Oh, the CDC swears they don’t track clean results, only the ones that come back positive for a live infection, but no one knows for sure. Legally, they’re not allowed to track clean results. It’s considered an invasion of privacy. If there’s nothing to indicate that a person is at risk of amplification, you can’t use their tests for anything. Not tracking, and not medical profiling—which is why we have that handy little ruling to depend on. See, the insurance companies would love an excuse to analyze the blood of every person in the country, looking for pre-existing conditions. Ironically, the insurance companies may have the sort of big pockets that can normally shove something like blood test tracking through, but the pharmaceutical companies makthem look like paupers, and the pharmaceutical companies didn’t want to lose their customer base because people couldn’t afford coverage anymore. That’s one more thing we can thank Garcia Pharmaceuticals for.

We left the motel at four-thirty in the morning. The sky was still pitch-black, and the streets were deserted. We planned to arrive at the CDC about fifteen minutes before the janitorial staff, stash the van in the maintenance parking lot, and enter through a side door while the grounds were still mostly deserted. It was a risky approach, but it was no worse than any of the other ideas we’d come up with, and it was way better than some of them. Maggie’s van was generic enough to be ignored, without crossing into the overly generic “plain white van with blacked-out window.” That sort of thing attracts attention by virtue of being designed to be ignored.

Kelly and I were the only ones awake in the van for the first hour of the drive. She sat next to me in the passenger seat—another risky approach, since her death was big news for weeks in the Memphis area. “Local hero doctor dies in the saddle” is the sort of headline that has legs. Newsies like stories like that; they can go back to that well again and again when things get slow, milking them until they go dry. At the same time, Kelly was the one who could steer me down the frontage roads and through the shortcuts only a local would know. The thing that made her a possible danger also made her a major asset.

Then again, hadn’t that been the case all along?

The sun was starting to burn a smoky line along the horizon when we hit the outskirts of Memphis. I clicked the radio on, cranking the volume as the scrambler grabbed the nearest station and blasted Old Republic through the van. “Classic rock!” I shouted to Kelly. I had to shout or she wouldn’t have been able to hear me. “That’s awesome! I hate this shit!”