Hidden Empire (Empire 2)

After his twelve-hour shift every day, Mark went to Sergeant Wills's workstation and emailed the day's stats to the health authorities in Atlanta. It was tedious at first; it didn't get hard until men started dying. They weren't numbers to Mark, or even mere names in a list. Especially because the first to die was one of his father's jeesh—Cole's jeesh.

Mark had cared for Cat Black personally; Cole's team were all in one room, except for General Coleman himself, who stayed in the headquarters office and continued to hear reports, communicate with the Pentagon and the ships offshore, and give occasional orders from his bed, as long as he was in condition to do so.

Cat was a bad patient from the start, grousing about everything, but as Mark told Cecily, "He's mostly just embarrassed, I think, because he hates having somebody else give him a bedpan and a urine jar, and wipe him up afterward."

"Maybe it's harder because of who you are," said Cecily. "I didn't really think of that."

"I asked him already," said Mark. "If he'd rather have a stranger do this, or Reuben Malich's son."

"What did he say?"

"That he'd rather be wiped up by several imams and ayatollahs of his acquaintance, because he thought they deserved to be up to their elbows in his … stuff."

"In other words, he was okay with having you continue."

"I don't think he cares very much anymore," said Mark. "The fever started today, and I switched him over from glycerin suppositories to loperamide and ibuprofen."

Cat was not the first patient to need the switch, or even the first of the soldiers—but he was the first of Reuben's jeesh to start down that precipitous slope. Within three days the jeesh were all fevered, trying to deal with dysentery, and still wracked with pain from coughing and the headache.

Cat became delirious, and sometimes flung himself around brutally, as if he were hallucinating some enemy, or maybe just a bothersome insect. More than once he hit Mark, not deliberately, but hard enough to knock him down. Cecily had to hear about this from Cole himself, when she reported to him; one of the still-walking soldiers had reported it.

"I think if the fever hadn't weakened Cat so much," said Cole, "he might have seriously injured Mark. Even as it is, I suspect Mark is hiding some bad bruises."

But as long as Mark didn't tell Cecily about it himself, she pretended not to know. She figured that Mark was determined to bear whatever pain it took to care for his father's friends. The fact that he didn't mention it did not surprise her, but it did please her. He was not a complainer.

As Cat sank further into his fever, he began to be harder to dose with his medications. He spat out pills, or let them lie in his slack mouth without swallowing. That was something Mark had to talk about, because Cat's dysentery was worse than anyone else's, and yet he was least likely to get his meds. And as for dehydration, he wasn't drinking enough, and even though the university hospital had the equipment for intravenous feeding, the Pentagon absolutely forbade using any of their equipment, for fear of injecting their soldiers with HIV from insufficiently sanitized needles.

As soon as Mark told her about the problem, Cecily went with him to see Cat, and was shocked at how weak and emaciated he looked. But then, all the men in the ward looked devastated by the disease. The others, though, were conscious enough to greet her, and Benny and Arty were still not

in the fever stage, so they could make a few wan jokes and then call her aside and whisper about how well Mark was doing, even though he had another roomful of patients to take care of along with them.

"He's a good man," they both told her. There seemed to be no sense of irony or condescension in their use of the word man for a thirteen-year-old; they said it as they might have said it of any soldier.

Cat did not recognize her, though, and as she watched Mark struggle to get water into him, Cecily realized for the first time that Cat was probably going to die of this. She had already seen enough Nigerians die—she had come upon patients who were already as bad as this on her first day working in the city—that she knew the signs of those who could not stay above the hydration line. As Cat got weaker, it would only get harder to put water into his system; as he got less and less of his medication, the diarrhea and fever would only get worse, dehydrating him faster.

But he was also a strong man, and so he did not die as quickly as most patients who fell below the line and couldn't rise above it. So it wasn't until the next night that Mark told her, "Cat's bleeding."

She knew what it meant and what it looked like, but she let Mark tell her what he had seen, because he needed to say it to somebody. "It was seeping out of his eyes like tears," he said, and shuddered.

"And his nose. And rectally—it was the only thing coming out, and it looked like pure blood to me, bright red."

Cecily held Mark's hand.

After a while, Mark got up. "I'm going back to him," he said.

"You have to get your sleep," said Cecily. "There are living patients who need you tomorrow."

Mark shook his head. "He's not going to die alone."

"He's got the rest of the jeesh in the room with him."

But Mark shook his head. By "alone" he meant "without somebody holding his hand," though he couldn't say so. And none of the others was in any shape to do it.

Cecily could probably have made him go to his room, but she couldn't have made him sleep, and he would never forgive her for it. But she could go with him.

That's why she was in the room when Cole came in. He was shuffling along weakly, leaning against the wall. He was the last of the jeesh to get the fever, and it had only come on him today. But Cecily knew that he had been wracked with coughing—some of the men had even broken their own ribs with coughing, especially the more muscular among them—and that now his headache was fierce. He must have been told what condition Cat was in—perhaps Mark himself informed him earlier in the day—and as soon as Mark saw him come through the door, he got up from his chair and helped Cole to come and sit beside Cat.

Cole was wearing his breathing mask—it was a regulation he insisted on, because even if all the soldiers were infected, their caregivers were not, and men in the sneezing and coughing stage should keep their sputum to themselves. He said nothing to Cat, but he held his hand and bowed his head and closed his eyes for a while, so Cecily assumed he was praying, though perhaps he was only remembering. It had been Cat who went with Cole into Aldo Verus's cavern fortress in Washington State. Cecily knew what it meant to Reuben when he had been in combat with a man who truly had his back—a man to be relied on in a fight. She could only assume that Cole felt the same way about Cat.