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stove. He walked to the kitchen, leaving Emma in the living room.
    “Seriously, Andy, this is just the beginning.”
    Andy looked at her from the kitchen.
    “Just the beginning.”
    And it was. The beginning of a turn in their friendship and the beginning of a new life for Andy. He just didn’t know it yet.

FLASH FORWARD
     
Ground Zero – 3
December 23 rd
Hartworth, Montana
     
    Nature had frozen Vivian Morris, and she barely decomposed. She was one of three bodies Edward’s team had retrieved from the fire station. There was a whole town outside his lab, a whole town that was dead, and the three bodies were just the start. Before they did accountability, called for reserve units , and collected bodies, Edward had to find answers.
    Something vicious had wiped out the town of Hartworth.
    He believed it wouldn’t take long to find out what it was.
    But the temperatures were cold, and he had to wait until Vivian thawed some.
    He knew she had been dead only for a few days. The circumstance s of the town told him that, not the frozen body.
    While he waited on her to thaw, he learned who she was. She was wearing a paper wrist band, handmade and stapled together. It had her name and age. Someone took care to make sure that when the bodies were discovered, so were their identities.
    But Vivian’s purse was next to her; in it was her bi-fold. The thirty-seven-year-old woman appeared to have two children and a husband. There was a dated wallet-sized photo of her and her family.
    It wasn’t taken long ago. Her children were young.
    Edward thought of his own children, and sadness hit him. He had to dismiss it quickly, for the time being, anyway.
    Vivian was beautiful in the picture, nothing like the decimated corpse before him. She was, like the other bodies, black.
    It reminded him of pictures of Bog People he saw, completely black, mouths open, screaming in pain, frozen in the last moment of death.
    It appeared as if she were missing a lot of her skin, like a burn victim. But she wasn’t burnt. Her body was so dark it masked any hypostasis that could be present.
    As she became workable, he lifted her eyelids. The sclera and gums were black, as well; there was no pink on her body.
    Edward hated even the thought of cutting her open, but he had to.
    Taking a blood sample from her was difficult; he chalked it up to the blood still being cold. He was able to retrieve some, enough to view in a microscope, but it, like Vivian, was black.
    He began audibly speaking his autopsy. “Not much epithelia remains on the body …” He sliced into her forearm, lifting a section of skin. He choked on a gag when he lifted and everything underneath pulled like a gluey dark substance.
    But that wasn’t the worst. That was when Edward cut into her torso, needing only to make a single lateral incision across her abdomen to know he was dealing with something new.
    Edward had to stop, just for a little bit , a moment to catch his bearings after seeing her internal organs.
    It was frightening. In all his years, he had never encountered anything like it.
    Whatever struck Hartworth hit fast and to an unusual extent, so fast that they told no one and the town was wiped out.
    Someone in town knew what it was. Someone in town knew it was coming enough to set up an aid station.
    Time frame.
    It was December 23 rd . The last call out of the town was a single call placed on December 20 th . Before that, nothing for two days. Vivian more than likely died on December 21 st .
    Was the last call for help, to say good bye?
    With the lack of communication out of Hartworth between the 18 th and 20 th , that told Edward the town was sick and dying,
    Everything was normal, phone communications, bank transactions, all normal until the 18th.
    The first ones probably started getting sick on December 17 th .
    To set up an aid station took knowledge that it was coming and of an incubation period to perch a guard on every access road, a fast incubation.
    Why did they