Listening to him, I felt a part of me drag itself to the surface that I thought I’d buried for good—the scientist. Sure, dissecting zombies had played into that hand—if in a very abstract way—but this? This was different. Unexpected but not entirely unwelcome, I had to admit.
And still—there were a million questions left unanswered.
“How do you even keep the lab powered? Or stocked, for that matter. It’s hard enough to keep people fed out there.” Something else occurred to me. “Is there anyone else here from Green Fields Biotech?”
A hint of contempt appeared in Lowe’s eyes that made my paranoia resurface, but again Stone was quick to smooth the waves.
“No, just the two of us. You saw yourself how few of us survived and got away. I haven’t seen any of them in months, since we got here.” He paused, apparently debating how much he should tell me, but he seemed to realize that keeping me in the dark was not the way to ensure my cooperation. “I expect that by now you have realized that this entire project has always been much larger than a single biotech firm alone. It took months to gather resources and connect people, but since winter, we’ve been dedicating everything we have to this. There used to be a supplies bunker buried in this town that was converted into an underground lab. The surrounding town was reinforced to assure that research could happen undisturbed. You can talk to the people here—it’s been a stroke of luck for the survivors and many more that have been seeking shelter here since the outbreak. Help us, and you’ll ultimately help everyone.” Again he paused, and I could tell that he was gearing up for the big sell. “In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised that once you’ve had a chance to assure yourself of the possibilities, you might consider joining us.”
“Join you?” I echoed, feeling like I was missing something here. Lowe’s frown certainly underlined that.
Stone smiled. “As you so succinctly noted, my expertise is not scientifically inclined, and he”—he nodded at his colleague—“is a botanist. If you want to lead this lab, just say the word and the job is yours.”
That, ladies and gents, was the last thing I’d expected to happen as we’d rolled through the gates of the palisades.
I mutely stared at Stone for several seconds straight before I found my voice again.
“Why don’t you show me your operation first before I make any rash decisions?” I couldn’t even say if I was interested. Was I? Until five minutes ago, I would have sworn on my life that I was quite happy with my current position, feeling emotionally dead aside. But that was before anyone had dangled an opportunity like this in front of me, appealing to both my vanity, arrogance—and the part of me that felt obliged to help if there was anything that I could do.
“Right away?” Stone asked. “Or do you want a little time to clean up? After months on the road, I wouldn’t want to get between you and a much-deserved hot bath.”
I was tempted to ask whether he was telling me that I needed it—which I did—but decided that my vanity was the smaller part of valor. “Let me see what you’ve got here first. Then food, and that bath. In that order. If there’s something I can help you with, I can always review your results while I eat and soak in the tub.”
“Of course,” Stone replied, stepping away, with Lowe falling in behind him like a lapdog. Who was actually in command was pretty obvious there. I also didn’t miss the partly gloating look Stone shot at Nate before he gestured toward the direction he’d come from. “When you’re ready, please follow me. Or Ethan can show you the way, if you have matters to discuss first.”
The boy in question perked up at hearing his name. I hesitated, partly turning to look at Nate. He shot me an inquisitive look but didn’t ask outright what was going on. “Everything okay?”
“Should be,” I answered, nodding. “If you can spare me for a couple of hours?” That came out more sarcastic than I’d wanted it to, but the bland expression I got in return made me want to stay an extra hour just to spite him.
“Last time I checked, you’re free to do whatever you want,” he said, but lingered until I’d turned away and followed Ethan, with Stone and Lowe already disappearing into a building further down the street.
“This is going to be so damn awesome!” Ethan enthused, then actually excused himself for the profanity.
I stared at him for a second before laughing out loud. “Kid, I’m used to a lot worse than that.” Which reminded me that I should probably censor my own speech for the time being.
But fuck, it felt good to be part of civilization again.
Chapter 21
From Stone’s explanation, I hadn’t expected much, but what Ethan led me into looked like an actual lab. Not quite the standard I’d been used to from my last place of work, but some of my undergrad chemistry labs had been worse. On three levels—ground floor and the two bunker levels below—they had set up several workstations with all the equipment needed for such an operation. On the lowest floor they even had two laminar flow hoods and a glove box that probably had to stand in for the biosafety level three and four equipment they simply didn’t have the architecture for. What was even more remarkable than that were the well over twenty people currently scurrying around between the desks and workstations, and the fact that the whole building had that typical laboratory feel to it that only now that I was back here I realized I’d missed with all of my heart.
Ethan needed exactly two seconds to announce to everyone that I was here, heads turning everywhere and eyes going wide. So much for the non-celebrity status. Work was set aside where possible and everyone crowded in, making me feel terribly out of place in my mostly black gear compared to the lab coats everyone else was wearing.
“What do you want to start with?” Ethan asked, clearly taking point seeing as he’d been the one to “discover” me. “Our findings about the activator first, or the viral protein sequencing?”
My first instinct was to go after the perpetrator itself—the virus—but the first thing he’d said made my thoughts snag on that. “What activator?”
Ethan looked at me as if I was crazy—or had made a really bad joke—but then he seemed to realize that I wasn’t just feigning ignorance.
“The activator that turns the virus from a dormant infectious agent into the killer that blasted us back into the stone age? The reason why everyone who ate something containing high fructose corn syrup that last week either died or turned into a flesh-eating monster?” He paused, cocking his head to the side. “You do know about the sugar, right?”
Before I could reply, another guy a few years older than Ethan interrupted him. “Idiot, she was the one who started warning people about it. Else there would have been even more deaths.”
I still remembered that morning in Gerry’s radio station—exhausted, drained, and with no fucking clue just how much worse it all would get so very soon.
“Yes, I know about the sugar,” I said, trying not to lay the blame on anyone in what sounded like an ongoing debate. “So it’s a two-component system? We figured that it was just the syrup itself that was contaminated.”
Ethan nodded, scrambling for notes on a desk nearby that he consequently pushed into my hands. “Here. It’s really quite easy, and very effective. It’s a co-activator, really, working in a similar way like with enzymes. Without the presence of the activator, the virus is deadly enough on its own. The activator is required to turn on what we casually call phase two.”
“Phase two?” I asked.
“Full-on zombies,” Ethan explained, his eyes bright with excitement.
“It’s a dose-dependent system,” a woman to his left offered. “Simple exposure led to death for most people, the course of the deterioration like a massively accelerated hemorrhagic fever. Repeat exposure led to accumulation of enough of the activator in the body to activate stage two. We’re still not quite sure about the time frame, but considering just how fast the virus kills, with most people it was likely a question whether they lived long enough to give the activator time to d
o its thing.”
I nodded slowly, taking all that in while my mind was racing. It made sense. It also explained why consumption of contaminated food turned the people who had been exposed to the serum before instantly—their bodies were already infected, so to speak, and just needed a jump start—while getting bitten didn’t lead to a change, the activator likely no longer present in the zombie saliva. Just the activated virus that turned us, not them. I was very careful not to let any of my thoughts show on my face. The last thing I needed was for anyone to get too interested in that special part of our group.
“And you know what that activator is?” I asked, scanning the papers that Ethan foisted at me. They were all hand-drawings, likely because nowadays pencils were much easier to come by than printer cartridges.
“It’s a pretty nifty system,” he explained. “It’s heavily glycosylated flavin adenine dinucleotide.”
“FAD?” I asked, perplexed. “That’s one of the most abundant cofactors in metabolism.” There wasn’t a cell in the human body that wasn’t chock-full of it. Shit.
“Which is the great part about it,” the woman interjected, then had the grace to look chagrined. “Worst, actually,” she corrected herself, but skipped right on to her explanation of exactly how the virus pretty much reprogrammed the cells it infected and used them to spread itself, ending with a succinct—and terribly accurate, statement. “It’s a self-priming system.”
I couldn’t quite suppress a shudder, but part of me had to admit that she was right—from a purely scientific point, it was a marvelous thing. And we were all so fucked. My thoughts were skipping over each other, trying to remember everything I’d ever learned about the process she’d just described while extrapolating from there to what the actual impact of that knowledge might be. Something else occurred to me then.
“The activator is part of the viral machinery,” I said, trying to narrow things down to the critical points. “So it’s no longer expressed in the body after the primary infection is over?” A virus was a pretty simple thing that way—it just “lived” to invade cells, turn everything upside down to program the host cells to produce more of itself, and once that was done, it made the cells burst to spread more re-programming-hungry virions all through the body.
I looked up when I was only met with silence, raising my brows.
“We don’t exactly know,” Ethan hedged.
“Why not? It’s a pretty simple question,” I replied. “If you know what the activator is, just run an assay for the active form and you know the answer.”
More silence, until the woman piped up. “We don’t have any tissue to test that on,” she admitted.
That made me blink. “There’s several hundred thousand walking, moaning tissue repositories shambling around out there in this state alone. What’s the holdup?”
It was Stone who answered me, if indirectly. “See, this is what I was talking about. You’re not yet here for fifteen minutes, and already you’ve found a new approach we can look into. Do you understand now why we need you here?”
Like a herd of trained monkeys, the lab workers nodded, a sea of bright, hopeful eyes fixating on me. That made me feel vaguely uncomfortable, but Ethan’s attention span deficit saved me.
“Anyway, moving on. In your notes there were much better diagrams of the virus already, but we’ve managed to isolate all the proteins that are part of the virion and the expression machinery. Here.” He handed me another stack of papers, this one showing both a rough drawing of what looked like a genome sequence in pictogram form, and another sheet of thicker paper with a dried electrophoresis gel, the customary blue bands bright on the white underground. It had been too long since I’d seen Raleigh Miller’s notes to be sure, but this looked similar to what I remembered.
“You keep saying my notes,” I replied absentmindedly.
“From the package the video came with,” Ethan said. “We didn’t manage to get the whole package downloaded by the time the internet went out, but thankfully Dr. Lowe and his people brought the rest with them.”
And that was the moment I remembered that—all science stuff aside—there was a very good reason why I’d exchanged my lab coat for my trusty shotgun. Glancing beyond the horde of scientists, I caught Stone’s gaze, easily deciphering the warning it held. What exactly that should have told me, I didn’t know, but it served as a much-needed reminder.
“Right,” I agreed with Ethan. “Well, looks like you’re doing good work here,” I went on, handing the papers back to him. “I’d love to take a closer look, but I think for now I’d really like something to eat first.”
Ethan looked a little taken aback, but the woman who kept inserting herself into our conversation took that opportunity to do so again. “I’m Megan, by the way. I can fill you in on the other things while we get you some food. There’s plenty more…”
And, just like that, I was swept up in her gushing with Ethan following us as she herded me back outside and over to one of the adjacent houses. I had to admit that I felt instantly better with the open sky above me, and when I saw the small but varied buffet that Amy and another woman were setting up while part of my group was already digging in, I couldn’t help but feel a little stupid about my latent unease and resentment. I was likely just being paranoid. It made sense that with years more data and research, Stone—and whoever was behind him, because it was obvious that he wasn’t the mastermind there—had given the scientists as much fodder as possible, without explaining where exactly the data had come from. I probably would have done the same in his place. The more I thought about it, the pettier I felt. I probably just needed to talk to him in private to clear up a few things—or forget about it all and just leave. It was a little distressing to realize that this second option only came after a noticeable pause in my thoughts.
Delicious, hot, fresh food did its own to distract me, to the point where I completely zoned out on Megan and Ethan for a few minutes as I dug in. That was real milk that the oatmeal had been prepared with. Eggs and bacon, likely coming from the animals I’d seen between the fields on the way to the town center. Butter to scrape on bread that was still slightly warm. Coffee that tasted a tiny bit burned, but that made it all the better because it came from an actual coffee maker. Tasting all that made me realize just how sick I’d become of subsisting on canned food and jerky for my protein, with rarely a chance to load up on fat. I didn’t even feel bad about licking my fingers clean, somewhat less dirty that they were now after a good scrubbing.
Megan was just about to launch into another idea for a new assay she wanted to do but didn’t have all the reagents and buffers for when I saw Martinez and Cho come into the house, both animatedly talking to a guy who looked like he was one of the guards. They definitely seemed like they were old friends—and after a momentary brainfart I realized that they probably were. It was so easy to forget sometimes that not all of us had been Nate’s people—at least not that day when the world had gone to hell. And with Stone and Lowe here, it made sense that they’d brought a few of the soldiers with them as well. Suddenly, the fact that I was still carrying both my guns didn’t sound half as crazy as it had a minute ago.
Martinez caught my gaze across the room, stopping in mid-sentence where he’d been busy recounting what sounded like a rather chaotic chase, likely from Sioux Falls. Grinning, he sauntered over to me, his gaze briefly flickering to the papers strewn across the entire table between the dishes from my breakfast.
“I see you’ve already found out that they have a lab here,” he said.
“I see you’ve already found out that a few of your old comrades are guards here,” I shot back. Why was I feeling like he had been chiding me, if softly?
His grin didn’t waver, but the way he rolled his shoulders spoke of residual tension that told me that he hadn’t completely let his guard down. “Yeah. Mac’s been catching us up on what they’ve been up to while we were digging in for the winter. Can’t say I regret my decision.”
/> “Well, then have fun catching up,” I replied, remaining about as circumspect as he himself. He nodded and joined the others, succumbing to the lure of the buttered bread, too.
Megan cleared her throat, drawing my attention back to her. “I don’t even want to think how you spent the winter. With no food, no shelter…”
“It wasn’t quite that bad,” I explained, picking up one of the oat cookies I’d snagged before. They tasted a little strange, sweetened with honey rather than sugar, but not that I was complaining. “The lack of intellectual stimuli was probably the worst.”
Just as I said that, Nate walked in, of course catching my barb. Much to my malcontent, he completely ignored me, instead joining Andrej where he sat alone at another table. Before I could consider whether I wanted to excuse myself from my two new best friends, Amy took a seat on the bench opposite from me, a warm smile on her face.
“I see that you’re already digging into heavy stuff,” she surmised.
I shrugged. “Might as well make myself useful.” I was actually glad that her presence shut the others up. “You seem to have quite the settlement here, at least compared to others that we’ve seen.”
Her smile became a little self-deprecating but no less proud. “We’ve been working hard to maintain what was here and build on it. When I came here, there were only five people, hiding, trying not to get eaten. Now we are over three hundred, and it’s been months since we had a more serious accident than a sprained ankle or a few bruises.”
“Doesn’t the presence of the soldiers disturb you?” I asked, nodding toward Martinez and Cho’s friend. “Or ours, for that matter.”
The Green Fields Series Box Set: Books 1-3 Page 85