He took his hands away. “They just might, but in all seriousness, we did not want to leave the market.”
Jocelyn thought again about the survivalists. “So there are still zombies there?” she asked.
Jize shrugged. “Who knows? Do you want to take the chance just so I can play the piano?” But he looked sad when he asked, as if pleading the answer would be, “Yes.”
Jocelyn merely smiled at him without answering the question. “It is nice to meet you. I wish the circumstances were better.”
He nodded.
Jocelyn turned her head to Janice. “And pleased to meet you, Janice.” She walked over to shake Janice’s hand, and Janice put down her book and took Jocelyn’s hand gently.
“How have your travels been?” Janice asked. “Are you hurt? You look okay.”
“I’m fine, at least physically.”
Marty grunted. “Now that that’s out of the way, we need to tend to some business. Jocelyn, I think a demonstration is in order.”
A demonstration? Does he mean of her healing? “You mean my—“
“Don’t say it. It’s better if everyone sees it for themselves.”
Marty had just boxed her in. He hadn’t given her warning he would spring this on this rag-tag team. But now they expected something, some kind of demonstration. But if her goal was Colorado Springs, and to be studied, then to get this team to help her, it would be better if they understood the truth about her healing power.
She retrieved the napkin from a dispenser by the coffee maker, sat back down, took her knife, and slit her forearm like she had done with Marty before. This time she squeezed it and drops of blood fell onto the table.
“What the hell?” Vin exclaimed. Marty put his palm up as if to hold off his speech.
Jocelyn waited a few seconds for the pain to subside, and then wiped the blood away from her arm, revealing the wound had vanished.
“Oh, my god!” Vin exclaimed. “She’s one of them!”
Alexander said next, as if it was worse, “Oh, my god, she’s a carrier!”
“How could she be a carrier?” Vin asked. “Doesn’t a carrier have symptoms?” Alexander knew Vin, with his engineering degree, was no idiot, though he wasn’t as smart as Alexander.
Alexander nodded. “Usually, but not always.” Alexander guessed what was going on and became sick to his stomach.
“You’re not squeamish at the sight of blood, are you Alexander?” Vin asked.
“It’s not that. It’s just . . .” No one talked. They all waited for Alexander to finish. They knew a superior intellect when they saw one. “Jocelyn, I believe you’ve been infected. Do you remember when that could have happened?”
She nodded and told her story about being alone in the cabin, encountering George, his bite on the neck, and her subsequent four days’ fevered sleep.
“Well, that makes sense. You fought it off; it appears you are immune.” He turned to Vin. “Now I’m pretty sure it’s a virus, but I believe something else is going on here.” Alexander paused.
“What makes you say that, Poindexter? Out with it.” Vin asked.
Alexander decided that now was not the time for theatrics. He picked up a plastic cup off his table and took a drink of his cold brew. He always made good cold brew.
“One could engineer a virus to repair damage like a cut on the arm, but the same could be accomplished with bacteria or nanobots. She clearly fought off one part of this zombie virus, but not the other part, so I believe there are two pathogens here.”
“You mean there may be little robots inside me?” Jocelyn asked. She was a smart one, too, though, again, not as smart as him.
Alexander shrugged; he liked pretending this was all matter-of-fact for him, but in truth he was astounded. “Not necessarily . . . It could be a genetically engineered bacteria, or a similarly engineered second virus. This zombie pathogen is a very complicated, engineered illness.”
He paused again. “Someone developed this agent, this illness. I’ve never heard of two viruses naturally working together, though I suppose it is possible, and what you see here in Jocelyn is the agent that changes your brain into a zombie, gives you the sores, makes you eat brains to spread the infection. . . you don’t crave brains, do you?”
Jocelyn stuck out her tongue and made a disgusted face. Alexander hoped she wasn’t play-acting.
“You have no sores?” Alexander asked.
“No.”
“Okay,” Alexander said. “That part you fought off, but the other part that gives you healing, you have not.”
“So, you’re the microbiologist,” Vin said. “What do you believe this second pathogen is?”
“I really can’t say, but when I see that the entire world succumbed at about the same time . . . look, I saw that infected woman. She clearly entered a new phase of the virus when she turned into a zombie, but the entire world, or at least the States, seemed to be overrun with zombies in the space of hours. And the odds that everyone originally infected would turn into a zombie at the same time are astronomical. Only direct programming could control something like this.”
Alexander glanced over at the clock above and to the right of the employee bulletin board. He watched the seconds hand march onwards.
“Wait,” Vin said. “Are you saying this was an attack coordinated to occur at the same time everywhere? How is that even possible?”
“I don’t know. You’re the software engineer. Can you think of how?”
“It would require clocks and a way to synchronize them. And all of that would have to be tiny and in silicon. Those little nanobots would need a lot of silicon. I don’t know where they’d get it from.”
“What about carbon? Human tissue is full of carbon, and carbon is quite similar to silicon, just above it in the periodic table of the elements.”
Vin gasped. “Carbon nanotubes could potentially be used in place of silicon. They discovered that years ago.”
“It’s possible, then? Nanobots could use human tissue to make tiny computer components?”
Vin nodded. “It’s
