Page 118 of Viral Justice

Ali stuck her head around the doorway. “Sorry, fellas, none of you looks good in a skirt.”

“Thank God,” Hunt muttered.

“I think I would rock a skirt,” Warren said. “I’ve got a great ass.”

“Who told you that?” Hunt demanded.

“My last girlfriend.”

Ali sighed dramatically. “Dude, she lied.”

“Fuck off.”

Grinning, Ali went into the room and woke Fatima. It only took a couple of minutes for Ali to explain what she wanted and Fatima agreed to help without hesitation.

The two women walked the short distance to Max’s lab and found him looking for something on the floor while on his hands and knees.

“Max, we’re going to head out now. Are you okay?”

He glanced at them briefly. “I’m fine.” He stopped and looked at her again, but this time his face was accusatory. “Stone, did you do what I think you did?”

She cleared her throat. “If it involved an injection, I did. I dropped the plastic into the fire in the sleeping room.”

He got to his feet, his lips tightly pressed together. “I should be angry with you. You disobeyed orders.”

“Special circumstances.”

“We’ll talk later.” That might have been the words he said, but his tone told her she was getting yelled at later.

“Yes, we will.”

She led Fatima to the exit and the two women headed out into the village. It was still dark and very few homes had a light of any kind, so they stopped at the ones that did, and found more sickness and death than anyone should ever have to see.

* * *

So far, she and Fatimahad only found a dozen people in the village who hadn’t gotten sick yet.

That, more than the lack of sleep or fear of a militant attack, made her stomach clench into a hard knot that threatened to make her throw up the eggs she’d eaten.

A dozen people out of hundreds.

Not everyone had died of the flu. Some had been killed by bullets and bad men, and others had survived the illness.

Max was going to be very worried by everything she’d seen. The sickness, murders, and abandoned homes. Twice, she’d walked into a home to find everyone dead of the flu except the woman of the house, who hung from a ceiling rafter.

Not everyone could survive the destruction of their family.

She came out of the house she was in, having found two teenage boys trying to bury their parents in their backyard garden. She sent them up to the old hospital, telling them that there was food and a place to sleep there.

She walked to the next house, rounded a corner and came face to face with eight men armed with semi-automatic rifles, all of them pointed at her.

She put her hands up in the air and began babbling in Arabic. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot. I’m not sick.”

No one moved for several seconds and the silence had begun to get uncomfortable, when movement behind the line of armed men signalled the arrival of someone new.

A man made his way to stand in front of her. Though she’d never met him, she’d seen enough pictures of the man to recognize him.

Akbar.

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