Point Of Transmission: A Post-Apocalyptic Epidemic Survival (The Morgan Strain Series Book 1)

by Max Lockwood

  Elaina sat quietly and thought about what he said. She was offended that he was suggesting that she didn’t work hard for what she’d accomplished and her praise was undue. She’d never really liked Bretton, but now, she had a solid reason to hate him.

  “You don’t have anything to say for yourself? You set me up. First, you ripped off my work and contaminated people. Then, you pointed your finger at me as this epidemic raged on. Then, you decided to hide out here and work for the government to make a cure for the horror you created? Let me guess—you haven’t been able to figure it out, have you?”

  “This is why I don’t feel any remorse about what happened to you,” he said, getting angry. His face turned bright red. “You’re a child. You may be advanced for your age, but you’re still naïve in the ways of the world. Do you really think that everyone is just going to pat you on the back for everything you do? Do you think that you’ll never be expected to compete with someone better than you? Get real. We’re just trying to get our discoveries out there before the next guy. You have to work quicker and be smarter. If I didn’t feel pressured to improve upon your work, do you think any of this would have happened?”

  Elaina couldn’t believe what he was saying. He was practically admitting guilt but still putting blame on her. If she weren’t chained to the table, she would have gotten up and walked away. She didn’t need this—she had more important things to do.

  “You don’t think I can do this? Why, because I’m young? Because I’m a female? You underestimate your daughter, too, and she’s ten times braver than you could ever be. You’re nothing but a coward. You’re selfish and weak.”

  This struck a nerve with Bretton. Channeling his daughter’s fury from earlier, he raised his hand and struck Elaina across the face. She took her blow and blinked back tears as she stared him in the eye.

  Bretton wondered if he had gone too far, but there was no going back now. Elaina Morgan had done her best to ruin his career, and he wasn’t going to sit down and listen to her hurl insults at him.

  “I shouldn’t have hit you, but you’ve brought out the worst of me. I wasn’t always this way. I was competitive, sure, but in a healthy way. I just wanted to be the best, to discover and create things that would change the course of history. I wanted to be remembered for my advances in the field. I didn’t expect for some spoiled brat to come into my lab and take my resources from me.”

  “What did I take from you? Besides, if you were so threatened by my skill, why didn’t I make you a better scientist? That’s what healthy competition is supposed to do.”

  Bretton clenched his teeth. “You forced me to take drastic measures,” he spat. “If you would have just let me do my work without trying to be a superstar, then I wouldn’t have had to work so quickly and recklessly. I’m sure you tell yourself whatever you need to so you can sleep at night, but you need to know that you’re responsible for what has happened to this city. As thousands of people die, know that this is a direct result of your actions.”

  Elaina took a deep breath. She wasn’t sure if Bretton was ever a rational person, but he certainly took a dive off the deep end. She wanted to make sure that justice was served. Even if it meant that she had to put her virus studies on the backburner. She could not work in a field where Dr. Vincent could carry on as he pleased.

  Elaina had had enough of his insane accusations. She just wanted to get to work. She had been in a holding cell, trying to convince the military police that she was innocent and that she wanted to try to fix things. She wasn’t sure if they believed her that she didn’t commit the original crime, but they seemed convinced that she wanted to find a cure.

  She was, quite frankly, surprised when the colonel asked her what it would take to correctly get the job done. She quickly found out that he didn’t mean compensation either. She quickly told him that she had already started working on an antidote and that she just needed a little more time to perfect it. She was fairly certain it worked for her strain, but she needed to make sure that it worked for Bretton’s strain.

  The fact that the military would even suggest torturing their own citizens in order to motivate them to do work for them was horrifying. Elaina didn’t want to work for an employer who treated their employees poorly, but she didn’t think of working on the cure in their labs as actually working for them. She was working for herself and the rest of humanity. What the military wanted to do with her cure once it left the lab was beyond her concern as long as everyone who needed it could get it.

  “Doctor Vincent,” she said softly, hoping he’d calm down enough to end their conversation. She wanted to get back to her lab. “Is there anything else you want to discuss? Otherwise, I would like to go back to my holding cell. I’m supposed to have a meeting with the colonel,” she lied to get her out of the uncomfortable situation.

  He stared, unblinking, at her. “You’re not working on the cure, are you?”

  “No,” she lied again. “I thought you said you had it covered.”

  He glared at her. “You little bitch, you’re working on this behind my back.”

  “This is beyond your expertise, Vincent,” she retorted. “What difference does it make if the cure is finished soon? Do you want me to tell everyone that you figured it out? I’ll do that if that’s what it takes.”

  “You can’t be trusted. Maybe I should just keep you here.”

  “Is anyone out there?” Elaina yelled toward the door. “It’s time for me to go.”

  “You’re not going to take me down, Elaina Morgan. I won’t stand for it.”

  “Please hurry,” she yelled, feeling nervous.

  The guard walked in and unlocked the handcuffs. Elaina rubbed her sore wrist.

  “You’ve become unstable,” she said, turning back to him. “You’re a good scientist, but you’ll never be great if you don’t learn how to control yourself.”

  “Good?” he scoffed, reaching into his lab coat pocket. “I think I’m on the verge of genius.”

  When the guard turned his back, Bretton lunged at Elaina, sticking her in the belly with a syringe. It happened so quickly and unexpectedly that she couldn’t react quickly enough to stop him.

  “What was that?” she cried, holding her stomach. He hadn’t been gentle with the needle, and a tiny drop of blood appeared on her shirt at the site of the sharp pain.

  His only response was a sly smirk. His silence was telling, and she feared the worst. In a lab full of deadly viruses, there was a good chance that there was something sinister coursing through her veins. She wasn’t sure whether the guard had seen what had happened, or he just didn’t care.

  Bretton was quickly ushered away, and Elaina was left to figure out how she was going to survive this infection without a sure-fire antidote.

  Elaina wasn’t sure if her sudden dizziness was from the virus or from fear, but she sat down on the cool concrete floor before she fainted. She needed to get up and do something about the injection, but her legs felt numb. She wanted Natalia or Alec—anybody—to come calm her down. She wasn’t sure if she could go on in the state she was in. What would happen if the infection took over her mind? There would be no one left on Earth who knew the virus like Elaina did.

  She closed her eyes and thought about her sister before her early death. She was so sweet and calm, even in terrible situations. When Lily was diagnosed with cancer, Elaina remembered that she was the one who comforted her family members when it should have been the other way around. Lily had a way of assuring everyone that they would be fine, even when she couldn’t be sure of it. Even on her deathbed, Elaina didn’t fear for her sister because Lily had convinced her that everything would be okay.

  Elaina pretended that her sister was in the room with her, telling her to get up and save herself.

  “Okay, Lily,” she said, pulling the familiar vial from its safe spot in her jacket, “Let’s see what you can do.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Alec watched from his bunk as the armed
guards performed their security checks. They would not be bringing any more residents into the quarantine, so all of the doors had to be sealed and locked. Alec rolled over on his back, quietly waiting for night to fall.

  He had almost completed his first day in the decontamination camp, and it had gone slowly. After being on the run in the city, on high alert at all hours of the day, being in a blank, sterile environment was incredibly boring. He couldn’t stand having nothing productive to do.

  It was strange watching the soldiers mill about, something that he had experience doing in his line of work. But there was something he didn’t trust about them. They gave him limited information and strict orders. He had tried to calmly ask if he would get his gun back when he left the camp, but he was only met with noncommittal answers.

  When he spoke louder, with more authority, he was ordered to return to his bunk. If he could not comply with orders, he would be segregated from the group and placed in a solitary cell, as opposed to the group cells their bunks were in. He obeyed, annoyed and defeated. He didn’t want to fight with anyone—he just wanted answers and he wanted his concerns to be listened to.

  He thought that, as a cop, his profession would gain him a little more respect around the camp, but to the soldiers, he was just another civilian who had committed no crime except for staying alive under present circumstances. Instead of fleeing the city or illegally bribing officers, he had done his duty to serve and protect. His repayment was to be treated like a criminal.

  Alec felt like he needed to talk to Natalia, but she was currently sitting on her bed, crying and throwing expletives wherever they seemed to stick. Will was next to her, a reassuring arm around her shoulders, nodding along with her story. There wasn’t room for Alec over there. He had pieced together what had happened to Natalia, so there was nothing left to learn.

  What he really wanted was for Natalia to tell him that she had made a mistake, and that the girl he knew as Lainey was not Elaina Morgan, mass murderer, after all.

  He once had a girlfriend who’d lied about all sorts of stupid things. She would tell him that he couldn’t go over to her place because they were in the middle of fumigating and it would be too dangerous to go in. In reality, she was hiding the fact that she would have other men over at late hours of the night. She’d tell him that she was deathly allergic to leafy greens and to make sure that none of her food contained any. Later, he found out that she was just a picky eater and didn’t want to have to pretend to like vegetables.

  The list of petty lies went on, but even then, Alec struggled to part ways with her. He knew that she was no good for him, but he couldn’t help but hang on to every word and try to keep up. When she eventually dumped him because he worked too much and couldn’t devote enough time to her, he was devastated, but with time, he felt great relief. He was relieved that there was nothing keeping him in a toxic relationship and that he no longer felt the desire to be with someone who made him feel terrible.

  Alec hoped that he would soon feel that way about Elaina. He hated the fact that he had grown attached to her in the first place, but he despised himself for continuing to have feelings for her that he just couldn’t shake. As he waited out his time in quarantine, he waited for time to heal the wounds left by her lies.

  Natalia seemed sure that Elaina hadn’t done anything wrong. Natalia was a child, though, so he wasn’t convinced that he could trust her judgment. She was a bright girl, but she had gone through a lot with Elaina. It would make sense that she would side with the person who saved her from a few scary situations.

  What he really needed was to hear Elaina tell him the truth. It probably wouldn’t change his current perception of her, but it would give him the closure he needed. He needed to know why she would do something so careless and dangerous because the Elaina he knew wasn’t like that at all. She was intelligent, independent, and caring. He saw the way she’d cared for a girl that she didn’t know very well and wondered why there was such a disconnect between the girl he’d tried to protect and the one on the news.

  Alec got up to walk around as he was starting to go stir crazy in the confinements of the bunks. But there was really nowhere for him to go. The cafeteria had closed until breakfast, the tiny recreation room had been sealed, and even the bathrooms only had two tiny stalls and a shower. There was nowhere to go but his own bed.

  After stretching out, he returned to his bunk and tried to will himself to sleep. But rest didn’t come for Alec, who had spent the last few days in and out of consciousness. It was much to early in the evening to go to bed, and Natalia and Will’s discussions from the corner weren’t helping.

  “Alec Lawrence,” a voice over the loudspeaker said. “Please report to the recreation hall immediately.”

  Natalia’s and Will’s heads turned his direction. He shrugged his shoulders at them and left his bunk. He didn’t know what they wanted with him, but he was a little relieved to have a reason to leave the bunk.

  An officer met him in the open space and escorted him to a small office off the side of the decontamination unit. He gestured to a short chair, and Alec sat down, his knees rising above his waist.

  The man, who later introduced himself as the colonel, peered down at him from his elevated seat behind the desk. Alec felt small, but he wouldn’t let them play mind games with him.

  “Officer Lawrence,” the colonel boomed. “I understand that you are one of Elaina Morgan’s accomplices.”

  “Accomplices?” he interrupted. “Hell no. I didn’t even know she was Elaina Morgan until I got here. I thought she was just some woman who got left behind in the virus and needed a little help.”

  “So you weren’t helping her escape?”

  “I only wanted to help her escape the virus, not the law. You know it’s part of my job description to capture criminals. If I knew what I know now, I would have never let her get away. I was on duty when things really got bad. I could have arrested her and brought her down to the station days ago. I just didn’t know.”

  The colonel studied Alec’s face, searching for a hint of a lie. When he seemed satisfied with his answer, he continued.

  “We need all the information you have about Elaina. I understand that you were made to believe that she was someone else, but there’s a good chance she let some information about herself slip out along the way. What do you know about her?”

  Alec thought hard. They’d had a few long discussions, but they didn’t have anything to say about personal details. When he thought about it, Elaina had been very careful to conceal anything that could identify her.

  “I didn’t learn much about her, to be honest. She seemed like a very nice, normal person. She met up with Natalia when she saved her from being attacked. I thought they were sisters. Elaina just seemed so protective of her and wanted to make sure she was okay. I remember her being very anxious to move on from our shelters. She came from a school but wanted to get to a hospital. I didn’t think that was a good idea, so we stayed in a shipping container instead.”

  “I see,” the colonel said, writing down a few notes. “How else might you describe Ms. Morgan?”

  From the back of his mind, words like quiet, sweet, and beautiful came to the forefront, as did liar and traitor.

  “I don’t know. She never gave me any reason to doubt her during the time we spent together. She was a fine person and a good travel companion. I was just trying to do my job and save as many innocent lives as possible.”

  “And did you engage in a romantic or physical relationship with Ms. Morgan in this time?”

  Alec blushed hard. “No,” he said quickly. “It was strictly cordial.”

  “Thank you for your honesty,” the colonel said, shutting his notebook. “Now, I’d like to ask you a question from one professional to another.”

  “Sure.”

  “Given everything you know about Elaina Morgan now, what do you think should be done with her? You’ve seen a lot of criminals in your line of work—she’s got to
be the most dangerous of them all. We have a lot of people out there who want justice, and it’ll be impossible to get her in a courtroom for a very long time to come. What, in your opinion, would be a reasonable punishment for her until then?”

  Alec knew where he was going with this and felt sick. He hated Elaina, but he didn’t want to think about the cruel and unusual punishment that would probably be inflicted upon her. If she were found guilty of her crimes, it seemed reasonable for her to sit in jail for the next few decades. But he didn’t want her to get hurt. If the Elaina he met was even remotely her genuine self, she didn’t deserve poor treatment.

  “I’m afraid I’m not qualified to speak on these manners,” Alec answered, standing up from his chair. “Is that all you need from me?”

  The colonel looked back at his notes, disappointed that he couldn’t get more from Alec. “Yes, that is all. Thank you for your cooperation.”

  Before Alec left, he made one last request.

  “Can I talk to her?”

  “To Elaina? I don’t think so. If you want her to know you’re disappointed in her, I’m sure she’s already figured that out. Besides, she’s meeting with our head of the research department. She’ll have to be back in her cell soon. There are reports of infected citizens moving closer to the area. Of course, it’s nothing that we can’t handle, but we’ll be under lockdown, just to be safe.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s nothing to worry about. Just sit tight and keep our conversation between us. I know I can trust you to keep the others calm in case things get noisy out there.”

  “Sure,” Alec said softly. “Let me know if I can be of further service to you.”