Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-35711173-20190207081051

This is a first draft of an Easter story.

The symptoms described are real, but they pulled from more than one case.

Animals is an obvious category. I'd considered Hospitals, Mental Illness and Science.

Glória in excélsis Deo. Et in terra pax homínibus bonæ voluntátis. Laudámus te. Benedícimus te. Adorámus te. Glorificámus te. Grátias ágimus tibi propter magnam glóriamtuam. Dómine Deus, Rex cæléstis, Deus Pater omnípotens. Dómine Fili unigénite, Jesu Christe.

All around Gabrielle, little feet banged the pews in boredom. She wondered why the priest here in Texas wanted to give Easter Mass so nobody could understand him. Father John at Saint Cecilia’s was boring. This one was even worse.

Why did Mom make her sit and listen to crying babies? It wasn’t just her own brother, Patrick. In the pew behind her, a little girl was wet faced from tears. Wiggling in her Dad’s arms, saying No, No, No, she cried so hard that her face became as red as her dress. Her two brothers in their blue jackets and ties looked at each other to say they have no idea why.

The pews were too big for her short legs. She couldn’t lean back. Easter Mass was too loud and too much for Gabrielle. She tried to hide under Mom’s nursing blanket, but her mother took it away and told her to sit. The adults seated near her were playing Facebook or Candy Crush. Dad let her take her tablet to church. Mom said she was a big girl who had her first communion and should be reverent, but Gabrielle knew Mom was mad that they had to move to Fort Hood when the Army sent Daddy to Afghanistan. Her Mom hated Texas. Gabrielle hated Texas too. She hated the dull, flat land, the food, and the chigger bites. Most of all, she hated the way everyone at school teased her by only talking Spanish around her.

“I want to get some water,” she whispered and slid out of the pew.

“Hurry,” her mother replied.

She walked around the building, glad to be out of the chapel. Anything was better than being in there. When she looked in the Parish hall, she saw an angel hiding in the shadows on the floor. It was small and cute, like a little brown kitten with fuzzy wings that had silver snow on it. When she knelt next to it, the angel sat on her finger. She stroked it, amazed at how soft it felt, knowing it had to be her guardian angel.

Suddenly, the door slammed open, and the bright lights turned on. Pain stabbed through her finger, and then her angel flew away. Two boys came in, bouncing a ball. “You chased my guardian angel away,” she angrily said.

“I didn’t see any angel,” said one, dribbling the ball on the floor.

“It was here,” Gabrielle replied.

“Sure, it was,” answered the second, stealing the ball from the first and bouncing it off the wall by Gabrielle’s head. “Along with Jesus, Joseph, and Mary.”

She got up and walked away. “You’re mean,” she said over her shoulder, wiping the blood on her finger on the wall as she went out.

Noreen, her mother handed her Patrick. “Now I have to go.” Gabrielle’s finger hurt and Patrick started fussing again. She tried giving him a bottle, but he pushed it away. Then she pulled out the tube of Nuby All Natural Teething Gel and generously slathered it on her finger and rubbed it on his gums. It was such a relief that Gabrielle gave him more. The teething gel felt soothing to Patrick. He soaked it up greedily. What Patrick and Gabrielle didn’t know was that it wasn’t only teething gel that she was rubbing in. It was the saliva from the sick bat as well. As Noreen nursed Patrick, he was giving death to her. The rabies viruses in the bat saliva flowed into her cracked, sore nipples and silently attacked the nerves near their point of entry. They burrowed inside and held the nerves as slaves, forcing them to reproduce more rabies virus cells until they exploded. The rabies cells forced nerve cells in their host body to make more rabies cells. In doing so, they followed the path that led to the most nerve cells, towards the brain.

The virus marched its way towards their brains at three millimeters an hour. In Patrick’s tiny body, they didn’t have far to travel.

His mother knew that he had developed a fever and a cough, but he had no way to tell her of the agony he felt. It didn’t worry her. A bug was running around town. She heard his crying, but sick children cried. She checked his diaper, but it would be dry. She offered him a bottle, but just the sight of it drove his throat into a thousand tortures.

Noreen knew he wasn’t well, but she started coughing too, then became nauseated and vomited. What she couldn’t understand was why he cried so when she tried to feed him. She couldn’t understand how a bottle or her breast brought unimaginable suffering. Light and noise exploded inside his head. Even a breath of air across his face tormented him.

The days hadn’t been kind to Noreen. The pain that had started in her shoulder had spread into her hand. Yet she ignored her own suffering as she cared for Patrick as she ignored the twisted nightmares that merged with her hallucinations. When Patrick had a seizure and lost consciousness, it was Gabrielle who called 9-1-1. Noreen cursed and tried to chase away the paramedics in fear. She was a failure as a wife and a mother. They really were CPS and were just pretending to be CPS so they could take her children. When Gabrielle screamed “No, Mommy, No,” the paramedics smashed through the door.

Patrick drifted in and out of consciousness as the ambulance took him to Darnall Army Community Hospital. Frothy spit flowed from his lips, and he struggled to draw breath. The constant barrage of lights and sounds became one with his feverish nightmares. As Patrick lay dying, Gabrielle and Noreen maintained their vigil in the waiting room. As Noreen paced, the numbness and tingling spread. When she began to swat bugs crawling on her left arm and her neck, Gabrielle screamed, knowing what was happening next. Both she and Noreen were both admitted to the isolation ward and then airlifted. Noreen went to Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas and the children to Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston. The doctors at both hospitals puzzled over the symptoms. They ran tests for everything from Rocky Mountain spotted fever to syphilis. All came back negative.

As Patrick sank deeper, the doctors waited for his last heartbeat. While he was still warm, a technician wearing a full bio-hazard suit peeled away his skull. Carefully, she sliced through his tiny brain with sterile scissors and exposed the glistening white cylindrical body bulging from the ventricle floor. She removed a small section of the Ammon’s horn of his hippocampus and applied it to a slide. Then she stained it and looked at the results through a microscope. They gave Patrick the same test they would have given a century ago to the head from a mad dog, but it gave results in minutes. The Center for Disease Control’s tests identified that the infection came from a bat, but they took two days to give their answer. Noreen walked passed her neighborhood pet shop. It had been closed down. All the cages and fish tanks were empty, and the doors were chained. A man standing outside said “I’m sorry. They shut it down and took everything away.” Then she was in a church book and supply store. It too was going out of business. They had some beautiful crucifixes at half off. Her left arm became huge as she was turning into Hellboy. Her pants were in shreds and the crotch was already gone. “I can’t walk around like this.” “What can we do about it,” said the store’s clerk. “This is just a book store.” “Do you have lab coats,” she asked? “Yes,” the Sister said and helped her put one on. Noreen wasn’t dreaming, yet wasn’t awake. The remains of her brain could no longer distinguish between the two. The pain in her arm mixed with the nurses changing her into a hospital gown and her body telling her it had begun the process of shutting down and dying. Within hours, she joined Patrick.

Three months into his deployment, Sergeant Ryan Murphy had been recalled from leading his fireteam at a forward base in Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan. As the chopper flew him back to Bagram Airfield, he wondered what he had done wrong, but he couldn’t think of anything. He had been hoping to earn a promotion to Staff Sergeant. Upon landing, they told him to report to his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Baldwin. He stood at attention, but the colonel said “At ease, Murphy. Sit down.” Pity dripped from his eyes. “Son, I got no way of doing this but to lay it on you. Your wife and boy died of rabies two days ago. You’re booked on the next flight out of here.” He took a moment to absorb it. “My daughter?” Colonel Baldwin shrugged. “I have no idea.” The flight took two days. Ryan was in a complete daze of shock and sleep deprivation. He tried to call the hospital from Bagram Airfield and when stopped in Qatar but the hospital wouldn’t tell him anything. Finally, he reached Houston. “I want to see my daughter. Can I speak with her?” The doctor in charge shook his head. “She is in an isolation unit.” “She’s going to make it, though. You’re going to save her.” “Sergeant Murphy, in the history of medicine there have been six documented human survivors of rabies. We are doing everything we can to make her the seventh. She is being very aggressively treated with human rabies immune globulin along strategic points of her nervous system and also with two forms of rabies vaccine.” “I want to see her. I want to talk to her.” “I will take you there, but she is in a coma. “ “A coma?” “We put your daughter in an artificial coma because her fever spiked from the medication. Keeping her in a coma allows us to treat her, but she’s out of it. When I asked her about any animals she might have been exposed to, all she talked about was a fuzzy Easter angel.” 