Cole thought. “I don’t know where it is. But I read it, it was there, I swear to you.”
“And so based off all of that, you want me to let you inject your blood into our Elder?”
It was clearly a rhetorical question, but Cole nodded his head weakly. It did sound dumb. And impossible.
“Dr. Captain,” Brady said. “What’s it going to hurt to try? Maybe it’s horse crap, I don’t know. I’ve seen some pretty amazing things, though, and most of them have involved Cole. If it doesn’t work, she’s going to die anyway, right?”
Dr. Captain nodded slowly. “Yes, that’s right. I don’t think she has much time left.”
“And if it does work,” Eva said. “If it does work, then we’ll save her life.”
“Maybe everybody’s lives,” Cole said.
Dr. Captain looked down at her hand. She stayed like that for a long time. Then, she opened her hand, and rocked the syringe back and forth across her palm. Her lips were moving as though going over all the options with herself. She shook her head. “Well, it’s good that I came in here when I did, to stop you.”
She wasn’t going to let it happen. She was going to take the blood, remove them from Elder Mariah’s room, and probably get them all locked up in a jail cell (that is, once they’d fixed it).
“If you’d have given her Cole’s blood straight out of a syringe like you were going to, she would’ve died anyway, whether it was going to cure her or not. She would’ve stroked out gone into septic shock, had a heart attack…” She took a deep, drawn-out breath. “Any number of things, all of them bad.”
She stood up, moved towards the IV bag, which was methodically providing Elder Mariah fluids. Dr. Captain paused there, like she was having second thoughts, then she took it off.
“You have to dilute the blood,” Dr. Captain said. “What we can try to do is add some of this to her IV fluid.”
She picked the bag up, and laid it down on the bed beside Elder Mariah’s body. There was a port beside the one that was already feeding a clear liquid into Elder Mariah. Dr. Captain lifted this one up, then pulled an alcohol swab out of her pocket. She took it out of the package, wiped down the port, then pushed the needle into it. Ready to depress the plunger, she looked up at Cole.
“Are you sure, Cole?”
Cole wasn’t sure of anything, but this—this felt as sure as he could possibly feel. “Yes.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said. “God knows we need something good to happen around here.”
Cole watched as her thumb pushed forward. The plunger released his blood into the IV bag. The thick fluid entered the bag in a cloud of red. Dr. Captain lifted the bag up, rotated it gently back and forth to mix it all together, and positioned it back onto the holder. She squeezed the bag at the top several times, and they all watched as the drops of liquid trickling into the IV line turned from clear to pink. The solution, now mixed with Cole’s blood, navigated its way down the line until it reached Elder Mariah’s right hand, then entered her bloodstream.
“Now what?” Cole asked.
“Now we wait,” Dr. Captain said. “For one thing or the other.”
They positioned themselves around Elder Mariah. Brady sat to her left, holding her hand, whispering to her something nobody else could hear. Eva sat down beside Cole, and held his hand. And Dr. Captain stood at Elder Mariah’s side, watching the Elder, unblinkingly. They were all waiting, as Dr. Captain said, for one thing or the other.
“I’m going to lose my license over this,” Dr. Captain muttered.
It wasn’t more than that first few minutes when Elder Mariah made a sound, a crackling kind of whisper that was as unintelligible as it was encouraging. Her eyelids flickered open.
“Nókom?” Brady said.
Cole watched as Elder Mariah’s left arm tensed, and she squeezed Brady’s hand. It was as though she squeezed tears out of him, because they came hard and fast, navigating around the largest smile Cole had ever seen on his friend, the only real smile Brady had offered since the night of Ashley’s murder.
Elder Mariah nodded. “Nósisim. I’m thirsty.”
“I’ll get you some water.” Eva got up from her chair. She reached over and grabbed a Dixie cup of water from the side table. Brady lifted her head for her, and Eva tipped the water into Elder Mariah’s mouth. When she was finished, Brady helped lower her head back onto the pillow.
“Ekosani,” she said.
During all of this Dr. Captain checked Mariah’s vitals, over and over again, trying to make sense of what was happening. She checked the Elder’s pulse, temperature, breaths per minute. Every sort of vital she could check, she checked. Finally, she turned to Cole and said, “I don’t believe it.”
“I don’t think I really believed it would work,” Cole said. “I just hoped, I guess.”
“I’m going to need, uhhh—” she started. “More blood. Enough that I can dilute it into all the IV bags, give this to everybody. Now.”
“Yeah, of course.” Cole felt it then. He knew that this was why he was here. For all the pain, all the loss, the sickness, and the confusion, this moment, right here, gave it all purpose. “Take it all, whatever you need.”
Dr. Captain smiled. Maybe it was her first smile in a long time, too. “I won’t need that much. But we should get you over to—”
There was a knock on the door. They all turned to see four people standing in the doorway. At the front of the group was a woman in a white lab coat. She was white, with blonde hair tied back tightly into a ponytail. She had a clipboard that she hugged close to her chest. Another doctor stood beside her, with his hands behind his back. He was younger, white as well, with short, black hair. He wore a white lab coat and black-rimmed glasses. Behind the doctors were two men dressed almost all in black: black boots, black cargo pants, black shirts, black hats.
“Holy shit,” Cole whispered to Eva. “Look familiar?”
“How could I forget?” she whispered back.
“Dr. Captain?” the woman said. She gave a quick glance over to Cole, her eyes widened for a moment.
“Yes, that’s me,” Dr. Captain said.
“I’m Dr. Ament,” she said. “So nice to meet you.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t…” Dr. Captain started.
“Your office requested assistance for the outbreak?” Dr. Ament said.
“Yes, that’s correct.” Dr. Captain walked towards the door. Cole listened intently as they talked. They were trying to lower their voices so the kids couldn’t hear them. Cole, though, could hear them as if they were standing right beside him. “I had asked the Department of Health a few days ago. I’m sorry, but usually when we ask for help we have to wait a hundred years. You can’t be from the government.”
“We’re a…” Dr. Ament began “…private contractor.”
“We pride ourselves on not making people wait a century,” the man said with a chuckle and a snort.
“And you are?” Dr. Captain asked the man.
“Dr. Carmichael,” he said, straightening his coat.
“I see,” Dr. Captain said. “I hadn’t received any notification of this. You’ll have to forgive me, who are you with, then?”
“Uhhh, yeah, we’re with Mihko Laboratories,” Dr. Carmichael said.
“Mihko Laboratories,” Dr. Captain said. “You mean the same—”
“One and the same. It helps to know the community. This will be of great benefit to you,” Dr. Ament said.
“We’re here to help,” Dr. Carmichael added.
“And we know you as well, Dr. Ament,” Dr. Captain said. “All too well.”
Dr. Captain looked back at Eva, Brady, Cole, and Elder Mariah. She nodded at them firmly and quickly. Cole would spend a long time deciphering that nod. It felt like so much more than that. And it meant even more to him when Dr. Captain turned back towards the strangers, and he saw her slip the syringe that held his remaining blood into her pocket before leading the four new visitors out of the room.