“I can see how that is a concern. I don’t see a lot of people out and about in the street though,” Clary said.
“Right, but if we are going to do this on any type of scale, I feel like it is imperative that we are able to account for that,” Scott replied.
Mark held up a hand and said, “I have a second batch of it that we can test out. This one doesn’t need any inoculations before using it. It would really excel what options that we have available to us. The more we are able to use it, the more that we are going to accomplish.”
“Wait, so we don’t need them there shots all the time like before, do you know how much them hurt?”
Mark ignored the whining coming from Earl, confident if he indulged him that it would only get worse. Clary impatiently asked, “So when are we going to be able to give this second batch a trial?”
“When did you want to go? I’ve already had it around me.”
“What does that mean?”
“I took it as a good sign being that if the original formula had been around us, we probably would have died.”
Clary leaned forward, there was no joke in his face, nothing to make anyone better. He whispered, trying to keep his voice even and unemotional. “You were out in Chicago shooting that shit off when you obviously had no clue whether or not there was any living in that building. What the hell were you thinking?”
Earl leaned forward before Mark was able to say anything and said, “No, he wasn’t out shooting nothing off. That was me and Big Joe, see he calls me Big Earl, seeing how we are pals and what not. We are gonna be in history books if they ever go and write another one. Damn, that’d be my luck, we go and save the world and there ain’t nobody out and about to make our damn story. See what”
Clary reached a hand out just as fast as he could. Earl didn’t have time to even flinch. Earl’s smile diminished immediately when Clary’s hand wrapped around his throat. He squeezed until Earl croaked and started pulling at Clary’s hand which wasn’t going anywhere unless he chose to. Clary said, “If the two of you, I mean if the entire group of you can’t make intelligent decisions then you will not be staying here. I don’t care if you can kill all of them, those that made it this long should be absolutely not endangered, or what’s the point of it?”
Mark tried to pull down on his hand as well but there wasn’t anything removing it until he opened it short of cutting the hand off. Mark said, “Okay, okay, we are sorry, it isn’t like we knew any of this was going to happen. Do you think that I wanted to end up in Iowa, where the entire crazy outbreak happened first? No, of course not,” Earl gripped Mark around the nose making sure that he had his attention fully. Mark nodded continuing with, “Earl is mentioning nothing like that will ever happen again. Not seeing how that is quite so important since we already said that we’ve fixed that problem.”
Clary released Earl and the air burned his lungs as he inhaled and it rushed to fill. Earl gasped once before trying to take another breath. Once he was breathing the way he wanted he said, “All right, so you trying to tell me if you were in a strange town with stranger people and you came up with the virus killer that everyone in the whole, excuse my El Frencho, the entire fucking world could use to make the world whole again. That you wouldn’t have a hard on the size of an elephant to go out and try and kill some of them fuckers?”
Clary sat back, folding his hands on his barrel stomach, and calmed himself. The vision burning itself into the back of his mind was Shaun clasping at his throat and choking to death and there wouldn’t be a damn thing that any of them would have been able to do. “No, I would have done it differently, to have gone to the outskirts of town where there might not be one of almost three million people that could still be alive! Is there a reason you had to do it in downtown Chicago?”
Earl looked straight to Mark like it was completely his fault. “Why didn’t ya’ll send us on a day trip, shoot, I never thought of going out and testing it way out there.”
Mark looked to Earl and the group watched as Mark’s shoulders deflated and he shrugged. “The big win long-term seemed more important than anything else would have been at the moment. I assure you that from the CDC building we didn’t see any people running around who weren’t out for blood.”
“If you want to do that shit around here, there are going to be protocols put in place before we do anything. Maybe that is something that we want to start here today. Especially if you are ready to try this stuff out.”
Scott said, “We can be as careful as possible, I’m sure there won’t be any issues with helping us find a specimen or two that we are able to try and test it on, right?”
Clary shook his head no and said, “We make sure that it is a safe place we go to. We don’t test anything new out going forward without discussing it first, and we make sure, damn sure, that we aren’t doing anything stupid. Does that about sum it up?”
Scott reached a hand out
