Battle by Tom Abrahams

Author:Tom Abrahams [Abrahams, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

FEBRUARY 9, 2044, 7:39 AM

SCOURGE + 11 YEARS, 4 MONTHS

ATLANTA, GEORGIA

“Do we know why she died?” asked Dr. Sharp of the broad-faced man standing in front of her. She was standing in the hallway outside a room called “No Man’s Land” in which a team of suited pathologists worked while tethered to filtered air tubes.

No Man’s Land was rated BSL 3 on a scale of one to four. Access was restricted. The room was separated from the rest of the facility by sealed double doors and a series of anterior rooms. The air handling was separate, filtered, and non-recirculated, unlike most BSL 3 labs. There were four bodies now, the most recent having been plopped onto a stainless steel table only minutes earlier. The broad-faced man, whose name was Bolnoy, snorted.

“She was infected,” he said with an accent that gave away his Russian origins. “But you knew this, no?”

Bolnoy was a supervising pathologist who’d been observing and recording the findings of his team inside No Man’s Land. They’d hypothesized that, like Ebola, the patient’s death wasn’t enough to end the threat of infection. This new mongrel virus, with bacterial components, was as lethal after killing its host as it was while that host fought to live.

Sharp poked at Bolnoy’s chest with a finger and locked his eyes with hers. “I’m not in the mood,” she sneered. “Don’t play with me.”

Bolnoy snorted again as if to suggest to his superior he wasn’t intimidated. He likely wasn’t. He’d seen the Scourge kill thousands in his native St. Petersburg and paid a hefty sum of money to secretly climb aboard a cruise ship docked in the Gulf of Finland at the eastern edge of his city. He’d stowed away on the ship until it reached its destination in Dover, England. By then, half the crew and most of the passengers were dead or dying from the disease.

It took him six months, and a lot of false starts, to find passage to the United States. He’d lucked into the job with the CDC through a friend of a friend. They needed people who could cut open bodies and knew anatomy.

He’d graduated with a medical degree from St. Petersburg Pavlov Medical State University. He’d joked all they’d need to do was show him a dead body and he’d start drooling. Nobody had laughed. But they’d hired him. He’d proven valuable and skilled, as well as irreverent and moody.

Now, as he stood in front of Sharp, he was an obstacle to the truth. She poked him again.

“Give me answers, Bolnoy,” she demanded. “We can’t send corpses out into the wild, even if they do retain their infectious properties.”

“Dr. Sharp, you know this virus is viable for several days after the host dies,” said Bolnoy, drawing out his words for effect. “I’m not telling you something you don’t know. And it’s entirely possible it lasts longer than that.”

“I’m aware,” said Dr. Sharp. “The influenza genome RNA segment gives the Scourge an added kick postmortem, which increases the infection rate by a factor of—”

“You don’t know the answer to that,” said Bolnoy.

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