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"There’s an outbreak in Oakland, Shaun And you’re right in the fking middle of it"
The foranic process, guided al and by the panic of the general populace Given the death rates at hospitals during the worst of the outbreak, it wasn’t a surprise that people would be afraid of them Given thrisk of amplification, it wasn’t a surprise that people would need medical attentionthe restoration of house calls and private care, increased access to hoy… and the sudden seanization If they couldn’t do what needed to be done, when it was needed, there was the risk that none of us would live long enough to s should be handled
The CDC enjoys relative freedom from all ethical medical laws and local restrictions The WHO enjoys absolute freedom in almost every nation in the world Maybe it’s tiht about that a littleof Alaric Kwong, April 15, 2041
Five
I droppedThe sirens werebut the noise Outbreak alaret your attention and make you focus on the problem at hand They ell for the first, and not soat Dave to shut the da off already, while he shouted at the it harder for him to concentrate
Only Kelly see was seriously wrong She clenched her hands together, stress-whitened knuckles resting against the underside of her jaw, and watched e for the rest of her face
I jerked theas far open as it would go before leaning out over the fire escape and looking down at the street The siren in the aparted to crack the case and yank out the wires, but with theopen, the neighborhood sirens were right there to take its place--and so was the screae off the screaunfire
At least
Oh, fk hts exactly," I muttered "Guys?"
"What?" asked Alaric
"I think it’s time for an evacuation Nice, easy, and oh, say, yesterday" I pushed away from the"I hate to say it, but this is not a drill"
There was ato rationalize what I’d just said Then they exploded intofor the weapons cache in the closet, Dave lunging for his keyboard Only Kelly stayed where she was, hands still clenched beneath her chin
Shaun--
"I’m on it," I said, and started for the server rack
It had been almost fifteen years since the last major outbreak in Oakland You want the recipe for a relatively zoive therained bunker mentality, and tell them they can’t depend on anyone outside the community They’ll police their borders so well that you’ll probably never need to worry about theain Trouble is, that sort of border patrol can wind up hurting as much as it helps Sure, Oakland had all the security features you’d expect to find in a major urban center, but most people didn’t know exactly how they worked or how to take full advantage of them They could handle their home defense systems The public defenses were a little more difficult
At least half the storefronts I’d seen duringopen, with their eates fully retracted Soed to descend, but not nearly enough of them to make a difference, especially when the doors weren’t locked Sealed blast shutters on a building whose doors were standing open wouldn’t save anyone They’d just ot in
About half the unsealed s had been broken--shatterproof glass is a much more academic concept when the infected are involved They don’t have any functioning pain receptors to slow thelass until so about civic-use storefronts in a relatively low-incoives There had been blood splashed all around the sidewalk, and there wasn’tfro past too late
I stepped up to the server rack and started to disconnect drives and flip the switches to transfer as much of our data as possible to secured off-site backups There are so network, including most of the research we’ve done into the conspiracy that killed ets backed up daily, both to the drives I was shoving into my pockets and to other, off-site drives, stored in safety deposit boxes, hidden caches, and stranger places all over the Bay Area I feel I’ve earnedsound of Becks loading her rifle behindsound of Alaric e the contents of the priht not be a field eeks I’ve evercoe doesn’t mean you’ll have a damn clue what to do when a zombie comes at you The belief that the two skill sets translate directly gets a lot of people killed