"It's a trap!"
Well, the good news is that the incubation period for the flu is one to four days, average being two, so we won't have long to wait to see if anybody else gets sick. I wonder if you can become sick from a sickness that is specifically engineered to infect one person. Guess we'll be finding out.
The pneumonia thing really bothers me. Flu would be bad enough, but the pneumonia, too? Somebody has a powerful hate on for Captain America, and who knows if it's this Namitar himself or somebody he's working for?
In college, I took a microbiology class because I was tired of everybody telling me what I was missing. My professor had been a public health nurse for years, and we got a lot of stories about disease. I'd kept up with the interest by reading books published on the topic. There are a lot of "biographies" of diseases like smallpox, rabies, and yellow fever, biographies of public health doctors from the CDC, and some that are targeted to a specific outbreak of disease, like the London cholera epidemic that was figured out by Dr John Snow. You'll find accounts in a lot of them that reference the Spanish flu epidemic at the end of WWI, which was quite a deadly pandemic. One of the things that was particularly horrible about it was that unlike most flu outbreaks that kill the young and the elderly, this strain killed young, healthy adults. Flu can kill because it causes the body to over-produce defenses that are specific to viruses, including cytokines, and this energetic response leaves a person open to opportunistic bacterial infections. Like pneumonia. If there's a lung infection, the cytokines can be produced in such quantities as the cytokines signal for far more than is needed that it creates what is called a cytokine storm. This cytokine storm causes inflammation, which can be permanently damaging and can cause the lungs to become blocked, preventing oxygen delivery to the body. The body's defenses end up suffocating the person. And that was why I was so worried about the pneumonia.
I just hoped the Super Soldier serum would provide enough protection.
I called the caf and had a meal sent over for me and the dogs. Then I got a Skype request from Peter. Nick hadn't been really informative when he told Peter about the situation, so I filled him in on what was known to date. I didn't mention the research I'd done; he could do some research if he wanted, but there was no point in indulging in speculation. The med staff would be doing everything they could. I promised to keep him posted and warned him in the most serious way to watch out since we didn't know if Namitar was working on his own.
I spent a lot of time pacing around. There wasn't anything decent on TV and I couldn't concentrate on a book. After dinner, Nick sent out an update. It wasn't good. The medical staff were doing everything they could, but Steve was just holding on.
A couple hours later, there was a terse update to the update. Tony had also been admitted to the clinic. His symptoms were similar to Steve's, but not the same. The next morning brought news that Tony had been diagnosed with yellow fever. Natasha was in with cholera, and Sam and Jim were being admitted. By the middle of the afternoon, only Bruce and I were still healthy. Sam had typhoid, Jim leishmaniasis. Scott, dysentery. Thor had malaria. Clint had something called Chagas disease. I had to look that up along with leishmaniasis. Wanda was a curious maybe-miss. She had been diagnosed with Lassa, but had only very mild weakness and sore throat; she'd been pumped full of Ribavirin and was responding well. Vision was another anomaly; he had a lot of dengue, but it was just sitting in him, not affecting him. A huge advantage of having a constructed body, I guess. The numbers were stable, so they were filtering his blood to remove the disease.
Our heroes were falling.
I got a phone call from Dr Harris, asking if I could come over to the clinic. I messaged Nick to let him know that I'd been requested, and high-tailed it over. Dr Harris met me at the door and we went to her office. She looked harried beyond belief. A new man joined us. I'd never met him before, but he looked even worse than Dr Harris. She introduced him as Raj Rai, and he was the new director of our new Infectious Diseases unit. He'd been hired from the CDC as the staff had been concerned that we might drag some diseases back with us from our missions and had started last week. He was the only member of the ID unit.
"Heck of a welcome," I said glumly.
Dr Rai quickly filled me in; the medical staff firmly believed that the diseases had been genetically modified to target one victim and supercharge the microbes, making the infectious stage shorter and the symptoms amplified. The variety of diseases seemed to bear this out, and I nodded. They were working on tearing the microbes apart to see what made them so dangerous, but of course, this would take time.
"We feel like most of the Avengers will recover in time; we are providing all the supportive therapies that exist and every medication that helps," Dr Harris said, taking over. I nodded; nobody would ever accuse our medical staff of half-assing anything. "There's no doubt that you all walked into a trap. We've taken samples from your clothing and have a team down on site investigating. The problem is with Steve Rogers. He's the only one who has two targeted diseases, and we believe that without the protection that the serum provides he would have been dead shortly after the symptoms hit. We thought about asking Thor if he could be treated in Asgard, but we don't know if he would survive the trip. We have no idea what forces are at work in that transport beam thing he uses. The problem is in the lungs. Steve's's immune response is so great it's causing damage. We're aspirating his lungs to keep him from drowning, but we don't know how long we can keep it up. We've got Wanda, Vision, and Thor just in standard rooms because Wanda is doing so well and Thor's physiology is just different enough from ours that the malaria can't get a good grip on him. Same for the Vision. Natasha, Scott, Sam, and Clint are in a BioSafety level 2 room, as are Tony and Jim. Steve is in the level four chamber. These assignments are for the protection of the patients, since it doesn't look like they're contagious. We want to make sure that there are no opportunistic infections as they get better. Steve just cannot risk being exposed to anything more, so he gets the full treatment: everybody who goes in has to go through the showers and change clothing and wear the spaceman suits, the sealed positive-pressure supplied-air suit. He's in a sealed room with a highly filtered ventilation system." She sighed. "I never actually thought we'd have to use that room. Essentially, what we'd like you to do is go in and see if you can't do something about those cytokines."
We talked it over; my ability to move things around is very small scale, but I would try to corral the mass of cytokynes and direct them to the site where Steve's lungs were being aspirated. So we went to the end of the building, down a fairly long corridor, and to the BSL-4 lab, which had been converted to Steve's sick room. I went through the changing room, personal shower, second changing room, donned the space suit, and went through the chemical shower. The room was cool to help control Steve's temperature. I thought I was prepared, but I wasn't. He looked thin and wasted and was unconscious, surrounded by equipment I didn't want to look at. I sat in the chair that was waiting and took a look into his lungs. The congestion was terrible and I didn't feel like I'd done much although I had a bad headache at the end of it. The doctors were encouraging, saying every little bit helps, but this was really marginal. What was needed was to disrupt the signaling that the cytokines were doing, and I had no idea how that could be accomplished. After I went through the disinfectant/shower procedure, I trudged over to find Nick; Dr Rai had told me that there was no point to a quarantine.
"Two things," I said as I dropped into the chair across his desk. He looked at me attentively, his eye bright with interest. "First, that guy that Pete told us about. The magician. We need to try to get in touch with him." Nick pulled out his phone to text Peter, who called back immediately and promised to see if his friend/acquaintance/wizard would help us. "Second, you need to get Bucky out here." Nick gaped and I got up and left.
I didn't sleep well that night, but when I got up before dawn, I found that Nick and Peter had acted fast. I stood by Nick as the quinjet landed and three figures emerged. The first one out was Bucky, and he restrained himself only with titanic effort as Peter introduced us to Doctor Strange. He was tall and thin, with dark hair peppered with white and a supercilious look on his face. He was also in a thin black unitard and the most outlandish cape: a high pointed collar, black on the outside, red lining, and a wide gold-patterned band of decoration around the edges of it all. Bucky didn't wait for anything more than the bare introductions before he grabbed my hand and towed me in the direction of the clinic. I took the lead inside and Dr Harris, who was looking progressively more drawn, nodded when I introduced Bucky to her. Then she sighed and made him promise to follow instructions to the letter, taking us back down to the sealed room and sent us through. I hooked up Bucky's air hose first and let him have some time with Steve by himself, watching through the sealed window until Doctor Strange entered the room. It was a very appropriate name. He literally floated into the room from the shower. How ostentatious.
He efficiently put on the last space suit and hooked up to the air supply, gesturing to me curtly. "I want you to monitor the patients and tell me what you see," he said imperiously, and barely waited until I spun my sight down enough to see the cytokines...and the damage that the inflammation was doing. Then I felt a brusque presence in my mind, studying what I was seeing, then it lifted. I kept my temper; the doctor looked pensive, then his face cleared and he floated a little higher, flinging his arms wide and closing his eyes. It wasn't nearly as impressive in the space suit instead of his costume. Bucky gave him a 'you've got to be kidding me' look before returning his attention to his best friend. I concentrated again and saw what I perceived to be a green energy move through Steve's lungs. It wasn't hindering Steve's labored breathing any, so I kept my peace. I could sense that the energy was muffling the signals sent between the cells. I broke up a small clog in the drain in the right lung, and the fluid gently trickled out, taking the ineffective cytokines with it. "You may go for now," Doctor Strange said abruptly. "You may return later this afternoon to confirm the efficacy of the treatment for the other physicians." I turned for the door. "You too," he said to Bucky, whose face darkened. But he got up and came with me.
I stopped by Dr Rai's office to tell him what I'd seen, and he nodded. We made arrangements for me to come back at 5 in the afternoon, and we left the clinic. "Who did this to him?" Bucky said, his rage simmering like tar. So I told him the basics from our mission.
"The guy is here?" he asked harshly, pouncing on the detail.
"Yep," I said. I looked up at the cold blue sky, squinting a little in the sun. "He's in the guard house. Interrogation hasn't been very successful," I mentioned. Bucky smiled grimly. "The guards are actually really good at their jobs. I like them," I said casually. "If you wanted to go for a walk to work off some energy, you might see the guard house on the way, it's over there on the way to the track and the obstacle course," and I gestured to the right.
"I think I'll check out the obstacles," he said, and without another word loped off, not quite in the same direction I'd indicated.
I watched him go.
"Emma," Bruce called, and I looked over to see him coming toward me, the dogs running past him. Sigurd zipped past to follow Bucky, and Torburn stopped to accompany me. "Was that Bucky?" he asked.
"Yep. I had Nick bring him in." Bruce nodded in acceptance.
"Fury said they brought in somebody from the outside to treat Steve," he said, and I nodded this time. "And that they hadn't gotten anything out of Namitar." I nodded again. He stared off where Bucky had gone. "Well, that might change. Have you had breakfast yet? You could catch me up, then we could go visit everybody else in the hospital."
"Sounds like a plan," I said, and we went to the caf. I caught him up on Steve's condition, and we both looked up to see Peter standing by our table, clutching a tray from the breakfast buffet. "Sit down," I invited him, and before long he was telling us how he'd met the strange doctor fighting crime in New York.
"I worry about you out there by yourself," I said gently, and he flushed a little.
"I'm careful. And I've met some others, not just Doctor Strange. There's a guy called the Devil of Hell's Kitchen, and a PI named Jessica Jones. There's something about the Devil that's a little off, and she drinks too much, but she is really tough. Doctor Strange used to be a surgeon, really world-class, but he was in a car wreck and he can't do it anymore, so he traveled, and who knows what else. But he is a legit doctor, so if anybody can help Cap, it's him."
Bruce changed the subject by asking how school was going, and we talked about that until we were done and going into the hospital. Dr Rai met Peter and gave us the ground rules for visiting the others: wear masks, avoid touching the patients and wash hands frequently to help protect them from new threats. Rounds had been recently completed, so everybody was awake. Tony's yellow fever was getting worse; he had the jaundice and abdominal pain, so the doctors were worried that he was entering the toxic stage. Bruce waved at everybody, but he went to sit by Natasha.
"How come you and Dr Banner aren't affected?" Peter asked, as we walked up the hall to Jim and Tony's room.
"I think not many people know that the Hulk is Dr Banner's alter ego," I say quietly. "And they found out here that the Hulk actually has different DNA. They're trying to wait for Natasha to recover to have Bruce change so they can get a blood sample. Bruce is clear, so apparently he wasn't a target. As for me, nobody but people on this campus know who the Armorer is, and I've always got that stocking mask on under my helmet. My hair isn't ever seen, let alone available to grab. Nobody knows what I look like, so I'm pretty safe. And pretty new; there haven't been as many chances to get a sample from me. I also lint roller my costume before I go out, so there's no lint or dog fur or hair on it. The dogs are Asgardian, so it would probably be very difficult to infect them with something that I'd catch." I tried to remember if the dogs had ever shown up with the Armorer. I thought not, because it would be a dead giveaway if they showed up with both me and her. Me, in any case.
After we'd visited everybody, I walked Peter back to the quinjet. He'd skipped school for this trip and he wanted to get back before his aunt noticed. I gave him a hug and promised to tell him as soon as anything changed, and stood back to watch the jet rise and dart away.