Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Read Free Page B

out a small penlight and shone it on one, then the other, holding the lids open with her free right hand.
    “Okay,” she said. We’re going to be moving you to another room. Have you got anyone in the waiting room?”
    Celia shook her head. Talia nodded, picked up her coffee cup, and exited the room.
    Outside, she took Randal aside.
    “Some subconjunctival bleeding,” she murmured. “Could be some kind of hemorrhagic fever.”
    “I was afraid you were going to say that,” Randal said. “Like what? Yellow Fever? Ebola?”
    “Whoa, Tex,” she said. “I said it
could
be, but it’s still not likely. She might just have a bad case of the flu and a nose bleed. But let’s be on the safe side. Put her in a clean room. Strict isolation, okay? Just in case. And let’s turf it to someone who really knows about this stuff—Collins, maybe, or Park. Okay? And don’t spread any Ebola rumors around. I was just thinking out loud.”
    “Okay,” he said.
    She had almost finished her coffee when Ravenna stuck her head around the corner.
    “Incoming SCUD,” she said. “Motor-vehicle accident.”
    “My lucky night,” Talia sighed, and she went to scrub up.
    * * *
    By the time she had the guy stabilized enough for real surgery, her shift was almost up. Which was good, because she was dead on her feet. She was pulling herself together to go when she ran into Randal.
    “Get her settled in?” she asked.
    “Yeah,” he said. “And you know what? We got another one.”
    “Another what?”
    “Another blood-sneezer. Old African-American lady. I sent her straight to isolation.”
    “Huh,” Talia said, and she frowned. “I don’t know. This is starting to sound like a thing. Have you called around?”
    “I’ve kind of had my hands full,” he said.
    “I’ll check it out tomorrow,” she said.
    She wore her scrubs home, showered, and pulled out a pair of pajamas.
    “It’s just us, baby,” she told the pj’s. “We can be together all night.”
    She fixed herself a Moscow Mule and just sat for a moment, savoring the slight sting of the ginger beer and lime over the kick of the vodka. She checked the messages on her landline. Some of her friends thought she was a bit out of it for having one, but landlines worked in power outages, and they worked when towers or satellites were down. And here in earthquake-land, that seemed like a good thing.
    Also, landlines—hers anyway—didn’t have texting, so she could safely give the number to people from whom she didn’t want to get texts all of the time. Like the people who had left the four messages on her phone. Her father, a guy named Dean she had met last week at a bar called the Choirboy, another guy named Serge who got her numberfrom, of course, her father. And another one from her father.
    Tonight, he counted as two people.
    Deleting the messages, she sat back and took a sip. Halfway through her drink she remembered to turn on her cell phone. It had been off all day.
    She had a text from St. John, a guy with whom she had done her residency. She hadn’t heard from him in a while—he worked at another hospital in the Bay Area, also in the ER. Curious, she checked the message.
    Hey Tal—funny disease today. Hemorrhaging, high fever. Couldn’t diagnose, turfed to ICU. Two cases. U have any? Let’s get a drink sometime.
    “Wow,” she said to her pj’s. “It must be a thing.”

2
    As the helicopter descended, Malakai began to think he had made a mistake—perhaps a fatal one. He had been ambushed before, in Rwanda and in South Kivu. In Uganda he’d been led into a trap he’d barely escaped. But this was California, and it was possible that his instincts had grown sleepy.
    They were kicking in now, though, big time. What he saw below him didn’t make sense.
    It didn’t fit with the public story, either, which meant something was happening that powerful people did not want to be common knowledge. That could very well mean he was entering into a situation he might