Fortunately, whoever shot the two men dressed in black had at least placed their bodies behind the garage, so she didn’t have as far to move them. Madeline quickly determined that burning them, along with the heavily soiled mattress, was the best way to dispose of multiple issues at once. And efficient. She was finding the clarity allowed by unburdening herself from any emotional hang-ups made the right choices obvious.
Carrying her bounty from the garden up the back porch, she paused at the top to look out over the property. While she didn’t experience the same feelings her favorite view used to produce, she could still appreciate the beauty. The silence and contrasting layers even mirrored her own thoughts to a certain degree, which the old Mads would have likely found some irony in.
Turning from the colorful vista, she entered her shadowy house. The power went out that morning. It wasn’t unexpected, but she’d hoped to have another day or two before it happened. Though prepared for outages, her extra fuel was limited and she needed to make it last for as long as possible. It was still uncertain as to how much time it would take before she was able to move forward with her plans.
Crossing the open floor space to the kitchen, she glanced down and noticed a spot where she’d missed some blood. Tsking, Madeline set the vegetables in the sink and grabbed the spray bottle of prepared bleach concentration she’d found the night she woke up.
Clearly, the Men in Black didn’t take the time to clean her home before inconveniently getting shot. No… her thieving visitors had already been there, and were waiting for them. Or, perhaps they were all surprised by each other. Yes. That was the most likely scenario.
“Yet, you came in through the front door,” she muttered thoughtfully, looking at where the rest of the blood used to be. “Which means you weren’t expecting to find anyone other than the hapless Dr. Schaeffer here.”
She’d been unconscious for three days. Only three days, and during that time someone had stolen her laptop, most of her research, the Libi Nati sample, and then left two bodies behind. Instead of anger, Madeline felt a deep, brewing kind of contempt. Not strong enough to be called hate, or even dislike, but a slight disdain for the absolute waste of time and resources. It was similar to how she used to respond to unintelligent students. A nuisance, but not worth the energy to work up an emotional reaction. Only now, it wasn’t a matter of energy or interest, but a lack of the ability to connect the synapses required for the feeling.
The most reasonable conclusion was that she’d suffered some sort of permanent brain damage from the prion disease. Which, would make sense. It had been theorized by more than one expert that a type of prion infection could be responsible for Alzheimer’s. In her research earlier that week, she’d located a study out of UC San Francisco from the year before that claimed to have proven Alzheimer’s was a double-prion disease. It therefore wasn’t a stretch to surmise that while her other neurological symptoms had dissipated, the part of the brain that fired off her emotions was left impacted in a similar way that memories were in Alzheimer’s.
Shrugging, Madeline knelt and began scrubbing at the dark crimson splatter on the hardwood floorboard. She couldn’t change what had happened, so instead she would adapt.
The bleach quickly discolored the wood, and standing, she studied it. Most every task she’d performed up until that point had a clear meaning behind it. Scrubbing the blood? Not so much.
“Interesting,” she said, looking at the stained rag in her hand. It was tainted with a mix of old blood and wood dye. Removing the blemish served no other purpose than to appease her previous obsessive behaviors that leaned toward a compulsive disorder.
Dismissing the curiosity, Madeline replaced the cleaning supplies and washed her hands before picking up a full bottle of drinking water off the counter, and an apple from a bowl. There would be no more whiskey. She no longer sought the escape it offered, so she’d used the rest of the case to fuel the burial pyre.
Taking a bite of the apple, she strode back outside and around to the side of the house where an impressive propane generator was hardwired in. It only took a flip of a switch, and she was once again operational. Her pace quickened on the way back to the office. She would spend the next several hours compiling more data and further casting a net. The rest of the evening would involve working outside in the gathering dark.
Her old laptop from the basement lab was set up on the desk. Retrieving it was one of the first things Madeline had done. She’d spent most of the previous night staring at it, patiently waiting for a few minutes of access in between the connection being picked up and dropped. She knew it was because of the increasing upper atmospheric interference from the ash causing the SAT link to fail, so there was nothing to be done about it. During the limited time she managed to get on the net, there was very little to be found. But it was enough. Enough to confirm that The Kuru was rampant and unstoppable. That it had a spread and kill rate of over ninety-nine percent, and that she wasn’t the only one to wake up.
There wasn’t much more to learn beyond that, and while she avoided trying to locate any of her ICONS connections, she was rather disappointed to find she couldn’t get ahold of any of her old colleagues, either.
Disappointed was probably too strong a term. Perhaps dissatisfied was a better way to think of it.
While the computer that was stolen had the bulk of Madeline’s work on it, the lab
