Side Effects

Chapter 23

"This might be the most boring thing I've ever read," complained Alaya as she leafed through the stack of papers. I'd started to read them first, and then every time I finished, I passed the page to her so maybe one of us would find a talking point for the conference. We didn't have too much to go on though.

I handed her the next page, earning a groan in reply. "I'm sorry, I really am. But maybe we can help people out if there is another pandemic in the future."

She gave me a little snort of annoyance. "You're lucky you gave me good food and two orgasms before we started this, or I'd be really cranky."

I chuckled a little bit at that. Tim, the driver, had been waiting right where he'd said he'd be, and we got back in the SUV to go to the airport. Using his knowledge of the city, we found a place that served some good local dishes and loaded up on food to bring to the plane. We ended up with a lot of meat in a peanut sauce, though in one dish it was lamb and the other chicken, plus several dishes of a local freshwater perch that I'd never had before. There was a lot of rice, fried bananas, and some lemony spicy chicken dish.

No, I didn't know what they were called, we were in and out too fast, but damn it was all good food. Once we'd gotten to a high enough altitude, Esme and Joel rotated eating while the other manned the cockpit. Keith was moaning happily at our choices as well, though as long as Alaya was happy, that was all I cared about. Luckily, she was happily sighing as well, and then after the food was done, I had her moaning in a completely different way as I showed her just what a gentleman I was.

Twice.

So, now that we were lounging in beds with all the papers, Alaya was in a good mood, even with her grumpiness at the papers. Good food and multiple orgasms will do that for you! "Okay, you keep looking at that file," she said. "I'll look at the other file." She pulled out the other stack of paper that she had.

"The other file?"

"Yeah, when I went into the file cabinet, there were two COVID files, so I copied them both. You're looking at the first one, this is the second. Maybe this one will be more interesting!" she reasoned. "Worst case, it's just as boring as yours, but we get through them faster."

"You're right about it being boring. It might make me take a nap at this rate," I groaned in annoyance. "This is better than sleeping medicine!"

"I knew it!" she crowed. "I'm not the only one dealing with this boredom!"

For a while, we sat in silence, and my mind just started seeing the same thing over and over. From what I could tell, the vaccine that our company had developed kept breaking down, so if it wasn't injected within an hour of manufacturing it, then it was useless. I remember that at least one of the COVID vaccines approved in the US had to be refrigerated, but that didn't seem to help our company's efforts, and by the time the issue was solved, we were too late to the game for it to matter.

I yawned, stretching as I felt my muscles knotting up, and then noticed that Alaya was frantically sorting through her papers, making two different piles with a look of concentration on her face. "Alaya?"

She held up her hand, and continued her sorting, which now included a third pile. "Give me a minute, then I can talk," she said hurriedly. "You're sure you had nothing to do with the research side of things?"

I snorted. "No way, I hated biology in school. You have me interested in anatomy a lot though, so maybe I'd have been better at it if you were in my class." She didn't even smile at the jest, and I knew something was up. Why did I suddenly feel nervous?

"Can you get me some water please?" she asked, finally looking at me. "I'm kind of freaking out, and I need a drink."

I stood up, throwing on a pair of sweatpants and a tee shirt before I padded up to the galley. Keith was up in the cockpit chatting with Esme and Joel, so I just waved and grabbed two bottles of water before heading back. I would have normally stopped to join the conversation, but Alaya had really seemed shaken, and that worried me too much to delay. When I got there, I handed her one, and she quickly opened it before drinking down half of it, sighing in relief.

"You ready to talk?" I asked.

She took a deep breath, then nodded. "I need to ask a few questions though, because I could be completely misinformed and making bad guesses, okay?"

"Yeah, okay." I slid back into the bed next to her as she picked up the first stack of papers.

"So, I thought COVID was around starting in 2019? Is that right?" she started. "Or was it around before that?"

"2019 is when it was first identified, yes. If it was around before then, nobody would have confirmed it," I confirmed.

"But COVID is just a code, right? What is the actual disease?"

I nodded along with her. "Right. It's a version of something called SARS, but I can't remember the exact classification. Honestly, that is the kind of stuff I always hated remembering." I smiled at her, but she was looking really pale.

"And how did it start?" she wondered in a whisper.

"Well, there are several theories. One is that it happened in a market in Wuhan, China from a raw bat that was a transmitter. Another was that there was a lab leak. There is evidence of both, so I'm not sure we'll ever know for sure."

I noticed a few tears in Alaya's eyes, and I was wondering what was going on. "Your sister, ummm, Anna, do you know why she was so angry during that time?"

I snorted now. "I heard her on the phone several times, probably with Ken now that I think about it, yelling that there was no reason we shouldn't have already had a vaccine. So many companies got them out, and got a lot of funding, but we never did."

Alaya sat there for a minute, and I just let her be. I didn't want to interrupt whatever she was trying to process. "One more question, but this is one you can't answer right away, okay?"

I looked into her eyes, and she was staring right back at me. I saw fear in her eyes, even more than the night in Malaysia when she was in danger. "Yeah. Ask it."

She took a deep breath, then spit it out. "Why would there be a memo from Ken to your sister about finishing the development of a new variant of the SARS virus, and that they could continue to phase two? And why would that memo be dated in the beginning of 2018?"

My blood ran cold at the question, and I took a deep breath of my own. Would they have developed a new strain just because it was possible to occur naturally, and they wanted to be prepared? I mean, there was nothing saying that the new variant that they developed was the same one as COVID. But, if it was, it would also explain my sister's reaction to not having a vaccine, as we would have known about it for over a year before it was discovered. "The company has researchers in China. Well, they get samples from them anyway. There are people that go into the bat caves there looking for things that could be the next pandemic to try and understand them before they start. Maybe they developed a disease from that to try and get a vaccine before it hit?" Yeah, there was certainly another option, but I couldn't face that right now. But I knew that she hadn't told me what phase two was, and I had a feeling it wasn't the vaccine.

"I thought that too. I thought maybe they were doing research. But you know what it is, right?" She looked up at me, and tears were slowly leaking from her eyes. And that was when I remembered that she told me that COVID killed her grandmother. Fuck.

"Tell me what you found out about phase two," I asked in a hoarse whisper.

She pulled the top piece of paper off the second stack and handed it to me, and I absently noted the 'Company Confidential' markings on it. She just nodded at it, and with dread in my heart I started reading. I could tell by her expression what I was going to find, I just didn't want to. But I did. I read it and my stomach dropped further and further with each word. By the end of the memo, I was in tears too, and I'd sunk back on the bed.

Everyone who thought it was a lab leak or a bat was wrong. It had been a deliberate release, but from a private company. My family's company. Wuhan had been picked because they were hoping for a rapid spread away from our lab. Ken had been confident in the vaccine they were developing. They thought they were going to make a mint. Instead, they'd killed millions, including Alaya's grandmother.

I barely made it to the bathroom before I lost my lunch in the toilet.