I remained standing to the side of the door until most of the soldiers had filed through, happy to take my place toward the back. It was only a matter of time until Hamilton would need me for the next barrier he couldn’t barge through, and if anything in there was actually out to get us, I’d rather it got them first. Nate seemed to subscribe to a similar doctrine as he paused next to me, waiting until I looked at his face, then down to his hands. He silently gave me the signal for “save yourself first,” making me smirk under my mask. Yeah, I had zero intentions of laying down my life for this mission, scientific interest and morbid curiosity be damned.
I was a little surprised when Cole and Gita grabbed all their equipment to take inside with them. Not my place to question, and I absolutely couldn’t concern myself with everything, so I simply didn’t.
Hill and Tanner brought up the very rear, and into the lair of evil we went.
Chapter 12
The corridor behind the door was just that—a corridor, and not yet part of the real complex. Sure, there was a station where a security guard would have been sitting, bored out of his mind, and locker rooms for the personnel to change into their most clandestine work clothes; also a small break room—where the splintered tables and bent chairs came from that had ended up in the corridor—and doors leading to maintenance panels, but all that could have been part of any lab—or office building, really. There were no corpses—long dead or still quite active—but also no blood or remains anywhere in sight. I figured it would have been creepier if it had all been in pristine condition, but not by much. I wasn’t sure what I had expected, but this was still too clean, too neat. None of the doors showed any signs of anyone trying to get out. While the one behind the scanner lock was massive enough that it wouldn’t have budged, even if assaulted with said chairs or table legs, that still would have left some scratches or chipped paint. Yet something must have destroyed that furniture, and suddenly, not knowing what was a bigger concern than I could ignore.
Richards and Munez quickly checked on the locker rooms, coming back out after declaring them “clear.” There were two vending machines in the break room, their glass fronts still intact, half full of snacks and sodas. The fact that nobody had tried to get to them made the destroyed furniture even more suspicious. If I’d found myself locked in here, knowing I was about to die, the least I would have done was stuff my face with candy.
As expected, Hamilton was cooling his heels at the next security door, waiting for me to work my magic—which I was reluctant to do as that gas mask was as comforting as it was uncomfortable to wear.
“Who’s gonna play guinea pig?” I asked, not pointing out that until we were done here, I really wasn’t expendable. I was surprised when Russell of all people—one of the few I was certain hadn’t been inoculated with the serum, and hadn’t received a booster shot as well—pulled his mask off, his face pinched with anticipation. We all waited with more or less bated breath. Nothing happened, until Richards did the same, experimentally sniffing the air. “Stale but could have been worse with the ventilation system on standby for so long. Not a hint of a chemical smell—or decay.”
One after the other, the soldiers removed their masks but kept them on the outsides of their packs where they were easily retrieved. I waited until the absolute last moment—after getting an exasperated look from Hamilton—before I pulled mine off and stepped up to the scanner. Again, it tickled my eyes before the door locks disengaged.
On the other side, a corridor led deeper into the building, yet another one was crossing it just after one more—equally abandoned—security station. After they’d made sure that nothing lurked in the vicinity, Cole checked on the dead computer while Hill got out a spray can and, quietly humming to himself, left four arrows on the walls of the straight corridor, one on each side of the intersection, all pointing the way we had come. When he saw me watching him, he shrugged—after making sure not to inhale the fumes. “When you’re on the retreat, it’s easy if you don’t have to guess which way is out.” He then proceeded to paint two red Xs on the floor of the crossing corridor.
“Station’s dead,” Cole reported. “We’ll have to get to the main server room. That should be on standby.”
Hamilton took that with a nod. “Aimes, Wu, check left. McClintock, Williams, right. Meet up with us at the main level common area once you’ve secured the rooms back here.” Apparently, now that we were at our objective, the asshole-in-charge was doing just that, being in charge. Red didn’t seem to mind, although I got the sense that he was keeping an eye on me. Or, which was less likely, he was eyeing my ass. I preferred to think he expected me to either run off or do something exceptionally stupid. My weird mind supplied that both was easily possible at the same time.
The rest of us went down the main corridor, stopping at the few doors that were unevenly distributed along the way. The first few were offices and a library, the rest labs and the assorted rooms belonging to them. Nothing interesting, although I noted that all the machines were on the high end of state-of-the-art, even though the equipment wasn’t much more complicated than you’d find at any college’s basic chemistry labs. While Hamilton was moving forward, I hovered in one of the labs for a bit, randomly pulling one of the black lab journals from where they were neatly stored above a desk by the door. As I’d expected, only basic-level prep and analysis work, nothing interesting. Any lab, even the most secret, clandestine one needed the facilities where the lab monkeys mixed the buffer solutions and ran endless series of PCRs.
None of the lab spaces looked out of the ordinary, and only in a single one did I find a smashed glass bottle on the floor, likely having slid off the shelf as it had been placed too close to the edge. I had no idea if earthquakes were common here—or how the lab had been sealed off—so it really might have been a matter of gravity. Hill continued with his arrows, appearing way more relaxed than any of the others, making me wonder if that was his tell. Not that I cared. It was just something to occupy my mind with while I got more bored by the second—and really wanted to do other things than stand around and look at broken bottles.
From remembering the blueprints, I knew that we were coming close to that recreational area that Hamilton had referred to when Nate sidled up to me—or probably just took one more step than necessary. It was hard to tell. He stopped scanning the white walls and instead looked intently at my face, his gaze skipping all over before it settled on my eyes. I stared right back, widening my eyes just a little as I continued to hold his gaze. It was tremendously hard not to smile.
“Are you high?” he whispered, low enough that the mic probably wouldn’t pick it up.
I shook my head, but that damn smile escaped me. “Nope. But a different word starting with ‘h’ comes to mind.”
Steps behind us alerted me to our four explorers returning to the fold, and Aimes didn’t waste a golden opportunity. “Horrendously annoying comes to mind,” he offered as he pushed past us. I glared after him for a second before I looked back at Nate, pursing my lips. He was biting his, hard-pressed not to laugh. Oh, he’d definitely gotten that message. And speaking of hard—
I forced that train of thought to derail and followed the others. “I’m good. Just give me something to do and I’ll be great.”
“Keep that thought,” Nate murmured, still amused. It was highly unusual for him to be so easy around me in situations like these, but maybe that was the lack of the burden of command. What did I know?
Up ahead, the corridor opened into a huge room, and just before that, another corridor branched off. Hamilton waited at the intersection, sending Richards and Tanner forward to check. They returned maybe a minute later, both looking strangely quiet. “It’s empty,” Red reported, his eyes skipping over the lot of us, evaluating. “But I wouldn’t necessarily call it ‘clear.’ No hostiles.”
Hamilton set four people to guard the intersection and had the rest of us move forward. At first, I didn’t get Red’s cryptic remark, but then we g
ot deep enough into the room to see the opposite wall—and the massive, dark splatters on it. I couldn’t see any bullet holes—and the dried blood looked more like it had sprayed in arcs rather than the patterns exit wounds might have caused—but it was impossible to deny that these were signs of violence. Instantly, everyone seemed more alert, their motions more precise, eyes never stopping as they roamed over every available surface. There were no other signs of disturbance; not even one of the sofas or chairs was misaligned. Or so I thought, until I looked up to where the upper floor ended in a room-spanning balcony, and noticed that a single ceiling panel wasn’t quite matching up. Probably whatever had smashed that bottle in the lab had been responsible for that as well, I told myself. Hell, if I hadn’t had my own adventure of crawling through ducts, I never would have noticed. But I did notice, and there was no ignoring it now.
Once the room was secure, Hamilton sent a few teams of two to check on the two corridors that led away from the area—one to the more interesting labs, the other to the animal facility—and set a guard at the stairs to the upper level. As soon as they got the okay, Cole and Gita scurried into the first room on the right on the animal facility branch—the main server room, as Cole explained.
And three minutes and a whoop later, the emergency lighting came on, green signs glowing ominously along the corridors. It hurt my eyes a lot less than the bright flashlights and let me see more of the upper floor—and the ceiling, with the dislodged panel.
Nate flicked me an inquiring question with his fingers, finding what irked me himself when I pointedly stared at the upper corner of the room. There must have been barely enough light for him to see without shining his light directly at the panel, but he gave the slightest of nods as he looked in my direction once more. He didn’t really look concerned but also didn’t tell me to forget about it.
With nothing else to do, I followed Hamilton when he walked into the server room, finding Cole and Gita quite busy in there. I’d expected a small room, crammed top to bottom with hardware, but the space was easily as large as the recreational area outside, and warm enough that I felt sweat bead on my forehead within a minute. Gita had already shirked her jacket, and Cole looked like he wanted to yet was too busy typing to bother. One of these days I had to ask him how he’d acquired those skills, and not ended up working for a Fortune 500 tech giant instead of Special Ops.
“So nobody’s going to mention that huge blood splatter out there, eh?” I drawled, mostly to amuse myself than expecting a reply. “And still no bodies. Doesn’t look good.”
Cole ignored me, and so did Hamilton. Too bad.
“Do you have access to the security logs yet?” Hamilton wanted to know.
“Just a sec,” Gita mumbled, hammering away at the keyboard of one of the resident workstations. “Got them right here.” She briefly scanned the many, many lines appearing on screen. “Pretty much matches the info you already got. The shutdown sequence was started at 3:49 in the afternoon. No further entries after that, except the automatic switch to standby once power failed two months later and nobody manually disengaged it. The next entry is us hacking into the system.” She briefly glanced at Cole. “We should probably delete that.”
“Too much work,” Cole muttered. “Just leave it.”
I studied the entries before the ones she’d indicated. “Do they log every single access?”
Gita hesitated, as if asking permission from Hamilton. “That’s the main system log. It’s admin level entries plus who passes through the outer door by the elevator.”
“So nobody left after the shutdown?” She nodded at my observation. “Anyone leave just before that?”
“Not in the last six hours leading up to the shutdown,” she noted. “But that doesn’t seem unusual. I briefly checked the days before that. Almost nobody left during the day, and most stayed for ten hours minimum. If you consider the decontamination protocols, it wouldn’t make much sense to just drop by for an hour or two.”
I was burning to tell her that I was very aware of that myself from years of practice but swallowed the remark. “How many people were here the day of the shutdown?”
Another window went up, more endless lines and columns. “A hundred and thirty-eight,” Gita reported, then hesitated. “Plus twenty-one in the other wing.”
“Other wing?” Nate inquired from beside me.
I gave him the answer with a fake grin hurting my facial muscles. “Bipedal animals, you could say. They actually housed them in the animal wing. No kidding.”
Looking at the numbers once more, I quickly did the math. “So that’s, what? How many calories does the average human body have? Let’s say we have a more sedentary lifestyle than the average population, and a few fitness freaks to balance that out. How many supercharged zombies can one hundred forty snack boxes feed for twenty-one months? Plus some lab animals as well, I guess. I don’t think they would have ignored a less savory snack after a week or two.”
Hamilton gave me a level stare that was dripping with condescension. “You done with that nonsense?”
I now beamed that same smile at him that Nate had gotten before. “Just calling it as I see it. No sense in deluding ourselves that we’re not the second helping. Or how else do you explain that we’ve been down here for half an hour and checked on a good tenth of the facility and we’ve found not a single sign of any of those one hundred and thirty-eight bodies? They must have ended up somewhere.”
Sadly, my keen observation went ignored, Hamilton instead turning to the screen Cole had pulled up. “Those are the secured doors?” It was a neat diagram with lots of green lines, only the two we had traipsed through glowing red since we’d kept them propped open.
“All others still locked,” Cole reported. “Any I should disengage?”
Nate cleared his throat, not bothering with checking the data. “I wouldn’t. The great thing about a door that locks is that you can slam it shut. Unless you want to set up some kill zones, I’d leave them to manual operation.”
“Gee, so I’m the only one who can go wherever the fuck she pleases?” I summed that up. “Neat.”
Nate and Bucky had their momentary staring match going on until the idiot-in-charge inclined his head. “Keep the doors locked. Except for these two.” He pointed at a spot next to the animal facilities.
“Why, wanna make it extra easy for them to get us?” I jeered, but only got a flat stare back.
“You have your tasks. I have mine,” Hamilton offered, a hint of nastiness in his tone as if the fact that I wasn’t in the know would drive me crazy. Well, it just might, but I did my best to stomp down on the instantly sparked curiosity. But what I couldn’t prevent was me taking a step toward him, thus invading his zone of privacy, which forced me to look up way past what was comfortable, but there was no avoiding that.
“Good. Because you don’t really know what mine are, do you?” He continued to smirk at me but I didn’t miss the hint of doubt that crossed his face, making me grin. “And you don’t, trust me,” I continued. No idea why I was yanking his chain, but I wasn’t in the mood to hold back now.
“I do,” he insisted, putting extra emphasis in his claim—and leaning closer so that his elbow brushed my arms where they were crossed over my chest, as if that would intimidate me. I briefly considered turning this into a real physical altercation but the rules of our previous encounters were still true, the booster making me stupidly aware of shit or not. He was taller and heavier, and had reach and number of fingers on me. Too bad, really.
“You don’t,” I disagreed. “Or did you listen in to the entire time Raynor cut me up and put me back together? I know for a fact you didn’t, else you would have stormed into that room and beat her up, I’m sure. Or in the hangar, when you held your little speech—did you follow the conversation she had with me and Gita? You didn’t. So, yes—I can’t look into your cards but you also can’t look into mine. And considering I’m the only one in here who understands what she’s dealing w
ith, that puts me miles ahead of you.”
“So what?” Bucky jeered, slowly getting his groove back, yet the fact that I’d gotten under his skin, even for a second, made me feel terribly vindicated. “It’s not like you can actively do anything with that knowledge.”
“I can’t?” I posed the logical hypothetical question. “I can grab the newest version of the serum they’ve been developing—or whatever else they’ve been researching—and inoculate myself with it. That’s such a fancy word, now, isn’t it? Simply swallowing it will do the trick. And I even got my backup here with me should one dose not be enough.” I took a moment to pause and look dramatically at Nate over my left shoulder before focusing on Bucky once more. “You still think they’d waste a dose of the updated serum on him just so you can pull your little mind control stunt? Oh, please, don’t be so naive. You know just how much each dose of the stable serum is worth. Enough to fund this entire mission, waste so many resources, and possibly so many people that cannot be replaced. And you know that Raynor can’t stand you. So why should she trust you?”
Sadly, no more doubt followed but I hadn’t really expected to get a second hit in. “Isn’t it the opposite of smart for you to tell me that now?” Hamilton drawled. “You’re bluffing.”
“Maybe I am,” I conceded. “Or maybe I’m telling you so you think I’m bluffing while I’m really not. Maybe someone else is going to do it? Who knows? How sure can you be about everyone’s—” and I meant Richards with that, obviously “— loyalties? So many possibilities, and only three and a half more hours to waste. Tick, tock. What are you gonna do about it, Bucky?”
He didn’t give me the satisfaction of reacting to his nickname that he loved as much as I did the one he’d pinned on me, but I could tell that he didn’t know for sure if he hadn’t misjudged me. A stupid move of me, and one that I couldn’t explain why I’d felt driven to go for it, but hey. What could possibly go wrong?
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 3 | Books 7-9 Page 89
