“Keep moving,” he said. Across Thirty-sixth Street, he pulled over, ducking under the canopy of a closed market. He looked up through the rain, eyeing the rooftops.
There, high across the street, a feeler leaped from the edge of one building to the next. Tracking them.
“They’re following us,” said Eph. “Come on.” They walked on, trying to lose themselves in the masses. “We have to wait them out until the meridiem.”
Columbia University
EPH AND NORA returned to the empty university campus soon after first light, confident they were not followed. Eph figured that Mr. Quinlan had to be underground, probably going over the Lumen. He was headed that way when Gus intercepted them—or, more accurately, intercepted Nora while Eph was still with her.
“You have the medicine?” he asked.
Nora showed him a bag full of their loot.
“It’s Joaquin,” said Gus.
Nora stopped short, thinking vampire involvement. “What happened?”
“I need you to see him. It’s bad.”
They followed him to a classroom where Joaquin was propped up on top of a desk, his pant leg rolled up. His knee was bulbous in two places, considerably swollen. The gangbanger was in great pain. Gus stood on the other side of the desk, waiting for answers.
“How long has it been like this?” Nora asked Joaquin.
Through a sweaty grimace, Joaquin said, “I dunno. A while.”
“I’m going to touch it here.”
Joaquin braced himself. Nora explored the swollen areas around the knee. She saw a small wound below the patella, less than an inch in length and crooked, its edges yellowed and crusty. “When did you get this cut?”
“Dunno,” said Joaquin. “Think I bumped it at the blood camp. Didn’t notice it until long after.”
Eph jumped in. “You’ve been going out on your own sometimes. You hit any hospitals or nursing home facilities?”
“Uh … probably. Saint Luke’s, sure.”
Eph looked at Nora, their silence conveying the seriousness of the infection. “Penicillin?” said Nora.
“Maybe,” said Eph. “Let’s go think this through.” To Joaquin, he said, “Lie back. We’ll be right back in.”
“Hold up, doc. That don’t sound good.”
Eph said, “It’s an infection, obviously. It would be fairly routine to treat this in a hospital. Problem is, there are no more hospitals. A sick human is simply disposed of. So we need to discuss how to care for it.”
Joaquin nodded, unconvinced, and lay back on the desk. Gus, without a word, followed Eph and Nora out into the hallway.
Gus said, looking mostly at Nora, “No bullshit.”
Nora shook her head. “Bacterium, multiresistant. He might have cut himself at the camp, but this is something he picked up at a medical facility. The bug can live on instruments, on surfaces, for a long time. Nasty, and trenchant.”
Gus said, “Okay. What do you need?”
“What we need is something we can’t get anymore. We just went out looking for it—vancomycin.”
There had been a run on vancomycin during the last days of the scourge. Befuddled medical experts, professionals who should have known better than to feed a panic, went on television suggesting this “drug of last resort” as a possible treatment for the still-unidentified strain that was spreading through the country with incredible speed.
“And even if we could find some vancomycin,” said Nora, “it would take a severe course of antibiotics and other remedies to rid him of this infection. It’s not a vampire sting, but, in terms of life expectancy, it might as well be.”
Eph said, “Even if we could get some fluids into him intravenously, it just won’t do him any good, except prolonging the inevitable.”