Page 35 of Hot Intent

It was dark when Katie roused to a hand on her shoulder shaking her awake. It was Sylvia.

“Alex, Katie, a truck just drove in with a dozen patients.”

Katie groaned and rolled out of the hammock. She ached all over even though her cell phone said she’d been asleep for nearly twelve hours. She pulled on her last clean t-shirt and followed Alex and the nurse next door.

The patients were crowded into the front room of the clinic, and they were in terrible shape. Several were barfing into bags, while several more twitched in convulsions They all smelled of excrement.

Alex swore under his breath. “Where have they come from?”

Sylvia collected answers to his rapid-fire questions while he started examining the worst-off of the bunch.

They all came from a small village to the north along the coast. They’d eaten enough different foods that he ruled out group food poisoning. Cholera would have made them all explosively empty their bowels and not just a few of them, so thankfully, that was off the table as a possibility.

Alex looked down throats, poked bellies, and took temperatures, a frown intensifying on his brow all the while. At last, he murmured, “Sylvia, I need to know exactly where these people live and how they got here.”

The nurse collected descriptions of several collective plantations clustered along the coast.

Alex asked with deceptive calm, “Ask how many have already died from this sickness.”

Sylvia stared at him in alarm. “Are we looking at an epidemic?”

Katie’s blood ran cold. This could get ugly fast if something infectious had hit the local population while the region was cut off from all assistance.

Alex merely repeated over his shoulder as he held down a convulsing woman, “How many dead?”

Sylvia asked the question.

“Taking into account that some of them may be duplicating counting some of the deaths, maybe fifteen. Several dozen have milder symptoms, and a dozen or so were too far gone to move and are probably dead by now.”

A teenaged girl barfed just then, and Sylvia bent down to wipe the girl’s mouth and give her a sip of water.

Katie sidled over to Alex. “What is it?” she murmured in English.

He muttered back without moving his lips, “Not here.”

“Can you treat them?” Sylvia asked anxiously.

He responded, “Give them comfort care. Hydrate them. Sedate the convulsers if you can spare the meds. Administer clear liquids if the patients can keep them down.” To Katie he murmured, “Come with me.”

Alarmed, she followed him into the tiny supply closet where Sylvia kept her stash of medical supplies.

“Help me find test tubes,” he ordered.

She dug into the boxes of supplies beside him. “What’s going on?” she breathed.

“Chemical agent.”

“As in nerve gas?” she blurted in disbelief.

“Keep your voice down,” he bit out. He added more gently, “I can’t be sure. We’ll need to take samples. Get them out of the country for testing, somehow.”

“Does Cuba make or stockpile chemical weapons?”

“Not that anyone in the U.S. is aware of.”

Ho. Lee. Cow.“Are you sure about this?”

He shook his head. “Can’t be until we run tests.”

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