And on to chapter two! Now things start happening...
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Fear Itself
Chapter 2
Much to her annoyance, Jordan's cell phone rang bright and early the next morning. She groaned, rolling over and reaching around for it blindly as the shrill ringing got louder and louder. Her fingers hit the little hunk of plastic, and the thing went flying to the floor.
"Oh, for the love of..."
This time she grudgingly pulled herself out of Woody's warm arms and leaned over the side of the bed to find it. The phone was still ringing angrily, and she flipped it open just before it went to voicemail. "What," she spat, the morning sunlight making her squint at the clock. It had to be too early -
"It's six thirty, Jordan," Garret's voice snapped. "Where the hell are you? Nigel just called in a panic."
"Called about what? My shift doesn't start for another hour and a half," Jordan grumbled, flopping back down on the bed and running a hand over her face in a vain attempt to focus.
She heard Garret sigh and knew that he was rubbing his face, too, but for a much different reason. "I assigned you to the high school career fair with him this morning, remember?"
"Oh, shit. I completely forgot."
"You were supposed to be there thirty minutes ago to help Nigel set up."
"Yeah, yeah, I know. It must have slipped my mind. My schedule is just all weird this week, that's all." She started to sit up, but Woody chose that moment to scoot closer and pull her back against his chest, still half asleep and only subconsciously realizing that she was moving away. "I'll be there in forty minutes."
"I should just fire you," Garret muttered. "My life would be so much easier without you to complicate things at every turn."
"You know you'd miss me." Woody had woken up a bit more, and Jordan shooed away his hands when they roamed down her abdomen. "Stop it," she said in a fake whisper. "My boss is trying to fire me again!" But then to Garret as Woody gave her a goofy smile and rolled over, "I'll be there as soon as I can. Really, I'm sorry I forgot. Tell Nigel I owe him one."
"Don't make promises you can't keep," he warned humorously before hanging up.
"What was that all about?" Woody asked when she flung the covers off and made her way toward the bathroom for a quick shower.
His voice was still lined with sleep and she flashed him a smile over her shoulder, leaving the door open as she ran the water. "Seems I'm supposed to be helping Nigel with some high school career fair thing this morning. Garret told me about it weeks ago and I blanked."
"A high school career fair? For the morgue? Isn't that a bit morbid?" He had come into be bathroom behind her and kissed the soft spot behind her ear as he reached for his toothbrush.
"Nigel's a criminologist, I'm a doctor with a unique specialty. Nothing morbid about that, right? But really, Garret just picked me 'cause I'm pretty." She stepped into the shower and pulled the curtain closed, already reaching for her shampoo. "Sorry to have woken you a few minutes early. And before you ask, no, you can't join me."
Woody just laughed. "Wanna meet for lunch?"
"Can't. I have no idea when this thing will be over." She sputtered and spit water out of her mouth, rushing to finish and getting frustrated with it all. She'd been looking forward to having a normal day today after spending a grueling nine hours in court the day before. Being with Nigel would be nice, but those kids...yeah, not so much. And missing her routine lunch with Woody was yet another thing to add to the growing list of what was making this week significantly different that usual. The complete lack of a real schedule –of her normal life – was messing with her head. She wasn't liking it. At all. "And now that I think about it, I don't have a clue when I'll be home tonight, either. I might have to pull a double to make up for all of the time that I'll have missed." It was a saddening thought, and she frowned in ever-growing annoyance.
"Don't worry about it," Woody told her softly, not needing to see her face to know how upset all of this was making her - from court to the forgetfulness to missing work to missing him. "I'll go put together some leftovers for you to take for lunch, and if you end up staying late I'll bring you something for dinner. Okay?"
"You're too good to me," Jordan joked, but his kindness made her throat swell for one heart-stopping second. She was thankful she was still hidden by the shower curtain even as he left the room. It would take a lot for her to admit it, but sometimes she could swear she fell more in love with him every day.
Now if he would just work up the courage to ask her those silly questions she knew he wanted to ask.
xXx
"Well, that sure took you long enough," Nigel griped the moment he saw her burst through the doors of the high school gymnasium, her casual business clothes a far cry from what she normally wore to work. "I've already finished setting everything up. Now you're just in time to help me mould impressionable young minds."
"Scar, is more like it," Jordan quipped half-heartedly as she pulled her messenger bag over her shoulder and hid it under the table skirt.
He eyed her warily, one eyebrow raised. "Is that all you've got for me this morning, love? Hardly your usual sarcastic self. Is something the matter?"
"No, I'm just…" She waved her hand dismissively as she surveyed the tables he had put together for them. "I'm just feeling weird, that's all. It's a strange week, working but not really working. And I'm sorry, man, but I really don't want to be here today. Teenagers and I don't always see eye to eye."
Nigel propped up the last poster – a standard medical textbook skeleton-and-muscle body – and shook his head. "Kayla liked you quite well, didn't she?"
"That was different."
Jordan's mood had shifted quite suddenly with that, and her friend opened his mouth to inquire or soothe whatever injury he had just ripped the bandage off of, but the door opened again and teenagers happy to be out of class for the morning poured into the large gym. Some of them began to peruse the tables set up by professionals around the perimeter while some drifted off in groups, trying to get away with chatting rather than looking for future careers.
The woman watched them with vacant eyes, not hearing as Nigel explained how he had laid everything out – pamphlets, brochures, papers. All of it went over her head as she watched the kids roam through the room. Kayla's face flashed across her mind, and she wondered if she would be doing something like this soon, too. She'd be almost eighteen now. Getting ready to graduate, go to college. Kayla, the girl who had almost been her adopted daughter. The only daughter she would have had, now that that goddamned tumor had –
"You're not listening to a word I'm saying," Nigel observed, poking her shoulder with one finger and pulling her from her reverie before the thoughts could spiral downward any worse. "Though you may want to liven up a bit; I see a group heading our way."
It was true. A group of three boys and a girl was slowly sauntering toward their vacant table. One of the boys was pushing the girl forward, all three ribbing her until she let them convince her to step up.
"Do you really cut up dead bodies?" she asked. The boys howled with laugher before quickly trying to stifle it.
Nigel, to his credit, gave her a patient smile and touched Jordan's arm. "I don't, myself, but this brilliant woman right here does."
"Really?" One of the boys came forward, his face a mixture of awe and disgust, as though he couldn't quite decide which to settle on. "Are you a real doctor? Like, did you have to go to med school?"
"Um, yeah." Jordan frowned at her friend, who was still grinning blithely. "I'm a 'real doctor', all right."
"You don't look like a doctor," another boy piped up, puffing his cheeks as if trying to catch her in a lie. The girl kicked at his foot with an angry look on her face. "What? She doesn't!"
"I change into scrubs before I start an autopsy," she explained calmly, letting the air out of her lungs slowly. "Sorry I didn't pull a suit out just for you. I'm gonna go step outside, Doctor Townsend. Why don't you tell these nosy kids about ballistics? That's gotta be more interesting than dead bodies." She backed away from the table so Nigel could delve into the science he loved so much, adding under her breath, "I'll be right back. Promise."
She hastily made her way to the back door of the gym, the one that led to the enclosed courtyard, seeing Kayla everywhere and feeling the world she had rebuilt closing in around her.
xXx
It wasn't until two o'clock that afternoon when she and Nigel finally returned to the Morgue.
Jordan took a deep breath as they stepped off the elevators, trying to let go of whatever momentary loss she had had at the school. She'd been able to get control of herself quickly once she'd gone outside, but being back in her own territory would be the final step in getting her head back on straight. Kayla had been on her mind a lot lately, ever since it had sunk in that her body might not be able to have children. The plethora of medications she was taking to control the growth of the meningioma would see to that, as would the imbalance in hormones brought from the tumor itself.
God, she missed Kayla.
"Welcome back," Garret greeted as soon as they turned the corner near his office. "How was the career fair?"
Nigel grinned at Jordan, who was refusing to meet either of their stares. "Our doctor here had quite a few younglings on her hook. I daresay one or two of them may actually follow the path of medicine one day. Though they probably won't be joining our little family here, if the look on their faces when she talked about exploding innards was any indication."
"Hey!" Jordan held her hands up in front of her in an attempt to defend herself. "I was only answering their questions truthfully. This job can get pre-ty messy. Remember that time we had to get a ladder into Autopsy to pick a John Doe's stomach contents off the ceiling? It took weeks to get the smell out of my hair."
"Very funny, Jordan." Macy handed her a file as he waved Nigel off to work. "We have a body coming in from the hospital at Boston U., an Ivan Hertz. Cause of death is unknown and the family would like an autopsy done by the end of the day. Think you could take it?"
She snatched the file and flipped it open, gazing over Hertz's unremarkable medical records. "Consider it done. ETA?"
"The ambulance is about ten minutes away."
No time to eat the lunch Woody had so thoughtfully put together for her, but she gave Garret a thin smile anyway. "I'll go put on my scrubs. Great to have me back in the office, huh? This is the part where you say, 'Oh yeah, Doctor Cavanaugh, it sure is!'" she said, swinging her arm in front of her enthusiastically.
Macy just shook his head and turned to walk away. "Go get changed."
xXx
Hertz's medical records really were unremarkable, Jordan mused as she waited by the freight elevator fifteen minutes later clad in scrubs and a paper gown, gloves already covering her hands. He had been a healthy man, mid-sixties. Never hospitalized for more than a broken bone during a skiing trip. He was on the Board of Directors for the Boston Medical Center. Ironic that he ended up dying there.
The cause of death was unknown, but the symptoms leading to it included bleeding from the ears, seizures, fever, cramping, and undiagnosed lesions. Could be a number of things, really. The elevator began to hum, and she looked up just as the EMTs pulled open the doors and wheeled the covered body inside. "You Cavanaugh?"
"Yep, that's me. Come sign him in, boys."
As the men pushed the gurney toward the desk, Jordan followed behind and unzipped the body bag down over Hertz's head. Pustules covered the skin on his neck, and she recoiled with a gasp of surprise before quickly recovering and reaching down to unzip the bag completely. There were more – she lifted his arms and found some under them, and then more between his legs. Lesions? These weren't lesions. "Shit."
One of the EMTs looked at her, his eyes wide. "What's wrong?"
"Wait here. Don't leave, okay? Put on masks and don't touch this body."
"What -"
"I'll be right back!" she called, already running out of the crypt and into the hallway, grabbing a mask from the box by the door on her way and covering her mouth with it. "Kate! Kate!" Her voice had taken on an edge of panic as she looked around wildly for the blond-haired woman, almost overturning a cart in her mad dash. Where was she?! "Kate!"
"What?" She finally appeared, coming out of Trace with her eyebrows high. Nigel came out behind her, but Jordan hardly took notice. "Why are you wearing a mask?"
"That body that you autopsied for Woody yesterday. She had pustules under the arms and around the groin?"
"Yes," she answered with a slow nod.
"Come look at this. Come on!" Jordan gestured widely for them both to follow her, and they did in confusion. The two EMTs were still there, masks on their faces now and huddled nervously near the elevator. "They looked like this, didn't they?" When Kate didn't answer fast enough, Jordan pointed at Hertz again. "Didn't they?!"
Kate met her eyes, shocked at the force behind the question. "Yes, they did. Do you know what they are? My biopsy results haven't come back yet."
"I've only seen it in textbooks and medical journals, and we'll have to run tests to be sure," Jordan said, growing quiet now as it sunk in. "But it all makes sense. His symptoms, the incubation period, these. Lesions my ass. These are buboes."
"Jordan?" Kate prodded when her mutterings became too quiet to hear. "What is it?"
"Yersinia pestis," she whispered hoarsely.
"Holy Mother." Nigel took a step back and grabbed a mask for himself and for Kate, who took it and calmly put it on. "The Black Death. Here, in Boston."