John Ringo - Under a Graveyard Sky

“Son of a bitch!” Faith snarled. “I make the tabloids but I don’t ?”

“You might want to remember what we’re actually doing here,” Sophia said, her face tight.

Durante waved his hand to indicate it was not a subject for discussion.

“New York,” Faith said, looking around at the unusually light afternoon traffic. “I don’t get the attraction. It stinks. It’s crowded. The people are rude. And there’s barely a scrap of green in the whole place.”

“You wanted to come,” Sophia said.

“Because it was better than being stuck on a sailboat,” Faith said. “But not much.”

“The food’s good,” Durante said. He really didn’t like New York much, either, but he felt he had to come up with some virtues. “And the girls are… There’s a lot of…art and culture…”

“The girls are hot?” Faith finished. “Or easy?”

“I’m not going to have this conversation with my boss’s teenage nieces,” Durante said. “It’s got its attractions. Of course… A lot of them are closed right now.”

“Hang on,” the driver said, swerving. A naked woman was running through traffic, hitting the cars as she ran as if trying to push the traffic onto the sidewalk.

“Zombie?” Sophia asked.

“Could be,” Durante said. “Probably. But this is New York. She could just be high. You don’t know until you run a blood test.”

“So, about the food thing,” Faith said, her stomach rumbling.

“We’ll get you delivery,” Durante said. “One other benefit to New York. You can get any kind of food in the world delivered.”

“I’m not really hungry,” Sophia said.

“I am,” Faith replied. “I need food. And after an almost continuous diet of Mountain House, I need good food. Is there Italian?”

“Best Italian in the world,” Durante said. “Better than Italy. Although mostly it’s mom and pop places. But we can get some delivered.”

“I just want a shower,” Sophia said, looking out at the city. “Nother zombie.”

“That’s a zombie,” Durante agreed. Two NYPD officers had the zombie restrained but it was clear that he’d bitten a passerby. The passerby was a punk with a gigantic pink mohawk who was crying and holding his arm and appeared to be begging the officers about something. The officers didn’t seem to be listening.

“And another one on the way,” Faith said.

“Indications are that if you clean the affected bite quickly the chances are reduced,” Durante said. “And they’re saying now that if you get the flu, the secondary virus is reduced if you take potassium supplements.”

“Yeah, the separation at the b phase telemerase site is inhibited by potassium,” Sophia said. “But it’s not an either or thing. If you take enough potassium to totally inhibit expression, it’s a lethal dose. But if you have a strong immune system, then having any inhibition of the expression gives your immune system a chance to beat the beta expressor. If you have a strong immune system. And bites are tough. The beta expressor is aggressive and resistant. It’s a matter of how much viral load you get through any source…”

“I take it you were listening at work,” Durante said.

“Dr. Curry has every channel that’s working on this running continuously in both the hot and the cold zones,” Sophia said, shrugging. “So, yeah, picked up a little. More than I can talk about in the car. He’s got the updated spread graph for one thing. The one that’s way ahead of the news.”

“Can I ask…” the driver said, then paused.

“It’s getting worse,” Sophia said after a glance at Durante. “Lots worse. The thing is… This virus is, molecularly, spit and baling wire is the way that Dr. Curry described it. After a while it’s just going to burn itself out.”

“Soon?” Durante asked. This was more than he’d been getting.

“Not soon enough,” Sophia said with a sigh. “Look it’s… The virus, the influenza one, is really complicated. It’s a dualistic expression. That right there is waaay out there. And two centers, UCLA and College of Rome, have both come back with pretty good models showing that dualistic is impossible to support over long term. Probably why it never evolved in microorganisms. There’s some fundamental problems with it chemically. And flues mutate. But the way that they mutate…. they just mutate. They can get more lethal, more infective, or less lethal, less infective, stop being infective or lethal at all or any combination. This one, the real killer is the beta expressor, the zombie virus embedded in the flu. CDC and Pasteur both ran models of it over multiple replications and it just…breaks pretty quick. It doesn’t mutate to be more lethal or more infective it stops working at all except as a mild flu bug. It stops being able to express the zombie part.”

“So the plague’s just going to…stop?” the driver asked.

“Yes,” Sophia said. “But it’s not going to be soon enough. Look, you buy a new computer. And you don’t know it, but there’s something wrong with it. Every time you turn it on, one little random bit of software goes wrong. Now a computer can go a long time like that. Or it can break the first time you turn it on. It’s random. That’s what’s happening with all the flu viruses. As they replicate, sometimes they break. Or get closer to breaking. As more and more break, the flu will burn out. The question is, if it will burn out before it kills the world.”

“And the zombie part?” Durante asked. “We’re getting a lot of transmission from bites now.”

“Yeah,” Sophia said, grimly. “They’ve broken out the transmission graphs by bite or flu and bite, or at least blood transmission, is starting to pull ahead of flu. There was one case in South Carolina where a husband apparently gave it to his wife through, well, fooling around. Then he zombied but didn’t bite her. She hid in the bathroom. And she had no flu antibodies. So they think it was sexually transmitted. And then she zombied.”

“Ouch,” Faith said, shuddering.

“The beta expressor isn’t really robust, either,” Sophia said. “There are four different models that people are arguing over but it looks as if it’s going to slowly degrade back to basically rabies or just fall apart. Like I said, spit and baling wire.”

“And with that we’re at the condo…” Durante said as the driver pulled up to the entrance. “Don’t wait for me. I’ll find my own way back.”

“Yes, sir,” the driver said.

“Dibs on the shower,” Faith said.

“Age before incompetence,” Sophia replied.

“This is going to be sooo much fun,” Durante said.

“So I see you made the news,” Dr. Curry said, moving his cursor to highlight particular points of the virus. His voice was muffled by the moon suit.

“I didn’t really have a way to avoid them,” Sophia said, carefully squirting prepared attenuated virus into vaccine bottles. “Well, if I’d know they were going to be out there we could have taken a back way I suppose.”

“This isn’t something we want to end up on the nightly news,” Dr. Curry pointed out.

“Tell me about it,” Sophia said.

“Although, it already has,” Curry said, gesturing to one of the plasma screens. The YouTube video was of a reporter outside a warehouse. The caption said “vaccine chop shop found by NYPD.”

“I hope like hell that’s not us,” Sophia said. The sound was turned down.

“Drug dealers,” Curry said with a snort.

“So we’re in competition with drug dealers?” Sophia said. “How’s drug dealers get involved, anyway?”

“People want the vaccine,” Curry said, gesturing at the laboratory he’d been provided. “Drug dealers fulfill economic needs that others can’t or won’t.”