Lost Immunity by Daniel Kalla (free reads TXT) 📕

green, but the marketing gurus insisted otherwise. “We got our marching orders, Fee. Neither of us likes them particularly. But our job is to ensure the rollout goes as smoothly as possible.”

“Yeah, that same argument worked wonders at the Nuremberg Trials.”

He can’t help but laugh. “Let’s get hammered on the flight home and forget it all for a few hours.”

“It’s a forty-minute flight to New York.” Fiona shows her first real smile of the afternoon. It’s slightly lopsided and brings out the luminescence in her gray eyes. As always, she wears minimal makeup, and her face is a bit long and narrow for his taste, but he still finds her attractive in a nineteenth-century, Russian-literary-heroine sort of way. He wonders if it’s her lingering sadness that’s so appealing.

“We’ll drink triples,” he says. “Then grab dinner in the city and finish the job.”

“Sure. Why not? I could use a good bender.”

There’s no ulterior motive behind his offer. Their friendship is comfortably platonic. Nathan has hardly dated since his divorce was finalized, six months earlier. The official end of his eighteen-year marriage hit him harder than he expected and slowed his post-separation tear of casual dating, and sex, to a trickle. Besides, he would never get physically involved with a colleague or coworker. He has always considered that to be the quickest form of career suicide. And aside from his two teenage sons, career means everything to him. The last woman he dated, albeit casually and briefly, once asked Nathan if he ever got lonely, and his candid answer surprised even him: “I’m way too busy to be lonely. Or at least to notice it.”

Regardless, Fiona isn’t accessible in the romantic sense. She hasn’t dated since she buried her husband over five years ago. It’s possible she has stayed celibate the whole time. Or maybe not. Fiona is as private a person as Nathan has ever met. Despite their closeness at work, he sometimes feels he doesn’t know her at all.

“Have you seen enough?” Nathan asks, handing the vial back to her.

Fiona carefully replaces it in the bin. “Here, yes. But I want at least a week of advanced reconnaissance in Reykjavík to ensure the storage and distribution facilities meet our standards.”

“Of course. But you should also take a few days to drive the Ring highway. My sons and I loved it when we visited a couple summers back. Spectacular cliffs and waterfalls. And you’ve got to check out the hot springs at Geysir. It’s where the word geyser literally comes from. To quote Ethan: ‘Geysir blows Old Faithful out of the water!’ ”

“Oh, Ethan.” She chuckles. “Good thing he got his mom’s sense of humor.”

“Thanks.”

Nathan’s phone rings, and he digs it out of his jacket pocket.

“Mr. Hull?” the woman calling says. “I’m Dr. Lisa Dyer with Seattle Public Health.”

“Dr. Dyer, you just caught me on a site tour. I’ll be back in the office tomorrow—”

“Your assistant told me. And I’m sorry to disturb you this way, but we’re dealing with a time-sensitive matter here.”

“In Seattle?”

“Yes,” she says. “There’s been an outbreak of meningitis. Four kids have died.”

Nathan taps the phone’s speaker icon so Fiona can listen in as Dr. Dyer fills them in on the meningococcal outbreak in the Pacific Northwest. The creases around Fiona’s eyes deepen with each sentence. And her head begins to shake as soon as the woman mentions Delaware’s upcoming Reykjavík vaccine trial.

“I empathize with your urgency,” Nathan says. “But this isn’t anything we can sort out over the phone.”

“Of course not. Maybe if I email you some of our preliminary findings, we could set up a videoconference with your team—”

“It’ll be easier if I just come see you, Dr. Dyer.”

“In Seattle? Aren’t you on the East Coast?”

Fiona taps her chest, indicating that she intends to accompany him.

“Yes,” he says. “Meet at your office tomorrow morning? Say nine?”

CHAPTER 6

“Do you want me to get out and push?” Lisa teases as the Jeep Cherokee crawls along the gravel driveway.

Tyra Osborne chuckles. “We should be all right. This puppy has four-wheel drive.”

It’s a running joke between them how much Lisa’s coworker obsesses over her new SUV. On the way south from downtown, Tyra drove the I-5 as aggressively as usual, weaving in and out of the carpool lane as if there were a race to get here. But once they turned off onto the gravel road leading to the main lodge at Camp Green, she slowed to the current snail’s pace to prevent any pebbles from dinging her car’s precious wheels or undercarriage.

“How did your HPV vaccine forum go?” Tyra asks.

“Feisty crowd,” Lisa says with a small shrug.

“Anti-vaxxers?”

“Mainly.” Lisa punches Tyra’s shoulder playfully. “Wish you could’ve been there with me.”

“Uh-uh. Oh, hell no. I would’ve absolutely lost it.”

Lisa knows that’s not true. Tyra is unflappable, and both Lisa and Seattle Public Health are lucky to have her as the program director, the nursing counterpart to Lisa’s medical role. The fortyish, stocky African American is motivated and efficient, but perhaps most vitally from Lisa’s perspective, Tyra is the consistent voice of reason and calm in the department. And she has helped Lisa avoid several missteps. But Tyra’s disdain for the anti-vax movement rivals or even surpasses Angela’s.

“There’s going to be a ton of pushback to the new mandatory HPV vaccination policy,” Lisa says.

“Even if those fools choose to ignore centuries of science, why can’t they use just a pinch of common sense?”

“The place anti-vaxxers come from… I’m not sure we’re even capable of seeing it the way they do.”

“The wrong way?” Tyra says as she parks her car a careful distance from an old pickup in front of the lodge.

“It’s like a faith for many of them.”

“I got nothing against anyone’s religion, just as long as their beliefs don’t hurt others,” Tyra says as she opens her door. “But in the case of anti-vaxxers, theirs really do.”

Stippled sunlight peeks through the dense tree towering above, and the fresh scent of cedar hangs thick in the air as