Contagion by Robin Cook Read Free Book Online Page B

said.
         “I did,” Terese said. “I’ve done everything I could think of and then some. I mean, it’s my best sixty-second spot. You told me yourself.”
         Terese rubbed her forehead. She was getting a headache. She could still feel her pulse clanging away at her temples.
         “You might as well tell me the bad news,” Colleen said. She put down her drawing pencil and swung around to face Terese. “What’s the new time frame?”
         “National Health wants us to pitch a new campaign next week.”
         “Good Lord!” Colleen said.
         “What do we have so far?” Terese asked.
         “Not a lot.”
         “You must have some tissues or some preliminary executions,” Terese said. “I know I haven’t been giving you any attention lately since we’ve had deadlines with three other clients. But you have had a team working on this for almost a month.”
         “We’ve been having strategy session after strategy session,” Colleen said. “A lot of brainstorming, but no big idea. Nothing’s jumped out and grabbed us. I mean, I have a sense of what you are looking for.”
         “Well, I want to see what you have,” Terese said. “I don’t care how sketchy or preliminary. I want to see what the team has been doing. I want to see it today.”
         “All right,” Colleen said without enthusiasm. “I’ll get everybody together.”
         3
        
         WEDNESDAY, 11:15 A.M., MARCH 20, 1996
         Susanne Hard had never liked hospitals.
         A scoliotic back had kept her in and out of them as a child. Hospitals made her nervous. She hated the sense that she was not in control and that she was surrounded by the sick and the dying.
         Susanne was a firm believer in the adage “If something can go wrong, it will go wrong.” She felt this way particularly in relation to hospitals. Indeed, on her last admission, she’d been carted off to urology to face some frightful procedure before she’d finally been able to convince a reluctant technician to read the name on her wristband. They’d had the wrong patient.
         On her present admission Susanne wasn’t sick. The previous night her labor had started with her second child. In addition to her back problem, her pelvis was distorted, making a normal vaginal delivery impossible. As with her first child, she had to have a cesarean section.
         Since she’d just undergone abdominal surgery, her doctor insisted that she stay at least a few days. No amount of cajoling on Susanne’s part had been successful in convincing the doctor otherwise.
         Susanne tried to relax by wondering what kind of child she’d just birthed. Would he be like his brother, Allen, who had been a wonderful baby? Allen had slept through the night almost from day one. He’d been a delight, and now that he was three and already exerting independence, Susanne was looking forward to a new baby. She thought of herself as a natural mother.
         With a start, Susanne awoke. She’d surprised herself by nodding off. What had awakened her was a white-clad figure fiddling with the IV bottles that hung from a pole at the head of her bed.
         “What are you doing?” Susanne asked. She felt paranoid about anybody doing anything she didn’t know about.
         “Sorry to have awakened you, Mrs. Hard,” a nurse said. “I was just hanging up a new bottle of fluid. Yours is just about out.”
         Susanne glanced at the IV snaking into the back of her hand. As an experienced hospital patient, she suggested that it was time for the IV to come out.
         “Maybe I should check on that,” the nurse said. She then waltzed out of the room.
         Tilting her head back, Susanne looked at the IV bottle to see what it was. It was upside down, so she couldn’t read the label.
         She started to turn over, but a sharp pain reminded her of her recently sutured incision. She