I'm back. I would like to thank Sam Tsui for making excellent music I can listen to while typing up. If you don't know who he is, search his name on Youtube. He is amazing.
Anyway, fic.
Magnus walked back towards the ISAL corridor. It had been eight hours since John, Will, Kate, the infected had been put in there. Somewhere, and Irish accented voice, a young woman, was singing.
"Alive! Alive-O!
Alive! Alive-O!
Crying-" The voice stopped as it heard Magnus's footsteps. Holly Malone on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor. She smiled embarrassedly at Magnus as she passed.
Magnus let herself in to the ISAL corridor. Will's room was first on her left. Henry was in there too, sitting on Will's bed. Both seemed, strangely enough to be hitting the bed between them repeatedly. It wasn't until Magnus got through the first door that she saw why. Playing cards lay in piles between them, Henry and Will moving them around as fast as they could. Magnus smiled as she entered.
"Slam!" Henry shouted grabbing one of the piles. "You goin' down Zimmerman!" Then he saw Magnus. "Sorry Doc."
"You're not doing anything wrong." She said, then to Will. "How are you feeling?" He shrugged.
"Not great, not awful." She tilted her head at him. She needed more than that. "Headache, cold."
"Tired?" He shook his head.
"I just woke up. Henry's OK to be in here, isn't he?"
"Morph and back between doors. That'll get rid of any virus you've picked up, but it's fluid bourn anyway, so you should be alright." Henry nodded.
"Cool."
Will, it turned out, was slightly pyrexic, submandibular lymph nodes up, though not as much as axillary, otherwise fairly normal.
"I feel like I'm waiting for a bomb to go off." He commented, taking the paracetamol Magnus offered him.
"The problem is, we have no idea how bad this is going to get." Will snorted.
"Thanks Magnus."
Kate wasn't alone either. Ashley was sitting a couple of metres away, one knee drawn up to her chest.
"I'm keeping my distance." Ashley protested as soon as Magnus opened the door.
"I didn't say anything, Ashley."
"Well, you were going to."
"Wouldn't you be OK anyway?" Kate asked. Her voice sounded slightly hoarse. Ashley shrugged.
"Druitt's got it. The mutations don't protect us." Druitt. Magnus knew it would take Ashley a long time to be calm around John, doubted she'd ever acknowledge him as her father, but still, hearing her speak of him so… It didn't matter.
"How are you feeling?" She asked Kate.
"Not so great."
Kate, it turned out, was slightly more pyrexic than Will. Anti-pyretics, antivirals and sending Ashley out so Kate would sleep was just about all Magnus could do for her. There was a reason Magnus hated viruses. Chuck was asleep, but in a similar state to Kate. She woke him to dose him up, and was sworn at by the back of his head. Ho Cuxin, unhelpfully, described his condition as
"Prepared for the fight that stands in my path." Chaddika was lying very still when Magnus entered, she could have been asleep, but she sat up as soon as Magnus drew close. Her eyes were red-rimmed.
"The letters are there." She said, pointing to the top of the cabinet. "It says on them who they are for. It's funny." She lowered her head for a moment. "I didn't really think about what I wanted you to do about… Vitamin K until I started trying to think about the letters." She dabbed the heels of her hands to her eyes and sniffed. "And I'm crying now. I haven't cried since… since I ran away, hardly anyway."
"It's understandable." Magnus put in. Chaddika looked up at her.
"I don't want it, the Vitamin K. The choice is to be dead or brain dead. It won't make any difference to me. There's no point in living like that."
Only John left now. Chuck had been the worst so far, Bigfoot was sitting with him. His case was also complicated by the fact that the two sides of his head disagreed about the Vitamin K. John was sitting in bed when Magnus came in, book in hand. He looked up when he heard her.
"Where are you up to?" He flicked his eyes back to the book.
"'What was Oliver's horror and alarm as he stood a few paces off, looking on with his eyelids as wide as they would possibly go, to see the Dodger plunge his hand into the old gentleman's pocket and draw from thence a handkerchief!'" Magnus smiled.
"So the hue and cry begins. I always thought it felt rather like a foxhunt." John chuckled.
"Frenzied pursuit of terrified quarry, but largely enjoyable? I agree. They still happen in a lot of places. If I saw one, I usually joined in." Magnus tilted her head at him.
"On which side?"
"Oh, chasing the thief. For a hue and cry to work, the malefactor has to be caught at it." That hadn't been a good thing to ask, so Magnus changed tack.
"How are you feeling?" John sighed.
"I've certainly felt much worse." She gave him a disparaging look.
"John, we've both taken Sourceblood. If it were anywhere near as bad as that, you wouldn't be able to tell me so coherently." He shook his head.
"It's just a headache and feeling cold at the moment. I expect it will get worse."
"You should probably get some sleep." John laughed coldly. She tilted her head at him.
"Do you really think I could Helen?" It took Magnus a moment to understand the question.
"You still see them, don't you?" He nodded.
"I think I will for as long as I live. Your people did not sentence me Helen, my own mind seems to have done that." Magnus drew breath to ask if he wanted to speak to Will about that, once this was over, if they were both still alive, but stopped herself. John was one of her kind. Their generation had taken whatever life dealt hem standing and silent. You didn't complain, you didn't acknowledge it. You carried on. He'd see speaking to a psychiatrist the same way she did, as an admission of defeat. John looked up at her again. "It needed to be done. No murder should go unanswered."
"John, the Whitechappel Ripper is currently buzzing around a sealed circuit some forty miles away from Moscow, and in all likelihood always will be." He looked down.
"You have confidence in the judgement of your people." Magnus nodded, but that wasn't the only reason. With hindsight, her first response to finding out… had been disbelief. Even panic had taken the better part of a day to set in. Somehow, she'd known, she'd just known that it wasn't right, that John couldn't have done that. At the time, she'd ignored it, put it down to not wanting to see what was in front of her. For all the time she'd spent telling her various protégés over the years to trust their intuition… But how could she have known? They'd barely discovered bacteria, the idea of something living, but too small to see was new and wild, something living and made of pure energy beyond consideration.
"I'll give you paracetamol now, let me know if your condition changes."
Magnus walked back out of the ISAL unit. It was a moment before she head any signs of life at all. Somewhere, further away, Holly Malone was singing again.
"She died of a fever,
And no one could save her-"
o0o0o0o
"Chaddika's dead." Bigfoot said as soon as Magnus re-entered the ISAL corridor.
"What?" She'd only been gone three hours, to snatch some sleep, at everyone else's insistence. "She wasn't too bad when I left." She'd been unconscious, had a fairly high fever, but she hadn't looked on the cusp of death.
"Happened fast. Fever went up, blood pressure rocketed, she just started bleeding."
"From where?"
"Nose first, convulsions started, then just about everywhere. Through her skin in a couple of places. Couldn't stop it. She bled out and crashed 'bout twenty minutes ago."
"Oh dear God. The rest of them?"
"Ho Cuxin's out, not much change. I've sedated Kate, she was in a lot of pain. Chuck's out, high fever. Druitt's the same as Chuck. Will's improved a bit. He seizued 'bout two hours ago, stopped. Henry's with him."
"Is Ashley still with Kate?"
"No. She went once I'd put Kate out." Magnus nodded.
"I'm going to look at Chaddika's body."
"Hoh." He put a hand on her arm. "Too risky. It's a mess. I took samples. Wait until the virus will have denatured."
"Hey!" Henry's voice, muffled by the glass. "Hey, get in here!" Magnus and Bigfoot turned and almost ran though the doors. Will was twitching, gasping, those half-voiced gasps she'd only ever heard when Will was truly scared. He arched his back suddenly, nearly throwing himself off the bed.
"Hold him." Magnus ordered. Bigfoot and Henry took a side each. Will was already on a monitor. That saved time. His heart rate and blood pressure were high and still rising. "Is this what happened with Chaddika?"
"Hoh. Close enough."
"Oh crap." Henry breathed.
"What did you give him before?" Will cried out, somewhere between a gasp and a scream. He must have been in so much pain.
"Six mg diazepam." Magnus nodded and ran for the cabinet. He veins were easy to find, getting the drug in was more of a challenge. Bigfoot and Henry were all by lying on top of him. His teeth were chattering. Magnus waited. The seizure might be abating slightly, but it wouldn't stop at that dose.
"Two more?" She asked Bigfoot. "When did you dose him before?"
"Long enough ago." Two more. Slowly, the spasms in Will's muscles grew weaker, less frequent, but his blood pressure was still worryingly high. If this virus killed by exsanguination, they needed to bring it down.
"Prazosin." She said, as much to herself as anyone else.
"Hoh." Bigfoot threw his head back in anger.
"What?"
"If I'd thought of that-"
"It doesn't matter now, and it may well do no good at all, particularly if it's not sympathetic tone holding his blood pressure up, but right now, all I want to do is get his blood pressure down."
"The prazosin worked, or it seemed to. Will's blood pressure was returning to something like normal and the seizure hadn't started again.
"We can't leave him now." Bigfoot said.
"I'll stay." Henry offered. "I can't get it." Magnus nodded.
"Thank you Henry. Put two hundred mg of Phenobarbitone in his drip every half hour for the next two hours. That should keep the seizures at bay." She was at the door before he spoke again.
"Ah, Doc?" She turned and walked back to Will's side. Henry was pointing to Will's mouth. There was still foam in one corner. Blood-stained foam. "Think he bit himself?"
"We can only hope so."
o0o0o0o
Chuck, Kate and Ho Cuxin were all fairly alike; unconscious, quite badly pyrexic, non-responsive (though that could have been the diazepam in Kate's case). If not for how fast Chaddika had died, Magnus wouldn't have been immediately worried about any of them. Apart from John. To look at him, Magnus would have assumed he was seizuring, but his vital signs suggested he wasn't, and his muscular spasms were far too localised, and Phenobarbitone had done nothing at all. More than anything, he looked like a child in the throes of a nightmare. His pyrexia was nearly bad enough to kill him. She did all she could; Paracetamol for the pyrexia, and probably pain, if he could register it, and she sat by him, just talking, like she had with Ashley, after the reverse mutation, about Ashley as a child, about the work she'd done with her father in the nineteenth century, how James had joined them, her occasional escapades with James, that Arthur Conan-Doyle had loved hearing about.
"He asked the three of us to wait and went in to a back room, we hared him lock the door, then a lot of furniture moving for a minute or so, then a clunk. James said we'd been waiting lone enough, so he and Nigel made a go at breaking the door down. I shot the lock in the end. We ran in to find him trying to hang himself! Fortunately, he'd made a mess of the knot, so he was still breathing. Nigel held his legs up while James and I cut him down. Arthur made a whole story out of that incident, put clues around it enough for his Sherlock to work out, but no one else. We always had a good laugh when the results appeared in the pa-" A loud knock on the window. Bigfoot.
"Magnus!" His voice was muffled by the glass. She got up and almost ran to him.
"What is it?"
"Chuck. Seizure." Magnus nodded and ran for the door.
I ask again: Who do you feel to be in most danger?
And does anyone recognise this bear?
