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Back Doctors and Friends
Chapters (42)
  1. Cover
  2. TITLES BY KIMMERY MARTIN
  3. NOTE TO THE READER:
  4. Dedication
  5. Epigraph
  6. CHARACTER SPECIALTIES
  7. PART ONE
  8. 1
  9. 2
  10. PART TWO
  11. 3
  12. 4
  13. 5
  14. 6
  15. 7
  16. 8
  17. 9
  18. 10
  19. PART THREE
  20. 11
  21. 12
  22. 13
  23. 14
  24. 15
  25. 16
  26. 17
  27. 18
  28. 19
  29. 20
  30. 21
  31. PART FOUR
  32. 22
  33. 23
  34. 24
  35. Epilogue
  36. AUTHOR’S NOTE
  37. BIBLIOGRAPHY
  38. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  39. Readers Guide
  40. DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
  41. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  42. What’s next onyour reading list?

Murmurs of appreciation from the crowd. The vast majority of humanity reacted to the artiovirus vaccine with the kind of full-blown joy that greeted the development of the polio vaccine in the 1950s. Even people inherently suspicious of vaccines tended to get on board once they saw AAROD threatening their children.

“Until ART, we’d forgotten how lucky we were not to be at the mercy of killer contagions to the same degree as our predecessors,” I say. “We took vaccines for granted, or we refused them. Want to know the name of the human being who is often credited with saving more lives from disease than anyone else in recorded history? It’s Edward Jenner, the eighteenth-century physician whose work led to the development of the vaccine that ended smallpox. But even before Jenner, people in Turkey and China and Africa were utilizing inoculation against viral threats. The artiovirus isn’t the last time humanity will face such a threat; it will happen again. And again. And each time, thanks to people like you, we will be a little more prepared.”

Time to bring this home. “We need your help tonight,” I tell the crowd. “Right now, as we speak, there are groups of scientists working around the clock to find a cure for AAROD. Immunomodulators, capsid stabilizers, monoclonal antibodies, gene silencing, infusion of stem cells—all of these are in trials now, and we need your help. All of us in this room are fortunate in more ways than one—we are alive, with our cognition intact—and we have financial resources.”

I wait a beat, locking eyes with Hannah in the front row. A film of tears coats her eyes and her hair has unraveled from its knot and the skin on her neck is a patchwork of mottled red and white, but she’s beautiful. I think of her with a baby on each hip, and then I think of Georgia.

Her ferocious intellect. Her perverse sense of humor. Her notorious disregard for current fashion. She exhibits—exhibited—a disregard for several other things as well, most notably the opinions of others. Opinions, being inherently subjective, didn’t interest her. She considered spending unnecessary money to be stupid, politics to be dominated by vile halfwits, and most social niceties to be an impediment to progress. She did appreciate culture, though: she would laugh uncontrollably at old reruns of Saturday Night Live, her head thrown back and all her fillings showing, until you’d find yourself laughing uncontrollably too. Georgia’s laugh, more than anything else, defined her.

“We have to help bring back the ones we love,” I say, and I step off the stage.

24

There’s Always Another Crash Waiting in the Wings

KIRA

ATLANTA, GEORGIA

Eighteen Months After Patient Zero