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stillborn infant. He couldn’t shake off the chills.
    Nixon scrubbed his hands with Betadine soap and Ben helped him with his gloves. “You have to understand the virus to appreciate the experiment’s intricacies, to control the infection and be safe from it. In the lab you asked me if the virus had a cure.” Nixon pulled aside the blue surgical lap drape and revealed the infected’s pallid, shaved, and decaying male genitalia. “The simple answer is no.” He motioned for Zach to stand next to him.
    You can do this. He willed his feet to move. The smell was even worse up close.
    Zach folded his arms over his stomach, quickly putting them down at his sides when Nixon glared at him.
    Ben pulled apart several paper envelopes and arranged a set of freshly sterilized tools on the tray to Nixon’s left.
    Nixon rearranged the implements and scowled at Ben. “Martin, how are we doing?”
    A dark curl sprang from beneath the young anesthetist paper cap. “Almost there, sir.” He piggybacked a small bag of sedative to the already running IV and adjusted the flow. “The second bag is up.”
    Ben readied a glass slide next to the microscope and set a cryogenic storage tank at Nixon’s feet.
    “If he wakes up,” Nixon said to Zach, “don’t get anywhere near his mouth. Don’t let him scratch you. Don’t let him bleed into a cut, or a sore, or your eyes. One bite, a single blood transfer between him and you, and you’re infected. Do you understand?”
    Zach nodded.
    “Are you all set here, sir?” Martin asked.
    “Yes, please sedate the next one. This shouldn’t take long.”
    Nixon unsheathed a syringe and worked the needle into the infected’s swollen testicle. Zach started to sweat and he took a deep breath.
    “You all right?” Ben’s paper mask muffled his voice.
    Zach swallowed, his mouth too dry for it to matter. “I’m fine. Good.” He told himself he’d harden to the clinical side just like he had to combat.
    Nixon withdrew a small amount of sperm and put a drop on the slide for microscopic examination. “Good. Very, very good.” He deposited the remainder of the specimen into the cryogenic storage tank and handed the syringe to Ben. “Great motility with this one. The hormones are working.”
    Another dot to connect. The realization of what he’d seen struck him. An infant born of a live mother inseminated with the sperm of an infected father.
     “You’re starting to get the bigger picture,” Nixon said. “I won’t insult you by pretending the experiment is victimless, but what we’re doing here will save lives. Far more than it will cost.” He applied pressure to the oozing pinhead wound. “The cure for the virus, the missing link to the cancer therapy that Allison needs, lies in the stem cells of the unborn hybrids. A variant gene lacking a section called CRA-3 is vital. The infection spreads quickly. The virus replicates and invades healthy cells until all of them are infected and the patient is turned. The only way to stop it is to implant resistant cells, CRA-3-deficient ones, which prevents that. The human body is a self-preserving machine and once the deficient cells are introduced, they will reproduce and eradicate the virus before it ever gets full blown.”
    “What about the women you’re making pregnant?” Zach asked. “What about their babies?”
    Nixon looked at him crossly and he regretted speaking out. “Not a single one of the hybrids has lived and none of them yielded the gene variant we need. You’ll see to it the mothers are treated properly.”
    Zach hadn’t signed on as a prison guard, but didn’t dare say it.
    A loud grunt pierced the pensive silence.
    Like the rat in the lab, the infected was coming around unexpectedly fast.
    “Ben, get Martin.” Nixon remained calm as he issued the urgent order.
    The zombie’s milky white eyes popped open and it gnashed its teeth, barely missing Zach’s arm.
    Zach jerked backward and reached for his concealed