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done something to tell him she was there, even though she knew she had done nothing of the sort. Grace waved for her to enter the room.
    Blushing, Alice pushed into the room. She took a seat on the other side of Quigley, barely looking at Cale.
    “Ah, the young intern.” Cale smiled; Alice had helped prep him for the vaccine. “Promotions come quick in times of war, eh?” he asked, with no sarcasm.
    “Apparently,” Alice answered. “I’m sure you couldn’t have been more than a Private before.” Cale laughed at that. Alice smiled, then suppressed it, looking nervously at Grace.
    “You’re sharp. I can see why they promoted you. I finished basic years ago and did well enough to become a Corporal. I did a tour in the Middle East and got myself busted up well enough to be sent home.”
    “You look alright,” Grace observed.
    “Well that’s cause I had a damn good surgeon out there in the trenches. Took a bit of shrapnel to my stomach after a grenade blew out a truck, I carried most of my innards in my arms as I hobbled to the tent. You can bet your ass I figured I was dying that day.” Cale smiled widely. “Guess someone was looking out for me. I ended up at Culex with a nice cushy desk job that was converted to a Government civilian position after I was discharged. It was a good life, until this shit brain Seth Stolz shows up; a transfer from Haven.”
    There was an audible intake of breath from around the table. Haven was where it all started, or at least that was the patchy information that had been given out before the TVs stopped working. For Alice, Haven was home. As far as she knew she had lost her whole family when Haven dropped off the grid. Cale nodded at their looks.
    “Yeah. Now I know we wouldn’t have been any better off if he hadn’t shown up, still woulda caught it, but with him there it happened like that.” Cale snapped his fingers. “Within a few days half the base was down with it. This was before it was on every TV and newspaper. We didn’t know what we were into until the first one came out of their coma. Let me tell you, this wasn’t one of the guys who came out healthy. This guy came out hungry. He worked his way through two nurses and a doctor before we were able to put a bullet through his skull. When the Bill to Kill came out, we started putting a bullet in their heads as soon as they entered the coma. At least we did for those that were still brought in.”
    “This might have been better contained if people followed procedure when their loved ones became ill,” Quigley said. He shook his head. Alice was used to Quigley’s anger on this topic. She didn’t blame the families for refusing to sign their loved ones up for execution.
    “Kady didn’t help that,” Alice reminded him. They all knew who Kady was. The first documented child to wake from the coma without going hostile.
    “News of Kady spread and suddenly there was hope.” Cale shook his head, as if hope was where the whole world had gone wrong. He was mostly right. “People stopped bringing in their ill; even some hospitals stopped the killing until after they woke. Burned the bodies up afterward, which did the trick alright for keeping those zombies down.”
    “Hostiles,” Grace corrected him again. Alice knew it was only out of habit. It was becoming harder to think of the things outside as anything but zombies.
    “Hostiles or zombies, it’s all the same thing now,” Cale said. “Burn the bodies, spread the pathogen. Probably the best thing we did to help the virus was burn the bodies.”
    “We all know what was done wrong,” Grace bristled. It was hard for everyone to accept how wrong the government had been about the whole thing. “Tell us about the cure. What the hell is it?”
    “Not sure exactly,” Cale admitted. “We couldn’t pick up the whole broadcast. We never figured out where it was coming from. The transmission had degraded by the time it made its way to us. The techs were able to