We reached the glass doors, and Sam swiped his card through the lock on the wall. The doors slid open with a gentle whisper. The air that drifted out between them smelled foul.
“Ready?” Sam asked. Jax nodded. I didn’t feel like I would ever be ready, but I nodded, too.
We slipped into the building like thieves in the night.
Chapter Twelve
We crossed the reception area quickly, looking all around for any sign of movement. It was as quiet as a tomb.
The walkie-talkie crackled through the silence. “We can see you on the camera,” Tanya said. “Everything looks okay.”
I glanced up at the camera set high on the wall, its red light blinking. Under any other circumstances, I might have waved, but I felt too tense to do anything more than press the button on my walkie-talkie and say, “We’re heading for the elevators.”
We reached the three closed metal doors. Jax pushed the button and it lit up green, an upward-pointing arrow indicating the direction we would be traveling.
“Come on,” Sam muttered, pacing nervously. “Where is the fucking thing? It’s not like anyone else in here is using them.”
We heard the elevator arrive behind the middle door, clanking noisily. The doors slid open and we stepped inside. A recorded female voice said, “Going up.”
Sam hit the button for the fourth floor. The doors slid closed.
“Tanya,” I said into the walkie-talkie, “we’re going up to the fourth floor. Is it clear?” I had wanted to ask her that question before we were on our way—that was the idea of having them check the camera feeds, after all—but Sam had pressed the button without thinking.
“I think so,” she said. “Johnny, check the level four elevators.” Then she said, “Shit. No, it’s not clear. There are nasties in the corridor.”
I looked at the illuminated numbers over the door. The third floor came and went quickly. The next floor was the fourth. I hit the button for the fifth floor, knowing the elevator was going to stop at the fourth, but hoping it would proceed faster if it had another floor to go to.
Sam leveled the MP5 at the closed doors. “Don’t worry, I’ve got this.”
“Don’t shoot if you don’t have to,” I said. “We don’t want to make any noise that will attract that thing in the vents.”
He nodded but didn’t lower the weapon. “I’ll only shoot if I have to.”
The recorded voice said, “Fourth floor,” and the doors slid apart. The corridor, which had been empty when we’d left the guard station, was teeming with zombies. Even though they were a few yards from the elevator, the stench of their rotting flesh hit me like a putrid fist.
They turned to face us, a collective moan rising from their hideous dead mouths as they sensed living prey. As I repeatedly hit the button to close the doors, I estimated there to be at least twenty nasties. Where had they come from so quickly, and why were they here?
I realized then that the stench was not only coming from the zombies; the dead, eviscerated security guards lay on the floor a few feet from the elevator door. The scene had looked bad enough in black and white on a screen; it looked a thousand times worse up close and personal.
It looked like the guards’ spines had been ripped from their bodies. Their uniforms and the flesh beneath were torn open in a ragged line from the backs of their necks to their buttocks. The bodies sagged unnaturally, making me sure that the spine was gone. But with all the blood and organs everywhere, it was impossible to tell for sure.
The zombies lurched toward us.
“Get us out of here, man,” Sam said.
I jabbed at the button marked “5” over and over. “The elevator’s too fucking slow,” I said.
Sam began shooting. In the steel elevator car, the noise was deafening. Every sound in my ears became muffled except for a sudden high-pitched ringing. Sam continued to fire, the MP5 jerking in his hand as it shot bullet after bullet into the mass of advancing, rotting flesh. A mottled blue hand reached in through the door. I hit it with my baseball bat but the lack of space to swing the bat meant I had to jerk the bat at the hand as if I was playing cricket, slamming the fingers into the steel wall above the elevator’s control panel.
Jax used her own bat to push the zombies’ face out of the elevator as the doors began to slide shut.
We went up to the fifth floor.
“Tanya, what’s the fifth floor like?” I asked quickly into the walkie-talkie.
“Clear,” she said as the doors opened and the disembodied female voice, sounding muffled in my ringing ears, announced, “Fifth floor.”
We stepped out into the corridor, weapons ready. The rooms on this level appeared to be offices. Some of the doors had metallic nameplates on them. I saw one that said, “Administration”, and another that read, “Personnel”.
“We need to find somewhere safe where we can discuss what to do next,” I said. There was no way we were going down to the labs on the floor below until that zombie horde moved somewhere else. I wondered if they had been attracted by the smell of the dead bodies by the elevator. If so, they would feed, and then hang around the area until something stimulated them to move. That was going to be a problem.
Sam opened a door that was marked as belonging to a Doctor David Laurie, looked inside, and waved us over. We entered the office, which was decorated with light blue walls and a darker blue carpet. One wall was lined with a bookshelf. The books were mainly thick hardbacks with titles that looked like they related to chemistry. A light wooden desk with a computer, mouse, and keyboard sat near a window. I looked out at the view of the compound and the rolling hills beyond. The rain had smeared the glass, making the outside world seem unreal.
“What are we going to do now?” Jax asked.
Sam shrugged. “I don’t know, man.”
I leaned against the desk, wondering how we were going to get to the labs. “We need those zombies out of the way,” I said.
“No shit, Sherlock.” Sam rolled his eyes and started to read the titles of the books on the wall.
The walkie-talkie crackled. It was Johnny’s voice that came over the airwaves, his smooth tone reminding me of when Lucy and I used to listen to him on Survivor Radio. I wished I was on the deck of The Big Easy now, dancing to some tune Johnny had chosen, instead of here in this facility where the virus that had destroyed the world had been created. “Alex, there’s someone walking along the corridor on your level.”
“Who is it?” I whispered into the walkie-talkie.
“It’s that woman we saw earlier, the one with the broken glasses. She’s near the elevators again.”
Sam went to the door, opening it quietly. “She’s there,” he whispered. “She’s not a zombie or anything.”
I remembered the way she had been staring vacantly as she walked, her broken glasses hanging from her face. If she wasn’t a nasty, then she had probably lost her mind. Still, she knew this place. She might be able to help us in some way.
“We could talk to her,” I suggested to Sam.
He nodded and was about to walk out into the corridor when he suddenly stopped. His eyes widened as he saw something out there. Then he stepped back into the office and closed the door.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
His voice came out as a whisper. “Something took her, man. Something that moved so fast I barely even saw it.”
Jax took the Desert Eagle from her holster and held it loosely in her right hand. Her hand was trembling, making the gun shake in her grip.
Sam backed away from the wooden door slowly, keeping the MP5 steady. “If it comes in here, I’m going to blast it,” he whispered.
We stood in the office silently, waiting. I realized I was holding my breath. I wanted to contact Tanya and Johnny on the walkie-talkie but didn’t dare make a sound. I was thankful that they had the good sense not to talk to us. The crackling from the walkie-talkie would alert anything in the corridor to our presence.
The rain beat on the wi
ndow as if it were counting off the passing seconds.
“Do you think it’s gone?” Jax whispered.
I shrugged. I could imagine it standing outside the door, waiting patiently for us to step out into the corridor. My fingers brushed lightly over the butt of the Desert Eagle at my hip. If the thing out there moved as fast as Sam said it did, I wouldn’t even have time to use the gun on myself before I was torn apart like those security guards by the elevators.
I remembered that it moved through the air vents, and frantically looked for the vent in this office, breathing a sigh of relief when I saw that it was barely big enough for a rat to crawl through. The larger vents in the building were probably only in the corridors, labs, and bigger rooms like the meeting room where we had seen the dead hybrids on the monitors.
I didn’t know how long we had been standing there when the walkie-talkie crackled.
It was Tanya. “It’s moved away from your location. It’s on level three. We just saw it run past one of the cameras there.”
I breathed another sigh of relief. “We have to get that chemical and get out of here as soon as we can,” I said. “Hart said that patient zero had become something more dangerous than a hybrid but he didn’t say it was so fast.
“He probably didn’t know,” Jax said. “They would only know what the people here at Alpha Two told them. Most people who knew how fast that creature was probably didn’t live to tell the tale.” She put the Desert Eagle back into her holster. “But I agree that we need to get the hell out of here as soon as we can. This place is much more dangerous than we thought.”
“So what do we do, man?” Sam asked. “There’s a shitload of zombies right outside the lab where the H1 is. If we go down there and start shooting, that thing might hear us and come to check out what’s making all the noise. Then we’re fucked.”
I looked out of the window at the dark, rainy night as if it might offer some inspiration. It didn’t. We couldn’t just stay in this office all night; we had to make a move. Each passing second we spent in this building could too easily be our last, and my nerves were so fraught I felt like I might snap at any moment and make a mad dash for the exit.
It became all too clear why Hart had injected us with the virus; he had sent us somewhere so dangerous that any sane person would abandon the mission and run for safety. I would never do that because of Lucy, but the others would and I couldn’t blame them. By injecting us with the virus, Hart was forcing us to see this mission through to the end. We had to ignore every survival instinct in our body that told us to get the hell out of Dodge. Because failing the mission would kill us anyway. We would become monsters.
So let’s get it done, I told myself. There has to be a way to get that chemical.
My thoughts were interrupted when the door opened. I spun around, bringing my bat up, ready to fight. When I saw the woman who walked into the office, I lowered it.
She was in her fifties, with blonde hair that was cut short in a pixie style, and blue eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses. Her white blouse and tweed skirt made me think she was an office worker rather than a scientist, but she wore a nametag that said she was Doctor Lisa Colbert. She looked at Jax and me as she entered the room, but she didn’t react to us other than to say, “This is Dave’s office.” It was said as a matter-of-fact statement rather than an accusation regarding our presence here.
“Doctor Colbert,” I said gently, “We didn’t know there were any survivors here. Is there anyone else alive in this place?”
She pondered for a moment and then shook her head. “No, only me. Nobody else made it. Vess got them all.”
“What are you talking about?” Jax asked. “Who is Vess?”
Doctor Colbert turned her eyes to Jax. “Vess.” She said the name in a hushed tone, as if she were afraid to speak it too loudly.
Sam raised an eyebrow. “This is bullshit. She’s crazier than a box of frogs.”
“Doctor Colbert, who is Vess?” I asked her, ignoring Sam.
“Vess,” she whispered, turning to me, her eyes wide. Her gaze seemed to become far away, and I wondered if Sam was right and she had lost her mind. It would be understandable, being the sole survivor in a building full of monsters. She had probably known most of the people who were now roaming the corridors in various states of decay before they had become zombies. What would that do to someone’s mind, to be hunted by creature that used to be friends and acquaintances?
She turned to the door and waved for us to follow her.
“I’m not following some crazy scientist,” Sam said.
“Wait here, then,” I told him. “She’s survived for this long, maybe she knows something we don’t about the building. I want to see what she’s going to show us”
“Probably her collection of dismembered dolls,” Sam muttered, following us out into the corridor despite his announcement that he wasn’t going anywhere.
I pressed the button on the walkie-talkie. “Is level five clear?”
“Looks clear,” Tanya said. “The nasties are all over those bodies on level four.”
“Let me know if they move away. We need to get to that lab.”
“Will do. Where’s that woman taking you?”
“I’m not sure.” I lowered my voice so that Doctor Colbert couldn’t hear me. “She may just be crazy, or she might know something about what happened here. Probably a little of both.”
“Be careful, Alex.”
“Of course.”
Doctor Colbert led us to an office door bearing the name Doctor Marcus Vess. She opened the door and stepped inside, gesturing for us to follow.
The office was identical to Doctor Laurie’s office, even down to the books on the shelf, which I was sure from the unpronounceable titles were the same ones as on Laurie’s shelves.
Doctor Colbert took a seat behind the desk and typed something on the keyboard. Turning the screen so we could all see it, she pointed at a picture of a dark-haired man in his thirties, dressed in a shirt and tie beneath a white lab coat, looking at the camera. He seemed to be in this office at the time. The image was actually a video. “This is Doctor Marcus Vess,” Colbert said. She pressed the play icon and Vess began to speak to the camera.
“This is a historic day,” he said. “The lab trials of the serum have been inconclusive on mice and rats, but I know that’s only because I developed it to combat CJD in human beings. Animal testing will never show us what can be achieved. The only way to do that is to perform a human trial. I spoke to Akers about it, but she has requested more testing in the lab before we even think about injecting the serum into a human being, even someone who has Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and is willing to take part in a trial. She says we can’t go ahead until we’re sure how the serum behaves in the human body.”
He paused to look out of his window. Sunlight streamed into the office, brightening the pale blue wall behind him. “How can we be sure until we administer it to a patient? If I don’t get results soon, I’ll lose my funding for this project and they’ll put me to work on something else. I’m making a breakthrough here, but Akers can’t see it because she’s too busy attending board meetings and making decisions that she has no right to make.”
Leaning in closer to the camera, he lowered his voice. “I’m going to inject myself with the serum today. Akers needs to be shown that it’s perfectly harmless in humans. Once she realizes that, we can move the project forward. It’s been delayed enough as it is.” He reached forward, and the video ended.
Doctor Colbert used the mouse to bring up another video. This one was recorded in a bedroom. Vess was sitting at the edge of the bed, dressed only in boxers, looking like he had a bad case of the flu. His eyes were bloodshot, his face drawn and tired. When he spoke, he sounded like his sinuses were blocked. “I made a mistake. I didn’t realize I was coming down with the flu when I injected the serum. It’s been going around the facility, so I should have been more wary of the possibility that I’d caught it. If it wasn’t for A
kers and her deadlines, I’d have waited.” He looked angrily at the camera.
“I think the serum is reacting with the flu virus. The vascularity in my arms is very pronounced.” He raised his arm to show the camera that the veins beneath the skin in his arm were dark and prominent.
“This has nothing to do with the serum,” he said. “I’m having a bad reaction to it because of the flu, not because the serum itself is harmful in any way. Akers won’t believe that, of course. She’ll try to stop my funding. Well, she can fuck off. Everybody can just fuck off.” He got off the bed and stormed across the room, beyond the view of the camera. I heard something smash. Vess appeared again a moment later with bloody grazes on his fist. “It’s just the flu,” he said before switching off the camera.
“Wow,” Sam said. “It looks like this dude fucked up big time.”
Colbert looked at each of us. “Do you want to see the rest?”
“We know how this one ends,” Sam said.
“We still want to see some more,” I told her. I had been led to believe that the zombie virus had been developed in a government lab, but now it looked like a harmless serum had reacted with the flu virus in the outside world. There wasn’t some diabolical government plot to create monsters; the whole thing had just been a huge mistake.
Doctor Colbert brought up another video and pressed play. This one was filmed in the bedroom again. Vess looked bleary-eyed as he looked into the camera. Only his face and the collar of his shirt were visible. “I went out tonight. I don’t know why. I still feel ill, and I’ve not returned to work yet. But I remember thinking I needed to get some fresh air, and see other people.” He paused and looked down for a moment before facing the camera again. “That’s the last thing I remember. I must have blacked out. I don’t know where I went, or how I got back home. But something has happened.” He moved the camera back, revealing that his shirt was covered with blood. “I don’t think it’s mine,” he said. “I can’t remember what I’ve done.” The video ended.
“There’s one more,” Colbert said. “Vess came back here, saying he needed to be treated in our hospital. After he explained that he had injected himself with the serum he had developed for the treatment of CJD, he was taken to the hospital wing to be monitored.
Undead Rain (Book 3): Lightning (Fighting the Living Dead) Page 6
