When the Wind Blows - James Patterson [80]
I looked at the foreboding metal sign on the locked door before us: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. So of course, Kit kicked it off its hinges. “Authorization accepted,” he said.
We were instantly bombarded with alarms blaring in the room and out in the halls. We walked inside. The rank smell of human waste washed over us like a fetid cloud. The dark of the room was broken by neon-colored tracers flat-lining across unseen video monitors.
I found the light switch and flicked on the overhead lights.
I have been exposed to some really bad things in my years of working with animals: abuse, neglect, occasional cruelty. But I’d never been confronted with anything as horrifying as this. Nothing even came close.
We were inside some kind of pediatric intensive-care ward. It was filled with shiny new life-support equipment, but also a dozen or so small cribs. All the equipment was new and expensive.
I shook my head slowly back and forth. This couldn’t be real. I held back tears, but it was hard. I looked at Kit. He had turned pale.
Inside the cribs lay dead and dying children. Everywhere I looked, I saw failure of pulmonary, cardiac, and renal systems. The screeching electronic noise was meant to alert medical personnel of trouble, which was pretty much total. Empty IV bags, stalled ventilators and dialysis machines. Vomit and excrement coated the tiny patients.
I finally screamed. I couldn’t stop screaming. Kit reached out and held me. I took long, steadying breaths, until I regained control of myself.
“We have to do something for them,” I whispered. “We can’t leave them to die like this. I can’t do that.”
“I know, I know,” he whispered back. “We’ll do what we can, Frannie.”
The room was painted pale yellow, with a border of whimsical cartoon animals running along the top of the walls. The cartoons made it worse—much worse. A flannel board next to a refrigerator held crayoned pictures, and yellow-on-white happy faces were stuck up at random on the walls. The happy faces killed me. Just killed me. I steeled myself to peer down into the closest crib. Inside, a naked female infant about several months old squirmed and waved her small, perfect hands in the air. The tiny baby had no face, no features at all.
A feeding tube was inserted into her small stomach, but the attached bag was empty. I put my hand gently on the top of her head. The green line of the heart-rate monitor beat faster.
She was aware of me.
“Hello, baby,” I whispered. “Hello, sweet little girl.”
I threw open the fridge, then the cabinet doors. I shoved aside bandages and tubes and syringes, but there was no food anywhere.
In mounting despair, I hurried to the next crib. The baby boy inside was already dead and decomposing. He had a head the size of a volleyball and the musculature of a child of four or five.
“You poor, poor thing.”
I pulled the plug from the monitor, ripped out the catheter in the little one’s head. I covered his face with a blanket.
The third crib held another dead child, a year-old babe with a body shape as ordinary as any little kid on the block—except that his skin was separated in irregular tears. The skin hadn’t grown at the same rate as the child.
The child’s eyelids were inverted, and the sightless, bulging eyes stared up at me. I couldn’t ever begin to imagine the pain he had endured before his death, possibly from sepsis. The fourth crib held year-old twins conjoined at the waist. One had died, and because they shared many organs, the other would be dead soon, too.
I gently put my hand on the living child’s cool cheek and the eyes fluttered open.
“Hi, baby. Hi there.”
There was nothing I could do for the living twin, nothing anyone could do without medical supplies. I was sobbing now as I went from crib to crib.
A dialysis tube had once been hooked up but was now dangling alongside the crib of a small being with simian features. The child was undernourished, dehydrated, comatose.
Everywhere I looked were deformed, impossible children. If I was right, the most incredible tragedy was that these