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“Clear,” I said, pulling out er than h for me to think it was a matter of preference, not , “I’d offer to take some marksmanship tests, but this doesn’t seem like the place”

“Later,” said Shaun Rick looked auy probably thought e, you take the foaling barn Rick, you hit the adult quarters I’ll take the hospital barn, and we’ll ether Radio contact at all ti, screaether to help?” asked Rick

“So the rest of us have tiet away,” I said “Cameras on, people, and look alive; this is not a drill This is the news”

Splitting up made the most sense: All four barns were involved in the outbreak, but it started in a single place We’d search the other areas individually, get soet back together where weThat didn’t stopbarn feed roolasses and the burning intheir futile efforts to contract and relaxing into full expansion as I walked into the ht they’re best suited to I saw in it the way the infected did, and like the infected, I saw everything

The ranch was clearly a state-of-the-art establishment, on top of all the latest developned to maximize the conore the federallyfrom one wall and the yellow-and-red biohazard bins that marked the barn’s four corners

The snore, and once I admitted it was there, the rest came clear The stains on the walls that weren’t paint or spilled feed The way the straw in the stalls was matted doith the remains of some thick, tacky liquid They hadn’t finished the biohazard cleanup in here yet That’s standard operating procedure First you remove all infected bodies and any chunks that were left behind Then you seal the building as well as you can and fill the air with bleach Finally, you set off the aerosol disinfectants and formalin bombs Formalin is a for, including the mobile infected, and standard decontamination procedures call for five waves of the stuff, releasing a new batch as the previous one is depleted by the organic materials around you It’s only after the area has been bleached so thoroughly that anything living is pretty h for all fluids to dry to a splatter-free state that it’s considered safe to start re potentially infected materials, like the straw in the stalls

My shoulder ca I activated three , one at an toaround the barn

A pile of dead cats was under the hayloft, their multicolored bodies twisted fro that killed them They’d survived the outbreak and the chaos that followed, but they couldn’t outrun the for at them They looked so small and harmless and they were Cats don’t reach the Mason barrier They weigh less than forty pounds Kellis-Amberlee isn’t interested in them, and they don’t reanimate For cats, dead is still dead

I made it almost to the wall before I threw up

It was easier once the initial wash of disgust was out of ns that anything unusual had happened; it was just the site of an outbreak, tragic and horrible, but not special Here was the place where one of the infected horses kicked its way inside, knocking the barn’s sliding door off its rails It would have hit the nursingdown, and the humans on duty were probably totally undefended They had no idea anything rong until it was too late If they were lucky, they died fast, either bleeding out or ripped to pieces before the virus had a chance to take hold and start rewriting them into another iteration of it That was sadly unlikely A fresh mob wants to infect, not devour

It was easy to picture infected horses raht and rushing on to bite still e; it’s hoe al of the century, and it was probably accurate We kno this sort of outbreak goes, even though e didn’t The virus is dependable, not creative

It took me twenty minutes to sweep the barn By the tiet out of there that I forgot to put ht The sudden glare was ainst the barn door, eyes squinting shut

“This is hoe can tell she hasn’t converted,” Shaun coet flash-blinded by sunlight when they forget their sunglasses”

“Fuck you, too,” I ot his arm around me and hoisted me away from the barn

“You kiss our mother with that lasses”

“Which are where?”

“Left-hand vest pocket”

“I’ve got it” That was Rick’s voice, and it was Rick who pressed lasses into my hand