Quarantine (The Shadow Wars Book 7.5)

by Lusher, S. A.

  Allan blinked and suddenly she was gone. It was his hands on the helmet, one of the latches undone. Trembling violently, Allan got his breathing and pulse back under control as he looked around, rapidly scanning the lab, slowly realizing that he'd been hallucinating. He let out a deep, shuddering breath, redid the latch, turned around and went back to work on the workstation. Another few minutes passed, and he finally had it.

  “Yes!” Allan cried.

  One of the scientists had apparently not trusted everyone he was working with, and had hidden some extra vials of the cure in a cold storage bay in the bowels of the ship. Allan made a note in his suit's database of the location and number to unlock the code-lock, since he no longer trusted his memory, and turned away from the workstation. All he had to do was get to a stairwell, go down and find that cold storage bay.

  Should be relatively easy.

  * * * * *

  He'd made it about halfway to the nearest stairwell when the paranoid awareness that someone was following him hit. Allan stopped and turned around, scanning the corridor behind him. Nothing but blood and bodies for company. As if his life wasn't difficult enough without having to put up with this shit. He turned back around just in time to see a doorway up ahead closing. Raising the bolt gun, Allan hurried over to it and opened it up.

  “Hunter?”

  An empty room. What was the point it? Nothing along the walls, no shelves, no crates, no equipment of any kind. Sighing, Allan shut the door and turned back to the corridor. Someone was up ahead, standing at the end of it in poor lighting.

  “Hunter?” he asked, his pulse beginning to rise again. Swallowing, he raised the bolt gun. “Hunter, if that's you, fucking say something.”

  The person standing there remained perfectly still. There was just enough light to tell that it was a person. This didn't make any sense. If it was an insane crewman, they'd be rushing him. Allan took a few more steps, bolt gun trained on them.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  Nothing. Whoever it was remained perfectly still. Allan's finger began to tighten around the trigger, but at the last second he paused. What if it was a survivor? He took a few more cautious steps. The next time he blinked, the thing popped out of existence.

  “What the fuck?” he whispered, turning around and checking behind him.

  Nothing there. He turned back around and-

  “Allan.”

  Hunter was right in front of him. He screamed and stumbled back several steps.

  “What-where-” He couldn't form coherent thoughts, let alone sentences. He fell back onto his ass and began scooting backwards rapidly as Hunter walked towards.

  “Why do you even bother going on?” she asked, her voice taking a hard edge, his words slightly distorted. Again, only her eyes were visible through her visor. “Why does it even matter anymore, Allan? Why?” she snapped.

  In a sudden resolute gesture, Allan raised the bolt gun and fired. The bolt sailed clear through her and she disappeared.

  “God...fuck...” Allan groaned, getting to his feet. He was hallucinating now. Probably the last stages of the virus before he went total bugfuck crazy. Of course, he couldn't keep shooting at her...what if happened if she really showed up and he put a fucking round through her skull because he couldn't keep his head together?

  Allan began rapidly making his way down the corridor. He came to the end of it, found the stairwell and began heading down it. What if this was a hallucination? How did he knew he hadn't dreamed up that cure? How did he know he wasn't just standing there in the main lab or some room, drooling and moaning, the last thoughts of a demented mind, his dying sanity and consciousness pretending there was a happy ending.

  No.

  He had to assume that what he saw was what he got...as long as it made sense. Of course, it was hard to tell what made sense when your brain was working against you. Allan reached the bottom floor and opened the door. Nothing out there but an empty corridor. He stepped out.

  “Give up,” Hunter whispered. He heard her voice inside of his helmet, not through a radio but actually inside of his helmet.

  “Fuck off!” he screamed, making it to the end of the corridor and turning. Just in time to see someone stepping into one of the rooms.

  He ignored it.

  “You killed all those people,” Hunter whispered from nowhere. “Just to save your own sorry ass and now you spend your time rationalizing it.”

  “I did what I had to do!” he snapped, gritting his teeth, anger beginning to well up within him. “It was kill the planet or kill the galaxy!”

  “You don't know that,” Hunter murmured, somewhere behind him now. He kept going. “What if they had it wrong? What if you had it wrong?”

  “We didn't!” Allan screamed. “We did what we had to do!”

  “Keep saying it, it makes it more true,” Hunter replied. Now she was overhead. Allan glanced up, caught a hint of eyes behind a ventilation grate.

  He reached the end of the corridor and turned. Almost there. He kept walking, putting one foot in front of the other. The door he needed was ten meters away. Then five. Then three. He was there. Allan hit the access button. The door slid open and Hunter stood there, staring at him with eyes and nothing more behind her visor.

  “You haven't answered my question yet,” she said. “Why do you bother to go on?”

  Allan raised his bolt gun. “Get out of my way.”

  “Make me.”

  Allan began to squeeze the trigger, but at the last second realized he might hit something important inside. Instead, he shoved past Hunter. As soon as he laid hands on her, she disappeared. He stepped into the cold storage bay and began hunting along the various cabinets built into the walls. Which one had it been?

  “Come on, you're screwed, give it up. And give me an answer,” Hunter said.

  Allan ignored her, accessing his database. He got the number of the cabinet and began sorting through them. It was like standing in a bank vault, the walls covered in small doors. It was getting even more difficult to concentrate.

  “Is it because you know nothing else? Go on just to go on? That's kind of circular logic, Allan. You continued your existence in order to continue your existence. Not much point in that, is there?” Hunter asked from somewhere behind him.

  “I do it...to repay the debt,” Allan replied finally. “Atonement. I save enough people and...”

  “And what exactly? You think saving enough lives will eventually make it okay that you killed all those women and children? All those families and parents? Eventually, if you do enough good, it'll make up for all the bad you did?”

  “I don't know!” Allan screamed. Abruptly, he gave up his search, turned and faced her. She stood in the middle of the room. “Maybe I want to be happy for once in my fucking life! Maybe I'd like not to be so miserable all the goddamned time! What was I supposed to do!? What was I supposed to do!? Just let him get away?! Let the army of insane fucking gods come to life?! And then where would we be?! We'd all be dead or worse!”

  “You think you deserve to happy?” Hunter asked.

  Allan began to respond, but suddenly realized what was happening. He was arguing with no one, or rather, with the infection. It was stalling him. He looked over Hunter's shoulder and saw the storage unit he needed. He moved around her and came to the cabinet. All the doors had little keypads on them. He opened up his database, called up the combination and punched it in. The door chimed gently, the keypad turned green and it opened up.

  “Oh thank God,” he whispered, spying a small blue vial.

  “You should just let yourself die,” Hunter whispered.

  Allan opened up his visor and screwed off the top.

  “Stop,” Hunter said, and grabbed his wrist.

  “Go to hell,” Allan replied, transferring the vial to the other hand and drinking the glowing blue liquid before anything else could happen. It tasted awful and burned going down. Hunter somehow became less substantial, almost see-through. Allan l
aughed. Either it was working and the cure was rapid-onset, or he was dreaming all this and about to go insane. Either way the situation was coming to a head. He tossed the vial down on the ground, shattering it, and closed his visor. Hunter reached for him again, her eyes narrow and angry.

  But she couldn't get a grip on him. Allan suddenly began to feel extremely sleepy. His body felt like it was too heavy to keep upright and he sat down. The lethargy only got worse as he ended up laying down, his eyelids drooping, consciousness slipping away. He shifted, trying once to stand back up, then immediately gave up.

  He was too tired.

  Besides, he deserved a break, it had been a long day.

  * * * * *

  He was moving.

  He was incredibly weak.

  Allan opened his eyes. He stared up at a moving ceiling. He was lying perfectly flat on his back and it was an incredible effort to keep his eyes open.

  “Hey, he's waking up,” someone said.

  A face appeared, hidden behind a flat pane of glass. “Specialist Gray, can you hear me?”

  “Yeah,” Allan replied weakly. “Who...”

  “I'm with Hawkins, Gray. We got your signal. We're the retraction team. You're safe, you're okay,” the man replied.

  “Hunter...” he whispered. “Where's Hunter?”

  “We're still searching the ship. So far, you're the only one...”

  But he was passing out again.

  * * * * *

  One more time, he woke up.

  This time, he was lying on his back, he couldn't move and something was very much wrong. The world slid into focus and he scanned the room. He was in some kind of infirmary. The lights were on and very bright. His awareness felt heightened. The first thing that was wrong was that he couldn't move, he was strapped down to whatever he was lying on. The second thing that was wrong was that his armor was off.

  Allan expected the miserable, screaming panic to swarm him then, the unmitigated terror that would blind his senses and leave him seeing red. But it didn't come, at least not as powerfully. He was scared, badly, but still fundamentally in control of himself.

  “Allan?”

  He looked down the length of his body and saw Hawkins standing at the foot of his bed. That sight alone was like a bucket of cold water on his psyche. He let out a long breath and tried to relax. “This isn't what I call a vacation, Director.”

  Hawkins chuckled. “Yeah, well...me neither.” He seemed distinctly uncomfortable. He cleared his throat and shifted. “We had to take your armor off...I'm sorry. That's why you're strapped down. Intelligence reports you'd react violently. We were going to put it back on, fresh and polished, but...something has come up and to be honest, I didn't want you in a suit of power armor.”

  Fresh, cold fear shot through. “Am I infected? Did the cure not work?” he asked.

  “No, that's not it. You were cured. We reviewed the footage from the mission cam mounted in your suit and...I'm afraid you've had a psychotic break.”

  Allan frowned, not quite understanding what he meant, then it hit him. He was referring to the hallucinations he'd had near the end of his journey. “You mean my visions of Hunter, right before I got the cure? I know, I was hallucinating.”

  The troubled look on Hawkins's face didn't go away. Slowly, almost sadly, he shook his head. “No, Allan...we reviewed the footage from your mission and...well, I'm not quite sure how to put this lightly, so I'll just come out and say it. You were the only survivor from the speed ship. You were alone, the entire time, on the Stygian, in terms of friendlies.”

  Allan's frown deepened. He continue staring at Hawkins. He wanted to say that he'd misheard the man, but he was sure he hadn't. “I'm...I'm not sure I understand what you're saying.”

  “I'm saying that Duncan, Hunter, Colin, all those people you thought you were talking to for all those hours? You weren't talking to anyone. You were alone. You had a psychotic break and hallucinated.”

  Allan shook his head again, and Hawkins pulled out an infopad. He passed it to Allan. “This is a...I guess you could call it a highlight reel from your mission, of all the times you thought you were talking to someone and you weren't. You should watch it.”

  With numb fingers, Allan took the pad from Hawkins's hands, turned it around to face himself and pressed the play button. The first thing he heard was himself, talking, the relief obvious in his voice. It was the first time he'd heard from the others, that they'd survived. He heard his half of the conversation, but there was only silence in the times where someone was supposed to be talking. He fast-forwarded, came to his reunion with the others...except he was in an empty, bloody infirmary, talking to nothing and nobody.

  “This...doesn't make any sense,” he whispered, continuing.

  He continued watching, seeing empty corridors and rooms, hearing himself have a variety of one-sided conversations. He sounded utterly insane.

  “Allan, it's obvious from your file that you didn't have the most stable of upbringings. The events of Lindholm only made you worse. It's also obvious that you're in desperate need of a psych-eval and therapy. Either you hit your head in just the right way, or just the wrong way, during your escape from the speed ship, or the events proved too traumatic for you. Before, I was willing to let you try and sort this out on your own, but now, if you're going to continue working for me, I'm afraid I insist that you deal with this psychological imbalance of yours,” Hawkins said.

  Allan set aside the infopad after turning it off and stared fully at Hawkins. “What do you want me to do? Go to therapy? Start taking pills? While I'm out there with a gun and armor, fighting monsters and narcissistic megalomaniacs?” he asked.

  Hawkins shook his head. “Unfortunately, we don't have that kind of time. I have another option. Something that will either cure you or kill you inside of a day.”

  Allan frowned. “What...what the hell kind of device do you have that either cures mental illness or kills the patient that quickly? Russian roulette?”

  Hawkins offered a grim chuckle. “Not quite. It's...well, suffice to say, it's a very complicated piece of technology and it's still experimental. Based on your file, I'd say you like to gamble with your life, and you also like things to be fast rather than slow. You're going to want to do this.”

  “...maybe. What kind of odds?”

  “Fifty-fifty.”

  “Ha! Good odds, I guess. Better than I get facing down alien experiments or mad gods...” Allan considered it for a long moment, but, in the end, what choice did he really have? If he had hallucinated this thoroughly...

  “It couldn't have been the virus, could it?” he asked.

  Hawkins shook his head. “No. A hallucination that powerful, that quickly...no, the hallucinations you saw at the end were a result of the virus. What you started seeing from the beginning is a result of your refusal to deal with your issues. And it's only going to get worse, I imagine. We can't have an incident like this happen again.”

  Allan sighed. “So, take the experimental treatment or get fired?”

  “Basically. Under normal circumstances I'd honestly offer you more typical treatment but...well, we're playing with matches here and there's a fuse that we don't know the length of. Rogue Ops needs to go down, and I need you and your friends to do it.”

  Allan smiled gently. “My friends...” He stopped considering the issue. “All right. I'll do. What do I need to do?”

  Chapter 10

  –The Quiet Sleep & The Hard Wake–

  “So, tell me about this...procedure.”

  It had been nearly a day since he'd woken from his near comatose state, Hawkins at the foot his bed, telling him that he was clinically insane. He'd taken it surprisingly well. Though that could be stemming from the fact that he'd had some kind of psychotic break. Maybe he was just tired, or it could have been the lingering aftereffects of the virus that Rogue Ops had synthesized. He'd had most of that day to recover, lying alone in the infirmary bed for most of the time. The othe
rs drifted in from time to time to check up on him.

  Greg, Trent, Drake, even Enzo, surprisingly. Not Callie, though. When he'd asked, Hawkins had said that she was still away on her mission. He missed her, feeling a hollow ache in his chest. He'd slept the majority of the time, drugs perking through his system, accelerated agents that were being dripped into his body via a trio of IV bags hung around him. Hawkins said he needed to recover, the sooner the better, and he also needed to get his strength back. The procedure to get his sanity back was supposed to be very...taxing.

  At the beginning of the following day, Allan had awoken bright and early, feeling physically much better. He was rested, fed, hydrated...and ready to face the new challenge. The fact that he was out of his armor took its toll on him, but it was nowhere near as bad as he'd thought it was going to be. He was generally nervous, his heart probably beating faster than it should have and he often found himself thinking paranoid thoughts.

  But he wasn't panicking.

  He'd had a shower, a shave and had changed into a fresh uniform. The shower had lasted close to an hour. That alone made him feel significantly better than he had been in a long, long time. After that, Hawkins had let him have a quick meal in the mess hall. He'd eaten meat and cheese enchiladas and drank several cans of Vex.

  And then Hawkins had led him to what seemed to be a private medical suite. The whole room, no larger than his quarters, seemed to be centered around a single examination table. It was orbited by an array of medical equipment and gently beeping technology. A pair of med-techs in white-and-orange uniforms waited.

  “The procedure is...experimental,” Hawkins replied. He motioned to the examination table. Allan lingered a moment.

  “Do I need to get naked for this?” he asked.

  Hawkins shook his head. “No. This isn't any kind of surgical procedure. This isn't like anything you'll have every quite experienced.”