Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 110809 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 554(@200wpm)___ 443(@250wpm)___ 369(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 110809 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 554(@200wpm)___ 443(@250wpm)___ 369(@300wpm)
“Oh.” He nods. “Well, I’m not supposed to go in there.” He gestures toward the airlock door that no doubt leads to a decontamination room. “But come on back out here, and I’ll show you where I can go.”
“Okay.”
He leads me out of the HCL and into another set of doors to the left. “In here, they call it the ‘open lab’. I guess it’s safe to work in here—at least no one told me I couldn’t empty the trash.” He shrugs.
Two men stand outside the doors, though they aren’t in soldier uniforms like the guys out front. Even so, they scream ‘security’ in the way they stand, like they’re waiting to get jumped. They don’t so much as look at us as we walk by, their dark suits giving them a twin vibe.
“I’m sure it’s fine.” I push through the doors and into a lab. The space is huge, the ceiling high overhead, but lights have been suspended at lower levels to make the entire area bright. There are a few rows of tables and several glass-front cabinets along the walls, each of them filled with a wealth of supplies. And one corner of the space is taken up by a glass room, respirators and a suit hanging outside of it. Everything is here. Absolutely everything I could need to continue my research and actually find a way to beat the plague. Hope, just a tiny thread of it, starts to spool around my heart.
“It’s her.” A woman backs her wheelchair away from a desk and rolls over. “Dr. Clark, right?”
“Yes, but you can call me Georgia.” I glance around the room. There are only a few people working. Where’s the rest of the team? There should be dozens, maybe hundreds of scientists.
The woman approaching me smiles, and it reaches her big green eyes over the top of her mask. “Cool. I’m Gretchen. Epidemiologist.”
Another woman pulls away from her microscope and two men walk over from their respective desks. Gretchen points to the first man with shaggy brown hair. “This is Wyatt. Then Aang. And that’s Evie.”
I look at each of them in turn and try not to fidget as they stare back. “Um, you’ve already met Gene,” I offer. “He’s my assistant.”
“Hello again.” Gene smiles.
Aang crosses his arms in front of him, the deep wrinkle between his eyes likely a permanent feature. “Yeah, he kept coming by yesterday trying to destroy my workspace.”
I glance at his desk. It’s covered in papers and various medical journals in haphazard stacks. I bet it makes Gene itch from just looking at all the mess.
“I don’t need the help,” Aang adds with a bit of a glower.
“Where’s everyone else? Already at lunch?” I ask, even though it’s first thing in the morning.
“Oh, um, no.” Gretchen shakes her head. “It’s just us here. Director Hamberg handpicked us, but he didn’t tell us anything else. Just that we would come here and research the cure. Stay isolated. Focus on the work.”
“He didn’t seem too happy about it either,” Wyatt adds. “But I guess those were his orders from the top.”
‘The top’, meaning my sister.
“So, you’re in charge?” Evie, a tall blonde with striking brown eyes, asks. She’s older, maybe mid-40s, but she has a bounce to her step. Peppy, almost.
“Me? I wouldn’t say I’m in charge. No.”
“That’s not the briefing we got.” Aang turns his glower on me.
“Go easy,” Gretchen hisses, then tucks her bright pink hair behind her ear. “We’re good with all that. Chain of command or whatever. It’s not a big deal.”
Aang’s resentful look doesn’t quite match with what Gretchen’s saying, but I shrug it off. We stand in silence for a while, the awkward growing like a colony of bacteria in a Petri dish.
Gretchen clears her throat. “Okay, so we work like this—the virus cells come to us already pre-generated and in a monoculture in each dish. I inspect the samples and do the data workup on the front end. If we need to refine the samples more, Wyatt suits up and does all that in the HCL next door.”
Wyatt, the lean, shaggy-haired man, gives me a mock salute. “I also play some mellow tunes for all of us to vibe to.” He hitches a thumb at the record player on his desk.
Gretchen continues, “After that, we each take our set of samples and get to work. I could give you a rundown of our findings so far, but that would probably take a month, at the least. Suffice it to say, this virus is smallpox on steroids. It’s horseshoe-like structure and ability to infect more than simply the nucleus of the host cell—” She throws her hands up. “Well, you know the rest. I’ve seen some of your data out of Austin.”
“You have?” I focus on Gretchen, at least she seems to be the most receptive to my presence. “I didn’t think anyone actually checked my findings. I’ve been working on the envelope. I feel like that’s the key, but I’ve yet to find any way to break it down without killing the surrounding cells. The virus is too cytopathic.”