Deadline

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 asshole 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.

Kelly sighed, opening her eyes for the first time since her lecture had begun. “That’s what I thought,” she said, looking right at me. “I ran the numbers over and over. I had an intern pull the census data six times. It’s all accurate.”

“But—”

“Less than eleven percent of the population suffers from reservoir conditions. Last year, they accounted for thirty-eight percent of the KA-related deaths.” Kelly’s tone was grim. Suddenly, her exhaustion was starting to make a lot of sense. “Statistically speaking, this can’t be happening.”

“Maybe it was a glitch,” suggested Dave. “Statistical anomalies happen, right?”

Becks snorted. “Yeah, and respected CDC doctors totally help their employees fake death by clone over statistical anomalies. It happens all the time.”

“The data goes back ten years, and it’s consistent all the way through. Every year, more people with reservoir conditions die than can be supported by reasonable projections—not from spontaneous amplification, not because they were stupid, not for any reason that I can find. And no one’s ever said, ‘Hey, maybe something’s wrong here.’ ” She paused, shaking her head a little. “That’s not right. There have been project proposals that would have addressed these numbers, and somehow they always get shut down. There’s always something more important, more pressing, more impressive. Politics get involved, and the reservoir conditions get pushed to the back burner. Again, and again, and again.”

“So what, you think it’s intentional suppression?” asked Alaric.

“Last year, there was a six-billion-dollar study on a new strain of MRSA that’s cropped up in two hospitals in North Carolina. We could have done it on a third of the budget and half the manpower. It was busywork. There’s so damn much busywork.” She rubbed her temple with the heel of one hand, frustration evident. “The CDC is supported by the government. We’re supposed to be an independent organization, but that isn’t how the funding works out.”

“Was Tate involved?”

The question was soft, reasonable; it took me a moment to realize that I’d asked it.

“Not with that study,” said Kelly. Hope flared and died immediately as she continued: “He was one of the supporters of continuing cancer research. You know, since cancer will become a threat again once Kellis-Amberlee has been cured. So more and more of our budget goes to things like that, and reservoir conditions just get ignored.”

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“How big a chunk of the CDC budget are we talking about?” asked Alaric.

“Eleven billion dollars.”

Dave whistled, long and low. “That’s not chump change.”

“No, it’s not. I’d say maybe twenty percent of our research budget is actually being spent on research into Kellis-Amberlee-related conditions. The rest of it keeps getting siphoned off into studies that look good, but don’t do anything.” Her frustration was evident. “It’s like we’re being stopped from finding out what this virus really does.”

Probably because you are, said George.

“I didn’t know that was possible,” I said. “You’re the CDC.”

“And somebody has to pay the bills.”

“Right.” I stood abruptly, stalking back into the kitchen with my mostly full Coke in one hand and the stack of papers in the other. Behind me, Kelly started to ask where I was going, and was quickly hushed by Becks. Becks understood. Becks always understands.

The kitchen was cool and dark and, most important, empty. I put my things down on the counter, turned to face the wall, and began, methodically, punching it as hard as I could. The sound echoed through the room, gunshot-loud and soothing. My knuckles split on the fourth blow. I started feeling a lot better after that. I generally do. Pain clears the fog in my head, enough that I can think again. Besides, as long as I’m punching walls, I’m not punching people.

Someone was using the CDC’s budget to control their research. Someone was funneling research away from Kellis-Amberlee, into diseases that weren’t an issue anymore and problems that shouldn’t even have been on the CDC’s radar. And Governor Tate had been involved. The man who killed my sister. The man who changed everything. If Tate had his bloody little fingers in the pie…

If Tate was involved, so was whoever he worked for, said George, as calmly as I couldn’t. We have to help her. We have to find out what’s going on. This could be our chance, Shaun. This could lead us straight to the ringleaders.

“Yeah.” I stopped punching the wall, taking a shaky breath as I studied the new dent I’d created next to the half a dozen that were already there. We lost our security deposit a long time ago. “I know.”

Good.

If we helped Kelly, we could find out who was manipulating the CDC. We could find the people who ordered Tate to kill George. After that…