"Another bloody happy customer," Donegan proclaimed from behind the wallpapered counter. The store hadn't been remodeled since the seventies, and it showed. The walls were covered in dark brown wood paneling, the floor in orange carpet. An old tube TV with dials sat on a table in the corner tuned to the news. Donegan was checking bonds at the computer, as always.
Will passed the waiting room couch and noticed a young boy was sitting on it reading a decades-old TV Guide. "What's with the kid?"
"Don't worry about the kid," Donegan said without looking up. The image on the computer monitor flickered. "Come on you piece of shite," he said, slapping its side.
"With all the money you're making, you could fix the place up a little."
"If it looks too nice people won't be walking in the door as much."
"Sure."
Donegan looked up from the monitor. "I'm serious. If I come at them with fountains and marble countertops, you think these chancers will be coming anywhere near me? The first rule of catching rats is, don't spook the rats." He closed the window he was working in. "Speaking of which, has our boy poked his whiskers out yet?"
"Still dark."
"Bah. He's skipped town by now." He wheeled over to a filing cabinet and started picking through the folders.
"I don't think so, his motorcycle hasn't left his apartment. The strip club he frequents is still my best shot. I'll have to keep watching it."
Donegan's eyes lit up. "Oh, a strip club, how convenient for you! Take in a show, throw down a bit of the black stuff."
"You know I don't go for those places."
Donegan wheeled back to the counter with a dog-eared folder. "You're full of shite. I've seen the birds they have there. Ain't no man alive doesn't like lookin' at them fine things."
Will shook his head. "Listen, Donegan...I need another job."
"You know the deal, when you're finished with this one I'll give you another one." He held up the folder to illustrate his point.
"What I mean is, I need a good paycheck. None of this nickel-and-dime stuff. Whatever you have lined up, I need the biggest one you have."
"Now what makes you think I would hold out on you? You know very well you're my favorite."
"Second favorite," Will corrected him.
"I like you much better than that wanker cousin of mine. But he's family. You know how it is."
"Unfortunately. All I'm saying is I'm struggling right now, I could use something extra."
"Alright, I'll keep you in mind, don't you worry." The TV in the waiting room caught his attention. "You hear about this Ebola business?"
"I don't really watch the news."
"You should. This shite could end up on your doorstep. All it takes is one wanker on vacation not washing his hands and boom! It all goes arseways."
"You say this every time there's an outbreak. SARS, Bird Flu, Swine Flu, regular flu. We were all supposed to die ten times over if you listen to the news. Did you know some teacher at my kid's school came down with Pinkeye and they shut the place down for three days? Three days. Between the food allergies and the infectious diseases, it's becoming impossible for a parent to give their kid a decent education."
"HVAC," Donegan said.
"What?"
"Air conditioning repair. That's where the money is. You tell Ryan to learn himself a trade and he'll be just grand."
Will blinked. "I'll be sure to tell him."
"Good. Now pull your socks up and scram."
-3-
Stanley hit a dead-end. In the last twenty-four hours he'd only left his chair three times, once to eat and twice to use the toilet. On the first trip to the bathroom, he'd made the mistake of looking in the mirror. His hair went in five directions and his face looked thin. His fingernails were chewed down and the collar of his shirt had a light ring of sweat.
He didn't look in the mirror the second trip.
His eyes felt like they'd been sucked out and two heavy stones had been shoved into the sockets in their place. No amount of coffee was going to fix this, but he couldn't go to sleep just yet. He was too close to the truth to give up now.
It was time for a break. Stanley minimized the window and stood from the creaky chair. He paced his apartment's small living room, going over everything he'd done to look for clues to what Building 8 was and where it could be found. Just as important was who was behind it. Someone was using their position of power to conduct dangerous and potentially illegal research on VX-99, and crushing anyone who caught the scent.
Stanley shook his head. Anyone who caught the scent. Who was he kidding? Not one of his contacts had known a thing. Only a few of them even agreed he was onto something, the rest told him he was looking too far into things, assigning patterns where they didn't exist. These people were hackers and conspiracy theorists. They ran websites that claimed NASA and the Illuminati were working together to form a new religion, and they were calling him paranoid. Whoever it was pulling the strings, they were so deep in the shadows that no one seemed to know there were shadows. It was a ghost hunt, and so far a fruitless one.
Stanley rubbed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and pointer. He was starting to lose hope. He'd been casting a wider and wider net, speaking to everyone he could including a few Black Hat-types. That was a dangerous practice. If he wasn't careful, he could get himself put away for a very long time.
A notification pinged from the laptop's speaker, catching him off guard. Stanley's eyes shot open. He spun to look at the screen and saw an IRC message had popped up.
In three steps he returned to the laptop and clicked on the notification, not even bothering to sit. It was a message from M. Zero, one of his lesser-known associates. The guy- or girl, he wasn't sure- had carried out a few high profile DdoS attacks, including shutting down the Brazilian stock market for close to two hours as a warning to their President.
Stanley opened the message.
"No matter what I try I can't open the second file," he read aloud. "Don't ask me where I got it. Don't contact me again. Going dark."
There was a compressed, unnamed folder attached.
The breath caught in his chest. Could this be what he'd been looking for, not just for the last few months but most of his adult life? He ran it for viruses, trackers and anything else even remotely suspicious he could think of, but the scan came back clean.
He opened the folder.
It contained three files. Their names were long and meaningless, just jumbled collections of letters and numbers which at a cursory glance didn't follow any naming system he recognized. For all he knew M. Zero had named them, so he didn't waste time figuring them out.
The mouse cursor hovered over the first file. This was it. No going back.
He double-clicked the first file. It was a long, jumbled text file which had suffered major degradation in the process of being decrypted. What had been salvaged amounted to budget and inventory records of an unnamed facility. Most of it was innocuous enough, ranging from computer hardware to stationery. The most telling sections detailed lists of medical equipment and chemicals, with a strong focus on decontamination. He thought immediately of Building 8. No matter how much he searched, there wasn't a single mention of that or any other name in the file. He closed it, intending to come back to it again.
The second file. That was the one M. Zero mentioned being unable to open. Just the idea of that was ridiculous. He wasn't some script kiddie. Someone with the skills to take down a foreign stock market should be able to open anything you could throw at them.
Right away Stanley noticed the file didn't have a file type. He ran it through TrID to see what he was working with, but it came back with no results. He ran it again to be sure. Nothing. He updated the file extension definitions, a list of almost eight thousand file types, and ran it a third time.
Still nothing. Like the first file, he intended to come back to this.
The third file was a video. It opened in one click.
The progress
meter showed the video was about a minute-and-a-half long in total. It was poor quality, possibly taken with a camera phone. Trying to make the window bigger only caused the picture to become blurrier.
Still paused, the video's first frame showed a long, bright hallway of what could only be described as a clinical-looking location. There were no plants, no decorations, no colors other than the sleeping bulbs of emergency lights on the ceiling. There were half a dozen doors all the way down, all with nameplates too far away to read. Several of them had security card readers.
There wasn't a single doubt in Stanley's mind: this was Building 8. The place he'd been looking for, with ties to VX-99 and God knows what else. He wiped the sweat from his lips and pressed play.
Screams leapt from the laptop's speakers, causing him to jump. He turned down the volume as quickly as he could. He didn't want to give the landlord another reason to think he was a nutjob.
He turned it back up, just enough to hear. They weren't cries of pain coming from somewhere down the hallway, they were the sounds of a man who had gone insane. It was primal, a high-pitched scream that made Stanley's skin crawl. He'd never heard anything like it before, and now that he had, he wished he could unhear it.
"What the hell did you find, Zero," he whispered.
Whoever was shooting the video began making their way to a door on their left. It was obvious from the cautious way they moved they were breaking the rules. Their free hand- a man's- reached out and opened the door in painfully slow movements. They were trying not to make a sound, even though not much could be heard over the wailing that still came from some unseen place. The man's hand was only visible for a second. The sleeve of his shirt was dark blue. Other than the lack of a wedding ring, it was the only clue to the cameraman's identity.
The room was dark, the only source of light a dim monitor some ten feet away. A table and chairs were just barely visible at the center. The unknown cameraman shut the door behind him, almost completely cutting off the continued screams.
As he slowly walked around the table, the frame stayed focused on the lightly-glowing monitor ahead. It was a camera feed, the contents pitching the small room back and forth in uneasy light. Stanley squinted to see what on Earth the black-and-white monitor showed, not knowing whether he wanted to see or look away.
The man on the screen was sick in just about every sense of the word. Dark vomit-stains coated the front of his hospital gown, a thick mixture like he'd been puking up bits of intestine and other internal organs. Most of his hair was missing, the remaining bits clinging to his bloodied head in clumps.
He smashed his body against protective observation glass over and over. And he was screaming, screaming through a toothy tunnel of a mouth, shaped like that of an eel or a lamprey. It wasn't a sound of pain coming from him, more like violent rage mixed with the most primitive desire.
"Please terminate the subject," a man's voice said calmly from somewhere off-screen. Seconds later, a harsh hiss came through the speaker. Gas filled the small room, engulfing the sick man in a thick mist. His hungry scream turned to one of pain.
When the cloud of gas cleared, the crazed man was on his knees but still moving. He slapped his hands out at the glass and made a gurgling sound deep in his throat. A jumble of concerned voices debated how it was possible that he was still alive. "Hit him again," the calm man's voice cut them off.
The gas returned twice as strong. This time when it cleared the crazed man lay lifeless on the floor, fresh blood oozing from his nose and mouth. Strange eyes stared blankly at the ceiling.
Stanley stared in shock at his screen. If this was a hoax, it was the most convincing one he'd ever seen.
Someone on the monitor spoke. It was the calm man's voice, but it was too low to be audible. Stanley turned up the volume as far as he could, but he still couldn't decipher the man's words. He took the video into an editing program and messed with the levels until finally he made out five, strained words.
"Going to call Colonel Gibson."
Bingo. He had a name.
Stanley opened a new window and typed the name into the search. It sounded familiar, but he couldn't place it. He'd investigated so many military men over the years, their names started to run together in a cloud of deceit and corruption thicker than the cloud of gas he'd just seen kill some poor man.
The search returned immediate results. The first was a veteran of the French and Indian War who had died in 1822. Stanley felt comfortable eliminating him as a suspect.
The second hit was a bit more recent. An image came up of an older man with a stern face and light blue eyes. Beneath the photo was a title.
Colonel Rick Gibson, Commanding Officer of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.
Stanley's mouth dropped. "Holy shit," he muttered.
-4-
The cat with the missing ear had been stalking a rat for the better part of ten minutes. Its scrawny, black body hung low to the filthy ground. With shoulders hunched and eyes as wide as saucers, it moved along the stack of wet cardboard boxes until it was a few, short feet from its unsuspecting prey. Then it tensed its paws, digging its claws into the ground.
It pounced. The cat shot out at lightning speed and fell on the rat, delivering a lethal neck bite before the creature had a chance to fight back. Within seconds the rat went limp. The cat gave the dead rodent a quick shake before running off with its prize.
"I have to look into that HVAC thing," Will said.
The alley behind the club had been his own, personal VIP room for nearly an hour. He'd gone directly there after getting the call from Crystal telling him Theo had shown up at the club. He'd hoped not to spend so much time waiting for Crystal to make her move, but patience was possibly the most important part of the job, and there was no avoiding it. He was alarmed by how quick the sickly sweet smell of rotten milk had become normal.
The club's back door opened. Will tucked himself against the wall just behind a dumpster. He held his breath as footsteps echoed through the alley. Crystal's breathy voice followed.
"Just wait for me here," she said in her seductive tone.
"You're coming back?"
"Of course I am, sugar. Just give me a minute to tell my manager I'm taking a break, okay?"
"Okay. Hurry back."
The door closed. Will carefully peeked out. Theo walked into view with a goofy grin on his pale, stubbly face. He was tall and skinny, like the picture in his file, but he hadn't realized just how tall and skinny he would be. In the light of the alley's security bulb, Theo looked like Frankenstein in a hoodie.
Will almost felt bad for the guy. He'd come back there thinking Crystal was about to make all his wildest, dirtiest dreams come true, and instead he was about to be handcuffed, thrown in a car and taken to jail. At times like this Will had to remember that this was what kept a roof over his wife and kid's heads. There wasn't a single person on the planet he would choose over them- especially some drug dealer with a stripper crush.
Will stepped out. "Theodore Weaver," he started, getting ready to announce himself as a Bail Enforcement Agent.
Theo bolted. Will reacted, breaking into a run after the lanky bastard. He had planned for this, keeping the alley's only easy exit to his back. Up ahead were a few dead ends and only one possible way out.
So many of them ran. And why wouldn't they? If they were stupid enough to skip bail, they were certainly stupid enough to keep the mistakes coming, not to mention desperate enough to be dangerous. Will's running shoes slapped the hard concrete as he breathed in and out in controlled rhythm, catching up to Theo in no time.
It was almost as if Will ran three miles every morning before he left for work.
Theo chose the wrong turn and got himself cornered. He hit the wall and spun to face Will, who had already stopped ten feet back with his hand on the small canister of pepper spray hanging from his belt.
"Stay away," Theo shouted, "I mean it!"
"Theodore Weav
er, I'm making a citizen's arrest."
Theo blinked. "Wait. You're not a cop?"
"I'm a licensed Bail Enforcement Agent."
Theo chuckled like something Will had said was funny. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a switchblade, flipping the blade out.
"It's still a crime to pull a knife on me."
"I don't give a shit."
"It's also a mistake," Will added.
Theo rushed forward, swinging the knife. He was a caged animal, and he acted like one, putting everything he had into a wild attack meant for nothing but escape.
He was met face-first with a stream of pepper spray.
Theo screamed, his eyes involuntarily closing. He still had some fight in him, though, and he swung his blade wildly even as he stumbled forward coughing. Will side-stepped the knife, grabbed Theo by the arm and brought him down to the concrete.
Will bent the guy's wrist back, forcing him to drop the knife. It clattered to the ground and he quickly kicked it aside. The knife slid between a cluster of garbage pails and out of sight.
Will handcuffed the cursing, half-blind man and sat him up. Theo let out a long chain of insults and expletives, cursing Will and his ancestors and just about everyone he'd ever met.
"Are you alright," Will asked when the guy had calmed down a bit.
"No, I'm not alright, you fucking maced me," Theo spit.
"Technically it's pepper spray."
"Same fucking thing!"
"Different thing. Same outcome. Come on, get up."
Will helped the guy to his feet, noticing his eyes were starting to open again. He walked his catch back the way they'd come, toward the alley's exit where his car was waiting.
"Was it Crystal? Did that slut sell me out," Theo asked, tears and snot streaming down his face.
"I didn't give her much choice," Will lied. There was no reason to bring up the phone call, or the finder's fee she'd negotiated.
"Next time I see her, I'm gonna slit her throat," Theo warned.
Extinction Cycle (Kindle Worlds): Extinction [Isolation] Page 3