Part 7 — The Staged Outbreak
The van eats the county road like an apology that finally learned to hurry. Maya’s badge on the dash ticks down: 00:02:12. The Biointegrity Alert keeps repeating in a voice so calm it feels like a threat: Shelter in place. Avoid contact with organic vectors. Vectors. That’s their word for a heartbeat.
Elena picks up on the second ring. Wind in her phone, gravel in her voice. “I moved the clinic. Old grain elevator, mile marker 18. Back lot by the busted soda machine. I’ve got the hood warmed and the generator lying about its age.”
“Sixty seconds from gate,” Maya says. “I’ll push the key on thaw.”
“Copy,” Elena says, and the call dies so she can make more life than talk.
We swing behind the elevator and brake hard. Corrugated tin, a ladder to nowhere, a mural of a smiling ear of corn somebody shot twice. Elena appears from between two box trucks, hair under a knit cap, hands ready. The loading door rattles up like a sigh. Inside: the same altar of machines and jars, rearranged like a survival prayer.
“Clock?” she asks.
“Under two,” Maya says, already moving.
We shove Buddy onto the table, oxygen humming, mask fogging. Elena cracks the foam cooler and lifts the primer panel like a relic. “Token?” she says.
Maya palms her badge to the activation pad. The screen blinks AUTH KEY? She presses her finger to the reader, jaw tight. The pad drinks the code like rain. KEY ACCEPTED — 00:01:03 blooms in green.
“Next,” Elena says, and I hand her Microbiome Starter. ACCEPTED — 00:00:47. Phage Adjunct. ACCEPTED — 00:00:26. Adjuvant C-17. ACCEPTED — 00:00:13.
The last ampule—BCG-Vet Adjunct (Legacy)—makes the pad think about history. COMPATIBILITY WARNING. Maya’s eyes flick to Elena’s. Elena nods once. “Override,” she says. Maya taps a string only her hands know. ACCEPTED — 00:00:05.
The badge on the dash blinks CREDENTIAL REVOKED like a door slammed gently and forever.
Elena exhales. “We’re in,” she says. “Rehydrate: five minutes. Prime: twelve. Then we walk the dose like a tightrope.”
Outside, a siren unspools down the river road, followed by another and another until it sounds like a song the state wrote to drown out thinking. Maya pulls her hoodie tighter and moves to the sink, washing her hands like confession. “They’re going to make this loud,” she says.
“They already did,” Elena answers, eyes on the clock over the hood. “Look.”
She taps a laptop wired to a dish that thinks it’s a bird. The screen fills with a live feed from some glossy studio where sincerity is manufactured in three camera angles. A PetKind spokesperson—hair clean as a promise—addresses the nation: “Out of an abundance of caution, we’re coordinating with the Department of Biointegrity to address an incident of possible zoonotic exposure. We urge citizens to report any unregistered organic animals immediately.”
A clip rolls: a grainy, slowed video of a gray muzzle near a child’s sleeve. The child flinches. Freeze frame on the droplet the editor decided to call a threat.
Maya flinches like slapped. “That’s Theo,” she says. “They cut it to look like—” Her mouth goes hard. She turns the feed off so fast the laptop forgets what it was selling. “Staged. God, it’s staged.”
“Outrage beats outbreak,” Elena says. “But only if we show the thing they’re hiding. Arthur—” She swivels the laptop and the little webcam stares back like an honest eye. “I’m going live on the Gate channels. Not public. Not yet. Just enough to make witnesses.”
I look into the dot. My hair is months past a barber. My face looks like the room light has to work harder there. Buddy’s ribs rise, fall, do the math. My voice comes out easy because truth wears well. “This is Buddy,” I say. “He coughs like a bad engine. He doesn’t carry anything except trust. We’re trying to give him back what the world took. If you’re watching, you already live on the side where breathing counts.”
Elena angles the camera down the hood. The vials lie in a white tray like six little moons thawing. “Primer loading,” she narrates for whoever found us, “phage ready, adjuvant reconstituted. We do this and we might teach one body not to be afraid of air.”
In our old neighborhood, the thread explodes.
K. Keane — HOA: Department officers at 14C. Arthur is absent. If he returns, protocol requires immediate report.
Theo (still under Mom’s login): he didnt do anything he just loves a dog pls stop
R. Cruz: I gave him my fan last summer when his AC died. He fixed my fence. He fixed my heart when my husband left and he said “bring your chair over.” I’m not reporting kindness.
Anonymous: Protocol isn’t personal.
Mr. Patel: My father taught me there’s the law, and there’s the neighbor. Choose once and live with it.
At PetKind, in a glass room polished like denial, Raj scrolls through Access. “Director Hale’s token just wrote to legacy biologics,” he tells the room. A junior raises a hand. “What’s legacy biologics?” Raj smiles the way a spreadsheet does. “A place we pretend we don’t own.”
“Bring her in,” the VP orders, and Raj nods like he’s always wanted homework.
Maya’s phone, face down on a crate, buzzes. She doesn’t look. Elena glances at me and I catch a flicker of apology in there for the daughter she raised on caution and the father who loved her anyway.
The clock hits PRIME COMPLETE. Elena draws the dose like she’s pulling thread through a needle you only get one shot at. “We go slow,” she says. “We watch for a storm. If it comes, we ride it.”
“Storm?” I ask.
“Cytokine surge,” she says. “His body could throw a tantrum learning to recognize friend from foe. We tell it stories until it calms down.” She meets my eyes. “You stay in his eyes. If he has something to hold onto, let it be you.”
I kneel by Buddy’s head. His pupils track me like a compass that still believes in north. Maya positions the pump. Elena threads the catheter with a steadiness born from a thousand small rebellions.
“Start,” Elena says.
The first drops move. Buddy’s chest rises. Falls. The monitors Elena trusts as far as she can throw them beep the way modern prayer beads click.
On the laptop, Elena’s live feed has found more eyes than she invited. Clips ricochet into wider rooms. Someone splices in Theo’s drawing—blue collar, big SHHH—and the word #RightToBreathe appears under it like a dare. The chat floods with hearts and warnings and addresses and scripture and curses and recipes for trouble. Somewhere, an old man texts his sister he hasn’t spoken to in years: remember Scout?
The sirens outside stop. The quiet lands wrong. Maya peeks through a slit. “They cut traffic,” she says. “Made a bubble. Classic containment theater.”
Her phone buzzes again. This time she looks. COME BACK NOW from Raj. Another: security is en route — this is untenable. Then a third, a private number: We need you for the response on 6. If you’re with your father, don’t be. — VP.
She types nothing. She takes Buddy’s paw instead and holds it, as if the room can be a family for five minutes.
On Maple Bend, the Department knocks on my door. Mrs. Keane opens hers before they can open mine. “He’s in dialysis,” she lies in a voice smooth as HOA bylaws. “Check the hospital.” The officer glances at his tablet, the same way the first man did when he stood over my hatch, and chooses whether to be a neighbor or a rule.
Back under the grain elevator, Buddy’s heart rate ticks up. Elena’s shoulders go tight. “There it is,” she says. “Storm cloud. We go slower.”
She nudges the pump down a hair. Buddy’s body trembles like a flag deciding if there’s wind. I keep my palm on his ribs, measure breath with breath. “Good boy,” I say, because sometimes the truest medicine is repetition.
Maya moves to the laptop and hits a button marked MIRROR. The feed spills onto a dozen Gate nodes Elena’s mapped across decommissioned church routers and forgotten school Wi-Fi. People watch. People type. People remember.
A new tone opens over the siren’s memory—the flat, amplified blankness of a Department bullhorn outside the loading door. “Clinic occupant,” it says, polite in a way only power can afford, “release the unregistered organism for humane termination and testing. This is an Order of Seizure under Emergency Code Eight.”
The word termination takes the oxygen out of the word humane. Maya flinches. Elena doesn’t. She speaks toward the camera and the door at once. “He’s not a vector. He’s a patient. If you want to watch medicine, come in clean. If you want to perform theater, find another stage.”
The bullhorn repeats itself, a bad actor convinced volume is a substitute for heart. Footsteps spread around the building like a net being explained to a fish. A thunk above us—a drone finding a perch. A hiss near the panel—something sprayed to smell like justification.
Buddy pants, slow and hot. His eyes hold mine like they learned this trick just now. Elena reads the numbers the way sailors read weather. “Surge passing,” she whispers. “Hold, hold—now.”
The beeping softens. The veins in my wrist unclench. Maya exhales a breath she’s been saving since she was twelve.
Outside, a metal wheel bites a hydrant valve. A pump chuffs to life. The power winks. The hood whines, then steadies on generator. Elena’s jaw sets. “They’re going to kill the line,” she says. “We can finish without it. We’ll sweat.”
On the laptop, the chat spins in new colors. Someone in a county uniform posts, Not all of us signed up for this. Someone else drops a map pin with a safe back road. Someone drops a verse. Someone drops a recipe. It all feels like a country trying to remember how to talk.
The bullhorn decides manners are wasted. “Final warning,” it says. “Open the door. Do not make us breach.”
Elena tapes the line. “Dose in,” she says. “Now we wait for the instruction to take.”
“How long?” Maya asks.
“Longer than they’ll give us,” Elena answers.
Maya looks at me. “If they come, we stall. We make them name what they’re doing in front of witnesses.” Her hand finds mine on the table’s edge and squeezes, once, a whole childhood in it. “I’m sorry,” she says. “For the brochure. For the rug. For calling safety something it wasn’t.”
“Later,” I say, because the room doesn’t have space for two kinds of breath.
Metal hits metal outside—the sound of a spreader bar kissing hinges. Boots drum into position. A voice counts down: “Three… two…”
The loading door groans, bends, bows like a spine under too much policy. The bullhorn breathes in to make a law.
And Buddy, as if to interrupt the script, coughs once—clean, not tearing, not the zipper sound, just a cough the body uses to say I’m here.
Elena’s eyes flick to the monitor, to the rise in oxygen saturation that looks like a small, stubborn sunrise.
The door’s bottom seam rips. Light knifes in. A boot toe appears. A man’s voice barks, “Now—”
—and every screen watching us fills with the same moment: a living creature taking a better breath while a government rehearses an ending.
Part 8 — Night of Drones
The loading door bows, rips, and coughs in a knife of daylight. A toe of a boot noses under the gap. The bullhorn inhales to name what it plans to do to a living thing.
Buddy coughs once—clean, not the zipper-tear, just a cough a body makes when it’s allowed to mean present. The pulse-ox ticks up three points like a sunrise nobody authorized.
Elena doesn’t blink. “Storm’s passing,” she says to the room and the world. “Hold.”
The bullhorn booms, “Final—” and Elena spins a dial. Ammonia sighs through the floor vents, a sharp, cold sting that sends the toes retreating and buys exactly the seconds she calculated.
Maya steps to the laptop and hits MIRROR again. “You want transparency?” she says, looking into the camera like it owes her interest. “Here.” She drags the live feed over Buddy’s numbers—oxygen climbing, heart rhythm steadying, the primer panel doing what it was built for when profit wasn’t in the room.
Outside, boots re-form. Somewhere above, rotors purr. A drone drops into the eave shadow like a bat that reads policy memos.
Elena flips the MBIO-SEED (Canis/oral) canister into her palm. “Immune memory’s one thing,” she says, kneeling by Buddy’s head. “But an empty gut can’t teach lungs how to behave.” She snaps open a capsule, mixes the freeze-dried powder with saline to a gray slurry, dips gauze, and slips it into Buddy’s gum pockets. “Hello, old neighborhood,” she murmurs. “You’ve been missed.”
Buddy licks once, reflex and trust. The bullhorn returns with a tone it borrowed from storms. “Open the door now. Humane termination will be swift.”
Maya freezes, then steps toward the gap until her sneakers touch the light. “Say it right,” she calls. “Kill. If you mean kill, say kill on camera.”
“Director Hale?” a different voice barks—clean, corporate, polite the way knives can be. Raj. “Step aside. You’re not authorized to be here.”
“Watch me resign,” she says, and the Gate chat explodes with hearts, fists, prayers, and a recipe for funeral potatoes.
On Maple Bend, a Department sedan idles in my driveway. The officer raises his fist to knock. Mrs. Keane beats him there with a tray of cookies and a lie. “Arthur’s at dialysis,” she says, gentle as a gun. “He’s fragile. So are we.” The officer checks his tablet—the little green DEFER button is in there somewhere—and decides whether to be a neighbor or a rule.
Deputy Denise keys her radio on the far side of the county. “All units, HazMat at the old grain elevator,” she says to static that remembers being honest. “Road closed, detour at County 12.” She hangs the mic, looks at the cruiser in her mirror, and says to no one, “I never liked brochures.”
Nora’s feed store door jingles. She grabs a box of N95s that may as well be talismans, a five-gallon jug, and her teenager Migs, who is vibrating like a tuning fork tuned to courage. “You lock up if I don’t come back,” she tells the seed catalogs. The bell rings agreement.
Back under the elevator, Elena tapes the line and checks the bag with a thumb that can feel a falter two beats before monitors admit it. “Dose is in,” she says. “Now we let biology remember how to be a friend.” She pulls off her gloves and looks at me. “He’s got a chance.”
“What do we do while chance does its job?” I ask.
“We make them wait,” Maya says. She peels the activation sticker off the last cryobox she primed, holds it up to the gap like a badge, and raises her voice. “Legal says you need a warrant that isn’t printed off a panic. HazMat says you enter clean. PR says you don’t want to be seen killing my father’s dog on eight hundred mirror feeds. Choose your door.”
A pause. You can hear meetings happening in that silence—men deciding what’s tolerable to be seen doing.
The bullhorn chooses another trick. “Regionwide ZV-8 bulletin,” it says. “Shelter in place. Do not congregate at the elevator. This is an order.”
The chat shows the opposite. Headlights bob in the back lot. A battered tractor trundles in and parks broadside across the alley. A co-op pickup angles behind it. A county plow rumbles up and stops there like a bad idea that decided to be good. People get out. Not many. Enough.
Nora’s braid appears by the gap. “You in there?” she calls. “I brought cold water and stubborn.”
“Leave,” Raj orders through someone else’s mouth. “You’re obstructing a containment operation.”
Nora waves a mask at the door. “This is containment,” she says. “We’re containing you.”
Denise’s cruiser noses into the lot backward, trunk toward the gap like a shield. She keeps her hat low and her radio loud. “Gas leak,” she announces to anyone with a camera. “Road’s closed. Folks, step back—unless you’re planning to stand.”
Theo’s bike skids in, trailing a mother’s horror. He’s holding a sign in marker that says DON’T HURT THE DOG with a lopsided heart I recognize from fridge drawings. His mom, cheeks wet, puts both hands on his shoulders. “We stand,” she says, voice shaking, “then we go home. We’re not heroes. We’re neighbors.”
The first drone drops a canister. Foam blooms across the asphalt like a white lie—sterile suppressant used for kitchen fires and televised courage. It slops toward the cruisers’ tires. Denise kicks it back with a boot and a curse. “You idiots,” she says to the sky. “You’ll suffocate the whole block.”
“Time to go,” Elena says softly.
“How?” I ask. The door is a spreader bar from obedience. The lot is a chessboard with both sides cheating.
Elena points up. “Grain chute to the south bay,” she says. “It drops into the alley behind the soda machine. We can squeeze Buddy through on the gurney. You drive the demo van. I’ll push the chute release and play damsel in distress. Maya—” She stops. The mother in her wants one thing. The strategist wants another. “Maya goes with you. Her token sync is dead, but her face still opens doors you’ll need.”
“No,” Maya says. “I stall. I’m the face they want to pin. I walk out and make them say the kill word on camera. You go.”
I shake my head. “I’m not leaving you.”
She smiles with the mouth that cried into Scout’s ruff when her mother died, then bit through news conferences with charm like a scalpel. “You taught me to hold the leash when it mattered,” she says. “This is the leash.”
Pounding at the door turns to rhythm—battering ram percussion. Metal whines like a scream it practiced for this.
Elena decides. “Two minutes,” she says. “Arthur—Buddy, cooler, tank, van. Maya—ninety seconds of theater. On my mark, you slip the foam line and run.”
She pulls the grain-chute lever. Bolts shriek, a steel tongue drops from the ceiling, and ghost wheat whispers down the chute like memory. We strap Buddy to the gurney, tilt, slide him into the mouth of old industry, and he vanishes into a silver throat with the tank rattling behind him. I go next, knees and elbows and a prayer for old bones. I spill into a stifling bay where the busted soda machine blinks a 7UP promise from 1998. The alley is a narrow ribbon between semis. The demo van idles, door gaping like a choice.
I haul Buddy in, seat the tank, check the tape, whisper that lie that used to be a lullaby. “We’ve got you.”
Above, the door gives one heroic shriek and folds. Light floods the clinic. Maya steps into it with her hands up and the camera live. “I’m Director Maya Hale of PetKind,” she says to the bullhorn and the Mirror feeds and the child with the marker heart. “If you’re going to kill a dog, say kill. Don’t say humane. Don’t say terminate. Say kill. And say it to them.” She points to the phones and the eyes behind them and the country that’s been rehearsing cowardice as civics.
Raj’s voice cracks for the first time in six years of smooth. “This is reckless,” he says. “You’re endangering—”
“The story?” Maya says. “Yes.”
Elena appears at the edge of the frame, hair wild, eyes sane. “Medical facility,” she snaps. “Back off.”
A Department officer—older, tired, human—lowers his battering ram a notch. He looks at the numbers on Buddy’s last frame streaming on a thousand screens. He looks at Theo’s sign. He looks at a deputy with a hat that says not today. He looks at Nora’s braid and Migs’ shaking shoulders.
“Move the foam,” he tells a rookie. The rookie obeys. Policy loses a round to presence.
“Now,” Elena hisses into her mic. I slam the van into drive. The foam parts in a grudging river. Denise backs her cruiser into the path of a gray SUV and smiles like an apology she won’t deliver. Nora slaps the van’s side twice—go, go—and we do.
A drone drops to eye level in the alley. It flashes a STOP VEHICLE display like a moral. Maya dives in the passenger door as we pass, slams it behind her, and the drone clanks off the mirror. Elena runs alongside, grabs the handle, and we yank her in as the van fishtails into daylight.
White bars flare in the mirrors. The demo van’s telemetry chirps: REMOTE IMMOBILIZE REQUEST. Maya curses, rips the glove box, comes up with a fuse map, and shoves my hand into the guts under the column. “Pull relay twenty-three,” she barks. “If it sparks, good. If it kills the radio, better.”
I pull. It sparks. The dash goes dark; the immobilize request sighs into confusion. We shoot the gap between a tractor and a plow, bounce a curb, and hit County 12 like a sin forgiven.
Behind us, the lot fills with people who didn’t plan to be brave and were anyway. Theo’s mom pulls him close and sobs into his hair. Denise lights a cigarette she won’t finish and tells the air she intends to keep her job and her soul, in that order if possible.
Ahead, the sky thickens with drones—orange stripers now, and the flat matte kind that don’t perform for clicks. “They’ll nest under overpasses,” Maya says. “Aim for trees. Metal scrambles them. Water throws their lenses dumb.”
I thread the river road’s cottonwood tunnels. The van bucks at every root like a horse that suspects you don’t deserve it. In the back, Buddy’s chest lifts, falls, lifts, a metronome that shakes the world into rows I can count.
“Next step is K9-POLY,” Elena says, popping the cooler like a prayer book in a storm. “We give it when he’s almost ready for the work. It’s ugly. It’s honest.” She looks at me and doesn’t sugar the pill. “He could crash. If he does, there’s no second try.”
The van’s radio resurrects just long enough to spit a new bulletin: Regional roadblocks active. Report vector sightings to 555-BIO-ALRT. Rewards apply. The sound of a country being paid not to remember itself.
Maya grabs my wrist. “Left,” she says, “now.” I cut. We crunch over a cattle guard into a stand of ironweed and a two-lane that thinks it’s a secret.
Five miles ahead, an overpass squats over a dip in the road. Orange stripers cling under it like wasps. We can’t go under. The river side cuts off with a ditch. The levee to the left is a narrow crown of gravel, high and stupid and ours.
“Do not,” Elena says.
“Do,” Maya says.
I do.
We climb the levee. The van tips into sky and water, gravel pinging the wheel wells like doubt. A drone swings out to meet us and drops a gift—spike strip, black and smug, blooming across the crown like a bad idea finding legs.
“Hold on,” I say, and we hit.
The front right blows with a shotgun bang. The van lurches toward the river like penance. I fight the wheel. Maya braces her feet and grabs the dash and starts praying in a language she calls “science but louder.” In the back, Elena’s hand is already on the ampule, drawing the white medicine that could be blessing or goodbye.
The van skates to a halt with its nose aimed at the water, the world tilted thirty degrees toward consequence. Gravel trickles under us in a slow, treacherous slide. Drones gather like carrion with degrees.
Elena looks at the line. Looks at Buddy. Looks at the river, the sky, the cliff of time.
“We do it now,” she says.
“Here?” I ask.
“Here,” she says, and taps the air over Buddy’s vein—a small, blue line that is, at this moment, the only borderline that matters.