On the ride up to Director Hobwell’s office, Jonan and I stood as far apart from one another as the elevator would allow. Hospital elevators were really deep compared to their cousins in office or apartment buildings, so maintaining appropriate distance was not as difficult as one might expect. Though that wasn’t the only reason why I was maintaining my distance from Dr. Derric.
The ride was short, but not short enough to keep the muzak from getting to me, so I passed the time by bringing up something still on my mind.
At this point, there was a chance—however slight—that Dr. Derric might be doing something nefarious like smuggling drugs or something. I know both common decency and my religion told me to refrain from being ovetly judgmental, but I found myself desperately wanting Jonan to have an unambiguously negative character trait, one without the slightest hint of a silver lining.
Though Lassedicy came in a dizzying array of variants, one of the few unifying principles they nearly all shared in common was a belief in moral absolutism. There was good, and there was evil, and the line between it was absolutely clear—and if it wasn’t… well, even there, rifts appeared. Angelicals and Old Believers would say, “if it wasn’t, it was because you hadn’t contemplated it enough”; on the other hand, Neangelicals and Irredemptists would say, “if it wasn’t, it was because you hadn’t prayed on it enough.” As for myself, I no longer knew what I believed. I wanted to believe in moral absolutes, but I was afraid they’d buckle under the weight of reality.
As much as I disagreed with the spirit of Jonan’s conduct, I could not deny that his reasoning had force to it, at least in the abstract. Jonan’s… Jonan-ness made my skin crawl. He was out for himself, and nobody else, except Ani—somehow. It would have been so much easier if he was simply a bad person. I wouldn’t have had any scruples about recommending Ani break off all contact with him ASAP. But it wasn’t simple. And I couldn’t leave it alone, because I didn’t want him to end up hurting Ani—emotionally or otherwise—and, at the personal level, I didn’t trust him enough to feel confident that he wouldn’t end up hurting her.
This, mind you, is why I hoped moral absolutism was true. It made everything so much simpler.
I took a deep breath. “So… ” I said, “what were those pills you got back there? Your usual?”
Jonan stood on the opposite side of the elevator, facing me, with his back pressed up against the wall, his arms crossed at his chest, and one foot against the wall. His brow furrowed. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
I nodded vehemently.
Jonan groaned and rolled his eyes at me. “Does it really matter?”
I quickly came up with a reason that even I would believe.
“If you have a condition that will impact your ability to serve the Crisis Management Team, I think I have a right to know.”
Oh God.
I groaned loudly.
All of two seconds had passed before I realized just how much of a hypocrite my words were making me.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“Just…” muttering, I shook my head, “a bad taste in my mouth, that’s all.”
The elevator doors slid open. We stepped out into the hallway.
Jonan sighed. “If you must know, it’s a specially prescribed mix of analgesics and corticosteroids.” Raising his green-gloved, lime-scented hand, Jonan squeezed it into a fist and slowly opened it up again. “Rheumatoid arthritis, damn my genes. The meds keep me flexible. And, in medicine, a flexible camper is a happy camper.”
“I see.”
Director Hobwell’s office was almost directly adjacent to the elevator lobby on the fifth floor of West Elpeck Medical’s Administration Building. Like any good employee, I’d made it my business to avoid ever having to tread in the Director’s office, however, there was no escaping the swirl of stories about Marietta, Hobwell’s secretary and personal guard dog—“Hobwell’s Hound,” people called her. Hobwell was busy enough that he had to outsource quite a bit of his angry demands, rants, and condemnations to his secretary—and, unfortunately, she did a phenomenal job at getting the Director’s messages across, or so the stories went.
Director Hobwell’s office was two rooms in one. The walls were covered in floral wallpaper. Their dark background was an excellent match for the mallard-green carpeting, the fibers of which iridesced as they flexed beneath my loafers. An open doorway in the wall separated the reception area from Hobwell’s office proper. The reception area was dominated by Marietta’s mahogany desk and the tall, narrow windows at her back which let in the midday light. The window pane’s upper reaches had stained glass, bordered by artfully curving mullion beams. Lush, antique sofas lay against the wall, some straight, others bent in an L shape to fit the corners of the room.
Amazingly, Marietta was not at her seat. Her chair sat utterly empty behind her desk. This was a rare, precious event, like a solar eclipse. Normally, Marietta and Hobwell shared their lunch break together, so there were few if any times when Hobwell was in his office without his secretary on duty to police the unwashed masses who dared approach him. The staff was evenly split between people who thought Harold and Marietta’s shared lunch-breaks were the result of Hobwell’s divorce several years back, and those who thought it were the cause; I belonged to the former category.
Jonan and I stared at one another for a moment before we marched into Hobwell’s office proper. The room was a near copy of the reception area, only with fine antique cabinets and only a single sofa.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
The Director’s head shot up from the work engrossing him atop his desk. He nearly snarled at us.
“Marietta! There are two—”
“—She’s not here at the moment,” Jonan said.
Hobwell glared at us for a moment—mustache bristling—before he stood up, walked around his desk to the door and stared out into the reception area, his eyes widening in disbelief as he processed the emptiness of his secretary’s chair. Then, with a groan, the Director shut the door, waddled back to his desk, and sunk into his chair.
Jonan and I stepped to the side during the entire process, making sure to keep our distance.
Director Hobwell slammed his fist down on his old mahogany desk. “This kind of thing wouldn’t happen if that damned woman had just followed my advice and used a bedpan!” He glared at us. “Don’t you agree?”
“Of course,” Jonan said, without missing a beat. He nodded. “It’s a restroom, only portable!”
Vigorously—not once, but twice, “Hobwell stabbed his finger in Jonan’s direction. “You are going places!” he said, with a pleased cackle.
Harold Hobwell’s smile was a rarity, and a sight to behold. Almost immediately, it crashed into the reality of the situation. He scowled, then sighed, and then tilted his head, holding it up with his hand while propping his arm up by planting his elbow onto the top of his desk.
“What is it?” he growled. “What is it now? What can you possibly want from me? I don’t need any more bad news.” He leaned back and slumped into his chair.
“How’d your call with DAISHU go?” I asked. “The one you told us about this morning?” I added, trying to be personable.
Harold Hobwell lowered his head and shook. Ruin darkened his eyes. “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, not even when it deserves it.”
Jonan cleared his throat. “Given the mounting numbers of NFP-20 cases, some of our colleagues have been expressing… distress over our adherence to SPN policies for uninsured patients.”
“The fungus doesn’t care about socioeconomic class,” I assessed, “even if we might.”
Exhaling, Director Hobwell let his arms rest on his chair’s armrests. “Tonight, Mayor Joleston will be announcing a city-wide curfew, along with widespread shelter-at-home orders for everyone who isn’t lucky enough or unlucky enough to get categorized as a so-called essential worker,” he explained. “Case data from Mu has been flooding our servers for the past few hours, and the takeaway is that we are going to need to significantly dial back our services if we want to have any chance of weathering this thing.”
Jonan and I looked each other in the eyes. For once, we were both on the same page: totally lost.
“Dial back?” I asked. My hand fell onto my thigh. “What?”
Hobwell’s expression cratered. “Whatever picture you have in your mind, I can assure you, the reality is far, far worse. This thing is spreading so goddamn quickly, we no longer have the luxury of accepting patients who have either yet to display symptoms of the Green Death, or who aren’t fulminant, in need of assisted breathing machines, or turning into magic mutants. We need to be prepared to be inundated with severe cases.”
“Holy crap,” Jonan muttered.
“Do you have any updates on Type Two cases?” I asked.
“I wish,” Hobwell answered. “DAISHU has put in a gag order on any and all discussion of the matter. Apparently, some cockamamie hacktivist collective has broken through DAISHU’s communication encryptions, and until they can re-secure them, the big-wigs aren’t going to risk letting out any information that might cause mass panic.”
“What about the uninsured patients who are already here, waiting for treatment?” I asked.
Hobwell gestured as he spoke. “They wait,” he said, “and—Angel willing—the needed time and space will arise. Wealthier folks tend to be the ones that receive the majority of the elective or non-essential procedures offered by West Elpeck Medical. With them out of the picture—at least for the time being—space should become available more often and more quickly than it otherwise would.”
That made me angry, although I didn’t show it—except, possibly, in the taut brusqueness with which I opened my mouth in response.
“Harold,” I said, “space is already available.”
The Director closed his eyes. He knew I didn’t refer to him on a first-name basis unless I meant business. “Those spaces are being held in reserve, Howle,” he said, “you know that. That’s the law.”
I leaned forward and put my hands on the desk. “And if it wasn’t for those laws, we’d be able to continue giving care to people that otherwise wouldn’t have been treated because of their higher SPNs. There are extra supplies and uninsured patients in need of treatment, but policy says the insured get priority over the uninsured.”
“You’ll find all those facilities are now filled by VIPs who desperately need them to help them survive the Green Death,” Hobwell replied, “and it’s a good thing we have supplies in reserve. Supplies save lives!”
“Do we even know what the fatality rate is yet?” I asked.
Jonan put his hand on my upper arm. “Doc,” he muttered, “enough.”
I stood up from my seat. “No!” I shook my arms. “That’s just it. It isn’t enough! We could be doing more, but we’re not.”
Hobwell threw his hands up in the air and leaned back into his leather chair. “What do you want me to say, Genneth? That our policy is cruel? Unfair? Wrong?”
I glared at him. “That would be a start.”
“Sure,” Harold replied, smiling maniacally. “I’ll say it: it’s cruel. It’s unfair. It’s completely and utterly wrong—even the mummies in the Quiet Ward could tell you that! I could butter my sentences with that grade-A truth from here ‘till judgment day, but it still wouldn’t make a whit of a difference.” He leaned forward and steepled his fingers. “I’ll say it again: don’t bite the hand that feeds you,” he emphasized each word. “If I tell Rally Hollworthy Jr. that his Lithium-magnate wife can’t come over for a morphine drip whenever she wants because she’s a fucking addict and belongs in rehab, he’ll pull the endowment for our oncology department, and then children will die of cancer and we will get blamed for it.” Hobwell pointed at the windows as he spoke. “If I tell Minister Albredge that he has to stomach the thought of white doctors being unable to decline helping colored patients, he’ll bring up more entitlement reform”—he enclosed the words in angry air quotes—“before the Diet and further hack away at our fucking flophouse of our taxpayer-sourced funding. And don’t even get me started about what would happen if we threatened DAISHU’s bottom line. The fact remains that strong are going to dominate the weak, and they don’t care that it’s wrong, and that’s the way it’s going to be—and has to be—if you want to get by without having an army of smarmy lawyers and snot-nosed accountants paving the road ahead of you in gold since you first popped into this godforsaken world, and the only way there’s going to be as much of a summer snow’s chance of change is if someone or something brave enough, kind enough, stupid enough arises to face down this madness and dare to do the right thing. And let’s face it: that’s not going to happen.”
Director Hobwell took a big breath. “I, for one, Dr. Howle, am not that brave, kind, or stupid. You’re better off asking your in-laws. I simply don’t have the fame or money for it; God knows, they do. Now, gentlemen,” he said, standing up from his seat, “if you’ll excuse me, I have a pandemic to deal with. Good day!”
He pointed us toward the door.