I grabbed her shoulders and looked into her eyes. “If you won’t fight, then at least run.”
She nodded, seemingly surprised by my determination to keep her alive.
“Are we ready, man?” Sam asked. He held the MP5 steady, muzzle pointed at the closed door.
The zombies began to pound on the door with their fists.
“How much ammo do you have left?” I asked Sam.
“It’s getting low. But we need to shoot our way out of here.”
I nodded.
Jax opened the door. The zombies in the corridor fought to come inside, to taste our flesh.
The sound of the MP5 was loud in the small office but not as deafening as it had been in the elevator. As Sam delivered headshot after headshot, the nasties dropped to the floor and lay there in rotting heaps of mottled blue flesh.
Sam ran forward, stepped over the carcasses, and began firing down the corridor toward the elevators. We followed, Doctor Colbert allowing me to drag her along by the hand.
At the far end of the corridor, a horde of nasties began shambling in our direction. Sam shot three of them, and they fell quickly as their brains were destroyed, but then the MP5 made an empty clicking noise. “Fuck!” Sam shouted.
“We need to turn right by the elevators,” Jax said as we moved forward.
I had to let go of Colbert’s hand as we got near the nasties so that I could use both hands to wield the bat. To my relief, she stayed close behind me. I had been afraid that she might just stand where she was, refusing to move, but she seemed to have decided to live a little longer.
I swung the bat at the head of the closest zombie, a man in a white lab coat whose face was hanging off his skull loosely, chewed and torn. His head caved in with a sickening crack as the bat smashed through bone and brain.
Jax and Sam were likewise swinging their bats, clearing a path past the nasties.
A blonde woman in a black blouse and skirt lunged at me, teeth bared. I pushed her back with the tip of the bat before swinging it into her head as hard as I could. Her skull cracked open, spilling liquid and brains as she fell to the floor.
“Oh, my God, that was Linda,” Colbert said, her hand flying to her mouth and her eyes wide.
We fought our way around the corner and into the corridor that led away from the elevators to the part of the building where we would find the emergency stairs.
The corridor was clear. We ran.
The zombies followed at their deathly pace, a collective moan rising from them as if they were pleading with us to come back and let them eat us.
We reached a closed, locked, metal and glass door. Jax used her access card to open it and we slipped through. The door closed behind us. The zombies pressed themselves against the glass in vain, watching us with their hateful yellow eyes as we walked away.
I noticed a camera on the wall at the end of the corridor. “Can you see where we are?” I asked into the walkie-talkie.
Johnny answered. “Yeah, it looks clear. The door to the stairs should be on your left.”
We found it. The door was a regular door with a sign that showed a stickman going down a flight of stairs beneath the words EMERGENCY EXIT.
“What’s the fourth floor like now?” I asked Johnny.
“Still a whole lot of nastiness going on at the elevators.”
“What’s in the corridor directly below us? If we take these stairs down to the fourth floor, where will we come out?”
“Let me just check that.” There was a pause while he checked the map. “Looks like labs. Most of the fourth floor consists of labs.”
“Can you check the area where the emergency stairs come out on that level? Assuming the stairs and elevators are in the same relative positions as they are on this floor, we should be far enough away from the elevators to avoid attracting the attention of the nasties there.”
Johnny said, “Tanya, can you find a camera for this corridor here?” I assumed he was showing her the map. A few seconds later, he said to me, “The corridor looks okay.”
“Is there a locked access door between the elevators and the emergency stairs on that floor, the same as there is on this one?” I looked along the corridor at the zombies still trying to reach us by pressing themselves against the metal and glass door.
“Yeah, looks like it.”
“I have an idea,” I said to Jax, Sam, and Colbert.
I opened the door to the emergency stairs. The stairs were made of steel and led down to the fourth floor as well as up to the roof. We descended them slowly, wary of any movement below us. But the stairs seemed deserted. When we opened the fourth floor door, it revealed a corridor identical to the one we had just left. Except the doors here were all digitally locked and led to labs. Through the glass panels in the doors, I could see white-tiled rooms containing various machines, steel worktables, and glass cabinets full of chemicals.
Through the access door halfway along the corridor, I could see the pack of zombies at the elevators, still feeding from the dead bodies of the security guards.
I removed my backpack and found the waterproof matches I had brought from Apocalypse Island. “This should make them move,” I said. “And they can’t come this way because of that door.” I struck a match and reached up toward the ceiling where a sprinkler sensor was located.
An alarm sounded and a red light above the emergency exit door came on. The sprinklers went into action, raining water down on us from the ceiling.
When the water hit the zombies, they left their feast and shuffled through a set of swinging doors that led to the main stairs.
“I don’t understand,” Doctor Colbert said, watching them through the glass door. “What’s happening?”
“They hate water,” I replied, putting the matches into the pocket of my jeans. “I think it’s something to do with the virus trying to keep the host body from rotting quicker. When it rains, the zombies seek shelter.”
“So they have a weakness,” she whispered, almost to herself.
When the area was clear, we opened the access door and walked along the corridor, through the spray of water, to the elevators. The bodies of the security guards had almost been picked clean, their bones clearly visible. I had been right; the spines had been ripped out and were missing. The chill that ran through my body had nothing to do with the coldness of the water that was raining down on us.
We found the lab that Hart had told us contained the H1NZ1 at the end of the corridor. Sam opened the door with his access card and we went inside.
The lab was large, clinically clean, and smelled strongly of bleach. The white tiles and stainless steel surfaces shone beneath the overhead lights. The sprinklers weren’t on in here; the system was smart enough to know that the “fire” was in the fourth floor corridor. The alarm was still ringing outside, but with the door closed, it sounded far away.
I turned to Doctor Colbert. “Do you know where the H1NZ1 is kept?”
She nodded. “In the supply room there.” She pointed to a doorway that led into a smaller room of shelves stacked with plastic containers and cardboard boxes. “I don’t understand. What are you doing here, and what do you want with the H1NZ1?”
“We’re from Site Alpha One,” I said as we went to the supply room. “We’ve come to collect the H1NZ1 because the scientists there need it.”
“Site Alpha One is still in operation?” she asked. “Being on an island they would have more chance of survival, but there was a cross-contamination of both sites because staff moved between them as required. When we lost contact with them, we thought the site had been overrun.”
“They had problems,” I said, “but the building is secure.”
“And the labs are still running?” she asked.
“Yes. That’s why they want the H1NZ1; the scientists at Alpha One have worked out a way to make an antivirus from it.”
We entered the room and Colbert went to a shelf that held hundreds of small metallic boxes. “It’s in here,”
she said. “Each box holds a single vial.” As we began loading them into our backpacks, she said, “That means they’ve been working on the problem all this time. At Site Alpha One, I mean. We thought that after the vaccine failed to work properly, and the zombies and hybrids took over this building, that was the end of everything. I had no idea they had developed an antivirus.”
“Yeah, apparently they have,” I said, stuffing handfuls of the metallic boxes into my pack. They were light enough that I could hardly tell they had anything inside. “But we need to get this stuff to them so they can produce it.”
Tears appeared in her eyes. “I thought everything had been destroyed. I thought that all of our work had ended. I was waiting to die and all this time, Alpha One was still operational and working on a solution. Do you people work for the security firm?”
Sam grunted and then said, “No, we don’t work for those fuckers at all.”
Colbert looked confused. “I don’t understand. You’re doing this for them but you don’t work for them?”
“We were coerced into coming here,” Jax said. She had filled her pack and slung it over her shoulder. “If we don’t get these chemicals back to Alpha One, we’re all going to become hybrids.”
Colbert looked shocked. “They let you get bitten?”
Sam rolled his eyes. “Worse than that, man. They injected us with the fucking virus.”
“Oh, my God,” she said with a tremor in her voice. “You’re not ill so you must have been injected with the pure strain. What color was it? It’s very important that you remember.”
“It was pale blue,” I said.
“When were you injected?”
“A few hours ago,” I said.
She nodded. “We must get these vials to Site Alpha One immediately.”
“They’re sending a chopper to pick us up the day after tomorrow,” Jax said.
Colbert shook her head. “No, that’s much too late. We need to go now.”
“We can’t,” I said. “They won’t be back here until 1300 hours on Tuesday. We can’t change that.”
“No, you don’t understand,” she protested. “You’ve been injected with the pure strain. You don’t have that much time.”
“Look, lady,” Sam said, “We know it takes four days to turn into a hybrid. They gave us the pure blue shit so that we won’t get sick in the meantime. It’s all under control.”
She marched out of the supply room and into the lab, leaning on the edge of a steel table as if to steady herself. “Listen to me very closely. Please. The people at Alpha One don’t know what an injection of the pure strain does. We hypothesized that a vaccinated person who received a dose of the pure version of the virus would turn into a Type 3 in four days. It was all theory.”
“Type 3?” Jax asked.
“Yes, Type 3.” Colbert went to a whiteboard on the wall, picked up a marker and wrote “Type 1” near the top. Below that, she wrote “Type 2”, and below that “Type 3”.
“What you call a hybrid is a Type 3,” she said, pointing at the bottom of the board. She wrote the word “vaccine” next to Type 3.
Pointing to the middle of the board, where she had written Type 2, she said, “The Type 2 is the undead zombie.” She wrote the words “No vaccine” and “bite”.
“When we were still in contact with Site Alpha One, we had a joint project to produce a pure strain of the virus. This is not the serum that Vess injected into himself; it’s the result of that serum combining with the H1N1 flu virus that was already present in his body. We wanted to be able to produce the pure virus so that we could study it and look for a way to kill it.
“At the time, the question came up of how this pure strain would react with the faulty vaccine that causes hybrids. We decided that it would have the same effect as the virus that is transmitted by a bite and the victim would become a hybrid. But because of the absence of some impurities that are transmitted from the biter to the victim, we decided that the transformation into a Type 3 wouldn’t involve the usual four-day sickness.”
“So there’s nothing to worry about,” Sam said.
“We were wrong,” Doctor Colbert said. “After the two sites lost contact with each other, we did some further studies here at Alpha Two. We went beyond simple theory and performed a series of experiments in this lab to find out what would happen if a vaccinated person were injected with the pure strain of the virus.
“The experiments had no real-world application; we didn’t think anyone would actually ever be injected with the virus—why would they? But scientific curiosity drove us to seek answers anyway. The results were conclusive; the vaccine has no effect whatsoever on the pure virus.”
Next to “Type 1” on the board, she wrote the word “Pure”.
“So that is how we classify the infected. When the virus is transmitted by a bite or scratch to an unvaccinated person, that person dies, and a Type 2 is created. A zombie. Add the vaccine into the mix, and that creates a victim who remains alive, but becomes driven by a homicidal rage. That is a Type 3. A hybrid.”
She pointed at the top of the board. “But if someone is injected with the pure virus, they become a Type 1. At the moment, there is only one Type 1 in existence…Vess.”
“So if we don’t get the antivirus that this H1NZ1 is needed for, we’ll become like him?” Jax asked.
Doctor Colbert nodded.
“Okay,” I said, “But we’re going to be given the antivirus when we get back to Alpha One, so why panic?”
“Tell me exactly when you were injected with the pure virus. What time was it?” Colbert asked.
I shrugged. “I didn’t check my watch.”
“It was eight thirty,” Jax said. “There was a clock in the room, and I noticed it said eight thirty.”
On the whiteboard, Colbert wrote “Introduction of virus: 2030 hrs Sunday.” She drew a vertical line beneath the words and asked, “What time is your rendezvous with the people from Alpha One?”
I told her, and she wrote “1300 hrs. Tuesday” at the bottom of the vertical line.
She said, “That would be plenty of time if you had been bitten, or if our original theories about the pure virus were correct. You’d be able to return to Alpha One and receive the antivirus with time to spare. From the time you were injected, you would have ninety-six hours before becoming a Type 3.”
“You’re saying we don’t have that long,” I said.
Shaking her head, she drew a horizontal line halfway up the vertical line and wrote “2230 hrs. Monday” next to it.
“The people who injected you were working on outdated information regarding the pure strain of the virus. This is when you’ll turn,” she said. “Tomorrow night at ten thirty. You don’t have anywhere near the ninety-six hours that the people at Alpha One thought you’d have. The pure virus works much faster than that.”
She checked the clock on the wall. “You have twenty-four hours left.”
14
“I don’t fucking believe this,” Sam said, throwing his backpack to the floor. “I knew we’d get screwed over by those fuckers on Apocalypse Island.” He paced back and forth along the length of the lab, muttering to himself.
“They didn’t know anything about it,” I reminded him. “They thought that everything they told us about the virus was correct.”
“Just shut the fuck up, Alex.”
I decided to let him work out his anger issues by himself. I didn’t want another punch to the gut.
Jax was standing by the window, looking out at the rainy night. I went over to her. “Hey, are you okay?”
She nodded but didn’t say anything.
“We’ll get through this,” I said. I didn’t really believe those words, not at that moment. We were only twenty-four hours from becoming creatures like the thing in the vents.
Jax sighed. “I don’t think so. Not this time, Alex. I’m going to die not knowing if my boyfriend is still alive or not. I’ll never know what happened to him. And he’ll
never know what happened to me.”
“Don’t think like that,” I said. “This isn’t over yet.” I was trying to reassure Jax but I was in exactly the same situation; if I didn’t get that antivirus, and turned in twenty-four hours, I would never know what had become of Joe and my parents. Lucy’s fate, on the other hand, was certain; she would turn. I guessed that the guards at Alpha One would kill her once she ceased being a human being. Hart’s wife, Kate, would suffer the same fate.
An idea came into my head. It was probably too late for me, but if I could get my backpack full of H1NZ1 to the rendezvous site, Hart would find it and take it back to Apocalypse Island. Lucy and Kate could be saved, even if we couldn’t.
Jax reached inside her T-shirt and pulled on the thin gold chain she wore around her neck. “Derek gave me this,” she said. “He asked me to marry him.” A diamond engagement ring hung from the chain, sparkling in the lab’s artificial light. “I never wore it because I couldn’t decide if I was going to say yes. I was an idiot. I should have said yes without even a second thought. I didn’t realize how precious our time together was. I didn’t know it was going to end so suddenly.” Her shoulders began to hitch. I put my arms around her and let her cry against my chest.
I liked Jax. At times, she seemed to be the most vulnerable person in the group, and that was endearing. Even though she could be damn tough sometimes, she wasn’t in the same league as Tanya. Jax showed her softer side sometimes, and the fact that she wasn’t afraid to show it made me like her even more.
It felt good to hold another person, even if it was someone I really didn’t know. In the midst of death, destruction, and a countdown to our own demise, there was comfort in the touch of another human being.
The moment was ruined when Sam kicked a steel worktable with the toe of his boot. The sound reverberated through the lab.
Undead Rain Trilogy Box Set Page 37
