Read Scourge - A Medical Thriller (The Plague Trilogy Book 3) for Free Online

what’dya say?’ he said in his New Jersey accent, something he’d gone as far as taking lessons to get rid of. ‘I haven’t spoken to you since Hawaii.’
    “ Luther had been one of the physicians I called for advice during the initial outbreak. Though he’s not a virologist, I felt he had a deep understanding of how the human brain and mind interacted and the consequences of certain infections on the psyche. That’s also part of any infection by a virus, the psychological effect. The research points to the fact that the attitude of a patient, particularly one suffering from a serious illness, plays a major role in their recovery… or their death. ‘It’s been hard to think about old friends lately,’ I said.
    “ I heard him exhale as though saddened. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘Lord, don’t I know. Have you read the Book of Revelation at all, Dr. Bower?’ He knew I wasn’t religious. What he was really saying was that I should read the Book of Revelation.
    “ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not recently, anyway. My mother was deeply religious, and I’m sure she made me read it at one point. Why?’
    “ ‘Because it contains everything you need to know about what’s going on. Every generation since John the Divine has believed their generation is the one, the one generation John was refer ring to when he spoke of the seas of blood and the rain of fire. Every generation thinks itself special, set apart from previous generations. The difference for us is, we’re it. This is Armageddon.”
    Samantha paused a moment. “You have to remember, this is before the world epidemic, before we labeled the four detonations the T-zero event, the moment when civilization was wiped out and started over. At that point when I was speaking with him, we had an epidemic on our hands, a bad one, but just an epidemic. I felt that we’d beaten smallpox before and could do it again, so all his mystical references didn’t resonate with me. I thought he was just being a Christian, which he was. ‘I need more than the scribbles of wandering tribes from thousands of years ago, Luther. Do you have access to a BS4 anymore?’
    “ ‘No,’ he said. ‘ USAMRIID revoked my top-secret clearance when I retired.’ I hesitated before asking him. Luther had been a brilliant physician and, though he didn’t receive credit, was on a team that had secured the Nobel Prize in medicine for their work using snake venom to combat brain tumors. But he had a wild side that, like his accent, he could never kick. I once heard he hired a stripper for one of his histology professors and had her perform a lap dance for him during the final exam. Medicine isn’t the kind of place where creativity and spontaneity are valued. It’s more like the military. He’d actually started work in the last place I could see him, the United States Army Medical Research Division, and as I could’ve predicted, he was forced to ‘retire’ within a year. It didn’t seem to faze him, and he just moved to Johns Hopkins. ‘I need you to come to Atlanta, then,’ I said. ‘You’ll have full access to the BS4. I’ll get you clearance. I need something analyzed.’
    “ ‘What?’ he said, the curiosity in his voice practically jumping out of the phone.
    “ ‘Lesions,’ I told him. ‘Lesions on the prefrontal cortex of patients affected by Variola , by Agent X, kinda dark, almost black lesions. They look like burn marks and appear to have damaged the brain tissue. I was attacked last night by two of my neighbors who had become infected. The father was shot and killed by police, and the son jumped out of his bedroom window, breaking his skull open and bleeding to death. We have them here for the autopsies, and their prefrontal lobes and a few other areas are covered in these lesions.’
    “ ‘Hm. Sounds mildly interesting. I don’t deal much with the infected. Do they all have the lesions?’ I shook my head even though I was on the phone and then felt silly. Putting my