Everyone was looking at me expectantly as I finished the last page, my mind churning with possibilities. “And?” Richards asked simply, but I was sure he was ready to wring my neck if I didn’t spit it out the very next second.
“They didn’t find a cure,” I offered, choosing the simplest version first. “But they were close to finalizing a version of the serum that came with most of the benefits yet without the final conversion.” I paused, tempted to keep my trap shut, but then barfed up the rest. “They also managed to, accidentally for the most part, generate a super-charged version.”
Davis snorted at the face I was making. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“None of the subjects they tested it on survived past sixty hours post inoculation,” I explained. “And they all went crazy way before that. Not really a good trade if you ask me.”
I got several solemn nods for that. Nate latched on to a different part of my statement. “I take it they didn’t test it on rats?”
I shook my head, grimacing. “Five test subjects, five negative results. There’s also a side note that makes me guess that they kept them afterward and put them in a single cell and watched which one would be the sole survivor, if you want to call it that. Number three, if you were wondering.”
“That means—” Red started, but I finished for him before he could.
“That means that whoever was running this facility was very aware of the trials, and likely also the materials used and took samples. There’s a chance that none of that made it out of this facility, but it’s not something that remained between Miller and Andrada. Hell, part of that could be the reason why it’s possible that we convert if you get in contact with the original activated virus. I also have no clue what she did after Miller died. I’d love to believe that she continued trying to hunt for a cure but the fact that they turned it all into a deathmatch makes me think that whoever funded this was way more interested in weaponizing it. Without the human trials, they might have kept this on the down-low, but not like this.” And who knew who else was aware of this? After all, Bucky had pretty much told me to my face that I didn’t know everything about what he was here to get.
Maybe I would do the world a favor if I somehow managed to shut us all in here and drowned us in peroxide and formaldehyde? The answer was likely a resounding “yes.”
Richards looked less disturbed than was good for my psyche. Nate gave me a considering look that let me know he was considering where to plant the explosives, right on track with my own reasoning. Burns tried hard to pretend he wasn’t considering the ramifications but the way he kept inching toward the door made it obvious that it only took a breath from me or Nate, and he’d help us do away with the other three to enact whatever plan we were hedging.
“So not exactly good news?” Red summed up what I’d said.
“It’s not all bad,” I admitted. “Actually, I think they were closer to finding the cure than they thought. I’d need to check her notes—if they are on that laptop—but I think that Miller was right with his initial assessment.”
“Which is?” Finally, a thread of exasperation appeared in Richards’s voice. So he was human after all.
I shrugged, but there was no sense denying it—and who knew, maybe this would turn into an extension of my lease on life? “That if he hired me, I’d be able to fit that last missing piece into their puzzle.” That sounded way less modest than it had in my head, making me smirk. “I’m not blowing my own horn. They both were experts in their own fields. I was beginning to be one in mine. Miller never confirmed it, but I got the job offer from Green Fields Biotech after I’d shared the later stages of my thesis with him—sounds realistic that he figured my knowledge could complement theirs.”
“But you can’t tell right now what’s missing,” Red stressed.
I couldn’t help but cock my head to the side and regard him suspiciously. “And I probably wouldn’t tell you if I did. Not as long as we’re pretty much stranded in the middle of a shambler nightmare on the other side of the world. But I’m feeling generous right now so here’s an honest answer: Not right now, but I have some ideas from the notes Hamilton gave me to go over when we stayed with the French. And right there in these letters are a few more clues, ones that are missing from her official notes. Given enough time, I might come up with some theories. One of them might just be the one.”
Richards nodded, ignoring how exactly I phrased my answer, talking in suggestions rather than absolutes. He looked at the stack of letters next, considering.
“Are you going to take them to Emily? I’m sure she’d be extra nice to you if you dropped those in her lap,” I cooed.
I got a look that was shy of an attempt on my life for that—almost worthy of Nate but not quite getting there—but Richards finally grabbed the letters to store them away in his pack. “I’m sure that Dr. Raynor will appreciate getting a look at them,” he agreed, very levelly.
“Oh, come on! I’ve been horny as fuck because of that damn booster you shot me up with. The least you owe me is no more bullshit like that. We all know you two are a thing. No worries, nobody’s gonna judge you for having a thing for strong, older women who could eat you for dinner if they wanted to.”
If I’d sprouted a second head, Richards would have looked less taken aback. Nate allowed himself the hint of a grin but gave me a warning look, silently telling me that Red wasn’t necessarily the one I should antagonize. Burns was grinning outright, and Munez had a hard time not choking on his chuckle. Davis bit back a bark of laughter before turning to Burns. “Is she always like that? Because I’m starting to feel like I’ve missed out on a lot since deciding not to go with you bunch of idiots.” He had been one of Nate’s guys for his mission to avenge his brother but had decided to throw his lot in with Bucky when given the choice.
Burns was only too happy to enlighten him about his loss. “Pretty much. She usually doesn’t accept anyone’s authority, but that’s Miller’s fault—he pretty much beat his standards into her, and more often than not he can’t hold to that himself. She doesn’t accept authority, and don’t even think about pulling rank on her. I’m not sure she even has a clue how ranks and hierarchy work.”
There, I had to interject. “I’d think twice before antagonizing Zilinsky.”
Burns guffawed. “Yeah, because you’re not suicidal, and she’s as much of a role model for ruthless behavior as you’re ever going to accept.” No objection there, so Burns turned back to Davis. “Usually, it’s pretty fun. Until some asshole or another gets cute and abducts and locks her up, and then it’s all bloody murder on the warpath.”
Again, I couldn’t let that slide. “That wasn’t entirely my idea, either,” I pointed out. “And I didn’t hear any of you big, strong men object.”
Burns shrugged as if that was all the same to him, continuing with, “Actually, I don’t remember the last time she was as agreeable as she is nowadays. Might even go as far as saying that I don’t quite buy it, but hey, I could be wrong. She can be a highly reasonable, logic-driven woman. And it’s not like someone shot her up with a chemical cocktail that’s been known to give her delusions of grandeur and gets the adrenaline junkie in her to take over the steering wheel. Then again, Lewis without a filter is always worth it, so I say, who cares if we’re all going to die down here. At least we’ll do so laughing.”
Davis looked more concerned than I’d expected. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’m sure that Hamilton was well aware of any side effects. Well, not all of them, but those that I’ve openly exhibited in the past. But he must have reasoned that it’s all the same and he needs every ounce of strength any of us can muster so anyone will survive what’s coming for us, so it’s all good.”
His eyes only got wider. “Do you know something the rest of us don’t?” Munez and Richards had mostly listened in silently until now, but that question made them look up sharply. Nate himself seemed a little disturbed, which made me want to laugh him in the face. Di
d no one ever listen to me?
“Know? No. But didn’t you just hear me tell you about the experiments they do down here? I don’t know for a fact—because how could I?—but I’m telling you, they had some other experiments going on when they shut down the facility, or they started a last round just for the hell of it, and the test subjects of those experiments are still very much alive. They must be really, really hungry by now, even if they went after each other. Every single shambler we’ve encountered out there has been a pack hunter, and those super freaks they’ve created will be, too. They are hungry, and they’ve culled down their pack to the strongest ones, and the moment we let our guard down, they will be coming for us. The only question is, will any of us survive so I can tell you that I told you so?” And just for a second, I was sure that he believed me.
Richards cleared his throat, making all of us look at him. “Paranoia’s also among her strongest character traits,” he observed.
I smiled, letting all of them make of that what they wished.
Red seemed poised to say more but then tensed, not reaching up to his ear like people did in bad movies, but it was obvious that he’d gotten a message over his com. I hadn’t, and from what I could tell, neither had the others. “Why do they have a command frequency and we’re not on it?” I harped in Nate’s general direction.
“Because we’re not in command,” he repeated the statement that Bucky so loved to rub in my face, his voice flat.
My possible answer got cut off when Richards reported, his eyes straying to me for a second, “No, we didn’t find anything, just a laptop.” Pause. “We’re about done here. Proceeding to the other offices now.” Another pause. “Copy.”
I waited until Richards looked to me once more before I observed, “My, my. Lying to our most esteemed leader. I wonder what he’d think of that if he knew?” Then I turned around and gave Burns a nod. “Lead the way, big guy. If you want to keep laughing your ass off at my shenanigans, you better keep me alive.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Burns offered with a huge grin but his attention was already on the corridor outside—and I didn’t miss that he not only checked twice, but also looked at the ceiling far longer than he had on the way over here.
Well, here was hoping that I was really only rocking a tad too much paranoia—but I really didn’t think so. And damnit, I’d hate to be right this time.
Chapter 13
As expected, the offices of Drs. Nakamuri and Dale were a bust, but at least they were close to the common area in the level below so we didn’t have far to go once the order came to haul ass there. I didn’t bother asking what Hamilton and his group had been up to in the meantime although I was burning to know. My body was singing with the need to burn off some energy any way possible, but physically attacking that asshole to try to beat the answer out of him didn’t seem wise—not even now when I felt like my chances were five percent higher than before at managing the feat. Not for winning, but doing some real damage.
That still didn’t mean that I was looking forward to what was next on our agenda.
But first, a detour to the bioreactors.
“Do we have any confirmation yet why the lab shut down?” I asked Hamilton as I followed him down the corridor leading toward the labs, but taking a straight at the intersection where the left turn would have brought us to the security checkpoint behind where the more interesting labs were. Someone had already gotten busy spraying arrows and Xs all over the hallway, and it felt just a little foreboding that we stepped over one of the “no go” signs.
Hamilton didn’t deign to look my way as he shook his head. “Cole is still trying to recover some backup files. He said the primary logs have become corrupted.”
“Or someone deleted them, manually,” I opined.
Now I did get a sidelong glance. “You mean your super-juiced experimental lab monkeys who are about to eat us alive?”
I wondered who else had been listening in to our conversations in that doctor’s office—or whether Munez or Davis had tattled on me. Munez, probably; Davis had looked sincere in the slight regret he’d shown when he’d asked about my usual MO. That alone wouldn’t have been enough to chalk him up as still sympathetic to Nate—and us, by extension—but it had only been the latest moment in a string of more moments, going on Burns’s assessment. I still didn’t quite understand why he had started trying to judge the soldiers’ reactions to us—knowing their allegiance was nice, sure, but wouldn’t make a difference in the end.
“Very funny,” I grumbled, then went on, artificially upbeat. “Or it could have been those eco warrior terrorists who, you know, kicked off the zombie apocalypse two weeks later, yay! Would make sense that they cleaned up after themselves, including deleting all data on the central servers. Might also explain what happened to any dead bodies in here. I don’t think they would have left anyone alive.”
Hamilton was still smirking—of course he didn’t believe me. “And not leave the bodies for the super-juiced experimental lab monkeys to dispose of them?”
“Well,” I started, considering. “They could have managed to delete the files, and then gotten killed. Sounds like a good compromise to me.”
“Will you finally shut up if a super-juiced freak comes charging at you?”
I considered that for a second. “I’ll likely scream like a girl when that happens.”
“When,” Hamilton echoed, derision dripping from his voice.
“Yes, when,” I repeated. “Do I get a cookie when that happens? One of those contaminated, sugary ones?”
Hamilton left it at a grunt, but I could tell that he wasn’t taking me seriously. Nothing I could do about that, but since we were at the security checkpoint for the bioreactors, I had other things to do, like let my eyes be tickled once again.
“I think I was wrong,” I mused as I waited for Munez, Davis, and Russell to clear the corridor up ahead. “I don’t think we’ll find anything useful left over in the tanks.” That Bucky didn’t jeer right in my face kind of underlined my guess. “I mean, there’s no evidence that anyone breached or took over this lab. And I don’t quite see how they could have gotten anything out after it was sealed. So the contents of the tanks are likely whatever’s in the log. But then you knew this already, didn’t you?”
Hamilton regarded me evenly before he extended a hand toward the door. “After you.”
While the others filed out and checked for any hostiles, I went over to the terminal by the door to check the—bona fide paper—logbook. As I’d expected, all three tanks had been full of yeast, doing… yeasty things. I couldn’t make sense of the designations of the strains and what they had been producing but one thing was obvious at a glance—this had nothing whatsoever to do with our objective. When I told Hamilton as much, I got a raised eyebrow from him. “And you’re sure about that?”
I nodded. “They were likely producing large-scale stuff for other experiments in here. What we’re looking for is all viral. I can, of course, waste half an hour to get into a suit and directly check on what’s in those tanks, but that’s thirty minutes of time we’ll be missing for whatever is actually your primary objective. You only went in here to humor me, didn’t you?”
The look on his face was surprisingly unreadable, but for once not hostile. “Negative confirmation is still confirmation,” he said rather cryptically. “We need to make sure.”
I was burning to object, but instead went on the com. “Cole? Does the bioreactor lab have electricity?”
A few seconds later I got confirmation. “All systems are on standby or down, and there’s an entire log full of warnings, but everything is still operational.”
I nodded, mostly to myself, and went over to the other workstation by the window that, were the lights inside switched on, would let us see the massive steel tanks in their level-spanning space. It took several minutes for the station to boot up, and a few more for the system to be operational. Then it was just a few clicks and some mechanical whines that made
everyone currently lazing around really alarmed, and my work was done. Grabbing a plastic bag from besides the station, I went over to where the automated system had deposited the three 50ml samples full of what looked like puke, containing the long-overgrown and dead yeast cultures that had last been cultivated in the tanks. Hamilton looked at me weirdly as I handed the bag to him. “What, disappointed that I didn’t have to strip naked? Here are your samples. I wouldn’t open them outside of a containment box. That shit will stink to high heaven, but it’s likely safe.”
“Likely?” Munez, next to Hamilton, asked, highly concerned.
“Well, there’s flesh-eating yeasts as well, but from the log those should all be your garden variety lab yeast. You could also use it to brew beer or bake a cake, but I wouldn’t use that batch.” I glanced at the bag that was right now disappearing into Hamilton’s pack.
Done—and still not giving me an answer—Hamilton called everyone back who wasn’t already securing the endless maze of corridors between the single labs. They were all biosafety levels one and two out there so minimal barriers—for anything moving in there on two legs. I lingered at the log for another moment, quickly checking on the previous entries but—of course—finding nothing suspicious. This was getting weirder and weirder by the moment, and that was ignoring the blood splatters outside and the general state the facility was in. Something was wrong here, and I absolutely didn’t want to find out what.
We retraced our steps to the last intersection before we turned toward the BSL-4 labs. The sample collection had taken just over twenty minutes—plenty of time for ten people to make sure nothing was lurking in the roughly fifty rooms around three hallways, the central one being that of the most interest to us now. It looked just like the others; the security station at the end of it did not. It was a three-component checkpoint that needed not just my iris scan but also a manual override from the local console, and some five-minute server-side magic Gita finally managed to pull off. I tried to remain outwardly calm but couldn’t keep my pulse from picking up as we stepped into the airlock. This was it—the reason why we were here. One of the last remaining treasure troves of scientific advancement. Potentially, the keys to the kingdom. Then why did a part of me pray that what we’d come here to fetch simply didn’t exist?
Green Fields (Book 9): Exodus Page 19
