Deadline (41 page)

“Just wondering.” I stepped to the side, sweeping one arm grandly toward the kitchen. “Ladies and gentlemen, Mahir Gowda!”

“Boss!” said Alaric, sounding delighted. As a Newsie, he answered directly to Mahir, and counted on Mahir to make me understand when I was being unreasonable. Having us both in the same house probably seemed like an excellent way to cut out the middleman. I couldn’t honestly say that he was wrong.

Becks didn’t do anything as gauche as shouting. Standing, she walked over to Mahir and threw her arms around his shoulders, hugging him tightly. He hugged her back, just as tightly. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said.

I looked away, feeling uncomfortably like a voyeur, and found myself looking at Kelly instead. She was watching the scene in front of her with an almost wistful
expression on her face, like a kid who wasn’t invited to the party.

She gave up her whole life to come here and tell us what she knew, and she can never go back. The people in this room, we’re all she has. And she’s never going to be part of things the way Mahir is.

“Right,” I muttered. Louder, pitched for an audience of people who actually existed
outside
my head, I said, “Something smells great, Maggie. Please tell me it’s dinner, and not a sadistic new kind of air freshener.” I brushed past Mahir and Becks, still embracing, and moved toward the counter.

Maggie flashed a smile my way. “Oh, it’s dinner. All the containers are labeled, and I made sure to get extra Aloo Gobi this time, so you won’t be able to eat it all.”

“You’re seriously underestimating my capacity for devouring curried cauliflower.” I reached for a plate.

That was the signal for everyone to start grabbing plates, utensils, and whatever combination of things they were planning to eat for dinner. Mahir ate like he was starving, and the rest of us weren’t much better. I wasn’t the only one who understood what Mahir’s arrival meant. This might be the last peaceful meal we had for a while, and none of us wanted to be the one to disrupt it.

Cramming six people around Maggie’s table was surprisingly easy. I’ve never known anyone who entertained as much as she does, or was as willing to adjust for strangers on a moment’s notice. Being in her kitchen was almost like being in one of those old pre-Rising TV shows, the ones where everyone seemed to wind up sitting around eating from the same bowl of mashed potatoes and talking about their day. We didn’t have mashed potatoes, and I wasn’t interested in sharing the
Aloo Gobi, but we did have rice and samosas and other things to pass around. Mahir turned out to be surprisingly good at talking to Kelly, who got a little more relaxed with every minute that passed.

The best intentions weren’t enough to stop the clock. All too soon, we were putting down our forks, finishing our drinks, and falling into an expectant silence. Maggie stood, starting to clear the table; Alaric and I moved to help her. She waved me back to my seat. “Stay where you are,” she said. “You’re going to need to ride herd on this madhouse, and that works better when you don’t have something to distract yourself.” She didn’t wave Alaric back down. I guess she figured he could do his part from the sink if he had to.

Mahir cleared his throat. “I’ll just go get a few things, shall I?”

“I think it’s about that time,” I agreed. “Get ready to explain some crazy science, Doc.”

Kelly smiled a little. “It’ll be my pleasure.”

Maggie returned to the table, handing me a Coke as she sat down to my left. Alaric sat next to Becks, leaving a space between us for Mahir. The air in the kitchen seemed to be getting heavy, pressing down on us like a lead weight.

It was almost a relief when Mahir returned with an armload of manila file folders, their contents bristling with multicolored tab dividers. At least this meant that we weren’t going to be waiting anymore. “I have virtual copies of everything here,” he said, dropping the files onto the table without any preamble. “I didn’t want to e-mail things, since there was a chance I was being watched after what happened with Dr. Christopher.”

“The Australian?” I asked.

Mahir nodded. “Precisely. I might not have been
under surveillance before that, but the odds increased rather substantially after I got someone deported. That’s when I realized it might be best for everyone if I came here.”

“Makes sense.” I glanced toward Alaric and Becks, saying, “One of the scientists Mahir went to talk to about Dr. Abbey’s research got kicked out of the country.”

Alaric whistled, long and low. “That’s not fooling around.”

“No, it’s not,” said Mahir, with dry gravity. “What we have here is a combination of the material that was originally sent to me, the material provided by Doctors Tiwari and Christopher, some supplemental research I was able to request from Dr. Shoji of the Kauai Institute of Virology before I felt it was unsafe to make any further out-of-country contacts, and finally, the files I was able to retrieve from Professor Brannon’s mail drop before it was shut down. I don’t have copies for everyone, but there’s enough here to keep us all predicting the end of the world until well past dawn.”

“Who’s Professor Brannon?” asked Becks. “Because I’m feeling a bit like I missed a memo somewhere.”

“Professor Brannon…” Alaric frowned. “He was a world-renowned expert in the behavior of Kellis-Amberlee. He spent his entire professional career identifying and studying viral substrains. He…” Alaric’s eyes went wide. “He shot himself last week. It was a devastating blow to the epidemiological community. No one saw it coming.”

“I’m afraid that was my fault.” Mahir handed him one of the file folders. “He’d been studying the virus in lab conditions. He’d never had the time to devote to studying it in the wild. I suppose we all require some
measure of specialization in order to keep our heads above water.”

Alaric started flipping through the folder in his hand, eyes narrowing in a focused “the rest of the world might as well not be here” way. I used to see that look on George’s face a lot.

Kelly, meanwhile, looked horrified. “Professor Brannon is
dead
?” she asked. She sounded genuinely stunned. “But… but… Professor Brannon
can’t
be dead. He
can’t
be.”

“You knew him?” I asked, reaching for a folder.

“I attended one of his lectures while I was in medical school. It was about the ways that Kellis-Amberlee inherently differs from a naturally occurring virus—” She glanced around at the rest of us, taking in our expressions, and cleared her throat before saying, “Naturally occurring viruses have a primary host, something where they, um, retreat when there isn’t an outbreak going on. Like malaria, which is bacterial, but still sort of applies. Even when there isn’t a malaria outbreak going on, the mosquitoes are still infected. That’s how it can keep coming back, no matter how many times we think we’ve cured it in a human population.”

“What does that have to do with Kellis-Amberlee?” asked Maggie.

“Nothing. That’s sort of the point.” Kelly shrugged. “Kellis-Amberlee doesn’t have a natural reservoir. It’s infectious across all mammalian species. Even things too small to amplifyn sustain the virus—mice, squirrels, everything. It’s completely endemic. Curing the human race wouldn’t do any good unless we could cure the rest of the planet at the same time.”

“Huh. Okay.” I looked to Mahir. “So he was a lab
guy, you showed him Dr. Abbey’s work, and then he shot himself. Why?”

“There are several potential reasons, but I think this is the main one.” Mahir began laying out a series of graphs. They didn’t make much sense to me, at least on the surface; each showed two jagged lines, one red, one blue, one going up as the other went down. The red line would occasionally fight against its descent, managing a brief upward spike, but it would inevitably get quashed by the blue line as it arced unstoppably toward the top of the paper.

All of us squinted at the pages. Kelly paled, clapping a hand over her mouth. She looked like she was going to throw up. Alaric shook his head.

“This can’t be right.” He tapped one of the pages, next to the start of the blue line. “This strain occurred in Buenos Aires only six years after the Rising. It was one of the first signs we had that Kellis-Amberlee was mutating outside a lab setting.”

Those are strain designations,
said George. Her voice was very small.
Those are the strain designations for some of the most widespread varieties of Kellis-Amberlee.

Everyone has Kellis-Amberlee, but most of us have only one strain at a time. Some are more aggressive than others and will basically wipe out an existing infection in order to take over a body. The original Kellis-Amberlee strain developed when lab-clean Kellis flu met lab-clean Marburg Amberlee. That was the first infection anybody had to deal with, the one that swept the world during the Rising. It took years of study and analysis of the structure of the virus before anyone realized that it was doing what viruses have done since the beginning of time: It was mutating, changing to suit its environment. For a while, people
hoped it was becoming less virulent and that it would eventually turn into something that didn’t do quite as much damage. Honestly, I think we’d have been happy if the virus just started killing people, rather than doing what it does now. At least then the dead would stay dead and the world could start moving on. Instead, Kellis-Amberlee has continued doing what it does best: making zombies and unleashing them on the world whenever it gets the opportunity.

I guess it’s consistent. That’s something, anyway.

“It’s correct,” said Mahir. His voice was dark, and there was something dangerous in his tone, something I’d never heard there before. He adjusted his glasses and continued: “There was a spike in deaths in Buenos Aires right before the substrain was isolated and identified for the first time. Eighty percent of the dead were confirmed as suffering from an early form of reservoir condition. It was five years before that substrain was identified in connection with a live reservoir condition.”

Kelly paled further.

“As part of his research into the behavior of the various substrains, Professor Brannon had access to census and death records from multiple parts of the world,” said Mahir. “Much of this data hadn’t previously been incorporated into the model—Dr. bbey is unable to acquire information through many normal channels, due to her lab’s lack of accreditation, Dr. Christopher’s focus is on treatment, not the structure of the virus itself, and Dr. Tiwari doesn’t do statistics.”

“I’m not following you,” I said.

“I am,” said Kelly. She directed her words at the wall, looking faintly stunned. “He’s saying that once they were able to feed the substrain analysis and the census data into the same model, they started getting
some results they didn’t want to get. The kind of results a man who spent his life working to save lives would commit suicide over.”

Maggie frowned. “I thought results were sort of the goal.”

“They are, in the general sense, but there are negative and positive results from any analysis. Look at this.” Mahir tapped the paper, shoving it toward Maggie. “Every time a new viral substrain is identified—
every
time—it comes immediately after a spike in the local death rate. Buenos Aires. San Diego. Manchester. It isn’t a coincidence, and it isn’t confined to any specific country or part of the world. It’s everywhere, and it’s every time.”

Becks shook her head. “What does that prove? Maybe the new strains are more virulent when they’re first getting started, and they’re killing all these people.”

“Unlikely.” He produced another sheet of paper, this one with a brightly colored pie chart on it.

“Eye-catching,” I said, tugging it closer to my side of the table.

“That was the intent.” Mahir pulled another copy of the chart from his file and handed it to Alaric. “This shows the aggregate causes of death among the people with reservoir conditions killed immediately prior to the identification of a new substrain.”

“These wedges are too small to read,” said Alaric.

“My point exactly. There is no dominant cause of death among the victims in these regions. They just… die. They get hit by cars, they fall from ladders, they take their own lives, they die. As if it were any other day, as if theirs were any other deaths. The pattern is in the absolute lack of a pattern, and it’s
everywhere,
and a month later, there’s a new strain of Kellis-Amberlee
running about, more virulent than the one that was in that region prior to the deaths. Three to five years after that, the first reservoir conditions linked to the new strain start showing up, and then it’s another two years before the cycle starts over again.” Mahir removed his wire-rimmed glasses, wiping them on his shirt. “Dr. Connolly, would you care to tell me what conclusions you draw from this data?”

“I can’t make any firm determinations without studying the material more thoroughly, but…” Kelly wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, voice hitching a little as she continued: “I would say there are no naturally occurring viral substrains of the viral chimera generally referred to as Kellis-Amberlee.”

“What are you talking about?” I demanded. “He just
said
there were new strains appearing all the damn time. This dead professor dude made his career studying them. They ve to exist.”

She didn’t say they don’t exist, Shaun. She said they don’t occur
naturally
.

Georgia sounded subdued, even resigned, like this was the answer she’d been expecting all along, like the part of me that kept her with me understood perfectly and was just waiting for the rest of me to catch up. I went very still, the skin tightening into goose bumps along my arms as I looked, helplessly, at Mahir. He looked back, waiting. They were all waiting, and they all knew I’d get there if they just gave me a minute. They knew George had the answers, and I… well, I had her.