Page 115 of Viral Justice

He finished with the last egg and set them up to incubate alongside the first batch. He checked the temperature gauge that had come with the rest of the supplies. Despite the DIY situation, the temperature was stable.

In a few more hours and he’d be ready to harvest the virus growing and multiplying inside the first set of eggs, mix it with a stabilizing agent, screen out impurities, heat it up enough to kill the virus, then inject it into his body.

He turned from his work, stripped off his gloves, washed his hands with sanitizer, and found a plate of scrambled eggs covered with a cloth on a backless chair just inside the door of his makeshift lab/OR.

Ali was asleep on the floor, her feet almost resting against the chair legs.

He ate, drank a full bottle of water, returned the plate to the woman he was thinking of in his head as their house mother, and lay down a few feet from Ali.

He wanted to spoon up behind her, but that, after all the posturing and lecturing he’d done to the team, would have been stupid in the extreme.

At least she was only a few feet away.

* * *

Max woke to the soundof his alarm going off. No, not his alarm, it was his timer. For the first batch of eggs. The virus was done cooking.

He rolled to his feet and noted that Ali was gone from her spot on the floor. As he glanced up, she walked through the doorway and looked at the eggs. “Is it done?”

“Done enough for the next step in the process.” He gave her a once-over. “You got enough sleep? Had something to eat?”

“Yes, thank you. I got four hours and some scrambled eggs that tasted so much better than an MRE.” She glanced at her watch. “I’ve only been up for fifteen minutes.”

“Good. On to the next step of the process.” He took a couple of steps, then turned back to her. “Who is healthy and who isn’t?”

She blew out a breath. “No one is one hundred percent. Almost everyone in the building is coughing. Warren and Hunt have fevers.”

“The kids?”

“Berez has a fever and a cough, but he seems okay. Coban got sick already and recovered. At least, that’s what his dad says. Ferhat’s cough is getting bad and he has a fever too.”

Max ground his teeth, but there wasn’t anything more he could do for anyone other than creating a vaccine that worked. “We need someone who hasn’t caught or had the flu.”

Ali nodded, but she was studying her meagre lump of possessions—backpack, poncho, half drank bottle of water. She picked up the bottle and finished it. “I’m going to see what’s going on in the village.”

Max frowned. “Why? Has there been more fighting?”

“No. It’s been eerily quiet for a couple of hours now. I don’t know if people are hiding out or if they’re all dead, and I think we need to know which one it is.”

“It’s the middle of the night now, isn’t it?”

She glanced at her watch and shook her head. “Yeah, zero three twelve.” She gave him a wry smile. “No wonder it’s quiet. Sorry.”

“No apologies necessary,” he told her. There was a flicker in the shadows behind her. Someone was either waiting to talk to one of them or listening in on their conversation. “Assuming our vaccine is a success, can you see what’s left for furniture in the building? Or anything that could be jerry-rigged into a gurney or cot?”

“Yes, sir.”

Had she figured out someone was behind her?

“Thank you, dismissed.”

Ali turned and walked away, but she wasn’t gone five seconds before he heard the murmur of her voice out in the hallway.

Someone had been there. Interesting.

Not interesting enough to pull him away from his work, however. He removed the first batch of eggs from the incubation area and began the painstaking process of removing their contents. He carefully added each bit to a test tube of stabilizing agent and then, when he’d harvested everything he could, put the tubes into the centrifuge to separate out any particulates or impurities.

After spinning the tubes, he removed the vaccine from them and put it into one test tube. Altogether, the resulting liquid measured approximately twenty-five milliliters. Enough for just over two doses.

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