“Girls are f**king weird,” I said.
You should know, George replied.
I smirked and leaned in for a closer look at the octopus. It settled against the glass, watching us with its round, alien eyes. “That is a freaky-looking thing,” I said. “What’s it for?”
“Barney here is for testing some of the new KA strains we’ve been developing,” said Dr. Abbey, removing the cover from the tank. The octopus promptly switched its focus to the surface of the water. She stuck in a hand, and it reached up with two tentacles, twining them firmly around her wrist. “We haven’t been able to infect him yet, although he’s shown some fascinating antibody responses. If we can just figure out what’s blocking infection in the cephalopod family, we’ll be able to learn a lot more about the structure of the virus.”
“Wait, you mean you’re actually trying to develop new strains of the virus?” Kelly looked at her with wide, baffled eyes, like this was the last thing she could imagine anyone wanting to do.
Dr. Abbey took her attention away from the octopus—which was now trying to pull her arm all the way into the tank—as she frowned at Kelly. “What did you think we were doing here? Growing hydroponic tomatoes and talking about how nice it’ll be when the CDC finally decides to get around to saving us all?” She began untangling her hand from the octopus’s grasp, not appearing to take her attention off Kelly. “Please. Are you really going to stand there questioning my medical ethics while you tell me you people haven’t been working with the structutand therethe virus at all?”
Kelly bit her lip and looked away.
“Thought not.” Dr. Abbey pulled her hand out of the tank and replaced the lid. The octopus settled back at the bottom in a swirl of overlapping arms, appearing to sulk. “If you’ll all walk this way, I think we’re about ready to conclude our little tour. You should have all the information you need by this point.” She turned and strode down the alley, shoulders stiff.
“Think we should follow?” asked Alaric, sotto voce.
“I’m not sure Joe here is going to give us a choice.” I glanced at the mastiff. He was sitting calmly behind our little group, blocking the only other exit from the narrow row between the tunnels. “Besides, we’ve come this far. Don’t you want to find out what the big secret the Wizard has to share with us is?”
“Maybe she’s planning to give you a brain,” deadpanned Becks.
“If she does, I hope that means you’re getting a heart,” I replied, and started walking.
Behind me, Alaric said, almost mournfully, “I just want to go home.”
Kelly and Maggie didn’t say anything at all. But they followed, and that was more than I had any right to ask of them.
Dr. Abbey was waiting on the other side of the alley, in front of a wide safety-glass window that looked in on what was obviously a Level 4 clean room. The people inside were wearing hazmat suits, connected to the walls by thick oxygen tubes, and their faces were obscured by the heavy space-helmet-style headgear that’s been the standard in all high-security virological facilities since long before the Rising. Dr. Abbey was looking through the glass, hands tucked into the pockets of her lab coat. She didn’t turn as we approached. Joe trotted up, and she pulled one hand free, placing it atop his head.
“I started this lab six and a half years ago,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for you—or someone like you—ever since. What took you so long? Why didn’t you show up years ago?”
“I didn’t even know you were here,” I said. “I still don’t really understand.”
Yes, you do, said George. Her voice was small, subdued, and almost frightened.
“George?” I asked. My own voice sounded almost exactly like hers had.
“We should go,” said Kelly, sounding suddenly alarmed. She took my elbow. I looked down at her hands, but she didn’t let go. “Or we should ask her about the research. You know, what we came to ask about.”
“Dr. Abbey?” asked Alaric. “What’s going on? What are you doing here? Why did you give your dog reservoir conditions, and what do you mean when you say he can’t amplify? And what does it have to do with the deaths of the people with the natural reservoir conditions?”
“The Kellis-Amberlee virus was an accident,” said Dr. Abbey, still looking at the pane of safety glass. Her hand moved slowly over her dog’s head, stroking his ears. “It was never supposed to happen. The Kellis flu and Marburg Amberlee were both good ideas. They just didn’t get the laboratory testing they needed. If there’d been more time to understand them before they got out, before they combined the way that they did… but there wasn’t time, and the genie got out of the bottle before most people even realized the bottle was there. It could have been worse. That’s what nobody wants to admit. So the dead get up and walk around—so what? We don’t get sick like our ancestors did. We don’t die of cancer, even though we keep pumping pollutants into the atmosphere as fast as we can come up with them. We live charmed lives, except for the damn zombies, and even those don’t have to be the kind of problem that we make them out to be. They could just be an inconvenience. Instead, we let them define everything.”
“They’re zombies,” said Becks. “It’s sort of hard to ignore them.”
“Is it really?” Dr. Abbey’s hand continued caressing Joe’s ears. “There’s always been something nasty waiting around the corner to kill us, but it wasn’t until the Rising that we let ourselves start living in this constant state of fear. This constant ‘stay inside and let yourself be protected’ mentality has gotten more people killed than all the accidental exposures in the world. It’s like we’re all addicted to being afraid.”