Scorpion Scheme Read online

  I knew it. I literally felt it in my bones.

  Distantly, through my deadened eardrums, men shouted.

  Women cried out.

  Car alarms shrieked in the chaos.

  Tucker tossed his body over mine, pushing my face into the back packs in our laps.

  "No!" I hollered, although it was too late, and I could barely hear my own voice.

  I tried to drop down to the floor, but our luggage took all of the available space. I flopped around like a sea lion plopped onto dry land.

  I wanted to shove the baggage out of the way, but that would mean blocking the aisles. And we needed the aisles if we were going to escape.

  Should we get off the bus?

  Yes, if the bomb was under the bus.

  No, if terrorists waited outside for us.

  I turned my head to the side and tried to think, to listen, to hear.

  I'd already lost 30 percent of my hearing from previous near-misses. The audiologist told me it could've been worse. Ears aren't meant to sustain gunfire at close range. Let alone bombs.

  Fuck bombs.

  Rage pulsed through my veins. I couldn't get one full day off before hellfire tried to attack me and Tucker through the walls of a bus.

  I suppressed my fury to flex my fingers (yep) and all ten toes (functional). Great. No obvious holes in my head or chest. Party time.

  "You okay?" I called up to Tucker. Hard to modulate my volume when I couldn't hear properly.

  I felt his chin nod into my hair.

  Okay. Good. If we had to run, we could run.

  In the meantime, we'd tend to the wounded. Kind of our M.O. as M.D.'s.

  An image flashed across my retinas: me and Tucker painstakingly bandaging wounds while our bus blew up around us. I swallowed and shoved that thought away.

  "Should we get up?" I muttered.

  I thought I heard him speak but couldn't understand it over the ringing in my ears.

  Smoke tickled my nostrils. I pushed my glasses back up my nose and saw that everyone else had hit the deck. No heads blocked my vision. I tipped my neck back enough to view our bus's unharmed windshield. The glass on our bus's sides were intact, and none of us wore glass in our hair, mouth, or eyes. Trust me, I know that gritty feeling.

  The bomb—at least the first bomb—hadn't hit our bus.

  Not yet, anyway.

  "I should call 911. Or whatever it's called here," I half-heard, half-saw Tucker say as he twisted his face to the side.

  I nodded agreement, and he began dialling. His phone seemed to work. That was good.

  I yanked my own phone out and saw I'd missed recent calls from both Youssef and Isabelle. Too little, too late.

  An older man, his beard threaded with white, with slightly dank breath but kind eyes, spoke to us earnestly from the aisle. He wore a grey turban and caftan.

  Tucker nodded when the man pointed to the door.

  They wanted us to evacuate. I understood that, even though I still couldn't hear properly.

  "Do you think there are any more bombs outside?" I enunciated carefully, both to Tucker and to our kindly man.

  The gentleman shook his head.

  "Do you think someone will shoot us if we go out?" I asked Tucker directly.

  He grimaced. "I don't know."

  At least Tucker was honest. And he moved off of me, which made my back feel 100 percent better.

  "Well. They probably know post-bomb protocol better than we do." I stood up to join them, shouldering my back pack and grabbing my suitcase.

  "Leave it," said Tucker.

  You're supposed to leave everything behind during an evacuation. If you're sliding down an airplane chute into water, I can see needing your arms and legs free to swim. And I guess luggage will weigh you down in general.

  Still, before I abandoned our suitcases, I mourned my one pair of jeans that fit perfectly and the brand new pair of black petite dress pants (stretch, so they were more comfortable than usual. They actually fit me off the rack instead of needing five inches hacked off the legs).

  At least I had my passport and laptop in my back pack.

  I noticed Tucker pulled on his back pack, too, before he fell into step behind me. As we snaked off the bus in a long line, I ducked my head down a bit. Anyone could shoot us through the bus's clear windows.

  Tucker kept his hands on my shoulders as we inched down the stairs into fresh air and more shouting.

  As my ears recovered (still ringing, but conducting other sounds as well), I heard frantic conversation in other languages. Sirens converged upon us. More smoke wafted through the air, and dust made its way past my glasses, into my eyes and onto my tongue.

  From the outside, I spotted the real carnage a few vehicles ahead. A black bus smoked, some of its windows blown out, while bloodied people migrated into the street, their eyes wide with shock.

  Tucker and my eyes met.

  This was our calling.

  They might kill us while we ran in to help. I'd heard of the two bomb technique in—was it Afghanistan? One bomb to kill and maim. First responders rush in. A few minutes later, a second bomb explodes to kill the helpers.

  On the other hand, there might be no second bomb. And Tucker and I had vital skills that needed implementing. Now.

  I nodded at the chaos. "I'm in. Just let me get my gloves."

  I carry two pairs of gloves everywhere I go. This time, I'd zipped them into the pockets of my red fleece jacket on the plane, along with other essentials like ear plugs and hand sanitizer, and money.

  Too bad I'd shed my fleece jacket and therefore the gloves after the toilet sprayed me. I could picture them bundled with my other soggy clothes.

  I pointed at the bus and told the turbaned gentleman. "My gloves are in there."

  Tucker swore mightily, but he knew as well as I did that we had to protect ourselves from blood-borne diseases before we raced in to help, especially considering Egypt's scary rate of hepatitis and HIV.

  "I'll go with you," Tucker said.

  When we tried to reboard the bus, several people stopped us, including our gentleman in the grey turban, who turned out to be the tour guide and spoke excellent English. Tucker explained our mission in two languages, repeating over and over that we were both doctors.

  Finally, two younger men hurried onto the bus and hauled both our suitcases out, which embarrassed me because it made us look like pampered rajahs who couldn't be arsed to handle our own luggage.

  Still, I unknotted my plastic bag, unzipped my fleece's pockets and handed one white pair of gloves to Tucker before donning the other myself. I grabbed my stethoscope out of my back pack while I was at it. Tucker already had his stethoscope strung around his neck.

  Tucker extended each finger into the glove gingerly. He's not a small, and the too-teeny gloves could rip any moment.

  My stomach twinged. "I should have packed a pair for you."

  "Nah. I should pack my own gloves."

  True, but the fact that we needed them right away still struck me as deeply unfair. "Who knew we'd run into a motherf—" I bit my tongue. "—a bomb on our way to Reza's grandmother's house?"

  "Who knew?" He managed to get his last little finger in and wiggled it at me.

  "All right, soldier. Let's get a move on." I waved my fingers back at him, and we headed into the fray.

  "Did your 911 call go through?" I asked.

  "It's 123 here, and no, I'll try again later." Tucker pointed to the right at the smoking remnants of a car. The bomb had blasted through the vehicle and punched a hole through massive concrete "Jersey" barriers before tearing through this bus.

  I flinched. "Yeah, let's avoid that."

  Luckily, a number of people already headed our way.

  One South Asian woman held her obviously pregnant stomach through her orange paisley sari.

  I detoured toward her. "Are you okay?" I held up a circle made of my thumb and forefinger, with my other fingers extended, in what I hoped she'd understand
as an international OK sign.

  Then I remembered that white supremacists now use the OK sign to signal each other, and I switched to a thumbs up sign.

  She nodded but looked shell-shocked as she seized the hand of her little boy, who sucked the thumb of his free hand. They seemed intact aside from a few cuts on their faces and arms, I assumed from broken glass.

  We moved toward a collection of bloody people, at least one of whom lay on the ground. I knelt beside him, an elderly white man in a maroon shirt and corduroy pants. He curled on his right side, touching his narrow, bloody nose. His whole body looked so thin that I immediately thought of cancer, although the blood pooling under his head posed a more immediate threat.

  Tucker paused, torn between staying with me or splitting up.

  "I'll be okay," I said, and he nodded and crossed toward a young family with two kids. The dad struggled to hold onto his daughter while wiping blood out of his own eyes.

  "Where does it hurt?" I asked my elderly patient, pulling an exaggerated pain face to make it clear, even if we didn't speak the same language. If he answered, that would help me assess his airway and breathing, the A and B of emergency ABC's.

  The man stared back at me, breathing fast but not wheezing. His trachea looked midline and his chest didn't heave.

  "His head," answered a female senior citizen with a not-quite-British accent. I noticed her topknot of greying hair and the same skinny nose. "I can't believe we came all the way from Johannesburg for this."

  Ah. South Africa, then. I tuned into the crowd around me and thought I detected Afrikaans.

  Someone had tried to blow up a bus full of South Africans.

  I filed that away for now. The man still hadn't said a word, which meant his airway could be blocked. "Can you speak?"

  The daughter asked him, and the man answered slowly, with effort.

  "He says his heart is heavy. It weighs too much," she reported, her forehead puckered.

  Shoot. Chest pain, although the man didn't look agonized as he dabbed his bloody nose again. I suppressed the urge to squeeze his nose and apply proper pressure for him. He was unlikely to hemorrhage from a nosebleed. I needed a better look at that head wound for C (circulation) and D (disability, or neurological injury).

  "Is he short of breath too?" I placed my stethoscope on his chest.

  My dulled ears, coupled with surrounding sirens and wails, meant that I couldn't hear much beyond him panting in my ears. Certainly no crackles or wheezes or heart murmurs.

  The man's voice boomed through the stethoscope.

  I jumped back from the amplified noise, lifting the stethoscope's diaphragm off his chest.

  "Sorry about that, doctor. My father didn't mean to scare you. He says that he's always short of breath. He has smoker's lungs. Two packs a day for the past few years."

  Of course. Emphysema, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, kills off your normal breath sounds. I could detect a whiff of cigarettes, but bomb smoke and the stench of blood overrode that. The take home point was that his B, or breathing, was pretty weak at baseline.

  As if to contradict me, the dad gasped a long line of words.

  I thought I understood one of them. "Did he say Kruger?"

  The daughter's lips twisted. "He's calling for my brother, asking the time, praying, and talking nonsense. He's scared. Something about a mongoose and treasure and I don't know what else."

  The man shifted, and I glimpsed the blood coagulating at the right side of his head.

  I pointed to it. "Could you steady his neck while I examine the side of his head, then apply pressure to the wound? Do you have any fabric?"

  "Good thing I bought this from a tout." She unwound the white scarf around her neck, revealing a diamond necklace with a familiar shape: ☥, which looked like a cross with a loop on top. She applied the scarf to her father's right temple, making a face. "I can feel the egg on his head—"

  The loud putt-putt-putt of a motorcycle cut her off.

  An elegant, dark brown skinned woman removed her motorcycle helmet, shaking out stick-straight blondish hair like she was in a shampoo commercial. The effect was somewhat ruined when she began to argue with the man who'd been seated behind her. He nodded as he extracted an oversized camera from a case.

  I turned back to check my patient head to toe without turning him, since his daughter couldn't stabilize his neck and staunch the wound at the same time, even if she'd been trained.

  His trachea remained midline, and he didn't have any obvious sucking chest wounds, shrapnel, or lacerations. He was still talking, if confused. GCS (Glasgow coma scale) 14. Not bad. "I need to check your belly, sir."

  A brown hand with Pepto Bismol pink nails thrust a microphone in my face. "Karima Mansour, reporting from the heart of the impact of an IED. This must be terrifying for you. How do you feel?"

  "No comment." Probably she was right to call it an improvised explosive device, or IED. A homemade bomb instead of military grade. Not that it made a difference to my patient.

  "How does it feel to be a victim of an IED?" The reporter shifted the microphone into the elderly man's face. He blinked slowly at her.

  "No comment!" I snapped.

  "Get away from him!" the daughter ordered so sharply that Karima Mansour shrugged and trotted toward Tucker, who stood a few metres away, ripping up some fabric to cover the dad's bloodied eyes.

  "Bunch of vultures," the daughter muttered, losing her grip on her scarf. Blood from her father's scalp dripped on the pavement. "He's Phillip Becker, and my name is Gizelda Becker, by the way."

  "I'm Dr. Hope Sze, Canadian family resident doctor. Just remember the letter C if you have trouble with my name."

  Her father sighed as I unbuckled a giant black fanny pack with a cobra logo to get at his abdomen. "Mr. Becker. Does this hurt?"

  No major abdominal swelling or bruising. When I checked his face for a reaction to my exam, he didn't wince, but his eyes sagged closed. He looked … immobile.

  "Sir?" I gave him a quick sternal rub, pressing my knuckles into his breastbone to make sure he was still in this world.

  He flinched but made no sound. Uh oh. "Keep his neck steady while I examine his head." I palpated the temporal/parietal swelling, a good 10 cm wide and boggy, with a small, hard metal circle at its centre. I shook my head. "Can you apply more pressure?"

  "Of course." The daughter swore to herself in Afrikaans.

  The father winced, still breathing but eerily silent.

  I pulled open his right eyelid to reveal a blown right pupil, 5 mm wide and not obviously reacting to sunlight, while the left was a normal 3 mm. I swore too, under my breath.

  "We need an ambulance," I said. And mannitol or hypertonic saline. With a neurosurgeon and anaesthetist chaser.

  Every sign pointed to a brain hemorrhage and coning. He could stop breathing any second.

  On top of everything else, I'd recognized the metal in the middle of his head wound.

  A nail head.

  The IED had been loaded with nails and other debris, spiking this poor man through the skull.

  3

  "That was unbelievable," said Tucker, once we'd safely sent our patients to hospital, met up with Youssef, and locked the hotel door behind us.

  "Very weird," I agreed, shoving my suitcase in the spacious closet and dropping my back pack on top of it.

  "Nice digs, though, right?" He surveyed the king-sized bed and winked at me.

  "Beyond nice." My family's vacations generally involved camping and/or sleeping in the car. The luxury surrounding us slowly permeated my IED-shocked brain, including the foil-wrapped chocolates on our pillows.

  The bathroom seemed bigger than our entire apartment in Montreal. I admired the shower tucked into the bathroom's corner and a full-sized tub lying below a window with a lovely keyhole frame.

  The choice of toiletries lined up between the double sinks knocked me out. Sure, shampoo, conditioner, soap, and lotion, but also eau de cologne, a t
oothbrush, a razor, and—get this—a vanilla candle.

  For some reason, the candle brought tears to my eyes. Maybe we'd get to enjoy our month in Egypt after all.

  I texted my family a photo of the desk, complete with a complimentary notebook and two silver pens. We made it to our hotel room! Love you, Mom, Dad, Kevin, and Grandma. Good night.

  Ottawa's time zone lingered six hours behind us, but my dad or Kevin, my nine-year-old brother, might have picked up on the IED. Right now, I'd marked myself as safe. That was enough.

  Good Wifi, I thought, and started to text my ex, Ryan Wu, before I remembered that he'd blocked my number. Ryan probably prayed nightly that I'd hemorrhage gonorrhea and chlamydia from the eyeballs down.

  "You need a shower?" Tucker plunked his butt on the mahogany desk chair, pulled off his shoes, and nodded at the bathroom to the right of the front door, across from us and the closet.

  "I need something." Something to stop the IED images circulating my brain. Washing off post-crisis was always a good idea.

  Tucker plugged his phone's cord into a built-in USB slot on the lamp base. He acted like it was no big deal, so I did too, even though I was thinking, Wowee! This place has everything! "You hear from Gizelda?" he asked.

  I shook my head and checked my home screen again anyway. Phillip Becker had been the oldest and most critically-injured tourist in the IED blast. His daughter, Gizelda, had taken down my new Egyptian number and promised to contact me on WhatsApp once her father was settled at the hospital.

  Tucker frowned at his phone screen. "I haven't heard from the Mombergs, either."

  The family with the injured father. I made a sad face at Tucker and tried not to feel guilty about mentally texting Ryan. Miss you, Ry. Love you. Even if you'd rather I burned at the stake for eternity.

  Tucker got up and unfolded the luggage rack for his suitcase. "What are the chances that we'd run into an IED? They haven't had a tourist bombing since 2017."

  "You told me." I kicked off my sandals and dug my toes into the beige hotel carpet. Its softness took the edge off my voice. "That was part of how you sold Egypt to me. You left out the part that the bomb killed four Vietnamese tourists."