Countdown Zero

by Chris Rylander

  Agent Blue and Director Isadoris had told me a few days before that the virus should no longer be airborne. The only real risk would be contact with infected people. So if we found any, what would I do?

  I searched my backpack of supplies desperately. I still had the extendable rod, the grappling hook harness and a section of the wiring, the laser cutter, the mission-brief documents, the one working gas mask, and the metal box containing the antidote.

  I handed the real mask to Jake.

  “Put this on,” I said.

  His eyes widened. “What about you?”

  “Don’t worry, I have a plan.”

  I grabbed the laser cutter, the leftover grappling hook wire, and the harness and got to work. First, I took off my jacket and sweatshirt and then tore off the sleeve of the sweatshirt. I cut it down into a double-layered patch big enough to cover my nose and mouth. Then I cut the grappling wire into smaller sections and ran the frayed ends through holes I burned into either end of the patch of sleeve. I did the same to the harness straps, measuring them around my head to make sure I got the size right. In the end, I had a crude makeshift mask of double-layered fleece, bound by wires and secured to my head with chunks of the grappling harness.

  It wasn’t much, but it had to be better than nothing. The fact that I could barely breathe with it covering half my face had to be a good sign that the virus would have a tough time getting in. And if I somehow did get infected, it’s not as if the disease were incurable. I had extra vials of the antidote in my pack.

  Jake gave me a wary look, but I shook my head. We didn’t have any time left to argue.

  “Lower me down?” he suggested, his voice muffled by the mask. “Then when you jump, I’ll break your fall. You went first last time.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s only fair that I go first this time.”

  I was starting to like his attitude. He made a good counterpart. Maybe I’d found my own partner? Like how Agent Nineteen had Agent Blue? If Jake continued to prove himself, he might even get to sign on with the Agency as well. And then maybe Isadoris and Blue wouldn’t be so mad that I’d broken my cover.

  I lowered Jake down as best I could, but he was heavy and I let go a little early. He landed with a thud.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” he said. I could just barely see him standing under the vent opening. “I’m ready.”

  I tossed down my bag first. He caught it and set it aside. Then he reached up for me as I lowered myself down. He grabbed my legs and held them steady.

  “Let go,” he said.

  I did and he buckled under my weight. We both hit the floor with matching grunts.

  And just like that, we had officially infiltrated the secret Agency base inside Teddy Roosevelt’s head.

  WE JUST LAY THERE FOR A FEW MOMENTS, CATCHING OUR breath. Then I rolled to the side and climbed to my feet. I took my nearly dead glow stick and shined it around. We were in a hallway not unlike those at the Agency HQ under our school.

  Jake got to his feet and rubbed his back.

  “Where are those blueprints?” he asked, his voice muffled by the gas mask.

  We checked them together.

  “We should be right here.” He pointed at a hallway not far from the lab.

  “Then we need to go this way,” I said, pointing down the hall behind us.

  Jake nodded, and we didn’t waste any more time getting started toward the Jarmusch Research Lab.

  As we jogged down the hallway, I tried to keep my mind from wandering to what we might find. A room full of corpses? A completely empty lab, but one filled with a deadly virus vapor? I didn’t know, and thinking about it was only making things worse. So instead I just tried to focus on not letting my jellylike legs collapse on me.

  There weren’t any dead bodies or signs of a struggle within the base hallways. Which meant two things were becoming increasingly likely:

  1.The outbreak was an accident and not the result of enemy infiltration.

  2.The base personnel were still alive in quarantine somewhere.

  But we would know for sure soon enough. Jake followed me to the right, around a corner, and then suddenly we were there. A lone door stood in front of us. A small label next to it on the wall read:

  THE JARMUSCH MICROBIOCHEMISTRY DEVELOPMENT AND TESTING LABORATORY

  “What now?” Jake asked.

  I pulled the mission documents from my bag. I didn’t know how much time we had left, but it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes.

  “The base emergency override system is engaged, so a simple passcode should get us in, rather than a retina or fingerprint scan. Supposedly.” I pulled out Agent Blue’s written instructions with the passcode on it. “I guess.”

  I typed the nine-digit code into the computer keypad next to the door. As soon as I pressed the first button, the keypad lit up a faint green color. At least Agent Blue had been right about the emergency power still working even after I took out the base’s power grid.

  After I typed in the code, nothing happened for a few seconds. Then there was a soft click as the door unlocked. I glanced at Jake, who made a motion for me to hurry. I grabbed the door and pulled it open.

  The lab was not pitch-black, which was good, because my glow stick was now officially dead. The room was dimly lit by two sets of emergency lights in the corners. It was dark, but there was just enough light to make out everything, kind of like in this fancy restaurant that we went to one time for my dad’s birthday.

  “Carson, look,” Jake said, pointing across the room.

  In the far corner was a smaller enclosed area. Behind the glass walls were all sorts of beakers, tubes, high-tech machines, and other expensive-looking lab equipment, in addition to a large walk-in fridge.

  Also behind the glass wall was Agent Nineteen.

  He was lying on the floor and not moving.

  That’s when I knew that we were too late.

  THE ONLY THING THAT KEPT ME FROM JUST COLLAPSING TO THE floor in a big heaping pile of failure was the fact that there was another guy behind the glass wall with Agent Nineteen. He was wearing a white lab coat.

  And he was very much alive.

  The guy waved at us frantically, shouting something. I couldn’t hear his voice at all, which was probably to be expected considering he was inside some sort of sealed-off room.

  “Come on, we’ve got to help him!” Jake said as he rushed over to the smaller glass room within the larger room.

  “Wait, we don’t . . . ,” I started, but then just followed him.

  It’s not like my sole mission was to save Agent Nineteen. Even if he was already dead, that didn’t mean I couldn’t still save any of the other Agency personnel who were still alive. But something odd occurred to me as I ran after Jake: Where was everyone else? The only ones behind the glass were Agent Nineteen and the guy in the lab coat. Agent Blue had said there were usually ten agents and staff within the base at any given time. Which meant there should have been eight more people here. Where were they?

  When we got to the glass wall and I saw the guy in the lab coat up close, I realized how dire the situation was. He looked like a walking corpse. Animated death. A chunk of rotting cow fat molded into a human being. His eyes were sunken inside baggy yellow sockets and his skin had the color and texture of cake frosting. Sweating cake frosting.

  He hit a switch on a steel beam in the middle of the glass wall.

  “Thank goodness you’re here!” His voice came out through a small intercom speaker sounding as desperate as he looked. “You need to go call for help!”

  “We are the help,” I said as calmly as I could.

  “What do you mean?” the guy said, confusion clearly visible behind his panic.

  “The Agency sent us,” I said.

  “You have the antidote?”

  I nodded. Then I pointed at Agent Nineteen, still crumpled on the floor, not moving. I couldn’t really s
ee his face to know if he was conscious, alive, zombiefied, or just sleeping. “Is he dead?” I somehow managed to ask without my voice breaking.

  Apparently the guy could hear me through the intercom as well because he started shaking his head right away, and there was no way he was reading my lips since they were covered with my makeshift gas mask. And I thought for a very brief moment that it was his way of telling me that Agent Nineteen hadn’t made it. But then he spoke again.

  “Not yet, but he will be. We both will be, very soon. No more questions, just do exactly as I say, got it?”

  I nodded, already taking my backpack off.

  “Where is the antidote?” he asked.

  I fished out the small, unmarked metal container, the size of a paperback book, and held it up. Relief flooded his empty eyes.

  “Over here.” He motioned and started walking. As I followed him, I noticed the small steel door on the far side of the glass wall. It was the size of an oven door with a smooth curved handle.

  The man hit another intercom switch above the door on his side of the glass.

  “Open the door,” he said.

  “Won’t that let the virus out?” I asked.

  He shook his head, scowling. “Agent Nineteen and I have mere moments left. It’s no longer airborne. But even still, this compartment is airtight, like an air lock in a spaceship in a sci-fi movie. Open the door, now.”

  I flung it open and put the box inside and then closed it without waiting for his instructions to do so. It’s not like I needed to be a scientist to figure that part out.

  The guy in the lab coat hit a button. A green light flashed above the door. He opened the compartment from his side and grabbed the box hastily with shaking hands that grew steadier as he opened it and held up one of the glass vials.

  “What about Nineteen?” I shouted.

  He shook his head, clearly too annoyed to respond to me. But it made sense for him to administer it to himself first. It was like on airplanes, how they always said to secure your own oxygen mask before helping others. If he died in that extra time while trying to get to Nineteen, then they’d both be goners.

  His lab coat had a small name tag on it: Phil.

  Phil removed an injection gun from the case and loaded one of the glass vials into it. Then he pressed it to his neck and shot the liquid into his artery. He breathed in heavily as he did so.

  “Phil,” I said.

  He looked up quickly.

  “Now him.” I pointed back over to where Agent Nineteen lay motionless.

  Phil nodded and hurried to Agent Nineteen’s unconscious body. I followed him back over and pressed my face up to the glass. I just hoped it wasn’t already too late.

  Agent Nineteen didn’t move, and I couldn’t tell if he was breathing as Phil replaced the needle and antidote vial in the injection gun. His hands moved faster now than they had before. Could the cure be working that quickly? I prayed it could.

  He pressed the gun to Agent Nineteen’s neck and pulled the trigger. He checked Nineteen’s pulse by putting his fingers on his neck and stood up slowly a few seconds later.

  “Is he still alive?” I asked.

  “His heart rate is low, but still beating,” he said.

  “When will he wake up?”

  Phil shook his head and then frowned. “It’s hard to say. It could be a few minutes. A few hours. I really don’t know. We haven’t yet done human testing of the virus to this stage of progression.”

  I nodded but allowed myself to breathe a sigh of relief anyway. He wasn’t dead. I got here in time to save him. The mission was a success.

  “Where is everyone else?” I asked. “How do I get you guys out of there? If it’s not airborne anymore, why are you still locked in there? How did the virus even get out for that matter?”

  The questions that had built up in my brain like a flooding river suddenly burst through the dam all at once. But before Phil had a chance to say anything, Jake spoke up.

  “Whoa! Mr. Jensen from school is the guy you were sent to save?”

  I clearly had a lot more to explain. But my head was still reeling. I felt like I might pass out. The makeshift gas mask I was wearing certainly wasn’t helping.

  “You can take off your masks,” Phil said, reading my mind. “I assure you, whatever quantities of the virus that were airborne within the base have long since died. As for your questions, I’ll get to those in a little bit, but first I have some questions of my own for you. Then we’ll work on getting us all out of here safely.”

  He was clearly the ranking Agency official in this situation, so I wasn’t about to argue. Besides, I was way too exhausted for that.

  “You say the Agency sent you in,” Phil said. “But you’re just kids.”

  I explained to him the reasons the Agency chose me for this mission, staying vague when explaining that I’d done some freelance work for the Agency earlier that year. I assumed that if he needed to know about my Olek mission, he probably already would. Then I told him how Jake had followed me and saved me when I’d fallen, hastily defending my decision to let him continue on the mission with me.

  Phil nodded slowly as I talked. “Who actually sent you?” he asked.

  “Director Isadoris and Agent Blue,” I said.

  “Remarkable,” he said again. “Well, you did a fine job, young man.”

  “Zero,” I said. “You can call me Agent Zero.”

  “Okay, then, Agent Zero,” Phil said, checking his wristwatch. “Let’s get to your questions, then we’ll go about getting us all out of here. Fire away.”

  I thought back to my string of questions. There were so many of them.

  “Where is everybody else?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid they didn’t make it,” Phil said somberly.

  “Really?” I asked, an emptiness taking the place of my stomach. “But how?”

  “They were sealed off in another part of the base when the outbreak occurred. In the panic that followed, there was a small explosion in that sector that both destroyed and collapsed the emergency ventilation system, and, well, I don’t want to get into grisly details, but let me assure you that they didn’t suffer. Thankfully there were only seven staff on duty when the outbreak occurred, so casualties could have been worse. Not that that diminishes the loss of some very dear friends and colleagues.”

  As he said this, he seemed to sink a few inches lower to the ground if that were possible. He just looked so haggard and defeated. I realized that to me this had been a stressful yet successful mission, and to him it had to have been one of the worst experiences of his life. He’d just lost a bunch of coworkers and pals and almost died himself. If I lost seven of my friends in one day, I’d basically be completely alone.

  “How did the virus get out?” I asked.

  “It was simply a mistake. A very tragic and horrendous mistake, which is what has made this all particularly hard to stomach. Even the most highly trained scientists are prone to errors from time to time . . .” He trailed off, checking his watch again.

  Did he have somewhere to be? Or was it a force of habit? I guess most of the science teachers I’d ever known in my life were the kind of people who had never been late for anything in their lives.

  “You said earlier that the virus wasn’t airborne anymore,” I said. “If that’s the case, then why are you two still locked in there?”

  “Once there’s a contamination, the system will automatically seal the lab and the Red Room, which is what we call this glass case you see here. It cannot be overridden from the inside. Unfortunately, there was nobody left to manually open it for us once we were able to contain what was left of the virus and its potency period wore off. That said, would you mind if I talked you through the release procedures so we can get Agent Nineteen a medevac? I’m concerned that he hasn’t yet regained consciousness.”

  I nodded.

  “Okay, I’m assuming they wouldn’t send you in here without the quarantine override code,” Phil
said. “It changes every twelve hours automatically and can only be accessed in Agency terminals outside the base itself. A panic fail-safe of sorts.”

  “Yeah, I have it memorized,” I said, trying to recall it. I hadn’t thought about the code since earlier that morning.

  “Good,” Phil said, looking relieved. He walked me through a number of steps needed to release the emergency quarantine seal on the Red Room.

  Eventually we got to the last step, which was to input the code into a computer monitor nearby. As soon as I put my mind to it, I remembered it almost instantly. I typed it in and the door to the glass room clicked open.

  I rushed inside and knelt next to Agent Nineteen. There was dried blood on his head, and he looked pretty much like any dead body I’d seen in movies. But he was breathing, so that was a good sign. I looked up again to ask Phil how we were going to carry him out.

  That’s when I found myself face-to-face with the business end of a handgun.

  “¿Cómo está?” the gun seemed to say. “Mi nombre es La Pistola, y estas a punto de morir.”

  For some reason, in my head, the gun spoke Spanish.

  I IGNORED THE GUN’S COMMENTS AND LOOKED PAST IT WHILE MY brain attempted to catch up with what my eyes were showing me. The first thing I saw was Jake, emerging from a huge walk-in fridge within the Red Room.

  “I got it,” Jake called out, holding something in his hands.

  His voice sounded distant, like this was all happening underwater. What did he have? Why was he telling me? Furthermore, did he not see La Pistola pointed at me?

  I tried to yell out for him to run. That it wasn’t safe in here after all. But instead all I could think about was the gun.

  I finally focused on the person holding it. Phil pointed it at me steadily as a smile stretched across his lips.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said before checking his watch again. “All that matters is that you don’t move. Do exactly as I say, and neither of you will get hurt.”

  Jake stood next to Phil, holding several metal containers similar to the one that had held the antidote. He held them up.