12.21 Read Online Free PDF

disappearing.

THREE

    E AST L.A. PRESBYTERIAN HOSPITAL: BARS GUARDED THE WINDOWS , and the typical crowd of smokers always seen around run-down hospitals stood outside puffing away. The front entrance was closed due to a leak in the lobby ceiling, so security shuffled visitors and patients alike into the hospital through the ER.
    Inside, Stanton was hit by overlapping smells: alcohol, dirt, blood, urine, vomit, solvent, air freshener, and tobacco. On chairs around the waiting room sat dozens of suffering people waiting their turn. Stanton rarely spent time in facilities like this one: When a hospital deals with gang violence on a daily basis, there’s not much demand for a prion specialist to give academic lectures.
    A clearly stressed-out nurse, sitting behind a bulletproof glass window, agreed to page Thane as Stanton joined a group of visitors gathered around a TV mounted on the wall. An airplane was being pulled from the ocean by a Coast Guard salvage vessel. Rescue boats and helicopters circled the remains of Aero Globale flight 126, which had crashed off the coast of Baja California on its way from L.A. to Mexico City. Seventy-two passengers and eight crew members had died.
    This is the way things can end, Stanton thought. No matter how many times life forced him to realize it, the thought still took him by surprise. You exercised and ate well, got yearly physicals, worked hard 24/7and never complained about it, and then one day you just got on the wrong plane.
    “Dr. Stanton?”
    The first thing he noticed about the tall black woman in scrubs standing behind him was how broad her shoulders were. She was in her early thirties, with cropped hair and thick black-rimmed glasses, giving her a kind of rugby-player-turned-hipster look.
    “I’m Michaela Thane.”
    “Gabriel Stanton,” he said, shaking her hand.
    Thane glanced up at the television. “Terrible, huh?”
    “Do they know what happened?”
    “They’re saying human error,” she said, leading him out of the ER. “Or as we say here—CTFL. Call the fucking lawyers.”
    “Speaking of which, I assume you called County Health?” Stanton asked her as they headed toward the elevators.
    Thane repeatedly pressed an elevator button that refused to light up. “They promised to send someone.”
    “Don’t hold your breath.”
    She mimed taking a huge gasp of air in as they waited. Stanton smiled. She was his type of resident.
    Finally the car arrived. Thane hit the button for six. When her scrub sleeve pulled back, Stanton saw a bald eagle with a scroll between the bird’s wings tattooed on her triceps.
    “You’re Army?” he asked her.
    “Five Hundred Sixty-fifth Medical Company, at your service.”
    “Out of Fort Polk?”
    “Yeah,” Thane said. “You know the battalion?”
    “My father was Forty-sixth Engineers. We lived at Fort Polk for three years. You served before residency?”
    “Did ROTC for med school and they pulled me over there after internship,” she said. “Two tours near Kabul doing helicopter retrievals. I was O-Three by the end.”
    Stanton was impressed. Airlifting soldiers from the front lines was about the most dangerous army medical assignment there was.
    “How many cases of FFI have you seen before?” Thane asked. The elevator finally started to ascend.
    “Seven,” Stanton told her.
    “All of them died?”
    “Yes. All of them. Has genetics come back yet?”
    “Should be soon. But I did manage to find out how the patient got here. LAPD arrested him at a Super 8 motel a few blocks away, after he assaulted some other guests. Cops brought him here when they realized he was sick.”
    “After a week of insomnia, we’re lucky he didn’t do a lot worse.”
    Even following the loss of a single night of sleep, deterioration of cognitive function was like a blood-alcohol level of 0.1 and could cause hallucinations, delirium, and wild mood swings. After weeks of progressively worse insomnia, FFI drove its victims to suicidal