Dr. Abbey looked down at Joe the mastiff. Maggie was stroking his ears, and he looked utterly blissful. “My husband,” she said calmly. “Joseph Abbey. He was a software engineer. I was still working for the provincial CDC back then, looking for solutions through ‘safe’ channels. I followed protocol, I maintained my lab at their professional standards, and I was stupid enough to think that meant something.”
The name of the school was familiar, but it wasn’t connecting to anything, and for once, George wasn’t helping. “Somebody fill me in,” I said.
“Joe used to give lectures to software engineering classes. They said it was good for the students to deal with someone who had ‘real-world experience.’ I always thought it was partially to remind them that there was a world off campus.” Dr. Abbey glanced my way. “Simon Fraser was a closed school. No student or faculty in and out during the semester. You came in clean, you stayed clean, you left clean. Pretty much the only risk of infection came from the outside speakers and the maintenance staff, and they were tested in every way possible. Joe used to say he couldn’t sit down for a week after he did one of his lectures.” She fell abruptly silent.
“There was an outbreak,” said Alaric, taking up the thread where Dr. Abbey left off. “The security footage was mostly destroyed, but what we have indicates that it must have started in the gym. Maybe someone pushed themselves a little bit too far and had a coronary. We’ll never know.”
“Oh, f**k,” I said.
“My thoughts exactly,” said Dr. Abbey.
An outbreak is never good, but an outbreak on a sealed campus is close to a worst-case scenario. The healthy would be locked in with the infected until someone could come and let them out, and the mop-up would probably take weeks, if not months, after which the school would almost certainly be decommissioned for several years while they waited for the hazard level to go down again. “What was the student body size?”
“About eleven thousand,” said Dr. Abbey. “It was a larger school before they closed it to nonresident students. Add another three hundred or so for the faculty and staff.”
“How many got out?” asked Maggie.
“None,” whispered Kelly.
“None,” echoed Dr. Abbey. “See, the outbreak started near the school walls, and they were located on a hill that made it difficult to get to the campus any way but via the main road. Whoever was in charge that day—whatever genius was at the switch—decided that it was too dangerous to try for an evacuation. That the infection was already too close to breaking out. So they called down the wrath of f**king God on that little school.”
“I remember that,” said Becks, sounding faintly awed. “We studied it when I was in training. Almost all the security footage went missing, even the stuff that should have been beamed straight into the Health Canada and CDC databases. It was just gone.”
“Except for the pieces that somehow ended up on private servers,” said Alaric. “I’ve seen some of the footage. It’s clearly an outbreak, but it doesn’t look…”
“It doesn’t look that bad,” said Dr. Abbey. She seemed to have regained a bit of her composure. She looked challengingly around at our little group before she continued: “It looks like the sort of thing you handle with an insertion team and a general quarantine. Not by ordering a firebombing on Canadian soil. My husband was in that school. He called me fifteen minutes before they hit the news, and he was laughing. He said there was ‘a little ruckus’ near the track, and that he’d be home in time for dinner. Told me to get an ice pack ready for the bruises left by all those blood tests they insisted on running. Everything was fine, and that was after the outbreak started. But they treated it like the end of the goddamn world.”
“So you went rogue?” I asked.
“Is that what they’re calling it these days?” Dr. Abbey shook her head. “I tendered my resignation immediately. They refused it. Three times. Said that I was a ‘valuable researcher,’ and that they’d be happy to give me the time I needed to get my affairs in order before I returned to work. So I got my affairs in order. I packed my things, I emptied out my lab, and I left while they were still congratulating themselves on being so understanding in my time of need.”
“You quit,” said Kelly.
“You never started,” countered Dr. Abbey. “Don’t you look at me like that, you little Barbie girl with your big moral ideals that go out the window as soon as think you know best. My husband died because a bomb was cheaper than a cleanup squad. That’s the simple truth of things. Joe died because somebody didn’t want to pay the bill. His sister,” she jabbed her finger at me, “died because you people won’t do the research into the reservoir conditions that needs to happen if we’re going to survive this damn virus. As a species, and as a society. You may think you’re doing the right thing, and hell, you may even be right, but when you don’t let anyone watch over your shoulder, how the f**k are the rest of us supposed to know?”
Kelly took a slow breath, visibly calming herself before she said, “I wouldn’t be here if I was still willing to play by their rules.”
“And again bullshit.” Dr. Abbey slid off the desk, taking a quick step forward. “You don’t make them, but you’re sure as shit defending them, and it’s time to stop. Because if you’re far enough off the reservation to be sitting here, they’re not going to let you come back. It’s cheaper to drop the bomb than it is to offer medical assistance, remember?” She leaned in until her face was almost up against Kelly’s, and said, voice suddenly soft, “I was you, once upon a time. Remember that. I was you, and the organization you still believe in made me who I am now. They’ll do the same to you, if you don’t get smart in a hurry.”