Virus

Twenty Three

I won't be wearing the exoskeleton suit or flying to Nevada to fight off Holler's armies. I refused to. There was no chance that I was going to walk into a battle and risk seeing Mick Holler in person. If he was anything like the vision I had, I wanted no part of him.

Unfortunately, I couldn't stop Travis or Dharma from going. Amberley had agreed to stay in D.C with me until the airstrike. Sara was an entirely different situation.

She stared, drifting her gaze between me and Travis.

"Stay with me," I snapped. She flinched.

"I support whatever decision you make," Travis said politely.

I'd never seen her so disoriented. She was usually so calculative and decisive. She usually had everything figured out. And now she was struggling between the biggest decision of her life.

"Sara, with the technology they'll be taking into Nevada, there is almost no doubt they'll walk out alive," Theodore said. He was standing on the other side of Travis as I was. In his hand was a flask of booze. "The technology was designed to withstand an airstrike if that is where the hundred men find themselves."

A week ago, when we were making final adjustments to the plan, Girida had felt that five men was a bit sketchy, so he pumped it up to a hundred.

"But you better decide soon because the last truck leaves in ten minutes."

Sara looked relieved. "I guess...I'll see you in a while," she said to Travis. Her lower lip quivered as she said it.

Travis wrapped his big meaty arms around her and kissed her. "I'll see you in a while," he echoed. Then he picked up his backpack and hopped onto the back of the truck.

Dharma quickly hugged Sara, Amberley and I and then followed Travis onto the truck. After her the doors closed and the last trucks roared through the sterilizing tunnel.

I hugged Sara quickly, but genuinely. "Thank you," I whispered.

"C'mon guys!" Amberley called from the doorway of the hotel. "Kelso will be waiting for us at the meeting."

Kelso and Girida had eagerly planned a meeting. They had found something with the virus.

Once we got to the meeting, I noticed that Shaun's seat was empty.

We took our seats. Claudia went first.

"Over the past five weeks, we've been measuring the amount of the disease found in the butterfly. It's been dropping drastically. We've estimated that by next week the virus will be totally out of its system. We haven't yet figured out if that was the way the virus was made or if it was our stabilizer. So, we have nine planes left in the garage and eighteen trucks. We want to spread the stabilizer everywhere. During the airstrike tonight, my scientists will load every single vehicle with the stabilizer and then we'll have then spread all over the west coast, spreading the serum. That way that if it isn't our serum that cured the butterfly, there will be no harm done."

I literally had to slap my hand over my mouth to keep from gasping. How could they be so stupid?

"If I may," I started, "what if this is just one of Hollers tricks. What if he designed the virus to do this so that we would waste all of our curing serum, just to have the plague spike up again?"

They were speechless.

"She has a point," Theodore said, sipping more booze and munching on a cookie. "Mick sure does have a lot of tricks up his sleeve."

"I say that we put a hole bunch it sick people into a quarantine and the test the stabilizer on them. For all we know, this serum doesn't have the same effect on us as it does butterflies. We watch their results."

"But if your right," Theodore said, "then how do we know that we won't see the virus weaken. And then we dump our serum all over the coast and a second later, bam the hole thing spike up again. I went to Yale with that asshole and I'll tell you, he's the most patient sucker out their."

"Why would he want to us to waste our supply though?" Claudia asked. "If he actually wants us to dump the stuff on the coast and then restart the virus at full hight, then he's being pretty stupid. If we doe spread the stabilizer, the residues will last for months, if not years. The virus won't have a chance of spiking up again."

Girida slams his fist on the table. "God damnit. We finally get a lead ad that bastard has to mess it up."

"It's obvious," I said. "If Holler is controlling the virus, we just have to find out how and steel it from him."