Free A Flock of Ill Omens by Hart Johnson Page B

it in turns to advise and evaluate how they were doing. By noon prospects seemed pretty hopeless, though once formal containment efforts began around one, the tide started to turn.
    Nathan liked being at command central. It gave him the chance to take the pulse of all of it, to mentor students in what to do, and to watch the effects of various preparations and reactions. It was tiring, though, even in this farce of a scenario. He gave Shana the swing shift so he could sleep for a few hours and come back to do the Saturday overnight shift.
    When he returned at midnight, Shana was frowning at a campus map.
    “There's something at the hospital,” she said as Nathan came in.
    “Hospital? We aren't supposed to interrupt them.”
    “It's in the rules, but what portion of kids do you think read everything? And Nathan? That's life, remember? You can put all the protocols in place, but how many epidemics follow human-made rules? Too bad there wasn't money for better prizes,” she said. “Then they'd follow the rules.”
    Infected students were supposed to register online—that was how they qualified for prizes—and registering included agreeing to the rules. Nathan ran his hand through his hair.
    “Those rule-breakers will make this thing spread faster, too,” Shana said, grinning.
    “Also like life?” he asked, and she nodded. Registering also made for an enforced 'incubation period'. They'd always known only a certain portion of participants would go through all the steps. That was part of the lesson that would be taught after the fact—collecting the information from various sources to triangulate and try to measure what really happened.
    “Science follows all the rules until you throw people into the mix,” Shana said.
    “Can we put somebody at the hospital to make sure we don't disrupt them?” he asked.
    “Can you go? I can cover here for another hour or two, but I'm on my bike.”
    “Done.” Nathan hated to babysit, but they were trying to run lean overnight, so the people working already had jobs to do. And he knew his way around the hospital, so he was probably the most efficient person to go.
    He drove to Boulder Community Hospital and didn't see anything to do with zombies. He walked around the outside, even peeking into the ER waiting room. It was swamped, but he couldn't see any zombie nonsense.
    He called Shana because it didn't make any sense.
    “I don't know. Ariel Hutchins called and said she had a kid with a sprained ankle caused by running from the zombies and at the hospital they couldn't get in because so many nurses were dead.”
    When Nathan pressed ‘end’ on his phone he decided that deserved a few answers from the information desk. It was past visiting hours, so the man at the desk had time to talk to him. Nathan explained who he was and why he was there.
    “Uh, no. I haven't heard anything about a Zombie Apocalypse.” The young man leaned forward to whisper. “Sadly, I do know something about dead nurses. We're dangerously low on critical staff. We've put in requests to Denver and Colorado Springs, but they're having similar problems—sick staff and increased demand.”
    “So this is the flu?
    “I'm afraid so.”
    Nathan made an executive decision at that point. The Zombie Apocalypse had to be called off. Doing anything that increased social interaction at this point was a bad idea.
    He went back to the lab and broke the news to Shana.
     

1.10. Sidney Knight:
    Portland, Oregon
    When We Lose
     
    Sidney spent the afternoon and evening researching the spread of the flu in more detail. She wanted to figure out where the flu was ordinary flu and where it was the bird flu—a more dangerous mutation of the original. But nobody seemed to be tracking that. The CDC website had stopped updating information, best she could tell, so she turned to the Dartmouth Atlas, one of the more reliable sources for stats. Death reports had quadrupled in only a few days and they'd made a set of