Free The Exodus Is Over by C. Chase Harwood Page B

experiment with prose and found a fondness for Scifi-action-adventure. Within that framework he gets to explore the countless ways that humans interact while under duress. "Life is all the more lived when the consequences are high. When told as a tale it can be quite a page turner," says Harwood. He lives in Los Angeles with his costume designer wife and young boy girl twins.
    The following are some other storytellers with whom the author finds a kindred spirit: HUGH HOWIE, STEPHEN KING, SCOTT SIGLER, DJ MOLLES, RHIANNON FRATER, SEAN PLATT, JUSTIN CRONIN, JAMES S.A. COREY, PETER CLINES, SUZANNE COLLINS, ERNEST CLINE, MAX BROOKS, VERONICA ROTH, LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD, ORSON SCOTT CARD
    "Pretty big shoes…”

Excerpt from Part 2 The Search For A Cure

    TRAN
    Dr. Robert Tran lay in bed, frustrated that his tiny opportunity to catch up on sleep was once again spoiled by his nagging subconscious. His brain had been tickling the back of his head for days. The researcher for the Centers for Disease Control knew the signs and it kept him awake with annoyed anticipation. The scientist in him suggested that he take a sleeping pill - a sleep-deprived brain being useless for dealing with a national pandemic. Theholy-shit-we’re-all-going-to-die-a-horrible-death normal human side of him said, “Sleeping pill? Are you nuts? You’ve almost got it.”
      A songbird began singing outside the window of his trailer. It was still dark out, but the bird didn’t care and then another one joined it. Tran pulled his pillow over his head to block them out. He’d been crashing in this FEMA trailer outside the now Relocated-to-Ottawa CDC headquarters for three months. Ever since Atlanta was overrun, the race against time had taken up residence in a research park in the Ottawa suburbs. Tran was a member of the Bacterial Zoonoses Branch, which was charged among other things with scientific support for CDC’s terrorism preparedness and emergency response. In reality his job was (to use the CDC’s words) Pathogen discovery and characterization of unusual bacterial pathogens and novel causes of critical illness and unexplained death . Currently, the critical illness department was overwhelmed. No one was really sleeping, and to make matters worse, as the now partnered Canadian/American Government declared martial law, a food rationing system had just been brought into effect. Tran’s stomach gurgled at the thought and he sat up to get a drink of water while cursing the chirpy birds outside.  
      The trailer’s potable waterlines had been hooked up to an old galvanized pipe system and much to everyone’s annoyance there was no filter and no home filters to be had. The result was rusty water. To minimize some of the metal, he held a handkerchief over the glass and let the water slowly filter through - and that’s when he had it - the tickle in the back of his head turned into a eureka moment: The birds, the dirty water, the bacteria that riddled the brain of the infected, it all came together like the last successful turn of a Rubik’s Cube.
      Turning on a light, he threw his glasses on and flipped open his laptop. First he brought up a map of the initial spread of FND-z. For each date that the infection jumped north, it showed a different color swath over the Southern Continental US. Somehow, the disease had overcome every quarantine effort the government, and even panicked but still organized citizens, had set up. Of course, now the thing was a self-perpetuating killing machine, wrecking any computer modeling that showed predictive behavior. In April the population density of infected had reached a tipping point beyond quarantine within the continental US. It was literally the last hope of North America that the final barrier, the Saint Lawrence Wall as it was now called, would hold.  
      Tran typed into the CDC database and pulled up the data for the migratory behaviors of North American birds. The Zoonoses branch also dealt with the