Free Omega Days (Book 2): Ship of the Dead by John L. Campbell

thanks.
    “How’s your partner going to feel about that?” Rosa asked.
    “I’ll deal with him,” Carney said, already knowing how TC would respond.
    The woman looked at him. “Who were you, before all this, Carney?”
    The man didn’t respond, and the silence went on so long it didn’t look like he would. Then he stood up and folded his arms. “For the last seventeen years I’ve been an inmate at San Quentin for double murder. My wife and her lover were drug addicts who let my daughter choke to death, and I killed them both in their sleep. I’d do it again.” He looked at their faces and nodded. “More than you were expecting. Careful you don’t ask questions when you’re not ready for the answers. Is this going to be a problem?”
    Xavier looked at the man, at the years of grief that tried unsuccessfully to hide behind hard blue eyes. “Are you going to be a problem for us?”
    “No,” Carney said, delivering the word without hesitation.
    Xavier wasn’t ready to ask the same question about the man’s partner, however, for it was now obvious where the two had met. “People change,” the priest said. “Your word’s good enough for me.”
    The inmate pursed his lips. No one had
ever
said that to him. He turned to look at the medic. “I answered your question, Doc; now I have one. What is all this?” He waved an arm. “How is it, exactly, that the dead are walking around wiping us out?” It was
the
question, one with which they had all wrestled, yet for the most part they had been on the run and fighting to survive too often to care about the answer. Now here it was.
    Rosa shook her head. “I’m not a doctor.”
    Carney laughed and sat down on the stage beside her. “Oh, no, Doc, I’m not letting you get away with that.”
    “Look,” she said, “I got my degree and finished pre-med, but actual med school hadn’t started yet. I’m just a medic.”
    “And that makes you the closest thing we have to an expert,” Carney said. “So let’s hear it. You must have a theory.” The others looked at her as well.
    Rosa hesitated, and then shook her head. “I can tell you what I heard and what I saw, give you my opinion, but that’s all. You need a virologist.”
    They nodded for her to go on.
    “Okay. We’ve been calling it a virus, but that’s just an assumption based upon how it acts. It could actually be something hidden in the genetic code. I don’t know if anyone’s done any lab work on it, so I can’t say. Let’s call it a virus for now.”
    “The Omega Virus, that’s what the news called it,” Carney said.
    “Right,” Rosa said, nodding. “But it’s more complex than that. There’s something else at work, maybe even a separate strain of OV. The virus is acting like a blood-borne pathogen in the sense that fluid exposure can give you the disease, almost certainly
will
give you the disease, but if it’s not through a bite, it isn’t always fatal.”
    They all thought about the girl in the other room.
    “How is that even possible?” asked Evan. “Fluid is fluid; if it’s infectious it wouldn’t matter where it came from in the body.”
    The medic shrugged. “I didn’t say it made sense or that it’s right. It’s just a theory based on what I’ve seen, both in the field hospital and out there.” She waved an arm. “Maybe it has to do with the carrier, some mutation in the walking dead. An autopsy on one of them might explain more.”
    “But even if one of the dead doesn’t kill you outright,” said Xavier, “the bite eventually will.”
    “Yes,” Rosa said. “The bite triggers the fever, and it’s always fatal. But it’s not what turns you.”
    “Bullshit,” said Carney. “You get bitten, you turn. Simple.”
    The medic shook her head. “Wrong. You get bitten, it kills you, and
then
you turn. Death is the problem here, and that’s why there has to be something else at work.”
    They stared at her.
    Rosa looked at each of them. “Ever see someone turn