Laughter and applause greeted his words. He stayed at the front of the room until the last of the students had streamed out; then he grabbed his coat and started for the exit himself. He needed to cancel classes for the rest of the day. He needed to call Stacy and tell her to get Phillip from his kindergarten. If there was one thing science had taught him, it was that safe was always better than sorry, and some things were never on the final exam.
* * *
Professor Michael Mason has announced the cancellation of class for the rest of the week. His podcast will be posted tomorrow night, as scheduled. All students are given a one-week extension on their summer term papers.
July 20, 2014: Manhattan, New York
The anchorman had built his reputation on looking sleek and well-groomed even when broadcasting from the middle of a hurricane. His smile was a carefully honed weapon of reassurance, meant to be deployed when bad news might otherwise whip the populace into a frenzy. He was smiling steadily. He had been smiling since the beginning of his report.
He was beginning to wonder if he would ever stop smiling again.
“Again, ladies and gentlemen, there is nothing to be concerned about. We have two particularly virulent strains of flu sweeping across the country. One, in the Midwest, seems to be a variant of our old friend, H1N1, coming back to get revenge for all those bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches. Symptoms include nausea, dizziness, disorientation, and of course, our old friend, the stuffy nose. This particular flu also carries a risk of high fevers, which can lead to erratic behavior and even violence. So please, take care of yourself and your loved ones.”
He shuffled the papers in front of him, trying to give the impression that he was reading off them and not off the prompter. Audiences liked to see a little hard copy. It made them feel like the news was more legitimate. “The second strain is milder but a bit more alarming. Thus far, it’s stayed on the West Coast—maybe it likes the beach. This one doesn’t involve high fevers, for which we can all be grateful, but it does include some pretty nasty nosebleeds, and those can make people seem a lot sicker than they really are. If your nose starts bleeding, simply grab a tissue and head for your local hospital. They’ll be able to fix you right up.”
He was still smiling. He was never going to not be smiling. He was going to die smiling. He knew it, and still the news rolled on. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, I have to beg you to indulge me for a moment. Some individuals are trying to spin this as a global pandemic, and I wish to assure you that it is nothing more than a nasty pair of summer flus. Please do not listen to reports from unreliable sources. Stick with the news outlets that have served you well, and remember, we’re here to make sure you know the real story.”
“And…we’re clear!” said one of the production assistants, as the cheery strains of the station break music began to play. The anchor kept smiling. “Great job, Dave. You’re doing fantastic. Can I get you anything?”
“I’m good,” said the anchor, and kept smiling. No one seemed to have noticed that they had no footage, no reports from experts or comments from the man on the street. All they had was a press release from the governor’s office and strict orders to read it as written, with no deviation or side commentary. They were being managed, and no one seemed to care, and so he kept on smiling and waited for the commercial break to end.
There was no footage. There was always footage. Even when good taste and human decency said not to air it, there was footage. Humanity liked to slow down and look at the car crash by the side of the road, and it was the job of the news to give them all the wrecks that they could stomach. So where was the wreck? Where was the twisted metal and the sorrowful human-interest story? Why did they have nothing but words on a teleprompter and silence from the editing room?
“And we’re back in five…four…three…” The production assistant stopped in mid-countdown, eyes going terribly wide. “Dave? Do you feel all right?”
“I’m fine. Why?” He kept smiling.
“You’re bleeding.”
The news anchor—Dave Ramsey, who had done his job, and done it well, for fifteen years—became suddenly aware of a warm wetness on his upper lip. He raised his fingers to touch it, and looked wide-eyed at the blood covering them when he pulled away again. His smile didn’t falter. “Oh,” he said. “Perhaps I should go clean up.”
When the broadcast resumed, his co-anchor was sitting there, a cheerful smile on her face. “We have an update from the Centers for Disease Control, who want us to reassure you that a vaccine will be available soon—”
* * *
News anchor Dave Ramsey passed away last night of complications from a sudden illness. He was forty-eight years old. A fifteen-year veteran of Channel 51, Dave Ramsey is survived by his wife and three children…
July 26, 2014: Denver, Colorado
Suzanne Amberlee’s nose had been bleeding for most of the morning. It had ceased to bother her after the first hour; in a way, it had even proven itself a blessing. The blood loss seemed to blunt the hard edges of the world around her, blurring things into a comfortable gray that allowed her to finally face some of the hard tasks she’d been allowing herself to avoid. She paused in the process of boxing Amanda’s books, wiping the sweat from her forehead with one hand and the blood from her chin with the other. Bloody handprints marred every box and wall in the room, but she didn’t really see them anymore. She just saw the bitter absence of Amanda, who was never coming home to her again.
In Suzanne Amberlee’s body, a battle was raging between the remaining traces of Marburg Amberlee and the newborn Kellis-Amberlee virus. There is no loyalty among viruses; as soon as they were fully conceived, the child virus turned against its parents, trying to drive them from the body as it would any other infection. This forced the Marburg into a heightened state of activity, which forced the body to respond to the perceived illness. Marburg Amberlee was not designed to fight the human body’s immune system, and responded by launching a full-on assault. The resulting chaos was tearing Suzanne apart from the inside out.
For her part, Suzanne Amberlee neither knew nor cared about what was happening inside her body. She was one of the first to be infected with Marburg Amberlee, which had been tailored to be nontransmissible between humans…but nothing’s perfect, and all those kisses she’d given her little girl had, in time, passed something more tangible than comfort between them. Marburg Amberlee had had plenty of time to establish itself inside her, and paradoxically, that made her more resistant to conversion than those with more recent infections. Her body knew how to handle the sleeping virus.
And yet bit by bit, inch by crucial inch, Kellis-Amberlee was winning. Suzanne was not aware, but she was already losing crucial brain functions. Her tear ducts had ceased to function, and much of her body’s moisture was being channeled toward the production of mucus and saliva—two reliable mechanisms for passing the infection along. She was being rewired, cell by cell, and even if someone had explained to her what was happening, she wouldn’t have cared. Suzanne Amberlee had lost everything she ever loved. Losing herself was simply giving in to the inevitable.
Suzanne’s last conscious thought was of her daughter, and how much she missed her. Then the stuffed bear she was holding slipped from her hands, and all thoughts slipped from her mind as she straightened and walked toward the open bedroom door. The back door was propped open, allowing a cool breeze to blow in from outside; she walked through it, and from there, made her way out of the backyard to the street.
The disaster that had been averted when the Colorado Cancer Research Center burned began with a woman, widowed and bereft of her only child, walking barefoot onto the sun-baked surface of the road. She looked dully to either side, not really tracking what she saw—not by any human definition of the term—before turning to walk toward the distant shouts of children playing in the neighborhood park. It would take her the better part of an hour to get there, moving slowly, with the jerky confusion of the infected when not actively pursuing visible prey.
It would take less than ten minutes after her arrival for the dying to begin. The Rising had come to Denver; the Rising had come home.
* * *
Please return to your homes. Please remain calm. This is not a drill. If you have been infected, please contact authorities immediately. If you have not been infected, please remain calm. This is not a drill. Please return to your homes…
July 26, 2014: Allentown, Pennsylvania
The people outside the prison could pretend that the dead weren’t walking if they wanted to. That sort of bullshit was the province of the free. Once you were behind bars, counting on other people to bring you food, water, hell, to let you go to the bathroom like a human being…you couldn’t lie to yourself. And the dead were walking.
So far, there hadn’t been any outbreaks in Brandon’s wing of the prison, but he knew better than to attribute that to anything beyond pure dumb luck. Whatever caused some people to get sick and die and then get up again without being bitten just hadn’t found a way inside the building. It would. All it needed was a little more time, and it would.
Brandon was sitting on his bed and staring at his hands, wondering if he’d ever see Hazel again, when the door of his cell slid open. He raised his head, and found himself looking at one of the prison guards—one of the only guards who was still bothering to show up for work.
“You’ve got a visitor, Majors,” said the guard, and gestured roughly for him to stand. Brandon had learned the virtue of obedience. It was practically the first lesson that prison taught. He stood, moving quickly to avoid a reprimand.
There had been other lessons since then. None of them had been pleasant ones.
The guard led Brandon through the halls without a word. Some of the prisoners shouted threats or profanity as they passed; Brandon’s role in the Mayday Army was well-known, and was the reason he was placed in solitary. As the situation got worse, his future looked more and more bleak. Outside the prison, he would probably have already been lynched. As if it was his fault somehow? That bastard Kellis was the one who built the bug. He should be the one getting the blame, not Brandon—