“I will.”
There was the sound of movement in the other room, someone stirring in their blankets. They rose from the cot and dressed quietly, Quinn staring at her as she donned her clothes, a sense of disbelief still clinging to the memory of their lovemaking, like some glorious fever-dream. She caught him looking at her and gave him a mock disapproving look. He smiled, and they crept to the plastic barrier and peered through.
Doctor Holtz was sitting on the edge of his cot holding his wallet. He looked up at them and blinked. The sound of his dry tongue rasping across his lips was audible.
“A chimeric virus. That’s how they did it,” he said, slowly nodding.
Chapter 27
The Storm
They gathered around Holtz as if they were half-frozen adventurers stumbling upon a fire.
Collincz woke at the sound of the doctor’s voice and leapt to her feet, straightening her uniform that she’d slept in. Holtz gazed around at them, his movements hesitant and slow.
“How long?” he asked Collincz after she’d handed him a bottle of water. His voice was still rough, but held a sonorous quality tinted with a slight British accent that Quinn was sure would resound powerfully in a lecture hall.
“About thirty-six hours or so.”
The old man nodded and ran his fingers over his wallet again. He began to open it but stopped.
“How many are left?” he said.
“Thomas, Murray, Wexler, and these three that came in from outside yesterday.”
Holtz looked around at them, his eyes hovering on Quinn’s face the longest.
“You’re the one with the paper, aren’t you,” Holtz said after a time. Quinn nodded, coming forward.
“Yes, but how did you know that? You were…”
“I thought it was a dream when I woke up. But now that I see you, I know that it wasn’t. Someone showed me a paper, held it before me?”
“I did,” Collincz said.
“Do you still have it?”
Quinn dug in his pocket and drew out the page that was beginning to roughen from being handled so much. Holtz took it from him and read, holding the paper only inches from his nose. When he was finished, he looked up at Quinn but didn’t hand the page back.
“Where did you get this?”
“From a man named Harold Roman. He was from this camp. We found him right before he died in Fort Dodge. It was in his pack. My father was James Kelly,” Quinn added.
“I see.”
“Do you know what it means?”
“Oh yes. In fact, it’s so familiar it’s almost like finding something that you hadn’t known you’d lost.”
“What do you mean?” Quinn said, grabbing a nearby chair and pulling it closer to sit in. The others did the same, seating themselves in a semicircle around the doctor’s bed.
“It means the answer I’ve been looking for was right before my eyes the whole time.” He cleared his throat. “When this all began, and my wife and I came here, we had all the samples and test subjects we needed. There was always a sick person turning up or being quarantined in different areas of the camp. Now, from the start, I suspected we were dealing with a virus, a very special virus, but a virus just the same. The problem was when we began to study the samples, we found only a simple strain of flu.”