Deadline

Nine

Dr. Abbey’s “office” was a euphemistically named cubicle only slightly larger than the ones around it. It didn’t help that it was jammed with file boxes, outmoded computer equipment, and—best of all—clear plastic tanks full of assorted insects and arachnids. I don’t have a problem with spiders. Spiders can’t carry Kellis-Amberlee. Ditto giant hissing cockroaches and squiggly things with way too many legs. Becks didn’t share my disregard. Every time the squiggly thing moved, she sank farther back into her chair.

It’s called a millipede, said George.

“It’s called comedy,” I muttered, and turned my attention back to Dr. Abbey.

She had shrugged out of her lab coat before pulling a bag of Oreos out of a filing cabinet and dumping them onto a paper plate. Now she was rummaging through the minifridge shoved under her desk, crouching in a way that I recognized as designed to put a minimum of stress on her knees. Joe the Mastiff was stretched out between her and us, enormous head resting between his forelegs. His pose was relaxed, but his eyes were alert, focusing on whoever had moved most recently. That meant his focus was mostly on Becks, who couldn’t stop flinching.

“So there’s apple juice, water, beer, and something unlabeled that’s either a protein shake or algae.” Dr. Abbey looked up. “Who wants what?”

“I want to know how you managed to induce a reservoir condition,” volunteered Kelly, the need for knowledge apparently overwhelming her reluctance to work with unsanctioned researchers.

Dr. Abbey fixed her with a flat stare. “That’s not a beverage. I want to know how you managed to justify violating a couple dozen international laws when you used a clone for personal benefit. Don’t they train you out of that at the CDC? I thought that was their job. That, and restricting research to party-line channels while people were dying.”

“I’ll take an apple juice,” I said.

“Nothing for me, thanks,” said Alaric. He was looking at Dr. Abbey with the same sort of intent focus that Joe was turning on the rest of us, eyes slightly narrowed.

“Uh, water,” said Maggie.

Becks said nothing. She was too busy watching the millipede.

“Got it.” Dr. Abbey straightened, passing a ble of water to Maggie and a bottle of apple juice to me before sitting in the chair next to her dog. “So you’re finally here about the reservoir conditions. Damn. I’ve had a bet going with Dr. Shoji in Oahu for years now. He’s been swearing you’d come someday. I thought you’d just keep treading water until we were all completely fucked.”

“Shoji?” asked Alaric, eyes narrowing further. “Would that refer to Joseph Shoji, the director of the Kauai Institute of Virology?”

“Why are you asking me questions you know the answers to already? Nobody here needs the exposition.” Dr. Abbey picked up her own drink, sipping calmly before she said, “If you think you can sell me to your government, think again. They already know who I’m in contact with, how often, how we communicate, basically everything but how often I change my underwear. If they wanted to take me, they’d take me. They just don’t want to risk it.”

“Actually, I sort of need the exposition, since I have no clue what you people are talking about,” I said. “Why doesn’t the government want to risk it? I mean, no offense, but it’s not like you’re sitting on a nuke here or anything.”

“Oh, but I am.” Dr. Abbey’s gaze went to Kelly, and stayed there, guileless and steady as she continued: “See, the CDC knows damn well and good that something’s wrong. I don’t know how many of the people working there know what it is, but you can’t have half a brain, work in the medical field, and not realize that something’s not right.”

“That’s not fair,” protested Kelly. “The research—”

Dr. Abbey cut her off: “That’s an excuse.”

“You’re talking about the reservoir conditions,” said Becks. It was a relief to have her join the conversation. Her training was a lot more analytical than mine. I didn’t know what questions to ask. She and Alaric did, and that could save our asses.

“Exactly.” Dr. Abbey kept looking at Kelly. “What do you know?”

“I don’t know who Dr. Shoji is,” I volunteered. “But I know that people with reservoir conditions are dying faster than they should be, and I know that my sister was one of those statistics, so we’re here because we need you to tell us what the CDC doesn’t want to say.”

Kelly shot me a look. “Control of sensitive information is a key duty of all government organizations,” she said. “Given your own need for information security, I would have thought—”

“Drop the party line, Doc,” I said pleasantly. “I still don’t have a problem with hitting girls.”

Her mouth snapped shut with an audible click.

Dr. Abbey studied me for a moment before looking toward Alaric, nodding in my direction, and asking, “Is he for real?”

“He’s for real,” said Alaric. “Infuriating, impossible, and probably insane, but for real.”

“Huh.” Dr. Abbey took another sip of her drink. “Jos five fully developed reservoir conditions. Retinal, cerebro-spinal, cardiac, testicular, and my personal favorite, thyroid. He’s the first documented case of a canine thyroid reservoir condition, aren’t you, Joe?” Joe turned his massive head toward her, tongue lolling as he drooled agreement with her words.

“You said you induced them?” said Becks.

“That’s impossible,” said Kelly. “The virus doesn’t behave that way.”

“It’s not impossible. It’s just hard,” said Dr. Abbey. “I started injecting him with the live-state virus when he was six weeks old. That gave his body time to learn to deal with it before he got big enough to amplify. The first two conditions developed on their own, as a consequence of the inoculations. The others took more doing, since they had to be induced after adulthood.”

“I just don’t understand,” said Kelly. “I mean, the risk of amplification alone—”

“Who says he didn’t amplify?”

We all turned toward Maggie—I’d almost forgotten she was there, I was so busy trying to understand what the hell was going on—who was looking at Dr. Abbey with wide, solemn eyes.

“What?” asked Kelly.

“Who says he didn’t amplify?” repeated Maggie. She picked up her water, took a thoughtful drink, and continued: “I mean, if you can induce reservoir conditions… You said he’d never amplify fully. It seems like there’s only one way you could know, and that’s by testing it. I’m not sure how you’d do it; it’s not like I’m a doctor, but it seems… possible.”

“Doesn’t it?” asked Dr. Abbey. “Gold star for you.”

A slow, horrifying picture was beginning to come together in my head, a picture that I didn’t want to see. George was silent, making it even harder to ignore the conclusions my mind was drawing. Whatever those conclusions were, she was drawing them, too, and she didn’t like them any more than I did. My mouth was suddenly desert-dry, as parched as the ground outside of Memphis, where snipers opened fire on our convoy, where Buffy died… where the CDC took us in for the very first time.

“Dr. Abbey?” I asked. She looked toward me, expression that of a teacher who wanted to encourage a favorite student to come up with the right answer before the final bell. “What do the reservoir conditions really do? Do you know?”

“Of course I do.” She smiled, setting her drink aside as she stood. “Come on. I think it’s time I took you for a tour of the lab. You need to understand what we’re doing here.”

“I’ve always liked a good perversion of science,” said Becks. At least one of us was remembering to keep things light. “Let’s take the tour.”

Yes, said George, sounding oddly subdued. Let’s.

Kelly didn’t say anything. Maybe that was for the best.

We left ourdrinks behind and followed Dr. Abbey from her cramped cubicle to the main floor of the lab. Joe padded along at the rear of the group, claws making an unnerving clacking sound against the bare linoleum. It was impossible to forget that he was there, or that he was—all protests aside—more than large enough to undergo full amplification. He could kill us all before anyone had a chance to reach for a weapon.

But he won’t, said George, picking up on the thought. I don’t think Dr. Abbey’s quite that crazy.

“Says the one with the least to lose,” I muttered.

Dr. Abbey looked back at me, brows raised. “What was that?”

I offered her a sunny smile. “Just talking to my dead sister. She lives inside my head now. She says you’re not crazy enough to let your dog go zombie and eat us all.”

“She’s right,” Dr. Abbey agreed, seemingly unperturbed by the fact that I was talking about carrying on conversations with a dead person. It was weirdly jarring. “Even if Joe could amplify—which he can’t, after all the work we’ve done—I wouldn’t let him do it outside a sealed room. There’s too much here that he could damage.”

“Like these?” Alaric stopped, frowning at a tank that contained about a dozen things that looked like guinea pigs with too many legs. Becks followed his gaze and let out a shriek, jumping backward.

“Goliath tarantulas,” said Dr. Abbey. “Average weight of the specimens in that tank is between four and six ounces. It’s taken generations to breed them up that large.”

“Why would you want to?” demanded Becks. “They’re horrible.”

“They’re infected,” said Dr. Abbey. We all turned to stare at her. She continued blithely, “The biggest female has amplified twice so far. Once she got sick enough that she started displaying stalking behavior and infected three other spiders before she could be contained. One of them didn’t recover. A pity. He was from a very encouraging line. Come on, there’s a lot to see.” She resumed walking, obviously trusting us to follow her.

“Spiders can’t amplify,” said Kelly, sounding uncertain.

“Keep telling yourself that,” said Dr. Abbey, and kept walking.

The rest of us hurried to catch up, with Joe once again lingering long enough to bring up the rear. I found myself wondering what would happen if one of us tried to split the party, the way they always seemed to do in the horror movies Maggie and Dave liked so much. Given the size of Joe’s head, and the number of teeth it contained, I wasn’t in any real hurry to find out. Let Becks take the suicidal risks. She was the group’s remaining Irwin, after all.

Dr. Abbey waited for us at the head of a narrow alley that smelled of salt water and damp. “I was starting to think I needed to send search parties,” she said, and ducked between the racked-up tanks, starting into the darkness.

“I don’t like this,” said Alaric.

“Too late now,” I replied, and followed her.

The source of the smell quickly became apparent: The tanks making up the sides of the alley were filled with salt water and contained a variety of brightly colored corals and plastic structures. I paused to peer closer and recoiled as a thick, fleshy tentacle slapped the glass from the inside. Dr. Abbey snickered.

“Careful,” she said. “They get bored sometimes. They like to mess around with people’s heads when they’re bored.”

“They who?” I asked, pressing a hand against my chest as I waited for my heart to stop thudding quite so hard against my ribs. There was a distinct heaviness in my bladder, telling me that I needed to find a bathroom before I lined myself up for too many more exciting surprises. “What the fuck is that thing?”

“Pacific octopus.” Dr. Abbey tapped the offending tank. The tentacle responded by slapping the glass again, before it was joined by two more near-identical appendages, and a large octopus slithered out from a crack between two pieces of coral. “We do a lot of work with cephalopods. They’re good subjects, as long as you can keep them from getting bored enough to slither out of their tanks and go around wreaking havoc.”

I glanced to Becks. “Isn’t this the part where you should run screaming?”

“Nah,” she said. “I’ve got no problem with octopuses. It’s bugs and spiders that I don’t like. Octopuses are cute, in their own ‘nature did a lot of drugs’ sort of way.”

“Girls are fucking weird,” I said.

You should know, George replied.

I smirked and leaned in for a closer look at the octopus. It settled against the glass, watching us with its round, alien eyes. “That is a freaky-looking thing,” I said. “What’s it for?”

“Barney here is for testing some of the new KA strains we’ve been developing,” said Dr. Abbey, removing the cover from the tank. The octopus promptly switched its focus to the surface of the water. She stuck in a hand, and it reached up with two tentacles, twining them firmly around her wrist. “We haven’t been able to infect him yet, although he’s shown some fascinating antibody responses. If we can just figure out what’s blocking infection in the cephalopod family, we’ll be able to learn a lot more about the structure of the virus.”

“Wait, you mean you’re actually trying to develop new strains of the virus?” Kelly looked at her with wide, baffled eyes, like this was the last thing she could imagine anyone wanting to do.

Dr. Abbey took her attention away from the octopus—which was now trying to pull her arm all the way into the tank—as she frowned at Kelly. “What did you think we were doing here? Growing hydroponic tomatoes and talking about how nice it’ll be when the CDC finally decides to get around to saving us all?” She began untangling her hand from the octopus’s grasp, not appearing to take her attention off Kelly. “Please. Are you really going to stand there questioning my medical ethics while you tell me you people haven’t been working with the structuthe cephalthe virus at all?”

Kelly bit her lip and looked away.

“Thought not.” Dr. Abbey pulled her hand out of the tank and replaced the lid. The octopus settled back at the bottom in a swirl of overlapping arms, appearing to sulk. “If you’ll all walk this way, I think we’re about ready to conclude our little tour. You should have all the information you need by this point.” She turned and strode down the alley, shoulders stiff.

“Think we should follow?” asked Alaric, sotto voce.

“I’m not sure Joe here is going to give us a choice.” I glanced at the mastiff. He was sitting calmly behind our little group, blocking the only other exit from the narrow row between the tunnels. “Besides, we’ve come this far. Don’t you want to find out what the big secret the Wizard has to share with us is?”

“Maybe she’s planning to give you a brain,” deadpanned Becks.

“If she does, I hope that means you’re getting a heart,” I replied, and started walking.

Behind me, Alaric said, almost mournfully, “I just want to go home.”

Kelly and Maggie didn’t say anything at all. But they followed, and that was more than I had any right to ask of them.

Dr. Abbey was waiting on the other side of the alley, in front of a wide safety-glass window that looked in on what was obviously a Level 4 clean room. The people inside were wearing hazmat suits, connected to the walls by thick oxygen tubes, and their faces were obscured by the heavy space-helmet-style headgear that’s been the standard in all high-security virological facilities since long before the Rising. Dr. Abbey was looking through the glass, hands tucked into the pockets of her lab coat. She didn’t turn as we approached. Joe trotted up, and she pulled one hand free, placing it atop his head.

“I started this lab six and a half years ago,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for you—or someone like you—ever since. What took you so long? Why didn’t you show up years ago?”

“I didn’t even know you were here,” I said. “I still don’t really understand.”

Yes, you do, said George. Her voice was small, subdued, and almost frightened.

“George?” I asked. My own voice sounded almost exactly like hers had.

“We should go,” said Kelly, sounding suddenly alarmed. She took my elbow. I looked down at her hands, but she didn’t let go. “Or we should ask her about the research. You know, what we came to ask about.”

“Dr. Abbey?” asked Alaric. “What’s going on? What are you doing here? Why did you give your dog reservoir conditions, and what do you mean when you say he can’t amplify? And what does it have to do with the deaths of the people with the natural reservoir conditions?”

“The Kellis-Amberlee virus was an accident,” said Dr. Abbey, still looking at the pane of safety glass. Her hand moved slowly over her dog’s head, stroking his ears. “It was never supposed to happen. The Kellis flu and Marburg Amberlee were both good ideas. They just didn’t get the laboratory testing they needed. If there’d been more time to understand them before they got out, before they combined the way that they did… but there wasn’t time, and the genie got out of the bottle before most people even realized the bottle was there. It could have been worse. That’s what nobody wants to admit. So the dead get up and walk around—so what? We don’t get sick like our ancestors did. We don’t die of cancer, even though we keep pumping pollutants into the atmosphere as fast as we can come up with them. We live charmed lives, except for the damn zombies, and even those don’t have to be the kind of problem that we make them out to be. They could just be an inconvenience. Instead, we let them define everything.”

“They’re zombies,” said Becks. “It’s sort of hard to ignore them.”

“Is it really?” Dr. Abbey’s hand continued caressing Joe’s ears. “There’s always been something nasty waiting around the corner to kill us, but it wasn’t until the Rising that we let ourselves start living in this constant state of fear. This constant ‘stay inside and let yourself be protected’ mentality has gotten more people killed than all the accidental exposures in the world. It’s like we’re all addicted to being afraid.”

Ask her about the reservoir conditions, prompted George.

“George—I mean, I want to know, what do the reservoir conditions have to do with any of this?” My voice sounded unfamiliar to my own ears, like someone else was asking the question.

“The immune system can learn to deal with almost anything, given sufficient time and exposure. How else could we have stayed alive for this long?” Dr. Abbey turned to look at me, eyes dark and very tired beneath the erratically bleached fringe of her hair. “The reservoir conditions are our bodies figuring out how to process the virus. How to work around it. They’re our immune responses writ large and inconvenient, like the autoimmune diseases people used to suffer from before the Rising.”

Just about everyone with an autoimmune syndrome either died during the Rising or found their suffering greatly alleviated as the body’s immune responses got something much better to waste their time on than attacking their own cells: the sudden burgeoning Kellis-Amberlee infection doing its best to wipe out everything in its path. Autoimmune disorders still crop up, but they’re nothing compared to their numbers before the Rising turned the medical world on its ear.

The facts flashed across my mind like puzzle pieces falling inexorably into place, each of them notching smoothly into place with the ones around it. The things Kelly was surprised by. The illegally massive dog with the induced reservoir conditions, and the casual way Dr. Abbey said he wouldn’t amplify, like she knew, absolutely, what she was talking about. The spiders, the bugs, and the octopuses with their grasping limbs and their staring, alien eyes. All of it made sense, if I just stopped trying to force it.

I turned toward Kelly before I realized that I was intending to move. Her eyes widened, and she took a step back, almost pressing herself against Maggie. Maggie gave her a puzzled look as she stepped out of the way.

“I don’t know what he’s so pissed about, but I’m not going to get in his way,” she said, in a tone that bordered on the sympathetic. “Better you than me.”

Alaric and Becks were watching me with confusion. Dr. Abbey turned to watch me advancing on Kelly, and there was no confusion in her expression, just calm satisfaction, the teacher’s face once more watching her student finally understand the lesson.

“The reservoir conditions are an immune response,” I said. It wasn’t a question; it didn’t need to be. I could see the confirmation in Kelly’s widening eyes. “They’re the way the body copes with the Kellis-Amberlee infection, aren’t they?” She didn’t answer me. “Aren’t they?!” I shouted, and slammed my hand into the safety glass.

Maggie and Alaric jumped. Becks stepped up beside me. And Kelly flinched.

“Yes,” she said. “They are. They just… they just happen. We think it has something to do with exposure in infancy, but the research has never been… it’s never…”

All my sympathy for her was gone, like it had never existed at all. I wasn’t seeing a person anymore. I was seeing the CDC, and the virus that took George away. “I’m going to ask you one question, Doc, and I want you to think really hard about your answer, because you’re legally dead, and if we want to hand you to this nice lady,” I gestured toward Dr. Abbey, “for her experiments, well, there’s really not much you can do about it. Don’t lie to me. Understand?”

Kelly nodded mutely.

“Good. I’m glad to see that we have an agreement. Now, tell me: The reservoir conditions. What do they do? What do they really do?”

“They teach the immune system how to handle an ongoing live Kellis-Amberlee infection,” said Kelly, meeting my eyes at last. She sounded oddly relieved, like she’d known we were going to wind up here and just hadn’t known how to force the issue on her own. “They teach the body what to do about it.”

“Meaning what?”

Alaric spoke abruptly, his own voice glacially cold: “That’s the wrong question, Shaun.”

“All right, you’re the Newsie. What’s the right question? What should I be asking her?”

“Ask her what would have happened if you hadn’t pulled the trigger.” Alaric looked at Kelly for a long moment, and then looked away, like he couldn’t bear the sight of her. “Ask her what would have happened to Georgia if you’d just left her alone in the van and hadn’t pulled the trigger.”

Kelly’s answer was a hushed whisper, so soft that, for a moment, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The words seemed to get louder and louder as they echoed inside my head, repeating over and over again until I couldn’t bear the sound of them. I slammed my fist into the safety glass as hard as I could, so hard I could feel my knuckles threaten to give way. Then I turned on my heel and stalked away, back down the dank-smelling alley where the octopuses watched with their alien eyes, back pastn’nks of massive spiders, past the working lab technicians, who barely even looked up as I passed them. I was running by that point, running as I tried to outpace the words still echoing in my ears—those horrible, condemning, world-destroying words. It didn’t do any good. No matter how fast I ran, no matter how hard I hit the world, nothing could take those words back again.

Those five small, simple words that changed everything:

“She would have gotten better.”