Defiant: Quantic Dreams Book 2 by Elizabeth McLaughlin (reading list txt) 📗

a terrible sickness. It would be cruel of us to put others at risk for our traditions, no matter how important they are.”

Abram’s hands balled into fists but he remained calm. “I understand. It just..I just want what’s best for her.”

“I’ll do it.” The whole family turned to look at me. “I’ll cremate the remains for you. It’s not a perfect solution, but this way you don’t have to…”

“We wouldn’t be participating.” Abram’s son finished for me. “I believe that may be helpful for us Jacob.” He turned to his father. “I’m sorry, I never introduced myself. My name is Lucas, and this is my wife Rachel. My mother’s name was Esther.”

I smiled through my mask. “A fine name for a fine man. Lucas was my father’s name. It’s clear that yours raised a strong man. It’s a pleasure to meet the both of you formally.”

I took my leave to find out where Esther’s remains were being kept. When I explained the situation to the medical technician tasked with keeping the body quarantined, he wasn’t happy. We argued for a few minutes but I eventually pulled rank on the kid and retrieved the gurney from the freezer we had commandeered. The body was still in the state it had been when she passed. Blood and mucus crusted Esther’s face and more blood was collected around scratches that dotted her arms and legs. Thank god the field hospital was off-limits. If I had to witness this I don’t know that I would have had the strength to continue. I sent the med tech to fetch a cloth and some warm water. Being careful not to expose any of my own skin to the body, I carefully cleaned Esther’s remains before sealing them again.

The march to the cremation chamber was uneventful. When I returned to Abram’s family quarters I found two small children accompanying the adults. Abram’s grandchildren. The kids smiled up at me but sobered up quickly at the sight of their grandmother’s body. I let Abram lead the impromptu procession. His son and daughter-in-law took the rear position and I motioned the grand-children to stand on either side of me behind their parents. After bidding the matriarch of their family goodbye, I took Esther’s body into the cremation chamber. As I shut her remains into the oven, I knew that this would be far from the last time a family had to say goodbye.

Chapter Thirteen

“I have good news and bad news. Which do you want first?” Dr. Rickman had called me into her office an hour prior but a patient had gone into respiratory failure and so our meeting had been delayed. I appreciated that she was taking the time at all.

“I’ll take the bad news first.” Things had already gone to hell, how much worse could it get?

“It’s a droplet spread respiratory virus. The symptoms appear to be more severe than we thought. We weren’t able to observe it in Allison and Tarik because they died so suddenly but...”

“But what?” An icy feeling settled in the pit of my stomach. I knew what she was about to say and I wished to god and heaven above it was something else.

“But in...younger patients...” She hesitated before nodding gently to herself. “In children and young adult patients we have been witnessing…an increased amount of aggression.”

“What kind of aggression? I can’t blame them for feeling aggressive, I would be too if I got sick with this.”

“Something more akin to rabies than a bad mood. We’re not sure if it’s from the fever or the virus itself, but it seems that when patients hit that point they start having significant disruptions in their cognitive functioning. They seem to lose all inebriation and revert to base behaviors, such as biting.” I glanced at the change to her personal protective equipment. Her surgical gown had been stuffed into two sets of nitrile gloves. In her left hand she held a face shield.

Biting? My mind flashed back to one of my favorite old movies, 28 Days Later. It detailed a zombie outbreak in Great Britain. The only catch was that these people were very much alive, instead of stumbling and shambling they morphed into rabid shadows of their former selves. Their only motivation was to bite an uninflected human and they frequently mangled themselves trying to do so. “It’s that bad?”

“Yes.”

I took a deep breath, the smell of my mask sour after hours of sweat. “What’s the good news?”

“It’s a droplet spread respiratory virus.”

I waved my hand in front of her face. “Earth to Phoebe, you just said that. Are you feeling okay?” The joviality was most certainly inappropriate, but I was feeling spread thin and was starting to not care about propriety.

She shoved my hand away with a weak smile. “That is the good news, Jacob. Knowing the nature and transmission of the virus is the biggest key in formulating a vaccine. It also means that it isn’t airborne.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Airborne viruses are just that-they travel through the air. Very, very difficult to stop transmission and spread. Droplet spread viruses are a lot easier to deal with in comparison. They’re spread through most bodily fluids. Sneezing, coughing, vomiting, et cetera. Slowing the infection rate isn’t what I’d call easy, but it means that quarantining everyone as soon as we could probably saved dozens of lives, if not hundreds.”

Good to know that my wild stab in the dark actually turned out to be useful. “And a vaccine?” A vaccine wasn’t just the key to reintegrating the population, it was the only way that a successful colony could be established.

“That’s going to take a little longer, I’m afraid. Five hundred years ago, the fastest vaccines took over a year to develop. We have far better technology these days, of course, but given that this appears to be a completely new pathogen it’s still going to take me well over a month. Maybe two. We’re working on weakening or completely deactivating the virus but I won’t be