With a sidelong glance at the fourth body bag, Carl raised one eyebrow. "Three of them?"
"Yes," he replied. "The fourth is well sealed and will be transported with you. There had to be some truth to this farce."
Doug looked at Gene, his eyes bloodshot. Sweat dripped from his forehead in spite of the cold, and his face got grayer by the second. Carl dropped his pants and kicked them off to the side. As the black man hopped up onto the table and slid his legs into the bag, Doug stumbled to his knees and retched.
"You sick, Doug?" Carl asked. The doctors ignored the question and rushed to Doug's side. He waved them off.
"I'm okay, I'm okay." He spat and stepped away from the sticky pool on the floor. He looked at Carl and Gene with shame. "Diseases make me nervous."
Carl smiled sympathetically. The Bangladeshi woman stepped forward and took a vial and syringe from her pocket. She grabbed Doug's wrist and pulled. "Stick out your hand." He did so.
She removed two cc's of medicine from the bottle, squirted a little of the liquid out of the syringe, and injected the medicine into his arm.
"What is it?" Doug asked.
"It will calm you. Get undressed and into the bag. We have no time left."
Ninety seconds later they lay in body bags with small, scuba-style oxygen tanks fed into their mouths. The Bangladeshi woman leaned over them and spoke.
"You must not betray your presence with the slightest noise until the plane has left the runway. To do so would jeopardize all of our lives, if Govind is to be believed." She hung a toe tag on each of them. "I don't know what he owed this friend of yours, but I'm certain at this point that they are even and that the three of you owe him much, much more. Be silent until we get you. You have forty minutes of air if you regulate your breathing. So do it." She zipped the bags closed and plunged the world into darkness.
Muffled voices continued another few minutes, then it fell silent.
Doug worked to control his breathing. In the darkness the red Biohazard logo clawed its way into his psyche with directed precision and headed straight for the panic, fight-or-flight center of his primitive subconscious. He'd never considered himself claustrophobic, but the fact that this was a body bag made the enclosure that much worse. The leathery, heavy plastic stank like the morgue. It blocked out even the tiniest traces of light.
He kept his eyes closed against the darkness and concentrated on the facts. Nothing in here is infected. The CDC people are experts. The other body is well sealed. Totally safe. The biohazard symbol flashed across his vision again, but the intensity of the panic dulled, as if filtered through cotton gauze. We're going to be in the air soon. In body bags. With an infected corpse.
He heard Gene's voice in his head. You can do this, Doug. It's like being in a sleeping bag, that's all.
A sleeping bag for dead people.
A sleeping bag. Just relax, everything's going to be fine. Just relax. He knew the voice wasn't real, but he took comfort in it nonetheless.
He took a deep breath, held it, and let it out. Better. His heart rate came down, his breathing slowed to an almost normal pace.
See, Doug? No problem. You'll be fine. Just fine.
He tried to shriek when hands grabbed him through the rough plastic of the body bag. He tried to panic. His body didn't move as strong arms lifted him and placed him on a gurney. His heart raced; his adrenaline level shot up. He tried to struggle, but couldn't move.
The world turned fuzzy. The gurney felt soft, like a giant pillow. It rocked like a cradle. It was warm, too. Comfy. Doug Goldman fell into a drugged sleep.
Gene heard voices as they wheeled him down the hallway, the closer one female, the farther one male. They didn't sound familiar.
"So where are these four going?" asked the female voice.
"Helicopter. Rooftop. I guess they're shipping them out somewhere."
"Why these four?"
He couldn't hear the reply over the clatter of the gurney wheels against the tiled floor.
"Yeah. There's some order from the CDC or something. Some sort of killer flu." Her voice was sad. The man asked a question Gene couldn't hear.
"I don't know," she said. "I've only been home twice since all this started. It's bad out there, you know?"
The clattering stopped with the movement. His stomach lurched. Elevator.
"What about you?" the woman asked.
The man grunted. "I live in Marin County. I haven't been home in most of a week. My kid's almost three, got to be missing me big time, and my wife's convinced I'm going to die in a giant fireball."
"Wow." The reply was as automatic as it was stupid. "That sucks."
"Sure does. The sooner this is over, the better."