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chastised himself for even thinking it. “What happened when Dr. Daniels came down?”
    “Civilian flights were hard to come by, so it took two days for him to get down to Atlanta. Looking back on it now, I should have known something was happening, but I focused completely on the lesions and didn’t pay attention to what was going on around me. Reports started trickling in from other cities, rumors started spreading among the staff of the CDC, news reports seemed to grow more violent. Something was happening, and no one was quite sure what.
    “I distinctly remember seeing a report of a mob attacking and killing a family with their bare hands. Ripping away limbs and tearing them open with their teeth… the report went into detail about it. Someone had taken a video on a cell phone. A family sat in a minivan at a checkpoint. It wasn’t as common as now, but checkpoints had been set up on all interstates, and if you were going to travel from one state to another, you had to verify the identity of everyone in that vehicle and submit to a search. A line had formed at this checkpoint in… I think it was Kansas City, and this crowd of people stormed the minivan. They came from the fields, their clothes in tatters, some of them nude. The driver’s side window was open, and one of the mob reached in and pulled out the driver, the father. Several of the mob ripped open his belly and eviscerated him while the others tried to get into the van. I remember thinking that the doors were probably unlocked, and why weren’t they just trying to open the doors? But that didn’t even seem to occur to the mob. They just smashed the windows, and several got into the van. You couldn’t see what happened to the family because… because blood coated the windows from the inside.”
    Mitchell knew the scene well. He’d seen a thousand just like it. “And you didn’t investigate an attack like that further? The CDC didn’t look into it at all?”
    “How could we? Smallpox is the deadliest virus in human history, and this particular strain is the most adaptive and unusual we’ve ever seen. We felt — I felt—that our only mission was to develop a vaccine. The world could go to hell around us, we could always rebuild, but someone had to be around to do the rebuilding. And I felt developing a vaccine was the way to do that.”
    Samantha folded her arms and looked down at the table. “When Luther arrived, he excised portions of Eric and Ryan’s brains and ran tests for almost a week. That week was… unusual. I’d go home every night and come to work the next day just like every other day, but something was different, almost like the air had changed. The days got darker… something.
    “The reports kept coming in , mobs of people killing anyone they could find. It wasn’t entirely unexpected. Whenever law enforcement breaks down, you can expect most men to satisfy their more wicked urges. Say what you will about Freud, he predicted that, at least. When a society loses the protections of law, like in Iraq after the American invasion when we dismantled the police and military, there’s still an order behind the chaos. In Iraq, people were trying to get as much material gain as they could. If that meant killing people, they did it, but it was never purposeless. Even when it seemed like it was, we found out that the killing occurred because of feuds between tribes that went back centuries. The killing had an explanation, but the killings taking place here, they had no explanations, no reason behind them.”
    She paused, unfolding her arms and putting her hands in her lap. Mitchell glanced down at the digital recorder to ensure it was still on.
    “ I was driving to work one morning, and there was a jogger by my house,” she said. “I don’t know what possessed this woman to go out jogging during martial law, but she did. Maybe she thought that little bit of normality would help get her through the rest of the insanity during the day.