While the soldiers began preparing to do what they knew how to do best, she did something to help them that was well within her area of expertise. Emma focused on creating more of the corrosive chemical they had used to deflesh the boney. She hated that name. It sounded almost comical for something so terrifying, but it was accurate and they weren’t scientists she reminded herself. Emma raided the other supply closet and recovered as much of the base materials as she could, carefully concocting the mixture that had worked previously, as well as developing another that should work just as well - provided there wasn’t something specifically within the nature of the first batch that had caused an expedited reaction to dissolve the boney’s flesh and muscle mass. Briefly, Emma thought back to her college days, studying chemistry and thinking how fascinating it was. Now she was developing concoctions to dissolve the flesh off an undead mutant. It made her curious about what her classmates were up to at that point: were they still alive, dead, or the undead? She’d discovered her parents were still alive, holed up in a refugee ship off the coast of Hawaii. Emma had even managed to speak with them for a few minutes before the necessity to return to work, examining the decrypted data she’d stolen, intervened. As Emma decanted a mixture into a glass bottle that could be thrown at a boney, she thought of their instruction to be careful and stay out of harm’s way.
“Sorry, Mom,” Emma said as she stuffed a cap on the bottle.
“What’s that?” Jack asked from behind her. Emma turned to face him and smiled briefly.
“Nothing. What’s going on?”
“Well, we’ve got a tentative plan of taking the one remaining elevator down to the fifth floor directly, but I’m not in love with it.”
“Why?” Emma asked, setting down the glass bottle on the tabletop before turning to face him and resting her rear against the workbench. Jack took a couple of steps closer to her, tapping the side of his helmet to turn off the communicator, then gesturing for her to do the same. She leaned over and turned the headset off even though she wasn’t wearing it, and then looked curiously at him.
“Going down to the third, that elevator was a killbox. I’d hate to be trapped in there again with only Hades for help.”
“It’s hard to trust him.” Emma stated.
“And it's hard to know if the information he’s given us about the fifth floor is accurate. I mean, what he’s said sounds plausible, but you heard him earlier, he’s more than a little crazy.”
“What did he say?”
“Basically that the lower floor houses maintenance and utility units: generators, laundry room, repair bays, food storage, and, he claims, the exit to the silver mine. There are no security cameras down there - he also claims - but based on how he distributed the undead throughout the facility, he reckons there are a couple of hundred down there.”
“That’s a lot. What are you going to do?”
“We’re going to have to clear a path to the self destruct system, trigger it on a decent length of timer, then we’ll meet with you and head back up to the top floor together, going out through the town hall.”
“It sounds so simple.”
“And it should be, provided our new friend doesn’t prevent the elevators from working to trap us here,” Jack told her. “But if he does - or anything goes sideways - then we’re going to need another way out. As there are no cameras down there, or at least none that are working, we’re going to see about securing the mine exit. It’d be less than ideal, but then again, being blown up would be one hell of a lot worse,” Jack told her honestly. Emma nodded.
“Well, Jack, I can’t say any of that sounds like a particularly good or nice option, but I trust you to get us out of here safely,” she told him, smiling briefly. He returned her smile and made a slight shrugging gesture.
“I’ll do what I can, but keep your weapons handy. We’re going to have to take Ridgewell down with us, so that’ll leave you and Bridges up here with the scientists and the security guard... Jeff or whatever his name is.”
“You think they might try something?” Emma asked, a feeling of mild concern in her stomach.
“I don’t know, but almost everyone down here died. Hades’ control over the security system meant he could’ve unlocked any of those doors remotely, so how did they survive this long? Maybe bait for when someone came looking, and maybe something else. I mean, God only knows what flaw he discovered that allowed him to take complete control over the facility, but there it is.”
“So, what should I do if the prisoners try to do something?” Emma asked.
“Protect yourself, whatever that entails,” Jack answered coldly. Emma nodded.
“I will.”
They hesitated for a moment. Emma had never been a woman to be overly swayed by her emotions: she was task focused and driven. Those qualities had contributed to her survival and ultimate escape from the facility at Bluefields, as well as her journey to Dewbury. Putting aside Jack’s aid, it had helped her to escape from Dewbury as well, but in the extremely rare quiet moments she had shared with Jack, he made her feel a little... softer than usual, and judging by the way he looked at her, she imagined he felt the same way. Immediately, she set aside this thought. It was the end of the world, and thoughts like that couldn’t be allowed to interfere with the work that needed to be done.
“I, uh, I’ve been making more of the corrosive in case you encounter a boney, as your people call it,” Emma said, turning away from Jack for a moment to collect one of the bottles to show him. “Like the others, it’s in glass which makes it easy to break, but don’t, you know, break it on yourself.”
“I’ll try not to,” Jack told her with a grin, trying to lighten their mood.
“When do you head out?” Emma asked.
“We’re rolling in five.”
“Make it ten and I’ll have more of the chemical ready for you.”
Jack nodded and before the tension could settle between them again, he smiled and turned away, leaving the lab. With a subtle sigh, Emma turned and resumed working.
TYRONE HAD SECURED some canvas duffel bags, which resembled the reusable ones sold in grocery stores. What purpose they’d served before the facility became a slaughter house he had no idea, but they were now being used to carry the dangerous acidic compound Emma had prepared: two bags for five bottles. Smith was carrying one of the bags, which held two of the containers, while Tyrone had the second bag with three of them. Their plan, the best as they could make with so little concrete information, was to move in a diamond formation. Jack would take the lead position, with Tyrone to his left and Smith on the right, Ridgewell bringing up the rear. They’d lodged another vending machine in the path of the door for cover, just in case the fifth floor was anything like the third.
“Don’t worry guys, I’ll guide you right to the self-destruct system,” Hades told them as they assembled by the one working elevator. “All you need to do is kill a handful of zombies. How hard can it be?”
“Why don’t you come down here and join us?” Jack returned.
“Because the composer doesn’t hop down from the podium and grab an instrument. We’re going to create beautiful music together, but don’t forget who’s in charge,” Hades responded, anger barely masked in his tone.
Jack glanced back down the corridor. Bridges was standing beside Emma near the security room. They had secured their prisoners in there and disabled the terminals so they couldn’t interfere with the security system. While Jack and the others went below, they’d keep working on the download from the terminals in the lab as well as taking a last look for anything they might have missed.
“Keep an eye on them,” Jack instructed Bridges. He smirked.
“I’ll keep an ear on them too.”
“Bridges...” Smith muttered. Jack shook his head, and then he looked fleetingly at Emma for a moment before focusing ahead. The elevator doors opened before he could swipe the security card.
“Come on, let’s get moving,” Hades chided impat
iently.
Jack boarded the elevator with his team, allowing them to pass by first so he could be the one nearest the doors.
“So, Hades, how did you manage to override the control system so that you can get by without the need for key cards?” Jack wanted to know.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because that might be useful information if we ever hit another Bolvinox facility,” Jack returned.
“Let’s just say it’s not hard when you’re the guy who designed the security system they use in all their facilities.”
Jack glanced at Tyrone and both shared a quizzical expression.
“For real?” Tyrone questioned.
“Why? You don’t think a guy like me could do something like that?” Hades demanded aggressively. The elevator doors closed and the car started to move down.
“Not at all,” Jack said calmingly. “It’s just we don’t know anything about you.”
“Well, it’s true. I was once regarded as the best in my field, right up until I got sent into the field to do a little boots on the ground work - decoding computers in a bunker. Dumb bastards ahead of me missed a booby trap. I went from the head of my field to a man with shrapnel in his guts and a one way ticket to deadsville. Then I got a choice. Turns out I made the wrong one,” Hades explained, his tone fluctuating between anger and depression with the flow of his story.
“And from then on you wanted revenge?” Jack asked.
“Not from then, but I knew where things were heading. I knew I needed to take precautions in case things turned out as I expected. It’s lucky I did really or there’d be an even bigger shit show in the world than there is right now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Get your game face on, Major Ramsay, you’re nearly at the fifth floor,” Hades announced.
The elevator began to slow, so Jack raised his weapon, bracing the stock against his shoulder. He knew a boney had fallen down to the fifth floor earlier, when Hades first got involved in the fight. Tyrone knew this too, so he carefully retrieved a glass bottle and held it ready.
“I’ll hit it, then Hades can get us out of here while the bastard melts,” Tyrone announced.
“Composer. Remember, I’m the composer... But yeah,” Hades declared over the radio.
The elevator dinged and the doors began to slide apart. Jack tensed and prepared for a wall of zombies to come towards them, or the muffled roars of the boney. However, to Jack’s incredible surprise, the immediate area was clear. It was dark on the fifth floor; not a single light seemed to be active, so all Jack could see, by the illumination of his flashlight, was the smooth metal of the corridors. There was neither blood nor signs that the infected had slaughtered anyone down there, but unmistakably, Jack thought he could smell their stench of decay. Jack carefully clambered over the vending machine and peeked to the left in the direction of the other elevator. The doors had been ripped apart, one torn straight out, the other ripped to shreds. Approaching it more cautiously, Jack saw that the boney that had been within the elevator was gone, and as it was nowhere nearby, it had apparently survived with minimal damage. Subsequently, it had shredded the doorway of the elevator, despite the doors having been partly open, and stomped off into the darkness. Looking around the elevator lobby, Jack could see there were scratches and gouges in the floor where its claws had dragged across the ground. Jack glanced at the security room then approached it, moving to the window and peeking inside. It was there he saw the first corpses of the fifth floor; a twisted tangle of skeletal remains and torn guard uniforms, and not far away, the gently swaying infected who had consumed the flesh from those corpses.
“Don’t worry about the security room. I’ll keep it locked down,” Hades announced. Jack looked around.
“How do you—”
“I can still see you on the elevator cam. Duh.”
Tyrone carefully replaced the glass bottle in the bag then climbed over the vending machine, followed carefully by Smith then Ridgewell. They took on their formation as the elevator doors closed, with Jack turning to look back down the corridor they needed to travel along.
“So, I’m going to give you some pretty precise directions. If you deviate from the path I’m laying out for you then we’re going to have a problem. As in, you’ll be lost and turning around in the dark with the undead shuffling around.”
“How’d you manage to lure them down here?”
“It’s pretty easy really. Zombies created with the Z-A One strain have incredibly enhanced senses: hearing, smell, sight... not so much touch, and I’m guessing taste is pretty shit too given that they eat people raw. But they can hear real subtle sounds - hell, one report suggested they could actually hear heartbeats, but I don’t know how they can be sure of that.”
“So? How’d you move the undead around?” Jack pressed.
“Once I broke containment, I played sounds over the tannoy system, just enough to get them moving. It wasn’t easy, but I got them on the elevators, dropped them off, rinse and repeat until they were distributed around,” Hades explained. There was a calm joviality in his tone that made it seem as though he was talking about moving pieces in a game. Then, Jack considered, to Hades it probably was exactly that.
At the first cross section Jack could see that there was a split left and right, as well as a path that continued ahead. Hades directed them to the right, and despite his misgivings about the mysterious voice on their radio, Jack followed his lead and made the turn. Distantly, he thought he heard moaning and a soft, almost moist padding sound echoing through the corridor. He swept the area with his flashlight, but seeing nothing, pressed on. There was definitely a more industrial feeling to this floor; pipes appeared suddenly out of the wall to run along at ankle level, as well as along the ceiling, to disappear after a while before others took their place. The broken glass along the floor indicated that the lights had been taken out above. A quick look with the flashlight indicated the bulbs had exploded.
“What killed the lights?” Jack asked aloud, though he was questioning nobody in particular.
“Oh, that was me,” Hades responded immediately. “After taking over all the systems, and once most people were dead, I got a little bored so I took to overcharging lights at random. Popped some cameras too, especially the ones down there.”
“Why?”
“You ever popped the bubbles on bubble wrap?” Hades responded as though that explained everything.
“So, you’re going to hack into every Bolvinox facility and trigger the self-destruct, that’s your endgame?” Jack probed as he reached a hard turn left that he had no choice but to take.
“Sort of... not really. I mean, I’d like to, but even with the backdoor I put in the system, there’s a lot of tunneling I’d have to do through the additional layers of security they put around the self destruct. With the Whiteshield facility I got lucky, with this one they caught on pretty quick, and taking a cursory gander at the others I can see they’ve already started disabling the remote access to the self-destruct system.”
A low, animalistic growl made the hairs on the back of Jack’s neck stand up. He got the unmistakable impression they were being stalked, and a quick glance at his teammates led Jack to believe they had the same feeling he did.
“Why was it on remote access anyway? Seems like a dumbass mistake to me,” Ridgewell announced, turning to look back the way they had come.
“Because if the shit hit the fan Bolvinox wanted the ability to cook and destroy a facility before their experiments could get out. A button is only good if there’s someone left alive to push it,” Hades answered.
The growl issued again, seemingly from a four-way junction just ahead. Jack raised his fist to issue a silent command to stop their advance.
“What’s that?” Tyrone asked softly.
“Not sure. Sounds new,” Jack returned.
“Where are you at?” Hades wanted to know.
“Four way junction.” Jack told him.
&nb
sp; “Make the right.”
“There’s something growling down here.”
“What’s it sound like?” Hades asked flippantly.
“Growling, padding. Pretty quick.”
The padding was drawing closer, as were the growls. Jack braced his weapon and took a rough aim at head height.
“It’s probably one of the dogs then,” Hades announced flippantly. “I told you this was partly an animal testing facility, right?”
Jack was about to ask what the hell he was talking about when a very large dog half rounded the corridor. There were chunks of fur missing from its thick coat, and coagulated wounds where the fur had been ripped out along with the underlying skin. Its snout was marked and covered in gore, with strings of flesh hanging from its jaws. Its eyes were cloudy and glazed over, and as a deeper, more menacing growl rattled up from within its chest, another rounded the corner.
“Zombie dogs?” Smith asked. Jack lowered his weapon and prepared to fire, squeezing off a shot as the zombie animal started to lunge forward. His shot slammed into the dogs back, but it still broke into a full run. Jack just managed to twist out of the way as it jumped, its jaws spreading wide in anticipation of sinking its teeth into him. Tyrone began firing, cutting the creature down mid leap while Smith put the final shot through its head. The second dog - and then a third - came at them immediately. Jack prepared to fire but it was too late for that. With only a second to react, Jack began to retreat and swatted at the beast with the stock of his weapon; the creature howled and dropped to the ground near the corpse of the first. The third dog made a sick interpretation of barking - a rattly, liquidy sound that gave it an even more alarming cadence than the normal sound of such a large and dangerous creature. His team was firing, Tyrone tearing into its snout with shots that didn’t quite connect with the brain of the creature while Jack continued to retreat, aiming down at the creature he had dropped to the ground with a strike moments ago. It was scrambling up onto its paws, the legs moving in an awkward fashion - though its jaws were snapping, - closing the inches between itself and Jack. He aligned his weapon and fired, putting the poor beast out of the misery of the cruel fate it had been subjected to. Tyrone and Smith had managed to gun down the third, the corpse of the creature slumping over with a number of gunshot wounds to its body and cranium. Distantly, they heard a gurgling howl and a number of barks - a pack of undead hounds, or wolves, which would soon be closing the distance between themselves and the fresh prey that had stumbled into their hunting grounds.
The Z Directive (Book 2): Mutation Page 15
