As the entered the HDU the doctor was still talking to April but she didn’t hear him, her senses screening out everything except the window in front of her. Behind the glass a girl lay on a bed, a thick, snaking tube lodged in her mouth, her eyes closed. Her chest rose and fell slowly, steadily. Her heartbeat pulsed out in a regular, luminous green line on a monitor next to the bed. April placed her hands and forehead on the window and whispered Aps’ name over and over again.
“She’s stable,” said the doctor. April turned towards him, took a deep breath and tried to compose herself. Tried to think.
“What does that mean?” she said. “Is she going to be alright?”
“It means that her condition isn’t deteriorating at the moment.”
“Is she going to be alright?” repeated April.
The doctor didn’t break her gaze but remained silent for a few moments. He walked over to stand next to April at the window and they stood looking in on Aps. April caught a faint scent of his aftershave, an incongruous soft hint of sandalwood amid the sanitised, sharp bleach smells. She stated to repeat her question a third time but he stopped her.
“We don’t know. Honestly, we don’t know. Her condition was not supposed to worsen like this, it’s not something that we had expected when she was infected…” He paused, “…when we infected her.”
April felt her chest tighten and all of her senses sharpened; it seemed too bright, too loud all of a sudden. The hint of his aftershave filled her nostrils and she was hit with a wave of nausea.
“…what do you mean?” she managed, turning to face him. Her initial shock was rapidly turning to anger. “You can’t be serious? You infected her with this?”
The doctor folded his arms. “What do you know about the vaccination efforts in the last nine years?”
“I don’t give a fuck about the vaccination efforts,” shouted April. “I want you to tell me what you’ve done to my friend, then I want my phone, and then I’m getting out of here and going straight to the police.” She was shaking, close to tears but met with a steady, implacable stare.
“Vaccination Initiative, Covert Transmission. Project Victory. For the past decade we have chased shadows trying to cure the Covid outbreaks, every time we got close it mutated and eluded us again. The longer it has gone on the more people lost faith in medicine to protect them and the fewer and fewer people would come forward for testing programs. Nothing like enough…”
April was shaking her head in disbelief. “…so you give people the virus without them knowing?”
“Put bluntly, yes,” he said. “We are at war. And we are losing. There are choices that we have had to make that none of us would have wanted to but they are necessary.”
“Go tell her they’re necessary,” said April, jabbing her finger at the window. “Now give me my phone.”
“I don’t think you understand,” said the doctor. “Who would you ring? The police? Who do you think manages the covert transmission for us?”
April reached for something to steady herself, she felt the room lurch slightly as she was flooded with another jolt of adrenaline. She remembered them picking Aps up after her arrest. Remembered them all talking later. What tests? What did they do to you? Just bloods I think. Just bloods I think. They hadn’t been testing her for a prior infection, they’d been injecting her with a new one.
“This is unfortunate,” said the doctor. “We were very careful who we arranged to be in the house with you. Everyone had to be the right profile, the right age, previous exposure to the virus without complication, healthy. We didn’t foresee this.”
“What do you mean?” said April. “Why would you arrange people to be in a house with me? What do I have to do with this?”
“You’re the key to the program,” he said. “You have been ever since you left ICU when you were fourteen. We weren’t sure then but later tests confirmed it. You’re immune to every mutation we’ve ever seen and we think that you are the key to the vaccine.”
“I want no part of this,” said April. “I want no part of your experiments. You can’t play games with people’s lives.”
“Then all we can do for your friend is hope.”
April turned back to look at Aps through the glass; almost peaceful, sleeping. She remembered that first time they met, how she’d blundered into the conversation about her childhood ICU time, how April had liked her despite her clumsiness. She’d had a hunch then that there was something honest about her, something decent, and nothing since had changed her mind. Us April’s got to stick together.
She didn’t turn back to face the doctor, she didn’t want to look at him anymore.
“What do I have to do? What do you need from me?”
“Your blood, April. We need your blood.”
42 @ 42 