"Of course not," Ron replied. Like I said, it's well hidden." He reached up and pressed his fingers into a brick high in the wall next to him. A loud noise like something unlocking echoed through the room and then a section of wall depressed in on itself and slid to the side, revealing a passageway.
Sarah looked at it in surprise. "I thought that stuff was only in the movies."
"I thought a bookshelf would be a little too obvious," he said. He turned the flashlight down the passageway. "Follow me."
Sarah couldn't see anything over Ron's shoulder at first, the light seemingly just disappearing into the darkness ahead. Once they got a few paces into the very narrow space, the sound of the wall sliding back into place behind them made her jump and spin around before realizing what it was.
"The actual lab is a lot nicer than this," he assured her.
"Now I know why you wear glasses," she said. "You must be like the mole people in here."
Ron chuckled. "When we finish the project, maybe I can go lie on a beach somewhere."
"That'll be the day."
They stopped at what seemed like the end of the corridor, coming up to another stone wall. Ron reached up, this time sliding his hand into a thin crevice between the wall and ceiling. Sarah cringed, imagining all the kinds of spiders and other creepy crawlies that could be nestled in there, but a moment later the wall in front of them parted to the side and bright light flooded over them.
Ron clicked off the Maglite and stepped into the laboratory. Sarah held her arm across her eyes to shield them from the blinding light coming down from the ceiling. When her vision adjusted, she saw a large lab not too different from the one they found underneath the police station. The main difference was that this one seemed to be contained all in one huge room. Rows of workstations spanned across the large area with desks and chairs lining the edges. Folders and papers and pens and coffee mugs sat around on the desks, and the scene painted a picture of what looked in some spots to be a frenzied jumble of notes and long nights. Strange equipment and machinery, large and small, sat on workstations or stood upright on their own. And even little houseplants in pots sat around the laboratory, maybe just to remind everyone that there was a world outside their dark hole in the ground.
A group of scientists in pristine white lab coats carried on, eight of them in total aside from Ron. They all stopped what they were doing and looked over at the two of them. Sarah glanced around at each person, and she couldn't help but get the sense that there was an uneasiness in their eyes as they looked upon her.
Ron pressed a button on the wall next to the open passageway and the small section slid back into place and sealed the lab. He turned around. "So, Sarah, this is our laboratory." He extended an arm and swept it across the room in grand fashion. He introduced her to everyone, and they all said a faint hello, still looking at her a moment longer with unease before they went back to work. Ron turned to one of them, a tall, slender man who had a fuzzy nest of short beard on his face. His curly blond hair sat on his head like a tuft of weeds, but there was a sharp edge in his eyes and he seemed to have a slightly more pleasant demeanor than the rest of the scientists.
"We had a, uh... slight security breach," Ron told him.
The man's face turned to one of concern. "Oh?"
"The zombie in the tunnel," Ron said. "You didn't see it?"
The man shook his head. "We've all had our noses to the grindstone. The sensors never went off."
"Why not?"
"I don't know," he said. "I'll check it out." Ron clapped him on the shoulder as he pressed the button on the wall and disappeared down the passageway.
Sarah looked around the large laboratory, in awe that such a place could still exist in this world, much the same as she had when they stumbled upon the one beneath the police station in Raleigh.
"Solar panels," Ron said, noticing Sarah staring up at the lights in the ceiling. "We have them out in the forest. They generate the power we need. All very concealed, of course."
"What about the sinks over there?" she asked, seeing them attached to each workstation. "You have running water, too?"
"No," Ron said. "We have water, but nothing running. The sinks just came with the units. If you look below them, we've got the water coming out open pipes into buckets. We've been fortunate to get what's here, but we also have to work with what we have."
"How did you build all of this?"
He looked a little sullen. "Sorry, but that's classified."
She raised an eyebrow.
"There are some things only the nine of us know, and it has to stay that way. I hope you can understand."
She nodded. She had already come to understand Ron as a person very well, and she knew it was going to be par for the course not always getting the answer she wanted out of him.
"Come on," he said, "let me show you why we're all here." He put a hand behind her shoulder and led her toward one end of the lab. As they passed a set of tall cabinets, a large holding cell sitting against the edge of the room came into view. The wall of the cell was metal up to their waists with thick glass extending from there to the ceiling. As they approached it and peered through the glass, Sarah saw a zombie imprisoned inside.
It sat on the floor in the usual ratty garments. When it noticed them, it perked up and slowly rose to its feet, sauntering over to the glass. It pressed its hands against it, then its nose.
"If all goes well," Ron said, "that zombie will be a man once again. We might even get to learn his name."
2
DUST UP
"Why does he seem so... docile?" Sarah asked.
The zombie stared at them with its face pressed to the glass, not hitting the glass or becoming agitated, but just staring. Its eyes sluggishly moved from side to side as Sarah walked around the cell, observing its behavior. And still it just stood there, looking at her. It closely resembled a normal human drugged on morphine.
"We have a gas dispersion system," Ron told her. "We pump in a gas regularly at low levels to keep the zombie sedated so that it doesn't act out. You can imagine how much of a distraction it would be were it to do so."
Sarah stared at it for a long time. "It almost seems... sad," she said. "This feels weird to me to say after all this time. God knows how many of them I've killed. But just knowing that's a human in there that used to be someone's brother, someone's son, someone's father... I almost feel like I've ruined so many lives, knowing that they can be brought back."
Ron shook his head and put a hand on her shoulder. "We have no choice, Sarah. Believe it or not, I've killed some of them as well. And that's even knowing what they are and what I could do to bring them back. It's the unfortunate reality of kill or be killed. That is, until we finish our project."
Sarah stepped away from the glass and turned back to the rest of the lab, not able to look at the sad creature anymore. Its eyes followed her, then its hands slid down the glass with a squeak and it turned away and returned to its spot on the floor. "So what do you need me to do?" she asked.
Ron stood beside her and gazed at the rest of the scientists that worked in the lab. They each seemed to have their routine that they went through like clockwork, moving in and around workstations and fiddling with equipment. They paid no more attention to the two of them and appeared laser-focused in their work. Sarah could only imagine how much of their lives they'd spent cooped up in this place, trying to fix their mistakes. She remembered how Ron told her that the zombie virus came from Jack Glass's manipulation of it after he raided their lab and destroyed the work they had already done. The thought of them literally being here for the last nine years made her shudder. She thought she had gone through some terrible guilt that she couldn't atone for, but this would have been on a whole other level.
"We're getting very close," Ron said. "We have almost everything we need, having acquired it over the past several years. But we're still missing a few things, and I'm going to need you to help us get them. You seem to have a knack
for brazen acts of heroism and combat, and that's a lot more than I can say for most of us."
"Considering these are the last few things you need," she said, "I'm assuming that you saved the hardest to acquire for last?"
Ron let out a strained chuckle. "You catch on quick." He cleared his throat. "I can promise that one of them won't be so bad, but the other ones won't be so easy. And even still, there's one that we don't know where to get."
"So what are they?"
Ron began to walk forward and led her back through the lab. They moved around the workstations, silently shadowing the other scientists as they worked, paying no attention to the two of them. "We need three items. The first one that I'll send you out for is the camera from an MRI machine, among a few other parts."
"An MRI machine?" she asked. "Why do you need that?"
"We already have some diagnostic imaging to be able to identify tumors in a body, but the quality of the imaging we have now isn't quite sufficient for our purposes. We had to rig our own machine up... a little bootstrap if you ask me, but it's all we've been able to do for now. With these last few parts, we should be able to get the precise imaging we need.
"The next thing we need," he continued, "are some files."
A short female scientist walked by in front of them carrying a couple of Petri dishes in her hands. Though she still seemed to be in her thirties, and really quite beautiful, the years of guilt and isolation looked like they took their toll on her, etching deep lines in her face. As she passed in front of Sarah, there was a momentary pause in her step and it looked as though her shoulders tensed up for the briefest moment, like Sarah really was making all of them uncomfortable. She wanted to ask Ron about it, but she didn't think it would be appropriate in front of them; maybe just something she would ask him later.
"Swiping a couple of files? That doesn't sound too hard."
"I'm not talking about paper files in a folder," Ron corrected. "I'm talking about computer files."
"Computer files? I haven't seen a working computer in nine years. Outside of Glass, who on earth would have a..." Sarah's eyes widened as she realized the answer.
Ron nodded when she looked to him for confirmation. "Don't worry," he said, "it won't be anything like the base you just snuck into, but it won't exactly be a cakewalk. Don't worry about that for now; we'll talk about that one later. The final thing we need is a considerable supply of glutamic acid, but right now we're not even sure where to get it, if we even can. So for now I only want you to focus on getting the parts from the MRI machine. Technically an fMRI machine, but I don't suppose you know the difference."
Sarah shook her head. "So what will all of these things do? How are you actually going to turn that zombie back into a human?"
Ron took a deep breath, like he was winding up for a long story. "The crux of the experiment is that cancerous cells have damaged mitochondria, which creates a scenario where they change the transduction pathways and the chromatin structure in order to—"
Sarah looked at him like he was from Mars. "Not a scientist," she said, pointing to herself.
Ron nodded. He took a moment to gather his thoughts, then he tried again. He stretched his arm out and pointed toward the cell with the zombie in it at the other end of the lab and said, "Zombie broken. We fix."
"Very funny."
Ron smirked. "The key to our experiment, to put it in layman's terms, is that something called the mitochondria within a cancer cell is damaged and we have to fix it to turn it back into a normal, healthy cell. Cancer cells also take in an exorbitant amount of glucose—sugar—so we've found a special way of binding what we need to the sugar, so when it enters the cancerous cell it will alter and repair the mitochondria back to their normal functioning forms. If this were just normal cancer we were dealing with, we would already have it cured. As an example: the little cure I already whipped up to save my own life when I was bitten recently. But the cancer in the zombies has been radically altered by Mr. Glass and his cohorts, creating a whole new set of obstacles. But through rigorous testing over the years, we've identified these blockades, so to speak, and we've been able to develop a medicinal technology that will bypass all of this to restore the specimen back to its original form. Think of it like a computer virus that has to find its way past the firewall of the computer. That's essentially what we're doing, except we're doing it for benevolent purposes."
Sarah thought about it. "So how do you actually get the cure into the zombie? I mean, the whole world is gone. How do you fix all of that?"
"I can't tell you that," Ron said. "That's classified, too."
Sarah's eyes narrowed. "Why do you keep saying that? You're letting me in on your secret lab and showing me everything that you're doing here... why tell me some things and not others?"
"I can't tell you that either," he said, but seeing Sarah open her mouth to protest, he added, "but you'll find out someday."
She grumbled. But she knew from experience the easiest thing to do with him was just to move on to the next subject.
He walked between two workstations as the scientists milled about around him and he opened a cabinet on the other side of the room. He took out some supplies and returned to Sarah.
"What are those for?" Sarah asked, inspecting the contents in his hands.
He directed her to a chair to sit down. "Think of it like an insurance policy. A just-in-case," he said as he produced a syringe. "Don't forget, your specific genetic makeup is the key to this experiment; think of it like the Rosetta Stone that will give us the advance we need to finally complete it."
"How will my genes affect the experiment?" she asked.
"Remember the firewall analogy? Think of your genetic makeup as holding the keys that can unlock all of those sealed doors and allow our cure into the body where it needs to go without the engineered resistance. And the reason why we need to take samples from you now is, well... in case anything happens to you out there. I know you're a tough cookie, but even you have to admit you've had some pretty close calls."
"Haven't we all," she muttered as she glanced around at the white lights in the ceiling.
After Ron extracted a few vials of blood from her, he took a swab of her mouth with a Q-tip and sealed it in a bag, then he handed her a plastic cup.
"What's this for?"
"Urine sample. There's a washroom over there," he said, pointing.
Sarah took the cup and disappeared into the makeshift washroom that seemed to be more of a closet than anything. She filled the cup and returned with the fresh sample. As she handed it to him, she glanced to the far end of the lab that she hadn't been to yet. "What's that?" she asked.
Ron glanced over and saw the panel of television screens she was looking at. "That's our security system." He led her over to it and she saw that it was a set of camera feeds and a control panel, similar to the one in the base where she discovered Wayne's location. As she inspected each screen, she realized that they all afforded views of the tunnel they had come through to get to the lab or of the forest surrounding it.
"I don't remember seeing any cameras," she mused.
"Of course you didn't," he said. "They're extraordinarily well hidden. We also have a series of sensors that tell us if there's significant movement in the area. They should have gone off when that zombie wandered into the tunnel, that's why Trevor's out there seeing what went wrong. But he should have it all fixed up and back in working order in no time at all; he's a man of many skills, much like you. Well, you know, aside from the man part.
Sarah ignored his lame humor. "When do I go out and get this camera?"
"Tomorrow," Ron said. "And speaking of which, Trevor will be the one accompanying you." Their eyes shifted over to one of the screens where the familiar man with curly blond hair was crouched over near the entrance of the tunnel, looking as if he was digging into the ground. "He'll fill you in on all the details. Just come back to the forest here tomorrow at sunrise. And you can come armed this time."
"You'll be making a little bit of a trek, so prepare yourself appropriately. And one other thing before you go..."
"Hmm?"
"You can't tell anyone else about this place or anything we've discussed here, not even Wayne. It's vitally important that you understand this."
Sarah nodded. "Don't worry, I got it."
"Thank you." The look on Ron's face changed from his normal, chipper self, becoming strained like all the other scientists. There was definitely something up that he wasn't telling her, but she would bide her time on that matter for now.
As they turned for the secret passageway out of the lab, the wall opened by itself and Trevor walked back in. "Just some debris in the way of the sensor," he told Ron. "It should be working properly now." He nodded at Sarah before he walked past them and returned to his work in the lab. Ron and Sarah said their goodbyes and she left.
She trudged her way through the watery tunnel, cursing the fact that she never thought to bring a flashlight, nor did Ron offer her one. But she made it through quickly without incident and traced her way back through the woods that she and Ron had come.
When she made it back to the nearest road and trekked down it for a couple miles, she came across a storage yard that she vaguely remembered passing earlier in the morning. It was one of the only former signs of life on the desolate road, the only other things in sight trees and empty fields. And just as she started to pass it, she didn't even hear a noise, but rather felt something in her intuition that made her pause. She glanced around, searching in the stark sunlight of the warm summer day. The isolation weighed down on her, as if a cloak of darkness fell over the area. Her heartbeat quickened and a strained feeling wrapped around her throat. Even though there was nothing at all in sight, she pulled her knife out, slowly spinning on the spot and glancing at potential hiding places if it turned out to be some of Glass's men.
Zombie Apocalypse Series (Book 6): The Eden Project Page 2