A Different Virus - Laura's Story

Chapter 71

I couldn't figure out where the time had gone. We had been here for a month already. It was halfway through September and the days were cooling off. Ninette was still using information from the samples she had taken when we first came. She still came for an occasional blood sample, but that was it.

I yawned as I looked around our room. Diane wasn't back yet. It had taken a lot of discussion, but she had convinced me to stay inside and sleep while she ran at night. There were three locks on the door just in case. I still had my walkie talkie, so Diane was just a call away and she had promised to keep her runs close by.

Ninette hadn't had any more breakthroughs, although she had several possible leads she was testing. She had spent an entire week trying to see if she could infect anyone else's blood or skin samples with the virus Diane carried without it attacking their cells. She had no success in that area, which she said was very unusual since viruses were usually contagious as rule. Ninette had decided to call the stubborn virus the 'Heartfire Virus'. Diane thought that it was a very fitting name for it.

I yawned and snuggled back into my blankets. It wasn't quite morning yet. Once Diane returned, I would tag along with her as we helped out with various chores around the settlement while Ninette wrestled with her lab equipment.

I sat on a rock while I watched Diane try out a new weapon that the blacksmith had given her. He called it a glaive. It was longer than Diane was tall and very light. It looked like a long staff with a big knife blade embedded into the top section. The shaft was an odd dark dull grey color. It had some sort of faint pattern beat into the entire shaft for grip.

The blade was a long as Diane's forearm and a third of it stuck above the shaft while the rest was seamlessly embedded into the shaft. It looked razor sharp. Even if it wasn't, it would be by the time Diane finished sharpening it. The blacksmith had proclaimed that Diane wouldn't be able to break it and that it was an excellent weapon to fight zombies while staying out of their reach.

Despite the fact that Diane had never held a glaive before, you wouldn't know it by how quickly she moved it through various practice patterns. The glaive was an insubstantial blur and Diane was a more solid blur. Her speed was phenomenal when she wanted to use it.

I recognized some of the moves from her training with Ace, but most of the time she was moving much too fast for me to follow. She didn't just concentrate on the glaive either, she did flips, spun, and kicked at imaginary targets. Her feet were in the air so much that I was beginning to wonder if she was levitating.

I bet if Ace saw that weapon that he would ban it from their practice fighting matches. She had a lot of reach with it. Diane did a blurring flipping spin before landing on both feet and letting the glaive slip through her hand until the butt hit the ground by her feet.

She grinned at me, "So, what do you think?"

I tilted my head, "Were you pretending to catch a rabbit for supper?"

Diane chuckled at my cheeky reply, "Not quite, but it could be used for that. Feel like getting some supper?"

I nodded and hopped off the rock I was sitting on. In all honesty, I wanted to know how her sword, dagger, bow, and arrows hadn't come loose in that display. As if she needed another weapon, she could start scaring the guards at this rate. She had already tried sparring against some of them, but even I could tell that they weren't nearly as good as the regular Guards back at Wainwright Fort.

I was happy to head back, we had been in the shade of the trees and it was cold enough that I had goosebumps.