Page 66 of Ruled By Fate

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Five minutes later, Brie knocked on the door of the morgue. Rashida answered with her customary friendly smile and ushered her in. “How did your second day go?”

“Oh, you know, just orienting.” Brie grinned and held up her tablet.

Rashida nodded knowingly. “Some of the preceptors like to take six months to get the newbies settled in. Denise always does it in three. Very sink or swim, that one.”

Brie put her backpack down on a table and settled into a chair, sipping her cocoa. “I didn’t get you a coffee. I don’t know what your caffeine cutoff time is.”

Rashida laughed. “If you’d asked me five years ago, I’d have truthfully said that I sometimes have a shot of espresso before bed. But these days, I switch to tea at five o’clock, no exceptions, or else I’m up all night.”

“How disgustingly healthy of you.”

“Indeed.” Rashida wrinkled up her nose. “No offense, Brie, but you kinda smell.”

“Oh.” Brie looked desolately at her feet. “I’m so sorry. A patient threw up on my shoes, and I forgot to put backup sneakers in my locker. I tried to clean them off in the bathroom…”

“No problem. Pop them off. I have just the place.”

“Really?”

“Of course. No need to prolong your suffering. Or mine.”

Brie took off her shoes and was more than a little surprised when Rashida put on gloves and popped them into one of the horizontal cold storage body lockers.

“Are you sure that’s okay?” she asked, her eyes wide.

“I doubt they’ll mind,” she replied with a wink. “Just remember which locker it is in case you’re here longer than I am. You’d need to fetch them yourself and lock up afterward. Assuming I ever get out of here,” she finished with a sigh.

“Oh, that’s right,” Brie remembered suddenly. “You said you were super busy. What’s going on? I think you used the word ‘bizarre?’”

Rashida’s eyes clouded as she grabbed her thermos and sat down. “It really has been.” She took a sip, staring thoughtfully at the wall. “Everyone has the ones they can’t solve because there’s no evidence after the fact. A tiny blood clot in just the wrong place, an embolism that dissipates by the time I get to the body. It happens.”

She took another draught and shrugged. “But these days…”

Brie was listening with intense curiosity. “What’s happening these days?”

Rashida hesitated a moment, then looked straight at her. “I can’t tell you how many young people have come through these doors with unexplained catastrophic heart failure lately. Like the guy your team lost yesterday. I spent all day on him trying to find some reason, any reason at all, to explain why that poor boy’s heart exploded. But for the life of me, I can’t even point you in the direction of the problem.”

She stared off into nothingness. “It’s like something just reached into his chest and squeezed his heart until it popped.”

Brie choked on her cocoa.

Rashida looked at her and raised a concerned eyebrow.

“That’s quite… that’s vivid,” Brie finally managed.

Rashida flashed a tired grin. “As an ER nurse, I’m sure you’ll see things that make that seem like a bedtime story. But that’s not even the strangest case. Then there are all the ODs with no drugs in their system.”

“What?”

“A lot of them, almost all young men, all obviously lost to some toxin or drug, but every single test I order comes up clean. Now, you tell me,” she turned in her chair, “how can it be that my table is full of people who’ve died of a heart attack, with no conceivable reason to have a heart attack? Or people who’ve died of a drug overdose, with no drugs in their bodies?”

Brie could only answer in a shocked stammer. “I don’t know.”

“Well, neither do I, neither do three independent labs I’ve outsourced to keep up with the demand, and neither does the CDC.”

Brie’s eyes widened. “You brought this to the CDC?”

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