ADAPTATIONS
24 – A Heat in the Night
Outside, the night's temperatures plummeted to the low twenties. It was typical for a November and those few that remained at the dig site to work through the winter months were prepared with extra food, water and gasoline for their generators. Inside Quarantine, Billy was getting a bit warm under the heating blanket the hybrid shared with him. He rolled over to see if, by chance, his side of it got turned on but it didn't. It was off. Perhaps Pet's side was cranked up that high that the excess heat was filling his side of the bed. He was snuggled up pretty close to her. His groggy hazel eyes focused in the dark to see the small orange light shining on the forth heat setting.
It was the temperature setting she normally kept the blanket on when he was over, so why was tonight so much more intolerable than the others? He laid back down to go back to sleep only to stop when he noticed how hot the woman's skin was. Billy gently touched her face and felt it was a bit sweaty and way hotter than she normally felt. Even during the times the blanket was on the sixth setting did she not feel this hot. He then rested the backs of his fingers on forehead. There was no making excuses for this; she had a fever. What should he do? Did she get that snot nosed kid's cold after he coughed and sneezed all over the dig site for two days?
Billy tried to shake her awake. "Nica?" She didn't answer. "Veronica? C'mon, wake up." She whimpered, but made no movement. He shook her a bit harder only to get the same result as before. Ignoring the cold air hanging in Quarantine's air, Billy trudged through the dark trailer and to the back bunkroom's closed door. He worried waking one particular man might result in his getting shot, but knocked on the door anyway. "Uh, guys?" He knocked again. "Hello?"
Derek groaned, "Fuck off."
Billy rolled his eyes and sighed. He planted his hands on his hips and clenched his jaw in annoyance. "I think something's wrong with Veronica. She's burning up and I can't get her to wake up."
Muldoon damn near ripped the bedroom door off its hinges in a panicked rush. He raced to the woman's room and felt of her sweat laden face. "Pet?" The small lamp on her nightstand was flicked on so he could better see her and his heart ached in his chest. Her fever flustered cheeks were standing out in contrast to her sickly pale complexion. "Bloody hell." Muldoon threw the blankets off the unconscious hybrid as he collected her in his arms. "I was wondering when this was going to happen again." He saw Derek coming out of the bunkroom, half awake, and demanded, "Start the bath. Someone get Dr. Grant."
Seeing the hybrid's limp form in his uncle's arms quickly snapped the bounty hunter wide awake. "Shit." Derek scrambled into the bathroom and started a lukewarm bath.
Billy was terrified. "What's going? What did you mean by again? Has this happened before?"
Terrence slid his thick blue winter coat on, never mind still wearing his grey sweatpants, and drove his bare feet into his boots. "I'll be right back."
Billy watched the many layers of nightclothes be stripped from the unknowing hybrid's form until she was left in her sports bra and blue and white striped pajama shorts. Her entire body glistened with sweat as parts of her damp hair clung to parts of her. It took both uncle and nephew to get her into the tub without hurting her. Her head was placed at the faucet end and her feet at the other end.
Muldoon took handfuls of water and ran it over the hybrid's face. "I need the Motrin out of the first aid kit."
Billy disappeared into the bunkroom to get the kit.
Derek looked at his uncle. "What's Motrin going to do for this? Isn't this worse than just some head cold?"
Muldoon continued to run cool water on the ill woman's face. "All I can do is treat the symptoms, like the fever, body aches, hot-cold flashes, sore throat, headaches, sinus congestion... There's no way to actually treat this as a whole, just the symptoms." Pet whimpered and coughed in her state of unconsciousness. "InGen tried to find a cure for this years ago in Kenya, but gave up citing it was too complicated."
Derek scoffed. "How is curing this too complicated for a company that re-created dinosaurs from prehistoric mosquitos? I think they 'gave up' because they didn't give a shit about her."
Pet whimpered again and her glossy raptor eyes fluttered halfway open. She weakly reached for Muldoon's hand and held it against her face as though nuzzling a security blanket. Billy returned with the first aid kit and set it down on the bathroom's small sink. He didn't care that he broke one of the clamps when opening it and fought with a bottle of liquid Motrin.
"How much do you give her?" He jammed the end of an oral syringe into a bottle adapter placed in the medicine bottle and waited for an answer.
Muldoon looked at the syringe in the protégé's hand. "Fill it up."
Derek was a bit concerned with the amount of medication he was about to give Pet. "That's a bit much, isn't it?"
Muldoon took the red filled syringe and pressed it against the inside of Pet's cheek. "I need you to wake up a bit and swallow this so you don't choke." The hybrid whimpered. "Come on, work with me." Pet tried to sit up, but was unable to. Muldoon saw she was as awake as he was going to get and slowly eased the entire syringe's contents into her mouth. He shoved the empty tube at Derek. "Get me something for her to drink…juice, water…" Again, Billy disappeared out of sight.
Derek looked at the measurements on the side of the syringe. He wasn't a doctor, but wasn't three teaspoons a bit much? "You're not worried about overdosing her?"
"I know what I'm doing. I've taken care of her when she was sick before." Again, Billy returned and with a small glass half full of apple juice. Muldoon held it to Pet's lips and got her to drink some of it.
Grant charged into the trailer and not appearing phased by the icy cold of the winter air outside in his white t-shit and dark blue sleep pants. The toes of his bare feet were bright red, though. He saw the light on in the bathroom and went to the doorway. "What's going? Terrence told me Veronica is really sick."
Muldoon handed Derek the juice glass. "Try to get her to drink all of this," and got up to talk to the lead scientist. Billy made sure to listen to what was being said, as well. "If you remember, while at Jurassic Park you came across a sick Triceratops." Grant furrowed his brow and nodded. "There were other species of animals sick with the same thing, too."
"I discovered this, myself, with a Brachiosaur the morning after the T-Rex escaped its paddock. It looked like the animal had a head cold."
"That's the lesser strain of the illness. The more severe of the strain was the case with the Trike. When InGen recreated the animals using the different DNA strands extracted from the preserved mosquitos, they didn't know some of the samples were tainted with a type of prehistoric strain of what scientists first starting calling the fowl plague in eighteen seventy-eight."
Grant spoke up. "Did the InGen scientists confirm this? That it was a prehistoric strain?"
Muldoon nodded. "Yes. They compared the two strains, the prehistoric one and a more current one. Mind you the millennia it has had to evolve." He gave a weak smile to the senior scientist. "This just goes to prove your theory, Doctor, that dinosaurs evolved into birds. To this day, there are some birds that live with strains of this plague, this…flu…in their intestinal tract. It's possible that as the original dinosaurs evolved into birds, the illness evolved with them to be what it is today."
Billy interjected. "Even then, birds that contract the fowl plague usually die because of the high mortality rate. Just this year, the first human infections were reported in China and it wasn't pretty which means it's still evolving. Did Veronica get this stuff from one of the sick dinosaurs on the islands?"
Muldoon shook his head. "No. Just as some of the species of dinosaurs were recreated with it, so was she. The Velociraptor DNA sample used to create her was tainted, too."
Grant's expression was grim. "Billy brings up a good point; the mortality rate of those infected. What are we looking at, here?"
Muldoon continued to explain. "I'm not going to lie, gentlemen, this will eventually kill her. This coming from the geneticist that created her and oversaw much of her medical care."
Derek shouted from the bathroom, "From what you told me, that piece of shit can't be trusted as far as he can be thrown."
Billy spoke. "Eventually… it's what you meant by again. She's had this before."
"Since an infant," Muldoon clarified. "It's a part of her DNA, which is why she has chronic symptomatic bouts from it. It's been poking its ugly head into the picture every three to four months, give or take a week or two. It comes on suddenly and sticks around for about a week before it goes back into remission."
Grant frowned. "Just like the Trike at Jurassic Park. I remember the veterinarian saying how it was sick every six weeks or so." His chest felt heavy with a sadness for the hybrid. "There's no cure for this, is there?"
"There could be…" Solemn blue eyes searched older grey ones for an answer, but it wasn't that easy. "If InGen wanted there to be."
Billy laughed disbelievingly to himself. "Either way, she dies because of InGen, whether it be from a bullet or a slow killing virus they created her with." He rubbed his hands over his face. "Mother fuckers."
Muldoon wanted to punch the protégé just for his statement, but what he said was true. There was no denying the inevitable.
Pet whimpered again, it paining Grant to hear it. "Any idea when it'll become too much for her body to fight?"
Muldoon shook his head. "Unfortunately, not. Dr. Jacobs couldn't say exactly when or by what age this would reach a lethal peak. It gradually gets worse each time it flares up, sometimes with one symptom being more severe than before. The next time it could be something else."
Grant sidestepped to the bathroom door to see the hybrid laying on her side in a tub full of water. Her eyes were closed and her head was laying on the side of the tub. A limp clawed hand hung over the side as water dripped from one of her claws. Derek had a washrag and was getting it wet to wring out over the parts of her body exposed out of the water. Grant could see her nose was running, too, which Derek also occasionally wiped with a handful of toilet paper he kept on the back of the toilet.
Her hand twitched and her eyes cracked open just in time to squeeze closed in a sneeze. Good thing he had a strong stomach, Grant thought to himself, or the sight of mucus sneezed all over Derek's leg would've made him gag otherwise. He instantly remembered the sight of Lexi right after the sick Brachiosaur doused her in snot and smiled to himself at the memory of.
Derek looked down at his leg and scowled. "Aw, c'mon, Pet, really?" He got the washrag wet and fervently wiped off his leg. "Gross! You better be glad you're sick or else I'd knock the rest of the snot out of you."
Pet attempted a very weak laugh. "Sorry..." she wheezed, "not sorry."
Muldoon stepped past Terrence to return to the bathroom. He dug around in the first aid kid for two thermometers. He shooed his nephew off his sitting on the closed toilet lid so that he could sit down there, instead. Derek looked at the two items. "Why two?"
Muldoon answered, uncapping the larger and normal looking of the two. "One is for cold blooded animals. Vets use it. This one," he motioned to the uncapped one, turning it on, "is what's used on people. This one won't read her standard temperature. It'll keep coming back as 'Low Temp', but given her having an obvious fever, it'll read it." Tenderly he turned the woman's face towards him and placed the thermometer under her tongue. He had to hold her mouth closed, given her being barely conscious and unable to hold it in her mouth herself. After a couple of minutes, it beeped, Muldoon reading the temp out loud. "Ninety-seven point eight." He sat the medical tool beside the sink and frowned at the sick hybrid he loved so much like a daughter. "That would be about a one-hundred and four for a regular person. I'll give it thirty to maybe forty minutes for the Motrin to kick in and I'll check her temperature again to see if it's lowering."
"If it doesn't?" Terrence questioned, leaning in the bathroom's doorway.
"Then I'll try putting ice in her bathwater to see if I can cool her body off that way."
Derek scoffed. "Good thing it's snowing outside. There's all the ice you need, right there, Rob."
Terrence huffed a laugh. "Screw that. Just take her outside. As cold as it is, if that doesn't break the fever then I don't know what will."
Derek dug his hands into the pockets of his pajama pants. "It's just a question of who's going to take one for the team and chance the extreme shrinkage of sitting outside with her."
Seven-twenty AM crept up on the Fort Peck Lake area as the morning's sunrays peeked over the larger hill overshadowing the excavation. The sun glistened off the snow blanketing the area and even off portions of thin ice that had formed over vehicles and their windshields.
Grey eyes took in the beauty of the serene sunrise, paying no mind to the bite of the winter air trying to get through the several layers of insulated clothing he wore. Muldoon was sitting on the ground behind Quarantine and with Pet stretched across his lap, eyes closed and her unmoving. She was dressed in what Muldoon thought was just enough to allow the cold to reach her while keeping her protected from too much of a chill.
Seated next to them was Derek, huddled against himself and gloved hands shoved under his arms for additional warmth. "It's so cold outside, I don't think my dick with ever un-shrink itself."
Uncle rolled his eyes at the much unneeded comment from his nephew. Pet groaned and spoke in a hoarse voice. "Maybe you can unfuck the ego stick crammed up your ass, then."
Muldoon gazed down at the hybrid. It was the first time he had heard anything from her that wasn't a cough, whimper, groan in pain or sneeze in the past several hours. "There you are." He pulled a thick glove off one of his hands and felt Pet's face. Even with it being in the mid-twenties outside, he could still tell if she was feverish or not.
Derek shivered and recoiled further into his coat. "It's about time. Now that you're awake we can go inside."
Muldoon shook his head. "You didn't have to come out here, you know."
"How can you sit out here in this and not freeze your ass off?"
"This is nothing compared to the nights in Siberia."
Bewilderment wrinkled Derek's features. "What? Siberia? What were you doing there?"
"I went on a few hunting trips with a good friend of mine and an Indian fellow he knew. We would spend days out there hunting caribou, musk ox and even polar bear."
"There's polar bear in Russia? I thought they were just in Antarctica."
Pet groaned and lazily threw a handful of snow at Derek. "You dumbass. Polar bears don't live in Antarctica. Polar bears live in what's called the Polar Ice Pack. Go look it up."
Derek held up his hands. "Like I know where that is! I wasn't raised in a zoo like you were, Pet. I don't know this shit!"
Pet snorted, which sounded drastically different than normal due to her illness. "I'm cold. Can we go inside, now?"
Derek jumped to his feet and brushed the snow off his backside and legs. "Yes, please!" He sprinted inside Quarantine, Muldoon assisting the extremely weak hybrid to her feet.
She was helped out of the many layers of warm clothing and allowed to bundle back up under her heated blanket. It took Muldoon forcing half a bowl of chicken noodle soup down her before she was given another dose of Motrin and allowed to sleep.
It wasn't the first or last time Muldoon would endure the bitter cold of the Montana winter. The next night, he was back outside and nursing a thermos of hot coffee.
