Green Fields: Incubation

by Adrienne Lecter

  That only left the rooms on the other side of the corridor, seeing as the next connective hallway was well behind the quickly narrowing window of movement that still remained to me.

  Thinking hard, I tried to decide which room might be best to hide in. Right across from my lab was the cell culture lab where all my experiments were conducted, but considering the speed they were working at, I would run straight into their arms if I went for that. Next was the large room where our floor's freezers and nitrogen tanks were stored, together with the huge centrifuges. I could probably hide behind one of those, but there was ample open space in between where I would get caught faster than I could duck away.

  Right across from the kitchen was the warm room for bacterial overnight cultures, packed with the suspension culture racks, two supply cabinets, and a workspace that was always so crowded on top and underneath that no one would notice if I pushed something away to create a small hidey-hole. Besides, it was set to a moderate sauna temperature of 37°C, and much preferable to the next door on the right that led into the -20°C cold room.

  With my mind made up, I only had to get there before anyone saw me. Easy peasy, eh?

  Not.

  The destruction crews were approaching fast. The one on the right was still two doors down, but the one on the left had now reached the lab next to the kitchen, with only a small supply room in between. Any moment now they would be done with it.

  Another cart came crashing out into the corridor to my right, and I didn't hesitate anymore. Pushing myself off the door frame, I ran the three steps it took to traverse the hallway, grabbed the heavy door handle of the warm room, and pulled it open.

  Never before had a slow moving door been that much of an annoyance to me.

  Noise and heat came at me in a moist wave, but I didn't care. Pushing on the inside now, I begged for the stupid door to open a little faster. The moment the gap was large enough for me to duck inside, I did, then pulled hard to make the door shut again.

  Normally, the mechanical hums and whines of the shaking culture bottles were soothing to me, but right then they turned into a searing hot knife at the back of my mind. It was impossible to judge how much noise the door had made as it shut, or if the sounds from inside the room had been audible beyond the corridor. Then again, they must have heard me crashing down out of the duct in the kitchen, too, and simply attributed it to the work of the other crew. Maybe that worked again?

  I didn't plan on pushing my luck, so instead of remaining just inside the door, I hastily stepped up to the workspace and started shoving the chemical waste containers aside to create some space at the end of the bench, right up to the wall. The best I could do with the table legs was a small crevice that made the ducts look roomy, barely wide enough for my shoulders to fit into, but it was better than being caught and dragged off to who knew where. Time was definitely working against me, so before I could have another freak-out because of the limited space I had to cram myself into, I crawled inside, backward, dragging one of the containers as close to me as possible.

  And then, I waited.

  Here at least it wasn't pitch black, even if my hiding space was pretty much the darkest corner of the room. I could still see a sliver over the containers surrounding me, except for the one I'd halfway pulled in behind me. Sitting there with my knees to my chest and my arms somehow wrapped around them, I could at least look at my watch, what little good that did me.

  The display read 5:07, an endless thirty-two minutes after I'd left the cell culture lab. To me it seemed like a small eternity already, and the constant level of adrenaline pumping through my veins was starting to take its toll. Try as I might, I couldn't keep my fingers from shaking as I waited and hoped, sitting in my corner, sweating like a pig as the drone of moving flasks surrounded me.

  Then the lights went out and I was suddenly sitting in the dark, while the flasks came to a whining halt as the machines stopped. In the sudden, eerie darkness the sound of the door swinging open was ominously loud, and I held my breath as I watched three people step into the room.

  Chapter 4

  Crammed into the small space at the end of the workbench, I couldn't see much besides some artificial light spilling into the room from outside, glinting on drawn weapons.

  I hadn't thought it possible, but my pulse started racing even more, to the point where I was certain that they had to hear my frantic heartbeat even though I didn't move a muscle. Wedged in as I was, I wasn't even sure if I could have moved had I wanted to. My muscles already started to burn, and the pain from my glorious exit from the ducts flared up anew. I did my best to ignore both.

  It got immediately easier when I heard a harsh, cold female voice talk in perfect English, with only a hint of an accent that I couldn't place. It was a different one than Andrej's.

  “Are you sure that you saw someone come in here?”

  My heart thudded harder while a fearful whimper tried to wrench itself from my throat. They'd seen me! They had fucking seen me!

  “Well, not exactly,” a male voice replied, a lot less sure than the woman's.

  “We heard some noise,” a second male voice supplied.

  “Crashes,” the woman responded snidely. “As in teams combing through rooms all over the building?”

  If I had to take a guess, she was annoyed with having to delegate tasks that were beneath her.

  “Maybe?” the first man replied, somewhat chagrined.

  “Could you two be any more incompetent!” the woman bit back, having none of it.

  “We think there was someone in the kitchen.” The second man stood up to her, if with less confidence than before.

  “In the kitchen,” she echoed. “And then ran into this room, without either of you actually seeing anything.”

  “Yes,” guy number one backed up his partner. “We were busy getting the protocol books, as we were told to.”

  Protocol books? Did they mean the lab protocols all personnel were required to keep? What use could that be to anyone? From experience I knew that it was hard enough to make sense of my own notes from a few months back. Having to rely on those of anyone else in my work group was a real bother, and to anyone not familiar with the experiments at all, it must have looked like so much gibberish. Why were they looking for that of all things? That was definitely something to think about once my mind wasn't about to turn into full flight mode.

  “Then where is that ghost you were chasing?”

  A bright beam from an industrial strength flashlight zoomed across the room, not even close to my hiding space.

  “But we saw—” guy number two started, but was swiftly cut off.

  “Fucking idiots,” the woman grumbled. Maybe she said more, but it got lost in the deafening sound of a rifle going off as bullets ripped through glass, plastic, and walls alike.

  The first seconds I was too startled to scream, although I doubted anyone would have heard it. Pain ripped through my ears, sharp and all-consuming. I felt still more shots going off and hitting all around me, but didn't hear them anymore. Then I managed to shove my left, uninjured hand into my mouth to mute the scream that I could no longer hold back. The muzzle flashes continued for about five seconds, then cut off, and moments later complete darkness surrounded me again.

  The sonic assault after the explosions had been bad, but it was nothing compared to the pain and disorientation that I felt now. All I could do was bite down on my hand and weep silently—presumably, as I still couldn't hear anything—and wait.

  The utter absence of sound went away as the unnerving drone of tinnitus set in, but I welcomed it. I'd never heard gunshots in real life, let alone unprotected and from up close, and it was not an experience that bore repeating.

  I knew when my hearing returned as I could make out the animalistic sounds coming in haphazard intervals out of my throat and chest. I didn't make them consciously, but I couldn't do anything to stop them. It cost me enough to remove my hand from between my teeth, and my whining cut
off in a sharp bark of laughter when I realized that I should disinfect the possible bite marks soon so they wouldn't get infected. Because human oral bacteria were the likeliest cause of danger to my life right now.

  I didn't check my watch for a small eternity while I listened to the sound of my heartbeat slowly calming down. Getting out of my crawl space seemed like the last thing on Earth that I should be doing. Just sitting there sounded like a damn fine idea.

  One thing was certain: these people didn't belong to any military force trying to help with the rescue effort. Combing through the labs I could have somehow reasoned away, but who in their right mind opened fire with an assault rifle inside a small room just because they were annoyed and possibly trying to scare up someone hiding in it? I had no idea if they'd been wearing ear protection, but even with noise-canceling headphones, that must have been a hell of a racket. Whatever was going on was not a humanitarian mission.

  I knew that my panic attack had passed when I felt curiosity seep into my thoughts.

  Checking my watch, I realized that I'd been very content to just be alive and hide from the world for almost an hour.

  Staying put was likely the smart thing to do. I didn't have food, but there was a sink at the other end of the room by the door, and as I didn't hear the faucet dripping, I assumed that it wasn't ruined. I was still sweating, but not as much as before, so I assumed that the environmental controls had been completely turned off as the lights went out, letting the room cool to normal temperature slowly. The scent of bacterial growth medium lay heavy in the air, making me guess that the culture bottles had taken the brunt of the rifle shots. The idea of leaving my cozy space to crawl across a floor full of glass, growth medium, and genetically modified enterobacteria wasn't exactly the definition of having a good day.

  The dark, sarcastic part of my mind supplied that at least the E. coli would have company if I had to defecate sooner or later. Would some unlucky undergrad student have to analyze the contents of that, too?

  My amusement was rather short-lived, and I tried to relax as much as possible in my current situation. Stupid notions aside, I had to decide what to do now, and only considering unrealistic options didn't make my day any brighter.

  If they were terrorists—and all signs pointed straight at that—there was no guarantee that I was safe just because I was hiding here. From what I could tell, they'd made a first round through the building to stir up all remaining personnel, which I'd evaded through means of air duct crawling. After that, they'd started tearing the labs apart to snatch up information. It still made no sense to grab the lab protocols if they could just as easily have checked the recent publications of each work group to see who was doing what, but maybe I was missing the point altogether. That part I was still very hesitant to make my mind up about.

  The utter destruction of the bacterial cultures could either have been step three, or just a declaration of madness in general. Both seemed to fit the bill so far.

  Extrapolating from that, it was hard to take a guess at what would come next, but I didn't think it beneath them for using the air conditioning system to gas out whoever had so far eluded them. Maybe I was just being understandably paranoid, but suddenly it sounded like a damn good idea to get to one of the safety checkpoints and outfit myself with a first-aid kit and a gas mask. If the coast was clear, I might either make it outside from there, or sneak down into the biosafety level three labs to don a light hazmat suit and respirator unit. I'd never been in the L3 labs housed in this part of the complex, but I knew that not all of them were with the hot lab I'd been working in that was set up in its separate bunker.

  Then it occurred to me that what they might be after was likely in one of those labs, and a cold shiver that had nothing to do with the drying sweat all over my body ran down my spine.

  Green Fields Biotech was mostly working in pharmacological and medical basic research with a few patents in vaccine development to spice things up, but as far as I knew, the most hazardous materials in the complex were your run-of-the-mill chemicals, not viral banks full of Ebola. We were a leading research lab for tuberculosis treatment and coronavirus vaccines, thus the L3 and L4 labs, but I couldn't fathom what a bunch of terrorists wanted with bacteria and viruses that vaccines and treatment methods were readily available for.

  It was then that I wondered once more if anyone had been in the L4 lab when the explosions had gone off. Suddenly the fact that the ventilation system and climate control was shut off took on an entirely new meaning.

  Chapter 5

  Until then, hiding had sounded like a perfectly acceptable option, but the moment I realized that the entire building could be compromised by a rapidly spreading disease that was unpleasant at the least and very likely lethal, every breath that I took turned into an inevitable time bomb. I'd landed my current job because of my thesis work on SARS. I was only too aware what might spread throughout the complex if the chain of security was compromised.

  Technically, the L3 and L4 labs were working completely autonomous, and the most likely security breach might happen by someone taking contaminated material outside with them. The gauntlet of decontamination showers and airlocks should prevent that if only trained personnel got anywhere near the hot labs, but the would-be Rambos who were combing through the labs up here and shot bacterial culture flasks for fun didn't sound remotely qualified for that.

  Thinking about all this, I realized that my priorities had just rearranged themselves.

  First, I needed to know exactly what was going on, right now.

  Second, I needed to get out of here, whatever the cost.

  It occurred to me that my reaction dipped not just a little into the melodramatic range, but I really didn't care.

  So bolstered was my survival instinct that I made it out of my tight, not-so-comfy space and across the wet, glass-strewn floor before dread's icy grip fastened around the back of my neck again. Yet, my mind was set, and not knowing got more and more unnerving by the second.

  Easing the door open, I looked outside.

  Once again the corridor lay abandoned, but in a much worse state than before. Carts were overturned, papers strewn everywhere, and substantial parts of the floor were covered in undefined liquids. I was doubly glad about my sturdy lab clogs, hoping that thick plastic would protect me from all the spillage.

  The kitchen across the corridor was dark now, but soft evening light streamed through the open lab doors. This time I wasn't fooled by the absence of patrolling guards and waited a full ten minutes before I opened the door completely and stepped into the hallway.

  I was met with silence, my uneven breaths the only sound in the world.

  First things first, I told myself, and slowly made my way to the nearest lab door. I would have preferred my own workspace, but for what I had in mind, any would do.

  There wasn't a flask still full or a beaker left whole, but I'd expected as much. Ignoring the general state of chaos, I stepped around the worst of it and worked my way through to the desks by the windows. Where I expected the neat array of black lab journals to rest was only a glaring hole in the otherwise overflowing bookcase.

  Next, I looked for the computers. Even with most people bringing their own laptops, each lab had a mostly outdated but still functional desktop unit. It didn't come as much of a surprise that the monitor lay smashed on the floor, and the case of the tower was a bullet-riddled ruin.

  The landline telephone hadn't fared much better, and the emergency line at the other end of the lab was dead.

  After this lab, I checked the next two and found still more of the same.

  The fourth lab was where my workplace had been since my very first day on the job, and seeing it in shambles now made me grow cold on an entirely different level. Trying hard to ignore that, I quickly traversed the room and reached for the top shelf near the window, almost howling with triumph when my fingers closed around the plastic casing of my cell phone.

  My surge of hope died when I
looked at the display and saw that I had no service, neither for calls or mobile internet. There was always stellar reception here, even when I took the phone with me into the lower floors to search for old publications in the archives, or used part of my lunch break to call Sam from the bathroom. Even in the thick of winter I'd never had connection problems. This was not the norm.

  Even if it was useless, I still held on to my phone but turned off the sound and vibration alerts. At worst, I could play a round of sudoku if I found myself wedged into another dark, cramped space, or throw it at someone's head to distract them.

  Armed like that, I stepped back out into the corridor, and after a moment's hesitation made my way into the cell culture lab. Maybe it was stupid to go check on my research when I had more pressing matters to attend to—like possibly staying alive—but as I was already here, I might as well look inside.

  Like everywhere else, the lights were shut off and the ever-present hum of the air conditioning units was glaringly absent, but that wasn't what made me halt in my tracks right inside the door. The already muted daylight spilling in around me wasn't enough to let me see more than a quarter of the room, but it was enough. The devastation I'd seen around the normal workspaces was nothing compared to what I glimpsed here. All the incubators were open, two even yanked off the bench they'd been sitting on and were now lying on the floor, cell culture dishes and red, spilled medium everywhere. All the hoods were trashed, and in front of them were heaps of shattered glass where the pipettes had all been smashed. A glance at the ceiling showed that they'd even yanked out the UV light tubes used for basic decontamination overnight when no one was working in the lab. Feeling a little brave, I hit the light switch, but nothing happened. The power was cut for good.

  With a sinking feeling in my stomach I went next door, only to be greeted with yet more of the same.