Retribution: Green Fields #11

by Adrienne Lecter

  “It’s not like he can get away,” I offered. “This is the only way in and out of there. I doubt they’ll have a bomb hidden in there that will kill us all on detonation. Short of that, there is no fucking reason for any of us to deliberately kill ourselves. I mean, who does that? Bring two bags full of C4 into a BSL-4 lab. Present company included.” Nate smirked but said nothing. Hamilton scowled but I could tell that my message was getting through to him. Just to make sure that was the case, I added, “Plus, you two both have open, bleeding wounds. Even if that lab has been unused for years—and I have a feeling that this is not the case—you will contract something, even if it’s just vapors remaining from the last cleaning cycle. Give me ten minutes and I’ll have three suits prepped. Then you can waddle in there and behave like as much of a blundering ass as you like.”

  “Do it,” Nate said before Hamilton could reply. I immediately set to work, right after dropping my weapon and pack, and tearing off my gloves to replace them with two sets of latex gloves.

  “If we dare risk overheating, we can stay in our gear, but the packs are too much,” I called back over my shoulder. “No knives or sidearms, either. It’s too risky as they could tear the suits, and you won’t be able to use them unless you carry them in your hands, anyway.” I felt like snarking that Hamilton knew his way around guns and hazmat suits since he had brought one into the hot lab in the Paris complex, but following the previously routine steps that had dictated my life for years seemed more important.

  In no time I had the first positive pressure suit checked and set it aside, watching from the corner of my eye as Nate and Hamilton got down to T-shirts and pants. “Boots, too,” I advised, continuing in the meantime.

  The door to the changing room outside opened, admitting Richards. “Need help?” he offered.

  “Help them with taping their socks and gloves, and then to get in the suits. And then do me.” Maybe not the best way to phrase that but I was otherwise occupied. I didn’t miss Red’s smirk, which disappeared as soon as he went to follow my instructions, coming face to face with a rather glowering Nate. Richards used the distraction that offered to give us an update on the situation.

  “Scott is gone, as are the three guards—we found a third one inside the room. Marleen said one got away, wearing civilian clothes, so he’s likely a scientist.”

  It wasn’t my most thorough checkup ever, but I figured that the suit integrity and the general setup was enough to keep us safe. Contrary to what people may have believed, hot labs produced surprisingly few infections. Work accidents usually involved animal bites or blunt force trauma of people bumping into shelves and tables. Unless, of course, someone shot at you, or you tried to tear your suit off because you were hallucinating, thinking that scorpions were crawling all over your body underneath the heavy-duty plastic. The latter had almost cost me my life and job when my supervisor effectively poisoned me. I’d never gotten a chance to ask her about her motives, but the theory that she’d done it to save herself from having to murder me was the one I chose to believe. I doubted that the scientist we were after now had that answer for me, but who knew?

  “Let’s try to catch him alive,” I said as I finished with the second suit and handed that to Nate. “He’s wounded, without a suit, so I doubt he’ll survive, but that doesn’t mean he won’t talk if we threaten him.”

  Hamilton laughed harshly, pausing for a moment in zipping up his suit. “Exactly how do you threaten someone who knows he’s as good as dead?”

  Not bothering with actually looking at him, I shrugged. “Lots of shit in there to hurt someone. I’ve always wondered what would happen if you dipped someone’s hand too long into a liquid nitrogen tank. Simply getting that shit on your clothes burns, but it evaporates too fast to leave more than red skin. I wonder if you could break off fingers like that.”

  Hamilton continued to laugh, mumbling something that sounded like “psycho bitch” under his breath. Yeah, I’d realized how that sounded as I’d said it, but any filters I had still left had gone to shit somewhere across Dallas. A glance at Nate revealed that he wasn’t bothering to give me any emotional feedback in favor of getting his suit on. I didn’t miss the dark stains all over his shirt, most not sweat, particularly around the tears and bandages. I told myself that he would be okay since he could still move fluently enough to get in the suit—and run faster than me, too—and the bandages weren’t soaked through yet.

  I hated that I needed Red’s assistance with taping up the pair of fresh socks I grabbed from a rack, and the gloves. Zipping up the suit only underlined how fucking useless my hands had become, muscle memory still in my brain not working any longer with several digits missing. By the time I connected the suit to an air hose to inflate it, Nate and Hamilton were ready, piling all available weapons that they could carry and use at the same time into their arms. As soon as I dared, I unplugged the hose and lumbered into the decontamination room, waiting for the others to follow before I cycled the airlock.

  Call me jaded, but I went first, unarmed, trusting that handguns would not be my end in here. Because he hadn’t bothered with a suit, the trail of blood—smeared on walls and corners, but also in droplets on the floor—made it easy to follow the path the scientist had taken. I still checked the signs around us to get a feel for the layout of the lab. Two of the closed-off parts with no viewports were labeled “Test 1” and “Test 2” respectively. I didn’t want to venture a guess why, but it seemed ominously obvious—including the heavy locks in an environment that had a lot of doors that closed tightly, but didn’t lock from the outside.

  The trail led deeper into the lab, past animal processing and a handful of work rooms. Without my suit connected to the air hoses, it heated up in record time but this way I heard a crash coming from up ahead and to the right before I saw the blood smear veer off in that direction. I had a certain inkling that turned out to be true as I passed from one hallway to the next, reaching the heart of the lab: the viral vault.

  My first instinct was to head right there but instead I grabbed a hose to at least top up the air supply inside my suit—dying of carbon dioxide poisoning wouldn’t do me any good, and neither would getting dizzy or barfing before that. Getting shot sounded about as pleasant, so I signaled the guys to go ahead. After all, it should pay off that they were lugging around their weight in weapons.

  Hamilton went first, shouting at someone to stop doing whatever was going on. A crash followed inside, making me guess he was disobeying, and maybe scrambling for cover. Hamilton repeated his barked order, louder now, and he and Nate disappeared through the door. Allowing myself a last moment of feeling the blissfully cool air run up my body, I disconnected the hose and followed them.

  What I noticed first was just how fucking huge the vault was. The ones in my old workplace and the lab in France had been the size of a small office maybe. This vault was easily ten times as large, holding way more than the ten or so liquid nitrogen tanks that I’d expected. I had no idea how large the storage vaults at the CDC were that held samples of all known diseases, but this one looked sized to easily rival that. Most of the tanks were undisturbed, lined up in neat double rows easily but likely not often accessed. A single man was half crouching in front of, half leaning against one of the tanks toward the wall in the third row from the door, four tanks seemingly at random open with their racks removed, currently lying discarded on the floor. The crash I’d heard must have been the last of the racks. Bloody handprints showed his progression from the first row of tanks to the open ones, with an extra trail along the third row—over to where an autoclave was starting up, already locked and well into destroying the samples likely dropped into it for disposal.

  The man looked familiar but it took me a few moments to jump-start my memory. The connection to Gabriel Greene—and my old workplace—finally did it: Brandon Stone. Gone was the ill-fitting suit he’d so loved to wear around the Green Fields Biotech complex, but he was still tall and gangly, and the pained sm
irk he directed at us reminded me of the disdainful ignorance he’d—mostly—viewed us scientist worker bees with. His hair was longer now, grown out of the stylishly tousled business cut he’d maintained even after the world had gone to shit—when I’d last seen him, in Aurora, Kansas, where he’d pretended to head up the lab there. A job that he’d offered me, and that I was glad—now more than ever—I’d never seriously considered taking. At least I’d always presumed that it had been pretense only. What had a lawyer-slash-economics guy had to do with running scientific research? Maybe that had been the pretense. Somehow, I didn’t buy that Cortez and his flunkies at the camp had been relying on a seventy-plus-year-old geezer. But a late-thirty-something?

  Damn, but was every single person I’d ever met in my life going to turn out to be a lying, scheming, murdering asshole? I was expecting that with Nate, but me?

  A glance at Nate and Hamilton confirmed that they definitely recognized him—and likely not from where I remembered him if the open hatred was an indicator. I stepped closer to them but made sure to remain at enough distance so they could bring their arsenal to bear on Stone if the need arose. I idly wondered if I should tell them to be careful should they discharge a gun in here so that a possible ricochet from a tank or shelf didn’t kill us. I figured they were smart enough to know.

  I would have loved to strike a pose, arms crossed over my chest and cocky as hell, but the suits kind of made that impossible. Connected to an air hose, it was even worse. Standing there with my arms hanging by my side wasn’t quite the same but what I had to go for instead. The face shield of the suit probably concealed half of my features. There was an obvious reason why interrogations were usually not performed under these conditions.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” I offered in as even a voice as I could manage. Not sounding tired as hell was a feat, and being angry for what they’d done to Nate only went so far now that I was running on fumes only. Not even Hamilton’s proximity was enough to give me a certain edge. Judging from how much more leaning than standing Stone managed, it didn’t look necessary, to be honest. “What should I call you now with all your recent career changes? Should I go all friendly with Brandon, or do you still fancy Dr. Stone although you haven’t done shit to deserve that title? Then again, the Chemist does have a certain simplicity to it.” I could tell from the light jerk that ran through Nate when final recognition set in, but that was all he gave.

  Stone flashed me a bloody grin that turned into a wheezing cough, blood bubbling out of his mouth. My guess was that he had a perforated lung. Too bad, really. As long as he could still talk… which I hoped he could. Otherwise this really was a bust.

  “I should have expected you to show up here,” Stone ground out, making me just a little happy—both with his words, and the fact that he was still able to answer.

  “That’s what you get for making shit personal,” I pointed out. “I would have been happy to live the rest of my life in the middle of nowhere, hunting deer and skinny dipping in the summer.” Sure enough, Hamilton had to grunt at that, which was audible even with the suits and all. I ignored him, my focus remaining on Stone. “But you can’t expect to kidnap the person most important to me and use him as a guinea pig and not call the wrath of me down on yourself.” Maybe I was laying it on a little heavily, but who cared? Stone looked bad, but not die-within-the-next-minute bad. I’d limped away from way worse myself.

  I didn’t care for the nasty grin appearing on Stone’s face. I really had liked him better when I’d thought he was just a sleek paper pusher. “You do know that’s not all we did to him, right?”

  I waited for either of the guys to say something, but Hamilton seemed for once content to let me do the talking—with running grunt commentary, of course—and for Nate it wasn’t that unusual. Glancing from Stone to the arsenal they were both toting, I shrugged as I turned to my husband. “May I borrow your combat knife? For whatever reason I’m suddenly overcome with the urge to ram it up his ass, blade first.”

  Nate had to turn around so I could catch his smirk. “Be my guest.”

  Stone looked alarmed for a second—which should not have been this gratifying but sure was—but relaxed when he realized I wasn’t about to lumber over to him so I could sodomize him with an edged weapon. Maybe later. Instead, I did my best to sound diplomatic, although I felt anything but. “How about we at least attempt to remain civil? We’re all intelligent people here. This doesn’t have to end in needless bloodshed.” Since that had already happened—and there wasn’t much else to do except deal with Stone—I felt that wasn’t even a lie. Stone didn’t believe me, of course, proving a different kind of smart.

  “You’re too late,” he offered, sounding tired yet vindicated. “Everything you have been looking for is already destroyed.”

  My gaze flitted over to the autoclave, happily continuing doing its thing. “Honestly, unless there’s a cure for the zombie virus in there, I’m not interested. For that, I’d maybe try to shut that thing off and rescue whatever possible, even if it’s denatured shit by now.” I narrowed my eyes at him, although I wasn’t sure whether he’d even see that. “Do you have the cure? Unlikely since I doubt you’ve been looking for it, but I have to ask. For my inner peace, and shit.”

  Stone blinked, torn between being irritated with me, and confusion. “Why would you not—” he started, then cut himself off. “No, there’s no cure. You know that.” His expression turned shrewd. “You do know, but that’s not what you meant, right? You know that you’re a dead woman walking, don’t you? Whatever you do, the serum will soon kill you.”

  It was surprisingly easy to shrug that off. What a difference a few days made—that, and bone-deep exhaustion. Permanent death to escape the painful weight my body had gained wasn’t sounding that bad right now. “Which just makes me twice as deadly and ten times as dangerous, to you,” I stressed, following that up with a jovial gesture as I spread my arms. “Let’s be civil. You tell us everything you know, including what you’ve been doing here and why you thought murdering every single scientist working for you was a bright idea. And maybe I kill you quickly, without finding out first whether I can freeze off your dick with liquid nitrogen.”

  Stone didn’t seem perturbed by the threat. Maybe I should have held out on my musing until now, or offer up a repetition? Nate had other plans, though, coming out of his glowering stupor. “You could start by telling us where Decker is.”

  Stone smirked, leaning back against the tank that was the only thing holding him upright now. “Ah, wouldn’t you like to know?”

  “We would,” Hamilton answered. “And if her rambling has given you any wrong ideas, we have absolutely no qualms beating the answers we seek out of you.”

  “Oh, I trust that you don’t,” Stone said, his grin spreading. I wondered briefly whether he was having a psychotic break. I could see how people still underestimated me—stupid move, but it happened—but he knew damn well who my companions were, and what they were capable of, and he didn’t seem to suffer from any delusions that he would get out of this alive. A smart man would have tried to bargain for a quick, painless end. His situation was the definition of nothing left to lose.

  “What do you know that we don’t?” Stone’s attention snapped back to me but he didn’t answer. “You could really profit from appeasing us, whichever way possible.”

  He pursed his lips, still deliberating. “Actually, I think he’d want me to share this with you. Oh, yes. It would be quite the reunion. Too bad I won’t be there to see it.” He briefly glanced at Nate, then Hamilton, but continued speaking to me. “Sadly, I have never been informed of where his hideout is. You could consider that the best-kept secret in the world right now. But I have a feeling that he will find a way to reach out to you, now that you’ve proven to become a prime nuisance. Please, ask what you want to know and I shall answer it to the best of my knowledge.”

  Very gracious of him—and I wasn’t going to look that gift horse in the mouth. N
ot yet, at least. “Why kill the scientists? With Walter Greene you had a veritable legend locked in here. Why the fuck would you murder him like any useless gutter rat?”

  “Orders,” Stone offered, ending with a wet cough. “I had them. The guards had them. And I’m sure several of the scientists did, too. The only reason why I’m still alive was because I was chosen to be last.”

  “Because you’re so damn important, huh?” Hamilton goaded him on.

  Stone’s grin resurfaced. “Because I’m expendable, and because I’m about as fucking useless to you as they come.” His attention turned back to me. “Walter Greene was a true visionary. The serum project wouldn’t have developed in the direction it eventually took, and our efforts would have been fraught without him. Leaving him alive for you to brainwash him into helping you and thus destroying his greatest creation? Impossible. If we hadn’t offered him a merciful death, he would have done it himself.”

  That answer didn’t sit right with me on so many levels. One certainty was the feverish tone it was delivered in. Another, the sheer senseless loss and stupidity of the idea. But what really made bile rise in the back of my throat was that it reminded me an awful lot of the speech Dr. Alders—the mad scientist we’d found in NORAD, who had been one of the founding brains behind the serum project—had given that had made exactly as much sense: none whatsoever. Maybe that shouldn’t have come as a surprise as it seemed the next step to connect the dots and throw them all into the same pile of assholes that deserved to die…

  And still, something didn’t add up.

  “Let’s suppose I believe that—”

  Stone cut me off with a snort. “You’ll have to take my word for it, seeing as I’m the last man standing.” His head snapped in the direction of the red room. “And you must have seen the evidence with your own eyes. So why doubt me?”

  Why indeed? Sadly, the truth didn’t do shit to set me free in this case.