trans_9 | Outbreak

"She threw up on my shoes," Claire replied, giving Sherry a bit of a Look, before her gaze returned to Luis. "And she's burning up. I'm guessing she's getting hot and cold flashes too, since she was bundled up when I came into the room."

"Ah." Luis didn't want to discredit Sherry's gray goop theory since it sounded perfectly plausible to him. Though they'd need to do something if she had a fever.

"Well, let's figure out how your fever is doing." He turned and dug in the cabinet for some thermometer patches-- a nice alternative to sticking something under her tongue-- then quickly pressed one against her arm.

"Fever all right. Are you cold too, Sherry?"

"No!" she replied and tried to yank her arm from his hand, while simultaneously throwing the trash bin hard enough to bounce it off Luis's head. "Let go of me! Let go!"

If Luis were a more fortunate person, he could say this was the first time he had been violently hit with something at work.

Unfortunately he wasn't great at reflexes and took the trash bin right in the face, tripping backwards and almost falling over while yelling a few impolite words in Spanish.

"Sherry!" Claire was astonished at her daughter's behavior for half a second before she was moving to grab her daughter, more concerned with her outrageous attitude than Luis's head (really, she's a 12-year-old girl, how hard could she have thrown the bin?)

"What has gotten into you?!"

When Claire got a hold of her, Sherry turned and punched Claire's arm as hard as she could (though, admittedly, it wasn't that hard). "Let me go! I don't want to be here! Let go!"

Luis was a nerdy guy and couldn't take a punch, let alone a metal bin to the face. And Sherry did have a surprisingly good arm on her.

He was a few feet back recovering from the sensation of getting his face smashed in, clutching at his watery eyes. "Jesus, Sherry, calm down!"

Claire didn't flinch when Sherry punched her, reaching out to catch Sherry's other hand.

"Sweetie, you need to calm down!"

Sherry's color blanched again and she convulsed, still trying to fight against her mother while she made that terrible, and tale-telling hnk-hnk-hnk retching sound.

If Claire valued her other shoes, she might want to move.

"Shit." Now that his face had stopped stinging he was in a little better shape to do something, though it still wasn't incredibly helpful.

He turned around to dig in the cabinet. "Keep a hold on her, hang on a second..."

Claire had a little bit more warning this time, so she swung Sherry around so she was facing away from Claire, though she doubted she had time to drag the little girl over to a sink.

"Hurry up, will you!" she barked at Luis, obviously kind of stressed out by whatever was happening to her little girl.

Sherry made an absolutely pathetic noise before vomiting again on the floor. Once that was done (ugh), she turned to attack Claire again, snapping at her mother's arm.

It didn't take Luis very long to pull a syringe out of the cabinet, carefully measure out some of the liquid inside, then step up beside Sherry and hold her still long enough to jab her in the arm.

"Sherry. Hey, Sherry, settle down," he said sternly-- though she wouldn't have much of a choice in the matter in a second, here. "It'll just take a couple of seconds..."

And just as predicted, within a few seconds the little girl flopped in their arms, out cold.

Claire barely managed to avoid getting bitten, twisting her arm out of the way as Luis administered the drug, and she let out a heavy sigh as Sherry fell unconscious, shaking her head.

"What's happening to her? She-she tried to bite me." There really wasn't much of a more horrifying thought, than what was going through her mind this second.

"I don't know," he sighed, as soon as the poor kid was unconscious enough for him not to worry about getting bitten or clawed. He hoisted her up and onto the nearest medical bed, carefully stepping around the mess on the floor. "Fever, chills, nausea and aggression is..."

Then he paused. "But if she had anything from the T-family it'd be showing on her by now." In the form of bruising, bleeding, rotting or other nasty skin problems. But Sherry looked completely normal.

Which was kind of reassuring, and kind of not at all. "How long has she been like this?"

Claire followed him to the bed, shaking her head slowly.

"I don't know... couldn't have been longer than a few hours. It's been... maybe fifteen minutes since I came back to the room, and she was looking pretty sick, then." She crossed her arms around herself, staring down at Sherry's still form. "I need to call Leon."

A few hours was pretty good news, actually. Things like the T-virus took much longer than that. And really dangerous things like T-Veronica would have gotten her much sooner.

"I'm going to move her across the hall and get her into a quarantine room," Luis told her. "It'll monitor her and keep it isolated until we find out what it is. Give Leon a call and let him know."

He paused again.

"She'll be okay. I'll make sure of it."

Claire let out a slow breath, and nodded, her gaze lingering on Sherry a moment before she looked at Luis.

"Thank you. Really."

"De nada," he replied, shaking his head. Sherry wasn't just his best friend's daughter-- she was a good assistant and Luis was pretty fond of her in his own right.

"Try not to worry too much. I haven't let a virus win yet on this damn ship."

That was a little comforting to her, and she smiled slightly, nodding her head.

"Yeah, okay." She glanced down again, before fishing her omnicomm out of her pocket. "You get Sherry over to Contagion, I'll get in touch with Leon and then I'll be over." Because her little girl was sick, and she wasn't going to leave until she was okay again.

A few minutes after getting Claire's call, Leon arrived at Contagion, heading right to Claire's side. Judging by the fact that he was a little bit winded, he obviously had been in a hurry.

"How is she?"

Claire was standing watching Luis check Sherry over when Leon arrived, and she immediately turned to hug him, shaking her head briefly.

"I don't know, Luis knocked her out after she started freaking out."

Luis was already deep in science mode, indicated by his glasses. He had another temperature patch pressed to Sherry's arm.

"Stacy calls it ROM-199A," he said. "It looks like a bad case of the flu from the outside, but a scan shows a huge increase in metabolism and a surge of activity to the lateral orbitofrontal cortex-- the part of the brain that governs aggression. Think of it as a lot of puberty, really quickly."

He sighed and pulled off the patch, checking her temperature and jotting it down in his notes. "The few files we've got on it says it's not fatal-- the biggest risk is from the heightened aggression, and as long as she's unconscious..."

Not fatal. That was a blessing, at least. There was some part of his brain that was calculating what this meant for the rest of the crew, but mostly there was a sense of relief that this virus won't take his daughter.

He hugged Claire back, then released her, and turned his attention towards Luis.

"Is there a way to treat or cure this? Get her back to normal?"

"Stacy alluded to a method, but the idea was that it'd make all the Ohm kill themselves before they were able to work out a cure. And if there's one thing I haven't had enough of around here, it's finding cures."

He set Sherry's arm down gently and rubbed his eyes wearily behind his glasses. "I can't give you an estimation, but I can get my entire department on it and as much of medical as we can spare."

Outbreak

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