Lost Immunity by Daniel Kalla (free reads TXT) 📕

skepticism, ignorance, and bias out there. And now I’ve inadvertently played right into the hands of the anti-vaxxers.”

“Lisa…”

“It’s true. Earlier, I heard one on the radio who cited Neissovax as the ultimate cautionary tale for all vaccines. And he was damn persuasive, too.”

“It’s all raw right now. It just seems worse than it is.”

“I’m being realistic, Nathan. Not since Andrew Wakefield published that damn fraudulent, debunked study that linked autism to the MMR vaccine has anyone breathed as much life into the anti-vax cause.”

This time, Nathan reaches for her. “None of this is your fault.”

She stares at him. “I wish you didn’t have to leave tomorrow.”

“It’s not tomorrow yet.”

Then her phone rings on the table, breaking the spell. She recognizes the number on the screen—which ends in four nines—as belonging to Darius’s roommate. She gently pulls her hand free of Nathan’s and grabs the phone. “I’m sorry, I need to get this,” she says as she rises.

She points to the bedroom, and he nods, so she steps inside the room and answers the call. “Dr. Lisa Dyer.”

“Hey, this is Jayden Rogers. You called?”

“Yes.” Lisa hurriedly explains who she is and her role in the outbreak management. “Jayden, were you the one who found Darius?”

“Yeah.” He goes quiet for a moment. “It was brutal.”

Lisa waits for him to elaborate.

“Darius, he was in bed,” Jayden says. “His face was just a mess. The sheets were soaked in this yellow gunk. And his eyes—they were like bulging out of his head.” His voice falters. “I mean he’s black and all, but his skin was like navy color.”

“Can’t imagine how traumatic that must have been.”

“Brutal,” he repeats.

“Did you know that Darius had been given the meningitis vaccine two days before?”

“Of course.”

“How?”

“We went together.”

“To the clinic? You were vaccinated, too?”

“Yup.”

Lisa looks over to Nathan, who eyes her quizzically. “How are you feeling?” she asks.

“Fine,” Jayden says.

“Why didn’t you report what happened on our public-health website?”

“I did.”

“After Darius died?”

“Yeah, like right away.”

She feels as if the ground is shifting beneath her feet. “You sure the report went through?”

“Positive.”

“You got an email confirmation?”

“I did,” he says. “And then I got another email a couple hours later.”

Lisa goes cold. “What did that one say?”

“Not much. Thanked me for the report. Said they looked into it and concluded that what happened to Darius wasn’t related to the vaccine. Something about it being too far delayed and not a typical allergy.”

Nathan’s face creases with concern. “What is it?” he mouths.

She breaks off the eye contact. The implications of Jayden’s words weigh in on her like a tunnel collapsing overhead. Someone must have hacked the website and deliberately suppressed the report of Darius’s death. How many other reports have been buried, too? And by whom?

Her mind spins, and she shoots Nathan another quick look. Was it you?

CHAPTER 48

“Is it something I did?” Nathan had sent Lisa the text after she made her abrupt departure the previous night, mumbling an excuse about a work emergency. She hasn’t responded to it or the three others he sent overnight—the last one, just after four a.m.

Who else, other than someone inside Delaware, would have such a vested interest in seeing adverse events wiped off the website? Lisa remembers how obsessed Nathan seemed with the site, and how often he asked about it. Was he in on it? Or Fiona? Or all of them at Delaware?

So, yes, Nathan. It might just be something you did.

Lisa checks her watch again. It’s almost 7:30 a.m., and still no call from her web designer. She turns her attention back to her long list of emails and forces herself to craft coherent replies. At times, the letters blur into one, and she can’t stop yawning.

Lisa barely remembers what a good sleep feels like. The previous night’s was the worst one yet. The sight of Dominic, waiting at home for her with an open bottle of red and two glasses, precipitated another torrent of guilt. If Jayden hadn’t called when he did, she probably would have ended up in Nathan’s bed. Instead, she wound up having sex with her husband again. But she couldn’t approach anything close to genuine arousal. Dominic picked up on her perfunctory effort. “I hope sex isn’t becoming just another chore in our relationship,” he griped as he turned off his bedside lamp, leaving Lisa in the dark to stew through a night of worries, doubts, and self-recrimination.

The phone vibrates on her desk. The long string of numbers without any dashes or intelligible area or country codes tells Lisa that it must be Austin, her webmaster, calling as usual on a voice-over-Internet-protocol line.

“Top of the morning to you, Dr. D,” he chirps in his weird vernacular that’s a hybrid of Gen-Z speak and something straight out of the fifties.

Austin is as close to a tech genius as Lisa has ever met, although technically she never has, since he lives in San Diego and they’ve only ever interacted via phone or electronically. She has no idea what he looks like, but she envisions him with a beard and a man-bun. This morning, she has no time for his chattiness. “What did you discover, Austin?”

“Some sophisticated prodding, Dr. D.”

“Prodding?” Lisa asks.

“Yep, I was up until the wee hours tracing backward,” Austin says. “Got to say, I admire the dude’s work. We installed a tight firewall. The full Chuck Norris. But the dude kept prodding and finally weaseled his way up our backside using multiple VPNs to access the database.”

Lisa understands enough of the description to appreciate the hacker hid his identity behind virtual private networks. “So you’re not going to be able track down an IP address for him or her?”

“Not a hope, Dr. D. The dude was bouncing from VPN to VPN, going full chameleon. Last IP address I could trace him to was somewhere in Latvia. But who the heck knows? Dude might be my downstairs neighbor.”

“Can you tell how many reports were removed from the database?”

“Nope. This wasn’t some bored fourteen-year-old chilling