“I already told you that they’re all dead, so I guess you came all this way for nothing.”
“That’s—”
“Nah, I’m just fucking with you, man. I’m a scientist, and I even worked at the university, so you’ve found a researcher. What could you possibly expect me to do?”
“Um…” Jake drew out the word. “We came here to see what research was being done into a cure or a preventative vaccine for the virus.”
“Yeah, well.” Jefferson uncrossed his leg and leaned forward. “I worked on it for a few weeks until the power went out—after I cleaned up all the bodies, of course.” He paused to bump fists with the man on his left. “It’s definitely manmade, a bioweapon. There are too many different kinds of DNA strands attached together to occur naturally. All of those strands mixed together create one hell of a nasty virus that I simply couldn’t figure out how to defeat. Then juice stopped flowing, the mayor got thrown off the bridge, the NYPD stopped going to work, and the city descended into complete chaos. We needed strong leadership, so I stepped in. The rest is history.”
“So, you don’t think there’s a chance of finding a cure?” Murphy asked to get the rambling conversation back on track.
Jefferson shrugged. “Sure, man. There’s a chance for everything. Phil here might just shoot you for invading my meditation time.” He pointed to the guard he’d fist-bumped. “Actually, that might be more of a statistical probability than a chance, but whatever. There may be a chance of developing a vaccine to prevent someone from acquiring the disease if there were a fully-functional lab and a very motivated researcher. From the few that I’ve seen, I’m pretty sure there’s no cure once it’s taken them.”
“What about if you were presented with a person who was immune to the virus?”
“I haven’t seen anyone with an immunity. Every person we’ve sent to Jersey for supplies or whatever that got bitten has been infected and we had to put them down. Are you telling me there are people with immunities to the virus?”
Jake nodded. “There are a lot of those types of people out there. We’ve got hundreds of them at Fort Bliss, probably a lot more who were never bitten before they came to the refugee camp. Last I heard, estimates were somewhere around one in a thousand were immune.”
“Fort Bliss? Is that in Texas?” Jefferson scratched at his beard and a hint of crazy showed in his eyes. “You guys really from the Army, or are you just some gang trying to move in on me?”
“No. We’re not a gang, man. Fort Bliss is the Army base next to El Paso…in Texas,” Jake replied. “Like I said a minute ago.”
“Texas! Texas!” He slapped “Phil” on the forearm with the back of his hand. “You hear this shit, Phil? They’re here from Texas and expect us to do something for them.”
“Yeah, boss. Dat’s just dumb,” the guard replied with a thick, native New Yorker accent.
“Exactly,” Jefferson agreed. He slapped his hands together and rubbed them back and forth. “I’m sorry, fellas, but I don’t think New York is the saving grace that you thought it would be.”
“But you said that you were a scientist,” Jake protested.
“Was. I was a scientist, man. Look around you…” He paused, then laughed. “Okay, okay. Not around you here in my apartment where my fine ass lady keeps everything spotlessly cleaned. I mean the city. Look outside. This place is barely staying afloat. Fuck, man. We had to make peace with the gangbangers so we could stop killing each other. Do you know how much that hurt Phil’s pride to have to do that?”
“Lots,” the brute interjected.
“Thank you, Phil,” Jefferson continued. “Look, Colonel Whatever—”
“Lieutenant.”
“Sure,” the leader said, not missing a beat. “This place isn’t going to help the military find a vaccine. We are barely surviving. Those first three or four months after the city was abandoned by the government were horrible. Horrible. You have no idea of the things that happened here. But we came through and we’re scraping by with maybe two or three percent of Manhattan’s pre-virus population. There’s commerce now. People have learned to grow vegetables in the parks and we protect the gardens twenty-four-seven—and not from the squirrels either. There’s none of those little fuckers left.”
Jefferson adjusted himself in his seat. “We’re trying, man. We’re really trying to survive here. There’s evidence that the infected are dying off, so all we have to do is outlive them and then we can try starting over. Until then, we don’t have time for scientific bullshit games, playing ‘what-if’ about a bunch of people with natural immunity to the virus.”
“It’s not a what-if game, Jefferson,” Grady said, his voice hoarse and gravelly from disuse during the man’s diatribe.
“Really, Secret Agent Man? One.” He held up a long, bony brown finger. “There’s no scientists left. Two.” A second finger joined the first. “We don’t know anyone who’s immune and I sure as hell ain’t risking any of my peoples’ lives to find out if they are.”
Grady released the pistol grip on his weapon, allowing it to fall on the cross-body sling he’d made from paracord. Then he pulled up the sleeve of his jacket to reveal the crisscrossed network of scars on his arm. “I’m immune,” he stated. “In fact, I was experimented on and I’ve been bitten, hell, I don’t know, a hundred
