Mira Grant - Deadline

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.”