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“Is that what you told her?”

“Of course
. Then I slapped her in the face and told her to go elsewhere.”

That was the big joke between them; customer service reps should be able to slap mean customers to put them in their place. It was ridiculous, but they found it hilarious.

“I punched a few people last week myself. Showed those customers who is boss,” Dom said, puffing his chest out.

“You did, huh?” Chelsea maneuvered herself over him, throwing one leg over his body to straddle him. She bent down and planted a gentle kiss on his neck. “My champion.”

Dom’s pulse quickened. His hands moved up to her hips. “Do I get an award for my heroic actions?”

She nodded and
dipped down again, showering his cheeks and forehead with kisses, her fingertips running along his jaw and down his neck. She pulled back, her expression gentle and focused entirely on him.

“I love you,” she whispered.

“I love you too,” he told her, meaning it more than words could ever express.

Barry got spooked and jumped ship. No one had heard from him for a day, but they didn't need to. He left a message with HR saying he was taking off an indefinite amount of time to be with his family. He wasn't the only one; a staggering 28% of staff took unpaid, personal time off, risking their jobs and any potential parting benefits.

Now Adam was left with Chandler, a slightly less intelligent version of Barry. He needed someone to harp on, someone to give him answers. Since Barry left, Adam felt like his lab work wasn't in good hands. He was forlorn that most of his own work involved paperwork, statements, and meetings. It made him feel rusty when it came to getting stuff done. The stages he'd come up with made sense, but some of it was speculation.

"Can you explain this to me?" Adam slapped the stack of photos down on Chandler's desk. His skin turned green as he looked away.

"Can
you
be a little more sensitive? Those pictures are horrific."

Adam rolled his eyes. "Don't you think I know that? This little girl
exploded
. Her chest cavity is
gone
." He leafed through the pictures, pulling out a close-up of a white worm-like creature five inches long. It was squashed in the middle like someone stepped on it.

"This. What is this? How is it so big and why aren't our samples this size?"

Chandler pursed his lips and stood from his desk, walking to various microscopes as though checking to make sure they hadn't grown. "I…I'm not sure, Dr. Baker. None of our samples have increased or decreased in size. We measure them twice a day."

"Are you saying this didn't happen?" He waved the photo at Chandler. "We need to figure this out."

"We need a sample. We can't do anything but hypothesize without tissue samples of the parasite, blood samples from the host…God, this isn’t TV. We don’t have montages and then groundbreaking results after a day."

"Hypothesize, then. We haven't gotten a new infected sample recently. Is it possible it could've mutated that much in the space of what, a day?"

Another lab geek stepped forward. Apparently the whole lab was listening in. Adam had been yelling though, he should've expected it.

"Dr. Baker?"

"Speak. Go, tell me whatever you've got."

She wrung her hands together. "It seems obvious the parasite undergoes mutations in every generation, or perhaps every other generation. For example, if I infect you, you might not have a mutated form of the parasite. But when you infect Chandler, maybe it will mutate."

"That seems too random," Chandler snapped. "Why would it skip a generation? It makes more sense it would mutate every generation."

The girl—Dr. Marla Ainsworth, now that h
e looked at her badge—was unimpressed. "Genetic changes happen over time, Chandler. Ever heard of evolution? Anyway, parasites are relatively simple organisms. Their life cycle is rapid, allowing them faster mutation. Picture this." Her eyes sparkled and she used her hands making gestures with her explanation. "You've got patient zero, right? He infects two unrelated individuals, A and B. Stage three happens, during which the parasite either mutates or stays the same. A passes on the parasite to someone else, but based on how the parasite adapted to that specific body, no genetic changes occur. But when B gets infected, that same parasite experiences a new environment that changes it. Thus when B transmits to a new host, a
new version
of the parasite is being transferred. That's how it's random. A hundred parasites fathered from individual A might stay the same. It's chance."

A tech with a huge black beard and round glasses added, "That would easily explain why incubation times vary so dramatically. We're still getting reports of 4 day incubation times to 1 day."

"So you're telling me we have no way to predict how bad this thing will get or how fast it will spread." Adam ground his teeth, his eyes bearing down on Marla. "You're telling me mutation is entirely random."

"Unfortunately, yes. That's how it seems."

“Evolution takes thousands of years, millions! What you’re saying, it just isn’t conceivable.”

Silence washed over the lab. People fidgeted and looked everywhere but at Adam. They weren't the ones who had to report this to the government. They weren't the ones making official statements to the entire country. They were basking in theories and the heat of a new biological discovery. Adam envied them.

Marla spoke up. "Dr. Baker, if we could just get live hosts we could observe, we might learn a lot more. We can't change the mutation factor, but with live hosts we could study the stages of infection in real time instead of going off the hospital and grocery store incident. Even the police and hospital reports we get now are never helpful. They say the same things over and over, none of it in scientific terms we might find helpful."

Glasses added, “And we’re getting the sense they’re so overwhelmed with what’s happening, no amount of requesting or harping will get them to give us more.”

Live hosts. They were almost
two thousand
miles away from live hosts. All the bodies they had were long since dead. But they had parasites; what if they just infected someone? It was corrupt, but desperate times…

His cell rang. He motioned the techs away and the unethical thoughts with them. It was Erik. "More bad news?"

"Not this time. Well, not for you at least. The little girl's parents are infected. We had them in questioning for 4 hours when both of them started experiencing Stage 2 symptoms."

Adam couldn't help but feel pride that everyone was adapting the stages from the report he filed. That moment of pride gave way to excitement once he realized what Erik said.

"And?"

"They're en route to you. They volunteered before they passed out."

Adam got the rest of the details from Erik and hung up. He looked at Marla who'd been honing in on the conversation. "It looks like your wish just came true."

Marla dropped her backpack in the hallway and headed straight for the kitchen. She was ravenous. The Indian takeout smelled divine and would be the perfect thing to soothe her nerves after the day she’d had at work.

Doom, her sassy tabby cat, jumped up on the counter as she pulled out the curry and na
an, whining to the heaven’s for a can of cat food. Marla obliged, letting the fat cat eat his food on the kitchen counter before returning to her own dinner.

She was both angry and
pleased. Angry on count of Chandler, that chauvinistic jackass, trying to put her down and discredit her theories. Theories were important. If they didn’t try thinking outside of the box, they’d never come up with answers. Everyone was wrapped up in the what, not the why.

Men were always like that. Too busy in their macho arrogance to get any real work done.

Marla hated confrontation—single crazy cat lady living in a studio apartment said it all—and usually would’ve stopped pushing her ideas right when Chandler started giving her a hard time. She didn’t want to be the center of negative attention and often became flustered when she needed to defend herself.

But n
ot this time
, she thought triumphantly as she swirled her naan bread in the curry.

She knew she could hold her own intellectually against the other guys in the lab.
It was only a matter of standing up for herself verbally. And today she had. Dr. Baker acknowledged her idea as valid, and everyone else did, too.

It was a triumph.

Marla moved her takeout boxes to the coffee table in front of her TV, gathering up the files she’d taken from work. She spread them out on the table and couch, settling in for an evening of research.

Tomorrow they’d have the Price couple.
Live specimens infected with
Anisakis Nova
. She jotted down an outline of the tests they’d be able to do with live hosts, eating bites of takeout between. It was too soon to mention her ideas to anyone, but Marla suspected she might have an idea for a cure. It was just a thought, one she’d need to solidify before presenting to anyone.

Today
was
a victory, but she had to be careful around the lab being a semi-attractive (phrase coined by herself) woman. The guys were hard on her because they were intimidated. Even when she was right, they were quick to claim someone helped her, or that her success was by mere chance. It was childish and irritating, resulting in many nights of takeout accompanied by a few glasses of wine. Marla loved what she did, but often hated the people she worked with.

It was the same old story, really.
She never wasted her breath complaining about it to the few friends she did have, because she knew most women suffered that type of discrimination. She figured the best way to combat it was to work hard to prove the naysayers wrong.

Her father always chastised her for going into science,
claiming she brought upon herself the difficulties she experienced in work and throughout college. Her mother tried endlessly to support her, but being uneducated and having been a housewife almost her entire life, Marla never felt like her mother could truly relate to her. She loved her parents to death, and they loved her, but they were set in their old ways. Being an only child, she was on her own. Perhaps that was what made her so self-motivated; she wanted to prove to
herself
how far she could go, how much she could succeed. No external influences.

Marla finished off the takeout.
Her stomach full, she was finally starting to relax. Doom, having finished his dinner and in need of attention, spread himself out across her papers on the couch. She pet him absentmindedly as she let her mind circulate around the parasite.

It was frightening. It was exciting. It was a jumble of things that made her very nervous.
Working on an event like this was the kind of thing that would get her name into the history books forever,
especially
if she managed to find a cure or provide some relevant breakthrough. Yet the destruction it was causing brought her to one morbid thought: what if there was no world to write her into the books once it was all said and done?

God, what if she
did
find a cure, but no one in the pharmaceutical industry was alive to manufacture it?

Marla shuddered. It was an ugly
, depressing thought. This was the makings of a horror movie.

She
and many of the other scientists were in an odd position of experiencing both giddy fascination and complete terror that the infection would hit them. Before he left, Barry made a smart comment that started a fight in the lab.

“What magazines do you think will feature my work? It
is
the breakthrough kind of thing that gets a guy noticed. I should probably see a stylist now—”

Barry was cut off by Suresh. “Are you fucking kidding me? There are literally
thousands
of people dying every day, and you’re worried about that shit?”

“I’m just trying to lighten the mood and—”

Suresh didn’t let it go. “You’re all living in la-la land. It’s fun and cool to be in here, far away from anything that could hurt us, running tests on things that don’t actually affect us. But it will soon and you’ll be sorry.”

The conversation ended there, Barry put in his place and fuming silently. She’d never admit it to anyone, but she was one of the la-la land people Suresh hated.

If there was one person who wasn’t clueless or in denial, it was Dr. Baker. She didn’t envy him, having to tell so many people so much bad news. He might not be doing work in the lab, but he was in the thick of things. Normally he was very put together, with his hair neatly gelled back and his clothes impeccably ironed. As the days wore on he became increasingly frazzled.

No one in the lab had an easy job—except Barry who decided he couldn’t cut it, probably
because of the fight with Suresh—but some parts of lab work was easier than that representative, red tape and fancy word junk.