by Kat Stiles
“Is Dad around?”
“Yes, he’s right here. I love you, baby. I’m so proud of you!”
“I love you too, Mom.”
“Hold on, here he is,” she said.
“Is that my Dizzy Lizzy?” he said, his warm laughter ringing through. It was a name he came up with when I was four and loved to spin around and fall down. It was before I was tested and labeled a genius, before my penchant for science was discovered, before I suddenly had to grow up. I remembered all those fun times with him, laughing until my sides hurt.
“How is your breathing, are you doing all right?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m fine, darling. You needn’t worry about me.” He took a deep breath and exhaled. “See? Never better.”
He must’ve known that wouldn’t fool me. I’d researched COPD for years and knew it wasn’t always a constant thing. For some people, it was the flare-ups that made life miserable.
“Fine, I’ll ask Mom about it.” Though I didn’t get along with her the same way I did with my father, I knew she wouldn’t try to bullshit me.
“Oh pet, it’s just the same. Good days and bad days. It is what it is.”
That kind of ambivalent answer only made me worry more. “Have you had an attack?”
The silence on the other end was answer enough.
“It was outpatient, so not so bad,” my mother said, taking the phone back. “The doctor’s trying a new prescription.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Trelegy something?”
“I’m familiar with it. Is he doing any better on it?” This wasn’t the first change in meds. He was previously on a drug that got him so nauseated, he barely ate.
“So far, so good, sweetie.”
“Be careful around sick people—that drug makes it easier to contract pneumonia.”
“Will do. So, how are you? Been on any dates, are you seeing someone?”
I cringed. No matter what we were discussing, somehow, she always managed to inquire about my love life.
“Too busy working,” I said, with an exhausted sigh.
“Well that’s your problem! Take some time off, go to a resort and meet a cute guy or two.”
“Uh-huh.” I remembered this conversation. We’d had it periodically throughout my college years. Sometimes I even got an anecdote from her youth which led me to believe she was one of the popular girls. My mother and I couldn’t be more opposite. Skipping five grades branded me an uber nerd for my entire public school experience. I couldn’t find a girl that would even talk to me to be my friend, and guys… None of them even spared me a glance. They all thought I was just a kid.
“I’m serious! You need to put yourself out there, have some fun before you get old like me.”
I smiled in spite of her persistence. “You know my policy, no drama.”
“Policy, what kind of way is that to live? You’ve got to be lonely all by yourself in that tiny apartment, no one to—”
“Birdie, please,” I heard my Dad say, using his pet name for her. “She’s doing brilliant research. She doesn’t have time to be ogled!”
I giggled. My father always got me. Whether or not my research was brilliant, he always had my back when my mother pestered me about dating.
“Don’t listen to her,” he said in a whisper voice, in control of the phone once more. “You’ve got your whole life for relationships. Just out of school, on the verge of the next major scientific discovery…” He coughed with an intensity that bothered me.
“Dad, are you okay?”
The phone was dropped or placed down somewhere; I couldn’t tell. I could just make out their voices in the background.
“You need to rest now," I heard my mother say.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said after the coughing ceased. “Always looking after me, Birdie.”
“Of course, I love you,” she said. “Come on, let’s get you settled.”
“Elizabeth, are you still there?” my mother asked, back on the phone.
“Is he all right?”
“Yes, baby, he… he just needs to rest.” There was an uncertainty to her voice that unnerved me.
“I should get to bed too,” I said, though it was still pretty early. “I’ve got a new project at work.”
“Oh really?”
“Yes, a novel virus,” I said, a little too exuberantly. “There was a outbreak in Latin America.”
“Hmm,” she said, and with that short syllable, I knew she thought the work was beneath me. She never approved of my working for a private company. She envisioned a loftier career for me, curing cancer or something else equally impressive.
“Beats erectile dysfunction, right?” I said.
She laughed a genuine, hearty kind of laugh. “You have a point.”
After a brief pause, she continued, “Gotta go, sweetie. Have to make sure he takes his pills. Love you.”
“Love you too, Mom.”
I ended the call and broke out my laptop. My research on COPD was an ongoing side project, fueled by my father’s condition. The available prescription drugs on the market were questionable treatments at best, most of them with several undesirable side effects. My father needed a real cure fast, before his condition worsened.
I felt cold. Not just my skin, but my whole body—my blood, my bones, my eyes. It was everywhere.
My father smiled at me from an unfamiliar bed, telling me not to worry. But something was wrong. Not just with me, but the whole world. Somehow, I knew thousands had died, and more were dying. I watched helplessly as people became cold, and there was nothing I could do about it.
A dark figure in the shadows stared at me. I didn’t see him as much as feel him. I ran until my lungs burned but I couldn’t get away. The most sinister laugh sounded in my ears. And then a single word: “Welcome.”
I gasped as I sat up in bed. I’d had nightmares before, but this one seemed so real. The world was so bleak, so completely devoid of hope. I shuddered. In the past, my dreams sometimes had a way of coming true, especially the vivid ones. That feeling of helplessness and dread stayed with me, haunting me as I got ready for work.
When I arrived at work, I was delighted to see my requisition forms were approved, and to speed things up a little, I made arrangements to pick up the vampire bats I needed for testing from a local reserve that housed a few colonies. My assistant Amy was bored and asked if she could come with me. I felt myself cringe automatically, though I didn’t intend to. I nodded and she practically hugged me.
“Oooh, a field trip!” Her smile was the most cheerful thing I’d seen in a week. “So nice to get out of this weird ass bunker.”
She was right about that; it did feel like a bunker. Because this was the president’s personal company and the research was top secret, the lab itself was underground. The building above the ground was leased out office space. It was predominantly occupied by startup app companies, the most ridiculous one being the cat butthole filter app, which as you may have guessed, projects a cat butthole on any image you provide. It was popular with the millennial crowd for half a minute. Needless to say, turnover was high upstairs and leases went month to month. But the dreamers above ground didn’t know about the lab—it wasn’t accessible via the elevators and there were no company signs anywhere. We had our own secret entrance, which sounds cool, but ended up feeling kinda creepy and sad, like a mistress leaving her lover’s house through the back door so the neighbors wouldn’t see. For an extrovert like Amy, it was probably unbearable. I bet she liked to people watch, just for fun. I cringed at the thought.
“I thought bats creeped you out,” I said, as I grabbed my purse.
“No more so than Charlie over there.” I glanced over my shoulder at the scientist she named and noticed him gazing longingly at her. “Didn’t even do a weave, and he’s still staring at me.”
Her hair was shorter than usual, which led me to conclude that was likely her real hair. The short, wavy curls were still lovely, and
I wondered if she didn’t realize she was one of the pretty girls. That she could come in dressed in a potato sack with a baseball cap on backwards and still have men drooling over her.
“I think he’s in love.” I smiled, suppressing a laugh.
“Who Charlie? Oh, he probably just needs a release. Like everybody else here.”
I burst out laughing. And then it occurred to me she was including me in that statement when a crooked smile appeared on her face. I couldn’t deny it, she was right. Jacob in cancer research was the only one who wasn’t frustrated, and that was simply because he was newly married. The rest of us were hopelessly socially awkward, too focused on the work, or most likely, a combination of both.
“Yeah, yeah. Come on, let’s go.” We checked out with the boss on our way out and left. As we emerged from the building, the sunlight hit my face and I realized it had been awhile since I last felt it. Between the late nights and early mornings at the lab, I would often go days, sometimes weeks without seeing it.
“Feels like we’re sneaking out, playing hooky,” Amy said, and smirked. “You ever do that in school?”
I think she knew the answer to that, even before I raised my eyebrow.
“Liz, one of these days you’re going to surprise me. All the little wild stories I make up about everyone, I just know that yours is going to happen.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, as we entered my small car. It was an electric model, a gift from my parents after I graduated college.
“I like to imagine secret lives for everyone. Rob, for example, is a spy working undercover. He’s into muscle cars, fast women, toy poodles and collecting ceramic plates from the 1980s.”
I cracked up. Well at least one of those may be true… “And what is my story?”
“Nope, I never tell people their own stories. But trust me, it’s a good one.” She smiled as her eyes wandered, taking in the buildings we passed as we made our way to the highway.
“You have too much time on your hands,” I said in a joking way, but her expression became serious.
“Can’t argue with that.”
It was true, I didn’t trust her with much in my experiments. But it wasn’t because I didn’t trust her in particular, it was because I didn’t trust anyone other than myself. I saw her credentials when John hired her—she was a brilliant student. Her study on environmental factors and behaviors affecting test subjects, and how it correlated to the efficacy of the drug in question was groundbreaking. I changed my testing procedures in light of her findings. There was no doubt she’d become a great scientist in her own right. But my peers had let me down so many times in the past, I just wasn’t ready to jeopardize a project on the chance of her being any different, any less distracted.
As the traffic started to get congested on the highway, I considered the situation. As far as lab techs went, she was good. If I didn’t use her, she would eventually get bored and request a different position or leave. “They’ll be more work to do with this project,” I said quietly.
“Mm hmm. Whatever you say, boss.”
She didn’t sound angry, maybe more ambivalent. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings or lose her, but I couldn’t give her more. I had to get a scope on what kind of drugs we’d be testing, the trials we would run, and other details about the project before I could begin to think about giving her a part of it. And with the shaky ground I stood on, one mistake would shut the whole thing down.
“So why vampire bats?” she asked. I was delighted at the change of subject and launched into the meager information I found about the history of the first cases, and how DESVID-2 morphed from animal to human.
“Is this virus like SARS?” The dread in her voice was noticeable.
“It shares some characteristics. But if my suspicions are right, it’s going to be much worse.”
“What are you thinking?”
“That more people may have it than is known, that some people are carriers and don’t even know it.”
There was a silence for a while. I knew she was aware of the ramifications of a deadly, asymptomatic flu-like virus. Up until this point, I hadn’t said my suspicions out loud, and hearing the words made it somehow more real, more correct. If it were true, what I saw in my nightmare was only the beginning.
At the reserve, we met up with the contact I had spoken with, Ethan. He looked to be twenty-something and a reformed emo—still wearing all black, and with black hair but no eyeliner. When he smiled as we shook hands, I noticed his canines were sharpened. It was unusual, sure, but not unheard of. Cosmetic dentistry was a thing in some circles here.
“How long has this reserve been here?” Amy asked.
“I was able to get funding for it about a year ago,” Ethan said. “The bats were already here, it was just a matter of getting the grant and the land protected, so developers wouldn’t chase them away.”
He seemed proud of that accomplishment, and he was right to be. Getting the cooperation of politicians and past the red tape of bureaucracy in this part of the country was a damn miracle.
“How many bats would you say are here in total?” I asked.
“There’s no way to know for sure, but I suspect they number in the thousands. I’ve recorded six different varieties as well.”
“That’s amazing!” Amy said, as she focused on a small cage on the floor. A blanket partially covered it, but I could see at least one bat hanging from the bars on the top of the cage. “Is this them?”
He nodded. “The vampire bat colony has flourished, so I could spare some.”
“Thank you, Ethan,” I said. “This will go a long way in my research.”
Amy took a closer look. “Ooh they creep me out! I can handle mice all day, but bats?” She shuddered as she withdrew.
“They’re incredible creatures, actually,” Ethan said, and I swear his eyes traveled the length of Amy’s body. “They have a tremendous sense of loyalty to their family. They take care of each other.”
I wrote a check out to the reserve and handed it to him. “Thanks again.”
He grabbed the cage and followed us back to my car, relaying care information for the animals as he gently placed the cage in my back seat. Then he shook my hand once again. “Good luck with your research.”
I nodded. He waved goodbye in a cute little lovesick way to Amy on the other side of the car. She smiled and he reciprocated, grinning ear to ear.
Once the doors were shut and we were driving away, I asked, “Is it always like that?”
“What are you talking about?” Amy asked.
“With men.”
“Oh you mean how he was acting? No, just sometimes. Not everyone finds me irresistible.”
I smiled. “You seem to have that effect on them.”
“I think it’s my perfume.”
At that I laughed. “Yeah, that must be it. But have you run a trial yet? Proven your theory?”
“Perfume is too expensive. I can’t waste it on scientific curiosity.”
“Yet you wasted it on Ethan,” I pointed out.
“He could’ve been hot, you don’t know. Or he could’ve had second thoughts about selling the bats.” She cracked a smile. “It’s good to be prepared.”
“Very true.” I hadn’t really spent much time with her, but I was beginning to appreciate Amy.
We made it back to the lab, and everyone was standing around the big screen tv in the break lounge. Across the screen was the headline: Breaking News: Hundreds of confirmed cases of DESVID-2 virus in Latin America, and 12 fatalities. A reporter spewed more statistics about the virus, but then suddenly stopped speaking and looked down, her hand on the tiny electronics in her ear. Her jaw dropped, as she quietly said, “You’re certain?” She cleared her throat and focused back on the camera. “This just in, there’s been a case of the DESVID-2 virus confirmed in New York. More details to follow.”
“Oh my God, it’s here already?” Amy said.
The other scientists looked at
us both, apparently just noticing our presence.
John rose from his chair. “Elizabeth, we need to talk.”
Chapter 3
John’s words registered in my brain. I mean they must’ve because I found myself following him to his office. But I couldn’t stop thinking about that news report. It’s spread here already? The outbreak only made the news yesterday. Unless…
“He kept this under wraps, didn’t he?” President Lamp was a lot of things: misogynist, hypocrite, megalomaniac, racist, and good old boy, but selfish to the point of jeopardizing everyone’s heath? I didn’t expect that.
The look of exhaustion on John’s face was answer enough. “I just found out about it. Apparently, he was warned late last year.”
I suspected he controlled the news, but I didn’t think he had that strong of a stranglehold on it. I can’t believe I didn’t see a single mention of it all this time.
“Now that it’s reached our shores…” John looked down, and I knew what was coming next.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “No, absolutely not.”
John ran his fingers through his hair, still looking down. “He hasn’t given the order, but you and I both know it’s coming.”
This wasn’t the first time a project I was involved in was ripped out from under me. “But it’s your call, right?”
He laughed as his gaze met mine. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”
I folded my arms. This time I wasn’t going to back down. “I want to be there.”
“What?”
“For the briefing, when he gives the order. I want him to tell me to my face.”
He scratched his head. “What difference will that make?”
Likely none. But it would be nice to see the president squirm for a bit. Strong, intelligent women were like kryptonite to him. “I’m the one who’s done all the groundwork, got the bats and the samples flown in. Frederick already has his hands full!” I realized my voice crescendoed as I spoke, and I instantly regretted it.