The only thing they’d been concerned about was sealing off the hospital and keeping everyone affected inside. It was like they heard the word anthrax and their minds went blank. All they could think of was their jobs. The city had seen outbreaks before, and it had cost a lot of officers their positions. If there was one thing the top brass was good at protecting, it was their own skins.

The chopper touched down on the rooftop helipad and Sofia leapt out. She kept her head low and ran to the door, where two soldiers let her pass.

Once inside, she made her way to the ground floor of the hospital.

“Olga,” she cried when she saw her.

Olga was standing by the window, looking out at the situation.

“Sofia, where have you been?”

“The military is staging this operation from Novouralsk.”

Olga grabbed her by the shoulders and pressed her tightly against her chest, as if afraid she would disappear again.

“I was so worried,” she said.

Sofia looked out the window. “What’s the situation?”

“Apart from the army surrounding us?”

“How fast are new cases coming in?”

“They’ve slowed,” Olga said, “but they won’t stop for days. You know that.”

Sofia nodded. The fact they’d slowed was something. “They must have figured out the source of the leak,” she said.

Olga looked at her cautiously. The two had never talked openly about what it was Sofia actually did inside the military compound.

“Let’s hope so,” Olga said.

Sofia nodded. Outside the window, they could see soldiers running everywhere.

“If they’ve stemmed the leak,” Olga said, “why are they still here? It looks to me like they think they have an outbreak on their hands.”

“They don’t know their asses from their elbows,” Sofia said. “They’re following orders, and right now, their orders are to keep us contained.”

“They’re creating a pressure cooker,” Olga said.

Sofia nodded. For now, it seemed the people inside the hospital were willing to allow a quarantine. They understood the need for precautions. But tensions were high. Ambulances were still bringing in new patients. The hospital was getting more and more crowded. One wrong move, one trigger-happy recruit, and things would get ugly real fast.

And as Sofia looked out the window, she saw that the military was doing nothing to calm the situation. Men were in the process of setting up machine gun posts on steel platforms right outside the fence. The guns all pointed inward.

It was already starting to make people nervous. There were groups forming in the parking lot, men standing around smoking cigarettes, eyeing the soldiers.