Zombies! (Episode 4): The Sick and the Dead by Ivan Turner Page B

been a decision. And Lance had shown her a wonderful Sunday.
     
    Now it was Monday. She'd spent the night with him again, but today she would have to head back to the lab and immerse herself in the plague.
     
    She was alone in the apartment. Lance had mentioned that he was going in early. She'd made him promise to wake her before he left but before they'd drifted off to sleep, he'd promised to break that promise. As she thought about it, she giggled a little bit, both delighted and embarrassed by her own girlishness.
     
    The moment passed.
     
    In an hour, she had to be at the lab and be Dr. Luco again. She needed to be a shark because she was meeting with lawyers today. Lawyers and bureaucrats and PR men. All morons. Yesterday, before anything else, Lance had gotten on the phone and started connecting the dots on the whole Head Shot fiasco. Head Shot was the new name of a popular cold and flu medication. It was the strongest anti-viral you could get over the counter and it really did work if you took it within eight hours of becoming symptomatic. With a cold. That they'd labeled it the "perfect defense against the zombie virus" was a travesty. And, oh yeah, a big lie. So Lance had made some calls to the health department. They had made calls to the representatives of the pharmaceutical company responsible for the manufacture and distribution of Head Shot . Denise had wanted a court order forcing an immediate recall. No such thing was going to happen on a Sunday. Even the press release she wanted had to be forestalled until Monday afternoon. Well it was Monday now and it was time for the wheels of justice to start grinding forward.
     
    Denise showered and dressed in a smart new outfit that Lance had gotten her yesterday. She would have gladly gone back to her apartment to get something to wear but he had insisted that she not leave his sight for one instant. She could have bought her own new outfits but he didn't allow that either. He was so different from everything that she expected. He was so very typical in many ways and yet he pulled it off without bluster. Though they had been working together on and off for a month, she felt that she had gotten to know him only in the last two days. And she was impressed. In fact, she could not ever remember a time when she had been as impressed by a man. As she buttoned up her top, she wondered if it was possible to fall in love in a weekend.
     
    She giggled again.
     
    But by the time she was out the door and into the street, Denise was put to rest and Dr. Luco had settled firmly into place. The meeting was in thirty minutes and she expected to arrive ten minutes early. The people from the health department would most likely be on time and the people from the pharmaceutical company would most likely be late. By all rights, the health department people and she should present a unified front but somehow she didn't think that would be the case. Bureaucrats one and all, she anticipated a boat load of red tape and nonsense. She surmised that it would only be a matter of time before she was so completely frustrated that she would have take a stand and bring out the big guns.
     
    She was ten minutes early. Almost to the second. The conference was being held at Arthur Conroy Memorial Hospital in upper Manhattan. It was where she kept her lab, where they had brought Detective Johan Stemmy when he'd been bitten, and every single victim thereafter. Her lab was in a bunker, literally a bunker, three stories beneath the ground. In case of contamination, the place could be locked down in under three seconds by manual switch or voice command. The voice authority required a spoken sixteen digit key code which she and four other doctors had committed to memory. The manual switches existed in every staff room, including the cafeteria. There were no windows. It took a keycard, a fingerprint, and an eye scan to get inside the complex. She wondered how Lance was always able to get in.
     
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