She'd set up in the airport quarantine rooms, already designed to contain airborne pathogens of infected international passengers, making it an effective 'clean room' like her lab in UCLA. There she'd gotten on with her studies in evenings when there was no flight or combat training, though she hadn't been there in weeks. There was nothing left to find in the cells of the bunker zombies.
So where was it going? Anna looked back along the hangar wall; she could get to her walkie in minutes and call the others in, to be sure, but then she might never know where this strange figure was really going, or what it wanted. She turned back; already the figure was by the concourse window.
It was an easy decision. She delved into the junk by the hangar wall, where she remembered dropping a- yes, rusted crowbar. It was heavy and the rust crunched sharply in her palm. She held it close in one hand and folded smoothly out of the hangar's shadow, slipping out of her rain boots and running silently with them in the other hand, barefoot across the cracked asphalt.
2. CONCOURSE
The figure edged easily through a broken pane in the floor-to-ceiling glass of gate 26, entering the terminal's lower concourse, while Anna watched from the cover of the stair car, wondering if it had come this way before. There was something too smooth about the movement, almost practiced.
Now it would be facing the dead escalators that led up to the concourse. She took a deep breath, waiting for it to reach the top and turn, where it would briefly face back toward the chicken coop. Seconds dragged on, and Anna became aware of the frosty asphalt beneath her bare feet, and the chill spring air seeping through her thin jacket.
That was long enough. She puffed hot breath onto her hands, rubbed them on the soles of her feet like a basketball player putting grip on their sneakers, then dashed across the open gap to the terminal. In twenty seconds she was there, standing beside the concourse windows, which were mirror bright in the moonlight, reflecting silvery clouds.
She peered in through the broken pane, waiting a moment for her eyes to adjust to the gloom within. No bullet met her, only the faint shushing of feet off the marble floor far away.
She slipped silently through the gap, treading carefully over old broken glass, and felt the difference in the air at once; it was stuffy inside, with residual heat from the previous day still hanging wetly like a greenhouse. The sounds of insects droning and grass rustling in the wind were gone, as if she'd simply flipped a switch and entered a new world.
Shush shush went the figure's footfalls, growing distant somewhere above.
The escalator was so cold it stung her feet, and the grooves caught her toes at painful angles like little pinching traps. She paused at the top to let her senses adjust. It was nearly fully dark this far inside, with only the faintest impression of moonlight reaching through the darkened glass to paint the contours of furniture and solitary luggage carts with gray, fuzzy mantles. The air was stale and stank of plastic sofas and must. She could just pick out the outline of the concourse ahead, a long broad corridor broken by gate desks and seating areas.
The shushing of feet came from the right, deeper into the terminal, but she couldn't pick out the figure in the darkness, which meant it couldn't see her either. She started out over the marble at a cautious run, so lightly her feet barely raised a whisper, but after a hundred or so yards she slowed, worried she might run full into it unawares.
Shush shush, it was definitely closer now. She advanced at a swift, silent walk until she she could pick it out, a slim silhouette against the windows. Questions ran through her mind as she followed, of how another survivor would even have found them. All the cairns pointed to New LA; the chances of stumbling randomly upon them here were incredibly remote.
A conversation with Amo came back to her, from before they knew who had taken Cerulean. "There could be another community of survivors out there," he'd said. "With a different idea of what survival is."
She shook off a shudder. It seemed unlikely, but if another group did exist then it made sense for them to attack here first. They had no defenses beyond the patrols, because they weren't a permanent encampment; no cairns pointed their way and they had no reason to believe anyone would come and find them. Perhaps that assumed anonymity had made them complacent. Anna gritted her teeth and squeezed the crowbar. She would find out.
The figure moved on through a central, open area of the terminal where the two wings conjoined. Ahead lay the security aisles, lines for passport control and beyond that baggage carousels, but the shushing sound of feet did not move that way, heading instead to her right. Anna course-corrected, wondering that there was nothing this way, except…
She frowned. Her lab.
Two gates went by on the right, then the figure turned into the corridor on the left, confirming it. This way led to the quarantine ward. Anna followed through the outer revolving doors and into a deep, inky darkness within. Thick, industrial-looking ventilation pipes and air-scrubbing filters ran along the sides of the corridor, barely visible in the dimmest hints of light.
She nudged past a gurney on wheels. The shush of feet was gone now, as the figure must have entered the main containment room. Anna ducked below the level of the room's windows and crawled on toward the 'airlock' door.
A light flicked on and she froze.
White light glared through the glass above her and sent odd refractions dancing along the wall as it moved. A flashlight, roving back and forth. It roamed away and she chanced peeking her forehead above the base of the window to look in.
The figure was inside, almost certainly a man judging by the backwash of white light on his angular face. He roved the flashlight along her workbenches, over notes lying in scrawled heaps, her high-powered microscope, her tall titration kit set up in the middle; all complex glass pipes, flasks and turrets, glinting oddly like a tenuous Fraggle construction.
Even here, this man moved with a confidence and comfort that suggested familiarity, as if he knew his way around. Without pausing he carefully cleared a section of worktop, moving her notes to the side, then knelt to open a specimen tray in her refrigerated sample stack. She was surprised to see frozen gas spilling out in a wispy white fog; she'd definitely drained the supply when last she'd been in here a month ago. It couldn't still be cold in there, could it?
The man extracted a test-tube slide, then spoke in a low, muted tone.
"That is a strange discoloration."
It wasn't loud, but in the silent lab Anna heard it clearly. Her frown deepened. Was he talking about one of her samples? Or was that, in his hand, a new one?
She didn't remember anything discolored. She hadn't run any stain tests because she'd exhausted their effectiveness before she'd even gone to Mongolia. They never showed anything; only the electron microscope had exposed the T4 to her. But then, what else could he be talking about?
She was so befuddled that she didn't realize what was happening as he went to the wall and pushed the breaker she'd installed. All at once, drawing from a battery she hadn't charged for a month, the roof lights flickered up to bright white sterile life, the air conditioner/scrubber surged to full power, and the lab came alive.
What? The corridor lit with the sharp light, exposing her completely, but she was too fixated on watching him to care, with her nose pressed to the glass as he bent over, took a heavy-looking canister from his backpack, and poured fuel into the generator.
What the hell?
He pulled the cord and pushed the button and the cacophony of the generator joined in with the scrubbers and air cyclers. This was crazy. So he was charging the battery? Did that mean he was doing experiments? Was he using her lab?
That was enough.
She stood up and strode without hesitation to the airlock door, pushing through the blowers that blasted polluting dust particles off her, through the inner door, and emerged into the lab.
He stared at her with his mouth dropping open.
"What the hell are you doing in my lab?" she demanded.
She recognized it. She'd seen it before in Amo, had felt it in herself, but she didn't have time to forestall it now. Abruptly the unreal feel of this bizarre, midnight meeting fell away, as from his loose jacket pocket the man drew a gun and pointed it at her face.
Lots of images raced through her head in that moment, taking less than a second and coming like shells fired from an autocannon. She saw herself again in a yacht off Hawaii, held at gunpoint by the madwoman who'd killed her own son to 'end his suffering'. That feeling of power when she hadn't cared if she lived or died came back in a heady rush, though other feelings came with it.
She saw Ravi curled asleep in their bed with his knees too high, blissfully unaware. She saw the look on Amo's face as he lied about what Salle had done, in the moment he decided that he would kill the bunker himself. She saw her own father's white eyes, flickering briefly back to brown as he died to save her from the red demon, and she saw Cerulean's lonely head, lying in a drift of snow in Julio's torture pit.
The rage came easily after that, flowing through channels well carved and only delayed by three months of waiting. This was easy. This bastard in her lab, this idiot using her samples, was not going to hurt any of her people again.
She raised her arm in an underhand lob and hurled the crowbar. It went spinning wildly over the worktop, crashing through the fragile titration apparatus and shattering glass into the man's face before plowing on to strike him solidly in the shoulder.
The gun may have fired, she wasn't sure, but nothing hit her and she was already moving anyway, rounding the workbench. She snatched up two flasks and flung them at him as she ran; one struck him a hollow THUNK on the breastbone and drew a gasp, while the other sailed harmlessly over his head to smash loudly against an air-filtration pipe.
She sprinted the last few steps barefoot over the smashed titration glass just as he leveled the gun again, then she was on him and her shoulder thumped into his gut. He was heavier but not by much, and her 100 pounds of speeding muscle carried him off his feet and into the air. For a split second they flew, then the ground rose up and walloped him in the back.
Anna landed neatly on his chest and rolled up easily to straddle him. Up close his thin face was worn, pale as a zombie and haunted by the defeat he had to know was on him. She thrust two palm-first blows at his nose; one glanced off his cheek but the other caught him full on and shattered the cartilage flat with a red burst, like she'd just splatted a ripe tomato.
He bucked and struggled to throw her off but he wasn't strong and Anna didn't give him the chance to gain leverage. With one hand she leaned over to secure the gun, holding it flat to the ground in his hand, while with the other she stabbed at his neck three times, driving the edge of her palm into his throat like she was karate-chopping a block of wood.
On the second he gargled and began to choke as his airway crumpled inward, then the third blow fell in a frenzy and only made it worse.
His grip on the gun faltered and his body began to spasm. Anna grabbed the weapon and rocked back off his chest to point the gun at his head. His face was already turning purple, and she squeezed her finger to the trigger. It wasn't enough that he'd choke now, not after so many people had died, not after Cerulean died, and Abigail and Lucy and Chantelle and so many others all had died.
Red cloaked her like a bloody fall of snow, and flashes of the day Cerulean beat Julio rose into her mind, back when she was only five years old. Her memory of it was foggy, but she had no doubt that this was how he must have felt, in the seconds before Amo and Jake pulled him away. It was the right thing. If only they'd let him finish it and kill Julio, then so many good people would still be alive.
He foamed and pawed feebly at his throat, but there was no choice here. She'd already killed three thousand, what was one more? Better safe than sorry, that's the lesson she'd learned by now.
She squeezed the trigger.
3. QUARANTINE
Click.
The hammer fell but no bullet discharged. His brains didn't blow out across the floor as she'd expected.
Click, the hammer fell again. She checked the safety- off. She palmed the release to eject the clip, saw no bullets, and laughed.
No bullets. He hadn't fired at all, then. The muzzle was cold and there was no tangy cordite smell in the air, which only confirmed it. Did that change things?
Anna looked down at this strange, pale man as he died. His face was purple, he was gasping and reaching, sweaty and desperate, and was that the kind of thing that might haunt her in days and months to come? It wasn't satisfying, not like killing the mad woman or watching Salle Coram's head blow out. It wasn't even a grim kind of justice, as roaming the halls of the bunker had been, turning three thousand mostly innocent colonists to zombies.
This just seemed sad. Like a mistake.
She stood up. Choking was an ugly death, with the bulging eyes and obvious, grasping torment. Really ugly, not one she'd wish on anyone, not even someone who'd, what? Used her lab? Pulled an unloaded gun on her?
"Shit," she whispered, as the red rage ebbed. Certain people certainly deserved to die; certain whole populations had to die just to keep her people safe, but this man?
"Shit," she said again, as the weight started to hit. She would regret this, she could feel it, but then what could she do now; how did you fix a broken windpipe? Her training at Macy's hands, training she'd scheduled to go deeper than basic first aid and full on into battlefield medicine, covered some of this, but not this exact scenario.
She closed her eyes for a second and focused. They'd practiced something like this on zombies, who hadn't cared. In the event of a throat injury, an extreme allergy, even poison gas that the enemy could theoretically deploy, you did, what, a tracheotomy? Maybe that wasn't possible with the injury she'd done him; the upper part of his neck didn't look right, punched in and crooked, but lower down?
There wasn't any choice.
On the worktop she found one of her glass knives easily. Those things cut through skin like butter. And a tube? She snatched up one of the glass stalks from the titration kit then dropped back onto the man's chest. He'd gone gray now and his legs were only feebly kicking. Death throes. Anna knew the brain could survive for four minutes without oxygen, and he was already about a minute into that.
The glass knife made short work of his black hoodie and she tore it away. Underneath his chest was frail, pale and bird-like, with an array of striped scars, like lash marks. She laid three fingers at the top of his breastbone, steadied the knife on her index finger, then pushed it a cautious inch in.
He convulsed a little bit harder. She ignored it, drew the knife out, and pushed the titration tube in to the slit. It slid through easily, filled up with blood, then the blood blew out like a whale spouting water from its blowhole.
Anna was splattered. She laughed, as his throat sucked roughly at the air.
"You're welcome," she said.
He was breathing. His eyes glared at her, wide and mad with having just almost died, before unconsciousness sucked him down. A single tube wasn't perfect, it was probably barely enough oxygen to keep him going, but he was alive, and for now, out for the count.
She pushed herself to her knees, starting to feel a little drowsy. Looking down, she saw two puddles of blood pooling out of her torn feet. The amount of shattered glass stuck in them was appalling.
"Ugh," she mumbled. That was a lot of blood. She needed to pluck it out and get a bandage on them soon. Lucky she was in a medical facility.
* * *
In an hour she had everyone there, all seven of them: Feargal, Macy, Wanda, Ollie, Ravi, Peters, and Jake. The assault squad, gathered round a man on the floor with a tube in his throat, breathing through it with an eve
n wet whistle.
"You did this?" Peters commented, first amongst them to speak.
The white floor of the lab was painted with bloody pools. The walls were spattered with blood; there was even spray on the ceiling, presumably from his first gasp through the tube. Glass lay in the dark red, sparkling like little diamond islands. Her bloody footmarks marked a trail leading out of the room, before she'd bandaged herself and slipped on her rain boots.
The man lay in the middle, wheezing through his tube. There was some color in his face now, though his neck was a deep purple and his throat was horribly crooked inwards.
Peters had asked her a question. She turned to him, feeling light-headed.
"It wasn't the first thing I did," she said. "I didn't just run up and stab him with a tube."
"But you did stab him with a tube?" Ravi confirmed. His expression was queasy. He wasn't good with blood.
"To save him," Macy stepped in sternly. "It's clear what happened here. Now we need to deal with it."
"He's lucky he's alive," Peters said, and that seemed to settle it. "Macy, what do you need from us?"
The rest happened while Anna spaced out. Loss of blood was making her faint. She slumped when Ravi pulled up a wheelchair for her to sit in. She tried to stand up again moments later, but her hands were too weak to get any traction on the handles. Through a fog she watched the others clear the workbench and lift the man up onto it.
A little later Macy was there before her, taking her pulse and peering into her eyes one after the other.
"She's lost a lot of blood," she said, not even talking to Anna. "Responses are sluggish. Ravi, get her on a drip; we've got saline packs back at the RV. You can lay her here."
Anna tried to say- "Don't worry about me, I'll be fine," but it came out instead as- "Ungghh", which was close but not quite there. For a time after that, while they laid her on a bench across from the man she'd almost killed, and rigged her drip, and Ravi squeezed her hand and Macy did exploratory surgery on the intruder's broken throat, she felt like she'd mostly gotten her message across.
The List (Zombie Ocean Book 5) Page 2