Plague Ship by Leonard Goldberg Page B

arm.
    “We don’t have any of those,” the nurse replied.
    Christ! David growled to himself, thinking again that the sick bay was like a mediocre dispensary. He knitted his brow and concentrated on other ways to lower the boy’s temperature. “You wouldn’t happen to have a cooling blanket down here?”
    The nurse shook her head.
    “Then wrap his extremities in towels that have been drenched in ice water,” David ordered. “And continue doing it until his temperature is down to 102.”
    He hurried into the radiology area and saw Arthur Maggio peering up at a viewbox that held Will’s chest film. Even from a distance, David could see the abnormal findings. The x-rays showed dense, nodular infiltrates, which were concentrated in the hilar region of both lungs. But the peripheral areas were spared. Instantly he knew the diagnosis and it was even grimmer than he originally thought.
    “Pneumonia,” Maggio pronounced. “The x-ray fits with his earlier symptoms of fever and chills and cough.”
    “Yes,” David agreed. “And it’s bilateral, too.”
    “Which antibiotics will work best here?”
    “I doubt that any of them will work, because I don’t think he’s got bacterial pneumonia.”
    Maggio studied the x-ray again, looking for any telltale clues. “You believe it’s viral, eh?”
    “Most likely.”
    Maggio nodded slowly. “That would explain the boy’s terrible headache and myalgias and, in particular, the pain behind his eyes, which his mother told me about.”
    David nodded back, now thinking he may have underestimated the old physician’s diagnostic abilities. “You sound like you’ve come up against viral pneumonia before.”
    “A long, long time ago,” Maggio said wistfully. “I was a young Air Force doctor stationed in Japan when we had a sudden outbreak of influenza. It spread like wildfire among the enlisted men who lived in crowded barracks. Some of them ended up with influenza pneumonia, and all of those died terrible deaths.” He paused and sighed deeply to himself. “And we couldn’t do a damn thing for them.”
    “We still can’t,” David told him. “We have no effective treatment, so most of the people with this disease die from it.”
    “Do we have anything at all to offer the boy?”
    David shrugged. “We can try him on antibiotics, just in case he has a bacterial super infection.”
    “Of course, there’s still a slight chance the boy’s pneumonia is in fact bacterial,” Maggio mused.
    “That’s not going to happen,” David said bluntly.
    “Well, I like to leave room for a glimmer of hope.”
    Carolyn came to the entrance of the area and stuck her head in. “Will’s CBC is fine. His white blood cell is 6,200, with a normal differential.”
    “Your glimmer of hope just walked out the door,” David said to Maggio, and shook his head at the bad news. If Will had bacterial pneumonia, which could be cured with antibiotics, the white cell count would have seen greater than 10,000, with a very high percentage of polymorphonuclear leukocytes. But that wasn’t to be. The boy’s fate was sealed. “How is his cyanosis doing?”
    “Worse,” Carolyn reported. “His face is turning deep purple, despite the oxygen.”
    David turned to Maggio and asked, “Do you have a positive pressure ventilator down here?”
    “We don’t have a ventilator of any type.”
    David came back to Carolyn. “Hook up another tank of oxygen and see if you can somehow get it to flow into the mask.”
    “That can’t be done,” Carolyn said promptly. “But maybe I can increase the delivery of oxygen using nasal prongs.”
    “Give it a try.”
    Maggio watched Carolyn dash away, then repeated her description of Will’s complexion. “That deep purple face,” he said quietly, his mind going back forty years. “I knew I had seen it before, yet I couldn’t place it. But now I can. That was the face I saw on the boys in Japan who died of influenza pneumonia.” He sighed sadly at the