Becca was toxic. Really toxic. In addition to her leg, there was evidence of infection in her core—her lungs and heart, and the structures surrounding them. It had been horrible to watch. Jennifer had been at her side every day—ten- or twelve-hour shifts. No days off. Jennifer’s supervisor at White Memorial had warned her against making any other schedule changes with the other nurses, but she went ahead and did it anyhow. She had been on two- or even three-week medical missions to the Congo where she essentially worked twenty-four-seven.

“I have an apartment and a new mattress waiting at home,” she would tell anyone who wanted her to take a break. “What do these people have?”

It wasn’t the hours surrounding Becca’s care that were getting to her, it was the helplessness and frustration. It was the waiting. She shifted where she was standing on a riser in order to get a better view over the surgeon’s right shoulder. This case had been incredibly draining on the entire team since the original, triumphant repair of Becca’s arm, but the development of infection had been toughest on Dr. Beebe. He seemed to have aged significantly since the first call from the ortho floor that something was going wrong with their star patient.

“Scalpel … suction … clamp … another clamp … scalpel … retract more, please…”

To Jennifer, Dr. Beebe’s words were like white noise. The only thing she felt the least bit relieved about was that Becca was deeply anesthetized.

“Hemostat … more suction, please … right here … suck right here, please. Bart, her blood’s looking a little dusky. Is everything okay?”

“Oh-two sat is down some. I’m working on it.”

Beneath her surgical mask, Jennifer felt her own respirations increase. Subconsciously, she rubbed at the V between the third and fourth fingers of her left hand. The eczema, for that is what she was certain it was, seemed to be getting a bit more intense—a bit more itchy. Given the disease that was ravishing her patient, it would have been foolish for her not to consider the possibility that she was incubating the same thing. But if it looked like a duck and quacked, it was a duck. And this rash looked like eczema.

Just in case, Jennifer had done some reading about the bacteria infecting Becca’s incision and surgical repair—the bacteria some in the press had dubbed the Doomsday Germ. The medical world, and the patients themselves, had been asking for trouble since the invention of penicillin, and more and more, the bacterial world had been delivering in the form of resistance.