“Yes, it is,” she agreed. She took a stack of manila envelopes from the briefcase and stood, walking a loose circuit around the room. Each of us got an envelope before she returned to the couch and sat, looking almost serene. I know that look. That’s the look I get from people who’ve done their civic duty by reporting the zombie outbreak to the local news media and are now planning to sit down and let it be our problem instead of theirs. It’s the expression of someone who knows, deep down inside, that the buck is about to be passed.
Buck-passing rarely comes with handouts. I peered into the envelope, natural paranoia demanding that I confirm it wasn’t filled with mousetraps or funny white powder before I removed the contents. Paper. Some paperclipped reports, a few loose memos, and a few sheets of statistical data. I didn’t understand most of what I saw, which really wasn’t surprising. I never was much of one for the numbers.
I looked up. Kelly was watching me intently. Everyone else was flipping through the contents of their respective envelopes. It looked like it was up to me to keep her talking. I waved a sheet of statistics and asked, “What’s all this?”
“It’s the story.” She sagged back in the couch, closing her eyes. The “passing the buck” expression faded, replaced by one of deep and abiding weariness. She kept her eyes closed as she began to talk. It may have been because she was concentrating on getting her facts straight, but I don’t think so.
I think she just didn’t want to risk seeing the look on my face.
“The first cases of confirmed Kellis-Amberlee occurred in 2014. That’s when the viruses were introduced to the biosphere, met, and managed to successfully combine. The viral substrains are either descendants of different initial cases of Marburg Amberlee or the result of very minor natural mutation, occurring within isolated geographic areas. Everywhere in the world, Kellis flu met Marburg Amberlee, and Kellis-Amberlee was the result. It’s not natural virus behavior. Neither of the pathogens involved was a natural virus. Kellis-Amberlee has been stable, and effectively identical, since it was ‘born.’ ”
Becks looked perplexed. “Did we sign up for a seminar or something?” I held up a hand for quiet. She snorted, and subsided.
Kelly continued: “The first cases of confirmed Kellis-Amberlee infection going ‘live’ in isolated parts of the body—the reservoir conditions—were identified in 2018. They may have been cropping up before then, but we didn’t have the capacity to track them. The infrastructure was still too broken down for that to be an option.”
“Makes sense,” I agreed. The Rising left the medical community in tatters. Frontline doctors and nurses were among the first to be infected, leaving the hospitals of the world severely understaffed even after the initial battles of the Rising had been fought and technically won. I say “technically” because it’s hard to call a conflict with that kind of casualty rate a victory. There are still hospitals and people who can use them, so I guess we’ll have to count that as a win, for now.
A smile tugged at the edges of Kelly’s lips. “I could start listing the index cases for the known reservoir conditions, but I doubt you really care, and they aren’t that applicable in this situation. They showed up one by one, they didn’t follow any perceptible pattern, and they were as incurable as the parent virus. That’s what matters to the story: Once you have a reservoir condition, you have it for the rest of your life.”
She’s got that right, said George bitterly. She developed retinal Kellis-Amberlee while we were little, and she had it until the day she died. Kids in our high school used to tease her about it and threaten to steal her sunglasses. They never did, though. There was always too much of a chance that her “cooties” might be contagious.
That’s bullshit, by the way. You can’t catch the live form of Kellis-Amberlee unless you come into contact with it, and George didn’t sweat the live virus. It just lived inside her eyes, all the time. Waiting for the day when it would get loose to play with the rest of her body.
Which it eventually did.
I had to force myself to start talking again, before I could really start dwelling on what had happened to George. This wasn’t the time. “So what’s the moral of our story?” I asked, relieved when my voice sounded halfway natural. “Reservoir conditions suck?”
“Reservoir conditions represent a viral behavior with no known purpose or explanation,” contributed Dave. Everyone but Kelly turned to look at him. He shrugged. “I took a couple of virology courses before I went to Alaska. It seemed like it might help with that whole ‘not dying’ thing.”
“Ah.” Dave was in Alaska last year when half the staff died. He was probably safer on the frozen, zombie-infested tundra than we were in Sacramento. There was something ironic about that. I paused. “Wait, are you saying no one knows what the reservoir conditions do?”
“There are theories.” Kelly sounded suddenly evasive. I eyed her. Her expression was practically a mask; with her eyes closed, she could have been thinking anything at all.
She should get some sunglasses if she wants to pull that trick, said George.