The Hornet’s Nest. Patricia Cornwell

days he might not get paid any more to write.

At which point, he could become a cop, he supposed, and this turned his mind to West

again, sailing him off firm ground into a dark, tangled, painful thicket that hurt and

frustrated him the more he tried to fight his way out of it. He ran harder, bending around

goal posts, passing empty bleachers filled with the memories of games, mostly lost,

during fall nights when he had usually been studying or walking the frosty campus

beneath stars he tried to describe as no one ever had. He would tuck his chin into his

hooded sweatshirt, heading to the library or a hidden corner of the student lounge, to

work on a term paper or poetry, not wanting couples he passed to notice him.

Even if West hadn’t wanted to play tennis, there was no need for her to have been rude

about it unless she hated him. Forget it. Her voice saying those heartless words followed

him as he ran harder, lungs beginning to burn, catching fire around the edges as his legs

reached farther, and sweat left a trail of scattered spots. He tried to outrun the voice and

the person who owned it, anger flinging him through the night, and past the fifty yard

line. Legs wobbled as he slowed. Brazil fell into cool, damp grass. He lay on his back,

panting, heart thundering, and he had a premonition that he was going to die.

Vy Virginia West felt like it. She lay in bed, lights out, a hot water bottle held close as

contractions prepared her for birth for no good cause. Ever since she was fourteen, she’d

gone into labor once a month, some episodes worse than others. On occasion, the pain

was debilitating enough to send her home from school, a date, or work, lying about what

was wrong as she gulped Midol. After a sullen Raines, the paramedic, had dropped her

off, she’d taken four Motrin, a little too late. Hadn’t Dr. Bourgeois told her to take two

hundred milligrams of ibuprofen four times a day three days before trouble started so it

could be prevented, and don’t cut yourself or get a nosebleed, Virginia? West, as usual,

had gotten too busy to bother with anything so mundane, so trivial, as her health. Niles

recognized the cyclical emergency and responded, curling around his owner’s neck and

head, keeping her warm. He was pleased she wasn’t going anywhere and he didn’t have to share their bed.

W Chief Judy Hammer was having morbid premonitions and was bedside, too, in the

Surgical Intensive Care Unit (SICU) of Carolinas Medical Center, where Seth’s condition

was serious and on the wrong side of getting better. Hammer was in shock, dressed in

gown, mask and gloves, sitting by his bed. High dose penicillin, clindamycin, and

immunic globulin dripped into her husband’s veins in an effort to counter necrotizing

fasciitis (NF). It was a rare infection, and associated with systemic infection, and a

fulminant course, according to Hammer’s personal observations and the notes she had

been taking every time Dr. Cabel, the infectious disease doctor, spoke.

This was all somehow related to everyday group A beta-hemolytic streptococci and

Staphylococcus aureus, which Hammer could not comprehend beyond figuring out that

the microscopic bastards were eating her husband alive. Meanwhile, Seth’s oxygen

content in his bloodstream had dropped below normal, and the medical center was in a

panic. Personnel had made Seth, the V. I. P, a top priority, and specialists were in and

out. Hammer could not keep them straight. She could not think as she stared at her

husband’s slack, feverish face and smelled his death through the mask she wore.

During the Civil War, surgeons would have diagnosed her husband’s condition as simple

gangrene. No fancy Latin term changed the reality of flesh turning black and green at a

wound site, with limbs, and eventually the person, rotting alive. The only treatment for

NF was antibiotics, surgery, and amputation. About a third of the three to five hundred

people who got the disease in the US annually died, or approximately thirty percent,

according to what Hammer had found through searches on America Online.

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