The Dying of the Light (Book 3): Beginning (8 page)

“So we’ve been looking at this as a two-pronged approach, as you know. Step one, create an artificial antibody that would bind to the abnormal areas of the prion and prevent its propagation. Step two, create a sequential gene-targeting system to alter the gene responsible for the normal protein, effectively making all future generations immune without the need for the antibodies.”

“With you so far,” Sabrina replied and smiled as Mary moved over to sit beside her.

Jim gestured to the whiteboard and some results that looked like gobbledygook to Sabrina but she was sure justified his position. “Thanks to the volunteers we’ve had, we’ve all but finalized the antibody. Just another few rounds of tests and we’ll be able to inoculate everyone alive now.”

“That’s fantastic!” Sabrina said and clapped her hands.

Jim held up a hand. “But again, that only gets us halfway there. We still need the gene therapy. And we’re having troubles with that. We’re getting close, but it’s just not there yet.”

“What’s the problem?”

Mary spoke up and walked over to a monitor, one that showed hundreds of mice in cages somewhere in another lab room. “We’re trying to use the knockout mice to help us induce a polymorphism in the gene responsible for the normal protein, which would essentially render it invisible to the prion.”

Sabrina couldn’t help but giggle. “Knockout mice, sounds like a cartoon.”

Mary smiled. “I’ve always thought so too. In any case, we’re having trouble locating the exact gene, even though we know from some prior research that we found that codons 127 and 129 are involved—”

Sabrina held up a hand. “Straying a bit too technical for me, love.”

“To put it another way,” Jim said as he picked up the conversation, “we’re close, but we don’t know how close, and we don’t know how long it will take us to know. You know?”

“There’s still the ethical question too, Jim,” Mary said, and Sabrina could pick up the underlying tension in her words. This was an old argument that somehow had retained its fiery disposition. “Are we even human at that point? Do we have the right to play God like this? Not to mention the things we haven’t thought of, susceptibility to other diseases, unknown and catastrophic side effects…”

“You don’t know what you don’t know.”

“Precisely.”

“But you’ve been working on it, right? With the mice?”

“We’re ready to start human trials if we get approval from upstairs and volunteers,” Jim said.

“But I thought—”

“Jim and I differ in our opinion on this one, Sabrina,” Mary said with a stern look at her partner. “I think it’s too risky, he says we don’t have any choice.”

“How do you mean?”

“First off,” Jim said, “the mice are fine. We’ve run through twelve generations of them after the gene therapy, and they are clinically, physiologically, histopathologically, immunologically, and reproductively normal. Brain tissue homogenates are resistant to prion propagation in vitro as assessed by protein misfolding cyclic amplification.”

Sabrina crooked an eyebrow at her husband, and he cleared his throat.

“They are functionally and biologically the same as the control group. No difference whatsoever, except that they are immune to the prion. All twelve generations.”

“Then it works!”

“No, not yet,” Mary said. “We haven’t tried it on humans, and there’s no way to know what it would do on us until we proceed with the therapy and those subjects have children and then more children and more children… We can’t go experimenting on people like that. There is simply no way of knowing what potential problems might result from these trials.”

“We don’t have a choice!” Jim slammed his hand down on his desk, knocking his coffee cup to the floor with a crash.

“We always have a—”

“No, Mary, we don’t, and you know it.” Jim walked over and knelt in front of his wife. “We’re dying, Sabrina. As a species. There’s less than a million of us out there across the whole planet. And there are still billions of walkers. It’s a war of attrition, and we’re losing. Unless we do something now, and I mean right now, we won’t see another hundred years. Maybe not even seventy or eighty. We’ll be gone.”

Sabrina sat back against the chair and looked at her husband. She heard Mary swear and storm off, tossing papers around, but the woman eventually came back to sit beside her once more. Sabrina had just stared into her husband’s eyes the whole time, trying to come up with a way he wasn’t right.

She failed.

Sabrina stood next to him, put an arm around Jim’s waist, and looked at Mary. “Did any of the mice die horrible screaming deaths?”

Mary’s eyebrows rose, and her mouth dropped open. “No, of course not!”

“Then whatever problems they might possibly have someday are better than what happens every time someone turns into a zombie or gets killed by one.”

Mary closed her mouth with a snap. That sort of logic was hard to argue with.

“Shouldn’t we look at the bigger picture?” Sabrina asked. “No, we don’t know what may happen if we proceed with the gene therapy. We could end up with no problems like the mice or something awful or something in between.”

She paused to look at her friend of more than twenty years. “What we
do
know is that eventually, without it, we will all die. Every one of us. And those kids that you’re worried about twelve generations from now who might have a problem will never be born.”

Sabrina walked over to stand between the two whiteboards. “What you two have done is nothing short of miraculous. Yes, you had essentially unlimited resources and years to work on it, but even so… You’ve developed a way to inoculate everyone now living and protect all our children forever.”

“It’s not quite that simple, Sabrina,” Mary said with a shake of her head. “The sheer scale alone… It’s not like we have massive manufacturing facilities that can run off a few hundred thousand doses or something.”

“We don’t have a whole country to provide for anymore. Or rather, we do, but there’s a damn sight fewer people in it. If we made it a priority here and in a couple other bunkers, don’t you think we could make it happen? And we can take the time to ramp up, do it the right way. Any babies born between now and when the therapy is ready will just get the antibodies and boosters after however long, and then the therapy will come a little later. We can find an abandoned facility somewhere that used to make vitamins or whatever and get it going again.”

Mary nodded, a bit of excitement and positivity in her tone. “We could turn out about, oh, a thousand doses a month here at least.” She smiled. “One benefit of being the ‘science bunker,’ I guess.”

“Now, what happens when we start to breed with survivors up top?” Sabrina asked. “Wouldn’t that sort of normalize any mutations and eventually bring things to a sort of even keel?”

“It could just as easily remove all our modifications,” Jim said. “Natural selection is a tricky thing.”

Sabrina nudged him again. “I get that it will take some time to get it to the point where we’re ready to disseminate the treatment, and I get that it’s not perfect. Nothing ever is. But this way, not even the Driebachs can wipe us out. Honestly, no more horrible screaming deaths? I’d call that a good day.”

ExForce Command
Joint Base Lewis-McChord

Eden approached command-and-control slower than she had in the past and winced as her left arm throbbed in the sling. At least she wasn’t limping and didn’t have to use a crutch or cane. That was all she needed, everyone thinking Daddy’s little girl couldn’t hack it. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she’d somehow screwed things up with Marquez to the point where she had to report to his CO. Eden didn’t look forward to the rumors that would be going around about this little visit.

The most annoying part of it was that she was good at her job—damn good. If she hadn’t been forced to be “David Blake’s daughter,” she’d be the Badass in Residence by now. At the same time, she loved her dad and wasn’t ashamed to be his daughter. But it made everything so much harder, especially since no one thought of it as being rough on her at all.

Everyone would want to know what the whiny little princess had complained about to her boss’s boss.

“Evening, Corporal Blake,” the one to the left said. His partner said nothing and kept his eyes forward. “The old man’s expecting you.” He turned, opened the door for her, and stepped out of the way.

The room was busy. Uniformed soldiers and civilian personnel milled about, talking and going over maps of what looked like old Tacoma and southern Seattle. She glanced over her shoulder as the marine closed the door, and then she turned back around as she caught some of the chatter.

“. . . almost ready now that the team is back. We’ll send in a cleanup crew…”

“. . . Eatonville? That was a nice place, as I recall. There was this little store…”

“Finished lollygaggin’, Corporal?” Lieutenant Colonel Dalton Gaines asked in his slow Georgian drawl.

She snapped her head around and stood to attention. “Yes, sir! Corporal Blake reporting as ordered, sir.”

Gaines was far enough over six feet that she had to look up at him, albeit only a little. Advancing age hadn’t softened him at all. If anything, he was harder, fitter, and was just a touch greyer in the last few years. He still made her think of a walking refrigerator, all barrel chest and giant muscles. She hadn’t had much direct contact with him since he’d moved out of the bunker to run ExForce, but he’d come over many times when she was growing up, a good friend of her parents. She’d learned not to underestimate him, as many did with his disarming “good ol’ boy” demeanor and accent.

Underneath that amenable exterior was one of the toughest men she’d ever met, not to mention the strongest.

Gaines snorted. “At ease, Corporal, and step into my office.” He maneuvered through the mess of the command center with a grace and economy of movement that she hoped she could develop herself one day. He opened a door to one side of the main room and entered a modest office complete with a desk, some chairs, a bookcase, and a filing cabinet. There was just enough space left over on the other side of the room for a small table with some water and… Could that be coffee that she smelled? Her mouth watered as she entered the room.

“Close the door and have a seat,” he said as he opened a file on his desk and took the chair behind it.

She did as instructed, shifting in her seat until she found a position that felt a little less like a hot poker was stabbing her side.

“Ribs still hurting ya?” Gaines asked.

“Only a little, sir,” she said, taking a deep breath against the pain and trying to appear strong.

Gaines snorted again. “Yeah, right. Well, the doc says you’re on restricted duty for at least a month, more if they don’t heal up right.”

“A month? Sir, I…”

“Save it,” he said, holding up a hand. “Even if I were inclined to disregard the doc’s orders—and I ain’t—your parents have made it clear what will happen to me should I not follow his instructions.” He chuckled at her grimace and continued. “Oh, it’s nothin’ like that. You’re not getting any special favors. I’d do the same for any of my people. I’ve had cracked ribs, and they’re no joke.” He put a hand on his side for a moment in tune with some memory that flashed across his face. He smiled at her as he continued, a genuine smile that showed the concern he had for someone he’d watched grow up. “So take it easy, okay? I don’t want to make that an order. There’s plenty of prep work for our first camp that you can work on anyway.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t mention it. Now, about your final hunt…”

“Sir, Marquez…”

Gaines looked up at her, and she fumbled to a stop. “Yes, Corporal?”

She sighed and shook her head. “Never mind, sir. You’ve got my report.”

Gaines nodded and sat back in his chair, holding the report in front of him in its folder. “I do indeed, Ms. Blake. From your report, your CO sent you out to hunt a reported walker, and it seems to have gotten the better of you.” His finger traced down the page he was looking at, quoting it in bits and pieces. “Fell through the floor… threw a knife but the walker threw it back… got bitten…” He turned the page. “Oh, let’s see, you threatened to make Foretti eat his gun and disobeyed the entry officer at the gate.” He finished reading and closed the file, tossing it on his desk. “Now’s your chance to explain. Make it good. I’m fixin’ to get Foretti and Marquez in here, and if y’all give me different stories…” He leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head.

Eden again started to speak but stopped herself and took a moment to figure out exactly what she wanted to say. Gaines was giving her a chance to explain, which was more than most officers would. It was definitely not something Marquez would’ve done.

“Sir, this wasn’t a normal hunt, even for a final qualification. I… I barely made it back, sir, and I wasn’t thinking clearly. I’m sorry for what happened at the gate.” She thought his eyebrow might’ve twitched just a little, and she continued. “With your permission, sir, I’d like to show you what I encountered.” She motioned to the laptop on his desk.

When he nodded, she spun it around, took her camera and cable out of her pocket, and plugged it into the side of the computer. Even though she’d used her right arm, the movement still jostled her injured left arm. She hissed as the pain shot through her, and Gaines shifted his chair to give her more room. A moment later, she was paging through the pictures that she’d taken of the unusual walker.

“I’m not crazy, sir. This was obviously not a normal walker. I think… Sir, I think these ‘ghost walkers’ that everyone’s talking about are a new kind of walker. One that’s smart, fast, and one helluva lot more deadly than your standard zombie.”

She sat back and looked at Gaines, who hadn’t said a word, hadn’t even
breathed
, while she went on her little rant. He was so focused on the screen, she wasn’t sure he knew she was even still there until he spoke.

“That’s the walker you killed? The one that bit you?” He still hadn’t so much as glanced her way.