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  He sighed and sat down in the closest chair. “Some people did come to work, until the first one of them tested positive. They were symptomatic and getting the rest of the office sick. I couldn’t risk it anymore; the CDC is ineffective if we’re carrying the disease. Joanne, John, and I stuck around. We’re all three immune, so I wasn’t worried about us getting sick. So like it or leave it, we’re all you’ve got here in New York.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Write me up in your report if you want to, but I know I did the right thing.”

  Cassie didn’t have much of a response. Sensing that the discussion was over, Chuck climbed back to his feet and led her down a side hallway. There were individual offices lining the hall, most with their doors propped open. John stepped out of one, running a hand through his shaggy brown hair.

  “This is you,” Chuck explained, pointing toward the office. Cassie looked inside and saw her suitcase already sitting at the foot of a foldout cot. The rest of the furniture had been removed, except for a small office desk and chair pushed up against the wall. “It’s not much, but it’s safer than any hotel right now. There’s a bathroom and shower down the hall.”

  She glanced inside once more and shrugged. “It’ll do.”

  “I’ll let you get situated. We’ll start first thing in the morning.”

  Cassie nodded as the two men left. She closed the door behind her and drew the blinds over the window. Sparse as it was, it would work for the next couple of days.

  She meticulously unpacked her bag. There weren’t any dressers to speak of, so it mostly consisted of retrieving her previous reports on the virus and its virility. She laid them atop the small desk and sorted through them, rereading her own handwritten notes from Atlanta’s outbreak response. After a couple of hours of absently perusing her work, she gently closed the folders and walked out of her room.

  In the main room, there was only a single office with light filtering through its blinds. She walked to the door and knocked softly. She heard Chuck scooting his chair back and walking to the door. He didn’t bother looking through the slats to see who was there; there were only three other people in the building.

  He opened the door and smiled as though he knew she’d be visiting. “Come in and have a seat.”

  Cassie entered before sitting opposite Chuck. She crossed her legs and drummed her fingers on her knee. “I’m sorry about earlier,” she said abruptly.

  He shook his head. “There’s no need. We’re all under an incredible amount of stress.”

  “No, Chuck, you don’t have to be the good guy. I was out of line. I came barging in like a bull in a china shop, throwing my CDC credentials around like they meant something here. I’m sorry. You clearly have this situation under control.”

  He laughed heartily. “Under control? Are you out of your damn mind? I’m holding on by a thread, while a crowd of the—pardon the expression—walking dead try to break down my gates every day. I’m a lot of things but ‘under control’ probably isn’t one of them.”

  Cassie sat back in her chair and ran her hand across her forehead, as though staving off the start of a migraine. “You’re doing a better job than I’d be, is all I’m saying. I don’t know how you do it. We have our own problems in Atlanta, but at least we’ve been on lockdown since all this started. I’ve got a full staff working around the clock to figure out how to stop this disease and you’re doing it here with three.”

  “Including me,” he emphasized.

  Despite her best judgment, the corners of her mouth curled into a smile.

  Chuck stood and walked around his desk, finally sitting on the corner next to her chair. “I know our situation here hits home for you. There’s a reason only the four of us are here. We have no living parents. No kids. We were either never married or long since divorced. The only thing we’re married to is the job. So, in the face of the apocalypse, we keep on doing what we do best.”

  “She’s a harsh mistress, this job,” Cassie joked.

  “Don’t I know it. Listen, don’t stress about it. You and I are fine. Go get some sleep because bright and early tomorrow morning, we’re going to try to solve this mystery.”

  Cassie smiled and nodded. She climbed back out of the chair, glad for even the brief conversation, and walked back to her room.

  * * *

  She showered quickly the next morning, tying her hair into a long braid rather than the bun on the back of her head. It soaked the back of her shirt as she finished getting dressed, but she ignored it. It was an austere environment to begin with; she wasn’t going to manage perfect.

  Dressed, she made her way back to the main offices. Most of the lights were turned off, but a bank of lights burned brightly at the far end of the room. She could see Chuck and John hovering around a massive dry erase board, talking in low tones between them.

  “Morning, gentlemen,” she said as she approached.

  They turned abruptly and smiled. “Good morning. Want something for breakfast?”

  She glanced around curiously. Chuck held up a protein bar. “The very finest the CDC’s vending machines can provide.”

  When she looked disapprovingly at his offering, he smirked. “Don’t worry, we get real food for lunch and dinner.”

  She ignored the meager snack and stepped between the men, examining the expansive white board. Multicolored lines spread like a spider’s web, expanding in ever widening concentric circles from the center. Hospitals and business names were printed in small letters around the outside, obviously Chuck’s meticulous handwriting. Closer to the center, however, the writing gave way to actual photographs.

  “Disease spread?” she asked.

  “As best we can tell.” He tapped a photo of an olive skinned man near just outside the center of the web. “The first confirmed death was Bradley Scaglione, a paramedic.”

  “But he’s not our patient zero,” she surmised.

  “No. The day he died, he responded to…”

  “Six,” John offered.

  “Six runs. Three car accidents, two home accidents, and one suicide. It had been a light day so far for a paramedic in New York. We think it’s one of the car accidents that actually started the spread.”

  Cassie’s gaze fell to the uniformed man in the center of the complicated epidemiological web. “I don’t get it. If you’ve got all this figured out, why did you request an investigator from Atlanta? It looks like you’ve got this all handled pretty well on your own.”

  Chuck set down the dry erase marker he’d been holding and turned toward her solemnly. “Because this,” he said as he tapped the board, “doesn’t make a bit of sense. One of the last runs of the day was for a truck accident—an armored car, actually.”

  “Armored car?”

  “An armored car owned by, and this is where it gets good, Peter Franklin Donalds.”

  Cassie furrowed her brow as she glanced back at the picture at the center of the whiteboard. “The pharmaceutical company?”

  "One and the same. Best we can guess, our truck driver," he tapped the picture in the center of the complicated web, "Kevin Mahoney, seems to be our patient zero. We called PFD and they admit he was supposedly carrying an untested Ebola vaccine."

  She frowned deeply and walked away from the whiteboard, pacing the carpeted floor. “That doesn’t make sense. PFD was recently approved as one of the companies authorized to pursue a viable vaccine against the disease. What the hell were they carrying in that truck?” She stormed away and approached the window overlooking the front of the building. She pulled open the blinds and pointed at the gathered crowd. “Take a look out there, Chuck, and tell me they were carrying a vaccine.”

  He put up his hands defensively. “You’re preaching to the choir, lady. At least now you understand why I called you. If PFD was involved in creating this virus, I’m going to need a lot more clout than I can manage as a regional CDC manager.”

  She glanced out the window at the throng of protesters. The hastily erected chain-link fen
ce around the New York office strained to keep them at bay. She felt for the National Guardsmen manning the gate. She was sure they’d rather be anywhere right now than facing an angry mob of infected people, even if they were wearing their MOPP gear.

  “You said that your paramedic…”

  “Bradley Scaglione,” John offered, staring at his notes.

  “Right, this paramedic responded to a vehicle accident involving a PFD transport moving what was supposed to be a vaccine and next thing you know he’s infected? What do we have for the timeline?”

  Chuck turned to John, who clearly had all the pertinent details in front of him. John cleared his throat as he read. “Scaglione presented at Mount Sinai approximately nine hours after responding to the accident. His medical report claims he was complaining of flu-like symptoms.”

  “That’s consistent with what we’ve seen.”

  “He was brought into the Emergency Room for observation. Within an hour, vomiting and diarrhea had begun. They gave him Zofran, which controlled the vomiting, but symptoms progressed to nose bleeds.” John looked up from his notes. “From there it’s everything we already know. Abdominal pain, migraines, and eventually bleeding from damn near every orifice he had. He died fourteen hours after being admitted, which is twenty-three hours after his encounter with the truck.”

  Cassie walked back over to the whiteboard and stared at Mahoney’s picture. It was a company photo and he was wearing a polo shirt with the PFD diamond stitched on his chest. “Who examined the contents of the truck? If it was transporting medical supplies, we should have been called.”

  “We were,” Chuck admitted morosely. “We sent out a team in full PPE and collected samples. There wasn’t much left; the truck caught fire during the accident. Almost everything was destroyed. We were starting to go through what samples we could salvage when Scaglione died, followed by the nursing staff that had been tending to him. It snowballed from there. We only got back to examining the samples days later and…well, you can guess what we found.”

  “The virus,” Cassie concluded.

  She traced the path of the disease with her finger, from Mahoney to Scaglione to a slew of nurses and a doctor. It was after the nurses that she sighed. There was a direct line from a nurse to the John F. Kennedy Airport. “We could have contained this,” she muttered. “One crappy break, one nurse who wanted to go on vacation, and this thing spread across the country. Just like that,” she said, snapping her fingers. “It needed a perfect storm to get out of New York City before we could lock it down and it got it.”

  “I think our crappy break came when the PFD transport happened to slam into the barrier on the interstate on-ramp,” Chuck corrected.

  Cassie paused, her finger hovering over the airport. It quickly traced backward to Mahoney. She furrowed her brow. “The truck crashed into a barrier?”

  “Yeah,” John replied. “It drove through a couple of the orange barrels and hit the concrete wall head on. The police said the fire started almost immediately afterward, probably from a crack in the engine and leaking fuel line.”

  She turned toward the two men, biting the inside of her lip as she thought. Eventually, she shook her head. “These trucks are made to withstand a direct hit from a rocket. Anything they’d be carrying in the back would be strapped down and insulated from an accident. There’s no way a crash with a wall, even if Mahoney here was driving a hundred and twenty, would have broken the vials in the back.”

  She glanced back at the whiteboard as the two men shrugged. “I’d kill to get a look at that truck.”

  “Then I’ve got good news,” Chuck said. “When we identified Mahoney as our potential patient zero, I contacted the NYPD and had the truck shipped over from their impound. I’ve got it in quarantine in the basement.”

  Cassie shook her head as she laughed softly to herself. “Chuck, we really need to work on what information you should lead with.”

  * * *

  John waved as the elevator doors closed and Chuck pushed one of the buttons marked for the garage. The elevator music drummed overhead as Cassie leaned back against the cool metal wall.

  She tilted her head to the side as she looked at the older black man. “Where is Joanne? I haven’t seen her since I got here yesterday.”

  “She’s our social media monitor,” Chuck said with a soft laugh. “She watches the couple remaining TV stations and monitors the few websites here in New York that are still updating regularly. Without a field staff on site, we’re kind of relying on the media, for as long as it lasts.”

  The elevator dinged as it came to a stop. The doors slid open to a well-lit garage. Cassie’s attention was drawn to a corner where long plastic sheets had been hung. Behind the semi-transparent plastic, she could see the outlines of a large armored truck.

  Chuck led them to a table just outside the quarantine, where he handed her static-free coveralls, booties, and gloves. She slipped them over her clothes before picking up a surgical mask. Finally, she pulled up the jumper’s hood, covering her long hair. When they were both dressed, Chuck unsealed the plastic partition and they walked through.

  The truck was in terrible condition. The front end had been smashed inward, warping the frame and twisting the body all the way up to the cab’s doors. Most of the damage, however, had come from the ensuing fire. Flames had gutted the cab. The sides of the truck were likewise blackened, starting about halfway up. Cassie walked around to the back of the truck, where the back door was hanging slightly ajar. With her gloved hands, she pulled the heavy door open. The rear of the armored truck was just as destroyed, blackened almost to the point of being unrecognizable.

  “Did the police forensic team go over the truck?” she asked.

  Chuck shook his head. “They never had a chance. They were swamped with 911 calls. You’re the first to really inspect it.”

  Cassie nodded. She knew the truck should have come straight to the CDC first, rather than to a police impound lot, but she wasn’t about to start that argument with the New York regional manager right now. “Would you mind being my recorder?”

  “Not at all,” he said, pulling a tape recorder from the pocket of his white coveralls.

  “Damage to the hood of the truck is consistent with a vehicular accident,” she began, as she walked around the front of the truck and examined the vehicle. “There’s extensive damage to the right front bumper, where it must have struck the concrete barrier.”

  She climbed up on the step outside the driver’s side door and peered into the cab. “There’s extensive damage to the dash and front of the seats. Fire damage seems worst in those areas, also consistent with the police report of a fire starting in the engine block.”

  Her eyes drifted toward the back of the truck, which was completely separated from the cab. She furrowed her brow as she climbed down and walked slowly toward the back of the truck. Glancing into the back once more, she shook her head at the extensive burn damage throughout the inside of the rear compartment.

  “What are you thinking?” Chuck asked, as he followed her with the recorder.

  “We’re assuming the accident caused the virus to be released, right?”

  Chuck nodded but didn’t figure she needed a response.

  “But we’ve already covered that this compartment was self-contained. The padding alone should have been enough to keep the vials from breaking.”

  “Yes, but the fire could have damaged the casings around the virus.”

  Cassie shook her head. “If it was hot enough to destroy the clamshell casings, it would’ve destroyed the virus, too. I think our timeline is wrong. The virus had to have been released before the fire broke out.”

  Chuck stopped the recording and lowered his arm. “That sounds great in theory, but even if the vials had broken first, the virus would have been contained in the back of the truck. The doors weren’t opened until the fire built inside and blew them open.”

  “At which time the virus would have already been destro
yed by the heat.”

  She grabbed the door to close it but withdrew her hand sharply as something stabbed her in the finger. She looked down and noticed a tear in her glove and blood welling from a small cut.

  “Damn it,” she muttered as she stripped off the glove. “Can you grab me another glove and a Band-Aid?”

  “Are you okay?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, just cut myself on the door.”

  Chuck turned and walked away as Cassie sucked on the blood pooling. It wasn’t very sanitary, she knew, but she wasn’t concerned about getting the virus. Her natural immunity would keep her safe. She looked up at the door, trying to find the metal edge that had cut her. As she peered closer, her eyes narrowed. There wasn’t a single edge, but a long row of sharp metal slivers, all pointing inward. The metal around the slivers was slightly bent.

  As the older man returned with the medical kit, Cassie quickly waved him over. “Did the police have to use a crowbar or Jaws of Life on this door?”

  Chuck sighed as he handed her the medical bag and walked back over to the table, retrieving the police report. “Nope. Says here the door was already opened by the blast. Why?”

  “Because someone opened this door from the outside…without a key.”

  He lowered the report and stepped closer. She pointed to the bent metal and he frowned. “Let’s just lay our cards on the table. What are we saying here?”

  “The fire’s been bothering me since you mentioned it upstairs. The back of the truck is completely separate from the front. There’s no reason why a fire in the cab should have affected the back of the truck at all. We know the virus had to be released before the fire broke out, or there wouldn’t have been an epidemic in the first place. Now someone pried this door open, probably before the fire.”

  “Say it, Cassie,” Chuck said sternly, raising the recorder and pushing the record button once more. “We need it for the report.”

  “I think the virus’s release was intentional. Someone set the virus free after the accident.”

  “Kevin Mahoney?” Chuck asked.