by AD Starrling
‘Yes,’ I said quietly. ‘This place is dead.’
The underground facility was deserted. We had already crossed several corridors and passed more than a dozen side passages, all devoid of signs of life. The only sounds disturbing the tomb-like silence were the buzz from the overhead fluorescent strips and the hum of an occasional vending machine.
‘From the number of guards we saw on the recon images, this place should be crawling with Crovirs,’ said Friedrich. ‘Something’s off.’
We paused at a crossroad and studied another pair of empty hallways. ‘I think he might be right,’ Reid muttered.
‘Wait.’ Friedrich’s tone was tense over the earpiece. ‘I see something.’ There was a long pause. ‘We’ve reached the lab.’ I heard a muffled hiss, followed by a protracted silence. ‘It’s empty,’ said Friedrich.
A cold chill ran down my spine at his words. ‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s no one here,’ Friedrich continued uneasily. ‘Most of the equipment’s gone as well.’ Rustling noises came across the earpiece. ‘I can see a decontamination room. It must lead to another lab.’ He paused. ‘I’m gonna check it out.’
‘Be careful,’ I said stiffly, trying to qualm the ominous foreboding growing inside me.
‘Hey!’ someone called out. I looked around. Bruno had wandered to the end of the east hallway: he was staring at something in an adjacent corridor, his gun pointed downward. ‘I found a dead guy.’ We joined him and looked at the body on the floor.
The man was dressed in a white, gas-tight decontamination suit complete with clamped boots, gloves and a hood with a shattered laminated visor. The mode of death was clearly evident: there was a single bullet wound in the middle of his forehead. Rigor mortis had set in and he lay stiffly against the pair of high containment glass doors at his back. A sign above the lintel read “UL 2”.
Beyond the transparent walls, lights glowed and winked on instruments sitting atop the work surfaces of a lab. Another set of glass doors stood closed on the other side of the room. A second body was visible through it.
I lifted the pass key from the dead man’s waist and moved it across the access panel to the right. The doors beeped and slid open silently. We stepped inside the lab.
‘What the hell is going on?’ muttered Bruno.
I studied the array of complex equipment that crowded the worktops before opening the storage compartments and fridges scattered around the lab. There was no sign of anything remotely resembling a hazardous, biological product-containment device, or a vaccine. ‘It’s a trap,’ I said dully. I paused in front of the doors leading to the next room. ‘Vellacrus must have known we were coming.’
Anatole frowned. ‘How? We only left Prague a few hours ago.’
‘I can only think of two reasons.’ I waved the pass key across the access panel and crossed the threshold into the inner chamber. ‘Either she’s a tactical genius, or someone betrayed us.’ I paused and glanced over my shoulder at the immortals. ‘If I was a betting man, I’d go with the latter option.’ I stopped by the second body and crouched down.
It belonged to a young woman. Like the man in the corridor, she was also dressed in a decontamination suit and had suffered a bullet wound to the chest. In her final death throes, her body had twisted sideways and her outstretched hand reached out towards a stainless steel door to the left of the room.
‘I take it these people weren’t immortals,’ Reid said quietly behind me.
I straightened. ‘No. They were probably hired from the nearest town.’ I walked to the steel door and stared through the oval glass port in the top half of the panel. The first stirrings of anger rose above the feelings of dread that still twisted through my gut.
‘What’s through there?’ said Reid.
‘It’s an airlock chamber.’ I studied the grey space behind the door. ‘It must lead to a decontamination room and a sterile lab.’ I opened it and stepped across the threshold. There were two suits on the wall. Reid came in behind me and started to climb into one of them. ‘What’re you doing?’ I said stiffly.
Reid paused and met my stare with a frown. ‘We’re not having this discussion again,’ he said gruffly. ‘Just shut up and get in the suit.’
I observed him for silent seconds before sighing loudly. I turned towards the doorway, where Bruno and Anatole stood watching us. ‘See if you can find anything on the computers,’ I told the two immortals. ‘They may not have erased the hard drives.’
The door closed after us with an ominous hiss. Another opened up ahead. I left the daisho in the airlock chamber and followed Reid into the decontamination shower. Moments later, there was a sensation of pressure and air whistled from the room. The light on the next containment door changed to green and a panel slid aside. We entered a small, brightly-lit, sterile lab.
The facility was still functional. Instruments gleamed and thrummed on the counters that lined the wall to our right, the steady buzz from the machines penetrating through the soles of our boots. A single, tall glass fridge squatted on the floor next to them: to my dismay, the shelves inside were empty.
‘It’s a good thing Anatole didn’t come with us,’ I murmured, glancing at the containment cages on a table. The bloated and bruised bodies of several dead rats lay inside.
‘Lucas,’ Reid said softly behind me. I turned and looked to where he stared.
A glass wall rose behind and to our left, separating the inner lab from yet another chamber. Inside it were three gurneys. Stacks of medical equipment crowded the space around the beds and almost overshadowed the bodies lying upon them. They were still attached to life monitors and IV drips. The machines had been turned off.
I took a step towards the door in the middle of the glass wall.
Reid frowned. ‘What are you doing?’
‘They may still be alive,’ I said flatly, reaching for the pass key at my waist.
‘They look dead enough from here,’ Reid muttered. He followed me into the second room.
The body on the first bed was that of a young woman. Several IVs were hooked to her arms and a central line dangled from her neck. There was a disconnected ET tube taped to her mouth.
‘What the hell?’ Reid’s eyes widened in consternation as he slowly moved to the second bed. The body of a man lay in it. Tubes and wires dotted his arms and legs, and he was attached to an array of silent machines.
This time, the coldness that gripped me felt arctic. I studied the purple and necrotic lesions that covered the visible areas of skin on the two corpses with rising horror.
Dry blood coated the eyes and orifices of the dead man and woman, while rust coloured stains dotted the white sheets beneath them in a macabre patchwork where they had bled from their IVs and their lower gut.
‘They were infected with the virus,’ I said slowly, surprised at how calm my voice sounded despite the emotions raging inside me.
Reid stared at the bodies. ‘Why would they do that?’
‘To see whether it worked.’ I took a deep breath and tried to suppress the rage and dread that threatened to overwhelm me before moving to the third bed.
The last figure was also that of a man. His skin was covered in the same lesions as the first two and one of his IVs was attached to a working drip stand. A drop of blood had oozed out of his left nostril. As I watched, it trickled down his cheek. My eyes widened.
‘He’s still alive!’ I moved quickly to the side of the gurney and reached for the man’s wrist. There was a faint pulse there. I looked up and saw his eyelids flicker open.
The man blinked and gazed at me blindly. ‘Yanof? Is that you?’ he murmured weakly through dry, cracked lips.
It was obvious that he could not see clearly through the visor of the suit. Either that or he was delirious from his sickness. I hesitated before holding his hand gently. ‘Yes, it’s me,’ I lied in a steady voice.
The man swallowed convulsively, a low rasp escaping his parched throat. He slowly lifted his head off the pillow and grabbed
the front of my suit in a surprisingly strong grip. ‘Burnstein tricked us, Yanof!’ he hissed. ‘He said he was going to give us the vaccine, but he injected us with the virus instead. You have to get out of here! Get out before it’s too late!’ He collapsed back onto the bed, his chest shuddering from the effort of his words.
I frowned in frustration. Our time was running out. I leaned across the gurney. ‘Listen! Is there anywhere else in the lab where they might have stored the virus or the vaccine?’ I said urgently. ‘Please, tell me!’
The man’s eyes closed. For a moment, I feared that he had passed away. A second later, his eyelids fluttered open once more and he struggled to focus on my face. ‘They took it all away,’ he whispered. ‘I saw them. There’s nothing left.’ He gasped. ‘I heard Burnstein say ... they were taking it to America.’ With those words, he took a final rattling breath and his face settled in a peaceful expression. I lowered his limp hand to the sheet and slowly closed his staring eyes.
At that moment, the walls and floor of the lab shook violently. A cloud of white plaster dust drifted down from the ceiling. The fading sounds of a distant blast reached us.
Reid and I stared at each other. ‘What was that?’ I said tensely in the mouthpiece.
There was a burst of static in my earpiece. Anatole’s voice came through brokenly. ‘Explosion—other lab—Friedrich and—trapped—we’ve gotta go!’
I looked around the room, my heart slamming a rapid tempo against my ribs. ‘Listen to me carefully,’ I said to Anatole while I frantically started to open drawers. Reid watched me with a puzzled frown. ‘I want you to leave right now. Rescue the others if you can, then get out of here!’
There was a short silence from the earpiece. ‘What about you?’ Bruno’s overwrought voice came across clearly.
I finally found what I was searching for inside one of the trolleys. ‘We’ll manage. Now go!’ I said harshly, lifting a sterile needle and syringe out of a plastic wrapper.
Reid stared as I tied a tourniquet around the dead man’s arm. ‘What’re you doing?’ he said dully.
‘We need a sample of the virus.’ I slid the needle under the man’s skin. ‘This is the next best thing.’ Dark red blood filled the attached syringe. I hesitated and glanced at him. ‘You should go too.’
Reid’s eyebrows rose behind the visor. ‘What the hell makes you think I’m going to leave without you?’
I smiled faintly and capped the needle. There was a secured biohazard container in a cupboard in the next room: I placed the syringe inside the metal flask and sealed it shut. We were slipping out of the white suits in the outer chamber when a second explosion made the floor tremble beneath our feet. This one had sounded closer.
I grabbed the daisho and ran out of the airlock after Reid. We hurried past the dead woman and man into the outer lab and entered the dust-filled corridor. We had just reached the junction to the next hallway when the roof caved in behind us, crushing the lab in a mound of debris. A cloud of fine plaster and brick dirt billowed past us.
Reid and I dropped to the floor and stuck close to the walls, trying not to inhale the gritty air. It took us several minutes to reach the passage that led to the stairs. In that time, more explosions rocked the foundations of the underground facility.
A shadow suddenly loomed in front of us. ‘It’s me,’ said Bruno, staring past the barrels of our guns. He shifted the unconscious man across his shoulder. Behind him, Anatole was dragging a second wounded immortal towards the containment door.
I lowered the Glock. ‘Is that everyone?’
Bruno shook his head. ‘Friedrich’s still back there,’ he said with a frown, indicating the corridor to his left. ‘He’s bringing the last of his men out.’
A blast suddenly brought down part of the passage Reid and I had just exited. Seconds later, a strip light shattered onto the wall of rubble. The ceiling creaked ominously.
We rose to our feet and stared at the debris. ‘It’ll be faster if one of us helps them,’ I said quietly and turned towards the relatively untouched hallway leading to the north lab.
‘This place is about to come down on our heads!’ Bruno barked. ‘We should head back.’ He paused. ‘Look, Friedrich’s a Hunter. This is how we work. Besides, we can dig them out later.’ He hesitated. ‘Victor will—’
‘Victor will understand,’ I interrupted roughly. The bodyguard’s frown deepened. ‘Everyone suspects that I might be truly immortal,’ I said patiently. ‘Now’s as good a time as any to test that theory.’ The immortal looked unconvinced by my words. I reached inside my backpack, removed the biohazard container and threw it at Reid. He caught the metal flask and stared at me with a puzzled expression. ‘You need to go.’ This time my tone was resolute.
A scowl darkened Reid’s face. The canister flew back across the corridor and hit me in the chest. I grunted. ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me,’ he muttered, stalking past in a huff. I sighed, slipped the container inside the pack and followed in his footsteps.
‘Where’re they going?’ said Anatole behind us.
‘To save Friedrich,’ Bruno replied bitterly. I caught the immortal’s faintly murmured words as we turned the corner. ‘Goddamned bloody heroes.’
‘Hey, he called us heroes,’ I said lightly.
‘Shut up,’ Reid grunted grimly. There was another detonation elsewhere in the facility. The floor shuddered beneath our feet. Moments later, we reached a dead end.
A wall of bricks and plaster obstructed our path: the cloud of dust was only just settling.
‘Wasn’t this the way to the lab?’ said Reid.
‘Ah-huh,’ I murmured with a slow nod.
Reid glanced at me. ‘Is there another way around?’
I looked over my shoulder. ‘I don’t think so,’ I replied with a sinking feeling. A faint noise drew my gaze back to the rubble. There was a disturbance in the mound of debris. Dirt trickled out in a minor landslide near the bottom of the barricade. Fingertips appeared in the gap, followed by the rest of a hand.
Reid and I started to dig wordlessly. Seconds later, I grabbed the flailing arm and we pulled the buried man out. It was Friedrich. Blood oozed from a jagged, gaping wound on his grimy forehead. His left leg was broken in at least two places.
The Bastian Hunter blinked and gazed at me in mild confusion. His eyes suddenly widened. He tried to sit up and choked. ‘One of my men was behind me!’ he gasped between hoarse coughs.
It was another minute before Reid and I removed the second immortal from the wreckage of the collapsed ceiling. The man had severe crush injuries to the chest and legs and was barely conscious.
The whole corridor shook violently as another explosion rocked the underground lab. The wall of rubble shifted with an ominous groan. ‘I think now would be a good time to get out of here,’ said Reid, staring at the unstable heap. I nodded briskly. We hauled the wounded men upright and headed towards the exit.
‘Why did you come back for us?’ said Friedrich, his words punctuated by painful grunts.
Reid and I glanced at each other. ‘We don’t make a habit of leaving our men behind,’ I said quietly.
The immortal lapsed into thoughtful silence. ‘That’s very altruistic and admirable, but still kinda dumb,’ he eventually muttered.
‘Yeah, well, dumb is our middle name,’ said Reid with a wry smile. I grinned faintly.
We reached the corridor to the steel containment door and started up the stairs. Four feet from the final landing, a detonation blasted through the open stairwell above our heads. I looked up. My eyes widened when I saw the deadly debris falling towards us. ‘Run!’ I shouted, racing up the final steps.
We entered the boiler room in a thick cloud of plaster dust, broken bricks and metal fragments. The ground trembled again. Pipes burst around us, releasing jets of hot steam that further obscured our vision. More percussions shook the walls as wreckage continued to pound into the base of the stairwell.
We were halfway across the floor wh
en another blast brought part of the ceiling down around us.
Buzzing stillness followed. I blinked and coughed dirt out of my mouth before looking around slowly. I was lying on my back under a thin layer of rubble. A jagged piece of metal protruded from the ground inches from my left eye. I rolled over carefully, disturbing my earthly blanket, and crawled to my knees. Friedrich groaned somewhere in the gloom.
Reid was climbing to his feet a few yards to my right. He shook his head dazedly and looked up. ‘Hell, talk about bad luck,’ he said flatly after a pause.
I turned and gazed in the direction he stared at, which was the access door to the elevator shaft. Or rather, where the door should have been. The mountain of shattered concrete and twisted metal that now stood before it was evident under the weak glow of the emergency light on what remained of the ceiling. I rose unsteadily to my feet and stared at the impenetrable barrier with a sinking feeling.
‘We’re trapped,’ Friedrich said dully.
I ignored the immortal and carefully climbed across the uneven floor to the mound of debris; I was damned if a heap of bricks and mortar was going to stop us after all we had been through. ‘There’s a crack in the wall at the side,’ I said after studying the obstruction for a while. I traced the jagged lips of the fracture with my fingers, an idea taking shape in my mind. ‘We could blast our way through,’ I said, turning to look at the others.
Reid frowned. ‘That could bring the whole place down on our heads,’ he said skeptically.
‘Unless we decide to wait here in the hope that Victor will dig us out before the Crovirs blow this entire joint to hell and back, I don’t see that we have any other options,’ I said steadily.
Reid held my eyes for several long seconds. A sigh left his lips. ‘That’s all fine and dandy, but where the hell are you gonna get your hands on explosives down here?’
My gaze switched to Friedrich. I stared at the immortal expectantly. The Hunter’s eyebrows rose. ‘How did you know?’ he said slowly.
‘I suspected Victor would’ve instructed you to destroy the lab behind us,’ I replied with a shrug.