Pandemic
A/N: As with "Violation", Casey's home is switched from the apartment on the show to a 2-story house for more dramatic purposes that will be revealed in a later chapter. Hope you enjoy, please read and review!
Boden came up to Kelly and asked him, "Severide, have you seen Casey yet this morning?"
"Uh, no, Chief, why?" Kelly asked.
"Shift starts in ten minutes, he's never late, I tried calling him, just got his voicemail, I tried calling Gabby too and she's not answering either."
Kelly took that news in and wasn't sure what to make of it. He hadn't really noticed Casey or Gabby being absent, but he'd been a bit preoccupied that morning.
"I'll swing by their place and see if they're there...I hate to think something could've happened but I guess it's possible," he said.
Boden nodded, "Let me know what you find."
"Got it," Kelly said as he headed to his car.
Severide knew it wasn't likely he'd get a response either, but all the same he took out his phone and called Casey, it went straight to voicemail. He tried Gabby's number too, her mailbox was full. Something wasn't making any sense, and he hoped they were alright.
In ten minutes he pulled up outside Casey's home, his pickup truck was in the driveway, already this wasn't looking good. Severide got out of his car and went up to the front door, and found it ajar.
"Casey? Gabby?" he called out as he pushed the door open and stuck his head in. "Anybody here?" He inched his way in and looked around.
He headed to the living room, and saw Casey passed out on the couch, a bottle of something was on the floor and it looked like he'd helped himself to a large portion of it.
"Casey?" Severide walked over to the unconscious man and saw he was in a dead sleep and his whole face was covered in perspiration. He felt Matt's forehead and he was definitely warm. Severide figured they had to have a thermometer somewhere leftover from when they had Louie, so he headed to the bathroom and looked through the medicine cabinet, and finally found a digital forehead model. He turned it on and headed back to the living room and placed it against Casey's temple and waited. It beeped and the screen read 100.9.
Then something dawned on Kelly, how quiet the house was.
"Gabby?" he called as he headed to the bedroom. "You here?"
An unusual sight met his eyes. The bedroom was a mess, various things had been tossed all around the room, the closet door was wide open and a whole section of Gabby's clothes were gone. What the hell was going on? Severide headed back towards the living room, and in passing, saw Casey's phone laying on the table. Curiously, he picked it up, it looked like Casey had been in the middle of sending Gabby a text message but never finished it:
Plz come back
We can fx ths
There was more under that but it stopped being coherent. Severide looked through Casey's phone and saw several messages sent to Gabby last night, more legibly written, but there was no response to any of them. What the hell? He took out his own phone and called Boden.
"Chief, I'm here...Casey's here, and he's sick, he's got a high temperature and he's definitely not in any shape to come in today. For that matter...I think I'm going to have to opt out too, I think I better stay here and keep an eye on him, Chief...Gabby's gone."
"What do you mean gone?"
"I don't know, her stuff's gone and it looks like she walked out on him," Severide looked around the room, wondering what took place here the last few days.
He heard Boden grumble something under his breath, then he asked Kelly, "How bad is he?"
"High fever, he's really out of it, I think it must be the flu," Kelly said.
He could just picture Boden nodding his head as he told the Squad lieutenant, "I don't need to remind you we're in the middle of a very dangerous flu season right now, we won't take any chances. I'll call in a replacement for both of you today, let me know if there's any change in his condition."
"Copy that, Chief."
Kelly disconnected the call and looked at Casey, who weakly moaned and moved on the couch.
"Casey," he said as he went over to the other man, "are you okay?"
Casey groaned and sat up and pressed a hand to his forehead like he was in agony.
"What happened?" Kelly asked him.
Casey just let out another moan, then he made a choking sound in his throat, and jumped off the couch and ran for the downstairs bathroom. The noises that followed suggested to Severide that he'd just barely made it, he went to the bathroom to check on Casey, and he found his friend on the floor with his head in the toilet. Kelly knelt down beside him and patted his back, "Take it easy, buddy, I've had a lot of rough nights, I've been in this exact position plenty of times."
A strained noise escaped from Casey's throat that sounded like something was trying to turn him inside out.
"Okay, maybe not exactly the same," Kelly added as he rubbed Casey's back, "calm down, breathe, take it easy."
After a couple minutes Casey finally seemed to calm down, he hit the lever, slowly pulled himself up, moved towards the sink, rinsed his mouth out, then blew his nose, and held onto the granite counter to support himself.
"You feeling better?" Kelly asked.
Casey shook his head slowly and got out a quiet moan. If Kelly had to guess, he'd say Casey had one bad sore throat, he could barely talk.
"Come on, buddy, let's get you upstairs to bed," Severide lightly pushed him towards the door.
Casey shook his head and maintained a death grip on the counter.
"Come on, Casey, you can't stay here all day," he told him.
But Severide quickly found out Casey couldn't stay in bed either. An hour later he pushed back the covers and made another mad dash for the bathroom and threw up again. Severide had had plenty of mornings of bad hangovers, but he'd never been as bad as this, Casey's whole body wracked and shook with every bout of nausea and he sounded like something was ripping him apart. After which he shook and shivered as he went back to bed, but after a while the covers became too hot and only spurred on another vomiting fit, there was simply no way for Casey to win.
In between runs to the bathroom, when Casey actually seemed to be trying to sleep, Severide checked out the contents of the kitchen. Apparently some things never changed, the only things in the fridge were leftover pizza and some beer. He ransacked the cupboards but didn't find much there either, and definitely nothing for a sick person, so he got on the phone with the grocery store and placed a delivery order for everything he could think Casey might need for the next couple days.
The next time Casey threw up, Severide went into the bathroom with a cold can of ginger ale and tried to persuade his friend to drink it, but Casey merely shook his head and refused. His face was pale, his eyes looked like they hurt to stay open, and in fact several tears had been wrenched from them in the last bout of nausea.
"Come on, Casey, you haven't had anything to drink today, you're going to get dehydrated."
Casey shook his head again.
"Just take a sip, you need to get something in you."
Casey could see he wasn't going to win, so he took the can and took the tiniest sip possible and put it on the counter, but he made no move to go back to bed.
"So you're just going to stay in here all day?" Kelly asked.
Casey nodded tiredly.
Kelly thought about it for a minute, disappeared from the room, and came back a few minutes later with a pillow, a sheet, and the cushions off the couch and set up a makeshift bed on the bathroom floor. Casey crouched down and crawled onto the cushions and laid flat on his back, the look on his face one of pure agony. Severide could see he was soaked in sweat, and then he picked up on a sickening smell and realized it was coming out of Casey's pores. And as bad as it was to him, he could only imagine how miserable it was making Casey.
Matt had closed his eyes in a vain attempt to go back to sleep, then he heard the faucet running, he looked up and weakly croaked out, "What're you doing?"
Severide wrung out a washcloth, then lathered it up with soap, then knelt down and grabbed Casey's shirt to pull it off over his head. "Gonna clean you up, ought to make you a little more comfortable anyway."
Casey shook his head, "No good...just throw up again."
Severide looked down at him and told him simply, "Then I'll clean you up again."
Casey rolled his eyes and sighed, then he flinched when he felt the cold washrag touching his skin, he groaned and grimaced in response to feeling it on his face, then his neck, his chest, under his arms, then again when Severide got another rag wet to wash off the soap. When it was finally over, Kelly draped the sheet over him as he lay on the cushions shivering.
A few hours passed without anymore incidents, and at first Severide was relieved and thought they were finally making progress, then he realized what it had to mean and he was worried. He knew by now the first can of ginger ale would be flat, so he cracked open another one and took it to the bathroom, he tried to get Casey to drink it, but the Truck captain kept his mouth shut, shook his head and refused.
"I know," Kelly said sympathetically, "you don't want to drink because you don't want to throw up."
Casey nodded stubbornly.
"That's because you're too dehydrated to throw up right now, Casey."
Matt merely shrugged.
"Casey, if you don't drink something you're just going to get sicker."
That didn't seem to faze him.
"If you don't drink something, you're not going to leave me any choice but to call an ambulance and have them give you an IV, you want that instead?" Severide asked him.
Casey glared at him, then finally took the can and took a small drink and reluctantly swallowed.
"There, better?" Kelly asked.
He heard a gurgling noise from somewhere inside Casey's body, then saw his cheeks puff up as he turned over on his knees and scrambled over to the toilet to throw up again. Severide moved over towards him and cradled Matt's head in his hands as his whole body spasmed, mostly in a fit of dry heaves since he didn't have anything left in him to throw up.
"I'm sorry, buddy, I'm sorry, but you've got to try and drink something."
Casey moaned and it sounded like a small 'no', just before another heaving episode overwhelmed him.
Severide could already feel Casey's skin growing dry and scaly like a fish out of water, he knew it'd be far worse by the time his stomach actually settled down, but he didn't know what else to do. When Casey finally calmed down and crawled back to his bed, Severide rinsed out the washrags in the sink and washed him again, much to the obvious dismay apparent on Casey's face. He groaned and squirmed and even tried hitting Kelly a couple times to make it stop, but Kelly got him cleaned up and then covered him with the sheet again so he could rest.
It was a long and excruciating day, followed by a longer and even more excruciating night that seemed like it would never end. Every couple hours Casey got up to throw up again, then finally around 3 in the morning he fell asleep and seemed to stay asleep, and Severide followed suit, sleeping on a spare pillow and blanket he'd laid out on the hall floor outside the bathroom, so he'd be right there if Casey needed him. Before he'd done that, he'd taken out his own phone and sent Gabby a message, asking simply: Where the hell are you?, there had been no response, and he was starting to think there wouldn't be.