Page 125 of Lethal Game

Was he serious? He was going to kill her anyway.

Still, she wasn’t quite ready to die.

“I have disease that affects my platelets.”

Akbar stared at her for a long moment. “What does this mean?”

That’s right, he wasn’t a doctor, he was a chemist.

“It means that if you’re stupid—” she glanced at Len “—and you twist my arm, I’m going to look like I was in a car accident. If you shoot me, you’d better mean to kill me, because I’ll probably bleed to death no matter how severe the wound.” She was laying it on a little thick, but she wasn’t telling Akbar anything he couldn’t find out on the internet.

He and Len exchanged a few more words, then Len headed off, leaving her with Akbar and at least a dozen of his well-armed friends.

Akbar stared at her like he was trying to take her apart. “Death does not scare you.” It was a statement.

One she disagreed with. “I’ve seen a lot of death, some of it violent, some of it...peaceful. However it happens, the result is the same. The loss of a person. All their knowledge, memories, culture, everything that makes them unique, is gone. From one second to the next, wiped out as if it had never been.” She narrowed her eyes. “Facing death has made me stubborn. I’ll fight death with everything I have, but I’m still afraid.”

“You think like a woman,” he said with a sneer.

“This is a surprise?”

He continued to stare at her like she was dirty underwear. “You saw your men. Will you comply with my order?”

“If I do as you ask, will you allow my men to have medical treatment?”

He nodded.

Hmmm, say no and get them killed or say yes and give them time to escape or get rescued? Yes, it is.

She swallowed hard, hunched her shoulders a little and nodded. “You want me to make your virus easier to transmit, right?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not the only consideration when evaluating the virulence of a virus,” she offered tentatively. No use in angering the nutcase. “There are others, like the immune status of the host, how quickly the host can adapt to the virus and mount a defense. How hardy the virus is or if it can survive outside the body for any length of time. What kinds of cells the virus can invade and multiply in or not, and how efficient the virus is at replication.”

“Replication has already been altered. As you can see—” he pointed at the hospital tent “—it runs its course in hours instead of weeks.”

“But there’s been no person to person transmission, has there? You’re infecting people one at a time.”

“Correct, but rapid person to person transmission is my goal. I want a rabies variant that can spread quickly through the population.”

“Airborne?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head. “The rabies virus isn’t the measles. It’s extremely difficult to become infected without a bite. Rabies has been around for thousands of years, it’s relatively stable for a virus.”

His expression was cold. “I changed it. I accelerated the progression of the disease.”

“Okay, so one change worked. Doesn’t mean another one will.”

His mouth tightened brutally.

Her hindbrain read the danger and kept her tongue talking. “Howdidyou infect all these people?” She glanced behind her at the hospital with its hundreds of occupied cots.

For a moment she wasn’t sure he was going to answer or if he was going to have her killed on the spot. Finally, he said, “The water supply. I’ve used up almost all of the virus I have. Creating large quantities will take time, even for me.”

“You thought you had already solved the problem of person to person transfer without a bite?”

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