“They are behind us! In the floor!” I shouted, trusting that someone would hear me and get ready to guard our rear and flank. I almost collided with Marleen as I careened around the corner. She quickly sidestepped, letting me slip into cover before she glanced into the corridor. She only got five shots out before the return fire made her pull back.
“Got one,” she shouted over the din of the bullets smashing chunks out of wall paneling everywhere. “One’s down, and one’s on the ground but still shooting.”
“That leaves one,” I summed up, getting ready to reduce that number to zero as soon as he was close enough to pulverize his brains.
“You got this,” Marleen told me and ran to the other corridor, immediately drawing fire when she checked on that. “Five here!” she called over before she set to decimating them.
Unlike the automated guns, the human opponents weren’t as quick in shooting when I glanced into the corridor, finding the single standing guard still a little far away. The shooting at Marleen’s side was loud—and near-continuous—enough to make me chance it, though. No sense in waiting for a kill shot here if I got gunned down from the other side in the meantime. To steady my aim—and present less of a target—I crouched down before I stepped into the corridor, aimed, and shot. A good call, it turned out, as he was still hitting where my head had been on the check before, ending with him dead on my second shot, and the one I’d wounded before down on the third.
The guard Marleen had killed was close enough that I risked wasting a few moments in favor of going for his assault rifle and the two spare magazines in his MOLLE vest. Not bothering with the one currently in the M4, I ejected it and slammed a fresh one in, and went to back up Marleen.
“Two down, three to go,” she told me as I patted her on the shoulder, letting her know I was ready. “You up, me down, on three!” I had barely enough time to register what she meant as she dropped to the floor and started her countdown. Without bothering to aim, I took a step into the corridor and shot everything at shoulder height that moved. I was almost surprised when her ploy worked and we killed the remaining guards before they could return the favor—or rather, pay it forward. My brain didn’t much care for me taking the risk, sending a shake through me that didn’t feel very pleasant. But we were still alive and mostly unscathed, so who cared?
“We need to catch up to the others,” I told Marleen, and after a last look in both corridors—finding them still empty of new dangers, and positively chewed-up from weapon fire—pushed on forward. Immediately, the acrid scent of too many weapons getting discharged without proper ventilation in too little space tickled my nostrils. It was easy enough to catch up to the others since they’d only managed to make it to where the long corridors started, needing the two corners on each side for cover. Two bodies were on the floor but still alive, clutching makeshift bandages—Blake and one of his guys. Marleen quickly joined them, walking backwards so she could keep an eye on what might be coming behind. I did the same, going in the other direction.
“They’re using the maintenance shaft in the floor,” I shouted at Nate as soon as I reached the corner. “We killed nine and it looks clear, but we need to check our six better.” He didn’t react but I presumed he’d heard me. Sending another volley down the corridor seemed more important. “What’s our opposition?”
“Two of the automated guns, and three or four men behind that. We already took out one gun, and killed two,” he explained.
Just then, Hill got ready to pitch another grenade down the corridor, making the others flatten themselves against the walls to avoid any shrapnel hurtling back toward us. That reduced the number of auto-guns to one, and soon to zero after two more grenades. He’d already used up all he had been carrying—very smart, considering he’d also been our C4 supply—and I offered him the two from my pack when he looked around for more to scavenge. The other group must have resorted to similar tactics since I heard two explosions go off there as well—followed by an eerie silence settling over us, only the low crackling of something flammable catching on fire audible.
“Go!” Nate hissed, and Richards sprinted down the corridor. Glancing over my shoulder to the other group, I saw Scott disappear as he did the same, the others getting ready, except for Marleen who was kneeling next to Blake, doing her best to help him to patch up a wound on his leg. As soon as she was done, she helped Blake pull himself closer to the center of the corridor so he could aim his rifle into the section behind us.
I was the last to leave, only needing to step over scrap metal and dead bodies as we made our way forward. As heavy as the opposition had been, no backup arrived, allowing me to chance a glance into the lab spaces—from the outside only as all of them were fitted with airlocks, and nobody made attempts to pry them open for me. Inside, it was all orderly cell culture with lots of incubators—production and high-throughput testing spaces, unlike the labs we’d passed before. The last two even went a security level above that, the three separate lab spaces only accessible through more airlocks, and the hoods I saw inside were closed glove-boxes, making me guess those were makeshift BSL-3 setups. Now we were talking, but no way did I have any intention of stepping in there without extra protection. I was already infested with enough shit that was killing me slowly. No need to add to that. Not just because of that I was happy to see that the security glass of the inner sections looked unaffected by the bullets and even grenades, built to withstand far worse. The corridor was littered with shards, crunching unhealthily under my boots.
Like in the other part of the wing, the corridors merged into a single one again—only this one was fitted with not just an airlock, but also a security checkpoint and heavy steel doors beyond the airlock, making me guess that we’d reached the innermost sanctum—the BSL-4 part of the building. It occurred to me that we still hadn’t come across the central control room, and we had been thorough about searching for it. Whoever must have figured it was worth setting that up inside the bomb-proof cocoon that likely housed plenty of viral shit that was way more likely to kill everyone than a nuclear strike must have been one paranoid fucker.
It absolutely fit the bill, but meant that we needed to get through that checkpoint.
I felt like joking to Cole that I’d known there was a reason why we let him tag along when he got out a laptop and somehow connected it to a cable that he pulled out of the wall, minimal sparking required. Hill and Scott meanwhile worked on prying the airlock open, but it was a heavier one than those we’d encountered before, needing four people in the end. Nate wasn’t one of them, staying back, turning his body so the others didn’t see how he pressed one hand against the bandages in his side, grimacing. I caught his gaze, giving him another wide-eyed, semi pleading “stay back!” with my eyes, which he of course ignored. I used the opportunity to dig into my pack and get the extra rifle ammo out that I’d been lugging with me for such opportunities as the one that had presented itself in the form of my new M4. The others had already searched the dead and relieved them of their spare ammo. Not knowing what opposition we’d be facing, we had packed heavy, and nobody was running empty yet—also due to the fact that we were below half strength now, manpower-wise.
“Ha, gotcha,” Cole muttered with a triumphant smile, typing even more furiously. “Sure, why upgrade your cyber security when you’re sitting three levels deep inside a bunker? I should have the lights back in three… two… one…” It actually took five seconds longer, but then the illumination panels all around us came on with a random series of flickers, quickly followed by the low hum of the ventilation system.
It was the latter, probably, that got Scott to halt and glance back to me. “Hey, Lewis—you’re the biohazard expert here, right?” I nodded. “Just how much junk did we breathe in since getting to this level?”
I shrugged. “Not much more than you’d get on any shooting range.” When he eyed me quizzically, I grinned. “You mean because of the labs? The ones with the airlocks likely have their own, closed-of
f systems that weren’t affected by the shut-down. The hot lab we presume is behind that door? That has its own entire ecosystem, including waste management and air. Nothing comes in, nothing goes out. Until you go through the decontamination chamber, you won’t get anywhere close to the shit that will kill every single one of us.” Or so I hoped, but there was no sense in spreading my personal brand of paranoia around. I could guess how much of that was based on reality; the others couldn’t.
Burns stepped up to me, still looking around alertly but a little more relaxed now that we were stuck here in a position that wasn’t that hard to defend—for now. “Do you ever get tired of ending up in places like this?” he asked, allowing himself a small chuckle. “This is now how many times that I’ve asked you if you get nostalgic about no longer working in high-security labs?”
“Fuck you,” I told him succinctly, answering his grin with one of my own.
“Any progress on the locks?” Hamilton wanted to know, still busy on the second half of the airlock, calling right over our chat.
Cole glanced up for a moment, then back down at his laptop. “Give me a sec,” he muttered. “I need to crack the security override first. Because you went all ape-shit on the outer door, it won’t let me disengage the system.” That said, the inner doors gave a squeal, followed by the mechanical sounds of getting pried apart. The heavy metal doors swung inward as well, making everyone standing idly by raise their weapons. Cole cursed but didn’t explain why.
No guards greeted us. Also no automated machine guns, nor a pack of mutant dobermans. Just the boxy complex of the BSL-4 lab with its impressive banks of air filters on top, surrounded by gray-tiled corridors, and two separate partitions on each end that were likely for maintenance or offices. Whoever had built this hadn’t bothered to make the inside of the security cocoon look pretty, leaving concrete and metal struts exposed.
“Two remain here,” Nate ordered, singling out Eden and the last Silo marine. Eden looked ready to protest, but a look at Nate’s face had her close her mouth without a word coming out. The rest of us—eight, minus Cole staying behind with his laptop—went through the open airlock and doors, quickly separating into two groups to cover the open space around the lab as quickly as possible. With the others paying attention to everything except the lab, I allowed myself a few lingering glances through the few viewports. Unlike most BSL-4 labs I’d seen, this one was more closed off. It was also larger, about double the size of the already substantial lab of the Green Fields Biotech complex where I’d been working until Nate had to bring down the sky on it. I could only guess at what they needed the extra space for. It was hard to tell, but what equipment I saw looked outdated if well-maintained.
Nobody shot at us during our entire circuit of the lab complex. If anything, that seemed to make all of us even more jumpy than we already were. I was surprised to see that on the other side, at the back wall, was another heavy metal door, like the one with the airlock. Nate explained the situation to Cole on the radio. Cole tried to get the doors open but gave up after five minutes. “They’re locked out of the system. My guess is you’ll need to flip a switch in the control room to open them. But I can put a temporary lock on the controls so that they can’t disengage them unless they have a hacker around who’s better than I am.”
“Do it,” Nate said, then took a look around before focusing on me. “Which end do we bust down first?”
Glancing at the ceiling, I tried to judge whether one sectioned-off part looked bigger than the other, but they seemed identical. “You choose.”
Since we were standing closer to the left one, Nate chose that, setting Scott and Marleen to guard the other for now.
Because of the required height of the cocoon, the single door to the section looked comically small although it was as broad as the airlock. While nobody had bothered to build a ceiling to hide the air recycling system, they had bothered with a floor; else we would have had to traipse across the sewage system—not a good idea, under any conditions. Nate hesitated, which gave Hamilton the perfect excuse to go first. I might have considered shooting off the lock; Hamilton tried the door first, finding it unlocked. We all watched, weapons at the ready, as it swung inward, revealing a normal-sized room. Even before I could more than catch a glance inside I knew that something was wrong. The scent of blood was so heavy that it tickled my nostrils just from what air filtered through the door.
At first, I thought someone had made the questionable interior decorating choice of painting the walls red. That must have been my mind blocking off reality because it was beyond what I’d come to encounter. But then I saw the bodies on the ground, dropped where they had been standing, most facing away from the door. It was over twenty, and only one was clad in dark fatigues. The rest were all in either scrubs or plain clothes, some wearing formerly white lab coats that had done a stellar job soaking up the blood—the scientists who must have been working in here. The blood was still fresh but had started to congeal, making me guess that they’d died over an hour ago. Since we hadn’t heard any shots, whoever had executed them must have done so while we’d breached the outer doors with our charges.
I’d thought I had seen it all, but the sheer amount of senseless slaughter horrified me in a way that nothing else had. Maybe some of it came from the fact that, however much my life had changed, it was still easy for me to see myself as a part of them.
I wasn’t the only one thus affected. Burns cursed under his breath, and even Hill had nothing disparaging to add. Everyone seemed loath to step into the blood, as if our proximity would somehow desecrate the space even more. From just inside the door, it was obvious that the room had been some kind of mixed office and recreational space, a sofa in the corner the only thing substantial enough that anyone could have hidden behind it, and since it was pushed against the wall I doubted that was possible.
Hamilton was the first to tear himself out of his stunned stupor and checked the sofa after all. I followed—not because I hadn’t already seen enough to give me new nightmares, but to check if I recognized any of the faces, where enough of them remained to identify anyone. I was praying that I wouldn’t, but no such luck. I didn’t remember the name of the young woman ten years my senior, but she had been part of the lab in Aurora, that blasted Kansas town where we’d gotten inked and officially ostracized by what remained of society. Two other men also looked familiar, likely from the same place. Since one of their people—a young scientist named Ethan—had ended up with Taggard’s merry band of kidnapping and raping assholes, it wasn’t that much of a surprise, mostly an unpleasant one. Ethan had ended up skinned alive and hung, his zombified self trying to eat us even so. At least these bastards had died in a quicker and more merciful fashion, although I didn’t allow myself to make a judgment call on the level of insanity involved. None of them were from the Silo, and as Hamilton’s search confirmed, also not from among Emily Raynor’s minions.
It was the very last body, slumped in the corner as if he’d been trying to hide behind the others, that made me pause, then shy away as if burned. Nate noticed, immediately training his rifle on the corpse, but it wasn’t active danger that had made me back away. He frowned down at the body, then looked at me, confused.
“Don’t you recognize him?” I asked, my voice flat going on hollow. When Nate shook his head, I looked down at the body again, just to be sure. No question, it was him. “That’s Walter Greene. Biotech pioneer and a long-time runner-up for a ton of awards, down to a possible Nobel Prize. Co-Founder of Green Fields Biotech. Gabriel Greene’s father.”
I was almost glad when two pistol shots rang out from the direction of the BSL-4 lab. That was something my mind had far less problems wrapping itself around than finding one of our age’s most brilliant scientists here, of all places.
Chapter 15
Having been at the opposite side of the room, I was the last to make it back out through the door. By then, Burns and Richards were already sprinting toward where we’d left Ma
rleen and Scott outside. Since Cole immediately reported in that the checkpoint was still secure, it made the most sense to check on the heavy steel doors in passing, but they remained untouched as well. From halfway around the lab I already saw the door to the partition on the other side open, but my attention was drawn to the figures on the ground. Two guards were dead a few steps away from the door behind which they must have been hiding. More worrisome, Scott lay on his back, blood spurting from a wound in his neck, while Marleen tried to do CPR. The amount of blood on her hands spoke of more wounds on the marine commander’s torso. She gave up just as Burns reached her, her head whipping around with frustration. “One of them got away!” she shouted. “He ran toward the door to the lab!”
Being last meant I was also the quickest to switch course and turn in the direction she indicated. I thought I saw someone disappear behind a corner, but that could have been just my imagination since I didn’t hear the slap of footsteps—but that was easily masked by our own pounding. Nate was right there with me, overtaking me with the entrance to the lab in sight. Hamilton pushed past me just as Nate flung open the door, forcing me to slow down a little. The good news was I had no need to case the two rooms they rushed through, and could fully concentrate on the blood smeared across a doorframe, alongside a wall—and the red light above the decontamination room just as it flashed back to green, indicating that someone had just entered and the airlock was ready for the next person or group to do so.
Hamilton saw it as well and rushed toward the door. My mind told me to shut up, but as much as I wanted to see him dead, this was different.
“Don’t!” I shouted before he could reach the door.
I was certain that in any other environment, he would have ignored me, but apparently around deadly viruses, my word counted for something, even with an asshole like him. It was still more anger than respect that I read on his face. “Why not?”
Retribution: Green Fields #11 Page 24
