by Mira Grant
“I can’t.” There was genuine regret in his tone. This was news, happening right in our company headquarters, and as the head of the Newsies, Mahir had a serious jones for information. That was part of what made him so good at his job. “This is a secure conction, but if I go for a video link, it’ll attract attention, and I’ll have to answer questions.”
“I take it from your tone that this would be a bad idea right about now?”
The lights on Kelly’s unit settled on a firm, unblinking green. She held it up, smiling a little, like she’d known the answer all along. Dave lowered his guns, sliding them back into their holsters. Becks lowered one of hers, hesitated, and lowered the other. I gave her an approving nod. The Masons may not have taught me much about how to treat a guest, but they taught me not to shoot at them unless it was absolutely necessary.
Mahir sighed. “Yes. A very bad idea.”
“I told you not to marry her, Mahir.”
“I’m not having this conversation again.”
“Just saying, you didn’t have to worry about this shit when you lived the happy bachelor life. Look, I need to go—the Doc’s just checked out clean, so it’s probably time to find out what she’s doing here.”
“Call me when you know what’s going on.”
“Got it,” I said, and clicked off.
Kelly lowered her test unit, apparently satisfied that everyone had seen it, and said, “I’m clean. Do you have a biohazard receptacle I can dispose of this in?”
“It’s next to the medical supplies.” I walked toward the kitchen. “I need a Coke. Anybody else need anything before story time commences?”
No one did.
The kitchen gave me just enough privacy to feel comfortable saying quietly, “Can we try to keep the interjections down for a little bit? I don’t want Kelly thinking I’m crazy.” I paused. “Not yet, anyway.”
You have a plan? asked George.
“More making it up as I go along,” I replied, and grabbed my soda before turning to walk back into the living room.
When I got there, Kelly was on the couch, Alaric was sitting on the beanbag he’d tripped over before, and Dave was back at his terminal, watching the scrolling data feed with one eye while remaining half-turned toward the room. Only Becks was still standing, eyeing Kelly like she expected the other woman to spontaneously amplify at any second.
“Aren’t we a cheery bunch?” I grabbed a folding chair from against the wall and set it up in front of the entrance hall. Nobody was getting in or out without going through me, and that wasn’t exactly an easy proposition. Potentially entertaining; not easy.
“I’m cheerier when there isn’t a corpse sitting on the couch,” said Becks, before moving to her computer chair and slowly sitting down.
“Most people are.” I turned to Kelly. “That brings us back to story time. Well, Doc? What’s going on?”
Kelly sighed. It was a soft, exhausted sound, conveying a vast amount of information in a very small amount of time. This was a woman who’d been run to the limits of her endurance before being forced to find reserves she didn’t think she had. Now even those reserves looked about to run out. Maybe the word “corpse” was more accurate than it sounded. I tensed, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“Dr. Wynne sends his regards.”
There it was: the other shoe.
Dr. Joseph Wynne was Kelly’s supervisor at the Memphis CDC. He was also the man who answered when George called the CDC for help on the night Buffy died. We knew we’d been set up—it was hard to miss that part, what with people shooting at our tires and everything—but we didn’t realize how thoroughly screwed we were until we talked to the CDC. Somebody else called them before George did. That first caller reported that we’d all gone into amplification, not just Buffy. Since we were outside in a confirmed outbreak by that point, Dr. Wynne would have been legally justified in ordering our immediate executions. He didn’t do it. That meant, in a strange sort of sidelong way, that I owed him.
“Does he?” I asked, as neutrally as I could.
“He sent a data card for you to review.” She picked up her briefcase from the floor next to the couch and popped it open, rummaging for a second before producing a plain white plastic rectangle. I raised an eyebrow. A smile ghosted across Kelly’s face as she offered the card to me. “What, did you think I managed to grow a full-body clone and stage my own death without help?”
“Guess not,” I said. “Alaric, run the card.” He jumped to his feet, snatching the card from her hand and running for his terminal so fast that I almost expected him to leave skid marks on the floor. I snorted with amusement before turning back to Kelly. “Now it’s really story time, Doc.”
“Yes, it is,” she agreed. She took a stack of manila envelopes from the briefcase and stood, walking a loose circuit around the room. Each of us got an envelope before she returned to the couch and sat, looking almost serene. I know that look. That’s the look I get from people who’ve done their civic duty by reporting the zombie outbreak to the local news media and are now planning to sit down and let it be our problem instead of theirs. It’s the expression of someone who knows, deep down inside, that the buck is about to be passed.
Buck-passing rarely comes with handouts. I peered into the envelope, natural paranoia demanding that I confirm it wasn’t filled with mousetraps or funny white powder before I removed the contents. Paper. Some paperclipped reports, a few loose memos, and a few sheets of statistical data. I didn’t understand most of what I saw, which really wasn’t surprising. I never was much of one for the numbers.
I looked up. Kelly was watching me intently. Everyone else was flipping through the contents of their respective envelopes. It looked like it was up to me to keep her talking. I waved a sheet of statistics and asked, “What’s all this?”
“It’s the story.” She sagged back in the couch, closing her eyes. The “passing the buck” expression faded, replaced by one of deep and abiding weariness. She kept her eyes closed as she began to talk. It may have been because she was concentrating on getting her facts straight, but I don’t think so.
I think she just didn’t want to risk seeing the look on my face.
“The first cases of confirmed Kellis-Amberlee occurred in 2014. That’s when the viruses were introduced to the biosphere, met, and managed to successfully combine. The viral substrains are either descendants of different initial cases of Marburg Amberlee or the result of very minor natural mutation, occurring within isolated geographic areas. Everywhere in the world, Kellis flu met Marburg Amberlee, and Kellis-Amberlee was the result. It’s not natural virus behavior. Neither of the pathogens involved was a natural virus. Kellis-Amberlee has been stable, and effectively identical, since it was ‘born.’ ”
Becks looked perplexed. “Did we sign up for a seminar or something?” I held up a hand for quiet. She snorted, and subsided.
Kelly continued: “The first cases of confirmed Kellis-Amberlee infection going ‘live’ in isolated parts of the body—the reservoir conditions—were identified in 2018. They may have been cropping up before then, but we didn’t have the capacity to track them. The infrastructure was still too broken down for that to be an option.”
“Makes sense,” I agreed. The Rising left the medical community in tatters. Frontline doctors and nurses were among the first to be infected, leaving the hospitals of the world severely understaffed even after the initial battles of the Rising had been fought and technically won. I say “technically” because it’s hard to call a conflict with that kind of casualty rate a victory. There are still hospitals and people who can use them, so I guess we’ll have to count that as a win, for now.
A smile tugged at the edges of Kelly’s lips. “I could start listing the index cases for the known reservoir conditions, but I doubt you really care, and they aren’t that applicable in this situation. They showed up one by one, they didn’t follow any perceptible pattern, and they were as incurable as the parent virus. That’s
what matters to the story: Once you have a reservoir condition, you have it for the rest of your life.”
She’s got that right, said George bitterly. She developed retinal Kellis-Amberlee while we were little, and she had it until the day she died. Kids in our high school used to tease her about it and threaten to steal her sunglasses. They never did, though. There was always too much of a chance that her “cooties” might be contagious.
That’s bullshit, by the way. You can’t catch the live form of Kellis-Amberlee unless you come into contact with it, and George didn’t sweat the live virus. It just lived inside her eyes, all the time. Waiting for the day when it would get loose to play with the rest of her body.
Which it eventually did.
I had to force myself to start talking again, before I could really start dwelling on what had happened to George. This wasn’t the time. “So what’s the moral of our story?” I asked, relieved when my voice sounded halfway natural. “Reservoir conditions suck?”
“Reservoir conditions represent a viral behavior with no known purpose or explanation,” contributed Dave. Everyone but Kelly turned to look at him. He shrugged. “I took a couple of virology courses before I went to Alaska. It seemed like it might help with that whole ‘not dying’ thing.”
“Ah.” Dave was in Alaska last year when half the staff died. He was probably safer on the frozen, zombie-infested tundra than we were in Sacramento. There was something ironic about that. I paused. “Wait, are you saying no one knows what the reservoir conditions do?”
“There are theories.” Kelly sounded suddenly evasive. I eyed her. Her expression was practically a mask; with her eyes closed, she could have been thinking anything at all.
She should get some sunglasses if she wants to pull that trick, said George.
I didn’t say anything. I just waited.
Kelly gave a small shake of her head and continued: “I’ve spent the last year studying reservoir conditions. The CDC tracks anyone with a KA-related medical condition, but nothing’s ever really been done with the data. So I thought I’d start.”
“Hey, that’s not true,” I protested. “George was in all kinds of studies. There was always some new specialist asshole wanting to poke her in the eyes and see what happened.”
“There have been studies of the individual kinds of reservoir conditions, but nobody’s really looked into the syndrome as a whole.” Kelly sank, if anything, farther back into the couch. “Why does it happen? Why does it happen in specific parts of the body? How is it that the virus is contained? Everything we know says that anyone with a reservoir condition should amplify immediately, but they don’t. They just keep going until they die. It doesn’t make sense.”
“And that’s what you were studying?”
A marginal nod. “Uh-huh. That’s when I found it.”
“Found what?” asked Alaric.
“Look at the statistics.” Kelly sighed, tilting her face up toward the ceiling. “The first column is population. The second column is percent of population with a known reservoir condition—type is irrelevant in this instance.”
I squinted at the numbers. I’d seen the number on the third column somewhere before. I hazarded a guess: “Column three is KA-related deaths in the last year?”
“Yeah.”
“So what’s the fourth column?”
Becks spoke, voice heavy with dawning horror. She’d managed to figure things out just a little faster than the rest of us, and she didn’t sound happy about her epiphany. “Oh, my God. It’s—that’s the number of people with reservoir conditions who died, isn’t it?”
Kelly nodded.
I squinted at the numbers. They didn’t seem to mean anything. I was about to open my mouth when George said, very quietly, Lookat column two again, Shaun.
I looked. And I understood.
“This can’t be right,” I said, suddenly cold. Reservoir conditions don’t increase the odds of viral amplification; they actually tend to reduce them, since most people who suffer from a latent form of KA wind up even more paranoid about infection than the rest of the population. People like George, who went out into the field, or Emily Ryman, who kept raising horses even after she developed retinal KA, were the exception rather than the rule.
Kelly sighed, opening her eyes for the first time since her lecture had begun. “That’s what I thought,” she said, looking right at me. “I ran the numbers over and over. I had an intern pull the census data six times. It’s all accurate.”
“But—”
“Less than eleven percent of the population suffers from reservoir conditions. Last year, they accounted for thirty-eight percent of the KA-related deaths.” Kelly’s tone was grim. Suddenly, her exhaustion was starting to make a lot of sense. “Statistically speaking, this can’t be happening.”
“Maybe it was a glitch,” suggested Dave. “Statistical anomalies happen, right?”
Becks snorted. “Yeah, and respected CDC doctors totally help their employees fake death by clone over statistical anomalies. It happens all the time.”
“The data goes back ten years, and it’s consistent all the way through. Every year, more people with reservoir conditions die than can be supported by reasonable projections—not from spontaneous amplification, not because they were stupid, not for any reason that I can find. And no one’s ever said, ‘Hey, maybe something’s wrong here.’ ” She paused, shaking her head a little. “That’s not right. There have been project proposals that would have addressed these numbers, and somehow they always get shut down. There’s always something more important, more pressing, more impressive. Politics get involved, and the reservoir conditions get pushed to the back burner. Again, and again, and again.”
“So what, you think it’s intentional suppression?” asked Alaric.
“Last year, there was a six-billion-dollar study on a new strain of MRSA that’s cropped up in two hospitals in North Carolina. We could have done it on a third of the budget and half the manpower. It was busywork. There’s so damn much busywork.” She rubbed her temple with the heel of one hand, frustration evident. “The CDC is supported by the government. We’re supposed to be an independent organization, but that isn’t how the funding works out.”
“Was Tate involved?”
The question was soft, reasonable; it took me a moment to realize that I’d asked it.
“Not with that study,” said Kelly. Hope flared and died immediately as she continued: “He was one of the supporters of continuing cancer research. You know, since cancer will become a threat again once Kellis-Amberlee has been cured. So more and more of our budget goes to things like that, and reservoir conditions just get ignored.”
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“How big a chunk of the CDC budget are we talking about?” asked Alaric.
“Eleven billion dollars.”
Dave whistled, long and low. “That’s not chump change.”
“No, it’s not. I’d say maybe twenty percent of our research budget is actually being spent on research into Kellis-Amberlee-related conditions. The rest of it keeps getting siphoned off into studies that look good, but don’t do anything.” Her frustration was evident. “It’s like we’re being stopped from finding out what this virus really does.”
Probably because you are, said George.
“I didn’t know that was possible,” I said. “You’re the CDC.”
“And somebody has to pay the bills.”
“Right.” I stood abruptly, stalking back into the kitchen with my mostly full Coke in one hand and the stack of papers in the other. Behind me, Kelly started to ask where I was going, and was quickly hushed by Becks. Becks understood. Becks always understands.
The kitchen was cool and dark and, most important, empty. I put my things down on the counter, turned to face the wall, and began, methodically, punching it as hard as I could. The sound echoed through the room, gunshot-loud and soothing. My knuckles split on the fourth blow. I started feeling a lot better
after that. I generally do. Pain clears the fog in my head, enough that I can think again. Besides, as long as I’m punching walls, I’m not punching people.
Someone was using the CDC’s budget to control their research. Someone was funneling research away from Kellis-Amberlee, into diseases that weren’t an issue anymore and problems that shouldn’t even have been on the CDC’s radar. And Governor Tate had been involved. The man who killed my sister. The man who changed everything. If Tate had his bloody little fingers in the pie…
If Tate was involved, so was whoever he worked for, said George, as calmly as I couldn’t. We have to help her. We have to find out what’s going on. This could be our chance, Shaun. This could lead us straight to the ringleaders.
“Yeah.” I stopped punching the wall, taking a shaky breath as I studied the new dent I’d created next to the half a dozen that were already there. We lost our security deposit a long time ago. “I know.”
Good.
If we helped Kelly, we could find out who was manipulating the CDC. We could find the people who ordered Tate to kill George. After that…
Maybe after that we’d both be able to rest.
I rinsed my hand in the sink, applying gauze and antibiotic cream before returning to the living room. There was no point in freaking Kelly out any more than the pounding noises doubtless already had. “Sorry about that,” I said. “I just needed to work through a few things.”
“It’s okay, boss,’d created said Dave. Alaric and Becks nodded their agreement.
Kelly bit her lip. “Is… is everything okay?”
“Not really, but we can pretend.” I walked back to my seat, belatedly realizing that my things were still in the kitchen. Oh, well. “So no one ever tried to figure out why so many people with reservoir conditions were dying?”
“Um.” Kelly blinked, apparently thrown by my return to the earlier topic. Then she nodded. “We got a new crop of interns recently. Very enthusiastic, very eager to prove themselves. One of them noticed the statistical anomaly while he was doing some filing, and he brought it to Dr. Wynne. What he said just didn’t sound right. I asked if I could look into it. Dr. Wynne was as surprised as I was, and he agreed.”