It was dark when Edwards looked out the window of Grady Memorial Hospital and watched the car's taillights pull into the parking lot. Another pair of cops returning with someone else they "saved". He sighed in frustration.
He would never have imagined himself in this situation. Years ago, after completing medical school, he decided he was more comfortable in a laboratory setting and moved into the field of molecular pathology. It had reenergized his passion for science, but now it felt more like a jail sentence. He was just another chess piece here, like everyone else in the hospital, who Officer Dawn Lerner manipulated.
Before things fell apart, Edwards had been working at the Atlanta CDC for years on a team tasked with finding a vaccine for Ebola. When the current outbreak started, though, their efforts were obviously switched to understanding this latest viral mutation and developing a possible cure.
The worse the outbreak got, though, the fewer people started showing up for work. Coworkers were taking their own lives just down the hall. Chaos wasn't just in downtown Atlanta, but outside the doors of their offices as though panic was a plague itself that prevented any progress from being made.
At first, Dawn was grateful to have him there as the only surviving person with medical training. She let him tend to patients as best he could under the circumstances. Dawn never inquired about his area of specialty until she noticed some of the textbooks he managed to salvage from many of the former doctors' offices.
It was sheer luck that he just happened to be there the day the outbreak reached critical proportions. The few doctors remaining at Grady had already been evacuated to the camps, so as a last minute favor, his supervisor volunteered Edwards to take inventory of the medical supplies left behind and begin packing them for shipment on the last convoy out. It was on that day that the doors to the hospital were shut for good without anyone given the option to leave first.
When their small group was first confined in the hospital, the clashing of different personalities got out of hand until Hanson took charge, but even when some semblance of order took over Edwards didn't trust any of them. It seemed wise just to keep his head down and do as he was told.
As second in command it was easy to spot Dawn's headstrong ambition, and once she assumed control later on, the methods for maintaining "the system" here became unapologetically brutal. If she found out what Edwards might be capable of, he knew she would offer up some of the wards for experiments, and trials, and testing. Anything for "the greater good", she would say. As if the wards weren't put through enough already, he thought. It sickened him to know what she let her officers do to the women held here, but his situation was precarious enough, so he kept his mouth shut. Dawn Lerner had zero patience for anyone who rocked the boat that she had deemed herself captain of.
It had been more than a year ago since Dawn had found out the truth. If he hadn't thought her crazy before then she proceeded to prove him wrong.
She became obsessed with the idea of him continuing his research, making her officers scavenge other facilities and hospitals for equipment he might be able to use. If the circumstances had been different, then he might have poured himself into finding a cure with enthusiasm, but knowing that any errors in his theories meant life or death for the wards made him reevaluate his methods.
He decided to continue in his research privately, and started purposefully injecting the wards with simple saline solution or vitamins. When nothing came of these "trials", he would just shrug and say he'd keep trying. Unfortunately, Lerner caught on after a couple months. She had held a gun to his head on more than one occasion, telling him that his days here were numbered if he couldn't show any progress in his work.
Well, he thought, it turned out that necessity isn't the mother of invention. Fear is.
When the hospital was first sealed they had all rushed to the windows and watched, horrified, as napalm burned the city around them. Anyone left who survived the fire was torn to pieces by the undead on the pavement below them. Innocent people would bang on the doors, begging for their lives. The sounds their fists made, thumping against the thick metal, would echo through the whole hospital. Just the thought of being dragged out onto the streets to fend for himself was enough to keep him up into the hours of early morning on a regular basis brainstorming, and after countless hypotheses and hundreds of hours of lab work he dared hope that he might have made a small breakthrough.
It started with Edwards thinking about what had been a very common process to treat blood plasma for viral infection before the world went to hell. A variety of viruses could be inactivated by lowering their pH over a short period of time. The procedure would alter the surface chemistry of most strains and even denature them so they were effectively rendered harmless.
The one drawback is that it couldn't be performed in living tissue because it would damage cellular processes and kill the patient. His speculation was that if he deactivated enough of the viruses in a patient's bloodstream after a bite then maybe it would reduce the level of infection to the point that the person wouldn't turn. Not so much a cure, but a treatment at least. It was a start.
The problem was that he had only begun to start decoding the DNA of this virus when he was at the CDC before the chain of events unfolded that took him away from his work. There was no way to know if the virus would have a typical reaction to this treatment. An electron microscope would be required to know more, but even if Dawn's officers could somehow find one, its power usage would be too great for the resources they had.
The ultimate test would be to run a patient's blood on hemodialysis through a pH filter slightly less than blood normally is, and hope it behaved as other known viruses. It was a long shot, but it was the best idea he'd had in a while with what he had to work with.
He kept this revelation to himself for weeks, unwilling to tell Dawn and have her subject a perfectly healthy and unwilling patient to what could be a disaster. Edwards swore he wouldn't breathe a word of his theory unless a new ward was brought in who was bitten and on the verge of death anyway.
The doctor turned away from the window and sat down at his desk, wondering who the poor soul was that was going to be imprisoned in this hell next. He was just starting to pick at his supper when he heard his name being yelled by several officers down the corridor.
Edwards rushed out into the hall to see a young blonde woman being rolled in on a stretcher with a bite mark on her right wrist.
"Oh, god."