by Mira Grant
He was silent.
“Fine. Whatever.” Making my voice light was almost impossible, but I did it. Somehow. “I guess I’ll just publish everything I’ve got here, let people with a more scientific background than mine sort it out. Right?”
“Shaun…” He sighed again. “Yes. Yes, she might have recovered. Might. The tests we ran on her blood were inconclusive.”
My vision flashed red. The CDC had George’s blood for weeks after her death. Logically, I knew they’d been using that time for tests, as well as decontamination, but I’d never really allowed myself to think about it. The idea of them doing God knows what to her had never been a pleasant one, and the more I knew, the less pleasant it became. “You’re an asshole,” I said, conversationally. “We trusted you.”
“Shaun—”
“Fuck off.” I hung up and tossed the burn phone back to Dr. Abbey. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” She tucked the phone into the pocket of her lab coat. “Satisfied now?”
“No. But it’s a start.” I turned to Kelly. “It’s your turn to talk, Doc. Make it count.”
“I…”
I glared at her. “Talk.”
She talked.
She kept her eyes on the floor the whole time, her voice tight and bordering on monotone. It was like she was trying to convince herself that she was giving a lecture, rather than being interrogated at gunpoint. The few times she did glance up, her eyes were filled with guilt, darting between us almost too rapidly to be followed. Then she’d look down again, her monotonous monologue never stopping. The expression on Dr. Abbey’s face—calculating and predatory—probably didn’t help. Then again, the fact that Becks was holding a gun pointed at the Doc’s head probably helped even less.
“The first reservoir conditions were identified in 2018. Four years isn’t long in human terms, but it’s centuries in virus generations. The Kellis-Amberlee virus had been replicating the whole time. Spreading. Changing. I mean, the first infected didn’t demonstrate mob behavior, but they started by the early twenties. That wasn’t an adaptation on the part of the infected. It was an adaptation in the behavior of the viral substrains driving them. Six of the fifteen strains we had identified by that point would cause the pack behavior. Nine wouldn’t. Ten years later, we could find only two strains that didn’t come with that instinct to infect before eating. Outside the ones we had stored in our freezers, that is.” She hesitated, shoulders tightening for an instant. Then, like some impossibly difficult decision had been made, she continued: “We tried cross-infection. Well. When I say ‘we,’ I mean scientists working at the CDC and USAMRIID. I wasn’t working with… I wasn’t a part of that project.” Kelly glanced up again, eyes searching desperately for a sympathetic face. “I wasn’t involved.”
“That’s when Dr. Shoji went off the reservation—he stuck it out as long as he could, but those cross-infection tests were the last straw,” said Dr. Abbey, in a casual, matter-of-fact tone. “You want to talk about the cross-infection tests? What those entailed, precisely? I’m sure these nice people would really love the gory details.”
Kelly took a deep breath as she looked back down. “They took… volunteers…”
“Prisoners,” said Dr. Abbey.
“They volunteered,” said Kelly, a stubborn note in her voice. “Yes, they were prisoners. They had no chance of parole, no chance of ever being released back into the public, and use of human test subjects has a… it has a long and time-honored place in medical science. Sometimes it’s the only thing you can do. That’s how they discovered that yellow fever was spread by mosquitoes, you know. How… how they proved that smallpox inoculation worked. A lot of people’s lives were saved by human testing. When there wasn’t any other choice. When there wasn’t any other way.”
“How many lives did this save?” asked Dr. Abbey.
“What did you do?” asked Alaric.
His was the question Kelly chose to answer. Darting a glance toward him, she said, “The choice was offered to certain inmates whose viral profile matched the criteria. Let us inject them with a potential vaccine and, if they recovered, we’d enter them in the witness-protection program. Whole new identities. Whole new lives. They could start over.”
“If they lived,” said Alaric, softly.
Kelly winced.
“Come on, princess,” said Becks. “Story hour isn’t over yet. I want to know what happens next.”
“The volunteers were injected with a serum containing deactivated viral particles from the opposing strain. The theory was that maybe one strain would destroy the other. Best-case scenario, they’d both destroy the other, and we’d finally have a treatment. Worst-case scenario…” Her voice tapered off.
Dr. Abbey took up the thread when it became clear that Kelly wasn’t going to, saying, “Worst-case scenario is what they got. Not only did every single one of their ‘volunteers’ go into spontaneous amplification when the two strains met, but they bred a new strain—one that increased mob behavior in exposed infected. They fucked up gloriously. And then they swept it all under the rug, with the rest of their failures.”
“What did you want us to do?” Kelly’s head snapped up, eyes narrowing as she glared at Dr. Abbey. “Did you want us to just sit back and watch the virus do its thing, not even try to find the answer? Yes, people died. Yes, mistakes were made, and mistakes will be made, and someday, maybe, because of those mistakes, we’ll have a cure. Wouldn’t you like that? A cure? An end to all the fear? Because that seems like a really good thing to me, and if I have to work with the CDC to make it happen, that’s what I’m going to do.”
“I’d love that idea, if I thought it was anything but a pipe dream.” We all turned toward Maggie. She’d moved to sit on the floor next to Joe, one arm slung lazily across the dog’s back. She looked completely at peace, despite the fact that she was leaning against an animal that could take off her face with a single bite. “People laugh at me because I watch a lot of horror movies, but horror movies are educational, if you know how to pay attention to them. They tell you about societal trends—about the things that people are afraid of. In the ones before the Rising, they were afraid of actual things. The new ones… they’re just afraid of not being afraid.”
Kelly snorted. “No one makes horror movies anymore.”
“Yes, they do,” said Maggie. “These days, everything’s a horror movie.”
“To get back to the original point, before we went on this fascinating and informative tangent, you said the virus was adapting,” said Alaric. He leaned forward, eyes fixed on Kelly. The Newsie in him sensed blood in the water. I could see it in his face. “No mob behavior, then, mob behavior. What are the reservoir conditions supposed to do?”
“No one really knows.” Kelly stole a glance in my direction, testing my reaction, before focusing on Alaric. She sounded less like she was lecturing and more like she was trying to make herself understood, like it suddenly mattered that we understand. “We think they stem from exposure to the live virus that somehow fails to cause full amplification. You see it mostly in people who risked exposure when they were under the threshold weight, although there have been exceptions. We’re still trying to figure out what causes the exceptions. Why it happens in some adults, and not in others. We don’t really know yet, and it’s not the sort of thing you can easily test.”
“So wait,” said Becks. “Are you saying that people who got exposed when they were really little, they get reservoir conditions instead of getting the whole zombie combo pack?”
Kelly nodded. “Exactly.”
My eyes were normal until I was almost at the amplification threshold, said George thoughtfully. The retinal distortion didn’t kick in until then.
“I know,” I mumbled, keeping my voice low, so as to hopefully avoid reminding my team that I was crazy. Louder, I asked, “What does that mean, exactly?”
“It means their bodies were exposed to live Kellis-Amberlee when they were still incapable
of suffering the full effects of the virus,” said Dr. Abbey. There was a lunatic good cheer in her voice, like being allowed to make that statement was a great and glorious gift. “Ever hear of chickenpox?”
“Well, yeah,” said Becks. “It’s part of the standard set of field vaccines.”
“For a long time, they didn’t have a vaccine for chickenpox—it was a childhood disease, and almost everybody caught it. Only that was a good thing back then, because most kids get over the chickenpox pretty easy. They itch for a week and then they’re fine. Better than fine. Having the virus once makes them resistant to catching it again, and for adults, chickenpox is no laughing matter. It can cause permanent nerve damage, severe scarring, all sorts of nasty side effects.r Dr. Abbey looked placidly at Kelly. “People used to have chickenpox parties, where they’d deliberately expose their young children to somebody who was already sick.”
“That’s disgusting,” said Becks.
“Now that we have a vaccine, sure. Back then, it was a way to save your children from suffering a lot more. It wasn’t safe—kids died of chickenpox—but it was a damn sight better than the alternative.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
I do, said George, very quietly.
“I do,” echoed Alaric. I turned to look at him, and he said, “When infants are exposed to live Kellis-Amberlee, they can’t amplify, but they still get sick. Only they can get better, can’t they? They can actually recover from the virus.”
“Bingo.” Dr. Abbey, touching her nose with her left index finger while she pointed at Alaric with her right. “Princess CDC, tell the nice man what he’s won!”
Kelly was silent.
I swallowed away the dryness in my throat, and said, quietly, “Please.”
My voice seemed very loud in the enclosed space of the lab. Kelly turned to face me and said, “Yes, sometimes early exposure can lead to individuals successfully fighting off a live Kellis-Amberlee infection. It’s impossible to run a standard blood test on an infant, because they can’t amplify, so we can’t find the usual amplification markers. But they’ll get sick. It’s been seen. And then, after a little while, they aren’t sick anymore.” Kelly stopped, choosing her next words with care: “Most of the individuals who undergo a potential infectious episode as infants develop one of the reservoir conditions when they get older, because their immune systems are preconditioned to respond.”
“Their bodies remember that the virus is bad, and they set up their own little kennels, filled with their own little packs of domesticated viral bodies,” clarified Dr. Abbey, leaning down to thump Joe on the side. He looked up at her adoringly, tongue lolling. “That’s what humanity does when faced with wolves. We take them in, tame them, and teach them how to keep us safe.”
“Yes,” agreed Kelly. “The reservoir conditions are a marker that the immune system has learned it needs to fight back when Kellis-Amberlee starts taking over.”
“That’s why you said she would’ve gotten better, isn’t it?” Kelly didn’t answer. I slammed my fist into the safety-glass window, hard enough to make everyone jump—everyone but Dr. Abbey, who looked like she’d plugged herself into some inner reservoir of contentment. “Answer the damn question, Doc.”
“Yes.” Kelly looked up at me, expression drawn. “Dr. Wynne and I reviewed her test results. Her immune system was already starting to respond to the new infection when the test was taken. The chances that she would have been able to fight off the infection were very good. Better than eighty percent.”
“Spontaneous remission,” said Alaric, sounding awed.
I didn’t take my eyes off Kelly as I said, “Explain.”
“It’s supposed to be an urban legend. Supposedly, there are people who’ve been infected—like, full-on ready-to-eat-the-neighbors infected—but they miraculously recovered before they could be put down. Nobody ever seems to know anyone who’s had a spontaneous remission. It’s always a guy who knows a guy who used to know a guy. But the stories keep cropping up, and then the CDC reminds everyone that there’s no cure and they get written off again.”
“Guess it’s not that much of a legend, huh, Doc?” I glanced toward Dr. Abbey. “Is that what we’re talking about here? This remission thing?”
“The CDC is telling the truth about one thing: There’s no cure for Kellis-Amberlee, and if someone offered me one, I wouldn’t take it, for a lot of reasons. They’re also lying, because if you can live with the virus from the time you’re born, why the hell should it be able to wake up but not able to go back to sleep?” Dr. Abbey smiled encouragingly. “Isn’t story hour fun?”
“Like a heart attack,” I said.
“Two in ten thousand,” said Kelly sharply.
“What?” I asked.
“Two in ten thousand.” She stood, ignoring the gun Becks had trained on her. “That’s how many people with existing reservoir conditions are likely to recover from a live infection. Two in ten thousand. No one who didn’t have a reservoir condition has ever recovered. The rate of recovery seems to be tied to the density of the viral particles in the individual reservoir, but we don’t have any hard-and-fast proof of that. It’s not like we’ve had much opportunity for study, since you can’t exactly get volunteers for that sort of thing.”
“Not even from the prison system,” deadpanned Maggie.
Kelly winced again. I didn’t really give a fuck. If she wanted to feel guilty, she’d damn well earned her guilt. “It’s not like that,” she said.
“Bullshit,” said Dr. Abbey. “There are plenty of ways to test that sort of thing. Take Joe. I exposed him as a puppy: He got sick, he got better, he developed his first reservoir condition. I exposed him again when he hit amplification weight: He got sick, he got better, he developed his second reservoir condition. At this point, I could bathe him in the damn virus and he wouldn’t amplify. He might get a little dehydrated and have some chest pains, but they’d pass quickly. Test passed.”
“How many puppies did you start with?” countered Kelly.
Dr. Abbey looked uncomfortable for the first time. “Joe wasn’t the first subject, true. But he’s been the most successful.”
“So wait a second,” said Becks. “Are you people saying what I think you’re saying?”
“That depends. Rebecca, do you think they’re saying that a person with a pronounced enough reservoir condition can come back from zombie-dom, and that we could intentionally give babies reservoir conditios by exposing them before they’re big enough to go zombie? Because that’s what I think they’re saying. But I’m the big, dumb Irwin, remember?” I punched the window again. “George was the smart one. Too bad she’s the one who died.”
“Two in ten thousand,” repeated Kelly, like it was some sort of magic charm. “Could you have pulled the trigger if you had that figure? Could you have put the gun to her head and let her go to keep anybody else from getting hurt if you knew there was a chance—even a tiny, tiny little chance—that she’d get better?”
No, said George.
“Yes,” I said, but there was no strength behind the word. I think everyone knew that I was lying. I don’t think any of them had the right to blame me.
Kelly shook her head. “Society would collapse. Everyone would start to think they were special, they would be the ones whose mothers or fathers or children would get better. They’d start hesitating before they fired.”
“Shoot first, ask questions later,” said Becks, very quietly. “I hate to say this, Shaun, but she’s right. If people stopped shooting, it’d be a bloodbath. Nobody would be willing to risk killing somebody who might recover.”
“And while they’re sick, they’re really sick. The virus isn’t any kinder to their bodies than it would be to yours, or to mine,” said Kelly. “They can hurt people, and they can infect people, before their fevers start to go down. Can you imagine? Getting bit, and then coming out of it and learning that you’d killed and eaten your entire family? And what happens if your family i
sn’t actually dead, just sick? As soon as you stop registering as part of the mob, they’ll rip you apart. We won during the Rising because we learned that once someone gets bitten, you shoot. Take that away, and we’re all going to die.”
“Nice speech, but there’s something you forgot, Doc,” I said, as mildly as I could.
“What’s that?”
“She,” I hooked a thumb toward Dr. Abbey, “managed to give a dog a reservoir condition. So why the fuck aren’t we starting a program to do that for people? Why are we just sitting back and… and not trying to change things?”
“Ask her how many of the puppies didn’t have to get bitten before they amplified,” Kelly countered.
“Aw, hell,” said Alaric. “Rick’s kid.”
“What?” asked Becks.
“He had a son. He also had a wife with ovarian KA. He did a piece for the site about it, before he went off to become vice president. Their son amplified as soon as he hit the threshold weight. He was born with the live virus in his blood, and he never managed to fight it off.” Alaric looked to Kelly. “That’s what you’re talking about, right?”
“It is.” She lifted her chin a little, trying to look confident. She was only succeeding in looking scared. “We can’t start a vaccination program unless you want to start turning every baby into a little time bomb. Maybe they fight it off and just have messed-up eyesight or weird headaches. Or maybe they’ll stay sick, and then one day, they’ll turn around and try to rip your throat out. We don’t have enough control over the virus to do it. And we can’t tell people because it changes things too much.” She shot a pleading look in my direction. “Your sister was passionate about the truth, Shaun, but there are truths the world isn’t ready to hear. There are truths that are just too big.”
“Who made you the judge of that?” I asked quietly.
“Nobody.” She shook her head. “There was nobody we could ask.”