Her parent’s kitchen dated back to when the house was built in the 1950s. It was neat and clean, just old fashioned, with thick chunky pine wooden doors and shelves.
Why change it if it works? her father always stated. His motto.
Her mother wouldn’t dream of letting her prepare her own breakfast. It was a different story before she retired. Her mother spent every waking hour at the university. She was trying to make up for it now.
After finishing the dishes, she dried her hands and wandered over to the cooker.
“Omelett?”
“Please.”
There was already a glass of orange juice ready for her. Melanie grabbed the Daily Mail that was resting on the other side of the table.
“He’s already downstairs I take it?”
“He’s an eager beaver, you know him. Why sleep when he could be tinkering down in his dungeon.”
His project was ongoing. So far, Edward had spent every free minute, over the last ten years, since he retired down in the basement.
Melanie couldn’t remember ever spending more than a few hours a month with her father, and that was only because her mother would sometimes make him come upstairs for his meals. As well as a dentist he considered himself a bit of a chemist.
Margery cracked two eggs into a bowl and started whisking with a fork. She added a pinch of salt, pepper, and a sprinkle of fresh herbs she had just cut up, then dropped a knob of butter into the hot frying pan.
In the background, an old radio played Elvis Presley’s Blue Christmas.
“Is that new?” Melanie asked, nodding to a flower in the windowsill that was surrounded by loose baubles.
“Yes dear, it’s a Medinilla Magnifica from the Philippines,” her mother replied as she poured the eggs into the spitting pan.
The plant had large waxy green leaves, and pink flower heads that drooped, which had hundreds of small pods dangling out of them, like bright pink chandeliers.
“It’s very difficult to grow. It takes a whole year just to cultivate from a cutting.”
The whole house was inundated with flowers. They filled the corners, shelves, sideboards, and hung from hooks, and rested on the work surfaces – and on every space that was big enough to hold a plant.
There was also the conservatory, which unlike normal people’s homes that had seats inside, theirs was filled to capacity with tropical plants. It was even rigged to spray mist twice a day. As a child, Melanie would sit on the small patch of stone tiled floor with an umbrella and pretend she was in a tropical rain forest.
Also, because it was Christmas, the whole house looked even busier, because there was green tinsel everywhere, as if the flowers had started to secrete weird shiny creeping vines.
The front and back gardens were bursting with plants, trees, and bushes. Since her retirement, her mother had won five garden in bloom competitions for the area of Exeter five years in a row, and had even won the national prize once.
The back garden also had two long polythene tunnels where she grew all the organic vegetables they needed. Any spare was sold to a local green grocer who sold them on his stall down in the market.
Her mother didn’t just have green fingers, as the saying goes, her whole body was green.
As she flicked the omelett with one hand, the other held a small water spray bottle, which she was using to spray the Marjoram, Tarragon, Garlic and Sage, that were in pots in a line on the fridge.
Even the kitchen had light green tiles and wallpaper covered in large green leaf motifs.
Her mother plated the omelett and placed it in front of Melanie, onto the white and green squared tablecloth.
“Thank you.” She tucked in.
Margery poured Melanie some coffee from the percolator pot, and returned to the sink to dry the dishes. She never sat down and ate breakfast with her daughter; she was just too busy.
The omelett was perfect, light and fluffy and was just right to start the day.
“What are you working on at the moment?” her mother asked while drying a plate.
Exeter University is one of the leading research facilities in England. The research department had an annual budget of almost fifty million pounds. The funds came from the government and large international companies.
The research was broken down into different groups: Behaviour, Ecology and Conservation, Evolution, Cellular and Chemical Biology, Environmental Biology, Microbes and Disease, Biodiversity and Renewable Energy, Earth System Science Group, and Wildlife Research Co-Operative.
The Microbes and Disease research focused mainly on infectious diseases and their interactions between microbes and their hosts. They studied bacteria, fungi and fungi-like organisms, and algae. Including pathogens that infect humans and diseases that infect crop plants and livestock. They also specialize in abiotic stresses in plants, focusing on the responses to infections and host-pathogen interactions. This is broken down into four groups, plant pathogens, genomics, molecular signalling, and vaccine development. They were also using next generation sequencing to understand the dynamics of the pathogens, and creating mathematical models of antibiotic utilisation.
This was Melanie’s specialties, and because of her ground-breaking sequencing theories, she was quickly snapped up by the university.
She was also an expert in cellular and chemical biology, which overlapped with her microbe and disease research. She looked into how the properties of living cells emerged from interactions of their constituent molecules. She utilised microscopy, biochemistry, crystallography, molecular genetics, and mathematical modelling to investigate key cellular processes, including cell-cycle, organelle motility, and metabolism.
So far, Melanie made fundamental breakthroughs with live-cell imaging and the discovery of new enzymes for biotechnology and molecular diagnostics.
Because of her the funding was pouring in.
“At the moment I’m helping out the Evolution Department from our Cornwall Campus; they need a hand sequencing a host-parasite coevolution, and how this parasite’s genes enable it to mimic its host genetic patterns,” she said as she lifted another piece of omelett to her mouth.
Her mother nodded. She was probably one of the only people she knew outside of work that understood what she was talking about.
Margery didn’t bother questioning why she was going in on Saturday. When she worked in the university, it wasn’t unusual for her to work seven days a week.
“I’m not sure what time I will be home; I have some Petri dishes I have to monitor real time. I need to check in hourly on the culture cells.”
Melanie finished up her omelett and downed the last of the orange and coffee.
“Have a good day darling.”
“Say hi to dad for me.”
“I will.”
3
Melanie left the house just after 7 AM. She climbed into her Smart car and headed down Pinhoe Road onto Blackbay Road, towards the roundabout.
There were several routes she could take to work, but she preferred the one heading along the B3183. It was a little longer, but fewer chances of congestion.
She drove down Longbrook Street, past all the tall red-brick houses on either side.
Christmas decorations hung from buildings and people’s homes, and across streets. You had a few crazy people who made a competition out of it, where almost every conceivable surface of their house and garden was covered in gaudy plastic, and flashing lights.
It was Saturday, so there were no parents dropping their kids off at school. And due to it being so early, it wasn’t too busy.
There were a few shop assistants carrying signs out to place on the pavement. Some joggers wearing earphones. A cyclist on an expensive looking bike, who was wearing tight-fitting Lycra clothes, and a funny pointy helmet.
Melanie parked outside The Upper-Crust cake shop and darted inside. It was her turn to bring the doughnuts in today.
Two sisters owned and run the shop. They were a little quirky, but Melanie liked their happy,
contagious demeanor.
After a five-minute talk, and taking way too long to put twelve assorted doughnuts into a box, she returned to her Smart car and placed the box in the small boot.
The traffic was still light as she pulled out onto the Prince of Wales Road. The sprawling university came into view.
There are three different sites to the University, there was the Tremough campus, in Cornwall, that Melanie was liaisoning with for her latest assignment, which covered seventy acres of land. Also St Luke’s, which was just over a mile away from the main campus, which covered sixteen acres. She worked at Streatham, the main three hundred and fifty acres campus.
There were just over thirteen hundred academic staff, two thousand admin staff, and eighteen thousand students.
Her science department was one of seventy research centres inside the university grounds.
Melanie drove through the main entrance.
To one side was the universities emblem on a large sign, with the motto Lucem Sequimur written beneath – We Follow the Light.
She drove slowly through the university grounds, past a wide range of different looking structures. Some squat, others towering high above. There were old-fashioned red-brick towers, with walls full of arched windows, others with modern squared windows set in a lighter red brick. Some looked straight out of a Harry Potter movie; others looked like normal office blocks. All of it was set in acres of manicured lawns, with pruned bushes and towering trees, and sweeping winter flower gardens. Intertwined among it all was miles of footpaths and pavements, car parks and hundreds of signs.
Even on a Saturday morning the campus was already bustling with activity.
Melanie drove into her departments car park. Opposite was the sports facilities, and the Great Hall, which was used as a gym.
She removed the box of doughnuts from the boot, and grabbed her bag.
The entrance to her department was through a large glass set of doors. Inside was four lifts, each one went to a different level of the five-story building. She never understood why each level required its own lift?
Contamination protocol possibly? she reasoned. Each level dealt in all kinds of viruses and pathogens.
Melanie stepped into the lift to the Microbes and Disease Department on level three. She needed to punch a code into a keypad before the lift activated. It only went to level three, so there was no button to push. The lift ascended.
4
The lift door swished open.
“Do you want me to take that?” Jeffery Grant asked, as he was walking past.
Jeffery was a tall lanky nineteen year old, who wore clothes that would suit an old man. Today he was sporting a pair of brown corduroy trousers with a button-down dark-green shirt, with a brown stripy cardigan under his open lab coat. His shoes were old-fashioned brown leather country brogues lace ups.
The top two percent of the university’s students were given the opportunity to work in the different research departments for extra credit, and help with their fees.
Jeff was Melanie’s lab assistant. He was on his second year of undergraduate studies in Biological and Medicinal Chemistry. Jeff had been working with her for five months.
“Thanks Jeff.” Melanie gave him the box.
“I sanitized and prepared the Petri dishes last night by placing them in an autoclave at one hundred and sixty degrees celsius for one hour. I then prepared the dishes with batch C of the nutrient solution. It’s now solidified and ready for inoculation.”
They walked down the stark white corridor towards Melanie’s laboratory.
“Thank you Jeff. I don’t know what I would do without you.” They pushed through into the lab. “I think the first plating will be with samples eleven through to thirty-one.”
“No problem. I will get right on it.” He dropped the file he was carrying onto a long work surface.
“I will just drop these over to the canteen.” He vanished back out the door.
Melanie walked into her small office and dropped her bag on her Spartan table. There were a few yellow post-it notes stuck around her monitor. Jeff was also her unofficial receptionist when she wasn’t around.
She scanned through them. There was a call from Doctor Barineau from the French Ecole Normale Supérieure University, wanting to know if she could critique his latest sequencing model paper? Also one from Professor Kamp from Yale University in America, asking if she would be available for a four hour lecture in February? She would call them both back later after she checked her schedule.
None were urgent.
The only concession to the fact it was Christmas in her whole department was a small, cheap and tacky foot high Christmas tree on the corner of her desk, which Jeff had brought in.
As her computer was booting up, she wandered over and removed her long lab coat off the freestanding old-fashioned coat stand by the door.
She sat down as she was popping the last few buttons closed.
There were a few emails from her colleagues from around the world. A couple from other doctors from the university, and one from Professor Tang who was wondering if she could spare forty minutes to give a lecture next week for his students. The rest was junk mail. She highlighted the ones she wanted to respond to later, and put her computer on standby.
Jeff had returned and was stood next to the centrifuge machine, removing small vials; each glass tube had a number on top. He wore blue powder free rubber gloves and a cone mask with an eye shield in case of viral or bacterial contamination.
Melanie pulled some gloves on from a box, and removed her mask from a hook next to the equipment.
“Right then,” she said, which came out slightly muffled, “let’s see if we can pinpoint those particular parasitic genes, shall we?”
5
The first Melanie heard about the outbreak was from Doctor Sandoval, who sent her an email about it.
Melanie sat down at 11:18 PM to close her computer down for the night and head home.
She decided to double-check that Doctor Wies, from the Tremough campus, had received her email with attached files on today’s discoveries.
Doctor Sandoval was head of the Microbes and Disease department, and he was forever sending her links to outbreaks and viruses that were happening in third-world countries or little-known regions around the world. He would contact research groups or local scientist in those areas to try to get a sample sent to his department. In some rare cases, he even sent someone over to collect samples.
Melanie read the report twice to check she read it right, due to being so tired. She then clicked on a link to watch a CNN news report.
“A group of nine loggers were airlifted out of a work site next to the Nosivolo River in Marolambo, Madagascar, and taken to Cape Town, South Africa, after apparently suffering from some unknown malady.
“Reports are sketchy at the moment, but what is known is within eight hours of the helicopter leaving for the Mananjary Airport, eighty-one miles away, the Madagascan government declared Marolambo, in the Atsinanana Region, in the Province of Tamatave, a quarantined area. All twenty-six thousand residents are said to be under house arrest.
“Also, the city of Mananjary, Fianarantsoa, where the plane took off from, has also been quarantined, with an estimated twenty-eight thousand civilians under house arrest.
“As the news comes in, we will update you.”
She knew all about viruses and their Basic Reproductive Rate. This one was spreading fast.
Melanie decided to keep an eye on the outbreak and check back in with Google first thing in the morning.
She shut down her computer and turned the lights off to her office. The building was quiet, with just the sound of large refrigeration units humming in the background.
As she was driving home, she received a phone call from Doctor Sandoval.
6
“Hi Doctor Lazaro, I’m sorry if I woke you?”
Melanie pulled over to the side of the road.
“I have just l
eft the university. I’m on my way home,” she said confused. The head of the department had never rung her private number before, whenever he needed her, he sent an email or wandered down the corridor to chat.
“I need your help with something. It’s a little unusual and requires complete secrecy on your part.” He let his words sink in.
“I’m listening.” She was intrigued.
“As you know, a lot of our budget comes from the government. What most don’t realize is that it comes from the MOD.” The words hung in the air. “That’s the Ministry of Defense,” he clarified, in case she didn’t know what the acronym stood for.
No surprise there, she thought. Everyone knew it, just no one talked about it.
“I have just received a phone call from a Brigadier General William Hay. He told me he would send some representatives to the department tomorrow, and he wants you to liaise with them.”
Melanie just held onto the phone.
Why me? she was thinking.
“Doctor Lazaro... Melanie?”
“I’m here, sorry Doctor Sandoval; I’m just a little shocked.” She was confused as to why they would ask for her personally. She knew she was the university’s golden child, but there were other doctors and professors from the university with decades more experience than her.
“Do you know what it’s about?” The inside of the car was steaming up. She was breathing hard.
“Apparently it something to do with the new outbreak in Madagascar. The General is sending two of his top scientists to speak with you about it.” The line went silent for a minute.
“Are you still there Doctor Lazaro?”
“Yes, yes of course. Sorry, it’s been a long day.” She hit a button to wind down the window to help demist the windscreen.
Flashing Christmas lights, in the distance, were just a blur.
“What time will they arrive?”
“I was told they had left and will be there waiting for you first thing in the morning.”
The Sixth Extinction & The First Three Weeks & The Squads First Three Weeks Omnibus [Books 1-10] Page 42
