The halves of the gate finally retracted into concrete walls, revealing the ramp leading down. From outside of the fence, I hadn’t been able to see what lay beyond the gaping maw, and for the first couple of seconds I wondered if I had started to hallucinate. The asphalt of the connective road from the runway ended at the bottom of the ramp, where I’d presumed some kind of hangar-like structure to be. Instead, there was a white-tiled hallway, leading easily several hundred feet into the ground, a lot longer than any of the buildings above. The walls and ceiling were white as well, everything perfectly clean, not a speck of dirt in sight. Right next to the ramp the doors of two industrial-sized elevators sat, one open, the other closed. Several more doors lined the long corridor, all closed and unmarked. Anywhere else I would have guessed that they belonged to offices. This was just fucking unreal. And definitely looking like a black ops lab out of a horror story.
Apprehension closed like an iron fist around my heart, wrenching what little breath there was in my lungs right out of me. Fear, bordering on panic, locked my knees, making it impossible for me to move even when Hamilton started down the ramp ahead of me. I really didn’t want to be here. All of a sudden, it was impossible to keep my mind from jumping to all the possible conclusions of what went on in there. It had been tantalizingly easy to downright forget Nate’s reaction to seeing that address since he’d been all for coming here once he realized that it was the only option that might keep me alive. That it was only a possibility, not a foregone conclusion, didn’t bother me that much anymore. It was the idea of surviving whatever they had in store for me that sent my pulse into overdrive. If not for my general state of exhaustion, I would have started to hyperventilate, but my body was too close to shutting down for that—and right then, I was overly aware of that. Unless I wanted to die right in this spot, I needed to go in there, but right now that was the furthest thing from my mind.
The nameless soldier who’d been marching behind me gave me a shove that sent me staggering forward, sheer luck rather than strength letting me remain upright. The irregular scuffling sounds of my boots as I caught myself made Hamilton glance back over his shoulder, a contemptuous curl to his lip. It was that very look he taxed me with that gave me the conviction to shove my fear aside and straighten. He was still underestimating me, fetch order or invitation notwithstanding. To him, I was still that confused, bordering on silly, scientist that had been too stupid to recognize a zombie when it came crawling for her, right in front of the ruins of the Green Fields Biotech building. I might have acquired quite the colorful vocabulary in the meantime, and could bullshit like the best of them, yet very much like Wilkes, he didn’t buy that any of my actions or accomplishments were my own. To him, I was just Nate’s puppet, a pretty face and nice piece of ass to distract from the fact that someone else was pulling her strings. Why it took me so long to realize that, I didn’t understand. Suddenly, it was as plain as day. And there I’d thought all that sneering had been about him looking down on my choices.
I had neither time nor interest to explore what the fuck was wrong with me that the fact that someone wasn’t taking me seriously gave me the strength to push my worst fears aside, but I was more than willing to ride that high as long as it would last me. No longer dithering on the edge, I followed Bucky to that waiting elevator with my shoulders pushed back and barely a drag in my step.
I would survive this, come what may. And I would make sure that, before we were through with each other, Bucky Hamilton would realize what a fucking fool he’d been.
Chapter 21
My conviction might have gotten me into that elevator, but my strength was about used up as the adrenaline rush that my little panic attack had brought with it dissipated. The elevator ride down wasn’t all that long, but with the weight of carrying over twenty people and the cabin itself, it lurched to a halt with enough force to make me stagger, and there wasn’t anything left inside of me to keep my balance. Nate moved lightning fast, grabbing me to keep me from falling, but that motion was enough to trigger everyone’s spidey senses. The elevator cabin might have been large, but it got incredibly cramped when all twenty soldiers fell into a defensive stance, weapons no longer at the ready but a millisecond from firing. I felt Nate ease up as he tried to look as non-threatening as possible, but my body started pitching forward the moment he wasn’t fully supporting me anymore, so he tensed immediately. Rather than help, the rush of adrenaline that followed was like someone had repeatedly worked me over with a baseball bat, just adding to the mess.
“Stand down!” Red barked when he finally found the common sense that Hamilton obviously lacked. “She’s just weak, not gearing up for a fight.” How anyone could need that explanation considering my state was beyond me, but when I caught his gaze, I found Red studying me intently. I gave as infinitesimal a nod as I could manage, both agreement and thanks. It still took the soldiers several heartbeats to obey, but the tension remained thick enough to cut with a knife. At Red’s nod, half of them filed out of the corridor, the others waiting to follow us.
“No need to carry me,” I whispered to Nate. “Just lend me a hand.” He had to do way more than that, but managed to make it appear almost casual how he gripped me at the waist, his arm slung across my lower back, taking a lot of my weight off my legs. If he’d leaned away from me, my feet would likely have stopped touching the ground. It was an awkward position, made worse by our difference in height, but with no one else ready to jump in on my other side, it would have to suffice. When we passed Red, I couldn’t help but snort at him. “What gave it away? The fact that I look like death warmed over, or the blood running from my eyes and nose?” Rather than reply, he flashed me the hint of a smile—a lopsided one, but it was honest. Damn, under different circumstances I might have gotten to like him. But, no. Not going to happen.
The moment I drew my first breath outside of the elevator, I knew that shit was about to get real. That my body was severely screwed up by now got even more obvious as I didn’t feel the change in temperature from outside, while it had to be warmer in here. A perfectly maintained seventy-two degrees, I was sure. The air smelled of exactly nothing, which gave away that it was filtered through the same HEPA filter banks that high security labs used all over the world. The white-on-white theme continued here, but we were no longer at the end of a corridor but right in the middle, with a slightly narrower one branching off opposite the elevator. A few of the doors had that office look, but most also had viewing windows in them, or were automated. The left part of the long corridor had several stretches of wall that had been replaced by glass, some frosted, most not. At both ends, I saw yet more hallways lead away from the main thoroughfare, upping my estimate of how large this complex was exponentially.
The soldiers fanned out, blocking the left corridor and the small one off to the right at the intersection, with the ones filing out behind us taking up position across the right arm by the first door, one with a window in it. Red and Bucky preceded us, Hamilton briefly rapping on the door before entering. Only five more soldiers followed, which still made the small room rather crowded. It looked deceptively like every doctor’s office I’d ever been to, including a bench covered by a white paper sheet. The mahogany desk to the side was the only piece of furniture that held any color, made even more noticeable as it was pristinely empty except for a pen and notepad.
There were three people waiting for us inside, and they were keeping with the doctor’s office scheme as well. The two men were in their late fifties or early sixties, both wearing dress slacks, white button-down shirts, and ties under their white lab coats. I immediately dismissed them as idle bystanders when my gaze fell on the woman, also in a lab coat, with a crisply starched, white blouse and black pencil skirt—and fucking black high heels. Her no-nonsense glasses and the tight bun she kept her brunette hair in lent her the air of a stern headmistress, but that wasn’t where her commanding presence ended. She couldn’t have been more than five years my senior, but there wa
s no question that she was in charge. I didn’t need to see Red give her a curt nod in greeting to get that, but the way her hawk-like stare made Hamilton draw up short was absolutely hilarious. Her gaze briefly skipped to me, regarding me like an insect—one she was interested in, but would feel no qualms at tearing out its wings and legs—and any laughter I might have felt rising in my chest died a very quick death. I almost sighed with relief when she zeroed in on Hamilton again.
“Finally! I’ve about had it with your incompetence,” she bit out, her faint British accent making the words sound even more clipped than they already were. “I told you no further delays. What part of my instructions was I not clear about?”
Bucky didn’t look guilty, but his sour expression was almost worth coming here. “Operational security first,” he grumbled, clearly annoyed that the head or more in height he had on her didn’t do a thing to intimidate her. If I wasn’t completely wrong in my assessment, she was the kind of woman who was on a first-name basis with most of the deadliest viruses and bacteria in the world—how any mere human, even one who had twice her mass and could likely pick her up and break her in two, could think to intimidate her was obviously beyond her. As much as I could admire that attitude, I immediately disliked her, and not just on principle. If Dr. Alders in Cheyenne Mountain had seemed like the epitome of the immoral scientist, she was the doctor who would do the clinical work his ideas required.
I decidedly felt like I needed a drink.
She scoffed at his excuse, sending another sidelong glance in our direction. “That is all you have to offer to excuse your penchant for wasting my time? Neither of them strikes me as stupid enough to put up any resistance. She likely cannot, physically, put up a fight any longer, and he is much too concerned with all the many ways we will have to hurt her to provoke any gratuitous violence.” She paused, entirely for our benefit, I was sure. “You’re dismissed. Now let me do my work, and let’s hope that your needless dalliance hasn’t cost us more than we can afford.”
Rather than wait for Hamilton to back down, she whipped around and stalked over to me, in passing grabbing some latex gloves from a tray. As she put them on, she ignored Nate after a passing glance, zeroing in on me instead. “I’m Dr. Emily Raynor, head of this clandestine operation, as you can very well guess for yourself, I’m certain. Let’s not continue to waste any more time on pleasantries, shall we? You’re already tardy enough as it is.”
It was one thing to be highly amused at Bucky turning into a prickly pear in front of this woman, but I wasn’t going to let her talk to me like that.
“Considering that I only got your invitation, if you want to call it that, about a week ago, and we had to get through snowstorms on foot and cross over six hundred miles to get here, I think we made great time.”
She looked stunned for a moment, as if she wasn’t used to anyone talking back to her, even less so with an attitude. Unlike Red, she didn’t appreciate that at all. Made me wonder if they’d removed her sense of humor when they’d lobotomized her, as well.
“What is done, is done,” she offered, her previous annoyance returning. “Crying over spilled milk helps no one. I presume that you are well aware of what is going on with your body?” There was no sense in being coy, but I didn’t very much feel like voicing my suspicions, so I nodded instead. Raynor kept studying my face closely, watching for a sign of fear or denial, I was sure. “Very well then,” she concluded when I remained silent. “Please remove your clothes so I can check on the progression and take a few biopsy samples for my people to analyze. They have started prepping the surgical suite as soon as we heard of your arrival, but we still need to do the preliminary tests as we cannot go in completely blind.”
Every single fiber of me was cringing at the very idea of being naked in front of the present company, but I didn’t hesitate as I reached up to unzip my jacket. It would have been easier to tear my gloves off first, but if I could delay that for a few more seconds, I would. The thick fleece jacket I wore underneath followed, same as the wool sweater, until I was down to the tight thermal that I couldn’t very well wrestle over my head with no fine motor control. So I inwardly steeled myself and pulled the gloves off with my teeth, first the left, then the right. I knew exactly when Nate saw the state of my fingers; the sharp inhale gave him away.
Raynor, already bending over and leaning forward with scientific interest lighting up her eyes, stopped, her head turned slightly to regard Nate for a moment. “Didn’t she tell you? Or were you simply not taking her seriously?”
Nate’s voice was pressed as he replied. “Of course she did, and I always take her seriously, but I didn’t think—“
“None of you do,” Raynor quipped, cutting him off the second he hesitated. “Always makes me wonder with the older batches of the serum. The selection of the subjects was done with special attention to intellect, but the effects of the serum must have impaired some cognitive functions long-term.” She offered a small grin, making me wonder if that was her idea of a joke.
I certainly wasn’t smiling as she took my left hand, then my right, her grasp surprisingly gentle if firm, turning them both over so she could study the backs of them the same as my palms. The left was arguably in better shape; while all fingers had a whitish cast with darker, purplish flecks, it was only the index finger that had turned a solid dark blue up to the joint closest to the knuckle and was swollen. On the right, two thirds of the pinkie and the top-most part of the ring finger were black, the swelling already gone down, leaving the skin shriveled and completely dead.
“When did you lose sensation?” Raynor asked, sounding like she was talking about a mild cough.
“About one… no, three days ago.” I replied. “I was out for almost two entire days.”
Still focused on my hand, she blindly gestured at the other two doctors. One came forward immediately, bearing a tray with sterile syringes. I didn’t even feel it when she punctured my right pinkie, but the left index finger still hurt like hell. I did my best not to wince—or hurl up what little tea there might have still been left in my stomach from earlier. More to distract myself than feeling a need to share, I offered, “I’m not quite sure if it’s necrotizing fasciitis, but—“
Raynor put the second syringe neatly into the dish set aside on the tray before she turned back to me. “Of course it is necrotizing fasciitis. Didn’t you read the results that Dominic Curran gave you?”
“I did,” I replied, trying—and failing—to keep my voice level. “What I don’t understand is why I still have anything working below my shoulders and hips.”
I hadn’t expected to start a scientific debate about that, but she looked actually intrigued by my question. “I can’t, of course, give you a detailed answer until we’ve run a full battery of tests,” Raynor offered, her ire toned down as if it never had been there to start with. “I presume you took the antibiotics Curran gave you?”
I nodded. “Yes. And I got a blood transfusion from my husband, which is the main reason why I survived the last day. But I’ve been having symptoms for weeks.” I thought about that for a second before I corrected myself. “Months. I know that in some patients with impaired wound healing you can have slow-spreading necrosis, but that’s not what’s happening with me right now. I don’t remember the exact numbers from my microbiology lectures anymore, but I know that we’re talking hours here rather than weeks.”
“That’s because you’re still considering your body’s capabilities in normal human terms,” Raynor suggested. “You are aware that your body’s metabolism is working at a massively increased rate? Everything else that’s connected to that is increased as well, most importantly, your immune system.” Her gaze flitted from me to where Bucky, Nate, and Red were standing, trying hard to ignore each other’s presence. “The reason they are immune to virtually everything is because their immune system launches a massive response to any given irritant within the first hour of contact, rather than a normal response that is delayed so
mewhere between twelve hours and several days. Yours started out almost at that level, but has since gradually lost the ability to fight onsetting infections as it had to combat more and more widespread chronic infections. You have been feeling better since the blood transfusion because you got a temporarily conferred partial immunity, but the same increased metabolism that has kept you alive after the infection is now rapidly destroying that effect.”
That was a surprisingly sound—and more detailed—explanation than I’d figured I’d get. Viewed that way, it made sense—why I’d been symptom free for months, but my body had downright plummeted into a rapid decline over the past week. Somewhere between Utah and Montana, the latent infections must have reached a critical threshold, and while Dom’s antibiotic bomb had done its own to try to stomp out the flames, it had left the embers glowing, only to flare up anew the moment my body had metabolized the last molecules of it.
“Any more questions?” Rather than wait for my reply, Raynor glared down at the most offending clothes I was still wearing. “Off with that. Although, going from the smell of it, burning them right off your body would be the wiser option.”
I considered trying to get my boots off myself but as that held a very high chance of me ending up on the floor, I unbuttoned my pants so I could shove them and the thick thermal leggings underneath over my butt before I planted it on the provided sheet-covered bench. “Help me?”
Nate didn’t need more of an incentive to join me. As he bent over to reach the laces of my boots, I whispered a quick, “Toes are worse,” just as a brief warning. His shoulders tensed further yet he didn’t look up or respond, but his touch was incredibly careful when he eased first the boots, then my socks, followed by my layers of pants off my feet. A disturbingly accurate assessment, but then I’d spent plenty of time walking that day when excruciating pain had turned into numb throbbing, then nothing, when we’d encountered the wolf pack and smart shamblers. I still had my hopes up that it would stay with two and a half fingers. As for my toes? Well, physical therapy to relearn to walk was fun, right?
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 3 | Books 7-9 Page 29
