Page 83 of Viral Justice

Max glanced at Jessup and Hunt, both of whom were frowning at him, then back at her. She saw the moment he comprehended what he’d said bloom on his face. His eyes widened and he sucked in a breath.

Too late.

She saluted. “Sir,” she said, her voice as cold as his had been. Then she turned on her heel and returned to her patch of wall where she’d been napping earlier.

“How badly did I just screw up?” Max’s voice was clearly audible out in the hallway. Was this his way of sucking up?

“Sir,” Jessup replied. “We all complain about how hard she puts us down during training. How she pushes and pushes us to put the extra effort in, because that little extra bit might be the difference between living and dying. She does that because she gives a shit. You just told her you don’t.”

“That wasn’t my intention. I was worried about her not having enough sleep when the fighting starts.”

“If you think she hadn’t already thought of that, you’re the one who needs more sleep. With your permission, sir, I’m going to relieve Tom at the watch so he can sack out.”

“Sir,” Hunt said. “Do you need me here, or can I set up a watch near the front entrance?”

“That’s fine.”

Footsteps moved away.

Max came into the lab only after one of his machines beeped.

Ali cracked open her eyes and watched him tear off a piece of paper the machine had spit out.

When he didn’t move, didn’t speak, just stared at the paper, she knew the result was not a good one.

“How bad is it?” she asked.

“It’s the bird flu,Influenza A H5N1.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s highly contagious among birds, domestic and wild. It’s everywhere. In humans it has a high mortality rate. Itwasrelatively hard for humans to catch the virus. The usual victims are people who work closely with chickens, but...” His voice trailed off for a moment before he finished speaking. “The medical community around the world has been watching this virus closely. It’s predicted to be the most likely cause of the next big pandemic, if it mutated to a strain that prefers the tissues of the upper respiratory tract of humans, rather than birds.”

“What do you mean by pandemic? Like the Ebola thing that keeps popping up in Africa and Asia?”

“No,” he said with a sad chuckle. “Ebola is nothing compared to what this virus could do. Some estimates say five million dead, others fifty million dead. I tend to be on the alarmist side myself. I think it could be far worse.”

“Worse than fifty million people dead?” She couldn’t imagine that many people gone all over the world.

“Fifty million dead and another thirty-five million infected. That means eighty-five million people will be out of commission, a lot of them medical personnel. Guess what happens to a society when that many people are unable to do their jobs?”

“Anarchy,” she whispered, horror strangling her voice.

“Yes.”

“How...” She had to swallow to wet a suddenly dry throat. “How can anyone calculate accurate infection and mortality rates that high? Isn’t all this just academic?”

“The Spanish flu at the end of the First World War killed at least that many people. Some say as many as one hundred and fifty million people died. There aren’t any hard numbers because people were dying so fast, and in some places entire villages of people simply ceased to exist. Not enough records were kept.”

“Oh.”

“What makes things different today is how mobile the world population is. It’s almost a given that any quarantine that’s put in place will be too little too late.”

“So, we start right now,” she said, getting to her feet. “We get out of here with the samples and get the pharmaceutical companies to produce a vaccine.”

“Normal vaccine production takes three months.”

“Three months?”

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