The best intentions weren’t enough to stop the clock. All too soon, we were putting down our forks, finishing our drinks, and falling into an expectant silence. Maggie stood, starting to clear the table; Alaric and I moved to help her. She waved me back to my seat. “Stay where you are,” she said. “You’re going to need to ride herd on this madhouse, and that works better when you don’t have something to distract yourself.” She didn’t wave Alaric back down. I guess she figured he could do his part from the sink if he had to.
Mahir cleared his throat. “I’ll just go get a few things, shall I?”
“I think it’s about that time,” I agreed. “Get ready to explain some crazy science, Doc.”
Kelly smiled a little. “It’ll be my pleasure.”
Maggie returned to the table, handing me a Coke as she sat down to my left. Alaric sat next to Becks, leaving a space between us for Mahir. The air in the kitchen seemed to be getting heavy, pressing down on us like a lead weight.
It was almost a relief when Mahir returned with an armload of manila file folders, their contents bristling with multicolored tab dividers. At least this meant that we weren’t going to be waiting anymore. “I have virtual copies of everything here,” he said, dropping the files onto the table without any preamble. “I didn’t want to e-mail things, since there was a chance I was being watched after what happened with Dr. Christopher.”
“The Australian?” I asked.
Mahir nodded. “Precisely. I might not have been under surveillance before that, but the odds increased rather substantially after I got someone deported. That’s when I realized it might be best for everyone if I came here.”
“Makes sense.” I glanced toward Alaric and Becks, saying, “One of the scientists Mahir went to talk to about Dr. Abbey’s research got kicked out of the country.”
Alaric whistled, long and low. “That’s not fooling around.”
“No, it’s not,” said Mahir, with dry gravity. “What we have here is a combination of the material that was originally sent to me, the material provided by Doctors Tiwari and Christopher, some supplemental research I was able to request from Dr. Shoji of the Kauai Institute of Virology before I felt it was unsafe to make any further out-of-country contacts, and finally, the files I was able to retrieve from Professor Brannon’s mail drop before it was shut down. I don’t have copies for everyone, but there’s enough here to keep us all predicting the end of the world until well past dawn.”
“Who’s Professor Brannon?” asked Becks. “Because I’m feeling a bit like I missed a memo somewhere.”
“Professor Brannon…” Alaric frowned. “He was a world-renowned expert in the behavior of Kellis-Amberlee. He spent his entire professional career identifying and studying viral substrains. He…” Alaric’s eyes went wide. “He shot himself last week. It was a devastating blow to the epidemiological community. No one saw it coming.”
“I’m afraid that was my fault.” Mahir handed him one of the file folders. “He’d been studying the virus in lab conditions. He’d never had the time to devote to studying it in the wild. I suppose we all require some measure of specialization in order to keep our heads above water.”
Alaric started flipping through the folder in his hand, eyes narrowing in a focused “the rest of the world might as well not be here” way. I used to see that look on George’s face a lot.
Kelly, meanwhile, looked horrified. “Professor Brannon is dead?” she asked. She sounded genuinely stunned. “But… but… Professor Brannon can’t be dead. He can’t be.”
“You knew him?” I asked, reaching for a folder.
“I attended one of his lectures while I was in medical school. It was about the ways that Kellis-Amberlee inherently differs from a naturally occurring virus—” She glanced around at the rest of us, taking in our expressions, and cleared her throat before saying, “Naturally occurring viruses have a primary host, something where they, um, retreat when there isn’t an outbreak going on. Like malaria, which is bacterial, but still sort of applies. Even when there isn’t a malaria outbreak going on, the mosquitoes are still infected. That’s how it can keep coming back, no matter how many times we think we’ve cured it in a human population.”
“What does that have to do with Kellis-Amberlee?” asked Maggie.
“Nothing. That’s sort of the point.” Kelly shrugged. “Kellis-Amberlee doesn’t have a natural reservoir. It’s infectious across all mammalian species. Even things too small to amplifyn sustain the virus—mice, squirrels, everything. It’s completely endemic. Curing the human race wouldn’t do any good unless we could cure the rest of the planet at the same time.”
“Huh. Okay.” I looked to Mahir. “So he was a lab guy, you showed him Dr. Abbey’s work, and then he shot himself. Why?”
“There are several potential reasons, but I think this is the main one.” Mahir began laying out a series of graphs. They didn’t make much sense to me, at least on the surface; each showed two jagged lines, one red, one blue, one going up as the other went down. The red line would occasionally fight against its descent, managing a brief upward spike, but it would inevitably get quashed by the blue line as it arced unstoppably toward the top of the paper.
All of us squinted at the pages. Kelly paled, clapping a hand over her mouth. She looked like she was going to throw up. Alaric shook his head.