From the perspective of Barry Allen
The six patients inside the office were sick, Dr. Snow reported, but would all recover. These 'subjects' had been intentionally infected with strains of the virus which Birdbrain had decided weren't deadly enough. He'd spent weeks refining and 'improving' his bioweapon.
Birdbrain himself wasn't at the office (Night Nurse called it 'the lab'), though a thorough search found plenty of useful evidence, including most of the equipment necessary to incubate a virus and detailed notes of the experiment that Night Nurse told us was almost over.
It had started with Birdbrain's breath. The first victims - students of Aves's at the university - had gotten sick within days of the accelerator explosion, and Aves had quickly realized that he was harboring the very virus he'd warned so many about.
And he'd warned them. And they'd FIRED him.
So he'd decided to make it very clear that this was nothing to ignore. He'd refined his weapon slowly; testing it on 'subject' after 'subject' until it was perfect. Now it killed only the very healthiest of subjects, turning their bodies against them, just like his body had become an agent of death.
In the last room of the lab, Caitlin found the most important thing of all: several vials with labels indicating they held vaccine. Caitlin pulled a syringe out of her bag and filled it.
"How do you know it's really the vaccine, and that it'll work?" I asked, putting my hand over hers as she considered the loaded syringe.
"I don't," she stated with a deep breath, staring at the syringe with a mixed look of stubborn determination and hope. "But I don't have much choice, do I?" She indicated the rooms all around us, filled with infected patients. "I'm exposed. I'm VERY exposed. Maybe this will keep me from getting sick."
"I'm not going to talk you out of this, am I?"
Her eyes steeled as only Caitlin Snow's eyes can, and she injected herself awkwardly in the arm. "If I'm not sick tomorrow, we'll know it's not dangerous. If I'm not sick the day after, the vaccine works. We can replicate it, spread it, and make sure this flu doesn't kill any more people."
I'm surrounded by heroes.
We called Joe, who called in the CCPD and what must have been one Hell of a bio-agent response team to catalog the lab, question the Night Nurse, and take the patients to hospitals. We had to get back to Joe's house. I had a date with the CDC.
From the perspective of Eddie Thawn
It's still weird to see Barry in his Flash suit. Weirder still to see the Flash emerging from the passenger side of a Honda Civic (Caitlin's) and walking wearily into a suburban house. It's kind of like seeing Spiderman commuting.
Caitlin and Barry arrived home at a quarter to 6 in the morning, and Barry looked terrible. None of us had slept, of course, but he didn't just look tired. I opened the door and backed away from Barry a bit, allowing Caitlin to guide the meta-human to the couch. Joe cleared a spot for him. Caitlin pulled out a medical bag and hooked up the Flash to an oxygen tank, and then to some pipe which steamed some kind of yellow steamy medicine up the kid's nose. It looked uncomfortable.
"This will treat your symptoms, Barry," she said; her doctor-persona softening that stiff look she sometimes gets, "but it's not a cure."
The Flash nodded.
She handed him a selection of pills to go with the breathing treatment. He took them, and she turned to us.
"I've got something which you may or may not want to take." Caitlin explained the vaccine, how it would work – or not – and where she'd stolen it from. She explained that she'd already given it to herself and that if it worked, they'd replicate it at S.T.A.R. and distribute it.
There really wasn't a choice to make. We rolled up our sleeves. I looked at Joe, "See?"
"See what? Ouch." He looked at his arm, where Caitlin had injected the might-be-a-vaccine.
"You laughed at me when…Ouch," That stung, "…when we were at Dr. Gillmore's office. I said I hated shots. You said there would be no shots."
Joe laughed, as did his crazy meta-human kid.
The CDC team arrived at Joe's house just after 11 AM, which gave Barry enough time to take whatever concoction Caitlin had given him. It was a LOT of pills, but the kid actually looked pretty good by the time he needed to.
I was on the phone with Captain Singh discussing what the team at Birdbrain's lab had found when Joe let the CDC personnel into his house. The CDC team members all wore bright yellow space suits. THAT's a comforting sight. They set up in Joe's living room as I briefed in Barry and Joe on what Singh had told me had been found at the lab.
Each of the patients had been evacuated to area hospitals, where they were presumably getting visits from their own yellow-suited CDC spacemen. All had been pronounced recovering. All told the same tale. They'd been kidnapped out of bars and restaurant parking lots over the past several months, with the last one some three weeks before. Once at the 'lab', they'd been restrained in hospital beds and made to inhale some blue or green gas. A man who could only have been Birdbrain had overseen the process.
Early on, some of the other 'patients' had gotten well fairly quickly. Those had been taken out of the lab and no one had seen them again. Each description matched a missing person report on file, but CCPD hadn't found any those bodies yet. Wherever they'd been dumped, it wasn't in easy-to-find public areas like where the later, sicker bodies had been.
Later patients had gotten stronger doses of what must have been deadlier virus. The six that Caitlin and Barry had found were survivors of a total of 18 they knew of. That accounted for the dozen bodies the CCPD had found, which had originally been called "death by natural causes." Natural my ass. Freaky unnatural meta... Sorry. Focus. At least we weren't missing any bodies from the pattern of one a week. We'd figured there were more out there from the skips in the pattern. The contagious bodies been dumped intentionally in places where they'd be likely to be found; placed there specifically to infect others.
The survivors described the gas, the process, and the mechanism used to make them inhale the virus. The problem was, none of that was found at the lab. "The place was basically empty, actually." I concluded, after sharing the information available, "There was no virus at all."
"Where's he taken it?" Barry wondered. He wasn't looking at me, but rather at several pages of notes he'd taken while I was talking, distracted by the puzzle as always. The kid had even written some sort of long equations on one page. Jeez he's a nerd.
I looked up from the dizzying display of math and focused upon the space-suited CDC personnel in the living room. They were setting out needles. I hate needles. Something occurred to me. "Hey Barry?"
He looked up from the notes. "Yeah?"
I nodded at the spacemen. "They're gonna take, like, blood and stuff. You know that right?"
He grinned. "I have that covered."