“What’s going on?” Brandon asked again.
“No questions right now, okay, buddy?” Ash told him, trying to keep his voice calm. “You’re going to be fine.”
It was a lie, of course. How would either of them ever be fine again?
He carried his son into the bathroom and sat him on the closed toilet lid.
“What’s Josie doing in the tub?” Brandon asked.
“Not now.”
The water was nearing the halfway point and was covering Josie’s waist and legs. Ash touched the side of her face, hoping her temperature had come down a few degrees.
Not only had it come down, it had plummeted.
He yanked her out of the tub without turning off the water, and began stripping off her drenched nightgown.
“Brandon, get some towels!” he yelled.
“Dad, what’s going on? What’s wrong with her?”
“Just get the towels!”
By the time Ash had her clothes off, Brandon had retrieved three towels from the cupboard under the sink. Ash used the first to quickly wipe off what water he could, then wrapped the other two around her. Though she was dangerously cold, unlike her mother she was still breathing.
“Get behind her,” he told his son as he laid her on the floor. “Hug your body to hers. We need to help her get warm.”
Brandon surprised him by not arguing. He stretched out behind his sister and hugged her tight. Ash did the same in front, creating a cocoon of warmth with Josie in the middle. It was the only thing he could think of doing.
“She’s so cold,” Brandon said.
“I know.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Where’s Mom? Does she know?”
“I let her sleep.” Brandon would find out the truth soon enough, but at the moment Ash needed him to focus on helping his sister.
Though Josie’s breathing was shallow, he could still feel her chest move up and down.
“It’s okay, baby,” he whispered over and over. “It’s okay.”
“She’s not getting any warmer,” Brandon said after a few minutes.
“Just keep hugging her.”
They were still holding her like that when the front door of their house smashed open. Ash could hear people running into their living room.
“Who is it?” Brandon asked, fear in his voice.
“I called the paramedics before I woke you,” his father said. “Let’s just hold on to your sister until they tell us to move. Okay?”
“Okay, Dad.”
Ash expected the EMT crew to come into the bathroom at any moment. But when no one appeared, he yelled out, “We’re back here! In the bathroom! We need help!”
Footsteps pounded in the hallway, but still no one came.
“We need help! We have a sick girl here!”
Finally, he could hear them approaching the bathroom door. He tilted his head back so he could see into the hallway.
First one person appeared, then two.
But the relief he should have felt was overshadowed by confusion. The people moving into the bathroom weren’t dressed in EMT uniforms. They were wearing biohazard suits.
What happened after that was a blur of images.
His daughter rolling out of the house on a gurney under a plastic tent.
Ellen leaving, too, only the plastic that covered her was a black bag.
And people, dozens of them, all dressed in the same biohazard outfits.
He didn’t know how long he and Brandon had sat on the couch while all this was going on, but it seemed like hours.
Three things he did clearly remember from after that point.
He recalled being led with Brandon out to a truck that had some sort of isolation container on the back. As they crossed the front yard, he heard another cry, this one not of pain or fear, but anguish. Loud and uninhibited. Looking up, he realized theirs wasn’t the only house with an isolation truck out front. There was one parked in front of every home on their block.
The second thing he remembered came several hours later, after he and Brandon had been separated and he’d been put in some kind of cell.
“Captain Ash.” The voice came out of a speaker in the ceiling.
“Where are my children?” Ash asked. “They need me!”
“I’m sorry to inform you, Captain,” the voice said, still calm, “but your daughter died three minutes ago.”
“Josie?” he whispered. “Take me to her! Please, let me see her.”
There was no response.
“I have to see my daughter!”
When the voice next spoke several hours later, it was to inform him that Brandon had also died.
That was the third thing he remembered.
2
Dr. Nathaniel Karp stood with his arms crossed, watching the center monitor. There were three other people in the room with him: two technicians and a guard, all of whom had the highest-level clearances within the project.
The feed in the monitor came from cell number 57. Inside the cell, Captain Daniel Ash continued to pace back and forth, his temper seeming to swing from angry to desperate to devastated and back again with each crossing.
Overlaid across the bottom third of the monitor were Captain Ash’s vital signs. Dr. Karp noted that the captain’s heart rate was elevated, and that his temperature had risen half a degree, but that was understandable given the circumstances. What interested the doctor more was that the captain seemed to be showing no signs of the illness.
The doctor glanced at the other video screens. Seventeen additional cells were currently occupied by neighbors of the Ash family. When they’d first been brought in, they were all like the captain-agitated, but healthy. Now, though, every single one of them was displaying symptoms of infection.
Dr. Karp looked back at Ash’s monitor.
Ash had been as exposed as anyone else when the spray was released on the three streets that made up the Barker Flats Research Center housing area. But it had not affected him at all. Just like it had not affected his son.
The immunity had obviously been passed down through Ash’s ancestors, and not his wife’s. Preliminary results indicated she was one of the first to succumb. Unfortunately, whatever gene was in play within the Ash family, there was an apparent gender component to it. The fact that Captain Ash and his son had remained
