Rodney was the first to stop at the edge of the gravel path, hesitant to cross the swamp and risk getting swallowed up by it this time. Carson was just behind him and was glad to have another moment to catch his breath. Streaks of light were beginning to cross his vision again, probably because of the strenuous running after having almost been strangled. He hadn't had a chance to clean off the nasty stuff that was clinging to his neck, either, and it was becoming itchy.
"Time to go, kids," Sheppard said as he and Teyla caught up to the others near the Stargate. The mob chasing them wasn't far behind.
John gently shoved the rest of his team to make them move faster. They finally managed to move forward single-file through the mud back to the Stargate, but before he could step off the steep bank to follow them, it started to crumble and disintegrate. John fell hard into the mud onto his back, knocking the wind out of him as he started to sink. The water was much deeper where he had fallen.
Muddy water rushed over his face and he clawed at it in an effort to not choke. John felt someone's hand grabbing his vest and pulling his head up out of the water. His efforts to clear his face of mud ended up splashing mud into the face of his savior.
"Will you quit squirming? You're splashing mud into my eyes." Sheppard rubbed the dirt off of his eyelids and opened them to see that McKay was the one who had waded chest-deep into the water to help. "That big sissy you call 'Ronon' was too scared to come and save you himself. It must be because of all those movies that you made him watch."
"We aren't sinking," Colonel Sheppard affirmed, surprised. Ronon was scared? After considering how shocked Ronon seemed after witnessing the countless quicksand deaths of nameless villains and heroes in several movies that had been shown over the last few weekends, perhaps he shouldn't have been surprised.
"You noticed that, huh?" Rodney replied sarcastically. "Well for your information, Mr. MENSA, people don't usually drown in quicksand or mud. It's denser than normal water and even more difficult to drown in, and if you don't start moving your ass those mutant people are probably going to do a much more thorough job of killing us!"
John turned just in time to see several of them stop at the edge of the embankment near the mud hole. He clawed at the mounds of mud next to his team, and luckily for them Teyla and Carson had managed to find safe places to place their feet and get close enough to help haul them out of the mud. Sheppard then scrambled to the DHD and started to dial Atlantis.
As the wormhole burst through the ring of the Stargate with its normal efficiency, despite its listing to one side, he touched his radio and shuffled his team through back to the city. "Atlantis, we're coming in hot!"
John took a moment to glance behind him, but upon doing so immediately knew it had been a bad idea. The angry mob was almost within arm's reach of him. They each reached out to him blindly through the crowd of sick faces. He staggered backward through the event horizon of the Stargate as one hand was almost close enough to touch his nose.
He landed hard on his side onto the cold hard floor of the control room and was quite grateful to be on solid ground once more. John heard Rodney bark orders to raise the shield as he pushed himself to his feet. Moments later, he saw faint flashes of light on the force field's surface.
It was a grim reminder of how dangerous it really was to travel the way they did through the Stargate. He regretted seeing anyone having to lose their life as their molecules were disintegrated against the force shield, but those poor people probably deserved it least of all. And now they might never discover the real cause of that horrible sickness, not until it managed to pop up on another hapless world full of pre-industrial people with no way to cure or control it before it decimates their population.
"You're filthy," Dr. Elizabeth Weir stated as John brought himself back to his senses. "What happened?"
"We were being chased by an angry mob of sick villagers," Sheppard said dryly, not envying the job of the person whose task it would be to clean up all the mud they were leaving behind. "Beckett was attacked and almost strangled to death by one of them."
"Sick?" she repeated hesitantly. "If your team was exposed to an illness from those villagers, we need to enact quarantine procedures to contain it immediately."
"Contamination is a distinct possibility," Sheppard confirmed.
A groan coming from John's left caught his attention, and he turned in time to see Carson collapse heavily onto the floor. A med tech, a young woman, caught him before he hit his head and called urgently for a gurney. As they checked his vital signs, he was lifted by two other med techs with care onto a gurney that had been wheeled in with another medical team.
"I want everyone in this room under quarantine immediately." Elizabeth started giving orders to the techs in the room. "Let's see if we can avoid a complete lockdown of Atlantis and have the Daedalus transport people directly to isolation rooms in the infirmary."
Carson and his entourage of med techs were the first to be whisked away by the beam of light to the infirmary. One by one, each member of Colonel Sheppard's team began disappearing from the control room in a flash of light. Soon enough, the bright white beam of light enveloped John himself and left him standing idly in the middle of a very small, very bleak and grey isolation room. A table, a single cot, and a small wall-mounted computer terminal were the only furnishings the room had to speak of.
John sat down heavily onto the cot and sighed as an orderly protected by a hazmat suit took some blood samples and promptly left. He was running on mostly adrenaline by this time and had the sudden urge to stand and start pacing through the small confines of what would be his room for the next few days, but he pushed it back into the deepest recesses of his mind where it belonged. Memories of the last few times he'd been confined in the infirmary still plagued him, but he was far too well-trained to allow it to bother him when he was needed.
Nagging fatigue then pushed its way unwittingly between his conscious mind and coherent thought processes, and he felt himself laying his head back against the stiff and starched fabric of what should have felt like a pillow on the cot. He simply couldn't keep his eyes open any longer as he succumbed to the quiet, stark silence of the isolation room.
------
Unlike John, Rodney had never been less in a mood to rest his entire life. After giving up some blood samples and watching the orderly leave, he alternated between fits of pacing and sitting cross-legged on his cot and fidgeting his hands and fingers. The thought of being infected with whatever illness the mutant mob of villagers had been afflicted with was terrifying. As he imagined what it would be like to be reduced to a mindless savage that didn't know how to do anything except strangle the people around him, he paced the confines of the suffocating and claustrophobia-inducing cell that he'd been beamed into.
Being confined to his quarters or even, if necessary, restrained in a bed in the main part of the infirmary would have been immensely preferable to the closet he was currently being kept in. Rodney's eyes darted back and forth between peering through the small clear window of the door and the ruined computer console that decorated the wall with its presence. It certainly didn't do anything else that was useful, and not for a lack of trying to fix it, either. The people outside in their hazmat suits were far too busy to bother bringing him any replacement parts, and Dr. Zelenka was simply nowhere to be found.
It was little comfort for him to know that the other members of his team were in cells just like his; there was no way in hell that they were suffering as much as he was, though. A streak of anger followed the thought that Carson was probably being coddled somewhere else in a much more spacious part of the infirmary. Of course he didn't envy the man having been almost strangled, but at the moment his claustrophobia attack was distressing him to the point where he was debating whether or not Carson had gotten the luckier end of the poking stick of fate.
The sudden musical tone of the door to his cell being unlocked startled him from his reverie. Rodney watched attentively as a young woman in a white lab coat walked in. She was blonde and wore thin-rimmed glasses. Had he not been so unnerved at the moment he might have been inclined to at least attempt to feign interest and treat her nicely, but flirting with the young woman was the last thing he wanted at the moment. All he wanted was to get out of that closet-like room and go back to his research.
"You'll be glad to know that your blood work came back clean," she informed him idly. He was about to push past her, but her hand appeared on his shoulder and stopped him. "But everyone in the infirmary is staying under quarantine for a while longer, just to be sure."
"I can't stay in here," he complained, his frown deepening. "Some of us have real work to do."
She sighed in exasperation. "I'm sorry, Dr. McKay, but these are Dr. Wier's orders."
He was determined to argue as heatedly as he had to in order to be allowed to leave the sardine-can like isolation room. "I feel fine! You said yourself that my blood work tested negative for infection."
He reached out and put his hand on the door frame in an attempt to keep it open as she tried to ignore him, and she stopped and turned around. He looked at her with pleading eyes.
"Please," he whispered as he fidgeted nervously. He hated begging, but wasn't beyond resorting to it in desperate situations, and sometimes he managed to call up enough charm from within himself that it would occasionally work. "Can't I be isolated somewhere else or be restricted to quarters instead or something?"
"I'll pass on your request to Dr. Biro." She closed the door on him as she spoke, almost crushing Rodney's fingers in the process. Apparently his finesse was going to need a little more work next time.