Retribution: Green Fields #11

by Adrienne Lecter

  No other assailants were hiding in the room or the adjacent corridor which was a great place for us to set up quick defensive positions. No one was stupid enough to linger in the possible direct line of fire from anyone moving toward us from that direction. Everything was clean and white, and while only every third panel that looked like recessed illumination was turned on, it was a lot brighter than our flashlights had managed in the other part of the building. This looked way more “high-tech laboratory” than the sixties nightmare before.

  A quick roll call revealed that the damage done was limited. Nate and Hamilton, standing directly in front of the door, had both been hit, but mostly by strafing fire. Sonia quickly confirmed that only the bullet lodged in Nate’s side had caused a real wound, but he insisted it wouldn’t hold him back for now. One of the marines had gotten hit in the upper arm, taking him out effectively for assault, but we’d need someone to guard the entrance, anyway. The only real casualty turned out to be Fletcher. The fever had left him too slow to react, resulting in three full-on torso hits. He was dead—bloody spittle and wide, staring eyes included—before we’d secured the room beyond the door. I turned away when I saw Blake bend over him, a knife aimed at his neck to sever the spinal cord. It was debatable that the infection had had enough time to spread in his body to achieve reanimation, but the last thing we needed was a zombie chomping into our backs now.

  Steps sounding ahead made everyone stop what they were doing and snap to full alertness. At Nate’s nod, Blake sent his fireteam forward, Richards and the three of us right on their heels. I barely managed to leave the corridor last and press myself against the opposite wall before bullets hailed down on us, stopping seconds later when Blake’s people mowed down the opposition. Cole and Hill went after them with Richards and me providing cover. Again two men in good gear, but not military grade. Blake took point, then us again, making it through five rooms and a short corridor until we got to a T-shaped intersection. As soon as Cole checked around the corner, bullets whizzed through the air, narrowly missing him although he had been cautious. Hill reached for a grenade but Richards signaled him to wait. Calling back to the others to take cover in the last room before the corridor, Richards had Cole check a few more times, with the same result every time.

  “Did you see how many?” Richards wanted to know.

  Cole shook his head. “I’m not even sure it’s a manned station. Could be some automated machine gun or similar. That, or they are paying way more attention than is healthy for us.”

  Richards turned back to Hill. “Have at it.”

  Flashing a brief grin, Hill switched places with Cole, and after two checks in the hallway to get a sense of the situation and the timing right, he hurled the grenade down the corridor. Five seconds later, the corridor around us shook with the detonation. When Hill checked again, the gun remained silent.

  Cole and Hill did a silent round of “me or you first” that ended with Cole stepping into the corridor. Nothing. As soon as he sprinted down the hallway, one of Blake’s marines did the same in the other direction, both men halting at the respective bends in their corridors. It turned out, Cole had been right. Hill’s grenade had reduced the machine gun set up behind a low barricade to so much scrap metal, and no body was in sight. I didn’t like the idea that they had motion-sensor-activated weapons here, but it couldn’t be that many, considering we’d already encountered four human defenders. Pushing forward in a slow, methodical manner was definitely the way to go.

  Another intersection—this one with three corridors leading away, but two of them ending in empty storage rooms—and another, longer corridor later that had my skin crawling with the utter lack of cover for over fifty feet, and our corridor opened up into a much larger room, several hallways, doors, and two staircases leading away from it. Richards had us wait for backup. My legs might have appreciated the brief respite but my nerves absolutely didn’t, the adrenaline in my veins making me want to keep moving. A few minutes in, Nate’s voice—clear and strong, much to my relief—came over the com, ordering everyone in our direction. The other corridor apparently ended in a small suite of rooms but was a dead end and a bust. As soon as the last team—Eden and Amos—caught up to us and Nate got a chance to check on the room, he sent us forward. He, backed up by Burns and Sonia, would secure the large room and staircases while the rest of us scurried into the corridors, continuing our search.

  It was obvious that this level was meant for storage, mostly, as besides the odd windowless office, all we found were storerooms. A few had boxes stacked in them, but it was all just random equipment, like latex gloves and plastic vials—exactly like those I’d seen at the camp. I couldn’t help but feel that whoever was guarding this complex wasn’t very good at it; all they’d needed to do to throw us off would have been to make the staircases look defunct and not hurl any guards at us to shoot, and we might have given up. Well, probably not that easily, but the complex looked large enough that a hundred people could have hidden easily, particularly as they’d already had a good two hours of warning since we’d breached the first door. Had they really expected that we wouldn’t find them here?

  I wasn’t the only one voicing the suspicion that we were walking into a more elaborate trap that hadn’t been sprung yet, but there wasn’t exactly anything we could do to avoid that, if it was true.

  Using one of the rooms adjacent to the hall with the staircases, Nate ordered us to take a short break to refuel. I would have loved to leave my pack there since it felt weighted down with stones by now, but I knew well enough that this was a stupid move. Chances were, we wouldn’t be coming back this way, and might even exit onto the street. While everyone except the guards got busy stuffing their faces, Sonia did a more thorough check on Nate’s wounds, forcing him to peel himself out of his outer layers so she could assess the entire damage. Glued shut, his thigh didn’t look too bad, but the bullet in his side hadn’t left an exit wound, so it was still lodged in there. Sonia wanted to dig it out so she could properly clean and close the wound. Nate shut her down and insisted that she just seal the wound up.

  I’d have expected the staircases to lead onto a shared landing, but as it turned out, each was the access point to a different wing. The one to the left, viewed from our entrance corridor, seemed to lead to shared common areas at a first glance—including a cafeteria, as Scott reported five minutes in. The right wing was labs and server rooms, so that’s where I went, obviously. We encountered another two of those automated machine-gun setups—that Cole forbid me to call “gun turrets” however much I begged—but no other opposition. From the other wing, we heard a lot more gunfire and grenade explosions as they met with heavier opposition. As much as I liked not getting shot at, I was frustrated as hell when every new door we burst through revealed yet another lab… that hadn’t been used for pretty much anything since I’d taken basic chemistry in high school. The air processing system had kept them mostly dust-free, but sticky labels were peeling off everywhere, their adhesive long expired. I randomly checked containers, and while it would have all been a gold mine if we could take the reagents with us, it was all inorganic chemistry shit, set up for analysis but not production of anything useful—except maybe meth, but we didn’t find anything hinting at drug production. We didn’t find even a single room that was set up for anything beyond biosafety level one, which meant nobody had worked on anything more dangerous than the odd E. Coli batch in here. Anything to do with the serum project—and potentially highly-infectious viruses—would have been BSL-3, even if they didn’t give a shit about safety. Getting any results would warrant keeping the workspace and samples clean, and you’d need the environment for that.

  We also didn’t find another exit, or an elevator or stairs to a separate level. Richards went as far as sending Cole up into the vents in the ceiling to check on the ventilation system. From what he could tell, it was contained to this level only. After we radioed our findings in, Nate told us to come join the others in the
cafeteria.

  We were back in the larger hall and aiming for the stairs to the other wing when the lights went out, the sound of the ventilation system shutting off moments later.

  Chapter 14

  It took minimal fumbling to get the flashlights out, but Richards had us wait another five minutes before we went up the stairs, mostly to listen for someone trying to sneak up on us. Blake’s team—who had been with us in the lab wing—went to join the others right away. Soon after we followed, we could hear the voices of the other teams, finding half of our people in the cafeteria. It was the first room I encountered that had seen use in this century, also evidenced by the three dead bodies stashed in a corner, close to where their blood had spray-painted part of a wall. I didn’t pass up the chance to refill my water bottles and grab some provisions, but made sure to keep them separate from what was left of those that I’d brought in; just because ten other people had already eaten them and hadn’t ended up dead didn’t mean I fully trusted them. No further casualties on our side, but three more wounded and down for the count—and one of them was Sonia. A bullet had strafed her high up on her thigh. While I took the fact that Burns was joking about “her juicy ass saving her life” as a good sign, she was limping heavily and in no condition for the duck-and-run routine required to keep pushing forward. Amos had a sprained ankle and damaged knee from getting into a physical tousle with one of the guards and regaining the upper hand too late, and the remaining marine from Scott’s team that wasn’t Scott himself had gotten chewed up by another of the auto cannons but was still well enough to drag his sorry ass from one corner of the cafeteria to the other. His face was white as a sheet, and while Sonia had done her best to patch him up, I could tell that his life was definitely hanging in the balance. If it had been up to me, I would have ordered Nate to stay with them, but nobody asked me.

  The tally on the other side was more grim. Twenty dead, and not a single one surviving so we could beat some intel out of him. Nate and Hamilton checked up on all of them, and from their grim looks I could tell that they recognized a few—former guards from the camp. At least that meant we really were in the right place.

  With thirteen people able to still move freely, it made no sense to keep our fireteams up. Nate didn’t protest when I told him I was coming with him and Hamilton now, leaving Richards, Cole, and Hill to fend for themselves. Burns opted to stay with Blake and his two remaining men, while Eden attached herself to Marleen and Scott.

  Our team took the lead as we proceeded to the staircase at the opposite end of this wing, the farthest point away from the central hall and the direction we’d initially come from, if my spatial orientation hadn’t completely forsaken me. “Staircase” was a bit much for the two sets of ten steps each leading upward, bringing it roughly to street level. There was only one paranoia-inducing corridor, though, and then more steps went back down to the lower level. I halted between the two sets and stared at the wall there, making the others halt, Hamilton the only one looking annoyed. Using my knife, I pried away one of the wall panels, and was greeted with what I’d expected, although they’d tried to hide it: three feet of layered shells, making up the outer cocoon of any self-respecting high-level lab in the world. We’d likely find another, similar if smaller construction further in if they had a BSL-3 and BSL-4 setup.

  The lights were still turned off, but when Cole checked one of the cables he dug out of another panel at the bottom of the stairs, he reported that it held an electrical charge. Since we hadn’t found a computer room or guard station—just defunct banks of servers that had never encountered an iPod—it was likely in this part of the complex as well.

  The corridor leading away from the stairs was only twenty feet long, ending in another T-crossing. Cole was the first to reach it and did a quick spot check, coming up empty. The corridors leading away were both a good hundred feet long with a single corridor leading off about two thirds of the way to the end. There were airlocks on both ends, from the looks of them leading into lab clusters. It wouldn’t have made much sense to build an airlock for a maintenance room.

  Nate signaled to Richards to come with him and chose the left branch, leaving the other for Blake and Scott. As I’d expected, the corridor at the intersection was a much longer one, leading deep enough into the building that the flashlights barely reached the other end. Nate signaled Richards to stay there and went to the airlock, Hamilton and I trailing behind him. Unlike the lab complex in France, there were no retina scans required to get the lock to cycle. From the lack of warning signs, it was an area that didn’t require a hazmat suit. It took Nate and Hamilton both to breach the two parts of the airlock since someone had either gone to great lengths to seal it, or the electricity working it had been shut off with the lights. With them already in front of me, it made sense to let the guys go first, so I waited impatiently until Nate whispered back that the air was clear. Clean, too, I realized as I stepped into the workspace—that special kind of clean that required HEPA filters that had only very recently been turned off. The main room of the workspace looked just like that, but both rooms at the back contained two laminar flow hoods for working with more dangerous shit, an autoclave each sitting between them. To the right was a small office, looking like every office I’d ever had the great fortune to call my own—full of stacks of papers, the shelves overflowing with more.

  Ignoring the main workspace, I went to the office first to get a quick idea what they might have been working on. I wasn’t familiar with any of the proteins mentioned, but from the names of the publications it was immunology stuff—viruses, yes, but not those ranging into serum-program territory. Most papers were from the last five years before the shit hit the fan, but more reviews and overviews than single-topic publications. It looked like someone might have been working on cross-checking effects, or just setting out to breach a new specialty. That guess also fit with what I found when I checked the two cell-culture rooms—bare-minimum set-ups to run the odd experiment, but not have four people running a million different trials at the same time. They only had a small incubator and a fridge, not even a nitrogen tank for keeping frozen samples.

  In short, interesting for me personally, maybe, but not the reason why we were here.

  When we returned to the others, Richards had already sent Cole and Hill forward to go snooping into the rooms ahead and secure the corridor to where the next cluster of lab rooms was, again to our left, putting it right adjacent to the office of the first lab. No airlocks on this one, letting us see right into the rooms through the rows of glass panes. The massive metal doors to the right—to the middle of the complex wing—led into storage rooms, filled with the usual equipment of large centrifuges, freezers, and my beloved nitrogen tanks. Hamilton frowned at me when I unscrewed the lid of the first tank and peeked inside.

  “Ha!” Three pairs of eyes shot to me, making me snort. “The tanks are topped up. Someone’s still using them. Those in France were half empty, and that was years ago. Someone is still refilling these.”

  Rather than pull the rack inside out, I went to check on the inventory book where the samples were marked. I didn’t see any dates but several different styles of handwriting, and none designating the samples as anything that jogged my memory. I left the room after that, figuring that finding someone—alive—would be easier in order to find out what they’d been up to.

  Scott radioed in that they were making their way through equal setups—which made sense as most labs were built in boring, symmetrical ways. In case of an emergency, it made no sense to confuse people.

  Once it became clear that the labs were pretty much useless, Nate sped up the process, only checking for possible nooks and crannies rather than letting me get lost in perusing the research itself. Scott and Blake were even faster, reaching the end of their corridor ahead of us. That way, they got shot at when they checked the corridor continuing on from the middle of the lab spaces, but not where that turned into another, similar two-pronged layout beyond.


  Hearing gunfire jolted me alert immediately, but my body was more sluggish to spring into action, making me stagger when one of my feet caught on a table leg. I managed to catch myself before I could face-plant on the floor, but didn’t miss Hamilton chuckling under his breath as he pushed past me to check on what was going on ahead. Nate was already outside with Richards and the others, so it was just me. Cursing under my breath, I sprinted after them, trusting that we had been thorough in our check.

  That’s when I came face to face with the fatigues-clad figure right now crawling out of the open floor panel.

  If I’d had a moment to think, I would have tried punching him out instead, but the shotgun was in my hands and he startled me, so he ate a slug before my mind could get smart. Looking behind me down the corridor, I saw four other guards, all in different stages of coming out of the floor. If I’d had a rifle, I would have considered spraying them with bullets, but the shotgun lacked range, and by the time I’d have fumbled the dead guard’s rifle from the sling across his body, I would be shot and dead myself. So I sent one slug toward the closest guard, whipped around, and ran, hoping that by the time any of them got ready to aim and fire, I’d be around the corner.