Night Zero- Second Day

by Rob Horner

  The hallway ended at the fourth crossing corridor, and his only options were to turn left or right.

  “There should be a maintenance door somewhere near you,” Willie said.

  “All the doors are white,” Michael hissed.

  “I never said the door would look different,” Willie responded patiently. “Only that it might be labeled.”

  Stifling a curse, Michael looked both right and left. To the right were doors on the right, opening onto rooms back in direction he’d come from. The same to the left—there were doors on the left. The wall he faced had to be the side of the building. There were no doors along it that he could…

  Wait. To the right was a single inconsistency in the wall, what might be a badge scanner without a reason for one, near invisible from his perspective.

  “I think I see something,” he said, and turned in that direction.

  Twenty feet on was a badge reader, though whatever it opened wasn’t easily discernible.

  Here goes nothing. Michael reached out with his badge and heard a click. A door appeared in the outer wall, sliding sideways on a cleverly concealed track. The room beyond was dark, but lights came on as he stepped inside.

  A large room full of generators and breaker boxes greeted him, only ten feet deep but running away to right and left probably to the ends of the building.

  A chill struck him as blasts of air from industrial cooling units riffled his hair.

  Server racks reaching to the ceiling surrounded a massive computer workstation at one end, probably the point where all data generated within the building was stored. The facility certainly maintained a secure transmission line to CDC headquarters, something uninterruptible in case of a power or Internet outage.

  “I’m in some kind of server farm,” he whispered. “There are generators and breakers, and it’s cold in here.”

  “Sounds like the place,” Willie said. “Go place your stuff near one of the generators and get on out of there.”

  Michael nodded, then chided himself. Willie couldn’t see head motions. Willie also wouldn’t know what Michael planned to do after placing the disruptor. Everyone wanted him to leave after setting up the little box and its power packs. They’d expressed concern about prison should he be caught.

  Probably protecting themselves, he thought. Not that I would ever rat anyone out.

  While Michael had no desire to experience prison, he also had no intention of missing the show after the holier-than-thou lab rats saw their work fall apart.

  All his life people had told him what to do. His parents played Russian Roulette with his mind when they went along like good little sheep and tortured him with vaccinations every year until he was old enough to decide for himself. The government told him to pay taxes every year for services he didn’t use. And now his friends, in their concern for his freedom, thought to tell him how to keep himself free. It was the same argument GovCo used about vaccines, and while he hadn’t called them out on their hypocrisy, he had no intention of letting anyone tell him what to do for his own good.

  Shaking his head—he needed these people for their funding and intelligence as much as they needed him for his willingness to tackle such a risky endeavor—Michael moved to an area between the large server farm and the first buzzing generator. The hidden door whisked back into place, blocking out any chance of a passing scientist or security guard seeing him from the hallway.

  He reached under his lab coat and found the black box clipped to his belt. A quick yank pulled it out.

  About the size of an iPhone X and four times as thick, the box was exactly what the name implied—a black, plastic case with no visible means of opening it. Three small plugs like headphone jacks marred the otherwise unremarkable surface. Each was labeled with the name of a color in small white letters. Red. Green. Black. These jacks matched the small plugs on three other black boxes, smaller brothers to the big one in his hands, each with a long, thin cable wrapped around it.

  Michael remembered the instructions.

  Place the big box on a flat surface near a generator. Each of the smaller boxes had a foot-long cord, and it didn’t matter where they were placed so long as their cords would reach to their respective jacks. The smaller boxes were about the size of a standard deck of cards, though they had a heft to them which exceeded their apparent size. Removing them from his belt relieved the constant drag of having them attached, something he’d grown accustomed to during the drive from his modest apartment to the facility and the ten minutes he’d spent inside.

  It took less than thirty seconds to place the big box on a flat shelf near the generator and connect the three smaller boxes, placing them on the same shelf.

  “All right, it’s plugged in,” Michael reported.

  Nothing happened that he could see, but Willie’s voice was filled with a sudden urgency. “The countdown is automatic, Michael. You’ve got two minutes to get out of there before the disruptor activates.”

  “On my way out,” Michael said, turning from the generator and ambling over to the computer workstation.

  “Let me know when you’re away,” Willie said.

  Michael didn’t bother replying. The computer was on, but the screen was locked. There were several folders open beside it, but nothing which looked incriminating. If anything, they looked like instructions for maintaining the temperature in the server room, or how to reset a breaker if one tripped.

  A shame, he thought. How perfect would it have been if someone left out a folder titled, “The CDC’s Secret Plan to Vaccinate the World?”

  Seeing nothing else of interest, Michael settled back to see what the disruptor would do.

  “Thirty seconds,” Willie informed him. “Tell me you’re out of there.”

  Something in his friend’s voice worried Michael. Willie was being awfully insistent. Feeling a little guilty at deceiving his fellow activist, Michael moved to the sliding door, which was clearly marked on this side, a white rectangle in an otherwise gray wall. The same type of badge reader waited for him, and a swipe of his badge opened the door again. Stepping into the hallway, Michael turned right, figuring to leave the same way he arrived, through the loading dock. He had no intention of coming out behind the glass windows where the secretary slash decoy no doubt sat waiting to exercise her panic button and summon all the armed G-Men in the building.

  “Five.”

  He turned left at the main corridor, this time paying no attention to the mirrored globes high up on the corners.

  “Four.”

  Willie’s countdown instilled a primal fear in Michael’s gut. Why was he counting down like the seconds before a rocket launch?

  “Three.”

  Fear brought clarity, and Michael broke into a run.

  “Two.”

  It wasn’t some fancy electric gadget. It was a bomb!

  “One.”

  Oh God, he’d planted a bomb!

  Michael launched himself forward, a scream just beginning, of warning, of fear, of…

  The three blocks of C-4 he’d placed and armed exploded behind him. Ear-shattering noise chased him, blowing doors off hinges, sending a fireball roaring along the narrow halls as ceiling tiles began raining down. A blast of air like the fist of a giant picked him up and threw him forward and to the right. His shoulder slammed into one of the glass windows of a lab where startled scientists looked up with identical expressions of shock and fear painted on faces visible beneath masks of clear polyurethane. Something snapped high on his chest as the glass cracked but held, throwing him back to the floor. Plaster, chunks of drywall, and wisps of pink insulation like poisonous cotton candy fell into his face as the giant’s fist became a dragon’s breath of heat. Turning his face to the side to avoid the stuff falling from above, Michael saw a wall of fire racing toward him from the back hall.

  He drew in a breath to scream, already scrabbling like an upended cockroach, trying to rise.

  Hot air reached into his throat, crisping his lung
s and choking off his scream. The wall of fire roared over him. His eyes boiled in their sockets, an unimaginable pain stabbing into his brain, before everything shut down, casting him into the cool relief of death.

  The scientists screamed in their temperature-controlled and environmentally sealed rooms, the sight of a wave of fire racing down the hall far beyond anything they’d ever imagined. The environmental safeguards—water sprinklers in the halls and Halon systems in the labs—never engaged. Their controls were gone in the initial explosion.

  Generators overheated as secondary explosions followed the first, fuel reserves going up like firecrackers stuffed under a tin can. Jets of flame followed lines of oxygen feeding the sealed rooms, setting scientists afire inside their suits, dancing figures of flame reaching out, staggering from wall to table to floor. Glass windows shattered, tongues of flame reaching through the frames, seeking new sources of oxygen. Test tubes exploded, their toxic contents joining the racing air currents seeking escape from the increased pressure inside the building. The final fail safes built into the building by the CDC engineers didn’t live up to their names. Steel core doors designed to prevent the escape of a biological agent into the surrounding atmosphere failed to descend, the last casualty of a terrorist attack aimed at the controlling mechanisms for the entire facility.

  The tremors of the explosion were felt as far away as the international airport, where a stunned Austin Wallace stood in the Same-Day parking lot and watched plumes of black smoke rise into the sky.

  * * * * *

  “Why’d that damn girl have to fly out of Atlanta?” Candace asked the empty car.

  The sun was hot above, and the small Hyundai was an oven. The air conditioner quit the year before and she hadn’t found the time or money to get it fixed yet.

  “And don’t even think about getting something new,” she added, slapping a hand over the air vent. Warm air—maybe a few degrees cooler than outside the car—pushed back. The fan worked, so that was a plus. It made an awful racket too, like metal rats gnashing their teeth loud enough to make you think it was doing some good. Too bad she lived on the western edge of Alabama, almost close enough to piss on Mississippi if the wind was at her back. She needed air conditioning, not fan-blown exhaust from the cars in front of her.

  The sea of taillights extended as far as she could see, which wasn’t too far, considering the spaghetti Atlanta made of the roads coming in and out.

  Merge here. Cross four lanes in a half-mile to exit there. Now merge again and get your ass back to the right side for the next exit.

  It was almost enough to give a lady a stroke.

  With the windows down, at least there was a hint of a breeze, though it stank of diesel, hot asphalt, and the peculiar funk that was all Atlanta.

  The lights ahead eased, she moved forward a good city block, then came to a stop again.

  There wasn’t even any good music on the radio, just a bunch of breathless idiots racing each other on the FM dial to be the first to say they were monitoring the scene of some industrial accident on the other side of the city but didn’t really know anything about what happened.

  They could guess, though, and they did it with none of the old caveats you used to hear from good reporters. No real facts. No advice to stay indoors, close your windows, or turn off the air conditioner—not that anyone could live in Atlanta in August without it. Now it was, “Sources say it might have been a gas main explosion and, if that’s the case, make sure you report any funny smells and avoid breathing more than necessary.”

  Fools. If you could smell it, you’d already breathed it. And if you were stuck in traffic like she and ten thousand other cars were, then you had no choice but to keep breathing it.

  Thankfully, she hadn’t smelled anything like household gas.

  She wasn’t even in a good position to see the smoke cloud back there; there was only a stain on the horizon, like a faded skid mark in some of her husband’s ten-year-old tighty-whiteys.

  The brakes came off and she nudged forward.

  Her freedom became visible around a short curve; the exit for I-20 W was a half-mile ahead.

  Once she got there, she’d be home free. Most of the traffic continued around the bend, heading north for Alpharetta or east toward South Carolina.

  The shit stain on the clouds moved back into view with the turn as well, though it was well behind and none of her concern.

  Let the smelly Atlanta-ians deal with it. Maybe it would bring a whiff of something besides century-old ghetto funk to the area.

  Another radio station. Another squeaky reporter talking about public utilities on the scene at a warehouse fire.

  Hadn’t they just said gas main eruption? Were they one and the same?

  A sudden revving of an engine made her turn to look to the left. There were three more lanes like hers, all packed with cars, then a short strip of median and a guard rail. On the other side of the rail the road dropped down, like the oncoming lanes were at a lower elevation. The two middle lanes continued straight. Her lane had a singular focus on making the exit. And if people wouldn’t wait till the last fucking second to merge, she’s already be on the exit, heading away from this fucking mess of a city! The left lane was also an exit lane, though for 20 running in the opposite direction. No concern of hers.

  It was a motorcycle, one of those crotch rockets all done up in racing yellow, black-clad helmeted rider bent over the handlebars like he was going downhill on the Tour de France, or whatever those stupid bike races were called. Suicidal idiots, the lot of them.

  The motorcycle rider had apparently had enough of the wait. Weaving and winding, he zipped out of the left lane and into the slutty girl’s treasure trail width of median. Cars honked as he passed, and Candace could imagine drivers cussing and flipping the bird all the while wishing they had a motorized phallus capable of speeding them away from the mess of traffic.

  An image flashed into her mind, the motorcycle rider zipping by on a gigantic penis. The wheels were oversized testicles with knobby surfaces just like real balls, a little leftover elbow skin God decided to throw on the basement exterior.

  She giggled at the mental picture.

  Her humor only lasted a moment.

  The motorcycle sped toward the 20-E ramp. A truck door shot open in front of the rider, some redneck with a gun rack just as fed up with the traffic and jealous of the biker who could work around it. The biker swerved, but there was nowhere for him to go. His front tire struck the shin-high suggestion of a guardrail and over it he went, black leather-clad legs flashing in the late summer sun. There was no scream or shout of anger and fear. The disaster would be personal for the biker, but it didn’t raise so much as an extra honk of the horn from the other motorists.

  From out of sight came a sudden surge of sound, smashes of chrome meeting fiberglass, the squeal of tires as brakes slammed in reaction.

  And her lane was moving forward again.

  Candace was stunned by the callousness of the act and by the complete indifference of the other drivers. They must have seen it like she did, as clear as day and twice as evil.

  The truck’s door was closed again, inching up to the exit. She didn’t think the driver had bothered to step out and look down.

  And what could she do?

  Nothing but ease forward, the press of merging vehicles finally clearing as those who weren’t supposed to be in this lane got out of it and those who were managed to slide into it.

  A few seconds later and she was in the long right turn of the exit, swooping out and coming back around. Though the way was clear the traffic remained slow. It wasn’t for the cars now, but for the rubberneckers craning their heads out of windows, peering over the sides of the rising ramp as it crossed back over I-285. Candace was no different, leaning left and looking down. The rider was a still form far below, black against gray and outlined by the nose-to-tail car wrecks which encompassed three lanes and went at least four cars deep. The motorcycle had tumbled
farther than its rider.

  From on high, she couldn’t see any blood.

  She could see the dark smudge in the air off to the south, but it was lowering like chimney smoke in a fireplace with a clogged flue.

  The car in front of her continued to move, so she did too, pulling her head back inside as a strange smell came on the breeze, a taste like copper and mint and something much worse. Hastily, Candace pushed the button to raise the window.

  God, she hated Atlanta.

  * * * * *

  It wasn’t only the wind carrying the particles or the airplanes taking off from the airport carrying sick passengers.

  It was drivers like Candace and other vehicles like her ten-year-old Hyundai.

  While Austin headed north and east, infecting a gas station attendant in Georgia before scoring on a paramedic in South Carolina, Candace motored west and south.

  She dropped her drawers for the first time—but definitely not the last, no sir and thank you—at a truck stop in Birmingham, Alabama. It was a close call held off by sheer willpower and ass cheeks honed from years of practice at clenching tight. Nothing like a bad gallbladder to teach a woman how to get buns of steel.

  Only once had Candace ever had a bowel movement like this, and that was when her doctor prescribed a dose of magnesium citrate as a temporary purge—the next best thing to legalized Drano for the human body. The sickening twist and emptying which accompanied the experience was made worse this time by a smell like a skunk had taken up residence between her legs and was spraying the whole bathroom. The other occupants exited as fast they could, retching noises following them out.

  It was so bad she had to put her hands out to the sides, holding onto the stall walls like her butt was a rocket and only her grip could keep her grounded. Sweat popped out on her face as nausea filled her mouth with spit, Nature’s lubricant, all ready to grease the wheels for her lunch’s imminent return.