The girl sniffed. She might not have been looking at her shoes but her voice was still overly subordinate. “I’m going to write better notes.”
“That’s right, you are. And another thing. . .”
Sam picked up a clipboard and formulated a reason for the unusual cross-pollination between the two hemispheres of the room. She spoke in a low whisper and placed her hand on the scientist’s shoulder.
Taken by surprise, the woman jerked at the sudden contact. She wore glasses but the prescription was so slight her face wasn’t warped at all.
Sam smiled in greeting. “I need a little help with my samples. My specialist field isn’t in chemistry. Do you think you could help me?”
The woman glanced over Sam’s shoulder at Lester. “I’m not sure we’re meant to be talking to each other.”
Sam placed her hand on the woman’s elbow and tapped out the same two letters.
The woman looked up into Sam’s eyes. A flicker of confusion across those bright blue eyes and smooth cheeks. “I can’t help you. I’m sorry. If you speak with Lester, he might arrange something. Until then, I think you should go back to your workstation now.”
Her eyes flickered to Sam’s left eye, not over her shoulder, but it was enough for Sam to pick up on the message. He’s looking at us.
Sam nodded. “Thank you for listening to me.”
The woman smiled politely—and a little tightly—before turning back to her workstation.
Sam was slow in turning around. She wasn’t in any great rush to meet the verbal assault heading her way. She wouldn’t approach another member of the research team. She didn’t want to put anyone else’s life in danger. She wasn’t sure the female researcher understood her tap code message anyway. Even if she had, she had chosen not to reciprocate. Only Greg was brave enough to reply and he was no longer with them.
Lester marched toward her. Fire boiled in his eyes. He worked his jaw preparing to unleash the worst tongue lashing she’d ever experience.
Sam held her clipboard in her hands before her. A protective shield against the approaching storm.
The door hissed open and a pair of guards dragged a body inside. Lester leaped aside to make room for them. The other scientists turned from their workstations, implements clutched in tight fists. One researcher dropped an empty test tube. They scurried to clean it up.
A streak of fresh blood trailed behind the bedraggled body. The man’s nose had been smashed; a pair of deep cuts hastily stitched back up with a cumbersome bodkin needle.
The guards thrust the man against the workstation beside Sam’s. They stepped back, hands resting on bloodied bludgeons at their waists. Ready, waiting, for an excuse to unleash them.
The man grasped at the tabletop with both hands and struggled to maintain balance. He wavered against an invisible wind but did not collapse. Incredibly, against all odds, the man turned himself around to stare the guards in the eye. He grinned with a mouthful of missing teeth and bloody gums.
The larger guard sneered around gritted teeth and made to unsheathe his bludgeon.
Lester clapped his hands, a single sharp crack that attracted the guards’ attention. “Thank you ever so much for bringing him back to us. You don’t know the nightmare it’s been, working without our bacteriologist.”
The guards shared a glare, but they relaxed their stances, letting the truncheons slip back in their scabbards’ leathery embrace. They marched from the room, the door sliding shut behind them.
Lester might have saved the man another bloody beating, but he wasn’t going to expose himself to any greater danger than he already had. “Everyone back to work.”
He marched to the other side of the room, as far from the disheveled figure as possible. Sam’s punishment was likewise forgotten.
Sam had eyes only for the broken figure struggling to stand at his workstation beside hers. Every inch of his clothes sported tears, a theme that continued on his exposed flesh with welts and bruises. He hissed through his teeth as he gripped a tray and dragged it across the tabletop. His legs shook, threatening to collapse beneath him at any moment. Somehow, he maintained his balance.
Sam choked on a hot wad and her eyes burned. She reached over to help him with his experiments. His test results would be useless, contaminated with his blood.
He raised his hand, blocking her, glaring at her with eyes red with broken blood vessels. Gently, he shook his head. Don’t.
Sam tapped a finger on the tabletop. “Let me help.”
His eyes were so swollen she wasn’t sure he could see her messages. She repeated the message, tapping the tabletop harder. Maybe if he can feel the vibrations. . .
He took his hands off the tabletop and turned away. With his face as swollen and disfigured as it was, it was impossible to read much expression in it.
Sam remained silent and concentrated on her work, a tight cluster of concern buried in the back of her mind for her friend.
19.
HAWK
Dr. Archer moved to the terminal and pressed at the buttons. She didn’t look up. “One last chance,” she said. “If you won’t do it for yourself, then do it for me. I don’t want to have to do this to you.”
“Then don’t.”
Her expression broke and for an instant—just an instant—she looked like she didn’t want to do it. Then her resolve reformed.
“You give me no choice, Hawk. I hope you remember that over the ensuing hours and days.”
“I’ll be remembering many things over that time, and not one of them will be you. You always have a choice, doctor. Whatever you choose to do to me, I hope you remember that.”
Dr. Archer’s expression didn’t falter. She’d already put her defenses up. She’d made her decision long before the light above the door blinked green and admitted her into the room. When she’d taken on the job, she knew it might come to this.
“Go ahead, doctor. Do your worst.”
“We’re scientists. We always do our best. And this is our weapon of choice.” She pulled a drawer open and withdrew a thick wad of paper. “Data. Information.”
“You’re going to torture me with the truth?”
“I want you to think inwards,” Dr. Archer said. “Deep inside. To where the Hunger resides. Can you find it? If my calculations are correct, it shouldn’t be too difficult to locate.”
Hawk turned his eyes inwards. He was surprised to find she was right. The cold hardness of Hunger had crept upon him in his desperation. It was right there on the doorstep of his consciousness. Preparing to pounce.
“How?” he said. “You installed the automatic injector. It’s real. It’s been working the past two cycles.”
“It came with a finite supply.”
“You didn’t fill it up?”
Dr. Archer shook her head. “Only enough for a few shots. To give you enough time to come to terms with what you can do. Our calculations turned out to be correct. Two cycles were adequate.”
It was a lot to take in. Hawk began to panic. “You’re willing to lose me if I don’t comply with your demands?”
“We’ve analyzed the data and found there’s little chance of you succumbing fully to the virus. Your mutation prevents you from sliding into deeper darkness. You will still be you, even if only a shred of the original Hawk remains.”
“A shred?”
“You will be conscious while we conduct our tests, but you will have no power over proceedings. You will become a zombie in all but name, locked inside your mind for eternity. We will open your mind once again and control you ourselves. It was never the primary option, but now we are at a loss for how to proceed.”
Hawk would become a vegetable, forced to do what they wanted. Then he would be tossed aside and left to rot. And that was if they felt unduly kind. They could just as easily keep him alive as a zombie for as long as they wished.
A new low.
* * *
“You can’t do this to me! I have my rights!”
“You’re dead. And the dead have no rights. In the eyes of the law, you don’t exist. You belong to us. We can do whatever we want with you. I’m sorry, Hawk. You are the only test subject we have. There aren’t many Walkers out there. The opportunity to study is too important to pass up.”
Hawk hung his head. The words that oozed from her lips were the truth. The Hunger was right there, preparing to seize his mind, creeping up on him inch by inch. Without another bloodshot, the Hunger would overtake him eventually.
Hawk’s voice was broken. His spirit in verbal form. “You said you were going to cure me.”
“I said I would improve you. You have already become so much more than you were.”
“I wanted to be human.”
“You will never be human, Hawk. There’s no going back for you now. You are already greater than either human or zombie. Can you see?”
“I can see all right.” Hawk couldn’t contain his rage. His eyes were burning coals. “You’re selling me down the river. You were meant to help me. But you’re only interested in helping yourselves. You’re like everyone else. You take what you want and turn nasty when someone says no. If you want your precious tests, you’re going to have to kill me to get them.”
Dr. Archer was taken aback. She blinked, surprised at the sudden shift into acceptance at the inevitable. She glanced up at the camera again. Hawk didn’t turn his head to learn what color flashed this time.
He was doomed either way.
Dr. Archer licked her lips. Her uncertainty was infectious. Hawk’s concerns melted beneath his resolve. He couldn’t stand down. It simply wasn’t in him. The only unknown was his opponents’ resolve.
He was their only test subject. Would they really risk losing him to prove a point? He doubted they could control him as well as he could control himself.
Flustered, Dr. Archer turned back to her terminal. “Now, we’re going to run some tests.”
A thousand electric screams rose in pitch and pulsed through his mind. He flinched against the pain.
The doctor’s voice was a distant buzzing gnat. “As you have failed to comply with our demands, you shall be punished.”
Hawk couldn’t bring himself to smile. His facial muscles contorted with pain, but already he sensed a small victory.
Punishment wasn’t the same as ordering a death knell.
He raised his eyes to hers. He could barely keep them open. “Bring it on, bitch. Bring it on.”
20.
TOMMY
The team hustled from the building. The locals busy at work had made themselves scarce. The alarm blared from the loudspeakers hastily assembled atop poles at regular intervals along the street.
There were no explosions, no hints of gunfire. Nothing that suggested the need for the cacophonous alarms.
Guy pressed his hands over his ears. “What’s it for? Other than to ruin my day?”
“Maybe the zombies are already here.” Jimmy peered at the others with open fear.
“Not yet. They were still some way off when we arrived.”
Emin clutched Jimmy close. “Then what is it?”
Tommy peered up and down the streets at the concrete and iron-plated hills and valleys, a temporary manmade construct. The zombie virus could snap those bonds of modernity and return the hilltop to nature from whence it came.
He had a bad, twisting sensation in the pit of his stomach. The city was quiet. Too quiet. Tommy turned back to their Humvee. “We have to get out of here.”
It remained precisely where they’d parked it. Tommy clutched his backpack close as he climbed into the driving seat. So much rested upon those few pages inside this bag. Perhaps everything on this pale blue dot of ours.
He started the engine and pulled away. The engine roared reassuringly as he pulled onto the silent winding street. Just over the horizon, where the city’s future met their present, Tommy made out the distinctive flashing lights of patrol cars.
The illusion of law and order in a world turned to ash.
There was only one thing they could be looking for, only one target they might have their sights on.
Jimmy climbed into Emin’s lap. She wrapped her arms around him tight. “Why are they looking for us? What have we done wrong?”
Guy’s lips barely moved. “In the wrong place and at the wrong time, by the look of it.”
Tommy glanced at the backpack out the corner of his eye. The Failsafe plans? Had the commander known they were coming for them? Had he known what awaited them inside the safe? Had he waited for them to retrieve the plans for him? He shook his head. His imagination was running ahead of him. If that was the case, the commander would have had them more closely watched.
The Architect then? Did he have some part of this? He was a spider, crouched at the center of his web of lies and deceit, a thousand plans lying in wait on each thread, just waiting to be pulled.
There are things even he doesn’t know about.
It was the one word of hope Tommy possessed. The one cause to think everything might work out for the best. When you had been burnt by a master of lies, you saw traps everywhere you went. That did not mean they were all real. The trick was figuring out which ones were, and which could be safely ignored.
They were pinning all their hopes on this one plan. The Failsafe. Their one hope of turning the tide and returning things to the way they were.
Pa-arp!
A police siren. Not the keen wailing, but the warning shot.
Tommy spun the wheel and took them down a narrow back alley. It served as the delivery yard for a row of commercial outlets on the high street.
He killed the engine and waited for the patrol car to pass. The moment it did, he restarted the engine, reversed, and took them back in the direction they’d come from. He caught the police car’s back axle as it hung a right. Tommy turned left and took them as far as he dared.
The place would be crawling with them before long. Tommy pulled down another back alley and parked between a pair of large skips.
Guy checked out his window. “Want to try on foot? I don’t know the sewage system here but it can’t be too dissimilar from Austin’s.”
Emin pressed her palms together. “No more sewers. Please.”
“I didn’t hear you complaining the last time we had to use one.”
“Then you weren’t listening.”
Guy pressed his lips together, forming his next retort.
Tommy opened his backpack and fished the file out. “We’re going to have to wait for them to lower their guard. Maybe they’ll give up. If they don’t, we’ll have to figure another way out of here.”
Emin shook her head. “They don’t look like they’re going to lower their guard for a while.”
“Then we’ll wait.”
Tommy opened the file and divided it into four sections. Three of equal size, and a smaller one for Jimmy. He didn’t want to give him the most important items. “Until then, I suggest we find out just what it is we’ve got ourselves into.”
With nothing else to occupy their time and more than enough curiosity to kill the cat, they dug into their papers.
* * *
Pa-arp!
Another warning shot. They were only in trouble when the full-on siren blared. None of them paid much attention to the alert. They were too engrossed with the details they’d read.
Tommy appraised their expressions. He couldn’t decide if they were befuddled or engaged. “Does it make any sense to anyone?”
Jimmy raised a hand. “It’s a report. But someone crossed out a lot of stuff.”
They waited for more. None was forthcoming.
“The contents page looks interesting,” Jimmy said, “but I don’t know a lot of the words.”
He held up the sheet of paper. He’d underlined the words he didn’t know and connected them with all with a giant question mark that he’d shaped into a less sinister version of Doc Ock.
Emin ruffled the boy’s hair. “Good work.”
“Honestly, I’ve seen worse PowerPoint presentations,” Guy said.
Tommy collated his papers. “How about you guys? Find anything of interest?”
Guy spread his documents out. “Plenty of things. But too much has been redacted for me to piece it together.”
“So, let’s start at the top. What is the Failsafe and what does it do?”
“I know what the word failsafe means but I don’t know what it specifically refers to here.” Emin bit her bottom lip. She needed to be careful. It looked about ready to fall off. “It means having something in place so that if something goes wrong with an original plan it’ll still work.”
Guy picked through Emin’s documents. “So, what’s the failsafe in this plan?”
Tommy waved his bunch of documents. “Something is hidden deep beneath Houston.”
“Beneath Houston? There’s nothing beneath Houston.”
“Apparently, there is.”
A siren blared and lights strobed the alley walls. Tommy reached for the keys in the ignition. He paused, waiting to see what the police would do. The patrol car edged past the alleyway and took its flashing lights with it.
The team relaxed.
“We have to get out of here,” Guy said. “There’s more of the buggers every minute.”
Tommy agreed. He started the car and kept the lights turned off. He edged toward the alley’s end.
“Doesn’t it seem strange to anyone else they’d build a base inside a big city like that?” Guy said. “Right where everyone can see it?”
Tommy didn’t take his eyes from the road. “Sometimes the hardest things to see are those right before our eyes.”
“That’s very philosophical for a grunt.”
Tommy grunted in response. “Sorry. I mustn’t have understood what I was saying.”
“I thought not.”
Tommy paused at the alley’s mouth. He leaned forward and peered in both directions. Obscured by darkness, they at least had a chance to slip past the patrol cars.
Death Squad (Book 3): Zombie Nation Page 12