Germ

He brought his vision around to the other side of the bed and lit on a startlingly beautiful sight among the stale blandness: Julia Matheson's beaming face.

"I thought I'd dreamed you," he said.

"You should be so lucky." She rose from a chair, gripped his hand. "How are you?"

He nodded. "No pain. Or maybe I'm just getting used to it."

"The doctor thinks you'll make a complete recovery. The Ebola was just starting to set in. Everything was reversible and repairable, thanks to Litt's antidote."

"Just thinking about Litt makes me queasy."

"One of the vials in the case we recovered contained his plasma. They think they can make an Ebola vaccine from it."

"How long have I been here?"

"Just over two weeks." She walked to the window and raised the blinds. "A military hospital of some kind. I think we're in Virginia."

He pushed himself up, wincing at sharp pains in his side and back. "You think?"

"I guess we're quarantined, but it's more like they don't know what to do with us. They let me call my mom. She had a . . . an episode, but the home health nurse got there pretty quickly. She's in their facility now."

She drew closer, and her voice grew soft. "Do you remember anything? Tate meeting us in the jungle? The U.S. soldiers intercepting his truck outside Pedro Juan Caballero? Getting evacced here?"

He tried to remember. "Vaguely . . . I guess."

She bit her lip. "Do you remember what happened to Stephen?"

He closed his eyes. He didn't move for a long time. Then a tear broke free and rolled down his cheek. Without looking at her, he said, "He saved my life."

"Both our lives. Many lives. I've had time here to imagine what would have happened if Litt escaped. He would have set up shop somewhere else and terrorized the world with his designer virus. That's what they're calling it, a designer virus, like it was something cool."

"A lot of people died to stop him. Your partner too."

"I wish I could see Goody's wife, the boys. They need to know he died heroically."

"They haven't said when we can leave?"

The door pushed open, letting in a sigh of antisepticized air. With it came an old man, leaning heavily on a cane, with the lax shoulders of a weary traveler. He paused, holding the door, then let it close. Allen felt he'd seen the man before but could not place him.

Julia had one hand resting on Allen's head. He felt it stiffen.

"I should throw you out this window," she said.

"I have no doubt you could, Ms. Matheson." His smile faltered. "I'm sorry for your losses. Both of you."

Allen caught her eye. "I don't understand."

"This is Kendrick Reynolds," she said, keeping a level gaze on the old man. "He promised to help, then he tried to incinerate us with the rest of his problem."

Reynolds shuffled to the end of the bed and rested his long, wrinkled hands over the tubular footboard. He said, "I did what I had to do. There was no time to extricate you and Dr. Parker and his brother."

"So he bombed the base," she continued, talking to Allen, glaring at Reynolds. "With us in it."

"We prevented a holocaust, Ms. Matheson."

"You didn't prevent anything. Without us, the antidote would have been destroyed too—the antidote that has saved, what, ten thousand people?"

"Most of them, yes. But if we hadn't eliminated Litt and his virus, we would be living in a very different world right now, one too terrible to think about."

"It was your mess to start with, your Frankenstein monster that got out of hand."

"I accept that indictment," he said with a slight bow of his head. "I can't begin to tell you the kind of second-guessing I've put myself through lately."

"How terrible for you."

Allen felt the coiled tension in Julia's hand. Afraid she might make good on her threat to toss the old guy through the window, he asked, "Why are you here?"

"I stopped by earlier, Dr. Parker, but you were not up to receiving visitors, and Ms. Matheson was busy giving some army officials a hard time."

Allen glanced at her.

"They've been trying to 'debrief me since we arrived," she explained.

"And she's been trying to debrief them,'" Kendrick said.

"So now they send in the big guns, is that it?"

He sighed. "I need to know only one thing," he told her. "Can you end it here?"

She thought for a moment. "Did you wipe out the virus?"

"We believe so. The compound was completely incinerated—the underground base, the surface, the surrounding areas. We bombed well into the night. Our on-site teams have found no trace of virus or any other biochemical agents. Are you all right?"

Allen was squeezing his eyes shut again, this time tightly. Julia answered for him.

"We had to leave Stephen's body there."