S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (59 page)

He finished his coffee and gathered his keys and tablet and left after shouting a goodbye to Cassie through the sliding door. He even gave Lyssa a tentative peck on the cheek.

And she was faced with the awkwardness of having to work with him.

With a sigh, she opened the car door and went inside.

She found Drew asleep at his desk in his office, his clothes and hair rumpled and a stale smell in the air. She cleared her throat loud enough for him to stir.

“How'd last night go?” she asked, settling into a chair.

He groaned as he sat up and stretched, eliciting a series of small crackles from his joints. Lyssa smiled in amusement.

“You think you'd learn,” she said.

“I'm not as young as I used to be,” he conceded. He winced and tried to work the stiffness from his neck.

“So?”

“Need. Coffee. First.”

“Yeah, in a to-go mug,” she told him, “because you're not staying. Tell me what happened, then go home and get some sleep. You look horrible.”

And he did. His eyes were bloodshot. The flesh around them was swollen and bruised, the conjunctivas pink. His face was blotchier than usual. He coughed experimentally, and seemed surprised at the alarming rattle in his chest.

“I guess I picked up Sudha's cold.”

Sudha. Damn it.

She hadn't stopped by her place. She didn't even know exactly where the woman lived.

Drew pushed his notebook across the desk toward her, and when Lyssa reached for it, she could feel the heat coming off his skin.

“Cold my ass,” she commented. “Feels more like the flu.”

“I assembled the nanotubes around our genes according to Heather's notes and ran a sample through the mass spec. The results should be printed out now.”

“Did you run any through chromatography?”

He nodded. “Better than ninety percent fully formed particles. No idea if they're functional.”

“We'll know better in a day or two. No time for tissue culture anymore.”

He nodded tiredly. “I injected all the rabbits, six with the complete assembly, the rest as controls. And I left instructions for the animal techs to collect samples.”

“So, why are you still here?”

Drew chuckled and stretched again. His joints didn't pop this time, but he groaned louder. Concerned, Lyssa pushed herself from the chair, reached over the desk and placed her hand on his forearm.

“Jesus, Drew, you're burning up! Go home!”

“I'm going. I'm going,” he said, already struggling to get out of his chair.

Lyssa's stomach lurched at the stink on his breath. She turned her face, trying not to show it. “I may want to analyze some of the samples myself,” she said.

“Tubes are in the freezer, the rack on the top shelf, right-hand side.” He found his car keys and stepped toward the door. “By the way, Sudha was in briefly. But I think she went back home. She looked terrible.”

“And so do you. Go home and get some rest.” She stood aside and let him pass. “And thanks, Drew. I won't mark you off as sick today.”

He chuckled and raised a hand. There was no formal sick leave policy for the senior staff. They took whatever time they needed, whenever they needed it, and nobody ever abused the privilege.

Lyssa dropped her keys and phone off in her office, then headed for the lab. After checking over Drew's meticulous notes, satisfied that he'd executed the experiment as well as could be hoped given the constraints they were working under, she checked on the rabbits. They all appeared to be fine, but that was only to be expected. The first symptoms, if any, usually didn't manifest themselves until at least forty-eight hours post-infection. Even so, seeing absolutely no difference in the rabbits' behavior between the control and test treatments, she experienced a moment of doubt. After the failings of the past year and a half, the likelihood of success now was practically nil. Which made her wonder even more why Drew had pushed so hard for this. Did he know something she didn't?

The unsettled feeling lingered inside of her for the rest of the morning, and nothing she did could shake it.

* * *

After their staff meeting, Lyssa pulled Ramon aside. Besides Sudha and Drew, she had to tell him that two of the animal technicians were also out sick, apparently with the same virus. “Whatever it is, it seems pretty contagious, and it's working its way through our crew.”

He frowned in displeasure.

“We may have to push back starting the Ames work.”

She secretly hoped he'd give her a little more time — another week would be ideal — though she knew it was unlikely.

At first she thought he hadn't even heard the comment, but then he shook it off and asked how she was feeling. He actually seemed genuinely concerned, even going so far as raising his hand and pressing the backs of his fingers to her cheek.

She remembered the way they used to be and found she missed his touch. Other than the quick kiss that morning, no more than a brush of his lips on her skin, they hadn't physically connected in almost a year. “No fever, anyway,” he said, looking relieved. “Good. I can't afford to lose you, too.”

She shook her head. “I'm fine, but Drew looked miserable.”

“Your right hand man,” he said. “Summer colds are the worst.”

“Yeah, my trusty sidekick.”

Ramon moved closer to her, hesitated. After a moment, she leaned into him and placed her head against his shoulder. She closed her eyes and listened to him breathe.

After a few seconds, he pulled away. “I'm sure he'll be back tomorrow. You know Drew. He'd have to be dying before he missed two days in a row.”

She chuckled. “I often wonder how we got so lucky finding him.”

“Me, too.”

She could feel the wall between them slowly dissolving and was glad. But, god, it was such hard work sometimes.

He gave her shoulder a squeeze and sighed. “Did you get what you needed? Did he inject the rabbits?”

Lyssa nodded. “He did a quick-and-dirty with the new assemblies. I'll have the techs run the first biochem assays this afternoon. It might be too soon, but Drew didn't get a baseline anyway.” She turned away from him to gather her notebook and tablet.

Ramon watched her uncertainly.
It's not right that I should feel so uncomfortable around my own wife
, he thought.
It wasn't always this way.
“I know we had these grand plans when we started the lab,” he started to say.

“Don't, Rame.”

“No, I need to, honey. You haven't been looking at the books, I have. Not even the stipend the cattle group was paying us would've kept us afloat for much longer.”

The news startled her. She hadn't realized they were treading such a fine line. She turned to the faded, blank wall beside the conference room door. Then to the tattered dry-erase board with its scribbles from the last meeting and the ghosts of other meetings which refused to be wiped away. To the scratched table and the stained carpet beneath their feet. And she saw, really for the first time, how rundown everything looked. “But if this last experiment works—”

“We'd still be years away from realizing any tangible return on it. You know that. Patent filings cost money. Assuming we'd even get a chance to own the intellectual property outright.”

She turned to him, frowning. “What are you saying?”

“This little experiment you're doing now, if it were to work, do you think this friend of yours would just give it to us? Or would we end up paying her royalties on it?”

Lyssa remembered what Heather had said about going back to it someday. Had she been serious?

“I thought you supported me doing it, Ramon.” She stopped and stared at him. “So, what? You're
humoring
me? Is that it?”

“Honey—”

“Don't tell me that. That's what you're saying, isn't it? You actually hope I won't succeed because you don't think we'd profit from it. Damn you, Ramon.”

“I just want you to see the whole picture.”

“Well, for your information, I do think Heather would just give this to us, free and clear.”

He sighed and shook his head. “I hope it succeeds, honey. And I hope you're right about your friend.”

“Then what is it?”

“It's this new project. I didn't want to let the others know when I announced it, but I have some misgivings about it, too.”

“About it paying out?”

“No . . . .” He hesitated. “Never mind.”

“Then why did you agree to it?”

“I told you, because we had no choice. I've run the numbers. We do this, we get another five-year runway. I think that's a fair tradeoff for a few months of work.”

“You make it sound like we're selling our souls.”

He chuckled uneasily, but he wouldn't meet her eyes.

By ten o'clock Friday morning Lyssa was having a difficult time restraining her excitement. Her preliminary observations of the rabbits seemed to indicate the injections had had the desired effect. The test animals were lethargic, their temperatures and heart rates elevated. Serum and urine protein levels were steadily rising. She was tempted to sample some of the amniotic fluid, but the protocol required at least seventy-two hours post-injection for definitive proof that they'd managed to get the genes into the developing embryos. And it wouldn't be until the middle of the following week before they'd be able to tell anything by ultrasound.

She waited for Drew to show up. But when nine o'clock rolled around and he didn't, she tried calling his cell phone number. The call didn't go through. All she managed to get was a strange, thrumming, staticky sound and an intermittent clicking. The new network, the so-called Stream, seemed to be having growing pains.

He's probably on his way in
.

By eleven, it was clear he wasn't. Either that or he was seriously stuck in traffic without a way to call. On the off chance that he was still at home, Lyssa decided to try him there. When she got his answering machine, she left him a message.

Five minutes later, she had Sudha on the line. The woman was clearly miserable with infection. Her voice was so raspy and nasally that Lyssa had a hard time understanding her. Between sneezes and coughs, which sounded more like angry snaps and growls, the woman managed to say, “I come in if you need me.”

“No,” Lyssa insisted. “We've already got four people out. I don't need anyone else getting sick.”

She went to the lab, but she was still too agitated and couldn't sit still.

On a whim, she decided to send out samples of the prepped material for analysis which they couldn't do in-house, just as an insurance policy in case the study yielded sufficiently positive results.

The analytical lab was located in Brookhaven. Test samples were normally picked up by a courier midmorning, delivering them by noon for a guaranteed same-day processing. Lyssa checked the time and saw that she had less than half an hour to make the pickup.

She found the rack of tubes in Drew's freezer and pulled it out, but it slipped from her hand and fell to the floor. Hastily gathering them, she decided just to have them all tested rather than to try and figure out which she needed. Unfortunately, by the time she'd filled out the paperwork, the courier had come and gone. She decided to drive the samples there herself.

She texted Ramon a message, telling him she was popping over to the deli near the Marine base in Riverhead and asking if he wanted anything. Before she'd even pulled out of the parking lot with the polystyrene box on the seat next to her, she received a reply saying he'd come along. She ignored it and hurried for the gate at the end of the drive.

A minute later she was on the bridge and heading for the main island.

* * *

“Did you bring me anything?”

Lyssa lifted her forehead away from the palm of her hand and stared at Ramon standing in her doorway. “Bring you . . . ?”

“You went out to the deli, remember? You said you were going to get me some lunch? I called to say I'd go with you, but you didn't pick up. I figured you'd at least get the message that I wanted a sandwich. That was hours ago.”

“Oh, right.” She pushed her notebook to the side of her desk, discreetly covering the copy of the test requisition the Brookhaven technician had provided her. The form had Lyssa's signature at the bottom, but she didn't remember signing it. Nor did she recognize the sample identification codes Drew had written down.

Lyssa had argued with the technician for over an hour, but she'd been adamant that she couldn't release the results. “It's part of our standard operating procedures,” the young woman tried to explain. “Whenever a sample is positive for any restricted biohazard, we're obligated to repeat the assay before notifying the requestor. If positive a second time, we have to notify the proper authorities.”

“But we aren't working with any dangerous disease agents,” Lyssa had replied. “Are you sure it was from one of our samples? Maybe it got mixed up with someone else's. Can you tell me which disease?”

“I can't give any specifics until we have confirmation, other than to say it's one of the restricted viruses listed in the International Convention on Biowarfare.”

“No. It can't be us.”

“I'm sorry,” the tech repeated. “As soon as I have the second set of results in hand, I'll email you. Do you still want me to run these new samples for you?”

The mystery had troubled Lyssa so much that she'd completely forgotten about the deli.

“Sorry, Rame. I forgot.”

“You were gone for almost three hours. Where'd you go?”

“There was traffic,” she lied. She couldn't believe he was keeping tabs on her. “Construction, I guess. Those damn new towers.” She felt herself getting flustered. “I guess I just blanked. I'm sorry.”