Society: After It Happened Book 3 by Devon C Ford

indefinitely without being able to go topside.  We left, everyone got sick and died.  Except me” she decided not to mention the Colonel and his breakdown; she didn’t want to have to justify out loud leaving a human being to die.
    “What’s in Scotland?” asked Dan.
    “The main virology research centre.  It’s a top secret thing; even my team didn’t know about it until we spoke to them in the bunker.  We lost contact with them too” she said sadly, suddenly feeling very tired.  “I was hoping I could get there and find out what this is.  I have a theory, but you might not like it” she finished as she typed in a long password to log on to the computer.
    “Go on” Marie urged her gently.
    “This pathogen is very fast acting.  The gestation period to fatality is the quickest of all known lethal infections ever.  It’s like Spanish Flu on steroids” she explained as she turned the computer to show coloured graphs depicting something which Dan lacked the patience to comprehend.
    Get to the point, he thought irritably.
    “So?” he asked, when no further explanation came.
    “So I think it IS Spanish Flu on steroids.  Don’t you see?” she brought up another chart showing times between exposure, symptoms becoming visible, and death.
    “Nothing natural should be this lethal so quickly, but there must be a random element of natural immunity.  How are we all still alive?  I see no obvious genetic theme running in all of the survivors, so why didn’t we die?” Dan hoped the questions were rhetorical, as she was starting to lose him a little.
    “So what are you saying?” he asked “In simple terms”
    “I’m saying we were attacked.  I believe this to be an airborne biological weapon.  Possibly.” she said with a resounding finality. 
    Dan’s mind swam with ideas and theories as he walked back to the farm.  Joe had taken over watching the unconscious attacker.  He had talked with Marie about what to do with him, not necessarily open to ideas other than putting him down.  It was Leah who pointed out that he had been bound, blindfolded and mostly unconscious when they brought him back, and that he had only seen the inside of a shed whilst there.
    Dan agreed that he didn’t need to die, but dumping him somewhere with a bullet hole in his leg would be worse than killing the man himself.  He cleaned and dressed the wound, giving the man back his clothes and adding a bottle of antibiotic tablets.  His hands were tied behind his back and he was blindfolded again before being put in the boot of Dan’s Discovery, then driven around for over twenty miles of aimless driving just to confuse him before he was taken back to where his dead friend sat in the wrecked car.  He was handed the keys to the small vehicle Emma had been driving and told very firmly that if he was ever seen there again, they would kill him. 
    He drove south without looking back.

SCIENCE TRIP
     
    Emma agreed to stay for a while and recover her strength as her recent illness had left her weak.  Marie called a council meeting that night, and explained what had happened with Emma and what she had said afterwards.
    The news of an attack using biological weapons being a possibility didn’t really affect any of them, which frustrated Dan.
    “If this is a bioweapon, don’t you see the implications?” he asked the blank faces staring at him. “If we’ve been attacked by another country, ask yourselves why?” nobody spoke.
    “What if it’s a precursor to invasion?” he suggested to them, finally getting some hint in their faces that they were beginning to grasp the point. “We have no idea if any other countries are affected by it; it could simply be that the island has been quarantined”
    “Slight problem with that theory” offered Neil “If there were still other people, other intact governments, out there in the world then why haven’t we seen any aircraft?”
    Dan thought about that one.  He hadn’t seen