“That I’m not going to infect the entire base,” I cut in, grinning when she had the grace to look slightly appalled at having to tell us that. “No worries. We didn’t expect to just waltz in here without anyone being curious at the very least. It’s not every day that someone comes right back from the dead and doesn’t go all ‘argh, brains!’” Maybe it wasn’t in my best interest to be quite so jovial about what had happened, but hopefully that dash of humor would keep the tension from skyrocketing.
“Right,” Stanton acknowledged. “If you will please follow us? You can leave the car right there. No one will get close to it.”
That wasn’t surprising, but I still ducked back inside to get something from the cargo hold. When I straightened, I realized that I’d just given half of the guards a good scare, several of them tense as hell. Moving slowly, I held out the repurposed travel mug and plastic bag in my hands, doing my very best not to set anyone off.
“Sorry. Just thought I’d make the sample collecting for your geek squad a little easier.”
The corner of Stanton’s mouth quirked up, and for a moment she looked hard-pressed not to laugh at her guys getting that jumpy over a literal bag full of shit. The guards stepped aside, letting us walk through their ranks to the shed, where one of them held the door for us. No one asked us to go in unarmed, so they couldn't have been that concerned.
From the outside, the shed might have looked like any rickety wooden structure, but that was only camouflage. Inside, it looked like a cross between a triage station and a sterile lab, with two bunks, several pieces of medical equipment, and every available surface covered in tools, containers, and bandages. There were two people in hazmat suits waiting for us—the non-pressurized kind, not the space suits they had downstairs by their main lab—a girl that I didn’t know, and Jon, one of the biochemists I’d had my academic differences with on our first stay here. The tension in here was way worse than outside, and mostly to break it, I held out my sample containers to them. “Who wants this?”
The two scientists traded glances. Jon was the one who picked up a tray and held it out for me to deposit the goods on. The door closed behind us, making me tense just a little. Stanton had joined us, together with two of the guards.
“If you don’t object, we would like you to stay under observation here until you’ve been cleared,” she explained. “Mako will check your vitals and draw your blood. She’s the best nurse we got here.”
“I’m also the only nurse here,” the woman objected, giving me a look that told me that she was already sick of Stanton. “Just sit down there and do what I tell you to.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I quipped back, smiling when she rolled her eyes at me. My guess was on her not taking bullshit from anyone. Stanton watched the proceedings for about a minute before she left, using the elevator at the back of the shed to go downstairs.
Mako clearly knew what she was doing—and also knew how to handle herself in a hazmat suit. She checked my heartbeat and blood pressure first, and hit the vein in my right elbow perfectly at the first try. I waited for her to show any signs of nervousness as she was switching the blood vials to fill all three of them, but she didn’t even flinch. She also didn’t put a bandage on the puncture mark but just told me to hold the cotton ball there until it stopped bleeding. Next, she checked my ears, swabbed the insides of my cheeks, and proceeded to almost blind me when she shone a light into my eyes. That caused somewhat of a stir, but she was quick to shut her flashlight off when she realized just how sensitive my eyes were. Jon remained hovering next to her, collecting the mounting heap of samples that she took. Rummaging around in one of the overflowing drawers, Mako returned to me with a different light, assuring me that this one wasn’t as bright as the other. It still made my eyes water, but didn’t feel quite like someone was trying to scramble my brain through my eyeballs. Whatever she saw made her compress her lips briefly, but she didn’t explain, just came back with another cup and told me to spit into it several times.
The door of the elevator opened, and Sunny stepped into the room. The Silo’s lead scientist looked a little frazzled, only belatedly pulling his face mask up over his mouth and nose. I couldn’t help but utter a low, somewhat derisive chuff. That I wasn’t the only one who was convinced that the hazmat suits were overkill was one thing, but if they insisted on going that extra mile, they should at least have done so uniformly. The way Sunny looked at me made my skin crawl with sudden unease. Not the alarmed kind of unease that might have made me go for my gun, but the awkward kind that stemmed from me being aware that he knew far too much. I hadn’t expected that to bother me, but it suddenly did. And unlike Mako and Jon—provided they were in the know—he did a really shit job hiding it.
“That’s it,” Mako told me when I handed her the cup, which she deposited on the tray after scrawling something on the side. “Now we just need some easily obtainable fluids from you,”—she looked at Nate—“and my work here is done.”
She got up, and when Nate made no attempt to sit down on the other cot, she took his blood standing. He got his own cup to spit into. Mako nodded at Jon to get the samples downstairs for analysis, and handed me a facemask. “Put this on. I’m sweating like a pig in this, and we all know that this is just precaution. Whoever comes up in a couple hours to tell you the results shouldn’t have to go through this again.” She winked. “Likely me, so now you know where my concern stems from.”
I nodded. As stupid as it might seem sometimes, protocol was protocol.
“Wait, what samples did you take?” Sunny asked, finally tearing his eyes from me. He critically eyed the tray before glancing my way again. “We, ah, really should do a smear—“
That’s about as far as he got before Nate stepped into his direct line of sight, arms crossed over his chest. “Sunny? Shut up,” he warned. His voice was low and held a rough edge, making me wonder if he was just reacting to my obvious unease, or had his own share of trepidation rising.
“But—“ Sunny tried again, yet at Nate’s scowl he fell silent.
I should probably have kept my mouth shut, but apprehension was making me stupid. “If you want a sperm sample from him, tell him to wank into a cup,” I advised. “Don’t come to me for that.” Maybe not everyone would have needed to know about what we’d done earlier—and it was a bluff, really, considering we had used a condom—but if I could maybe kill any further questions with that, all the better.
“I’ll better get to analyzing then,” Sunny offered, unable to look at me now. He joined Jon in the elevator, leaving us with our capable nurse.
Mako was still frowning after him when the elevator doors closed. She checked on Nate’s needle mark, then collected the bloody cotton balls from both of us, disposing of them in the same biohazard bag as the syringes had gone into. She hesitated, looking at Nate briefly, before she turned back to me. “If you, personally, feel like you want anything else checked up on, we can do that later, downstairs, in the infirmary. Just come find me.”
“Thanks,” I said, appreciating her offer, but not quite sure if I would take her up on it.
She nodded. “I, or someone else, will be up with the preliminary results as soon as we have them. It’s cooler in here with the A/C running, but feel free to wait in your car, if you prefer that. These two yahoos over there are under orders to go wherever you go, so if you want to get rid of them, just promise you’ll stay in here. We’ll lock the doors, and they’ll leave you alone. Need anything in the meantime? There’s a shower and toilet behind that curtain over there.”
I wondered if she added the last to stress how well-equipped the amenities were, or because I was stinking up a storm. I’d washed up at the lake, but not much since.
“Thanks. Cleaning up and catching some sleep sounds good,” I offered.
Nate cleared his throat behind Mako. “Something to eat would be nice, particularly if you might want some more stool samples in, say, the next week. We haven’t really had much to eat out there.�
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Mako looked appalled at not having thought of that earlier.
“Of course. You okay if I just drop it in the elevator and send it back up to you?” We both nodded. “Great. We’ll lock you in here, but in case of emergency, you’ll get out or into the elevator by hitting ‘1111,’ but that only works when we set the system to high alert. Hasn’t happened yet, but the Commander makes us do drills every month. I’ll get your food now. Shouldn’t be long.”
On her way to the elevator she stopped by the door and typed a code into the pad there, making red lights flash above the frame once. The guards followed her to the elevator, leaving us to our own devices.
Nate slowly turned to me, watching me carefully. At first I wondered if he was going to ream me again for forgetting about the food, but when he stepped up to where I was still sitting on the cot, I realized that it was concern that had him act like he was walking on eggshells.
“What?” I asked, unable to keep a certain bite out of my tone.
“Nothing,” he replied. “You okay?”
“Why shouldn’t I be?” If that came out with challenge, it wasn't intentional.
Nate shrugged, taking my defiance for what it was. “Wanna hit the shower, or shall I go first?”
“Why don’t you join me?” I suggested, sliding off the cot. “I could use someone to wash my back.”
His lips quirked up into a smile. “You are aware that there’s a good chance that the shower’s also under video surveillance?” I’d noticed the cameras in the corner before but hadn’t really paid any attention to them.
“Well, like that has bothered us in the past,” I offered. “Besides, wouldn’t you prefer them to get a good look at your ass rather than my tits?”
“True,” he agreed, grabbed my hand, and pulled me toward that ominous curtain. “Let’s hope for them that they’re smart enough to turn down the volume.”
Chapter 10
We hadn’t brought any spare clothes, and with the door locked, that left us only two options—except going buck-ass naked—either wear our sweaty, grimy gear again, or grab some of the scrubs that were stored on a shelf next to the shower. I went for the scrubs without hesitation, not bothering with my sports bra after staring at the grayish sweat stains left on the black nylon. Nate only pulled on a pair of green scrubs pants, leaving his torso bare. There was too much definition to his muscles, most of the subcutaneous fat gone. But that wasn’t what made me do a double take when he turned away from me.
“What’s that?” I asked, scrutinizing the puckered scars maybe a hand span below where the scar the rebar had left was. “When did you get shot?”
He looked down at the scars, idly scratching them before he turned away. “At the factory. You weren’t the only one who found out that bulletproof vests don’t really work when someone shoots you below where they cover your vital organs.”
I wondered if I should have felt bad for only noticing that now. Why he hadn’t told me was beyond me. Likely because he'd figured I had something else to concern myself with, like dying. And after I’d gotten better, I hadn’t really seen him naked much. It still weirded me out a little. Yet just like the scratch on my arm, the scars looked months old, not less than four weeks.
The elevator arriving postponed any answer that I might have given. Mako had been true to her word. There were two wrapped sandwiches there, two steaming bowls of soup and a huge platter heaped with chicken wings and potato wedges, a mountain of fruit, and a pitcher with lemonade. I knew that just seeing all that food should have made me salivate, but my stomach didn’t even grumble. Nate pulled the small cart holding all that into the room, but hesitated before he picked up one of the chicken wings.
“I doubt they’d poison us after they had all the chance in the world to drug us already,” I said.
He shrugged and dug in. I didn’t need the pointed look he gave me to do the same. The scrubs were loose enough on me to make it obvious that I needed food, and lots of it.
“Question,” I asked when the soup was gone, only crumbs remained on the platter, and we were halfway through the sandwiches. “Just how much higher is your metabolic rate than mine used to be? If I heal faster, there’s a good chance I’m also burning more energy.”
Nate mulled over that while he finished his BLT. “It depends on how active I am and how much damage my body has to heal, but about two to three times. When I don’t eat enough the first signs are that I get tired quicker and need more sleep. Next concentrating gets a little rough.”
“How many days are you past that stage?”
He shrugged, smiling wryly. “Two weeks, give or take? But I can go three weeks without food. It’s not pleasant, but I’ve done it before.”
“Willingly?” I knew that was a loaded question, but he didn’t shy away from responding.
“Yes and no. They starved us for a week, a few months after they’d ascertained that the serum was doing what it was supposed to do. After I left, I did it again, to see how far I could push myself. Eighteen days was where it got uncomfortable.”
“So not actually three entire weeks,” I said.
“Still needed four days to get back to where I could find the next burger joint, so it was twenty-two days,” he corrected. “Next time we have to ration, we’ll switch to insects.”
“Insects,” I deadpanned.
“Great source of protein, and you find them everywhere,” he explained, grinning at the face I was making. “Everything tastes the same to you now, so what’s to complain?”
“You’re serious.” I still wasn’t quite sure if he wasn’t just yanking my chain.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Nate said, stretching out on his cot. I wondered if I should have joined him, but remained on my own. They weren’t really designed to house two people, and after spending the last days crammed into the car, space was a luxury I was more than happy to indulge in. I still felt anxious about what would come of the tests, but considering that they hadn’t been waiting for us, weapons drawn, there was room for hope. I was clean, I had eaten enough that Nate had stopped scowling at me, and I felt moderately safe. Later, that might change, but for now I decided to just run with what I had.
I must have been more tired that I’d thought as I only woke up when Nate touched my shoulder, not at the arrival of the elevator. Dominic and some guy that I didn’t know were standing in the room, looking vaguely uncomfortable. Sitting up, I did my best to shake off the lingering grogginess. I was a little surprised that it was Dom who they’d sent up, presumably with the results on the sheet of paper that he was currently mangling in his hands. Maybe he just seemed so nervous because the guy next to him was pretty much at ease, his heavily tattooed arms crossed over his chest. When Dom saw that I was awake, he smiled at me, but it held a definite edge.
“Just spit it out,” I said, maybe a little more grumpy than warranted, but I was done being afraid. “Can’t really be worse than my last weeks have been.”
The scientist hedged around a moment longer, but then took the figurative hand I’d offered him.
“Fact is, you are infected,” he said, briefly glancing down at the printout. “It’s the same virus that the zombies are spreading, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, seeing as you were bitten.” Nate gave him a look that was a silent, “Oh, don’t you say?” making Dom scramble on. “And it’s not. The virus you have is a mutated version. As we don’t have any samples from the zombies you contracted it from we can’t be sure, but our geneticists are ninety percent sure it mutated after you contracted it, likely because of… the extenuating circumstances.” Another pause in which he tried not to look at Nate, but failed horribly.
“Is it stable?” I asked, wondering if that was a stupid question or not. “Can you even say that yet?”
Dom shrugged. “Bug guy, remember? You’re the virologist. I’m sure the guys here would love to do more tests, but if you ask me, it has to be stable unless you feel like your condition i
s deteriorating.”
Only when he continued to wait for my reply did I realize that he needed one. “Not sure how I would feel that, but I have been getting better, not worse. And none of the symptoms I’ve found got worse.” If anything, the light sensitivity seemed to have lessened over the past days of prologued exposure.
He glanced at the sheet one last time before he finally handed it over. There were only some scrawled remarks and percentages on it that I had a hard time deciphering.
“We’ll know more once we’ve analyzed where exactly the mutations are, but it’s not the same variant as the serum, if you were wondering,” he went on explaining. “We still don’t know exactly how they managed to manipulate the inert virus to make it active, if that was even what they did, whoever engineered the zombie variant. But the best guess right now is that the virus recombined with the serum version, that way introducing a mutation that is essentially the active virus but hasn’t triggered full conversion.”
Glancing from the paper to Nate, I noticed that he hadn’t missed that special formulation, either. “Full?” I asked.
Dom shrugged. “Essentially, your blood test came back screwed up. Your samples trigger all the zombie specific antibodies, but your virus titer is low, particularly in all other fluids than your blood. Might still be enough to infect someone, but no idea if that would mean whoever gets it would turn into a zombie, or stop at about where you are. The samples also trigger all the serum specific antibodies, but that was already partly true for the old results we have on file. From Aurora,” he clarified.
“So essentially, I’m what now? A hybrid?” I guessed.
“Genetically, yes,” Dom agreed, if hesitantly. “Practically…”
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 2 | Books 4-6 Page 44