Free Three Days in April by Edward Ashton

a solid ten seconds of awkward silence.
    â€œIt doesn’t matter,” says Terry finally. “If what you’re saying is right, there must be over five thousand ­people still alive. They can’t just burn them, can they?”
    I shake my head again.
    â€œThat’s what I was trying to say before Anders interrupted. If everyone were really dead like they’re saying, they could probably afford to wait for a while, maybe send in some bots to poke around and see what went down. With survivors, though . . . if this is a virus, all we need is for one person to sneak out of town with this stuff percolating in his gut, and before you know it, it’s eighty-­eight percent of North America dead. Better to make it one hundred percent of Hagerstown, and leave it at that.”
    Anders is glaring at me again. Terry’s face is blank and slack as a rubber mask.
    â€œAnd they said . . .”
    â€œRight,” I say. “They said there were no survivors because saying that we’re about to cook a few thousand adorable little scamps down to scrapple would probably upset some ­people.”
    She stares at me through a long, awkward pause.
    â€œBut you think it’s the right thing to do,” she says finally.
    I kick the footrest up, knit my fingers behind my head, and look up at the ceiling. There’s a crack in the joint compound that runs all the way from one end of the room to the other. I never noticed that before.
    â€œI’ll say this,” I say. “If I were in charge, and I had to make the call on whether or not to slag a few thousand rug rats in order to prevent the release of an engineered virus that had just ripped through an entire town in under an hour, with an eighty-­eight percent fatality rate . . . I would be very sorely tempted to do it.”
    The sofa creaks as Anders shifts his weight. That crack runs right underneath the wall that separates Anders’ room from the hallway. Is that a load-­bearing wall?
    â€œDo your friends think that’s what this is?” Terry asks. “A virus?”
    I sigh.
    â€œNo, ma’am. They do not.”
    We sit in silence then. Terry and Anders watch some idiot on the wallscreen drone on about containment protocols for a while, and then they cycle through the same clips they were showing before. I blink to my ocular again, and query similar incidents in the past fifteen years. I get a link to a feed about an outbreak of black pox in a CDC facility in Bismarck, a bunch of links related to that brain fungus thing that got set loose in Tokyo a few years ago, and a ­couple of dozen fictional vids about viruses that turn everyone into zombies.
    I actually consider trying to do some research, but I kind of have a thing for zombie vids, so I wind up streaming one of those instead. This one is called The Omega Protocol . It’s got a ­couple of decent actors, and a CGI group that usually does a nice job. It starts out with a little bit of promise, but after about twenty minutes, I click it off in disgust. I like zombies, but I cannot stand zombie vids that take themselves seriously. In this one, zombieism is caused by a virus that can only be spread through the bite of an infected person. Once a victim gets bitten, the virus gestates for a while—­to give him time for angst-­y conversations with his loved ones and contemplation of suicide, I guess—­and then turns him into a shambling, rotting wreck with a hankering for human flesh. At the point where the story picks up, literally everyone on Earth except for the heroes is infected.
    Which is all well and good, I guess, except for this: We already have a virus that is spread through bites, that causes you to act crazy, and that is 100 percent fatal. It’s called rabies. And yet somehow, not every person on Earth has contracted it.
    Something bounces off my head. I blink the ocular back off and look over at