Thompson’s rifle barked and a form behind the barrier rose up. I didn’t wait to tell if it was because they had been hit, or if they were trying to move to cover. I just put the reticule on them and squeezed the trigger. Al did the same, and I saw more muzzle flashes from the opposite side of the room. Hernandez was still up. The security guard went down, transfixed by multiple rounds.
In an act of desperation, the final guard rushed from behind his cover. He wasn’t screaming. Instead, he had his weapon up and firing, sending a barrage of lead in my direction. I made myself as small as possible as rounds slammed into the glass container and ricocheted off the sturdier metal base. Then the shooter was down, as Al and Hernandez caught him in a crossfire.
They didn’t stop to check on me, instead rushing to the position from which the security team had been holed up. I pushed myself to my feet and ran forward to meet them, but it was already over. There were a number of bodies, and the pair had kicked weapons clear from dead hands, but it looked like we were alone.
Then I really looked at Hernandez.
Her face was ashen, and her left arm hung limply at her side. Blood oozed from a wound high on her biceps and flowed down the arm, until it dripped from the fingers of her hands. “Dammit,” I snarled. I keyed the mic. “We need Tia up here, now.”
“It’s okay, hermano,” she insisted. She threw me a wan grin. “If it hit anything really important, I’d be dead by now.”
“Shut up, Hernandez,” I said. I was vaguely aware of Al’awwal securing the area, making sure there weren’t any hidden bad guys waiting for the opportune time to strike. Which was probably what I should have been doing. Instead, I moved to Hernandez’s side, and shined a flashlight into the wound. She winced as I manipulated her arm, turning her to check for an exit wound. I found one—a nasty, ragged tear from which more blood oozed. I said a silent prayer, thanking whatever gods might be listening that the bullet had missed the brachial artery.
Then Tia was there, pushing me out of the way. “Keep the light on her,” she said as I gave way before her professional brusqueness. “Through and through. You’ll be okay.” She opened her medkit and started pulling out bandages, disinfectants, and god-alone knew what else. I did my best to keep the light steady as she worked, but was distracted as the rest of the team arrived. Thompson had slung his rifle and had his pistol—a big revolver—in hand. Silas and LaSorte were carrying Fortier between them, a situation none of the three looked particularly comfortable with.
The detective had his right pant leg cut away halfway down his thigh. A tightly wound bandage—already showing some seeping red against the white—wrapped tightly around his leg, covering from his kneecap up beneath the ragged hem of his shortened pants. He was sweatier than usual, and a grimace of pain twisted his face, but his subgun looked like it had been put to use. “This sucks, Campbell,” he said. “Why couldn’t you find a base guarded by geriatric Girl Scouts or something?”
“They’d probably kick your ass, too,” I shot back, but without any real heat.
He made a sound that was half-grunt, half-chuckle as the synthetics lowered him to the ground. If he was disturbed by resting so close to so many corpses, it didn’t show on his face. “What now?” he asked, rubbing gently at his leg.
“We keep going,” I said at once. I glanced at my watch—the entire fire fight from the first rounds to now had taken less than four minutes. “Hopefully this was their ready team, and any other security is still gearing up. We’ve got a small window to get this shit done.”
“Lead on, oh Captain,” Fortier said with another snort. “I’ll be sure to hop along behind you.” There wasn’t any sarcasm in the words, just a sort of comic fatalism. I felt my stomach twist a bit. Maybe it was from the stench of my own kit—now that the adrenaline was calming down, my sense of smell was returning, and it smelled like I’d rolled around on a slaughterhouse floor before taking a nice long swim through a chemical tank. But maybe it was the fact that, for a second there, I could almost like the fat detective.
I shook that thought from my head. “You good, Hernandez?” Tia was tying off a bandage. I noticed an expended syringe on the floor, probably a pain killer.
“The doc’s worked her magic,” Hernandez responded. She tucked her nine-millimeter barrel first under the armpit of her wounded arm, wincing as she did so. It allowed her to drop the mag, then pull a fresh one from her own dump pouch, and slam it back into the gun. She gritted her teeth and racked the slide by shoving forward with her right hand while clamping down on the frame with her left arm. It had to be excruciating with the bullet wound, but she bared her teeth in something akin to a grin. “Might need some ammo, though.”
“Two minutes to reload mags and re-kit as best we can,” I said. I pulled some nine-millimeter subgun mags from my pouch. “Use these to reload, Hernandez. I’ll switch to this.” I patted the Brazilian weapon. “Everyone else, find whatever you can use and let’s get locked and loaded. We’ve still got a job to do.”
Chapter 20
We made our way through the underground Walton Biogenics facility. Maybe my prediction was right, and the guards we’d taken down were the Walton equivalent of a rapid response team and the rest were gearing up to come finish our little operation. Maybe we were luckier than we had any right to expect, and that had been all the security force, dropped in the charnel chamber that housed the remains of so many synthetics. Whatever the reason, we made our way through the halls until at last we were in front of another unlabeled door. Well, not entirely unlabeled. There was nothing to indicate who worked here or what the specific function of the room was, but the plain metal door did bear a single sign.
It had the black circle and three crescents on a field of bright yellow that anyone over the age of about ten years old would instantly recognize. But in case someone lived in a cage, the word “Biohazard” was painted in block letters beneath the symbol.
“Seems like we’re in the right place,” Al’awwal noted.
“To bad we don’t have any MOPP gear,” I said. “I guess we just open the door and go in.”
“A moment, Jason,” Silas said, voice strained. The synthetic looked…bad. As bad as when he’d been in the mask. His breathing was strained, his face sweaty. His frame, always intimidating, seemed somehow shrunken. But the determination in his eyes burned as bright as ever. “We can verify if there are any warnings on the network. If LaSorte can take care of Detective Fortier on his own for a moment?” LaSorte nodded, shifted his stance a bit, and took the full weight of the injured detective. Fortier, for his part, tried to keep as much of his weight as possible on his uninjured leg and off the synthetic. Despite Silas’s illness and Fortier’s injury, the three working together had managed to slow us only a little bit, while keeping the shooters free to engage any combatants that popped up.
Silas’s fingers swiped over his screen. “Everything seems to be intact. Or, rather, shut down. There is no indication of any contaminants.” Another swipe. “And the door should be unlocked.” A strange expression crossed his face, and he swallowed numerous times, as if trying to get down a mouthful of food that was sticking in his throat. “And, Ms. Morita, it may be time for more of the numbing agent.”
Tia moved to his side, administering another dose of the mild paralytic that kept Silas from giving our position away with the racking coughs the Walton virus had left him with. I waved at the others, and they stacked up, moving now like a well-oiled machine. We weren’t exactly expecting armed resistance on the other side of the door, but practice and preparation now might save lives later. I nodded to Al, on the opposite side of the doorway from me. He reached out, pulled the latch, and gave the door a shove.
I was the first one through, the unfamiliar subgun up and at the ready, flashlight sweeping across the room. My first impression was of a hospital, or maybe a morgue. Clean, white tile. Stainless-steel tables. Lots of glassware. A b
ank of indefinable machines and equipment that reminded me vaguely of the forensics lab. The back wall wasn’t really a wall at all, but rather a giant sheet of glass or translucent plastic. I could see behind it to a number of smaller chambers—labs, maybe—isolated from the rest of the area. The room was large— not half as big as the synthetic graveyard we’d had the firefight in, but still huge. Thirty people could have comfortably worked in the space. Fortunately for us, it was empty.
The entire team made their way inside. Silas and LaSorte found a rolling office chair, and deposited Fortier in it while the rest of us spread out. Al stayed at the door, covering our six in case security showed up. “Is this it?” I asked. The question wasn’t directed at anyone in particular, but all eyes turned to Tia.
“Someone find a light switch,” she said.
“I’ve got it,” LaSorte replied, tapping at his screen. The overhead lights, bright white LEDs, burned to life, banishing the shadows and filling the room with an almost sterile glow.
“What are we looking for?” Hernandez asked. Tia had fashioned her a sling out of an elastic bandage, securing Hernandez’s left arm in a more comfortable position. She’d holstered her sidearm, leaving her right arm free to poke and prod at the various vials and test tubes scattered across the tables.
“I’m not sure,” Tia admitted. “I need to get into one of their screens. LaSorte? Silas?” The pair nodded and moved to one of the desk-mounted screens, powering it on and starting to work their magic. “The rest of you… Try to find any handwritten notes. It’s a long shot, but maybe there’s something they wrote down. And anything in a sealed vial, like the kind that holds drugs to be administered via hypodermic needle.” She rummaged around in her medkit, pulling out a small glass tube sealed with plastic or rubber at the top. “Like this. But don’t open anything,” she warned. “We don’t know what might be cure and what might be plague. So, look, don’t touch. Okay?”
We all responded in the affirmative, and set about our tasks. It took me about thirty seconds to realize it was futile. I had no fucking idea what I was looking at. I was afraid to reach out and touch any of the assorted glassware—though none of it looked to have anything in it, anyway. It reminded me of any time I walked through one of the few brick-and-mortar stores that clung desperately to existence, the kind where every available inch of space seemed to be packed with shelf upon shelf of breakable shit. It always felt like one wrong turn, one misstep, and I’d find myself shattering thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise. Maybe that’s how they stayed in business.
Still, I did my best. Opening drawers, poking around racks of test tubes and flasks and shit I couldn’t even name. Looking for anything sealed, or, a treasure beyond worth, a fucking notebook. Anything.
No one else seemed to be having any luck, either. Fortier had rolled his chair one-legged over to the individual labs at the back and was studying the control panels to the airlock-like doors. I hoped to god he wasn’t dumb enough to open one, not without clearing it with Tia first. The others were pretty much doing the same thing I was. Wandering about, poking their noses into whatever bit of lab tackle looked interesting. Except for Silas, LaSorte, and Tia, who all three had their faces close to one of the screens. They were our real hope at finding a cure. The rest of us were just the mooks who had to deliver them to this room and get them back out again. It was humbling to think that, despite being the “face” of the revolution, when it came down to it, I was just a monkey with a gun.
“No!” The cry came from Tia, and it had me spinning about, bringing my weapon to my shoulder and scanning for targets. My eyes found her, and I had to scan again, she looked so distraught. Silas and LaSorte weren’t looking much better. Or rather, LaSorte was looking almost as bad as Silas who, generally, looked like shit. All of their eyes were locked onto the screen before them.
“What is it?” I asked, moving that direction. The others were gathering as well, even Fortier, rolling his way toward us. I noticed that his bandages had darkened. The wound wasn’t gushing, but he was still bleeding. Bad sign, and something I should point out to Tia.
“It’s gone. It’s all gone,” she wailed, glaring at the screen.
“What’s all gone?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm and soothing against her despair.
“The cure.”
Those two words hit me like a fifty-caliber bullet. Had we really come all this way, fought through the security, taken casualties, just to fail? “How?” was the only thing I managed to get out.
Silas answered, voice strained from the paralytic, but lacking the despair that filled Tia’s voice. He sounded almost resigned somehow. “It was part of the decommissioning process, Jason,” he said. “They had not produced much of the…cure.”
“Targeted virus,” Tia corrected absently, her eyes, tears leaking from the corners, staring blankly at the screen. I wasn’t about to ask for the difference between the two.
Silas shrugged his acknowledgement. “Targeted virus. What they did make, it seems they did only for use of their soldiers. Who, it seems, are not genetically immune. They require the vaccine, the same as any of us would. According to the records we were able to find, all of the cure they produced was used. There is none stored, and it seems they destroyed all the samples. There is nothing left.”
“No,” I said flatly. “I don’t accept that. It can’t just be gone. We’re in their fucking lab for Christ’s sake. Can’t we just make more?”
“From what?” Tia asked, and I winced at the bitterness in her voice. “You can’t just push a button and make a cure out of thin air. Even if we could figure out which of this equipment they used, or what the process was, we’d need…” She trailed off. A strange expression flashed across her face. It was half the “eureka moment” of an idea and half a flash of horror.
“Need what?” I demanded.
“Shut up, Campbell,” she snapped. “I’m thinking.”
I’d never seen her like this before. I looked at the others, who exchanged shrugs with me. We backed off, even the two synthetics, giving her space to work. I was conscious of the time ticking by. If there was any security force left in the facility, they’d have gathered in strength, maybe even put out a call for reinforcements. We were far enough from anything that we probably didn’t have to worry about outside reinforcements getting here, even by chopper, before the whole thing was done, but that might not matter.
I worked the problem in my head, forgetting about searching for anything in the lab. I’m not sure how much time had passed while I was considering options and working my way through tactics, but my reverie was shattered when Tia said, quite distinctly, “Well, fuck me.” Hearing Tia say those words, whatever the context, could probably have woken me from the dead. In this case, though, it got everybody’s attention.
“Did you find anything?” Hernandez asked.
Tia looked up from the screen and around the room. She seemed to be searching for something. Her eyes found Fortier, who was sitting, slumped in his chair, by the glass wall leading back to the working labs. “Fortier,” she said, raising her voice nearly to a shout. “Check those labs. You’re looking for a…” She trailed off. Thought about it for a moment. “You won’t know what it’s called. You’re looking for something that looks like the offspring between Frankenstein’s lab and Satan’s juicer. It should be in one of those labs.”
That description certainly got all our attention, and Fortier uttered a weak laugh and after apparently dismissing the lab he was right outside of, starting slowly rolling toward the next one. The rest of us started moving that way, all except Tia. There was something…off…about her posture. Like she was both excited for, and at the same time dreading, whatever it was that Fortier might find.
“Got it,” Fortier shouted. “Ha! Satan’s juicer. What the fuck am I looking at?” he demanded.
“A chance,” Tia said. But there were tears
in her eyes again.
“What is it?” I asked, turning back and moving to her side.
There weren’t just tears in her eyes. She was crying. No. Sobbing. Deep, wracking sobs that she was somehow holding most of the way in, making her body shudder with suppressed emotion. “Oh, Jason,” she whispered and threw herself at me. Her arms locked around me, and I was suddenly juggling my subgun and Tia. “I wish there wasn’t a way.” Her words were said with such savage intensity that I pushed her momentarily away, so that I could stare into her tear-stained eyes.
“Jesus, Tia,” I said. “What is it?”
The others had gathered now, forming a loose semi-circle around us. No one said anything, aware that Tia wasn’t exactly in a place to have questions shouted out her. But the look in all their eyes shouted the questions anyway. What had she found? And why was she reacting this way?
She pushed herself away from me and collapsed into the chair again. For a few heartbeats, she just sat there, staring into her hands. Then she drew a deep breath and scrubbed her palms over her face, wiping away the tears. When she looked back up, her features were calm, though her eyes were still deep wells of pain. “There’s a way,” she said.
Everybody opened their mouths to speak at once, but she held up one hand. I wasn’t sure if it was the professional authority or the raw emotion, but we all obeyed that outstretched hand and kept our mouths shut. “Listen first,” she said. “The machine that Fortier found… We can use it to make more of the targeted virus… The cure. Enough to start LaSorte, Al’awwal, some of the others on it. And, more importantly, enough to reverse engineer the process. Hopefully enough that any halfway competent bio-chem student or hospital can make more.”
SINdrome Page 21