Chapter 7
AVA
A va walked into the hospital with a smile on her face, but it almost instantly faltered when she was met in the lobby by Doctor Mars and Doctor Watson. Their grim expressions chilled Ava’s mood.
“Doctor Jackson,” Doctor Watson began. Her voice was tight. “Have you come up with a public statement?”
“Come up with one?” Ava asked. “I thought we were still deciding if we needed one.”
“I believe we do, Doctor Jackson,” Doctor Mars said. “Word has gotten out about the campers, and the treatments aren’t working. We nee d to make sure that if anyone else has symptoms they will come in as soon as possible.”
Ava nodded; she had to agree. “When do I need it?”
“I have a press conference scheduled for tomorrow morning,” Doctor Watson said. “We have taken some of the samples back to Atlanta, and we are working on them from there also. Have you made a determination as to what it is yet?”
“We have a working theory,” Ava answered. “We know where it started anyway—it has to do with the dust and decaying rodents we found at Sandra’s place of business. Something had been bringing them into the wall. But the virus goes dormant, it’s like it has a self-protection sequence.”
“And the treatment?” Doctor Watson asked, though it looked like Doctor Mars was getting ready to.
“I’m not sure before I get to the lab. We’ve been working all through the night.
Most of the antivirals will neutralize it, but once the virus detects that it is under attack, it goes dormant, so the antiviral will work as long as it can get in, but as soon as the threat is gone, the vi rus opens itself back up again.
We are looking for something that can either work around that or kill it fast enough that it can’t go dormant.
We are trying a treatment process, but I need to get back to the lab to see how it is working. ”
“What process is that?” Doctor Watson asked.
“It’s done in stages, basically we kill what we can then once it goes dormant we wait for it to come back and try again. We are hoping to get rid of it that way,” Ava said then paused.
“But?” Doctor Mars asked, though she knew the answer, they had talked about it the night before.
“The virus replicates so fast that waiting for it to come out of dormancy gives it a chance to proliferate, and I’m not sure our medicines can keep up with it,” Ava said, her heart sinking.
She couldn’t help but wonder if Dr. Mars had more information about how that was going than she did at the moment.
“Sounds like you need to get to work then,” Doctor Mars said, her voice was sharp and did not leave room for argument. “And have a press statement ready for nine a.m. ”
“Of course, Doctor Mars,” Ava said and straightened her shoulders. She turned to head toward the elevators.
“Doctor Jackson?” Doctor Mars called.
“Yes?”
“Where is Doctor Grant?” she asked.
Ava blinked a few times before responding.
Did she already know that they had spent the night together?
Surely not, she didn’t get involved with her staff’s personal lives, just the professional.
“I… um… I don’t know, I haven’t seen her yet,” Ava answered.
She noticed Dr. Mars’s eyes narrow slightly, but she nodded and turned to usher Dr. Watson back into her office.
Ava crossed the floor to the elevator and sucked in a deep breath as the doors closed in front of her.
She hoped that the lab would have good news.
The button for the third floor lit up as she pressed it, and when the doors opened again, she found the lab eerily quiet.
She walked in and looked around, startling Lindsey, who was sitting on a stool at one of the tables.
“Oh, hey, good morning, Doctor Jackson,” Lindsey said, blinking the exhaustion from her eyes .
“Have you gotten any sleep?” Ava asked, furrowing her brows.
“Um, a little,” Lindsey said, though Ava didn’t believe her. “I’ve been monitoring the patients with our treatment plans.”
“And?”
“Well, it’s not the news you were hoping for—they seem to be getting worse. We were worried that the virus would replicate too fast for us to keep up, and it seems we were right.”
“Damn,” Ava said, looking over the test results as Lindsey handed them to her. “Have any of them worked yet?”
Lindsey shook her head; she almost looked as though she was about to cry.
“Go get some sleep, Lindsey,” Ava said gently. “I’ll work on this from here. Come back once you get some rest, you won’t be able to help if you can’t think.”
Lindsey nodded but still hesitated before sliding from the stool. “I’ll try, Doctor Jackson, but this virus won’t let me sleep. We have to figure it out or those patients down there will die.”
“We will do everything we can to make sure t hat doesn’t happen,” Ava said, forcing conviction into her voice.
Lindsey nodded and walked toward the elevator. Ava sifted through the papers again, looking for any numbers that would appear hopeful, but they didn’t look good.
“Good Morning, Doctor Grant,” Ava heard Lindsey say as she stepped onto the elevator. She forced herself to focus on the papers, not looking up as Elizabeth crossed the room.
“Good morning,” Ava said without looking up.
“Good morning,” Elizabeth said and leaned over her shoulder. She placed a hand on the small of Ava’s back, and her skin began to tingle. Ava pressed her lips, trying to ignore the sensation. “What are we looking at?”
“The staggered treatment isn’t working,” Ava said, finally looking up from the papers. “Lindsey tried several antivirals, but none of them are fast enough to take out the virus, and every time we allow it to come out of the dormancy, it makes the patients worse.”
“Damn,” Elizabeth said.
“That’s what I said,” Ava turned to Elizabeth with a slight smile. Elizabeth pulled back slightly and Ava tried her hardest not to react. They were at work, they needed to focus, people’s lives depended on it.”
“Do we know for sure what the virus is?” Elizabeth asked and walked away from Ava.
“I had techs and med students digging through every piece of information they could find on viral infections, but they couldn’t find anything to match it. We know it came from the rats, and it is similar to rabies, but it doesn’t look like anything we’ve encountered before, anywhere.”
“So we are dealing with something completely new,” Elizabeth said, more to herself than Ava.
Her eyes followed Elizabeth as she walked around the lab. She was amazed at how well Elizabeth was responding to her. She was perfectly professional. Ava wanted to lean her over the lab table and kiss her like they had kissed last night, and she wondered if Elizabeth was having similar thoughts.
“Doctor Jackson?” Elizabeth’s voice ripped her from her thoughts. Damn it, I need to foc us . The sting of using her professional moniker made her flinch.
“Sorry,” Ava said and turned her eyes back to the paperwork. “We seem to be keeping it at bay at least with the rabies vaccinations, but I don’t know how long those will last.”
“Did they find anything that falls dormant like this?” Elizabeth asked.
“I don’t… I don’t think so,” Ava answered. She flipped through some other paperwork on the tables, one of the stacks looked like notes from the medical students.
“Are they still here?” Elizabeth asked.
“Probably in the conference room, if I had to guess,” Ava said.
Elizabeth nodded, but her eyes lingered on Ava for an extra second before she turned and left the lab.
Ava took a breath she didn’t realize she had been holding in since Elizabeth came into the room.
She couldn’t let her feelings for Elizabeth get in the way of the case.
Somehow she knew that would only serve to annoy Elizabeth.
She was the truest of professionals and if Ava’s romantic inclinations were to get in the way of saving those patients, she wouldn’t be able to live with hersel f, and she knew that Elizabeth would probably lose all respect for her.
She turned back to the stack of papers and started sorting them in the order of their progress, two of the antiviral drugs they had tried were almost completely unsuccessful, but one of the others aside from the rabies vaccinations showed promise.
They just had to figure out how to kill the virus once it fell dormant.
This was not getting anywhere at the moment, so she pulled out a notebook and started writing down points that she would need to make at tomorrow’s press conference.
This would not be the first one she’d done, but the others had been for studies or treatments where she knew all the details.
Things that she had been working on for months, sometimes years, before presenting them to the public.
She had even won awards for some of her treatments, especially for some of the degenerative diseases like Parkinson’s, but this was untested waters for her.
She didn’t know how to speak to the public with the most common answer to any question posed to her would be I don’t know .
She considered going to find Elizabeth but th ought better of it. She was certain that she didn’t need Elizabeth’s help and was just looking for an excuse to be near her. She couldn’t let that interfere with her work. She focused again on the page in front of her. She called Dr. Mars’s office.
Doctor Mars picked up on the second ring. “What is it?”
Ava blinked in surprise at the curt answer but took a beat and spoke. “Did they get the site cleaned up?”
“Sandra’s office?”
“Yes,” Ava answered. “Is this something we need to be looking for in the other buildings or is it contained?”
“As far as I can tell, it’s been contained, but I can’t say for sure,” Doctor Mars answered. She heard Dr. Watson in the background.
“A CDC team is sweeping all the buildings in the downtown area looking for other possible locations, but nothing has come up yet,” Doctor Watson added.
“Thank you,” Ava said. “I was coming up with some points for the press conference.”