Shaun froze. I turned to stare at Rick. “Explain.”
“It’s sharp.” Rick looked between us, eyes wide. “It’s sharp-edged, in a horse stall, on a breeding ranch. Do you see any broken windows around here? Any broken equipment? Neither do I. What is something sharp doing in the stall? Horses have hard hooves, but they’re soft on the inside, and they get cut up really easily. Competent handlers don’t allow anything with a sharp edge loose near the stalls.”
Shaun lowered his foot, careful to keep his weight balanced on his toe, not pressing on the plastic. “Son of a—”
“Shaun, get out of there. Rick, find me a rake or something. We need to turn that straw.”
“Got it.” Rick turned and headed for the rear corner of the barn where, I supposed, he’d seen some cleaning equipment. Shaun was limping out of the stall, still pale-faced.
I hit him on the shoulder with the heel of my right hand as soon as he came into range. “Asshole,” I accused.
“Probably,” he agreed, calming. If I was calling him names, it couldn’t be too bad. “You think we found something?”
“It seems likely, but it’s not your concern right now. Get the pliers, get that goddamn thing out of your shoe, and get it bagged. If you touch it, I’ll kill you.”
“Gotcha.”
Rick came trotting back, rake in hand. I took it from him and leaned over, starting to poke through the straw. “Rick, keep an eye on my stupid brother.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Using the rake to turn over the straw where Shaun had stepped uncovered several more chunks of plastic, and a long, bent piece of snapped-off plastic in a familiar shape. Behind me, Shaun breathed in sharply. “George…”
“I see it.” I continued stirring the straw.
“That’s a needle.”
“I know.”
“If there’s no reason for the plastic to be in there, why is there a needle in there?”
“For no good reason,” said Rick. “Georgia, try a little bit to the right.”
I glanced toward him. “Why?”
“Because that’s where the hay is less crushed. If there’s anything else to find, it’s more likely to be intact if it’s off to the right.”
“Good call.” I turned my attention to the right-hand side of the stall. The first three passes found nothing. I had already decided the fourth pass would be the last in that area when the tines pulled an intact syringe into view. Not just intact: loaded. The plunger hadn’t been pushed all the way home, and a small amount of milky liquid was visible through the mud-smeared glass. The three of us stared at it.
Finally, Shaun spoke. “George?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t think you’re a paranoid freak anymore.”
“Good.” I gingerly used the rake to pull the syringe closer. “Check the sharps bin and see if there are any isolation bags left. We need to vacuum seal this before we take it out of here, and I don’t trust our biohazard baggies.”
“Why?” Rick asked. “They did the Nguyen-Morrison.”
“Because there’s only one thing I can think of that someone would inject into a perfectly healthy animal that then turns around and becomes the index case for an outbreak,” I said. Just looking at the syringe was making me feel nauseous. Shaun could have stepped on that. He could have put his foot down wrong and…
New thought, Georgia. New thought.
“Syringes are watertight,” Shaun said, as he turned to head for the sharps bin. “Bleach wouldn’t have been able to get inside.”
“You mean—”
“Unless I’m wrong, we’re looking at enough Kellis-Amberlee to convert the entire population of Wisconsin.” I smiled without a trace of humor. “How’s that for a front-page headline?
“Rebecca Ryman was murdered.”
The Kellis-Amberlee virus can survive indefinitely inside a suitable host, which is to say “inside a warm-blooded, mammalian creature.” No cure has been found, and while small units of blood can be purged of viral bodies, the virus cannot be removed from the body’s soft tissues, bone marrow, spinal fluid, or brain. Thanks to the human ingenuity that created it, it is with us every day, from the moment of our conception until the day that we die.
We’ll have multiple “infections” of the original Kellis strain during our lifetimes. It manifests to fight invading rhinoviruses seeking to attack the body and it acts to support the immune system. Some will also have minor flares of Marburg Amberlee, which wakes when there are cancerous growths to be destroyed. The synthesis of these wildly different viruses has not changed their original purposes, which is a good thing for us. If we’re going to have to live with the fact that formerly dead people now rise up and attempt to devour the living, we may as well get a few perks out of the deal.
We only have problems when the conjoined form of these viruses enters its active state. Ten microns of live Kellis-Amberlee are enough to begin an unstoppable viral cascade that inevitably results in the effective death of the original host. Once the virus is awake, you cease to be “you” in any meaningful sense. Instead, you’re a living viral reservoir, a means of spreading the virus, which is always hungry and always waiting. The zombie is a creature with two goals: to feed the virus in itself, and to spread that virus to others.
An elephant can be infected with the same amount of Kellis-Amberlee as a human. Ten microns. Speaking literally, you could pack more viral microns than that onto the period of this sentence. The horse that started the infection that killed Rebecca Ryman was injected with an estimated 900 million microns of live Kellis-Amberlee.
Now look me in the eye and tell me that wasn’t terrorism.
Fifteen
It turns out that calling a United States senator from inside a quarantined biohazard zone to report that you’ve found a live cat and a syringe containing what you suspect to be a small but terrifying amount of live Kellis-Amberlee is a great way to get the full and immediate attention of both the army and the Secret Service. I’ve always known radio and cellular transmissions out of quarantine zones were monitored, but I’d never seen the fact so clearly illustrated. The words “intact syringe” were barely out of my mouth before we were surrounded by grim-faced men carrying large guns.
“Keep filming,” I hissed to Rick and Shaun. They answered with small nods but were otherwise as frozen as I was, staring at the many, many guns around us.
“Put the syringe and any weapons you may be carrying on the ground and raise your hands above your heads,” boomed a dispassionate voice, distorted by the crackle of a loudspeaker.
Shaun and I exchanged a look.
“Uh, we’re journalists?” called Shaun. “On Class A-15 licenses with the concealed carry allowance? We’ve been following Senator Ryman’s campaign? So we’re carrying a lot of weapons, and we’re sort of uncomfortable with this whole ‘syringe’ thing. Do you really want to wait while we take off everything?”
“God, I hope not,” I muttered. “We’ll be here all day.”
The nearest of the armed men—one of the ones in army green rather than Secret Service black—tapped his right ear and said something under his breath. After a long pause, he nodded and called, in a much less intimidating voice than the one from the loudspeaker, “Just put down the syringe and any visible weapons, raise your hands, and don’t make any threatening moves.”
“Much easier, thanks,” said Shaun, flashing a grin. At first, I couldn’t figure out why he was wasting the energy to show off for the crowd, which was probably pretty high-strung and might be trigger-happy. Then I followed his line of sight and had to swallow a smile. Hello, fixed-point camera number four. Hello, ratings like you wouldn’t believe, especially with Shaun doing his best to keep it interesting.