Deadline

Becks looked perplexed. “Did we sign up for a seminar or something?” I held up a hand for quiet. She snorted, and subsided.

Kelly continued: “The first cases of confirmed Kellis-Amberlee infection going ‘live’ in isolated parts of the body—the reservoir conditions—were identified in 2018. They may have been cropping up before then, but we didn’t have the capacity to track them. The infrastructure was still too broken down for that to be an option.”

“Makes sense,” I agreed. The Rising left the medical community in tatters. Frontline doctors and nurses were among the first to be infected, leaving the hospitals of the world severely understaffed even after the initial battles of the Rising had been fought and technically won. I say “technically” because it’s hard to call a conflict with that kind of casualty rate a victory. There are still hospitals and people who can use them, so I guess we’ll have to count that as a win, for now.

A smile tugged at the edges of Kelly’s lips. “I could start listing the index cases for the known reservoir conditions, but I doubt you really care, and they aren’t that applicable in this situation. They showed up one by one, they didn’t follow any perceptible pattern, and they were as incurable as the parent virus. That’s what matters to the story: Once you have a reservoir condition, you have it for the rest of your life.”

She’s got that right, said George bitterly. She developed retinal Kellis-Amberlee while we were little, and she had it until the day she died. Kids in our high school used to tease her about it and threaten to steal her sunglasses. They never did, though. There was always too much of a chance that her “cooties” might be contagious.

That’s bullshit, by the way. You can’t catch the live form of Kellis-Amberlee unless you come into contact with it, and George didn’t sweat the live virus. It just lived inside her eyes, all the time. Waiting for the day when it would get loose to play with the rest of her body.

Which it eventually did.

I had to force myself to start talking again, before I could really start dwelling on what had happened to George. This wasn’t the time. “So what’s the moral of our story?” I asked, relieved when my voice sounded halfway natural. “Reservoir conditions suck?”

“Reservoir conditions represent a viral behavior with no known purpose or explanation,” contributed Dave. Everyone but Kelly turned to look at him. He shrugged. “I took a couple of virology courses before I went to Alaska. It seemed like it might help with that whole ‘not dying’ thing.”

“Ah.” Dave was in Alaska last year when half the staff died. He was probably safer on the frozen, zombie-infested tundra than we were in Sacramento. There was something ironic about that. I paused. “Wait, are you saying no one knows what the reservoir conditions do?”

“There are theories.” Kelly sounded suddenly evasive. I eyed her. Her expression was practically a mask; with her eyes closed, she could have been thinking anything at all.

She should get some sunglasses if she wants to pull that trick, said George.

I didn’t say anything. I just waited.

Kelly gave a small shake of her head and continued: “I’ve spent the last year studying reservoir conditions. The CDC tracks anyone with a KA-related medical condition, but nothing’s ever really been done with the data. So I thought I’d start.”

“Hey, that’s not true,” I protested. “George was in all kinds of studies. There was always some new specialist ass**le wanting to poke her in the eyes and see what happened.”

“There have been studies of the individual kinds of reservoir conditions, but nobody’s really looked into the syndrome as a whole.” Kelly sank, if anything, farther back into the couch. “Why does it happen? Why does it happen in specific parts of the body? How is it that the virus is contained? Everything we know says that anyone with a reservoir condition should amplify immediately, but they don’t. They just keep going until they die. It doesn’t make sense.”

“And that’s what you were studying?”

A marginal nod. “Uh-huh. That’s when I found it.”

“Found what?” asked Alaric.

“Look at the statistics.” Kelly sighed, tilting her face up toward the ceiling. “The first column is population. The second column is percent of population with a known reservoir condition—type is irrelevant in this instance.”

I squinted at the numbers. I’d seen the number on the third column somewhere before. I hazarded a guess: “Column three is KA-related deaths in the last year?”

“Yeah.”

“So what’s the fourth column?”

Becks spoke, voice heavy with dawning horror. She’d managed to figure things out just a little faster than the rest of us, and she didn’t sound happy about her epiphany. “Oh, my God. It’s—that’s the number of people with reservoir conditions who died, isn’t it?”

Kelly nodded.

I squinted at the numbers. They didn’t seem to mean anything. I was about to open my mouth when George said, very quietly, Lookat column two again, Shaun.

I looked. And I understood.

“This can’t be right,” I said, suddenly cold. Reservoir conditions don’t increase the odds of viral amplification; they actually tend to reduce them, since most people who suffer from a latent form of KA wind up even more paranoid about infection than the rest of the population. People like George, who went out into the field, or Emily Ryman, who kept raising horses even after she developed retinal KA, were the exception rather than the rule.