“Do it,” Nate said, then took a look around before focusing on me. “Which end do we bust down first?”
Glancing at the ceiling, I tried to judge whether one sectioned-off part looked bigger than the other, but they seemed identical. “You choose.”
Since we were standing closer to the left one, Nate chose that, setting Scott and Marleen to guard the other for now.
Because of the required height of the cocoon, the single door to the section looked comically small although it was as broad as the airlock. While nobody had bothered to build a ceiling to hide the air recycling system, they had bothered with a floor; else we would have had to traipse across the sewage system—not a good idea, under any conditions. Nate hesitated, which gave Hamilton the perfect excuse to go first. I might have considered shooting off the lock; Hamilton tried the door first, finding it unlocked. We all watched, weapons at the ready, as it swung inward, revealing a normal-sized room. Even before I could more than catch a glance inside I knew that something was wrong. The scent of blood was so heavy that it tickled my nostrils just from what air filtered through the door.
At first, I thought someone had made the questionable interior decorating choice of painting the walls red. That must have been my mind blocking off reality because it was beyond what I’d come to encounter. But then I saw the bodies on the ground, dropped where they had been standing, most facing away from the door. It was over twenty, and only one was clad in dark fatigues. The rest were all in either scrubs or plain clothes, some wearing formerly white lab coats that had done a stellar job soaking up the blood—the scientists who must have been working in here. The blood was still fresh but had started to congeal, making me guess that they’d died over an hour ago. Since we hadn’t heard any shots, whoever had executed them must have done so while we’d breached the outer doors with our charges.
I’d thought I had seen it all, but the sheer amount of senseless slaughter horrified me in a way that nothing else had. Maybe some of it came from the fact that, however much my life had changed, it was still easy for me to see myself as a part of them.
I wasn’t the only one thus affected. Burns cursed under his breath, and even Hill had nothing disparaging to add. Everyone seemed loath to step into the blood, as if our proximity would somehow desecrate the space even more. From just inside the door, it was obvious that the room had been some kind of mixed office and recreational space, a sofa in the corner the only thing substantial enough that anyone could have hidden behind it, and since it was pushed against the wall I doubted that was possible.
Hamilton was the first to tear himself out of his stunned stupor and checked the sofa after all. I followed—not because I hadn’t already seen enough to give me new nightmares, but to check if I recognized any of the faces, where enough of them remained to identify anyone. I was praying that I wouldn’t, but no such luck. I didn’t remember the name of the young woman ten years my senior, but she had been part of the lab in Aurora, that blasted Kansas town where we’d gotten inked and officially ostracized by what remained of society. Two other men also looked familiar, likely from the same place. Since one of their people—a young scientist named Ethan—had ended up with Taggard’s merry band of kidnapping and raping assholes, it wasn’t that much of a surprise, mostly an unpleasant one. Ethan had ended up skinned alive and hung, his zombified self trying to eat us even so. At least these bastards had died in a quicker and more merciful fashion, although I didn’t allow myself to make a judgment call on the level of insanity involved. None of them were from the Silo, and as Hamilton’s search confirmed, also not from among Emily Raynor’s minions.
It was the very last body, slumped in the corner as if he’d been trying to hide behind the others, that made me pause, then shy away as if burned. Nate noticed, immediately training his rifle on the corpse, but it wasn’t active danger that had made me back away. He frowned down at the body, then looked at me, confused.
“Don’t you recognize him?” I asked, my voice flat going on hollow. When Nate shook his head, I looked down at the body again, just to be sure. No question, it was him. “That’s Walter Greene. Biotech pioneer and a long-time runner-up for a ton of awards, down to a possible Nobel Prize. Co-Founder of Green Fields Biotech. Gabriel Greene’s father.”
I was almost glad when two pistol shots rang out from the direction of the BSL-4 lab. That was something my mind had far less problems wrapping itself around than finding one of our age’s most brilliant scientists here, of all places.
Chapter 15
Having been at the opposite side of the room, I was the last to make it back out through the door. By then, Burns and Richards were already sprinting toward where we’d left Marleen and Scott outside. Since Cole immediately reported in that the checkpoint was still secure, it made the most sense to check on the heavy steel doors in passing, but they remained untouched as well. From halfway around the lab I already saw the door to the partition on the other side open, but my attention was drawn to the figures on the ground. Two guards were dead a few steps away from the door behind which they must have been hiding. More worrisome, Scott lay on his back, blood spurting from a wound in his neck, while Marleen tried to do CPR. The amount of blood on her hands spoke of more wounds on the marine commander’s torso. She gave up just as Burns reached her, her head whipping around with frustration. “One of them got away!” she shouted. “He ran toward the door to the lab!”
Being last meant I was also the quickest to switch course and turn in the direction she indicated. I thought I saw someone disappear behind a corner, but that could have been just my imagination since I didn’t hear the slap of footsteps—but that was easily masked by our own pounding. Nate was right there with me, overtaking me with the entrance to the lab in sight. Hamilton pushed past me just as Nate flung open the door, forcing me to slow down a little. The good news was I had no need to case the two rooms they rushed through, and could fully concentrate on the blood smeared across a doorframe, alongside a wall—and the red light above the decontamination room just as it flashed back to green, indicating that someone had just entered and the airlock was ready for the next person or group to do so.
Hamilton saw it as well and rushed toward the door. My mind told me to shut up, but as much as I wanted to see him dead, this was different.
“Don’t!” I shouted before he could reach the door.
I was certain that in any other environment, he would have ignored me, but apparently around deadly viruses, my word counted for something, even with an asshole like him. It was still more anger than respect that I read on his face. “Why not?”
“It’s not like he can get away,” I offered. “This is the only way in and out of there. I doubt they’ll have a bomb hidden in there that will kill us all on detonation. Short of that, there is no fucking reason for any of us to deliberately kill ourselves. I mean, who does that? Bring two bags full of C4 into a BSL-4 lab. Present company included.” Nate smirked but said nothing. Hamilton scowled but I could tell that my message was getting through to him. Just to make sure that was the case, I added, “Plus, you two both have open, bleeding wounds. Even if that lab has been unused for years—and I have a feeling that this is not the case—you will contract something, even if it’s just vapors remaining from the last cleaning cycle. Give me ten minutes and I’ll have three suits prepped. Then you can waddle in there and behave like as much of a blundering ass as you like.”
“Do it,” Nate said before Hamilton could reply. I immediately set to work, right after dropping my weapon and pack, and tearing off my gloves to replace them with two sets of latex gloves.
“If we dare risk overheating, we can stay in our gear, but the packs are too much,” I called back over my shoulder. “No knives or sidearms, either. It’s too risky as they could tear the suits, and you won’t be able to use them unless you carry them in your hands, anyway.” I felt like snarking that Hamilton knew his way around guns and hazmat suits since he had brought one into the hot lab i
n the Paris complex, but following the previously routine steps that had dictated my life for years seemed more important.
In no time I had the first positive pressure suit checked and set it aside, watching from the corner of my eye as Nate and Hamilton got down to T-shirts and pants. “Boots, too,” I advised, continuing in the meantime.
The door to the changing room outside opened, admitting Richards. “Need help?” he offered.
“Help them with taping their socks and gloves, and then to get in the suits. And then do me.” Maybe not the best way to phrase that but I was otherwise occupied. I didn’t miss Red’s smirk, which disappeared as soon as he went to follow my instructions, coming face to face with a rather glowering Nate. Richards used the distraction that offered to give us an update on the situation.
“Scott is gone, as are the three guards—we found a third one inside the room. Marleen said one got away, wearing civilian clothes, so he’s likely a scientist.”
It wasn’t my most thorough checkup ever, but I figured that the suit integrity and the general setup was enough to keep us safe. Contrary to what people may have believed, hot labs produced surprisingly few infections. Work accidents usually involved animal bites or blunt force trauma of people bumping into shelves and tables. Unless, of course, someone shot at you, or you tried to tear your suit off because you were hallucinating, thinking that scorpions were crawling all over your body underneath the heavy-duty plastic. The latter had almost cost me my life and job when my supervisor effectively poisoned me. I’d never gotten a chance to ask her about her motives, but the theory that she’d done it to save herself from having to murder me was the one I chose to believe. I doubted that the scientist we were after now had that answer for me, but who knew?
“Let’s try to catch him alive,” I said as I finished with the second suit and handed that to Nate. “He’s wounded, without a suit, so I doubt he’ll survive, but that doesn’t mean he won’t talk if we threaten him.”
Hamilton laughed harshly, pausing for a moment in zipping up his suit. “Exactly how do you threaten someone who knows he’s as good as dead?”
Not bothering with actually looking at him, I shrugged. “Lots of shit in there to hurt someone. I’ve always wondered what would happen if you dipped someone’s hand too long into a liquid nitrogen tank. Simply getting that shit on your clothes burns, but it evaporates too fast to leave more than red skin. I wonder if you could break off fingers like that.”
Hamilton continued to laugh, mumbling something that sounded like “psycho bitch” under his breath. Yeah, I’d realized how that sounded as I’d said it, but any filters I had still left had gone to shit somewhere across Dallas. A glance at Nate revealed that he wasn’t bothering to give me any emotional feedback in favor of getting his suit on. I didn’t miss the dark stains all over his shirt, most not sweat, particularly around the tears and bandages. I told myself that he would be okay since he could still move fluently enough to get in the suit—and run faster than me, too—and the bandages weren’t soaked through yet.
I hated that I needed Red’s assistance with taping up the pair of fresh socks I grabbed from a rack, and the gloves. Zipping up the suit only underlined how fucking useless my hands had become, muscle memory still in my brain not working any longer with several digits missing. By the time I connected the suit to an air hose to inflate it, Nate and Hamilton were ready, piling all available weapons that they could carry and use at the same time into their arms. As soon as I dared, I unplugged the hose and lumbered into the decontamination room, waiting for the others to follow before I cycled the airlock.
Call me jaded, but I went first, unarmed, trusting that handguns would not be my end in here. Because he hadn’t bothered with a suit, the trail of blood—smeared on walls and corners, but also in droplets on the floor—made it easy to follow the path the scientist had taken. I still checked the signs around us to get a feel for the layout of the lab. Two of the closed-off parts with no viewports were labeled “Test 1” and “Test 2” respectively. I didn’t want to venture a guess why, but it seemed ominously obvious—including the heavy locks in an environment that had a lot of doors that closed tightly, but didn’t lock from the outside.
The trail led deeper into the lab, past animal processing and a handful of work rooms. Without my suit connected to the air hoses, it heated up in record time but this way I heard a crash coming from up ahead and to the right before I saw the blood smear veer off in that direction. I had a certain inkling that turned out to be true as I passed from one hallway to the next, reaching the heart of the lab: the viral vault.
My first instinct was to head right there but instead I grabbed a hose to at least top up the air supply inside my suit—dying of carbon dioxide poisoning wouldn’t do me any good, and neither would getting dizzy or barfing before that. Getting shot sounded about as pleasant, so I signaled the guys to go ahead. After all, it should pay off that they were lugging around their weight in weapons.
Hamilton went first, shouting at someone to stop doing whatever was going on. A crash followed inside, making me guess he was disobeying, and maybe scrambling for cover. Hamilton repeated his barked order, louder now, and he and Nate disappeared through the door. Allowing myself a last moment of feeling the blissfully cool air run up my body, I disconnected the hose and followed them.
What I noticed first was just how fucking huge the vault was. The ones in my old workplace and the lab in France had been the size of a small office maybe. This vault was easily ten times as large, holding way more than the ten or so liquid nitrogen tanks that I’d expected. I had no idea how large the storage vaults at the CDC were that held samples of all known diseases, but this one looked sized to easily rival that. Most of the tanks were undisturbed, lined up in neat double rows easily but likely not often accessed. A single man was half crouching in front of, half leaning against one of the tanks toward the wall in the third row from the door, four tanks seemingly at random open with their racks removed, currently lying discarded on the floor. The crash I’d heard must have been the last of the racks. Bloody handprints showed his progression from the first row of tanks to the open ones, with an extra trail along the third row—over to where an autoclave was starting up, already locked and well into destroying the samples likely dropped into it for disposal.
The man looked familiar but it took me a few moments to jump-start my memory. The connection to Gabriel Greene—and my old workplace—finally did it: Brandon Stone. Gone was the ill-fitting suit he’d so loved to wear around the Green Fields Biotech complex, but he was still tall and gangly, and the pained smirk he directed at us reminded me of the disdainful ignorance he’d—mostly—viewed us scientist worker bees with. His hair was longer now, grown out of the stylishly tousled business cut he’d maintained even after the world had gone to shit—when I’d last seen him, in Aurora, Kansas, where he’d pretended to head up the lab there. A job that he’d offered me, and that I was glad—now more than ever—I’d never seriously considered taking. At least I’d always presumed that it had been pretense only. What had a lawyer-slash-economics guy had to do with running scientific research? Maybe that had been the pretense. Somehow, I didn’t buy that Cortez and his flunkies at the camp had been relying on a seventy-plus-year-old geezer. But a late-thirty-something?
Damn, but was every single person I’d ever met in my life going to turn out to be a lying, scheming, murdering asshole? I was expecting that with Nate, but me?
A glance at Nate and Hamilton confirmed that they definitely recognized him—and likely not from where I remembered him if the open hatred was an indicator. I stepped closer to them but made sure to remain at enough distance so they could bring their arsenal to bear on Stone if the need arose. I idly wondered if I should tell them to be careful should they discharge a gun in here so that a possible ricochet from a tank or shelf didn’t kill us. I figured they were smart enough to know.
I would have loved to strike a pose, arms crossed over my chest a
nd cocky as hell, but the suits kind of made that impossible. Connected to an air hose, it was even worse. Standing there with my arms hanging by my side wasn’t quite the same but what I had to go for instead. The face shield of the suit probably concealed half of my features. There was an obvious reason why interrogations were usually not performed under these conditions.
“Fancy meeting you here,” I offered in as even a voice as I could manage. Not sounding tired as hell was a feat, and being angry for what they’d done to Nate only went so far now that I was running on fumes only. Not even Hamilton’s proximity was enough to give me a certain edge. Judging from how much more leaning than standing Stone managed, it didn’t look necessary, to be honest. “What should I call you now with all your recent career changes? Should I go all friendly with Brandon, or do you still fancy Dr. Stone although you haven’t done shit to deserve that title? Then again, the Chemist does have a certain simplicity to it.” I could tell from the light jerk that ran through Nate when final recognition set in, but that was all he gave.
Stone flashed me a bloody grin that turned into a wheezing cough, blood bubbling out of his mouth. My guess was that he had a perforated lung. Too bad, really. As long as he could still talk… which I hoped he could. Otherwise this really was a bust.
“I should have expected you to show up here,” Stone ground out, making me just a little happy—both with his words, and the fact that he was still able to answer.
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 4 | Books 10-12 Page 67
