The Inner Struggle: Beginnings Series Book 7 (52 page)

Robbie shrugged, “Fine.”

Joe moved closer to him laying his hand on Robbie’s shoulder and squeezing it, feeling bone. “Dean?” Joe faced Dean. “How much weight did he lose?” Joe pulled at Robbie’s clothes and the looseness of them.

Dean blinked several times. He guessed he had just been with Robbie so much he really didn’t notice how much weight Robbie had lost. He knew he lost some. “Um . . . we weighed him in at one . . . wait a second.” Dean reached down to the folders he brought in. Robbie’s virus was one of the things being discussed at the meeting. He flipped open the folder. “Ellen weighed him in a . . . no, this can’t be right.”

“I knew it.” Joe told him as he grabbed a chair for his son then returned behind his desk. “He lost a lot didn’t he?”

Dean shook his head. “Not according to this. Ellen has him weighed in at two-hundred and three pounds.” A sudden thinking look hit him and he started speaking softly to himself. “Which means all medication and treatments given would have been given according to that weight. Not the new . . .” Dean reached out without taking his eyes off the folder, he grabbed a pencil from the top of Joe’s desk and he began to take notes. “I’ll have to recalculate.” He lifted his head, adjusted his glasses and turned to Robbie. “Robbie, when we’re done, can you come down to the clinic with me. I want to weigh you. I need to know how much you did lose because us over medicating you could have had something to do with what cured you.”

This shocked Joe. “You mean the antiserum we found didn’t do it?”

Dean closed the folder. “Not alone it didn’t. It ended up being a combination of occurrences that caused Robbie’s getting well. But I gave a dose of one of our agents according to what Ellen had here. Obviously I gave a bigger dose. I have to recalculate, in connection to his weight now, what the dose I actually gave him was. It probably won’t make a difference, but it never hurts to be sure.”

Frank laughed in a ridicule way. “You know, Dean, for a big shot little scientist, you sure are stupid. How could you not know he didn’t weight two hundred pounds?”

“And you would?” Dean asked back.

“Fuck yeah. I can tell you exactly what he weighs.”

“Right Frank.”

“I’m telling you.” Frank stood up. “Robbie, stand up for a second.” He waited until Robbie did. Frank ran his hand over Robbie’s back, across his arms then he lifted him briefly. “Thanks.” Frank clapped his hands and sat back down. “One seventy-two.”

Dean snickered at him. “Just like that. So accurate. You’re gonna tell me not only are you He-man, Superman, but now your Scaleman as well.”

“One seventy-two.”

“On the nose?” Dean edged on.

“Exactly.”

“Right.” Dean spoke sarcastically.

“Bet me.”

“That he’s exactly one seventy-two?”

“Yep,” Frank nodded.

“I’ll bet you. What do you want to bet?”

Frank thought about. “O.K., no matter what time, day or night, no matter what the other one is doing, they have to change Brian’s diaper when it’s needed.”

“So what you’re saying is if I win and at ten o’clock at night, I can come down to the social with Brian, when I have him, and make you change him?”

“Yep,” Frank nodded, “and I get to do the same. The winner gets to interrupt the loser for one week no matter what they’re doing and the loser has to stop.”

“What if the loser is having sex?” Dean asked.

“Yep. So when I come knocking on that bathroom door of yours, Dean, the fantasy must stop for diaper duty.”

Dean grumbled some. “You’re on.” He stood up too. “Come on, Robbie. Ellen has a scale back here in the examining room.” Dean walked to the door behind Joe’s desk, not paying any attention to the fact that Joe had tossed his pencil in the air in meeting time defeat. “In here.” He opened the door.

Robbie followed Dean in. “Dean, you’re gonna lose.”

Joe leaned further back in his chair. He stared at Henry when Robbie, Dean, and Frank disappeared into the other room. “Why do I even bother, Henry? You and I will have our meeting as soon as I get rid of these three.” He jolted forward when he heard Dean whined loudly, then Frank laugh after. “Dean lost.”

Dean stomped from the back examining room. “Shut up, Frank.”

“Day and night. Ha!” Frank plopped in his chair next to Dean.

Sulking, Dean leaned. “How did you that? How did you guess his weight so exactly.”

“Easy.” Frank told him. “I weighed him in here about two hours ago. I saw him and I said, ‘man Robbie are you skinny,’ so we weighed him.”

“You what!” Dean sat up. “What the hell was all that dramatic feeling him and picking him up?”

Frank shrugged. “I don’t know. You bought it though, didn’t you?”

“You cheated Frank,” Dean pointed. “All bets are off.”

“Shut the fuck up, Dean. They are not. You did not make it contingent on whether I had weighed him already or not. Too bad . . . “He saw Dean’s mouth open. “Shut up . . . you lose.” He stopped Dean again. “Baby.”

Like a tattle tale, Dean turned to Joe. “Joe!”

“Dean. Enough.” Joe picked up his notes. “Now we’ll start, get you three out of here and then Henry and I can have a real meeting. First.” He cleared his throat shutting up Dean or Frank before anymore can be said. “Dean, I need you to meet with Jason and me at the clinic tomorrow morning for that little experiment you agreed to participate in.” He held up his hand. “Before you say anything, Frank is doing it after my meeting with Henry.” He shifted to the next item. “Virus update, Dean. What do you have on it?”

“We’re getting close. We think that we can, without a doubt, cure the original strain of the virus.”

Joe nodded but hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. “So you beat it?”

“No, not at all. The original strain we beat . . .” Dean saw he was losing them. “All right. We have witnessed three forms of the virus. There is the one we brought back from the future trip, the one which infected Robbie’s men, and then the host virus. The original virus.”

“Which you’ve seen when?” Joe asked. “When did you see the host virus?”

“When we gave Robbie the antiserum.”

Joe’s eyes widened. “So it wasn’t an antiserum? It was actually the virus. Was this a set up?”

“No.” Dean shook his head. “It was definitely an antiserum. The only thing, it just didn’t work on those already infected. George, for some reason wanted it to work on Robbie but it wouldn’t have. See, an antiserum, a good one, is done by injecting a small amount of the original strain or host virus into the person to build up immunities. When we injected Robbie with the antiserum it had a negative effect. Instead of curing him, it actually gave him the host virus. The host virus therefore took over the virus in Robbie’s blood. And by a shot in the dark, one of our agents, combined with other little things, kicked its ass.”

Joe looked pleased. “So we’re out of the woods here?” He smiled. “When they release the virus on us, we’ll beat it with the combination and that agent of yours.”

“No.” Dean hated to tell him. “Unless they inject each and every one with the host virus, it will mutate and we won’t get it.”

“But you’ll be able to cure those who have the host virus?” Joe asked. “To infect us they have to drop it on us, right?”

“Right,” Dean said. “But those who catch it, say second wave, we will not be able to cure. So in an essence, we’re still at a loss unless we get the host virus. Then what we would do is inject those second or third wave people with it and repeat the process that happened to Robbie. Which brings us to another problem.”

Hating to hear, Joe tortured himself. “What problem is that?”

“As I said before, the symptoms are as deadly as the virus. We still stand a lot of risk losing lives to the symptoms. But I guarantee we save a lot more lives than we lost in that future I went into.”

Robbie raised his hand in question, “What if they don’t drop it on us, what then? What if they send a few infected people in here. Those people wouldn’t have the original strain would they? If that was the case, no one would be cured.”

Dean shook his head in disagreement. “I’m going to say no on a couple points, Robbie. One, George would have to send at least twenty people in here with it. It’s not airborne. They’d come down with it while in containment. How many people would they physically come in contact with? Ellen? She’s not a carrier. You? You no longer are a carrier. And as far as Joe and Jason go or Dan, how much physical contact will they have with these survivors? Not much. George knows this. He knows it won’t get out of hand that way.”

Frank decided to go further on Robbie’s question. “What about if he injected these people with the original strain?”

“Then we’d have a bunch of the host in which we could use to infect others in order to cure them. But . . . it won’t happen. When you directly inject someone with the host sample of the virus, they almost immediately become ill, therefore doing away with any incubation period. If George say . . air drops it in, we will immediately have everyone infected, which won’t be so bad because we can beat it. Ellen and I are gonna start producing our agent for the masses. However, like I said before, we don’t know how he’s gonna do it, if he does it. And then there’s our worst case scenario. Everyone comes down with it all at once and they don’t have the original strain, which is nearly impossible. Because the only way everyone is going to come down with it at the same time, is if they are all exposed to the same source, a source with the original strain.”

Joe understood. “But if that happens, the masses would fall ill after the source with the original strain and by that point, you would know who had the original strain and you would be able to use their blood?”

Dean nodded. “Yes as part of our cure. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Joe. I know all of this sounds good, like we have beaten this but there’s something I can’t beat. That is the symptoms. Only the person infected can do that. Example, Robbie . . .” Dean pointed to him. “Look at the toll the virus took on him.”

Robbie ran his hand down his own chest. “I’m still the best looking man in Beginnings.”

Frank rolled his eyes. “And the skinniest man now too.”

Dean reached down to his pile of folders. “There is something I’d like to say.” He grabbed one and set it on Joe’s desk. “This goes no further than this room. It can’t. The only reason I’m letting Ellen know this is because she helped figure it out. But for security, Andrea, Jason, Johnny, no one is to know we’ve beaten the original strain. As far as Ellen and I mass producing agent 17, we’re doing that in the cryo-lab after hours. We have to. As much as I trust Andrea and Johnny and Jason, I can’t take a chance, even minor, that it gets to John Matoose. If John Matoose leaks to George that we’ve beaten the original strain, he may change the virus or just as easy hit us with a second wave. We don’t want that. We need him to hit us with the original strain or have someone among us with it so we can use their blood.”

Though Joe understood, he still saw problems, security leaks or not. “But he still could hit us with the second strain whether he knows about the cure or not and then we’re screwed.”

“Not entirely.” Dean opened the folder. “As long as George is clueless, then we still have our, ‘fingers crossed’ ace in the hole host.” He saw their lost looks. “In the future we brought back samples. In the future there were three forms of the virus. The ones who came down with it first. The ones that come down with it second and . . . the original host. We confirmed that sample with the antiserum. The original host was in the Beginnings future.”

Amongst the ruffling chairs, Joe spoke up. “You know which people infect us? You know the carriers?”

“Carrier,” Dean spoke. “This person did not start the plague. They were the only one with the host virus. This person came down with it in the middle.”

This confused Joe even more. “How can be, Dean? How can one person come down with the original strain in the middle of a plague? That would be nearly impossible . . . unless.” Joe let out a breath and sat back. “They were injected with it.”

Dean raised his eyebrows. “That’s what we think. That’s the only way it could have happened. So, we let George think we have no cure. His person injects this person. When they get sick, we have our host to cure the others in Beginnings.”

“Who?” Joe asked. “Who is it?”

Dean pushed him the folder. “Jenny Matoose. I think she finds out about John and he hits her with it. Which means he’s gonna have the original strain on him. If we can possibly divert him from hitting her with it, then we can find it on him. Keeping Ellen on Jenny is good. The closer Ellen is to the situation, the more we can monitor what Jenny finds out,. They talk. I didn’t think it was possible, but this wedding thing is making them act like friends. With Ellen right there, we’re one step ahead than we were in the future. We watch and see what happens with Jenny. She can be the key, if the future holds true, to beating this thing if they don’t hit us with the original strain.”

Joe brought the folder closer, peering down to it as he spoke. “So behind the scenes, you guys have the original strain beat. To everyone outside this room, you are working on a cure, which you still will,” Joe instructed. “And we watch Jenny, because obviously she finds something out that causes her death. But she won’t die in this history, will she Dean?”