“You should maybe run that one in two steps. Use one gel for the larger proteins, another with a different density for the smaller ones,” I advised.
“It’s… it’s just a control,” she offered, stammering. Turning from her back to the gel, I studied it again. There were clear similarities between some of the lanes, but the entire thing didn’t look particularly homogenous. I didn’t want to harass the poor woman any more than I already had, so I left it at that, retreating to the upper level where that folder in Stone’s office was like a beacon to me.
He looked up from the files he was perusing as he saw me duck through the door. “It’s right over here,” he said, not even questioning why I was dropping by. My eyes snagged to the dark green folder, but I tried to restrain myself a little longer.
“Are the results from the DNA analysis in yet? The PCRs you wanted to run, I mean,” I asked.
He looked confused for a moment, but then seemed to realize that I must be talking about our blood samples. “Any hour now, I’m sure,” he explained. “We ran the samples of the women and children you rescued first. As you probably already saw, our equipment is quite limited.”
“It’s okay. I’m just curious,” I replied. “Exactly what loci are you looking at, anyway? I don’t remember anyone here mentioning the specifics to me.”
The smile on his face grew. “Do you think that I actually know the first thing about that? They need to think that I know it all. You know better.”
That was cryptic enough that I decided that, right now, I didn’t really need to know.
“Have you come to a decision yet?” he asked as I was about to turn away.
I hesitated, my eyes snagging to the folder again. “I think so. I’m just not completely sure yet,” I admitted.
“Anything I can do to speed the process along?”
Mulling that over, I leaned against the doorjamb. “Not sure anyone can help me there. But thanks for asking. I really didn’t expect you to be so candid about everything.”
He made a sound low in his throat that I thought had started out as a laugh. “There are no sides to this anymore. Just us. I won’t hold it against you that you’ve retained the bias your associates seem to have about this project. And I get it. If someone working for a company had murdered my brother, I wouldn’t easily trust them or anyone associated with them, either. It just remains to hope that you as a rational scientist can rise above such petty squabbles.”
I was sure that Nate would have a field day with such a statement, but didn’t tell Stone that.
“Working on it. I’ll let you know tomorrow morning,” I promised.
“Perfect.”
After that, I went back into the lab proper, but I couldn’t help but feel like something had changed in the past few minutes. While I went through another stack of results from Ethan, I noticed the girl from downstairs ducking into Stone’s office, quickly closing the door behind her. I couldn’t hear them talk, but the blinds weren’t completely drawn and I could see her gesticulate wildly as she handed him a stack of papers. Stone’s face was out of my view, but when they both exited a few minutes later, the set of his shoulders was perfectly tense. That was something I was intimately familiar with. Something was going on, and I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.
“Who’s that woman?” I asked Ethan as I watched the girl disappear downstairs again, her head swiveling from left to right as if she was checking on her surroundings—never a good thing if it happened in a virology lab.
“Who? Oh, that’s Stace. She’s one of our techs. She usually does the groundwork stuff. Has a really calm hand so most of the analytic gels are done by her. And she’s a magician with the PCR machine. I swear, half the time when someone else runs that thing, she has to do it all over again because the results were useless.” As strange as that sounded, I knew—had known, rather, I reminded myself—a coworker who’d been like that, too. He’d usually done all the PCRs for the entire floor if the super-clear pictures were needed for publications. I had no idea how he’d done it—I’d watched him often enough—and how the simple fact that someone else did the same pipetting steps using the exact same protocols and materials could yield a better result was still beyond me. So much for science being the opposite of magic. In the end, we were all still alchemists cooking our stinking concoctions.
Remembering that anecdote almost made me ignore the actual information Ethan had just dropped, but with a little pause my mind caught on to it.
“Any idea what she’s working on right now?”
He shrugged. “Some protein gels, I think. Why? Finally ready to have someone run the first new project for you?”
I was just about to answer him when Megan appeared at my side, looking a little green in the face.
“Something wrong?” I asked, feeling my hackles rise.
“No, no, of course not,” she assured me, clearly lying. “Do you have a minute? Dr. Stone and Dr. Lowe are gathering everyone in the meeting room upstairs. They asked me to fetch you.”
“Everyone” clearly didn’t include the other scientists, because none of them were flocking toward the stairs, like they usually did around lunch time. It was hours too late for that, of course, but something else about this was hinky.
“Sure,” I said, not quite so sure whether I wanted to follow her, but this was likely just another instance of my paranoia screwing with my head. Martinez was right—the last weeks had left some mental scars, and I felt rather ill-equipped to deal with that right now, so I ignored it.
As I followed her up the stairs to the upper level, I wondered if I should have ditched my lab coat. It had seemed normal to shrug it on this morning—it simply was the easiest way to carry all the knick-knacks around that I needed, like a calculator, pens, a notepad—but it definitively made reaching for my backup gun harder. And with my thigh holsters stashed in the backpack next to my bed, that left me feeling vulnerable all of a sudden.
The moment I stepped into the meeting room and the door closed behind me—with Megan remaining outside—I knew that this was one neglect I shouldn’t have allowed myself. Then again, judging from the fact that a good two thirds of the people crammed into the room were guards, it was debatable how useful my weapons would have been in the first place.
“What is going on here?” I asked as heads swiveled in my direction. The tension in the room was thick enough to cut, and I didn’t need to see the pinched expression on the Ice Queen’s face to know that something was very wrong here. Nate barely glanced at me, but that split-second that our gazes met was enough to convey a warning. None of my people seemed to be carrying weapons, and judging from the stack piled up on the desk in front, someone had been thorough in patting them down.
Stone and Lowe were standing in the front part of the room, flanked by more guards, also looking at me when I spoke up. Stone had a more or less neutral look on his face, but Lowe was practically gloating. So much for hoping that he wouldn’t cause any trouble for me. That would have been too easy.
“Ah, Dr. Lewis. So good of you to join us,” Lowe said, malice dripping from his every word. Jerking his head at one of the guards who lurked next to the door, he told him to frisk me. He did a really bad job, coming not even close to my backup piece—yet trapped as it was under the heavy fabric of the lab coat, I wondered what good it would do me. Even if I managed to draw it and pass it on to Nate, I doubted that he could shoot more than one or two before they’d overwhelm him. A flicker of hope remained inside of me that it wouldn’t come to that, but I wasn’t counting on it.
“The results are in,” Stone explained. If I wasn’t mistaken, there was a hint of nervousness in his voice—and a hefty dose of the gloating that Lowe was doing more obviously. Moving to the overhead projector, he switched it on, making the blown-up projection of an electrophoresis gel appear on the wall, the bright blue bands covering the entire fifteen lanes—twelve samples, two controls, and a marker at the very end.
“Tha
t’s a protein gel,” I said, feeling my mouth dry up as my eyes skipped from lane to lane. It was the gel that Stace had been running down below—her “control.” Control, my ass. My mind ran wild with speculation—I had to admit, part of me had been dreading this since the moment Stone had mentioned needing blood samples from us—but underneath the obvious feeling of betrayal a cold, focused fear raced through me. I’d expected there to be four samples that were chock-full of whatever they were looking for, yet the gel clearly showed six. That left two more of us that had gotten the serum, besides Nate, Pia, Andrej, and Burns, but even this wasn’t that surprising. No, what was closing up my throat was the heavy cloud at the very top of the second lane, right between the marker and the first overloaded lane. I didn’t need to see the schematic of what sample belonged to whom to know that the second lane was mine, and the third likely Nate’s. Farther down to the right was another lane that had a similar cloud up there but faint—Martinez. But then it made perfect sense—most antibodies needed only a few months to be cleared from the blood, and it had been almost a year since I’d killed his boyfriend after he’d insta-converted from guzzling sugar syrup in a coffee shop.
I didn’t need to be a genius to figure all that out—and, quite frankly, I felt incredibly dumb as horror swept through me right there—because what they’d obviously done was the first thing I would have tested for if I knew that a good subset of the population still remaining alive had been infected with what was basically an inactive, dormant version of the virus.
Taking a calming breath, I forced the panic down and made myself look from the evidence of all that was wrong with the world back to Stone. I knew that I couldn’t feign complete ignorance, but I was sure that the fear I was feeling was making my face look blank rather than distressed. You could only spend so many months on constant high alert before you learned to keep it in check.
“It is a protein gel,” Lowe confirmed, looking a step away from rubbing his hands in glee. His childish display of schadenfreude was beyond annoying, and I latched on to that, trying to keep the panic at bay that way.
“Of what?” I asked, hoping that the choked-up quality of my voice would be read as general annoyance. Crossing my arms over my chest, I stepped further into the room, both to study the image better, but also to get closer to someone who might be able to make better use of my gun than I, myself. No one stopped me. In fact, from the corner of my eye I could clearly see that the guards were largely ignoring me, remaining focused on the guys instead. Stupid of them, maybe good for me. “You said you were running DNA tests.”
Lowe open his mouth to reply, but Nate cut him short with a loud, scoffing sound. “Oh, I’m sure they are. But only after finding out what they actually wanted to know—how many of us could actually be dangerous to them and their new oppressive world domination scheme.”
I didn’t have to feign confusion as I looked at Nate, but the way Stone’s jaw stood out as he gnashed his teeth was telling that I was—once again—the only one who didn’t know what was going on. Although, I could take quite the educated guess.
Nate didn’t wait more than a moment to give me a chance to speak up before he went on, his eyes boring into Stone's. “Don’t you feel you at least owe her an explanation of what you’re planning on using her for? She should know the emotional baggage she’ll have to shoulder first.”
He looked at me then, his face unreadable, but his eyes were burning with emotion. Pent-up anger that I hadn’t seen since that building had come down on us was now clawing its way free from where he’d pushed it down, and I could tell that he was about as sick as I myself was of there constantly being secrets between us. But there was also warning plain in his eyes, so I kept my mouth shut, letting him talk instead. His eyes remained on me as he started, but kept snagging to Stone and Lowe with increasing frequency.
“Why don’t you tell her about your super-soldier serum? Why don’t you tell her that the reason you can test specifically for whatever it is that fucks up my metabolism is because you’ve had a good thirty years to fine-tune your methods? Why don’t you tell her why the first thing in the briefing that we all got after surviving infection was that if we ever planned to commit suicide, we should better make sure to do it in a way that involved a complete destruction of the brain stem?”
Lowe actually blanched while Stone settled into a grim kind of acceptance. I felt my stomach drop out from under me, but forced myself to remain still as I continued to hug myself. Nate’s eyes returned to me, and he didn’t look away anymore.
“Want to know how the virus came into existence that killed most of us off? They engineered it. I don’t know exactly who ‘they’ are, but by the time I was inducted into the program, they’d already perfected the serum, so it was likely in the late eighties or something. It’s a weapon, turning any soldier into a suicide bomber. That it gives us a somewhat higher endurance and stamina with decreased pain sensation is a bonus they likely only found out about later. But the real function of the serum was to plant a nasty surprise behind enemy lines. Because, you see, when we die, we don’t just stay dead. We continue to fight as mindless, vicious monsters, rising again after just enough time for the virus to take over the dying brain and body. An unstoppable killing machine that no one expects. Sure, eventually they’ll put us down for good, but not until devastating numbers of unsuspecting enemies are claimed. Quite efficient a system, wouldn’t you say? As long as the soldier is alive, he’s a useful tool. And after he dies, he gets even more useful, more deadly, with no sense of mercy or moderation.”
I didn’t even try to deny his claim—watching what had happened to Bates was more than enough evidence to convince me. Besides, why should he have been lying to me now? Nate did a lot of things, but lying wasn’t one of them. But that didn’t mean that I didn’t hate every single word he said.
Not just because it made a different kind of horror come alive in me—the emotional impact of living with the knowledge that someone had turned you into a ticking time bomb must be beyond what I could comprehend. No—it stemmed from what he didn’t say, but what that fucking cloud in my sample was screaming at me, too loud to ignore. At any given moment that I’d been around him—waking, sleeping, fucking, eating, laughing, joking, just plain being—he could have turned into a fucking zombie, and as Sioux Falls had shown quite starkly, I wouldn’t have stood a chance. And it wasn’t like he was a closed-off system, as that cloud proved.
A year ago—or even mere months—I would probably have barfed up everything I’d eaten today. Now, I still felt the need to hurl, but there was so much else that was equally bad that I managed to retain a grip on myself, leaving it at a dry swallow as I continued to stare into his eyes.
And along with the horror came my old friend betrayal, doing a much better job choking me up. I wrenched my gaze away with a shaky breath, looking over to Stone and Lowe. Lowe was still gloating, but I thought I saw understanding and sympathy in Stone’s gaze. So, the bastard thought he could read me well enough to understand what I was feeling right now? That I’d only just understood that I’d spent the last months in constant danger, and that was what made me want to scream?
Taking another deliberate step forward—but this time away from Nate—I cleared my throat, trying hard to stop glancing at that damn protein gel.
“What exactly does that have to do with anything?” I didn’t bother with denying that I knew about the serum. I doubted Stone would have bought it.
It wasn’t Stone who replied, but Amy. I hadn’t even realized that she was there with us, but now she stepped forward, assuming a place beside Lowe, looking about as happy as I felt.
“I’m sorry, but we cannot let a menace like that run free in our towns.” Towns, plural, making me guess that there was more behind this than just her personal fear. Stone stepped in, confirming my guess.
“The government has decreed that everyone needs to be tested, particularly those that show behavior that might lend itself to someone who
think he’s invincible.” His eyes focused on Nate, but when he remained silent, Stone went on. “In fact, everyone needs to be tested. I haven’t been lying to you, just omitted how widespread our testing is. All the settlements that want to belong to the strengthening network that will give rise to a new rendition of our great nation are required to do this, and so far, all of them have been happy to agree. We lend support as much as we can, and we are what remains of humankind—why would anyone not join?” It was a rhetorical question clearly, but he went on before anyone could object—which was rather likely from Pia’s sneer. “It goes without saying that when you spend months rebuilding a town from nothing, care for your neighbors and friends, you don’t just jeopardize that.”
“Meaning what?” I asked cautiously. Amy gave me a sympathetic look, while Stone continued to explain.
“Those of us who are normal need to be sure that we are not endangering ourselves by mere association with those that are not.”
Nate scoffed. “So what are you going to do with us? Kill us?”
Stone actually looked taken aback. “Of course not. We fully recognize the sacrifices you have volunteered to make for the greater good.” He stressed that enough that it was clear that he wanted it known that Nate and all the others hadn’t been subjected to whatever had happened against their will. “And we thank you for your service. We just can’t let you run around with everyone else none the wiser.”
Nate’s smirk didn’t hold much humor. “And to accomplish that you’ll do what? Brand us like animals for everyone to see?” The resulting silence made the shifting of the guards as they gripped their weapons more firmly even more obvious. Barking out a harsh laugh, Nate shook his head. “You got to be fucking shitting me.”
The Green Fields Series Box Set: Books 1-3 Page 89
