We’re still working on getting Alaric ready for his field trials. Next up, Becks is going to take him down to the beach and see if they can find a zombie seal to poke at. Never a dull moment around here. Oh, well. It’s better than a desk job.

—From Adaptive Immunities, the blog of Shaun Mason, April 12, 2041

Eight

Maggie didn’t look happy about being sent off to outfit the Doc, but she did it; that was really all I could ask of her. I stayed in the living room, getting a few posts up on the site and making it clear that we’d been nowhere near Oakland when the bombs came down. While I was at it, I surfed over to the medical blogs to see what they had to say about the “death” of Dr. Kelly Connolly. With the way they were going on about her—lost scion of one of the CDC’s proudest heritage families, rising young star of the virology world—you’d think she’d been on the verge of curing Kellis-Amberlee, not just slaving in the CDC salt mines with the rest of the peons.

That’s the power of good press, said George dryly.

I chuckled, and got back to work.

Alaric came into the room with a half-eaten piece of toast in one hand as I was firing off an e-mail to authorize the continuing sale of Dave’s merchandise line. “Did you see the crime scene photos on the gossip sites?” he asked. I nodded. He continued: “This is, like, Invasion of the Body Snatchers levels of scary. I always knew cloning technology was better than we saw here on the fringes, but the CDC employs the best doctors in the world, and even they couldn’t tell it was a clone.”

“Could be worse.”

“How?”

“I have no idea. But it can always be worse.” I glanced toward the kitchen door. “Where’s Becks?”

“She’s helping Maggie with Dr. Connolly.” He took a bite of toast, sitting down at p>

“I always knew she was smart.”

Alaric grunted as he logged on and started working the message boards. I leaned over to “supervise,” which really meant “look over his shoulder, drinking a Coke and pretending to pay attention.” He ignored me. I took his tendency to shut me out while he worked personally at first, until George assured me that he’d always done the same thing to her. He was just one of those people who really liked to focus on his work.

I love how you ignore the inherent impossibility of me telling you something you didn’t already know, George said.

“Don’t start with me,” I said, and took another drink of Coke. That’s normally enough to shut her up for a little while. When that doesn’t work, I zone out in front of the news feeds. Comforting for her, educational for me. Everybody wins.

It’s true.

“It’s a shitty thing to say and you know it.”

Alaric ignored my conversation with the air. He learned the hard way that sometimes it was best to turn a blind eye. During our first few months in the office, he asked who I was talking to every time I forgot and answered George aloud, and he pointed out that she was dead more than once. He stopped after I finally lost my temper and introduced my fist to his face, resulting in skinned knuckles on my part and a broken nose on his. He still flinches if I move too fast. Guess I can’t blame him. If my boss were a potentially crazy man with a mean right hook, I’d probably be a little jumpy, too.

The title of one of the threads caught my eye. I leaned forward, tapping Alaric’s screen. “There. Can you expand that thread?”

“Sure.” He clicked the header line: CDC Safety Precautions Insufficient? “I don’t see what it has to do with—”

“Just scroll.”

“Right,” he said, and started scrolling.

The thread started as a discussion of the break-in at the Memphis CDC and devolved into a discussion of CDC security precautions over the course of half a dozen posts. As I’d hoped, the posters quickly started naming names, citing every CDC doctor, intern, affiliate, and publicity person to have died during the last eighteen months. “Alaric, can you grab the names of the deceased and start calling up obituaries and circumstance-of-death reports? If anyone looks at you funny, you can say you’re basing a report off this thread.”

“Sure,” he said, warming to the idea as he saw where I was going with it. “I can do you one better. I still have a few of Buffy’s old worms live and functional. I’ll set one of them digging for connections between the deceased employees, Kelly Connolly, Joseph Wynne, and any other unusual or unexplained deaths in their circle of friends.”

“Just don’t get caught or traced and you can do whatever you want.”

“Awesome.” Alaric bent d, starting to type. He had the same focus I’ve seen from George, Rick, and every other Newsie I’ve ever met. I could probably have danced naked on his desk without getting him to do more than grunt and shove me out of the way of his screen. Content that I’d done something useful, I got up and walked to the kitchen. A fresh Coke would keep me from thinking too hard about the tools he was using to do the job.

There are people who say that Kellis-Amberlee and its undead side effects are going to bring about the end of the human race. I tend to disagree with this perspective. I’m pretty sure that if the zombies were going to destroy humanity, they would’ve done it back in 2014, when they first showed up. I think that if anything destroys the human race at this point, it’s going to be the human race itself.

With my posts done, Alaric working, and Becks and Maggie sequestered with Kelly, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I settled for sitting at the kitchen table with my fresh can of Coke, waiting for something to happen. My patience was rewarded about fifteen minutes later, when something happened.