“You okay?” she heard Ben’s muffled voice whisper — or was he yelling? — into her ear. She nodded and stood up.
The others recovered from the shock quickly, and soon each of them was examining the wreckage and destruction. Julie stepped off the concrete step and looked in the direction from which the blast had come.
A large, blossoming, mushroom-shaped cloud, probably ten times the size of the one she’d seen only days earlier, had formed and was reaching up to the sky. It was a whitish-gray color, and she could see that toward the bottom of it, a layer seemed to be peeling off.
“It’s the water,” Ben said. He still had his arm around her and was now holding her close. “It probably offset a million gallons of water, but it doesn’t seem like —”
A massive tremble directly below their feet caused Ben’s words to be clipped short.
Julie panicked, running back onto the concrete slab, unsure of what to do.
“Julie — get away from the building!” she heard Ben yell. For some reason, she obeyed, though her mind felt like mush. She ran off the step just as the brick wall they’d been standing under collapsed.
And still the ground shook. She saw jittery images of a policeman scream as the wall fell directly onto him, and another image of a stand of trees not a hundred feet from them simply disappear into the earth.
The earthquake stretched on, growing more and more violent, but there was nowhere to go.
Ben held her, and together they just waited.
She thought every bone in her body was going to be shaken loose, and only then did she remember Ben’s leg injury. She glanced over to him and saw that he was clenching his jaw, trying to steady himself. He was leaning almost completely on his good foot, doing his best to ignore the pain.
And then it stopped.
Just like the bomb’s initial blast, the earthquake just stopped. It was as if the Earth was resetting itself, shaking itself off from a fight.
She looked around. If it was bad before, this was a disaster. The entire brick structure was rubble, reduced to bits of brick and metal rebar. Trees were toppled, more on the ground than there were still standing, and a large crater had formed just on the other side of the road.
“Is it over?” she heard someone ask.
“No idea. I think if it was going to blow, it would have done so by now!” another voice yelled in response.
They waited for almost an hour, milling about and checking their vehicles for damage. Except for a few small aftershocks, the ground seemed able to hold the supervolcano at bay. Julie was on edge the entire time, waiting for everything to be incinerated without warning, but when no fire came up out of the ground, she began to relax a little.
She and Ben were standing by the truck, ready to head back to civilization, when a group of officers came over. One of them, the man who’d questioned Ben earlier, started up the same conversation thread from before. “Bennett, you mentioned something about figuring out the virus earlier. What was that? What did you figure out?”
“Like I said, it’s still a theory, but I think it’s worth exploring. Once Julie’s emailed her headquarters at the CDC about it, we’ll be able to test it and get some hard data soon.”
The man’s expression softened a bit. “Ben, you’ve gotten us through this far. You were right about the caches, and you were right about the bomb.”
Another officer was standing nearby, smiling. “Yeah. You know, you’re either working for the bad guys or you’re just smarter than you look. Tell us what you’re thinking, man.”
Julie saw Ben sigh. “Okay, maybe you can help me piece it together. Basically, Stephens — that guy we thought was on our side — has been leading us on the whole time. He wasn’t just doing his job, though. It was personal to him, for whatever reason. He had more investment in this thing than just trying to accomplish a goal. I think he was trying to make a point.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, back at the lab, I heard him say something like ‘America isn’t united enough…”
“…To save itself,” Julie finished. “Yeah, I heard him say that too. Three times.”
“Well,” Ben continued, “I think he was trying to tell us something. That, and he only murdered people who were single, alone, and clearly isolated in some way. He even tried to kill me, just before all of this.”
Julie was quickly brought back to that fateful moment. Beating Stephens to a pulp after believing Ben was dead.
“So I’ve been thinking about what it all meant. We already knew he wanted us to figure it out — he admitted that much himself. So I had to ask myself why he’d do it that way, when it would have been far easier to just blow the park and caldera silently, without taking us along for the ride.
“And that led to thinking about the virus. Julie and I both had it — we were covered in the rash; they even took her in to quarantine.”
“But it worked its way out of your system, right? After it killed itself off?” Officer Wardley asked.
“It did, but when Julie and I were together, like physically close to one another, it didn’t get worse. Only when we were separated was when it grew in each of us.”
Julie was now confused as well. “Are you saying this thing can be beaten just by getting people close together?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. But from what we learned in the lab, and from our own experience, I’d say it’s worth a shot.”
The answer was too simplistic to be possible. She looked around at the others, and many were nodding. As she thought about it more and more, it did seem obvious to her as well.
“So what do we do?” she asked. “Get everyone together in a room and hope that it spreads, like chickenpox?”
“Maybe. I’ll leave that up to your people,” Ben said. “But I’d bet it’s a start.”
Chapter Sixty
Ben and Julie spent the remainder of the day quarantined inside a massive white CDC tent set up just outside Yellowstone National Park. Her email had reached the highest levels of government, and each of the departments involved with the investigation of the enigma strain virus weighed in, including the CDC.
In the end, Ben’s ideas were deemed sound enough to be fully tested and researched, and new quarantine locations were launched and data was gathered. Across the United States, each zone was given an updated protocol that included instructions based upon Julie and Ben’s findings, with the expectation that each area would send their research back to corporate headquarters in Atlanta.
The tent outside Yellowstone was no different, and Ben and Julie found themselves helping with anything and everything to get the station set up and prepared, only to become the first test subjects. They’d explained everything that had happened so far, including Stephens’ involvement, how Ben and Julie discovered where the caches and the bomb were hidden, and what they thought might be the way to defeat the virus.
Each of them had been assigned a separate bed, but because of their discovery of the “close proximity” rule, each bed was arranged close to another bed, and all of the infected patients were placed into the same large room, allowing for the disease to proliferate and spread among them. Within a matter of hours, the CDC confirmed Ben’s prediction that the proximity effect had a massive impact on slowing the spread of the virus, and within another few hours, they’d all but confirmed the suspicion that extended exposure to the virus led to an eventual recovery and inoculation.
They were released shortly after verifying that they were virus-free, and the research continued, using patients gathered from cities and towns in the surrounding two hundred mile radius around the camp.