by James Axler
“Time to get out of your hazard suit, Echo,” Lima said to the female whitecoat.
“Yes, Doctor.” When she took off her hood, she immediately covered her nose with her hand. “The smell...” she said.
“Hurry up, off with the rest of it.”
After she had removed the suit, Lima gestured toward an empty cell with the door standing ajar. “Inside, please.”
“Why do I have to go in there, Doctor?” she asked. “You didn’t say anything about a cage. Are you going to lock me in?”
“It’s for your own safety, I assure you.”
“I don’t understand why that is necessary.”
“It’s just a precaution,” Lima told her. “In case the unexpected happens and muties somehow get loose, you won’t be in any danger.”
Echo looked at the cell but didn’t move toward it, apparently reconsidering her decision to volunteer.
The head whitecoat nodded to the enforcers, who moved quickly to seize her by the arms.
“There is no need for this,” she complained to Lima.
The whitecoat took an injector from one of the men in black and fired it into her shoulder.
“Ouch! Why did you do that?”
“We need a positive test of the virus on the genetically unaltered. Surely you can understand that.”
“But you said I was here so we could monitor the natural transmission of the virus through the air.”
“Unfortunately because of the new time constraints we don’t have that option,” Lima said.
The black suits rushed the struggling woman to the cage, shoved her in and slammed the door shut.
“Unfortunate, too, that we can’t wait for you to display the full-blown infection,” Lima told her as he turned the key in the lock. “We’ll have to verify that using your elevated white cell count.”
“You said I wouldn’t come down with it.”
“Either way, you will be autopsied along with the others to obtain the data we need. I’m sure you’ll understand that, as well.”
“You dirty bastard!”
Lima shrugged off the insult. Turning toward the companions he said, “When the rest of you start dying very shortly, you should know that your one-eyed friend there made it all possible by donating his infected blood. And if for some reason you don’t die from it, we’re going to cut you open anyway to find out why you survived. For us it’s a win-win—for you it’s a lose-lose.”
To the enforcers he said, “Come on, let’s leave them to their dying.”
With that Lima and his lackeys headed for the exit.
Chapter Twelve
As the elevator plummeted, Mildred looked at Doc, noted his concerned expression and said, “What?”
“I am just curious as to which button you pressed, my dear Mildred,” he said. “Where do you intend for us to get off?”
“I hit the button that’s got an ML beside it,” Mildred said. “That’s ML for main level or even main lobby. I didn’t catch the number of the floor where the butcher shop and hydroponics farm were, but I remember we passed ML on the way up. How that relates to where the others were being held and the mat-trans, I have no clue.”
“There is no guarantee they have not been moved in the interim,” Doc said. “Or separated, which would complicate matters considerably. It would appear we know very little of what we need to know.”
“We know Dr. Lima’s name.”
“How does that figure into a plan?”
“It’s a first step. If we can find the head scientist, he’ll take us to Ryan and the others, and he’ll lead us to the mat-trans after that, so we can get the hell out of here. We won’t be giving him any choice—either he talks or he dies. The main level seems as good a place as any to start tracking down the bastard.”
The confident words sounded hollow, even to her. This redoubt was far larger and far deeper than any they’d come across: a sprawling maze of dozens of levels, countless flights of stairs, twisting corridors—some no doubt blocked by cave-ins and glacier intrusion. It was also the most heavily populated, best organized and well-armed artifact of predark science they’d ever seen. Whether they succeeded in finding their companions or not, the situation presented an almost infinite number of ways to get boxed in, trapped and chilled.
And then eaten.
For a moment Mildred envisioned them all hanging naked and bloody from the meat hooks while workers in blue cut them into steaks, chops and roasts. The image of a brim-full foot bucket made her shudder.
“That fellow in orange seemed fascinated by the cuffs on this garment,” Doc said, breaking the long, murky silence. “I am afraid the discrepancy in length will continue to draw unwanted attention, and possibly put us in danger. And, as you might well imagine, it is quite drafty.”
“Are you saying you want to hunt down a taller enforcer to strangle and strip?”
“No, of course not. I was just pointing out the increased risk of discovery.”
She glanced at the old man’s bare shins. “For Pete’s sake Doc, pull your pants down.”
He was still struggling to do that when the car’s doors opened on the main level. Unlike the grim hallways, it was bright and expansive. Both the scale and design surprised Mildred. Under a towering domed ceiling, a circular floor of polished concrete stretched off for a couple of hundred feet. A spiral staircase led down from the horseshoe-shaped balcony floor above. There were signs of quake damage: curved chunks of concrete had fallen from the inside of the ceiling dome, and there were cracks in the floor. The great hall was a blur of rainbow colors in motion as people in coveralls hurried in all directions. The mob scene reminded Mildred of Grand Central station at rush hour. Clearly they were all gearing up for something momentous. There was a long line of people with carts waiting for a turn in the elevator.
The workers in green suits who stood at the front of the file deferred to the black-clad enforcers and let them exit before they piled into the car. As Mildred and Doc stepped out, they got strange looks from the people waiting in line. The greenies turned as they passed to keep staring at them.
They weren’t looking at Doc’s pant legs; they were staring at their faces, which puzzled Mildred because their faces were covered. Then she looked around the great hall and realized what was wrong.
“Doc, we can’t wear the balaclavas pulled down over our faces,” she said, rolling up the front of her knit mask. “None of the other enforcers are wearing them like that. Roll up your mask, quick.”
“Uncovered, we risk being recognized as impostors,” Doc said as he complied.
The green suits seemed to have lost interest. People were hurrying around Mildred and Doc, but didn’t pay them any mind.
“In a place this big,” she said, “it’s likely that every black suit doesn’t know every other black suit. For all we know they promote from one color to the next, so new enforcers could be popping up all the time. We have to press onward as if we have an important job to do, just like everyone else.”
Mildred scanned the throng, and, seeing a whitecoat coming their way, immediately moved to intercept her.
“Excuse me,” she said, catching the woman by the arm, “we’re looking for Dr. Lima. You wouldn’t know where he is, would you?”
Mildred could see the harried whitecoat wanted to pull away, but the black coveralls made her think twice. “Uh, I’m not in his department,” she said, “but if you go down to the Bioengineering Level, someone there is bound to know.”
“How many floors down is that?”
When the woman gave her a puzzled look, as though she should have known the answer, Mildred squeezed her arm. The word “nineteen” came out in a squeak.
“Of course. Thank you.”
The whitecoat quickly melted into the crowd behind th
em.
“There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” Mildred said to Doc. “Now, let’s find a staircase.”
As they weaved their way through the throng of oncoming bodies, Doc said, “I cannot help but feel sorry for these people. Starving themselves and their children. And for what?”
“I’d feel sorry for them if they were different people,” Mildred said. “We have our own to protect.”
They found the entrance to a staircase and started down, double-time. Behind her, Mildred could hear Doc grunt softly each time the weight of his burden came down on his back. There was no traffic to speak of going the other way.
The landing they sought was marked with tall, stenciled letters: Bioengineering Level. They pushed past the door and entered a hallway full of scurrying whitecoats. They all had their arms full—carrying boxes of lab gear and hard drives—and they were moving in the opposition direction, presumably headed for the elevators.
Mildred blocked the path of a male whitecoat and asked for directions to Dr. Lima’s office.
The man pointed to the double doors he’d just exited.
Mildred and Doc used their boot soles on the metal kickplates, keeping their hands free as they entered. The foyer on the other side was brightly lit and the white walls and ceiling made it seem even brighter. Through open doorways on either side, Mildred could see whitecoats packing things in plastic crates—complicated-looking electronic devices, lab glassware, sheafs of file folders and piles of computer disks. Other whitecoats were stacking loaded crates along the hall’s wall. There were four men in black standing around, doing nothing. Their interest, on seeing Mildred and Doc, seemed casual, at best. When one of them nodded a greeting, Mildred nodded back.
Then she stepped up to the long service counter and addressed a man working at a computer station on the opposite side. “We were ordered to deliver a bag to Dr. Lima,” she said.
The whitecoat looked up from his computer screen. He wasn’t wearing a respirator, but had been wearing one very recently. He wasn’t alone. His face, and the faces of the others hurrying around the room, showed telltale pressure marks across the bridge of the nose and on the cheeks.
Mildred hooked a thumb in the direction of the lumpy looking duffel on Doc’s back. “That’s supposed to go to Dr. Lima.”
“He’s not here at the moment. But you can leave it with me. He should be back shortly.”
“No, I can’t do that. It’s supposed to be delivered in person.”
“What is it?”
“Don’t know. Didn’t ask. We were told to hand it over to him. Where is he?”
Mildred glanced at the black suits, two of whom were conferring. Were they looking at Doc’s ankles? Or how high the seat of the coveralls rode in his butt crack?
“You’ll have to ask his staff,” the whitecoat said. “It’s the third door on the right. Someone in there will know where he is.”
Mildred and Doc moved away from the counter, the men in black watching them leave. As the companions stepped through the doorway, three men in lab coats carrying packing crates brushed past them, emptying a reception area except for the whitecoat sitting behind a cluttered desk.
The woman looked up at them over her half-glasses and Mildred knew they were screwed. It was the same skinny, hair-in-a-bun bitch who’d escorted them to the butcher shop. Despite their new uniforms, she recognized them at once.
“You!” she said, jumping up from her chair.
In the next breath she was going to scream.
Mildred whipped the handblaster from its hip holster, aimed the weapon at center mass, and said, “Not a sound.”
Quickly closing the distance between them, she shoved the muzzle hard against the woman’s forehead. “You better give me some kind of sign, girl. Are you on board with keeping quiet?”
The woman nodded. Then her eyes darted past Mildred to the door.
Their other escort to the butcher shop, the prematurely bald whitecoat, burst into the room carrying a pair of empty crates. When he saw the blaster and Mildred, he stopped in his tracks, leaving the door to swing open behind him.
“What are you...” he gasped.
He got no further.
Doc stepped away from the wall and smashed the truncheon into the back of his head behind the right ear. As the whitecoat’s knees buckled and the crates tumbled from his arms, Doc caught him around the waist and pulled him out of view of the doorway.
Not quickly enough.
In the second before Doc back-kicked the door closed, Mildred saw the two black suits slumped by the counter suddenly perk up and then start toward them.
There were two other doors in the reception area, and both were open. One of them led to a laboratory, the other to a deep storage closet.
“Is there another way out of here?” Mildred asked her captive.
The woman shook her head.
They needed some distance from the corridor, and the way things were going, some soundproofing.
“Move! Move!” Mildred said. “Into the lab. Got him, Doc?”
The old man already had the male whitecoat by the heels. He dragged the body into the lab and Mildred shut the door after him. The room was divided by a long, blacktopped worktable with cupboards beneath it and stools behind it.
Mildred shrugged out of her backpack and Doc dumped the duffel. She shoved the whitecoat around the end of the lab table. Doc took position alongside the door, blaster in one hand, truncheon in the other.
“Sit on that damn stool and don’t say a word,” Mildred told the woman, then ducked behind the counter beside her, out of sight.
There was a tentative knock on the laboratory door.
Then it opened.
“Everything okay in here?”
Mildred waited a beat for them to step into the room, then rose from cover holding the blaster out in front of her.
The enforcers were much heavier-set than Doc and nearly as tall, but he was behind them. Before they could turn, he slashed forehand and backhand with the truncheon. It reminded Mildred of his precision sword-work, only in this case there was no edge to slice flesh, just the golf-ball-sized knob of leather-covered lead at the end of the weapon. It made solid contact with one mastoid, then the other.
Thwack, thwack with a fraction of a second between.
Both men crumped to their knees, then toppled forward onto their faces.
Doc reached back and closed the door.
“Things are getting ever more complicated,” he said, staring down at the three unmoving forms.
“Time to simplify,” Mildred said.
She put the barrel of the weapon into bun-woman’s ear. “We need to know where Lima took our friends. You need to take us there. Can you do that?”
The woman nodded, but something flashed in her eyes. Defiance?
“Don’t even think about it,” Mildred said. “See that duffel bag? We’re armed to the teeth with your automatic weapons. If things go south for us, you’re going to have a bloodbath on your hands.”
“What about them?” Doc said, indicating the three men on the floor.
“Check for pulses.”
Doc reached down and felt the whitecoat’s throat first. He shook his head. “This one’s gone,” he said.
The others were both still breathing.
“Should we dispatch them?” Doc asked as he straightened.
“If they’re found, dead or alive, the alarm is going to be raised,” Mildred said. “So it doesn’t matter what we do to them.”
“When they come to, they are not going to be in any shape to help chase us down. I whacked them very hard.”
“Okay, let’s tie them up, nice and tight.”
Keeping an eye on the female whitecoat, they worked quickly, using hollow rubber t
ubing from the lab table’s Bunsen burners to bind the black suits’ wrists and ankles behind their backs. They stuffed wadded-up rags in their mouths and tied them in place. After confiscating their blasters, they pulled the living and the dead out of sight behind the lab table.
“We’re outta here,” Mildred told the whitecoat. “You’re going to walk beside me with this gun in your ribs, you’re going to keep your eyes straight ahead and your arms at your sides.”
The woman nodded.
Gathering up the duffel and backpack, they left the reception room and turned for the exit, moving briskly. As they passed through the double doors, Mildred glanced over her shoulder and saw the remaining enforcers crossing the corridor, heading for the entrance to Lima’s office, apparently checking on the two men in black who hadn’t reappeared.
“We’d better pick up the pace,” she said, pushing the whitecoat ahead of her down the hallway. “What’s the fastest route to where you’re keeping our friends? Talk!”
“Elevator.”
“We can’t wait for that.”
“Stairs, then. The landing entrance is just ahead.”
Mildred looked back again. The double doors were still shut, but the pursuit would be coming. And soon.
As they hurried down the gritty stairs, Mildred kept a hand on the whitecoat’s shoulder. “How far is it?” she said.
“Twenty-five levels down.”
That translated into fifty flights and landings.
As they descended, despite the fact that their body temperatures were rising from the exertion, it felt like they were entering a deep freeze.
After going down ten floors at top speed, Mildred called a momentary halt for them to catch their breaths. In the weak light of the landing, the three of them were puffing steam like racehorses.
“This is taking too long,” she said. “Once the black suits figure out who we are, they’re going to know where we’re headed.”
Doc nodded, huffing for air.
“Where exactly are you holding our friends?” Mildred asked, giving their hostage a shake.
