Free The Dying of the Light (Book 3): Beginning by Jason Kristopher Page A

walked over and knelt in front of his wife. “We’re dying, Sabrina. As a species. There’s less than a million of us out there across the whole planet. And there are still billions of walkers. It’s a war of attrition, and we’re losing. Unless we do something now, and I mean right now, we won’t see another hundred years. Maybe not even seventy or eighty. We’ll be gone.”
    Sabrina sat back against the chair and looked at her husband. She heard Mary swear and storm off, tossing papers around, but the woman eventually came back to sit beside her once more. Sabrina had just stared into her husband’s eyes the whole time, trying to come up with a way he wasn’t right.
    She failed.
    Sabrina stood next to him, put an arm around Jim’s waist, and looked at Mary. “Did any of the mice die horrible screaming deaths?”
    Mary’s eyebrows rose, and her mouth dropped open. “No, of course not!”
    “Then whatever problems they might possibly have someday are better than what happens every time someone turns into a zombie or gets killed by one.”
    Mary closed her mouth with a snap. That sort of logic was hard to argue with.
    “Shouldn’t we look at the bigger picture?” Sabrina asked. “No, we don’t know what may happen if we proceed with the gene therapy. We could end up with no problems like the mice or something awful or something in between.”
    She paused to look at her friend of more than twenty years. “What we do know is that eventually, without it, we will all die. Every one of us. And those kids that you’re worried about twelve generations from now who might have a problem will never be born.”
    Sabrina walked over to stand between the two whiteboards. “What you two have done is nothing short of miraculous. Yes, you had essentially unlimited resources and years to work on it, but even so… You’ve developed a way to inoculate everyone now living and protect all our children forever.”
    “It’s not quite that simple, Sabrina,” Mary said with a shake of her head. “The sheer scale alone… It’s not like we have massive manufacturing facilities that can run off a few hundred thousand doses or something.”
    “We don’t have a whole country to provide for anymore. Or rather, we do, but there’s a damn sight fewer people in it. If we made it a priority here and in a couple other bunkers, don’t you think we could make it happen? And we can take the time to ramp up, do it the right way. Any babies born between now and when the therapy is ready will just get the antibodies and boosters after however long, and then the therapy will come a little later. We can find an abandoned facility somewhere that used to make vitamins or whatever and get it going again.”
    Mary nodded, a bit of excitement and positivity in her tone. “We could turn out about, oh, a thousand doses a month here at least.” She smiled. “One benefit of being the ‘science bunker,’ I guess.”
    “Now, what happens when we start to breed with survivors up top?” Sabrina asked. “Wouldn’t that sort of normalize any mutations and eventually bring things to a sort of even keel?”
    “It could just as easily remove all our modifications,” Jim said. “Natural selection is a tricky thing.”
    Sabrina nudged him again. “I get that it will take some time to get it to the point where we’re ready to disseminate the treatment, and I get that it’s not perfect. Nothing ever is. But this way, not even the Driebachs can wipe us out. Honestly, no more horrible screaming deaths? I’d call that a good day.”

     
    ExForce Command
Joint Base Lewis-McChord
     
    Eden approached command-and-control slower than she had in the past and winced as her left arm throbbed in the sling. At least she wasn’t limping and didn’t have to use a crutch or cane. That was all she needed, everyone thinking Daddy’s little girl couldn’t hack it. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she’d somehow screwed things up with Marquez to the point