“Is the data safe?” Michael asked.
Any response was drowned out by the sudden blast of the extinguisher systems. The air filled with sodium bicarbonate powder. It rained down like a blizzard of dandruff and smothered the flames.
“Can’t…breathe…” Nicole gasped. The survivors crawled out of the lab, escaping into the hallway and gulping fresh air.
“That didn’t go quite as planned,” Michael wheezed.
“When the smoke clears, we can try again,” Gretchen replied.
“Sue is dead,” Bernard whispered.
“Yes. Which means she’s no longer hurting or afraid.” Gretchen dropped the empty magazine out of the pistol.
“They ate her…” Bernard’s voice shook.
Gretchen rounded on him. “Bernard, get your shit together. You did a good thing. You saved the rest of us. Sue’s death wasn’t your fault.”
“I’m going back in,” Michael said. He kept low, his shirt over his mouth and nose, breathing against the smoke and chemical dust. The pile of bodies in the room beyond the lab was melted together in a mosaic of blackened skin and red-raw flesh.
He pulled on the door, grimacing as the half-cooked flesh of the knot of corpses ripped, spilling steaming viscera and foul stench onto the floor. Michael gagged and held his breath; jumping over the pile was impossible. He gingerly stepped, feeling the crunch of crispy skin under foot. The room beyond the lab was stained with smoke and the smeared bodily fluids of the infected who had been trapped in there.
A filing cabinet stood in one corner, the large dial lock on the front suggesting it might contain the data tapes Sue had referred to. On the off-chance that the cabinet was unlocked, Michael tugged on the handle of the top drawer. It slid open and he jumped back in surprise.
“Christ…” he muttered. The drawer contained a small pile of papers and Manila folders. No sign of anything that could be data tapes. Taking another breath, he held it again and flicked through the folder contents. Lots of pages stamped TOP SECRET. The content of the pages was mostly blacked out. Some of them showed signs of being hastily burned and shredded.
He pulled open the second drawer: black plastic containers. Michael cracked one open, it was empty. He went through the others; all empty.
The third drawer held two ring-binder folders and a couple of technical manuals for an autoclave and an incubator.
Taking a handful of the damaged papers, Michael slipped them into his jacket and left the room. He stopped when he saw something oozing out of the steaming pile of shit that was the tangle remains of the infected.
Michael froze, hoping that it was just fluid pressure. The blackened crust of a burnt skull cracked like a hard-boiled egg. Michael wrinkled his nose at the new stench. A translucent lump pushed its way out through the spreading crack. To Michael, it looked like a birth, a hatching of something from a protective shell.
The white gel-like form pushing its way free was about the size of Michael’s fist. He stared at it, thinking how it looked like a jellyfish.
It is a jellyfish… The realization came to him in a rush. It was something he could understand. In all the madness of the last few days, this was something familiar, and he found that reassuring.
“How did you get there, little guy?” he asked the white lump. The jelly lay pulsing on the steaming heap of twisted corpses. Michael looked around and took a pair of long tweezers from a laboratory tray. He gently poked at the jelly, lifting the edge of its skirt to see the hidden forms under it.
A thick tendril lashed out and wrapped around the metal tool. Michael jerked his hand back as the tweezers were yanked from his grip.
“Heh…” Michael grinned in spite of the horror of it all. Among all this, a jellyfish was still doing everything it could to survive. Where the hell did it come from?
“Doctor Armitage?” Bernard called from the corridor.
“Yeah?”
“Did you find the data tapes?”
Michael walked out of the lab. “I found cases, but they’re empty.”
“What?” Bernard shuffled the flamethrower in his arms and went to look for himself.
“Everything okay?” Nicole emerged from across the hall where she and Gretchen had been looking for weapon components.
Michael nodded. “Kinda. Let’s go back in and I’ll explain to you and Gretchen.”
Both women listened in silence as Michael explained about the unlocked filing cabinet and the empty tape cases.
Bernard returned looking puzzled. “Lot of people had access to that filing cabinet,” he said.
“Yes, but very few people knew what was being stored in there,” Gretchen reminded him.
“Sue didn’t know the tapes were gone. If she did, she wouldn’t have opened the door,” Michael said.
“Someone shoved the infected in there and closed the door to cover their tracks?” A dark expression crossed Gretchen’s face. Michael recognized it from the fights that had marred the last eighteen months of their five-year marriage.
“Who the fuck would do that?” Bernard looked like he wanted to throw his hands up in the air, but the weight of the flamethrower barrel kept them still.
“Shh…” Nicole stood by the door and now waved a hand to silence the conversation. “There’s someone out there…”
They listened, ears straining to hear more than the blood pounding in their ears. A wet gurgling sound came from the other side of the door. Then something slapped against it.
Gretchen waved for everyone to be still. She still gripped her pistol, even though it was empty.
Nicole’s nose wrinkled; the smell of burnt flesh and boiled body fluids hung in the air, but now it was richer and even more cloying.
They stood in silence, staring at the door and waiting for another sound. Long seconds passed then the door shuddered under a heavy blow. Nicole backed away, and Bernard started pumping the pressure lever on his homemade flamethrower.
The door boomed as it was struck again. A long crack appeared in the length of the door. The reinforced wood splintered and bowed inwards.
“You ready to burn whatever comes through that door?” Gretchen asked.
Bernard nodded, flicking his cigarette lighter to set the pilot light on the flamethrower burning.
The door shattered, sending shards of wood across the room. An arm, burnt black and oozing fluid, reached through the hole. It grasped at the air and was joined by a second arm, then a third. Burnt skin hung in ragged strips from the torn flesh. The raw meat of the arm was filleted to the bone on the ragged spines of the shattered door.
“Bernard…” Gretchen warned as the scientist continued flicking his lighter.
“Fuck…fuck…fuck…” he whimpered. The door split further, the panel tearing apart under the onslaught. The thing that pushed through the gap was the scorched remains of the bodies piled up in the lab, melted together and moving chaotically with too many limbs. The mess of body parts lashed out and grabbed at Bernard. He backed away, tripping and falling on his ass.
The flamethrower spewed burning fuel as Bernard tumbled. A jet of flame arced up the wall and across the ceiling. The room filled with smoke and intense heat. Michael and the others started clubbing the monstrous knot of body parts with scraps of furniture and the remains of the door.
Gretchen grabbed a long dagger-like sliver of the door and stabbed into the center of the writhing mess. A guttural scream came from somewhere deep in the ball of blackened flesh. Blood and yellow liquid sprayed as Gretchen’s makeshift knife stabbed deep.
Nicole smashed a wooden chair over an arm that tugged at her ankle. She kept hammering at it until the bones broke and the flesh was an ochre smear on the concrete.
The blaze spread across the ceiling, dripping burning oil onto everything and setting new fires on the walls and floor.
“We have to get out of here!” Michael yelled. His eyes were streaming from the smoke and he wished the automated fire-control systems would hurry up and activate.
Gretchen howled in rage and pain, and the quivering lump in front of her finally went still. She kicked it one more time and then climbed over it and into the hallway.
“Come on!” she yelled.
Nicole ran blindly, her arms outstretched and her clothes smoldering with burning embers. Michael guided her to the doorway and helped her through. Turning back, he grabbed Bernard by the boots and dragged him to the door. The flamethrower had gone out, its reserves of fuel used up. Gasping for air, Michael stripped the flamethrower off Bernard’s back and heaved the man onto his shoulder. Staggering under the extra weight, Michael crashed out of the burning room.
“Don’t stop!” Gretchen shouted at him. Over the noise of the spreading fire, Michael heard the snarling growls of more infected coming after them.
Chapter 12
On the count of three, the marines lifted Nolan and laid him out on a cleared table in a mess room.
Brubaker continued his examination. Nolan’s pulse was slow and erratic, his respiration shallow and labored. The medic carefully probed the sergeant’s skull for crush injuries.
“It went inside his head, Brew,” Lewis said.
“Yeah, you said that already.” Brubaker could see no sign of the jelly lump that the marines insisted had crawled out of the dead man’s skull and ambushed Nolan.
Nolan’s ear canal showed signs of fresh bleeding, but a cursory examination showed nothing blocking it.
“He fell, right?” Brubaker asked.
“Yeah, but the fucking thing went all up in his ear first,” Lewis insisted.
“I fucking heard you, Lewis.” Brubaker opened Nolan’s right eyelid and waved his flashlight in it. The pupil didn’t contract. Then, a moment later, a line swept across his eye, like a second eyelid or windshield wiper.
Brubaker dismissed it as a trick of the light, then he saw the same dark line coil in the darkness of Nolan’s pupil.
“Okay, there’s definitely something in there,” he agreed.
“What do we do? You can get it out, right?” Lewis looked at Brubaker with a fearful certainty. Brubaker was a marine medic, trained and experienced in handling all kinds of traumatic injuries from gunshot wounds to burns. This shit might even puzzle a specialist in parasitology.
“The Sarge is stable. That thing inside his head hasn’t killed him yet. If it’s what is making the others crazy, then we have some time before Nolan wakes up and starts trying to eat us.”
“We can get him fixed before then?” Lewis looked ready to shoot Nolan where he lay.
“If we can get him back to the sub, then maybe. There’s a fully equipped medical team on board. They can do things we never could.”
“There’s gotta be medical stuff here. Like a clinic or an operating theatre?”
“Sure,” Brubaker replied. “Are you a neurosurgeon, Lewis? You been holding out on us and secretly have an IQ of one-forty?”
“No,” Lewis replied, sulkily.
“Well shut the fuck up and let me do what I can for the Sarge.”
Lewis went to hang with Nato and the rest of the squad. Brubaker covered Nolan with a blanket and stared at the still body.
“You hungry?” Caulfield asked from the galley window.
“What’s good here?” Brubaker asked.
“I wouldn’t wanna eat anything I didn’t hump in here myself, but they have plenty of food in cans and freeze dried. If the electricity can be trusted, the freezer back here has got sides of beef hanging in it.”
“MRE it is then,” Brubaker said.
Nato, Menowski, and Lewis joined them at the long table. They ate quickly and silently, each man glancing to where Nolan lay a couple of tables away.
“Never thought I’d miss Iraq,” Brubaker said, staring at his empty MRE container.
“Or Afghanistan,” Caulfield added.
“Least we knew who our enemy was in those shitholes,” Nato agreed.
“Never had to shoot another American,” Menowski said.
“Those weren’t Americans. Not anymore anyway,” Lewis replied.
“Quit talking, all of you,” Brubaker ordered. “We have a job to do. Let’s do it.”
“Sergeant Nolan got briefed after the last team came in. Do we know where we are going? What his orders were?” Lewis asked.
Brubaker stood up. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it, Rifleman.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Lewis scowled.
“It means that with Nolan down, Brubaker is in charge,” Nato said.
“Okay, but does he know shit?” Lewis asked.
“I know shit. Now get out there and sweep the rest of this level.”
The squad checked their gear and weapons before leaving the mess room. Brubaker was the last to leave. He glanced back at Nolan, lying still on the table. He hoped there would be time to get him to safety.
Chapter 13
“Are they still out there?” Nicole asked.
After avoiding roaming packs of infected, they had taken refuge in another storeroom.
“No sign of them.” Gretchen stood by the door of the dark storeroom. Bernard was sitting against the wall, eyes closed, breathing steadily. Michael was somewhere behind them, searching the shelves for anything useful.
“What’s with you and Michael?” Gretchen asked without taking her eye away from the narrow gap in the open door.
“Nothing.”
Gretchen glanced at Nicole. “You answered too quickly for it to be nothing.”
“We were at a conference in Honolulu. I’d read some of his research, but never met him.”
“He can be quite charming when he first meets a woman,” Gretchen replied.
“There was a lot of drinking involved.”
“There usually is.”
“He cheated on you? While you were still together, I mean.”
“Probably. When we first started dating and things got serious, he was doing his Master’s in Marine Biology and I was working my ass off in the Navy. We didn’t pay enough attention to each other to realize that a relationship was a bad idea.”
“You got married; there must have been something between you.”
“I guess.”
Nicole shivered and hugged herself. “Look at us, two capable, professional women, completely failing at the Bechdel test.”
“That’s the movie thing, right?” Gretchen asked.
“Yeah, to pass the Bechdel test, two women in a film have to talk to each other about something other than a man.”
Gretchen sighed. “I wish this was a movie; then we could leave the theatre early and get a coffee.”
“And food, coffee and a bagel.”
“I’ll have a burger, chili fries, and a large coke.” Gretchen grinned infectiously, which made Nicole giggle.
“What are you two talking about?” Michael emerged out of the darkness, looking intrigued and slightly nervous at the way the two women looked at each other and then giggled harder.
“Nothing. You want to wake up Bernard?” Gretchen asked.
“Hey, Bernard. Time to go.” Michael nudged the scientist’s foot. Bernard jerked awake with a snort.
“Whazzit?” he mumbled.
“We’re moving out,” Michael said.
“Okay…” Bernard blinked and worked himself off the floor. “I need to pee,” he muttered.
“Back corner,” Gretchen said. They waited in silence until Bernard returned.
“All set?” Michael asked. Bernard nodded and Gretchen opened the door.
Dark blood pooled along the hallway, streaked and smeared where stumbling feet had dragged through the mess.
“There’s an elevator over in section D-four,” Gretchen said.
“And you’re sure that we can access back-up data from the level three labs?”
“Nothing is certain,” Gretchen replied.
“We should take the stairs.” Bernard was on edge without the flamethrower to protect himself.
&
nbsp; “Do what you want,” Gretchen said. She glanced around the next corner and nodded it was all clear.
“These labs on level three?” Nicole asked. “What’s the setup?”
“Biological specimen analysis. It’s a secure level, so we have quarantine protocols and containment for anything pathological.”
“Anything dangerous in there?”
Bernard stopped walking. “Smallpox, Ebola, and other genetically engineered variant strains of hemorrhagic fevers. Those are the ones I know about. Level three labs had things going on that they wouldn’t even tell me about.”
“If we can get in, maybe we can find some answers?” Michael suggested.
Gretchen nodded. “That’s the plan. Maybe find out what’s behind all this, and then we can take a sample back and that’s our get out of jail free card.”
Nicole stared. “You are seriously suggesting taking a potentially lethal unknown infectious agent out of a contained environment?”
“I’d rather get out alive and have something to guarantee our escape.”
“Well, when whatever species evolves to take our place in the world millions of years from now, I hope they appreciate that you were the agent of their ascension,” Nicole said.
Gretchen scowled. “Sure, maybe we can commission a fucking stone memorial somewhere when we get back to the mainland?”
Nicole’s eyes narrowed. “I can’t let you expose the rest of the world to an unknown infection.”
A fit of coughing doubled Gretchen over. She spat blood leaned against the wall, struggling to breathe.
Michael immediately went to her side. “How are you doing?” She had been moving fast in spite of her wounded abdomen. He didn’t know how she kept up the pace and intensity, but adrenaline was a great drug.
“I’m still here,” Gretchen replied, her face pale and sheened with sweat.
Michael put a hand on her shoulder. “Nicole is right; we can’t take a potentially lethal specimen out into the world. We need to know what it is and how it works.”
“You need to get out of here. If you stay, you will die.” Gretchen was almost pleading with him. Michael wasn’t used to seeing her being vulnerable and he found himself unsure how to respond.
The Trench Page 6
