Another surprise was Bucky Hamilton himself joining us, of course accompanied by his finest, none of whom I recognized from any of the botched encounters from before except for that red-haired guy. Covered in soot and gore, he couldn’t hide his wariness, but his voice was strong and dripping with irony as he spoke up, just loud enough that we and those in our immediate vicinity could hear. “I’ve been thinking about keeping this to myself, just for the heck of it, but what does knowledge really do for you if those that seek it don’t even know you have it?” Focusing on Nate, he chuckled. “If you still want to know who is responsible for killing your brother, go to Cheyenne Mountain. They have all the answers that neither of you ever wanted to hear.”
He was gone before I could inquire what that was supposed to mean, and the scowl on Nate’s face let me know that he felt about the same.
“What’s in Cheyenne—“ I stopped right there. “Fuck. Does he mean NORAD?”
Nate considered for a moment but left it at a shrug. “Only one way to find out, right?”
“So you are still talking to me,” I clarified, and promptly had to do with a hostile glare for an answer.
Pia looked a lot less enthusiastic about the endeavor, but it was only when she spoke that I realized how damn exhausted she was. “You know that your time’s almost up.” At my frown, she explained. “Your body has been running on high for almost twenty-four hours. It’s not a matter of if you crash, but when you crash. Doing this today is unwise.” More like insane, but I didn’t need to voice that.
I waited for Nate to object—or agree—but he continued to stare at everything and nothing with that partly glazed look on his face. I remembered that, from my last few hours before I’d almost died. He was running on empty, but refused to accept that. Maybe this was utter madness, but that didn’t mean that there was a chance in hell he wouldn’t go straight there the second he got into the car.
“We’ll manage.” Looking around us at the tired people everywhere, I felt my heart sink. “If it’s a trap, even an army won’t help us. But it didn’t sound like it.”
“We’ll come with you,” Chino Torres announced from behind me, flashing me a toothy grin when I looked surprised. “You dragged us this far. We’ll drag you those few steps further.”
Turning back to Pia and Burns, I realized that both of them weren’t going anywhere. Motioning Burns over, I dropped my pack to get the hard drives out of mine to shove them into his. Now that most of the ammo had been spent, there was room aplenty. Nate watched me with a spark of interest cutting through the apathy, but I didn’t explain. “Take these to Greene,” I instructed when Burns managed to heave the pack back onto his shaking shoulders. “Chances are, he already has the information on them, but if not, I want that secure and somewhere we, or someone else not deeply mired in this, can access it.”
“Will do, boss,” Burns chirped, gifting me a weaker version of his usual smile. Nate’s frown he ignored as he hugged me, leaning down so he could whisper into my ear. “He’ll come around, don’t worry. What he needs—what you both need now—is a little time. Bug down somewhere, weather out the hangover, recharge your batteries. Treat tomorrow as the first day of the rest of your lives. And don’t forget to make every second count, even if you spend half of it bickering like an old couple.”
Pia left it at a curt nod, but I could read the same advice in her slight smile. Truth be told, a vacation from all this sounded like a damn good idea.
Thirty minutes later, we rolled out of the base, followed by a small entourage of cars that had seen better days, although the Rover beat them all. Next to Torres and the other two remaining members of the Raiders we had Dan Harris and the other guys from Vegas tagging along, with Jason and his group bringing up the rear. For the first few miles we rattled along the convoy that had started back toward our base camp and the new settlement of North Platte, but soon we veered off southeast, leaving the others behind.
All I could do was hope that this wouldn’t be the last anyone ever saw of us.
But maybe, just maybe, that wouldn’t have been the worst possible thing to happen.
Chapter 28
We reached the Cheyenne Mountain complex via backroads that took us well past noon to get there, but with the upside of barely seeing a shambler anywhere. I didn’t know what to expect—like everyone else, I’d seen images of the gaping maw of a tunnel that ran into the mountain, connecting one of the most secure places in the world to the streets outside—but while the sight was still overwhelming, it was missing one crucial detail: signs of habitation. If I’d learned one thing over the past year it was to gauge at a glance whether something was worth looting—as in, hadn’t been raided before—and whether someone was around who might object to that happening. There weren’t even any broken-down cars on the road leading up to the tunnel, which seemed highly unlikely to me. People in the area must have fled here when the shit hit the fan, but there wasn’t even a discarded plastic bag anywhere. As we left the cars ambling in the middle of the road to get out and take a quick look around, I was quite happy to join Jason. The only thing except for basic driving directions that Nate had told me was that, technically, NORAD had moved out of Cheyenne Mountain over to Peterson Air Force Base years ago, not that it mattered now. I was definitely starting to feel the massive hangover from the booster shot wearing off dawning on the horizon, but until it hit I was determined not to let exhaustion—or my pissed-off husband—drag me down further.
We debated whether we should take the cars inside or hoof it, but ended up deciding that we’d be sitting ducks either way, so we might as well drive. There was no electricity in the tunnel that I could see. We had to give up first place in the driving order to Jason as the Rover was too smashed up to have any lights left. Or windows, for that matter. The two-mile tunnel into the mountain took forever, but still we saw no cars, no debris, no zombies. The latter irritated me the most, seeing as they could have simply walked inside. Considering how overrun Colorado Springs was, statistically, there should have been zombies here, seeking refuge from the bright sunshine during the day.
We stopped with Jason’s headlights illuminating the blast doors. They were open, making the complex look even more like a ghost town. We got out and advanced on foot. I couldn’t help but feel like the walls were closing in on me. Here, there was some minimal debris, pebbles and dust for the most part. As we reached the main entrance I saw the first real sign of disturbance—footprints in the dust. So someone was here after all, or had been in the past months.
Nate reached for the surprisingly demure door to the first building we approached, halting when it didn’t give. In the flickering beams of our flashlights I saw him grimace. “Number pad,” he explained, shining light onto the offending security device.
More out of jest than actual intent I suggested, “Just try zero-zero-zero-zero-zero.”
He did. Something clicked, and the door swung outward enough so we could enter. Creepy wasn’t even cutting it close.
I followed Nate into the corridor, doing my best to keep my waning attention focused as I covered him. I’d switched back to my Mossberg, kind of expecting to have to shoot doors open. Not that anything in our arsenal would have done away with the blast doors, but still.
Nate paused maybe ten feet into the corridor, shining his light on something on the floor. A candy bar wrapper, I realized, cautiously nudging it with my boot. I didn’t recognize the brand. One of Jason’s guys, who was a good decade and a half older than me, barked out a brief laugh. “My granddad used to keep that hidden all over the house. Grandma forbid him to eat it, because of the sugar content. Shit, I haven’t seen that in… fucking forever.”
We resumed our cautious trek, soon finding more empty food containers. Cereals that I was familiar with, but a completely different design on the box. Some nondescript cans that stank of tuna. The odd chunk of something that Nate identified as some devilish kind of bread used for rations because it took ages to go stale.
None of the rooms we passed had anything interesting inside—besides everyday items that the people who had been working here before had left. Most looked like the personnel would return any moment now from their smoke break. So we followed the proverbial trail of bread crumbs.
Until we reached one more door, at the end of the corridor, and Nate halted, listening with a raised hand to indicate that we should do the same. It took me a few seconds to realize what was weird about this. What I had figured was just my mind playing tricks on me was the hum of generators—and neon lights.
“What—“
Nate shut me up with a jerk of his head, then eased the door open. After the almost-darkness before, the glare stung in my eyes, even though it came from a single light halfway down a concrete hallway that had seen better days—back in the sixties. The entire hallway was lined with shelves, running perpendicular to the straight, narrow space. I soon realized that they were the source of the discarded wrappers that we had found before, boxes upon boxes of them stored here. On one of the boxes there was even a date printed—May 1963.
“Those must be from when they built this place,” I murmured, pitching my voice low to keep it from carrying. Nate didn’t react, but as he advanced, scanning each row of shelves before moving to the next, the tension in his body increased. I started to wonder if he knew something that I didn’t—like, did they actually keep aliens in here, and we were about to traipse into their lair?—but figured that had it been something critical for our survival, he would have mentioned it.
We reached the end of the hallway, where a single door led to the next room. Nate grabbed the handle, but then stopped to rub his eyes, blinking furiously. So much for this being a good idea.
“Let me,” I proposed. “For whatever reason, I think my mind isn’t as fucked up as yours yet.”
He glared at me briefly, but then stepped aside, letting me take the lead. He waited until I was ready before he reached across my body from next to the door and eased it open. Beyond, there was a room, about as large as the last one but with only minimal space taken up by shelves. It wasn’t empty, though, the middle plastered with rows and rows of computers and workstations, the far wall covered with displays. Ancient displays, gray with dust, and computers that made up for in boxiness what they lacked in processing power. Only a single desk to the left side was covered with modern hardware, several sleek laptops and three connected, large displays, lines of code scrolling down what I could make out of the screens. Stacks of papers covered the rest of the surface, with a few sheets littering the floor. A slight figure was partly hidden by the swivel chair she was perched on. At the sound of the door creaking open, she turned around, revealing—
“Dolores?” Nate rasped out, incredulity heavy in his voice.
I wouldn’t have been able to remember her name, having spent less than a day around her, but that was definitely the tech wizard from Nate’s crew when they’d infiltrated the Green Fields Biotech building.
Dolores. Lori. Why was there suddenly that connection swimming up from the depths of my memory? Something someone had said, someone… raving mad, barely making sense. Kat, back in Halsey, when I’d realized that she hadn’t been my workplace friend but actually part of the group that was responsible for murdering Nate’s brother, and almost doing away with me as well. What had it been that she’d muttered repeatedly? Lori promised that the plan would work.
Maybe it was just one huge coincidence, but I’d long since lost hope in regards to that. The barrel of my shotgun had wavered down toward the ground while I was thinking, but with that last realization it snapped back up, remaining trained on the woman in the chair. Her dark eyes regarded us coolly, all the laughter and teasing I remembered gone.
Nate got over his shell-shocked moment quickly, stepping around me to scan the room. It was only then that I realized that Dolores wasn’t alone. There was a man sitting in another chair on the opposite side of the room, previously hidden by the door. He must have been sixty, maybe pushing seventy, his hair grey and styled in a terrible comb-over, the glasses and white lab coat that he was wearing over his checkered shirt lending him a scholarly air. Him I’d definitely never seen before, but I was sure that Nate recognized him. At least until he uttered a perplexed, “And who the fuck are you?” So much for that.
Pushing his glasses further up the bridge of his nose, the man looked vaguely offended, whether by the obvious obscurity or use of profanity was anyone’s guess. He made as if to push himself off his chair, but stopped when he realized that half of our arsenal was trained on him. He didn’t look too flustered, making me guess that he’d been around armed combatants before.
“Dr. Gordon Alders,” he introduced himself, looking mighty self-important. Nate barely blinked, his expression still blank. Alders looked to me next, but I gave him the approximation of a shrug. That he expected that to ring a bell for me made me guess that his field of research must have bordered my own, but I’d read far too many research papers in my time to remember names. “I am the creator of the XLC1-alpha virus.” Silence. Sure, the letters rang a bell—just hours ago I’d been looking for them in the nitrogen tank protocol list at the labs inside the base—but not the suffix. Someone behind me cleared his throat, making me guess that I was absolutely the only one that had a clue. Seeing Alders get more annoyed by the second was worth watching, but I finally found an ounce of compassion—or was that morbid curiosity—inside of me.
“You created the virus that was later used in the serum project?” I hazarded a guess.
Alders’s face brightened for a moment, but the satisfied expression was a tad too nasty for my tastes. “Yes, that as well. But you, Dr. Lewis, should know that in its first iteration it was called XLC11.”
Whatever. My arms were slowly getting tired from keeping my shotgun up, and I was well beyond playing guessing games. “Please, enlighten me then.”
It was Dolores who answered instead, her voice taking on an undertone that was shy of fanaticism. “The virus that liberated us all.”
And that was the moment when I realized why Bucky Hamilton, asshole extraordinaire, had sent us this way. Not to satisfy anyone’s curiosity, although I couldn’t help but want to hear the rest of the story now. No, his motive had been as simple and petty as they came: to hammer down, once and for all, how deeply betrayed Nate had been by the people he’d trusted. And it only took a glance at his face in profile for me to know that he’d reached the same conclusion.
The next breath I took hurt, not just deep inside my chest from having held it too long, but my very soul.
There were a million things I could have asked, but none got as close to being as important as the near breathless grunt Nate uttered. “Why?” Just a single word, but it held all the disbelief in the world. Not that anyone could do something like that—but how they’d justify it.
If anything, Alders continued to look pleased with himself, and was more than happy to elaborate. “The world deserved to know of the atrocities committed.”
He looked less pleased when Dolores cut in, “And it needed to be cleansed.”
“Cleansed of what?” I wanted to know. Maybe a stupid question, coming from someone who was covered, head to toe, in gore and blood, and only half of that from zombies, but still.
Her dark eyes narrowed, and I could tell that I was on her shit list, too. “Of the parasites who not only take everything for granted but wipe out everything around them, thoughtlessly, ruining their habitat not only for themselves but for every generation that will come after them. Someone had to put a stop to that.” That she delivered those lines not with fanatic fervor but a calm, calculating tone made it so much worse.
“Wait, let me get this straight. You justify the eradication of billions of people because of what, global warming? Are you fucking insane?” Damnit, but that was pushing my boundaries of what I could take, and nobody—except Nate, maybe, a little—had ever betrayed me.
Alders made a clucking sound as if that argum
ent was something beneath him. “Of course not. That’s just ridiculous propaganda that was required to find willing helpers to facilitate the spread of the infectious compounds.” Dolores’s glare made it plain that she disagreed, but Alders talked right over her scorn. “I’ve dedicated my life to science, and look what they turned my creation into! Unlike you, I’m a real doctor, sworn to uphold the sacred principles of Hippocrates. Do no harm. Honor the findings of those that came before me. What did they do? Not only did they not value my contribution, but turned what might have become the cure for all illnesses into a weapon!”
I was still casting around for what to say—exactly how do you deal with the ravings of a seemingly lucid madman?—when Nate’s scowl next to me deepened. “Wait, I do know you from somewhere. You were the leader of the serum project back when I got my injection. Far as I remember, the only time you deigned to get anywhere near us was to check on those that survived.”
And wasn’t that an interesting little tidbit, making me snort. “That doesn’t really sound like you suffered such a hard blow when they used your high principles for something actually useful.”
Oh, Alders didn’t like that one bit. “Of course I couldn’t abandon my project even when I realized that they used my research for harm rather than good. It was still an imperfect creation, applied years before it should have gone into the first clinical phase. How could I have just let them do that without finding out what I was responsible for?” I had to admit, I could see where turning innocent soldiers who hadn’t been informed about what they were actually doing and thus couldn’t have given informed consent, into walking, breathing weapons could be a strain on your conscience. Yet Alders prattled right on, making me realize that I was, yet again, too naive. “You should have seen what damage they caused. What survived the inoculation was more often than not barely human to begin with, and eager to be further shaped into weapons that were all the more despicable for the acts they committed. Acts of opposition were no longer ironed out by negotiation, but by sending scores of these monsters I helped create in to eradicate all evidence of dissent. They could have potentially wiped out entire nations given enough time; the resources for that they already possessed. And not only did the leaders of our great nation sanction this, no, they wanted to publicly advertise it. The new weapon, the perfect soldier, the right tool for world domination. That was the day I knew that I had a responsibility to make things right.”
Green Fields (Book 6): Unity Page 40