What We Become | Book Two

28. Reverse

I made my way over to one of the workbenches where most of the scientists seemed to be huddled around. Mike stood in the centre of the semi-circle, a pair of green gloves covering his hands. A notebook was open on the desk in front of them, scribbled writing and scrawled drawings filling the pages.

"What's going on?" I questioned, making myself known.

Mike looked up from the book. "Oh, Ben. You're here."

"I thought I'd been summoned?"

"You were," he replied. "I just didn't think you'd show."

I pointed a finger to the notebook. "What's that?"

"Oh! Of course," he seemed flustered as he removed his gloves and dropped them into a yellow bin. He turned the book around to face me on the other side of the bench. "You see, this cure is seeming more complicated than we originally thought..."

"How so?" I asked as my brows pulled together. The pages in front of me seemed to make no more sense than to someone who was seeing it for the first time. "I thought my blood was all you needed."

"It was," he said. "We just can't figure out how to make it work."

The bright white light of the fluorescents bore down and hung on me like a spotlight.

"Smartest brains in the world and you lot can't figure out how to make it work when it's in front of you?"

He coughed. "It would seem so... Now, that book in front of you shows how your body reacted to the Infection."

"I documented it as best I could," Julia joined in. "The raised temperature, your pulse, everything like that."

I nodded as if I understood.

"We can't just put your blood into an Infected and expect the effects to reverse," Mike spoke again.

"Why not?"

"Because we've already tried that."

My brows pressed together. "On who?"

"One of the test subjects we've got... It didn't work. It's like the Infection was too strong for the white blood cells to even have a moment to work."

I pursed my lips, beginning to understand. It felt good to be needed, to be able to work towards something again.

"So, you need something to withstand the Infection long enough for the white blood cells to work?"

Mike smiled and his eyes glinted. "Exactly.

"Like a trojan horse type thing?"

His bottom lip pushed out. "You could say that." He took a breath glancing at the pages. "It's unlike anything anyone has ever seen. It defies all the science we know, it's too unpredictable."

I lent my hands against the desk with the book in front of me. "There was a case a long time ago, they stopped an outbreak using serum taken from the blood of a boy who had recovered—"

"But we've already tried that," Julia said softly.

"I know but maybe if it was a higher concentration it could handle fighting it," I replied. "We already know that this isn't like anything else, we can't treat it that way either. The limits are off here, we have to think outside the box."

The semi-circle of people nodded in agreement and I felt a slight satisfaction in knowing they were impressed.

"You're definitely right," Mike agreed. "We haven't been looking at the bigger picture."