“Stop jumping to conclusions,” Leah said, elbowing her brother. “They’re probably already on their way back to Oakridge.”
“In body bags,” Brian muttered under his breath.
The door at the rear of the room suddenly cracked open and a short blue-coated woman slipped out. She glanced around the room and picked a kid seemingly at random, waving him over to the door. He followed her through and they both disappeared.
“So much for lines,” May said, watching the door shut behind them. “We could just as easily be the next picked or the last.”
“Something tells me they have no idea how to deal with people,” Noah mused after a few minutes. Several more students had been selected and led out of the room in that time.
“Well, Insight’s not your typical health center,” Leah pointed out. “They’re a research lab. They’re obviously not focused on improving the client experience.”
“Clearly,” Brian replied, spinning around and around on his lab stool.
“Hey, I’m not hating these chairs,” Leah said. “If anything, it’s kind of funny that this is how they decided to deal with all of us. Just shove us in an extra room and make us wait. What are we going to do, file a customer complaint?”
“I wonder if they ever got any use out of those blood samples Dr. Jansen took,” Brian said out of the blue.
May looked at him in surprise. “Did they get sent here? I don’t remember where she said she was sending them.”
“Well, where else would she pick? She’s clearly good buddies with Insight, and what better place to pick for demystifying such a bizarre sickness?”
A few dozen students streamed into the room then, new arrivals from the latest shuttle. They filtered through the space and found seats for themselves.
Noah stared anxiously down at his hands. “I hope the treatment doesn’t involve anything that would reveal we’re the same people that those blood samples came from. Not sure if it would change anything, but anonymity is definitely the right choice when it comes to this place.”
“Hopefully, even if they do realize, we’ll be long gone by then,” Brian said.
The back door opened and the same woman emerged. She cast her gaze briefly around the room before making eye contact with Noah and beckoning him over.
His eyes flicked to his friends in surprise.
“Well, go on, this is what we came for,” Brian said. “They probably won’t try to kill you.”
“If they try anything suspicious, you can just eat them,” Leah said with a grin, then narrowed her eyes. “That’s a joke, in case you’re wondering. Don’t eat the scientists.”
Noah swallowed and stood from his seat without responding.
“Don’t eat them!” Leah yelled again as he walked away, attracting the attention of a few of the nearby students.
Noah turned to smile nervously at her, and then he was through the door and his friends were out of view.
The room he found himself in was about twice the size of a typical doctor’s office. There were two male doctors standing near the far wall, where an odd contraption sat whirring quietly, the pitch and volume slowly winding down.
The main body of the apparatus was a waist-high steel drum painted a bright blue. There were several tubes with pressure gauges affixed to the top of it, and the entire thing was perched on four small swiveling wheels. An exam table had been positioned next to the machine. There was a second door to his right, as well as a wide counter that stretched nearly wall-to-wall.
“Please take a seat,” the woman beside him said.
Noah walked hesitantly to the exam table and sat himself on the ledge.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
One of the doctors picked up a plastic oxygen mask that turned out to be attached to the end of one of the machine’s tubes and began picking at something on its outer shell. “This machine will remove the dust particles from your lungs.”
“And that will cure me?”
The doctor gazed at him for a moment before nodding and returning his attention to the mask. “We have found that removing a certain threshold of the particles results in a near-perfect return to normal health within the next twenty-four hours.”
Noah raised his eyebrows. “‘Near-perfect?”
“Students who have been injured while they were infected may experience some weight loss, but it’s nothing that can’t be regained with time.”
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“Seriously?” Noah complained. “Look at me! What am I supposed to do?”
“I recommend you visit a dietician.”
Noah gave the man an appraising look. It was hard to tell under all his layers of protective apparel, but he seemed to have quite a bit of meat on his bones.
“Continuing your current line of thought is ill-advised,” the doctor said calmly, somehow reading his mind despite his averted gaze. “We have security measures in place that will prevent any accidents resulting from your poor self-control.”
“I have perfect self-control.”
“That’s good to hear.”
The doctor finally seemed satisfied with the mask and stepped closer to Noah. “The process will take about a minute. At the end of that time, we will run a test to ensure you are properly cured.”
Noah noticed with some dismay that the oxygen mask was attached to the tube by means of a thick wrapping of duct tape. He raised an eyebrow at the doctor, who sighed.
“I am aware that the construction of this device might not inspire confidence, but please bear in mind that we had to come up with a design overnight. We did not have sufficient time to fabricate all of the parts we would have liked.”
“As long as it works,” Noah said uncertainly.
The doctor smiled thinly and placed the mask over Noah’s mouth before pulling the elastic bands over his head to secure it in place.
“Don’t fight the machine,” the man warned. “Keep your mouth open and let it do its job.”
Noah nodded mutely. The doctor nodded at his partner, who flicked a switch atop the metal drum. The whirring noise, which had almost died down into nothing, rose suddenly into a headache-inducing whine. The mask pressed itself against his face slightly, pulling the tube which hung between him and the machine almost imperceptibly tighter. Noah couldn’t feel it against his face, but he recognized the sound and the visual cues for what they were.
“Did you literally tape an oxygen mask to a vacuum?” he demanded.
The doctors glanced at each other in surprise.
“What? Did you really think nobody would be able to tell?” It took some effort to get the words out; it was becoming more difficult to speak with every passing second.
“The vacuum is set to run at half power,” the second doctor finally said defensively, voice raised to be heard over the piercing sound of the motor. “The suction is not strong enough to harm a human body.”
“That’s not the point,” Noah tried to say, but he couldn’t produce an audible sound. I can’t believe this was the solution that a multi-billion dollar company came up with.
The tube shook slightly, but whether that was because of the dust moving through it or the shaking of the machine’s motor was impossible to tell. Noah was quite glad he couldn’t feel what it was like for a vacuum to be suctioning at his air passageways, but it would have been nice to have a visual confirmation that it was being effective. He suddenly realized his mask was transparent and went cross-eyed trying to look at it.
For a moment he wondered if he had been mistaken about its transparency; the material was an even shade of jet black. But as the seconds passed, it began to slowly return to its usual unclouded state as clumps of the dark material were pulled away into the tube. Noah watched it happen uneasily; there was quite a bit more dust being pulled out of him than he was comfortable with. It was quite a relief when the mask was fully clear once more.
The first doctor reached towards the machine and hit another switch. After a few moments it became apparent that the motor was winding down, and both doctors came to stand close beside Noah. Before the machine had gone completely silent, the first one pulled the mask away from Noah’s face and turned expectantly to the second man. He was handed a large slip of what looked like paper, but was actually what Noah recognized as the filter test-strip material from the small disposable testing contraptions back on campus.
The man slid it over Noah’s mouth before letting the mask snap back to hold it in place. Noah realized they were letting the remaining power of the machine ‘breathe’ for him, suctioning at his lungs and theoretically pulling whatever dust particles remained there into the filter.
After another few seconds the doctor finally took the mask off altogether and pulled the filter away.
“That’s it?” Noah asked.
“We need to check the effectiveness of the treatment,” the doctor said, setting the mask aside and taking the test strip across the room to the counter. He inserted it into a familiar black device and leaned back patiently for it to produce a verdict. “This is mostly just a formality, but we have had a few cases…”
Noah didn’t say anything. He didn’t feel any different, but the doctor had said it could take a day for the treatment to kick in, so he didn’t let that bother him too much. He just stared hopefully at the device.
There was no visible indication of whether he passed or failed, though the gadget must have conveyed the results somehow. Noah’s anxiety mounted as the doctor extracted the test strip, opened the cabinet beneath the counter, and slid the slip carefully into a specific file. He then closed the cabinet and turned back to Noah with a flat expression.
“You still have an unsafe amount of dust particles within your lungs, such that you cannot be considered cured. The treatment process was insufficiently effective.”
“Wh-what?” Noah stammered. His heart dropped. “What does that mean?”
“It means you will be staying overnight as we work on developing a more potent treatment.”
“Just do it again,” Noah said quickly. “Run the vacuum at full power.”
The doctor shook his head shortly. “We already ran it at the maximum safe power level.”
“I don’t care about whether it’s safe. I’ll heal afterwards.”
“That’s not guaranteed,” the second doctor said evenly. “We can keep it as an option if we fail to design a better treatment, but it will not be our first choice.”
“And here I thought you guys didn’t give a crap about your patients’ survival rate,” Noah muttered.
All three doctors in the room turned sharply to him. “That is a common misconception,” the doctor by the counter said unhappily.
Noah huffed and looked away. “Why didn’t the treatment work?”
“It’s impossible to say with what information we currently possess. All I can say is that there has been no apparent correlation between the few students who have not been effectively treated.”
Noah closed his eyes. Frustration welled up within him at how unfair it was that the treatment just inexplicably failed to cure him.
“Fine,” he finally snapped. “Where do I go?”
“Follow me.”