Apex Magazine Issue 20 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Apex Magazine
Publisher: Apex Publications
Published: 2011-01-09T03:38:19.779000+00:00

POINT OF INFECTION +19 DAYS

A stupid accident and a weak-willed fool: that’s all it takes to tell the world what’s coming. Alan was careless with the rats he was releasing into the African countryside. A soldier spotted him, and came to ask what he was doing. He might well have talked his way out of the situation—I hired him, in part, for his finesse with words—but the trap in his hands still contained a rat, terrified, confused, receiving a thousand conflicting commands from its tiny rodent mind. It chose the clearest path, and ran.

Alan, unthinking, grabbed for its tail…and it bit him.

He’s in CDC custody now, begging them to save his life, telling them everything he knows. There has never been a guaranteed cure for rabies, and my youngest daughter is rabies writ large, incurable, unstoppable, already burning out his nervous system. In another day, she’ll mature enough to enter her secondary phase, the one possible only in a primate host. A day after that, she’ll be airborne, and Alan, and everyone who comes into contact with him, will be lost.

I wonder if they’ll realize what’s happened before they spread the virus further, or if my darling will burn through Africa like a match set to dry grass. It makes no difference. So much of what Alan knows is wrong. My lab moved three days ago, after the last of my assistants was safely gone. The “vaccine” he has to give them is tailored for an enhanced strain of the bubonic plague, a project I abandoned years ago. He has no protection against what’s coming. Neither will they.

Still, I wish he’d been stronger. I wish he’d lived up to the potential he once displayed.

I wish he’d been more ready to close his eyes and listen to the bells.

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