Chapter Twenty-Six
A li looked mad enough to tear a man apart with her bare hands.
Something had gone wrong, but he could see no injury on her, no evidence she was any less healthy now than when she left. He glanced at Hunt and saw nothing there either.
“What happened?”
“We picked up your package.” Ali sounded like she was angry with him. Furious with him. She dropped her end of it and walked around him, going into the building without a backward glance.
Max watched her for a second, then leveled his gaze on Hunt. “What happened? And don’t tell me nothing went on, because she doesn’t get angry like that without cause.”
Hunt winced. “It was something I said.”
When the other man didn’t add any details, Max’s moron radar went off. “What is wrong with you people?” he demanded. “Have you seen us doing anything we shouldn’t? Like holding hands or kissing? Or even disappearing together for unexplained periods of time?”
“Um, no.”
“Do we call each other pet names?”
“No.”
“Why does every soldier who spends more than five minutes with us think we’re behaving unprofessionally?”
Hunt rubbed the back of his neck and glanced away. “You have your own language.”
“What?”
“You know, married couples develop their own code words and body language. When you’re in a room together, you each know where the other is all the time. You’re careful to keep each other in sight and if she’s in a room, you always look at her first.”
Fuck. Shit . Their relationship was already harming her. If he didn’t do something right now to explain both their behavior, the harm would be irreparable.
“You,” Max said in what he hoped came across as the voice of doom, “have watched one too many Discovery Channel shows on human sexuality.”
“But—”
“General Stone assigned Sergeant Stone as my personal bodyguard. Threats have been made against my life. She’s not just teaching me how to shoot and defend myself. It’s her responsibility to keep me alive and safe. I wasn’t all that pleased to have someone hovering over my shoulder, and she wasn’t happy about having to do the hovering. But we both got over ourselves, worked out our differences and developed a working relationship that actually might leave me alive long enough to retire. I had to learn to trust her and she had to learn to trust me. I will never do anything to damage that trust, do you understand me?
Hunt closed his eyes, his wince taking over his entire face. “Bodyguard.”
“Bodyguard,” Max confirmed.
“I wasn’t trying to be an asshole,” Hunt said. “I was trying to protect her. She’s been limited in what she’s allowed to do. None of us want to see that continue.”
“Sergeant Stone is more capable of protecting herself than almost any other person alive,” Max told him.
“So, you’re not having sex?” Jessup asked.
Max jerked his head around. When had he joined the conversation? Then the soldier’s words sunk in. “Why the fuck would you ask that?”
“Uh, sorry, sir.”
Did Ali have to put up with this crap all the time? How on earth did she manage to not kill anyone?
“Just to be clear, so there’s no misunderstanding,” Max said carefully, “your question disrespects Sergeant Stone. I will never do anything to disrespect her, including answering your question, because the moment I do, I imply that the question is acceptable, when it’s not.”
“Shit,” Hunt said. “Okay, I get it.”
“Me too,” Jessup said, shaking his head. “She’ll probably kick the shit out of me during our next training session.”
“Probably,” Max agreed. “Set up rotating watches with whoever is healthy and inform Sergeant Stone. She won’t be on watch, but I’m putting her in charge of security in our new home until I get this damned vaccine finished.”
“Yes, sir,” they said in unison, saluting as one.
“Dismissed.”
The men left and Max went back to his lab.
Ali was leaning against the wall with her arms crossed over her chest. “Nice pep talk.”
“Pep talk?” Max asked with a snort. “I was trying to save yet another moron’s life.”
“It’s hard to be you, obviously.” She hadn’t moved, hadn’t changed her tone one iota, but he suddenly realized she was laughing at him.
“I damned near strangled the two of them,” he confessed. “And you know how anti-violence I am.”
“You’re not anti-violence, Max,” she said. “You’re anti-murder.” He didn’t agree, but he wasn’t going to argue with her.
He glanced at the eggs he had incubating in his makeshift incubator consisting of an ancient lamp with an intact light bulb and some thin metal sheeting he’d shaped to direct the heat generated by the bulb at the eggs. “I’m most definitely anti- mass murder.”
She pushed away from the wall. “How long until you have a vaccine you can test?”
“Another eight hours. The kids came back with a couple dozen more eggs, so I can start a second batch now.”
“How many people can you vaccinate with the first one?”
“Maybe two or three, but I’ll need to test it before I give it to anyone.”
“Test it?”
“Normally I’d use mice, but...” He gestured at the shabby interior of the hospital. “I’m going to have to improvise.”
Her gaze narrowed. “Improvise how?”
There was no point in hiding it. “I’m going to test it on myself.”
“What’s the worst-case scenario if the test goes wrong?”
“I die of the flu.”
She snorted. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re the only doctor we’ve got. You can’t test it on yourself.”
“I’m not expecting anyone else to do something I won’t.”
“I can guarantee you’ll have volunteers.” The determined expression on her face told him she was going to be first in line.
He had to head that off right now, but he knew Ali, knew she wasn’t going to let this go. She’d fight him tooth and nail. “If I can’t be the test subject, neither can you.”
She rolled her eyes. “Fine.”
She gave up way too quickly. “The test subject has to be healthy, no sign of the flu.”
She frowned. “That doesn’t leave a lot of people.”
“I guess I’ll have to cross my fingers and toes that someone volunteers who’s not already sick.”
She didn’t answer, just watched him with that frown and a pale face. She had dark bags under her eyes too, making her look tired and sick.
“I’m going to get these eggs cooking. After you’ve approved the watch schedule, could you try to sleep?”
She pushed away from the wall. “I will, if you’ll do the same when you’re done playing mad scientist.”
“Deal.”
Ali nodded and left the room. Max got to work.
He opened the package and was pleased to see all the supplies he’d asked for inside and unbroken during its landing. Syringes, needles, gloves, masks, saline, and a number of small but vital things needed to prepare his homemade vaccine.
He candled the eggs the boys had brought and discovered fourteen that were at the right stage of embryonic development to use to grow the virus. He put four eggs that were too far along in their growth to chickens aside. The remaining ten eggs he gave to Fatima. She was soon happily transforming them into some kind of scramble with potatoes and a root vegetable he didn’t recognize. The kids must have gotten them. Damn it, there were too many people coming and going from this place.
The smell of food, real food, was so out of place in his stressed brain that it made him feel a bit nauseated.
Or it could be the lack of sleep.
Or the insane desire to choke Akbar, if he ever caught up to the slippery bugger, with his bare hands. For some reason, Max didn’t think he’d have trouble killing Akbar, hand-to-hand or with a gun. The man was sick in a way no medicine or treatment could cure.
Predicting his next move was like trying to see through muddy flood water. Too much, too fast, no obvious path.
Max carefully inoculated each egg. What was Akbar going to do next?
Making an accurate prediction was difficult. There were so many variables.
There were also a lot of militant and extremist groups who would welcome Akbar into their fold, supply him with a place to work and medical equipment on the promise that he was creating a massive weapon to use against the Western powers. None of those militants would suspect that he was willing to kill them along with their enemies.
All Max could do was imagine the worst-case scenario and assume that was what Akbar would attempt to engineer.
A worldwide pandemic that killed hundreds of millions. Was this flu capable of doing that?
Possibly.
And that possibility was enough to ensure that Max would break rules to try to stop it, including testing the vaccine on himself. Not a fact he was going to share with Ali.
He finished with the last egg and set them up to incubate alongside the first batch. He checked the temperature gauge that had come with the rest of the supplies. Despite the DIY situation, the temperature was stable.
In a few more hours and he’d be ready to harvest the virus growing and multiplying inside the first set of eggs, mix it with a stabilizing agent, screen out impurities, heat it up enough to kill the virus, then inject it into his body.
He turned from his work, stripped off his gloves, washed his hands with sanitizer, and found a plate of scrambled eggs covered with a cloth on a backless chair just inside the door of his makeshift lab/OR.
Ali was asleep on the floor, her feet almost resting against the chair legs.
He ate, drank a full bottle of water, returned the plate to the woman he was thinking of in his head as their house mother, and lay down a few feet from Ali.
He wanted to spoon up behind her, but that, after all the posturing and lecturing he’d done to the team, would have been stupid in the extreme.
At least she was only a few feet away.
* * *
M ax woke to the sound of his alarm going off. No, not his alarm, it was his timer. For the first batch of eggs. The virus was done cooking.
He rolled to his feet and noted that Ali was gone from her spot on the floor. As he glanced up, she walked through the doorway and looked at the eggs. “Is it done?”
“Done enough for the next step in the process.” He gave her a once-over. “You got enough sleep? Had something to eat?”
“Yes, thank you. I got four hours and some scrambled eggs that tasted so much better than an MRE.” She glanced at her watch. “I’ve only been up for fifteen minutes.”
“Good. On to the next step of the process.” He took a couple of steps, then turned back to her. “Who is healthy and who isn’t?”
She blew out a breath. “No one is one hundred percent. Almost everyone in the building is coughing. Warren and Hunt have fevers.”
“The kids?”
“Berez has a fever and a cough, but he seems okay. Coban got sick already and recovered. At least, that’s what his dad says. Ferhat’s cough is getting bad and he has a fever too.”
Max ground his teeth, but there wasn’t anything more he could do for anyone other than creating a vaccine that worked. “We need someone who hasn’t caught or had the flu.”
Ali nodded, but she was studying her meagre lump of possessions—backpack, poncho, half drank bottle of water. She picked up the bottle and finished it. “I’m going to see what’s going on in the village.”
Max frowned. “Why? Has there been more fighting?”
“No. It’s been eerily quiet for a couple of hours now. I don’t know if people are hiding out or if they’re all dead, and I think we need to know which one it is.”
“It’s the middle of the night now, isn’t it?”
She glanced at her watch and shook her head. “Yeah, zero three twelve.” She gave him a wry smile. “No wonder it’s quiet. Sorry.”
“No apologies necessary,” he told her. There was a flicker in the shadows behind her. Someone was either waiting to talk to one of them or listening in on their conversation. “Assuming our vaccine is a success, can you see what’s left for furniture in the building? Or anything that could be jerry-rigged into a gurney or cot?”
“Yes, sir.”
Had she figured out someone was behind her?
“Thank you, dismissed.”
Ali turned and walked away, but she wasn’t gone five seconds before he heard the murmur of her voice out in the hallway.
Someone had been there. Interesting.
Not interesting enough to pull him away from his work, however. He removed the first batch of eggs from the incubation area and began the painstaking process of removing their contents. He carefully added each bit to a test tube of stabilizing agent and then, when he’d harvested everything he could, put the tubes into the centrifuge to separate out any particulates or impurities.
After spinning the tubes, he removed the vaccine from them and put it into one test tube. Altogether, the resulting liquid measured approximately twenty-five milliliters. Enough for just over two doses.
He prepared two hypodermic needles and, before anyone could walk in and stop him, injected himself with one of them.
There. He’d done it, and no one was the wiser.
He laid the used needle on the counter and looked around for the sharps container he’d seen not five minutes ago.
Coban came running into the room. “My father won’t wake up.”
Oh no.
Max followed the boy into the room they’d been using for sleeping and found Ferhat unconscious and burning up. At this point there wasn’t a whole lot anyone could do, but Max started an IV anyway and had Holland watch over him.
He headed back to his lab.
Ali stood next to the tray he’d left on the counter, the used hypodermic in her hands. She glared at him with narrow eyes. “You injected yourself already, didn’t you?”