She had died, while he watched, and then she had gotten up and stumbled toward him. Of course, his rational side insisted, she had been infected, not dead. She had been covered in fluids and tissues from the infected man, the man whose brain Clark had, had shredded, so obviously she had been infected, even if'even if he had personally seen her bleed out. Even if he had watched her die.
He needed to think about that. He needed to consider all the implications. He also needed to put it out of mind altogether if he was going to continue to function.
'Shh! I hear him moving around in there, get your foodhole shut, alright?'
Clark cleared his throat discretely and opened the door of the warden's office. In the corridor beyond the two MPs stood at attention against a steel wall painted in flaking tan. Their salutes were perfect.
'At ease,' Clark ordered, and they relaxed fractionally. 'You two head down to the DCAF, if you're hungry. I'm safe for now, thank you.' He turned the opposite way, toward the prison's nerve center.
On the way he passed a window and was startled to see it was dark outside. Had he slept that long? Normally he woke like clockwork. In the prison yard soldiers with red lens flashlights were sweeping the open area between the fences. So far none of the infected'the dead'the victims of the Epidemic had wandered into the prison's valley but it would happen. They might be out there even now, stumbling toward the warmth and the food trapped inside. He couldn't see them in the dark, of course, so he hurried into the operations room.
Racks of server hardware had been crammed into the small office and the floor was a hazard of unsecured cables. All the equipment made it ten degrees warmer in the room, when added to the body heat of the half-dozen specialists plugging and unplugging the modular components.
At the far end Vikram stood before a massive flatscreen monitor. He was reading from a printout of an Excel worksheet while a specialist inputted coordinates on a wireless laptop. 'Woods Landing, Wyoming. That will be, now, let me look, call it forty degrees thirty seconds north, one hundred and six degrees mark west, we do not need to be so exact, yes? Given our resolution? The date for this location will be March the Seventeenth. Oh! The day of Saint Patrick.'
Clark's thin lips twitched in something reminiscent of a smile. His friend had a way of staying cheerful despite circumstances that had seen them both through many a losing battle.
'Still working tirelessly, I see, while the old man gets his beauty sleep,' Clark said. The specialist on the laptop turned away and looked busy, knowing he wasn't supposed to be part of this conversation.
'It is the epidemiology data, Bannerman.' Vikram handed him the worksheet and Clark scanned it.
'Sanchez mentioned it to me before she was killed,' he assented. 'It was what she wanted to talk to me about when she called me down to the Bag.'
'It was her crowning achievement.' Vikram tapped the flatscreen monitor to show Clark a map of the United States. Tiny dots covered most of the west in several different colors. Clark imagined he knew what they represented'every known appearance of the Epidemic. 'She had learned, as did we all, that this is no virus, and no bacterium. So she went on the hunt for some other villain. And this is what she found.'
There were too many dots. Bannerman stopped scanning the screen and looked down at the paper in his hand. Each incident was listed with a place name and a date, with even a time of day listed for many entries. He flipped to the bottom of the sheet, to the oldest data. 'This can't be right. These dates' they go all the way back into last year, some of them. I arrived here in the middle of March, what was it, the eighteenth? The nineteenth. The Epidemic was three days old then.'
'Lieutenant Sanchez thought not so much. She believed it started earlier but that we missed the signs. Her notes are maddeningly vague and of course we cannot ask her what she was thinking.'