by Brett Abell
“I would like to speak to the manager, please.”
The man looked up. At first she could see that he was irritated that he was being bothered, but that changed the moment his eyes drank her in.
I’d crush your balls in a vise before I ever let you touch me, she thought as she smiled for him.
“I’m Carl. I’m the manager. How can I help you?”
“You have a waitress, Cathy, I believe her name is.”
“Oh yes, she’s one of our best,” he said, fully expecting Beth to say how wonderful their dining experience had been.
“If she’s one of your best, you may want to rethink your entire training strategy. She was rude, slow, got our order wrong, and I smelled a hint of weed on her clothing. I write a food blog called the Cutey’s Corner. I have over twelve thousand subscribers to my blog and newsletter. What do you think I should tell them tonight when I get home?”
Carl’s face dropped. The reek of cod liver got even stronger, as though it was being secreted from his glands. “I’ll take care of this immediately. You come back tomorrow, and I will comp your entire meal for free, and Cathy will be gone.”
Beth paused for a moment like she was thinking it over. “All right. I’ll hold off posting it until after tomorrow night’s dinner. But I’m writing up tonight’s experience in the off chance that she’s still here.”
He put his hands up in a placating manner. “Don’t even waste your time. She’s gone the moment you leave.”
Beth smiled. “Thank you,” she said as she left.
“What was that about?” Charlie was leaning against the wall in a desperate bid to keep it or him standing; he wasn’t quite sure.
“Nothing, I was just thanking them for their excellent service.”
“You’re so nice,” he slurred.
“I am, aren’t I?” She gave him a peck on the cheek. “Now show me where you work. Lab equipment makes me hot.”
The inane insane comment should have garnered some adverse reaction from Charlie, but he was seeing what he wanted to and most of the time, that was the swell of Beth’s breasts in her low-cut blouse.
“Did I tell you the government was there?” he asked nervously.
“I have on red panties, Charlie. Do you want to see them?”
Beth thought she was going to lose him there for a moment, his eyes involuntarily beginning to roll up into his head.
“Come back, lover boy.” She squeezed his crotch, his eyes shot open. She escorted him into her car then texted Durgan to meet her at the university “shit is about to go down.”
Ten minutes later, they were on campus. “You’re going to have to park in student parking, and we’ll have to walk to the back of the research center so we don’t garner any attention.”
Beth smirked as she noticed Charlie uncomfortably shifting the front of his pants around repeatedly. They were within fifty feet of the building when Charlie finally seemed to take notice of the case Beth was carrying.
“What’s in there?”
“Sex toys. Now hurry up so we can use them. I’m so hot.” The words were said as flat as pancakes, but Charlie cared little for the inflection, only the promise they held. “How are we going to get in?” They were hidden behind a tree, looking at the nearly darkened structure.
“Did I tell you I was a fucking genius?” It was slurred, but Beth truly believed this wasn’t the ramblings of a drunk but rather the truth told by an academic. “Unlocked my window and cleared the security system from realizing this.”
Two minutes later, they were standing in a small cluttered office. “What do you think?” Charlie asked, pointing his fingers around the walls.
“Where’s the lab?”
“Right out that door.”
Beth was through before Charlie could even acknowledge her passing.
She had stopped halfway across the room. “Where’s the good stuff, Charlie?”
“The what stuff?” He’d followed her out.
“Where’re the army guys keeping their stuff?”
“To be fair, I think they were Marines.”
“Charlie, I’d really like to see the dangerous stuff.”
He started hemming and hawing. “I … I don’t think that’s such a good idea. They’re guarding it and it is dangerous, extremely so from what I’ve been told.”
Charlie’s eyes widened as Beth bent at the waist. “Oops, my shoe is untied.” She turned to look back at him; his eyes were fastened to her buttocks. Men are so goddamned stupid. How are they running the planet? I don’t even have laces. “Much better,” she said as she stood up. “I really need to get out of these pants soon.”
“The failure flume.”
“What?”
“Um, that’s what we call it. There’s a chute that goes to an incinerator in the basement. If we have an experiment that goes bad, we toss it down the incinerator.”
“Charlie, start making sense or these are going home.” She pushed in on the sides of her breasts. Charlie winced.
“The chute is here and it goes up to the lab where they are housing the virus.”
“How do we go ‘up’ a chute?”
“It has a maintenance ladder installed. They have to periodically check to make sure that there is no breach in the material, allowing some nasty bug to escape. It happened once in Colorado, got half the students sick with a horrible flu. Shut the campus down for nearly two weeks.”
“Charlie, I’m getting bored, and these toys’ batteries are going to die,” she said, holding the case up.
“Right. Let me just shut down the security for that.” He went over to the nearest terminal and within a few moments, he gave Beth the thumbs up. “Over here.” He motioned to the far wall, where an access panel was at chest level. It was square shaped, roughly two feet by two feet. Charlie punched a code into a keypad and the door opened up silently.
Beth pulled out a small penlight from her pocket and poked her head inside the hole. There was indeed a ladder, but she could not see more than a few feet in either direction. She looked at the inside wall of the chute before coming out.
“Um, Charlie, how are we going to get into the lab on the next level?”
“Oops.” He smiled sheepishly. He went back to the keyboard and punched in a few more things. Beth stuck her head back in the shaft and looked up, a window of soft light had appeared. “Well, I hope none of those Marines are in that room.”
Beth pulled her head back in quickly. “Is that possible?” She was slightly panicked. Breaking and entering was one thing, toting around a bomb was quite another.
“Probably would have heard something by now.” He seemed slightly bemused. “Besides, most sane people want to stay as far away from that stuff as possible.”
“You first.” She moved away to give him room.
“I’ve always wanted to do this,” he said as he stuck his head through, reached across, grabbed the ladder, and then pulled the rest of himself in.
Beth waited until he’d gone up a few rungs. Now she just had to hope he didn’t lose his grip and hit her on the way down. She needn’t have worried; by the time she was on the ladder, he was already halfway into the more secure room above. He’d seemed to have forgotten about her as he moved further into the room. Beth quickly climbed; she kept one hand on the ladder and had turned to drop her case into the lab while Charlie was halfway across, looking at a small case inside a lab freezer.
Beth noticed her breath coming out in giant plumes. “Shit, Charlie, it’s freezing in here.”
“They’ve turned up the air conditioning, thinking that will somehow keep this compound inert. Not cold enough, not by nearly forty degrees.” Charlie opened the freezer door and pulled the case out. He then placed it on a workstation before popping the latches.
“What are you doing?” Beth asked in alarm.
“I’m being dangerous. I’ve seen the shows; women like you love this danger stuff.”
“Charlie, I don’t think you should be
messing with that.”
“I handle viruses all day. I think I know what I’m doing.” The case popped open with an audible whoosh. “All this trouble for something so small?” Charlie lifted a vial no larger than a roll of dimes.
“Charlie, put it back. Why isn’t that thing in a metal container?” Just because she wanted to create anarchy, death, and mayhem didn’t mean she wanted to be exposed to it. Her goal was to be shielded from the destruction as the world swirled into the toilet so that she could stand atop the ashes unscathed at the end.
“Acid based, eats through metal apparently. Come on, take a little look.” He smiled and started to turn, then his right foot caught on the leg of the table. It was in agonizingly slow motion that Charlie began to fall. The vial had been slung from his hands and was lazily somersaulting through the air.
Charlie had just braced his fall and swung his head up in time to watch as the vial crashed to the ground. A hiss emanated as the fluid made contact with the floor and began to eat into the tile.
“Oh oh,” Charlie said.
An alarm blared overhead, vacuum seals began to inflate into place. Beth nearly lost the fingers on her hand when the incinerator door quickly shut. She had just enough time to grab the case back. The edge of it caught on the door and was ripped from her hand, sending it spiraling away to the bottom of the shaft. She half-expected to be bathed in a flash of fire and heat. She heard the case strike bottom and then nothing. She got one last quick glimpse in at Charlie; a large boil was already forming on his cheek.
“Shit, shit, shit,” she said as she quickly descended, nearly diving through the incinerator door she’d come in on, mistakenly thinking that this one might close quickly as well. She was halfway across the campus grounds when she realized she’d not set the bomb. She didn’t think it could be traced back to her but it was an unnecessary risk. One which she would ultimately never need to worry about, as bigger things were in play now.
Sirens began to go up all over town as the local authorities were informed of an emergency at the university.
Beth called Durgan to tell him where she was. He was there in under two minutes, a half-eaten hamburger on her seat.
“You mind?” she told him.
“What the hell happened? I didn’t hear an explosion, but something sure does have the natives riled up.”
“Your friend Charlie did our work for us. Stupid shit tripped and dropped some virus. Poor bastard never even got to cop a feel.”
“He dead?”
“I hope so. Whatever it was doesn’t look like it plays too pretty.”
“What now? Do we get out of town?”
“We can’t. I need to get the bomb back.”
“Where exactly is the bomb?”
“Inside an incinerator shaft.”
“Any chance they’ll burn it?”
“I don’t know, but I won’t feel safe until we retrieve it.”
“And how are we going to do that? You said our little buddy just released poison or something.”
“I’m not exactly sure how bad the thing is. They might have it cleaned up in a day or two and eventually someone is going to notice that case.”
“It’s not like it has your business card inside.”
“It has my fingerprints.”
“So. You have to have something on file for that to matter.” Beth was quiet. Durgan started to laugh. “Ah, so our prospective new fearless leader has a record. That’s funny.”
“Not so funny when they start looking for my known associates.”
“Okay, we’ll stay in town for a couple of days.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Beth had thought about lying down and getting some rest. At first that seemed feasible, but the image of Charlie’s blistering face was the first thing to interrupt her, and then the incessant wailing of what seemed like every siren in the tri-county area was the next.
There was a heavy knock on Beth’s door. They couldn’t have found me so fast, could they?
“Beth, we have to go.” It was Durgan. She crossed the small room to open the door. She couldn’t ever remember seeing the expression of concern that was now etched on his face.
“What’s the matter?”
“Whatever Charlie let loose is bad. Like bubonic plague bad. Like in we-need-to-get-the-fuck-out-of-here-now kind of bad.”
“The bomb.”
“Fuck the bomb; there isn’t going to be anyone left to find it.”
In less than five minutes, they were speeding out of town.
“How do you know how bad it is?”
“Ever heard of the Internet?”
“You’re funny.”
“I belong to a couple of anarchist and conspiracy groups online and they are receiving all sorts of government, military and emergency services transmissions all centered around this place. They’re calling this place ground zero.”
“Have I been exposed?” Beth pulled down her sun visor to look in the small, lighted mirror.
“You’d be dead if you were. I’m getting reports that twelve people are already dead.”
“What? It was contained in that room.”
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t know … maybe. Charlie said something about the virus being acid based and that it could eat through metal.”
“Probably ate through the floor then and went below, where some other poor sap was contaminated and spread it around.”
“I was in that room.”
“Relax, I’ve told you, you’d be dead already.”
Beth bounced her head off the dashboard as Durgan slammed on the brakes.
“What the fuck? You asshole!” She looked over to Durgan and then out the windshield, following his line of sight.
There were two large military trucks blocking the roadway. A large pile of sandbags, positioned into a semi-circle fighting hole nestled a machine-gunner, his finger already on the trigger. A soldier inside the truck brought a microphone to his mouth. His booming words came through a loudspeaker housed atop the cab.
“Turn around. This is an emergency. This entire area has been quarantined and is under martial law. If you do not turn around or you advance upon this position, we will open fire.”
“Can we get around them?”
“Are you kidding me? That’s a fifty-caliber machine gun. This car, and us along with it, will be in multiple pieces in less than five seconds if we don’t do what he says.”
Durgan swung the car around. Beth flipped the machine gunner off.
“That’s not even the dumbest thing you’ve done today,” Durgan said as he sped back to their motel room.
They’d no sooner got back into Beth’s room when they heard a loud explosion off in the distance.
“Might have solved one problem,” Durgan said, peering through the window.
“I don’t think that was the bomb, unless dropping it triggered something.”
There was a halo of light off in the distance where something was encased in a conflagration of flames. Durgan went outside to get a better view.
“Beth, come out here,” he said after a minute.
“What?” she said peevishly.
“Shh … listen.”
“I don’t hear …” There was the far-off staccato burst of gunfire. “That the roadblock?”
“No, this is closer. What the fuck is going on?” They stood out there for another ten minutes. More gunfire, some further away, some closer. “Come on.” Durgan grabbed her shoulder and led her to the trunk of the car. He opened it up and handed a heavy duffel bag to Beth, who grunted under the heft of it. Durgan grabbed two more, closed the trunk and ushered her inside.
“Expecting trouble?” she said when she placed the bag on the bed and opened it up, revealing a twelve-gauge shotgun, an AR-15, ammunition, and an assortment of handguns.
He spilled the contents of his bags, which consisted primarily of gun magazines and ammunition.
“Let’s start loading.”
&nbs
p; A squeal of brakes outside was punctuated with the crumpling of metal as the car smashed into a utility pole. The horn’s shriek pierced the night for a full thirty seconds before mercifully stopping. Neither ever pondered going to see if the person needed aid as they busily shoved bullets into their respective holders.
“You should maybe shut the lights off,” Durgan said as he once again peered out the window. Machine gun fire chattered off in the distance.
“What’s going on?” She reached across the bed and clicked the lamp off.
“There’s people across the street.”
“So?”
“They don’t look right. I thought they were helping that poor slob that crashed, but the more I’m looking, the less I’m thinking that’s the case.” He ratcheted a round in the shotgun he was carrying.
Beth was standing, adjusting the hip holster she’d put on. “This thing is a cannon.” When she was done, she grabbed a .357 Magnum off the bed and placed it inside the leather material.
“You’ve got to see this shit.” Durgan had not moved from the window. He held the curtain open so she could.
“What the hell are they doing?” A dozen or more people were around the crashed automobile. The three by the door were bending over and shaking their heads back and forth before standing back up. “Are … are they fucking eating something?”
“I think they are.” He pulled her away from the window and made sure the curtains were closed tight.
“Please tell me they’re not eating the driver.”
“I’d like to tell you that. I really would,” he said, backing away from the window. “I really wish we got a room on the second floor.”
There was a thump on the door and then it was gone. Beth pulled her revolver out when something slammed into the window.
“Don’t,” Durgan said softly before she could head to the window.
“Get out of my parking lot!” Adam, the night manager, shouted.
“Stupid shit,” Durgan said.
“Hey, what the hell?” Adam asked.
Those were his last words as he broke out into a long wailing scream that went on for nearly a minute. The end came in a choked sobbing sound, wet with blood.
