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Firefly: Deleted Scenes
Ficlet 46: Paging Doctor Waldorf
By Gamera Obscura

"You see this badge? It says 'Doctor'. I say walk, you walk."
-Doctor Samuel Waldorf, Episode 9, "Ariel"

(The following takes place between Episode 9, "Ariel", and Episode 10, "War Stories".)

"Paging Doctor Waldorf. Doctor Waldorf, please call 5-4898," a voice was speaking. A familiar woman's voice. It was distant and fuzzy.

There was a long silence in the darkness. Then, the voice broke the silence again.

"Paging Doctor Waldorf. Doctor Waldorf, please call 5-4898."

The man on the floor stirred slightly. He groaned as he rolled over, then opened his eyes.

Then there was the voice again, clearer this time. "Paging Doctor Waldorf. Doctor Waldorf, please call 5-4898, stat."

The man struggled to his feet, moaning as he got up. His back hurt. His upper back. He looked around for a phone, and realized he was in the med vault. He scanned the shelves and understood that he had not only been attacked, but he had been right to suspect the EMTs he had accosted in the hallway. The med vault had been pretty expertly and nearly completely cleaned out. Those stretchers – the morgue coffins, which had almost certainly been empty – for how else would they have been able to get him here unseen? – would have hidden a multitude of medicinal sins.

He picked up the phone and dialed the number being used to page him.

"Pathology, Unit 2," said the woman's voice at the other end of the line.

"This is Doctor Waldorf," said the man.

"Where have you been, Doctor? It's been over an hour since you went on break," the nurse sounded concerned.

"I'm in the med vault," Doctor Samuel Waldorf said. "I was attacked by two thieves posing as EMTs. They had morgue stretchers with them, and after knocking me out with a pair of cardiac infusers, they dumped me here and cleaned out the vault. Contact security and tell them to lock down the hospital. Then get someone from Pharmacy down here to assess the loss. Suspects are a dark-skinned woman by the name of 'Jennifer Bellings' and a Caucasian male named 'Raymond Parks' with dark brown hair. Both are probably aliases. They're in EMT uniforms, or at least they were when I last saw them."

"Yes, Doctor. Please wait there for security. Doctor Dahl has taken over your duties in your absence."

"Thank you," said the Doctor, and rang off.

While he waited, the Doctor did a quick assessment of what was missing. They had naturally taken all the opiates and opioids, including all the methadone, plus all the serinoids and anything related to immunization boosting or anxiety medication. Anti-inflammitories, sedation meds, and anti-hypertensives were all gone as well, as were a number of other classes of drugs. All the valuable medicines; either the thieves had knowledge of what would get them the most on the black market, or else someone with that knowledge had informed them of what would be the best to take.

Ten minutes later, a Chinese woman whose name tag read "L. Barber" arrived with a tablet computer, and nodded to the Doctor. "You're Doctor Waldorf?" she asked.

"The very same," he said. "Looks like they got all the good stuff."

Barber glanced at the shelves, then picked up the phone and dialed a number. "This is Ling," she said. "We need a full restocking; they took over seventy-five percent of what we had in stock, at least. I'm about to run inventory on what's left, but you should call the central compounding lab and have a full inventory sent to us so we don't come up short on anything we need in the interim."

Ling worked for another ten minutes, taking inventory of the little they had left, when the phone rang. She answered it.

"Med vault, Barber," she said, then handed the phone over to Waldorf. "It's for you," she said.

"Waldorf," he said simply into the phone.

"This is nurse Nicklas," said the voice, the same woman he had spoken to earlier. "I have been unable to reach anyone at the security substation. No one is picking up over there."

"Okay," said Waldorf. "I'm going to walk over there and report to them in person. I'll be back on duty as soon as I finish filing my report."

"Yes, Doctor. I'll inform the staff," Nicklas said.

Waldorf hung up the phone and began to walk the considerable distance to the security substation; St. Lucy's was quiet, as quiet as it ever got at end of third shift. On his way, he passed a pair of men, one of them bald like him, both wearing black suits with black ties, and, strangely enough, blue pathology gloves. He did a double take and looked back at them before he turned a corner and stepped up to the door to the security substation, walking inside.

"Aiyaa! Biao zi de erzi!" the Doctor exclaimed at the sight of everyone in the station lying on the floor in pools of blood. "Help! I need help in here!" he shouted as loudly as he could, then rushed over to the nearest body. He checked for a pulse, but found none, and judging from the temperature his electronic thermometer read, he had been dead for some time. There was no sign of an entry or exit wound from a bullet or a knife, and no sign of a struggle. No one outside had apparently heard him, because no one had come to his aid from the hallway. He picked up a phone and called nurse Nicklas.

"Pathology, Unit 2."

"This is Doctor Waldorf in the Federal security substation. Everyone here is down, at least one is dead. I need two code teams and as many people from Pathology as you can spare. Have the hospital locked down under quarantine, on my authority; there may be a fast-acting pathogen at work here, and I need this section of St. Lucy's sealed and quarantined. Tell the Pathology staff coming to bring everything they need to do post mortems in the hallway. We need to get a handle on this as quickly as possible. Now, repeat that back to me."

Nurse Nicklas complied, until Waldorf was satisfied, then he left her to her considerable work, and began to assess the others. Ordinarily, this would be a triage situation, but as the Doctor quickly discovered, everyone in the room was dead. They had bled considerably from their eyes, ears, noses, and mouths, and most interesting of all, from beneath their fingernails. Waldorf took off one of the Fed's shoes and socks, and saw that his toes were smeared with blood as well. Waldorf's bowels clenched at the idea that he could have exposed himself to a potentially airborne pathogen that could even now be working very hard to kill him.

A few minutes later, the code teams rushed in with their carts, but he waved them off. "Sorry to waste your time, folks, but everyone here is dead; there's supposed to be a holding cell down the hall over there," he pointed at the other side of the room. "You can make yourself useful by checking to see if there's anyone alive or dead in the cell, or anyone alive or in need of aid guarding it."

The members of the teams nodded and pushed their carts through the door, fanning out to look for survivors.

A few minutes later, as the first people from Pathology began to show up, someone from one of the code teams poked his head back into the room. "We have two more dead down the corridor to the holding cell; if you give us stretchers, we'll bring them out. One is like the others, the other apparently has a broken neck, and some blood around his lips, but no pool of blood."

One of the pathologists radioed in for orderlies to bring in a pair of stretchers, and after doing a quick count on the floor, told his contact on the other end of the comm that they would need a total of nine of them.

A nurse and an orderly both entered the room, each pushing a stretcher, and followed the man from the code team down the hall.

Doctor Mbeke came up to Waldorf. "What do we have here?" he asked. "Besides the obvious, I mean."

"Bleeding from every visible orifice, as well as from the fingernails and toenails. Cause of death is not apparent," Waldorf said. "How's the quarantine coming?"

"Director Warren has been contacted and is shuttling in now. He's approved the lockdown and quarantine, and facilities is currently setting up plastic airlocks with disinfectant showers at either end of the hallway. I'm told breakfast and coffee will be brought to us within half an hour. I have four Doctors setting up for post mortems in the hallway, plus six nurses and two orderlies. You have any symptoms?"

"None at present," said Waldorf. "Onset was apparently sudden and simultaneous, with progression almost immediately to incapacitation or death, otherwise these people would have phoned for help. They've been dead for at least thirty to forty-five minutes, by my estimate. Temperatures were already down three to five degrees by the time I checked for pulses. No need for the code teams."

"Well, they're stuck in here with us now," Mbeke said. "Do you have any theories?"

"Over an hour ago, I was incapacitated by a pair dressed as EMTs using cardiac infusers; I came to in the med vault, which was pretty thoroughly cleaned out. It's possible they released an environmental agent or pathogen into the substation in order to prevent a security response in the event they were discovered."

"That's… troubling," said Mbeke as the code teams wheeled the two bodies of the Marshalls through the room and out into the main hallway. Then they returned with the orderlies and a passel of stretchers to retrieve the rest.

Mbeke gestured towards the door. "Time for us to get to work."

O-O-O

Three hours later, after a workup was done on the first group, Mbeke called for Director Warren, who stood outside the east "airlock" when he arrived. Doctor Waldorf stepped to the inside wall of plastic, and spoke through the barrier to Warren.

"Good morning, sir," Waldorf said.

"I saw your report on the robbery," Warren said. "Good catch; I'm sorry they incapacitated you. We have Federal Marshalls on-site, and I am liaising with them. They want to talk to you, but I've told them that you're hands-off until all the post mortems are done. What have you turned up?"

"Death due to intra-cranial hemorrhage, as well as symptoms of diffuse mucosal bleeding, into the brain, the trachea, the lungs, the abdominal cavity, the urethrogenital tract, and in at least two cases so far, the pleura and the peritoneum, too. One case of petechiae in the face, scalp, and upper torso. No sign of lividity in any of the organs, no signs of septic shock or any infection at all, in fact."

"Putan!" said Warren. "What a gorram mess. No clue as to the cause?"

"Nothing definite as of yet, sir. My guess is that if this was a pathogen, it either has a much longer incubation period than we suspected, or else it has denatured. Neither I nor any of the others are showing any symptoms at present. I'm recommending a 72-hour observation period in quarantine. We're going to need a couple dozen cots."

"You'll have them. I'm dipping into the petty cash to have food delivered from Marazzo's for lunch; hope you like Italian. We'll have a copy of the menus emailed to each of you, you each reply with your order and we'll get it to you ASAP."

"Thank you, sir. That's very thoughtful of you," Waldorf said.

Mbeke approached Waldorf. "We do have one interesting piece of information, Director, although we're not sure what it means at this point."

"What's that?" asked Warren.

"Code team took a Capture of the positions of the bodies before we moved them, and we tagged them in order from closest to the door to the furthest away. So far we've found, and I think the remaining post mortems will bear this out, that the closer they were to the door, the worse the bleeding was. The bleeding of the one we found in the hallway to the holding cell, the one whose neck wasn't broken, was the worst of all. There were actually petechiae on the face and torso, but he's the only one with this phenomenon."

"Doctor Waldorf mentioned the petechiae. Does any of that suggest an environmental cause?" Warren asked.

"It does sound less like a pathogen, given that," said Waldorf. "It also may tend to suggest that a weapon of unknown design might have been used."

"A weapon?" Warren asked, his brow furrowed.

"We're just spitballing here," Mbeke said. "But it's possible some heretofore unknown weapon was used to kill these men."

"Okay," Warren replied. "I'll pass all of this along to the Feds; they're very motivated to find out who or what killed their comrades. In the meantime, we'll get you those menus, and we'll have lunch sent in pretty quickly for you. We'll also get you cots, some folding tables, chairs, and a CortexVision or two to keep you entertained once the work stops. So tell everyone to settle in, and I'll be back to let you know what Toxicology says after the results are in. Good work, you two, and please pass my commendations on to the others."

"Thank you, sir, we will," Mbeke said.

"Yes, sir. Thank you," replied Waldorf.

Waldorf sighed as he turned around and headed back for his next post mortem. It was going to be a long week, assuming any of them lived long enough to see the end of it.

(Author's Note: The aftermath of the Hands of Blue killing the Feds at St. Lucy's has always been of particular interest to me. I couldn't have done this alone, however. I have to give credit where credit is due, and that credit goes to "Selective SciFi Junkie", who is my Beta for medical situations and terminology, and freely offers her services as a medical professional to any who would like to consult her on medical scenarios and terminology for their works. To my credit (I am apparently not above blowing my own horn), she found that with the exception of a couple of minor nitpicks, my portrayal of the situation, and virtually all of my medical terminology was right on the money; I will admit, however, that she gave me a blow-by-blow of what a Doctor would do upon coming upon nine dead bodies in a hospital, complete with a likely breakdown of what their damage would be, based on the symptoms shown in Episode 9, "Ariel". Incidentally, I recently helped her as Beta for her post-Serenity fic (which is nearly 25,000 words long), called "Strange Bedfellows", which I also came up with the title for. If you're looking for a realistic, medical-jargon-heavy fic about the aftermath of the BDM "Serenity", then this is the fic for you. I spent three weeks picking it apart, going it over meticulously, and improving it at my own pace in between writing these ficlets, and I'm grateful that SSJ was in no rush to publish; now, however, publishing she is, with at least four chapters out so far. I suggest you check it out. Also, today brings with it a grand milestone, as Firefly: Deleted Scenes broke 100,000 words today, or over 300 pages! This is a great day for me, and I celebrate it by publishing what is probably my favorite ficlet so far. Please enjoy it; I hope you like it as much as I liked writing it!)

(Next Time: No Luck With The Councilor - With Mal and Wash being held by Niska aboard his Skyplex over Ezra, Inara attempts to get a friend to intervene on Serenity's behalf.)