by James Harden
“Wait,” I say, a light bulb appearing over my head. “Kim, do you have a barcode tattooed on your wrist?”
Jack stops kicking the door. A look of hope on his face.
“Yeah?” she says. “Why?”
“Try the scanner.”
Kim has a look on her face that says, ‘I can’t believe I didn’t think of this’. She moves her wrist underneath the barcode scanner but nothing happens.
“Not authorized,” she says, reading the small screen.
Damn.
“Who the hell would be authorized?” Jack says.
“George,” I answer.
“Well, he can’t help us. He can’t help anyone anymore.”
I grab his name tag, and I feel sorry for him and how he went out and how he will be remembered.
The passport sized photo ID.
No smile.
Job title: Prison Administrator.
Barcode.
Wait. There’s a barcode.
“There’s a barcode,” I say.
“What?” Kim asks. “Where?”
I slide the name tag under the barcode scanner and the doors magically open.
Well, the first set of doors magically open and we step through. The second set of doors remains locked.
And the infected finally appear from the dark. They are slowly stumbling towards us. But when they see us, they start running.
And the second set of doors has still not opened. The first set of doors has not closed. We are sitting ducks. We are standing in front of the doors, like we’re waiting for an elevator.
We must look so stupid.
This could be the end.
All because of a faulty door.
I’m starting to realize this was a mistake. We should’ve made a run for the subway station. Taken our chances in the tunnels.
I kick the door in frustration. “Why the hell is it not opening? What’s going on?”
Kim grabs Jack and pulls him closer to the second set of doors. “Get behind me!”
She raises the handgun and starts shooting at the closest infected.
She is able to drop one.
Two.
Three.
She takes out four infected people.
She keeps firing but eventually she runs out of ammo. I think back to the box of ammo that George had found. I have no idea where it is or where we left it.
We back up. We brace ourselves.
Finally, the first set of doors close so that now we are trapped between the first set and the second set. We are safe. We are protected from the infected. But now we are stuck, we are trapped between both sets of doors.
The infected slam into the first set of doors. And the doors, they actually begin to buckle and strain. They appear to bulge forward. And I’m thinking, I thought these doors were designed for this kind of abuse. They are reinforced. They are bullet proof. They are built to last. But the energy and the mind blowing strength of the infected are making a mockery of the security doors.
The doors continue to strain.
They continue to buckle.
But they hold.
And the second set of doors finally open.
And we back away. We enter the corridor that leads to the military prison. No one says a word about how we were nearly killed. About how we were just standing there, waiting for the doors. Waiting for an elevator. Waiting to die.
Chapter 20
We walk away from the security doors and the infected. I walk backwards, unable to take my eyes off them. Their energy. Their aggression. They look so desperate. All they want to do is break through and infect us.
Simple. Pure.
We keep walking. It does not take long for the darkness to take over and swallow us.
The corridor and our world becomes the red glow of the emergency lights, the sound of our breathing, the sounds of the infected banging and bashing and slamming into the security doors.
“Are you all right?” I ask Jack.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” he answers.
“How long were you locked up for?”
“From the first day I arrived. They brought me to the holding cells and I was kept there for the entire time. They kept threatening to take me down into the prison. They kept asking me if I was willing to cooperate. I had no idea what they were talking about. There was a guy. An old guy. General Spears. He came and saw me a couple of times. Dude was crazy. Most of the time, I had no idea what he was talking about. I think he just wanted my obedience. My respect or something. But I was in that holding cell for like, two weeks. Felt a lot longer. I think I nearly died of boredom a couple of times.”
“I’m sorry,” Kim says. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I didn’t know they were going to lock you up. I tried to get you out. You have to believe me.”
“Sorry?” he asks. “It’s not your fault. It’s not anyone’s fault. You took a bullet for us. Don’t be sorry. We owe you. We owe you big time.”
Kim shakes her head and says that we don’t owe her anything. And then she thanked me for saving her life. For getting her to the quarantine facility in New Zealand.
It was this weird web of fate. Kim had saved us back in Sydney. She had taken a bullet for us. And in turn, I had saved her. I got her to safety. Got her to the New Zealand Quarantine Facility. But because she had an open wound, she had to stay behind when I was released. And as a result, she was essentially kidnapped and experimented on. But these experiments saved her life.
The experiments rid her body of cancer. Turned her into a super soldier. She became a trusted advisor to General Spears. She was seen as a walking miracle.
A highly prized asset.
So when Jack ran off into the desert and was found by the military, Kim was able to convince the military and the General to let her brother live.
Of course, Jack would never have run off into the desert if Kim hadn’t been taken away, if we hadn’t found Doctor Hunter’s computer that had the video footage of Kim being experimented on.
I think it was the footage that pushed Jack over the edge. Seeing his sister drugged up and taken hostage. It was too much for Jack to take.
See what I mean? It was a messy web of fate. And we had all suffered and we are all tired and we had barely made it through.
But we did make it. And we have no choice but to keep going. Keep fighting. Keep suffering.
Once we were sure the security doors would definitely hold, and we had walked off into the dark so we were out of sight, we all breathed a sigh of relief.
I am grateful to be alive but at the same time I am terrified of what lies ahead. I am terrified of what lies at the end of this dark corridor. I am terrified of what is waiting for us in the prison.
Criminals?
Infected?
And I am terrified of what happens to me in less than two days’ time.
I lean against the cold concrete wall for support. “Guys, I need to sit down for a second. I’m not feeling so great.”
I start to sway and Kim puts her hand on my shoulder to steady me. “Yeah, you look kinda pale.”
I put my back against the wall and slide down to the floor.
I am breathing heavily.
My hands are shaking.
Jack kneels down next to me. “Are you sure you’re OK?”
“Yeah. I just need a minute. I’m fine.”
Jack then stood and he began swearing with joy. “I am so glad to see you guys. I mean, I thought I was a dead man. I thought everyone was…”
He trails off.
And I know what he is going to say next.
Suddenly the smile disappears from his face and he lowers his head and he whispers, “Where is Maria?”
There is no answer from Kim. But Kim does not know where Maria is.
There is no answer from me, because I don’t want to talk about it right now.
“Where is Maria?” he asks again.
I look up at Kim and she wants to know as well.
I
take a deep breath and I say, “The truth is, no one knows where Maria is.”
The man in the gas mask said he had taken her to the Control Center. But he could be lying.
He could be lying about everything.
I am about to say no one even knows if she is still alive.
But I don’t say this.
Instead I say, “She’s down here somewhere. But she has been taken. It’s up to us to find her. To save her.”
“Save her?” Jack says. “Is she in trouble?”
“Yes. She is in big trouble.”
“Who the hell took her?”
“I don’t really know. A bad man. A crazy son of a bitch. A psychopath wearing a gas mask that he has stitched into his scalp.”
“Do you have any idea where she is?” Kim asks. “Any idea at all?”
I shake my head. “No. Not really. The man in the gas mask said he had taken her to the Control Center.”
“Why?” Kim asks. “What’s at the Control Center?”
“Wait,” Jack says. “What if she was being kept in one of those holding cells back there?”
“She’s not,” I answer.
“How do you know that?”
“Because. I just do. Plus, we didn’t see her on the security cameras.”
“But why the Control Center?” Kim asks again.
“I’m not sure. I think the Control Center is the main communication hub for the Fortress.”
“Yeah, so?”
“This guy, the man wearing the gas mask, he wants to kill Maria on camera. He wants to broadcast her death to the world. He needs to do this from the Control Center.”
Jack does not understand. He is confused and angry. He runs his hands through his hair. “Why? Why does this moron want to kill Maria?”
“He wants the Oz virus to spread around the world. He wants to kill everyone. He doesn’t want Maria getting in the way of his sick, twisted dream. He doesn’t want anyone to make an anti-virus from her blood. So he is going to kill her on a global stage. He is going to terrorize everyone. He is going to spread fear.”
The implications of what I have just told Jack, sinks in immediately. He now knows what’s at stake.
“We have to find her,” Jack says. “We have to go and get her. Right now.”
“We will,” I say. “But we have to be careful. If we go running off into the dark, we will get ourselves killed. This whole facility is completely overrun. It’s wall to wall with the infected.”
Jack is pacing back and forth. He is anxious and nervous. He knows it is time for action. “So what the hell happened?” he says. “What the hell is going on down here? How did this place fall apart? How the hell did you guys even get here?”
I catch him up on how Maria and I found our way here, to this godforsaken place known as the Fortress.
I told him what had happened when Maria and I made our escape from Daniel’s camp. Is escape even the right word? Maybe. Maybe not. I was unconscious when Maria made the decision to leave. So I can’t be sure. But according to Maria, Daniel had gone insane. He was becoming violent. He was sick.
I now realize he was displaying the withdrawal symptoms of the nano-virus.
“So Maria made the decision to take one of the Humvees and look for you,” I say.
“You left the camp?” he asks.
“Like I said, I was unconscious at the time. But had I been awake, I probably would’ve done the exact same thing. Of course I would’ve. We had no choice. And you just freaking left us. I know you were trying to find your sister. I know you warned us you were going to do it. But goddamn it Jack, you just… you just left us!”
Jack doesn’t look at me because he knows he did a stupid thing. “I didn’t think you would come after me. I didn’t think you would follow me into the goddamn Australian Outback!”
“What did you expect us to do?”
“I expected you to get the hell out of the country.”
“We couldn’t leave. Daniel’s jet was screwed. There was no extraction. We were stranded. We had no choice.”
Jack is shaking his head. He knows he messed up. “No extraction? I didn’t know. I thought Daniel’s people would get you out. I thought…”
He trails off as he realizes that he left us while we were still stranded.
“But anyway, I’m not important,” he continues. “I am nothing. You risked Maria’s life. And now we don’t know where she is. She could be dead for all we know.”
“She’s not dead,” I say. “She’s not.”
“How do you know that? You don’t know that. You can’t know that.”
I look at the watch. Fifty hours and two minutes.
This countdown means something.
Well, I don’t know for sure.
But I do.
Call it a hunch.
Call it what Ben called it. A cold, sinking, awful feeling.
You come to trust that feeling, Ben said. You come to trust it with your life.
The man in the gas mask is going to kill Maria. He is going to show the world.
And he wants me to watch. He wants me to struggle and fight. He wants to torture me. And it is working. I am on the verge of breaking apart. I am on the verge of giving up.
But I don’t. I can’t.
I remember back to the day of the massacre at the Sydney Harbor Bridge. We had barely survived. We were treading water in the harbor and Kenji was looking at the ruins of the bridge. And in that moment, he made a vendetta. He wanted to find whoever was responsible and make them pay.
We have that chance now. I have that chance now.
Is the man in the gas mask responsible?
Did he cause this plague? Did he cause the outbreak?
I don’t know.
But I do know he wants to kill Maria.
The watch beeps at me. At us.
It tells me I have fifty hours to live.
“He is waiting,” I say.
“Who is?”
“The man in the gas mask. He has Maria. And he is going to kill her. In front of the cameras. He is going to record it. He is going to broadcast it to the world. Live. In real time.”
Jack thinks about my theory. But he is still not convinced. “What the hell is that watch counting down to?” he asks.
“I have been injected with a time-release nano-virus. When the countdown reaches zero, the nano-bots will eat me from the inside. Just like what happened to George.”
“Who did this to you? Why did they do this to you?
“The man in the gas mask,” I answer.
“But we can fix you, right?” Jack says. “George mentioned something about a cure. We can stop the nano-virus before…”
“Yeah,” I lie. “We can fix me. I’ll be fine. But first we need to find Maria. We need to stop the man in the gas mask before it’s too late.”
Kim nods her head. “We have to get to the Control Center. The nerve center. I’m pretty sure it’s on one of the higher levels. It contains all the communication equipment. The satellite link. It’s the only connection to the outside world.”
“That’s where he’ll do it,” I say. “That’s where he’s taken her. That’s where he is waiting for us. That’s where we’ll find him.”
“And Maria,” Jack says.
“Yeah. And Maria.”
I take out the blueprints from my back pocket. “But first we have to go through the prison system.”
I lay the blueprints on the ground and we sit down and study them in the faint red emergency light.
“OK,” Kim says. “According to these blueprints, the military prison is connected to the civilian prison.”
Jack and I are both nodding along.
“So we should be able to eventually make our way through,” she continues.
“What about this part here,” Jack says, pointing to a section of the blueprints that is shaded black.
“What the hell is that?” I ask.
“Not sure,” Kim answers.
; Unfortunately, this black section is what connected the two prisons. It also connected both prisons to the research labs. But because it is blacked out, we would not be able to use the blueprints to navigate through.
I take a closer look. The black section is labeled ‘classified’. “Why the hell would this section be classified?” I ask. “This whole installation is classified and top secret. What could possibly be top secret within a top secret military base?”
No answer from Kim. She is thinking hard.
“Whatever it is,” Jack says. “It can’t be good.”
He’s right. It never is.
Kim rolls up the blueprints. “Come on. It’s this way. We need to keep moving.”
Chapter 21
We come to what appears to be a service elevator. The gate is open and the elevator platform is in a lowered position.
We look down. It’s a distance of about thirty feet.
“What now?” Jack says.
I shrug my shoulders. “I guess we have to climb down.”
Kim points to the wall. Lucky for us there is an emergency ladder that can be easily accessed. We climb down carefully and finally arrive at the entrance to the military prison.
The entrance to the prison is basically another set of security doors.
Next to the security doors is a small room that looks similar to a toll booth. I guess maybe it’s supposed to be a control room for the security doors.
“How do we get through here?” I ask.
“Might need to use George’s access card again,” Jack says.
“Maybe.”
I look for a scanner but I don’t see one. Maybe the door had to be opened by pressing a button in the control room. The control room appeared to be a small square room with windows all around. It’s slightly bigger than a toll booth.
The windows are covered in dust and dirt. We can’t see what’s inside the room.
“We might need to break the windows,” I suggest.
“They’re probably reinforced,” Kim says.
“We could shoot them out?”
Kim checks the handgun. “I’m out of ammo, remember.”
As soon as Kim has the gun in her hand, a bright red laser appears from somewhere inside the booth. A red dot appears on my chest. Right on my heart.
“Stop right there,” a voice says.