Chapter 6

You could have heard a pin drop. Silence reigned around the table as uncertainty prowled and patrolled the edges, looking for a crack to creep into. Eventually it found it's opening in the form of Dad going absolutely insane.

"WHAT?" How did it have that? Bubonic plague has been extinct for years! The only way that could happen is-" He stopped short, somehow paling even further. I didn't think that was possible, but he somehow proved me wrong. A glance at Shaun told me he was just as astounded.

"Exactly." Audrey zeroed him in from across the table. "There is no natural way for it to have had it. Someone cooked up that virus in a lab." Somehow the atmosphere grew even heavier.

"Give the nerds a medal." Dr Abbey grinned, clearly enjoying everyone's reactions. With that, she turned and clicked a projector on behind her. When the hell did she have time to put a Powerpoint together? Hell, who even used Powerpoint now? Clearly Dr Abbey did. I risked a glance at Foxy and just about knew her well enough to see she was trying not to show emotion. Then I remembered she used to work in a school before she voluntarily went insane and decided to go to great lengths to keep herself as such. She was probably no stranger to Powerpoint.

The slide clicked over from a weird intro card with some greyscale pictures of what looked like London way back when to another with a diagram of a bubonic plague cell. She clicked another button and another picture of a cell emerged that looked more up-to-date and was definitely taken on a post-Rising device. As I spotted that, so did Dad and Audrey.

"When was that one taken?" Dad asked, pointing to the new one.

"About ten minutes ago." Dr Abbey told him. "My microscopes come with built-in image capture. One of my HAZMAT interns took it. I wanted a photo for comparison. On the left, you have your traditional Y Pestis virus and on the right you have the one we found in the zombie George and Shaun kindly brought in."

"The one you told us you wanted." I interjected, determined not to have the blame shifted to us.

"Notice anything different?" she asked, pointing to the two. I was the first to admit I was stumped. The science had always been Dad's thing. As I looked around, I noticed Ash had also sat back to let Audrey take the reigns on this one.

"The new one has a very similar mitochondrial patterns to the Kellis-Amberlee virus." Audrey pointed out. Suddenly, it all clicked together. It all made brutal, tragic sense.

"Someone rigged the bubonic plague to cause amplification." I summarised. "Am I getting close?" Dr Abbey stared at me, disbelieving. I took it from that and the fact everyone else was also staring at me that I was right.

"You know, if you and Shaun hadn't been living in Canada for about half a decade now, I'd say you were in on this and shoot you right now." Dr Abbey's stare didn't waver and I can't lie, it was kind of unsettling. She clicked the white board again and the slide changed over. "Someone has tried to go triple helix on this thing and make it a three-way combination. They've been trying to increase the virulence of a disease that was specifically designed so that everyone would inevitably catch it anyway as well as give it some up-front lethality. The infection itself puts so much stress on the body that it can cause spontaneous amplification. By the time the buboes come up, you won't even know which way 'up' even is."

"But who would do that?" Dad asked, voicing what we were all thinking. "Why would they make a weaponized virus with that much power? How would they keep it stable?"

"Isn't that periodic zombie apocalypse we're already having more than enough?" Ash chimed in. "Don't be forgetting that one." That was a good one too. I had to admit I hadn't considered that one.

"Could this potentially trigger a second Rising event?" Mom asked.

"Technically the mosquitoes did that." Shaun reminded her. "Enough people died that it counted. This would be a third event. Yes, I was once an Irwin. Yes, I still enjoy annoying things by poking them with sticks-"

"Amen!" Ash called out from the other end of the table.

"-but I don't think I want to see a third event." Shaun said it more like an admission than a statement. "More zombies to poke means less people in the world. We're short enough on those that the Canadian government is talking about fertility programs and repopulation laws. They didn't have as many kids in orphanages as America did."

"Well no one tell that really horny guy that works around here." Foxy chipped in from her corner of the room. "We'd never get him back!" It took a second, but Dr Abbey suddenly burst out laughing. Suddenly, so did Shaun. After a second, Ash joined in. Before I knew it, we were all laughing. Only our parents remained stone-faced and glaring at us for apparently not taking this seriously enough. That couldn't be further from the truth. In reality, we were all bricking it. But Foxy had actually managed to say something to defuse the room rather than doubling the tension. Maybe she was making progress.

"Okay..." Dr Abbey took a second to compose herself. "Okay, so the question still remains: who would make something like this? Ideas? Anyone? Discuss."

"What about Clive?" Ash suggested. "He might be on a power trip again."

"He's dead." I could see Foxy grinning from the corner. I didn't know who the hell Clive was, but presumably she'd been the one who sorted out his little pulse problem. I instantly saw Ash and Audrey relax a bit. "Also, what do you mean 'again'? He was never off a power trip." Foxy continued. "Never mattered to me. He only tried to touch me once and so I told him the same thing I told Shaun. They both stayed in line ever since. Then they gave me the stuff that stops all those kids in my head from screaming and then later on I found Shannon." I went to respond and then paused. Something about her statement caught my attention.

"What does she mean by that?" I asked, turning to Shaun. "Why would she need to keep you in line?"

"Oh, yeah." Shaun's expression became one of equal parts recognition and guilt as he remembered. "I think we've talked about this already. She's talking about when I found out you were going to be okay. She told me and I was so relieved that I hugged her without even thinking about it. Although I think with that other guy she's on about something else entirely." As he spoke, I realised we had in fact talked about this multiple times. Still, I just couldn't get it through my head that he'd done that. It was such an un-Shaun thing for him to do. It really showed how much I'd terrified him and I still felt guilty about that to this day.

"What if one of his followers stepped up to take his place?" Audrey suggested. "We never heard about his death, but did anyone ever hear anything from his compound since? Did you hear anything about any of the women and children there? Any of the other soldiers or staffers? I think we should check the place out to be on the safe side. He had a lot of supplies there and that includes a fully functioning lab. Anything could have happened." It was a good point. I could tell from looking around that she'd reached a few people around the table.

"Well, we haven't had to deal with any raids since." Dr Abbey mused.

"Yeah, it's been boring!" Foxy practically whined. "There's been literally no excitement since that zombie bear I took down two days after the last time they were here!" At this news, Shaun's face went ashen.

"Wait, there actually was a bear? Fuck! I can't believe we left just before it showed!" He looked royally pissed off and I couldn't blame him. I'd never understood the thrill of being an Irwin but I knew how much he'd enjoyed it. Apparently he'd also taken one out with Becks shortly before I escaped from the CDC facility. That in itself felt like a lifetime ago. Becks, Dave, Buffy, Jake... All had gone quietly into the night. Well not quietly, exactly. They'd all made a hell of a commotion upon their deaths. So had I as a matter of fact. But unlike me, they didn't have the luxury of being here now. I did. And I intended to make that count. If someone was making these new infected on purpose, we had to stop it.

"Okay!" Dr Abbey clapped her hands to get everyone's attention back on her. "So we know Clive had a fully working lab at his place and I'm willing to bet a fully functional hospital." She looked directly at Ash and Audrey. "Correct?"

"Yeah, he had a full lab and hospital setup." Audrey nodded. "It was so freaky. He had full access to medical attention whenever he or anyone else needed it. Virtually no one working there was doing so by choice. Anyone could have poisoned him at any time, but no one did." Ash and Audrey knew a lot. They'd clearly been in the compound at some point. I wasn't about to ask. It didn't sound like they'd been there any more willingly than the rest of them. I wasn't about to ask. A glance at Shaun showed that he'd come to the same conclusion I had. It wasn't our place to say anything on this.

"Okay, so he had a full lab, hospital and the facilities and supplies to do this." Dr Abbey nodded. "The only other one near here with that sort of equipment is me and I definitely am not mad enough to do this. But we can't rule out that this might somehow have been a freak accident and that the two viruses are compatible all by themselves. I'm sending a team of HAZMAT interns to find any burial sites for black death victims around the area of George and Shaun's encounter. Stacy and Michael, I'll ask you to go with them and help out if I may. It'll be legendary for your ratings and they'll benefit from your contacts when it comes to research. I'd say that's a fair exchange. Ash and Audrey, do you think you'll be able to stomach a return trip to Clive's base?" We all looked over at them and I noticed Ash had visibly paled. Audrey noticed too and pulled her closer, holding her close until she stopped shaking. Now I was certain that something bad had happened to them in there.

"We can do it." Audrey said, surprising me greatly. "But we won't go in there without some serious firepower as backup." I could see Dr Abbey pretending to consider it.

"Would George, Shaun and the most drugged up, hyperactive, space-lobster-loving serial killer in the world do?" she offered. I glanced over to see Foxy beaming from ear to ear. She knew she was about to go back to work. And she liked it.

"Foxy is a colourful character. She used to be a teacher at Evergreen Elementary School; the school that is today known as one of the greatest failures in the combined histories of both the education and security industry. That in itself is staggering since I would swear she was still a teenager. Hell, I thought exactly that for a second when I first met her. Nowadays, she's a different person altogether and completely insane thanks to the outbreak at her school.

Can we truly blame the fat cats in high places for providing false guarantees? Or did they just think according to logic when mapping the security systems? I personally think it's a bit of both. Yes, Alaric was correct when he said that the word 'guarantee' is a strong word to use, but at the same time the thing that most people forget is that is that kids don't think according to logic. If there's a system designed around logic, a child will find a way to circumvent it without a backwards glance or second thought. Alaric himself has complained that his little sister will be playing a game, see a high spot with lots of treasure and jump at the wall using any little rock that sticks out to get there rather than the obviously marked path that's basically next to it. Sometimes it even works. And this is what the people who made Evergreen's security systems failed to account for.

As a result of their monumental balls-up, Foxy is a character who has to be seen to be believed on a greater level, I would say, than the late Mat Newson; a Newsie and computer genius who was almost as good as Buffy and who worked with Ash and Audrey. Mat was a good soul, but they struck me as being a bit full of themselves when we worked together. That was probably why we butted heads. They thought the same of us since we were the adopted children of the Masons and claimed that made us entitled. A stereotype we were trying to avoid at the time.

How ironic I find it that the Masons are now the ones trying to deny any involvement with us."

From Dead Girls Can't Lie, the personal files of Georgia Mason II.

June 3 2046.

Unpublished.