Nowhere to Run Read Free

night before as she heard Constance Young’s voice coming from the TV in the living room.
    Blond, expertly made up, and dressed in an electric blue suit, Constance was looking great again this morning. Annabelle was proud of the friend she had made in her first life at KEY News, when they’d both been starting out, Annabelle as a researcher and Constance as a young reporter. Constance had stayed the course, covering long stakeouts, volunteering for the stories none of the seasoned correspondents wanted to do, paying her dues. While Annabelle was home with her kids, Constance had devoted herself to her professional passion. Now she was cohosting the nation’s highly rated morning program and making seven figures a year. Constance was beautiful, smart, successful, and unhateable because she was such a damned nice person.
    If not for Constance, Annabelle doubted that she would be working at KEY News again. It was Constance who, upon hearing what was going on with Annabelle, put in the good word to the executive producer Linus Nazareth to hire her. Annabelle knew the producer had no use for mommy trackers, and she was sure Nazareth had decided to take her on just to keep his popular star happy. If Constance Young wanted Annabelle, then Annabelle was in.
    Annabelle had been working her tail off to prove herself and satisfy Nazareth’s latest ringing directive to “make bioterrorism sexy. Seduce me. Tell me why I should care and what I can do to save myself. Keep me and all the mommies at home riveted to our television sets lest our babies lose their lives.” With those twisted marching orders, Annabelle had been forced to become all too knowledgeable about botulism, smallpox, tularemia, and plague.
    As she cracked eggs over the rim of a stainless-steel mixing bowl, Annabelle listened to Constance’s introduction.
    “Now, in our continuing series ‘What you need to know about bioterrorism,’ KEY News Medical Correspondent Dr. John Lee reports this morning on anthrax. You may be surprised at what he’s found.”
    Annabelle turned to watch as the videotape rolled and a cluster of rod-shaped bacteria lit up the television screen.
    “Anthrax is the perfect killer, invisible and silent,” began Dr. Lee’s smooth voice. “But actually anthrax is a livestock disease and, usually, humans contract it through contact with diseased animals or their hides.”
    The image on the television switched to a medical textbook picture of an ugly, black scab on a human hand.
    “Though anthrax spores can be ingested if infected livestock is eaten, most human infection, ninety-five percent of it, is through skin contact—what we call cutaneous anthrax. A small pimple or ulcer grows into a coal-like lesion. In fact, anthrax got its name because an infection looks like anthracite or coal. The good news is, while potentially deadly, cutaneous anthrax is highly treatable with antibiotics.
    “But by far the deadliest form of anthrax is inhalation anthrax. Once someone has breathed anthrax spores into their lungs, flulike symptoms will appear. A fever, cough, body aches—symptoms that don’t normally send you running to the doctor. But if there is no aggressive antibiotic treatment, the fever will elevate, breathing will become labored, and the body will go into shock.”
    The doctor Annabelle had interviewed the week before at New York Hospital was identified on the screen and offered his expertise: “When this severe stage sets in, it is almost always too late for a cure.”
    Now, Lee appeared on the screen and began walking through a laboratory. “But anthrax, as it exists in nature, is not the perfect weapon. Purifying and concentrating the anthrax spores and weaponizing them, causing those purified spores to separate so they can linger in the air and be inhaled, requires real laboratory skill. There is no way to account for all the anthrax strains that exist. Hundreds of scientists and technicians can get ahold of anthrax, and they