That made me look up sharply. “You call the last hours smooth sailing?”
His shrug was nothing if not nonchalant. “No casualties on my side, and almost no civilian. We scrounged together enough money so that I won't have unsavory drug lords breathing down my neck for a decade, and I'm here with you, doing what I came here to do. How is that not unfolding perfectly?”
Viewed like that, he was right. Only my personal perspective was somewhat different. It was impossible not to let that sour my mood. So instead of chatting on, I resigned myself to playing my part in his perfect little game, resenting him—and myself— just a little more.
Over the course of what felt like a small eternity but was likely closer to half an hour, I went through six tubes of adhesive, and we left a trail of empty gym bags and explosive wrappers behind. I'd kind of expected him to keep the last explosive for the room his brother died in, but we passed through that midway. There were still four explosives left in the last bag when he told me to use the remainder of the glue on the brick that he then stuck to the door of the room the viral stocks were kept in.
“Why not put that onto the walls inside the vault?” I asked, feeling a little stupid.
Nate finished setting up the detonator, then turned so he was looking at me.
“Because we can't get inside. This is the best we can do.”
He put the remaining bricks, complete with the blasting caps, at the foot of the wall left and right of that door.
“Why can't you get inside?” I asked. So far, none of the doors that usually required authentication via retina scanners had been barred to them.
“Because the vault is controlled by a different set of security measures. It was easy enough to blast through the others, but this one was too tricky for the limited time frame that we had. I've planned for that eventuality; with the strategically positioned explosives around the room, the walls should cave in. They are not reinforced.”
I still didn't quite get it.
“What's so different about this door?”
Even through the perpetual background noise of the hissing air hoses, the condescension in his voice was obvious.
“Have you ever been inside?” he inquired.
I shrugged, wondering how much the gesture was visible with the suit.
“Yes, a couple of times.”
For a moment he looked at me sharply, but then his enthusiasm muted.
“Alone?”
“No, always with Thecla. I'm not authorized to... oh.”
“Oh, indeed,” he agreed, mimicking the sound I'd made as my epiphany struck. “Only very few people are allowed to open the vault, and you're not one of them. Dolores cracked the general security override by allowing any valid ID in the general system to be accepted by the lab complex database, but the same didn't work on this door. Something about being unable to add any new entries without the right verification key. Don't ask me for the specifics; I know how to blow up a building, not its computer system.”
This time it wasn't fright exactly that made the fine hairs at the back of my neck stand on end. For a few seconds it was overwhelmingly hard to keep my mouth shut, but somehow, I managed. Why I did, I had no idea, but with my thoughts suddenly racing, that was nothing I wanted to concern myself with.
“So there was one more thing you wanted to show me?” I asked, referring back to our conversation on the way down here.
“It’s probably nothing,” he said—but the way he said it made me twice as suspicious about the entire thing as I’d already been.
“Yeah, right.”
His snort sent dissonant static over the com.
“Then I’ll let you be the judge of that,” he replied as he unhooked the air hose and started down the hall again—back to the secret room hidden behind my old workspace.
“Something on the terminal?” I ventured a guess—and stopped in my tracks as my mind zoomed to the next conclusion. “What exactly does one of your guys losing it have to do with whatever fucked-up things your brother was doing down here?”
Nate stopped and turned, and this time his smile couldn’t have been described as anything except sardonic. “You’ll see.”
I really didn’t like the sound of that. Not. At. All.
It took us only a minute to make it back there, and we stopped in front of the terminal. Like last time, the screen activated as soon as Nate touched it. He briefly scanned the list of files until he tapped the one showing Raleigh’s last hours. I wondered if he expected me to watch the entirety of it yet again, but instead he swished around with his fingers until he managed to activate the time control. He dragged his finger to about the last third of the bar and let go, making the video resume just as Raleigh said his last goodbye to his brother, again.
There were still five minutes remaining when the screen went black. I had a really bad feeling about this all of a sudden.
The screen remained dark for about ten seconds before it switched back to camera view, if of a different angle. The entire room was visible, shown from what looked like a camera that had been installed in the corner above the observation lounge window. The lab furniture and the two hospital beds were recognizable, with Raleigh’s body unmoving on the one to the right. The clock in the upper corner showed ten minutes and fifty hours—a little over two hours after Raleigh’s catalogued demise. With the different angle and more distance, it was hard to judge how extensive his physical deterioration had become by the end, but there were rivulets of blood dried from his nose, eyes, and ears, and I could make out several dark splotches of subdermal hematomas and lesions on his cheek, neck, and exposed arms. His scrubs likely covered more, judging from their soiled state. It was hard to watch, but nothing unexpected.
“Why are you showing me this?” I asked, turning partly so I could catch the look on Nate’s face. The impassive mask from before was back in place, but now he was quick to shush me.
“Just watch.”
“I don’t know—“
“Watch,” he interrupted my protest, his voice coming out pressed over the com. One hand settled securely between my shoulders—the worst show of support in history, if it was supposed to be that. More to oblige him than anything, I looked back to the screen—
And let out a shout and took an instinctive step back, or would have if not for the hand pressing harder against my spine now.
Raleigh was up and moving, but I wasn’t sure if I’d have called what he did “walking,” exactly. There was something fundamentally wrong about the way he moved, jerky and kind of uncoordinated. I had seen my share of sick people rise after their musculature had been partly atrophied, but this looked nothing like it. His limbs seemed to weigh a ton, judging from how much momentum he needed to gather for each motion. Yet his face remained impassive, not a muscle moving in his cheeks although he should have been scowling or frowning from exertion. If he would just look up…
Then I got my wish, and immediately rued my curiosity. His eyes—they weren’t empty, far from it. Mindless rage shone from them, and as if the camera catching that look was a clue, he screamed—a sound so primal that it made hair all over my body stand on end despite the perpetual overheating that always happened in the suit. That first scream was followed by a second, then a low moan that was even worse before Raleigh whipped around, grabbed the foot-end railing of the bed, and wrenched it away from the wall as if it weighed nothing. Metal groaned as it crashed into formica hard enough to leave a dent—which, considering the security standards the lab was built to should have been impossible. The thing on screen—it was hard to continue to think of it as my almost-mentor—wrenched the bed around again and into the other direction, this time succeeding in tearing the rail off completely. It wailed in triumph before it ran toward the only part not covered by the view—the observation window. The rail, wielded like a club, was smashed repeatedly into the glass, each dull impact making my body jerk with tension. Another scream that barely sounded like an animal’s, and I heard the g
lass splinter.
The sprinkler system engaged, automatically flooding the room with the hydrogen peroxide and formaldehyde vapor used for disinfection, the first fail-safe should any kind of contamination happen. Even tense with fright as I was, my heart went out to the creature, as nothing—macro nor microorganism—could survive that. Yet instead of dropping dead within the first few seconds of inhalation, it continued to rage on, until two minutes later it staggered back as the body started shutting down with hypoxia and systemic shock. More moaning and clawing at the air and floor followed until—finally—it remained motionless on the floor, dead for good now.
Neither of us moved as the video rolled on for another minute, and I wasn’t sure that I took more than a breath or two. I certainly welcomed the darkness of the screen when it finally came before it reverted to the file menu.
It was only when he removed his hand that I realized just how much pressure Nate had had to put up to keep me in place, making me stagger with the sudden missing support. Inhaling deeply, I turned to look at him, feeling cold sweat trickle down my neck and face.
“What the fuck was that?”
The look in Nate’s eyes was impassive, but even through the distortion of the visor I could see the line of his jaw stand out as he gnashed his teeth.
“That was the effect XLC34 has on one out of ten people exposed to it.”
“XLC34?”
He gave a quick jerk of a nod.
“The lab designation the virus has. At least I presume that Thecla infected Raleigh with the initial strain, because the one he’d been developing further to stabilize kills in less than a day after infection.”
I knew that this wasn’t the part of the information that my mind should have latched on to, but I couldn’t help myself. “What happens to the other nine?” I asked, my voice shaking slightly.
“They die.”
In a way, that answer felt like it was the lesser of two evils, but my mind wasn’t quite up to judging that yet correctly.
“Just… how is this even possible? He was too weak to remain upright just half a day into the infection. And then he just got up and…” I trailed off there, not sure how to go on.
Nate offered me a sardonic smile completely void of humor.
“I’m neither a doctor nor a scientist, so I can’t really give you an answer. But the official version is something along the lines of the virus attacking the central nervous system along with the brain, which shuts down one system after the other. Most die of cardiac arrest or pulmonary failure.”
Having a heart attack or suffocating didn’t sound pleasant, but considering what Raleigh had turned into… and my mind was so not ready to finish that thought yet. If ever.
“And the unofficial version?”
I got a snort for again jumping at the least obvious clue.
“I don’t know. What would you call something that appears to be dead for an hour or two, then suddenly attacks everything in sight, all teeth and claws?”
I opened my mouth, but closed it without anything coming out. My mind was in overdrive right now, panic making racing thoughts blow up before they’d led to the right connections—or not.
“Your guy, the one with the chocolate bar,” I started, my voice gaining strength as I went on. “That’s exactly what happened to him. I’m right, aren’t I?” Just seeing the jaded look in his eyes was confirmation enough—and kicked my fear up another notch or two. “But that’s fucking—“
“Impossible?” Nate supplied helpfully.
“Insane!” I finished, then frowned when something else occurred to me. “Wait. You knew. You knew that this could happen. You didn’t even hesitate to shoot him. And Thecla knew it, too. That’s what she meant with ‘it’s out there,’ right?”
He did me the courtesy not to play dumb.
“She saw this video, right? And was likely the one who had to dispose of the body and repair the damage by herself. Plus, I find it highly unlikely that she wasn’t aware of exactly what she had been working on.”
That was not the part that had my teeth on edge.
“Are you shitting me? Please tell me that this is not spreading out there, right fucking now?”
Just the fact that Nate seemed relatively unperturbed even in the face of my panicked interrogation should have been answer enough, but I needed to hear it from him like nothing before in my entire life.
“No. The virus remains stable once it has infected a host, and transmission hasn’t occurred in situ as far as I know.”
“As far as you know?!” I echoed, still on the verge of screaming. If not for the suits, I would have grabbed his shoulders and physically shaken him, whatever good that would have done me.
“It has been engineered to remain that way. Infection has to occur through injection. You’re the virologist, you tell me exactly how you people do it, but it has a built-in off-switch. As soon as it has infected a host, it deactivates the infection vectors, or some shit. Like with a vaccine, you can’t transfer it to another person. Not even a full blood transfusion would have that effect. Some kind of integration into the host’s DNA,” he explained, followed by a snort. “You’ll probably understand that a hell of a lot better than I do.”
There were viruses that worked that way, but I had yet to encounter one that wasn’t out to jump from host to host at the earliest convenience. Unlike bacteria or larger critters, viruses never turned parasitic. They were always a “in for the whole pot or nothing” kind of gamble.
“They engineered it like that?” I asked when I finally got a grip on my racing heart and managed to clear my mind a bit. “Whoever actually built this thing? Because Raleigh didn’t. He was working on the vaccine.” The more I’d scanned his research, the more obvious that had become—at least now, in hindsight. He certainly seemed to have made the already deadly virus a lot faster in its killing time—which might have been a small grace had it replicated freely and jumped from host to host, as fast-replicating viruses were usually the inefficient ones, killing their host long before effective spread to new hosts could occur. Just one of the reasons why everyone and their mother caught the common cold—virtually no deaths and a long window of contagion guaranteed a maximum of exposure potential.
And that I was rattling off these facts in the back of my mind bothered me on a different level.
Nate’s reply was a welcome reminder that I had more important things to focus on than the underlying biology of whatever it was that had killed his brother.
“The most commonly used strain, yes.”
Just like that, whatever calm I had managed to hold on to evaporated.
“So there are more?” I asked, back in the throes of my rising panic attack.
“Several. But that’s the only one I know of that anyone ever turned into a weaponized form.” With stats like what he’d told me—and I’d seen for myself, in action—I didn’t know if that was a relief. That the very thing existed was beyond mind-boggling.
“Does the CDC know of this?”
Nate shrugged, and even with the bulky suit it looked kind of smug. “Who do you think funded Raleigh’s research?”
It made sense, of course… but also didn’t. And the more I thought about this, the more questions came up in my mind—but first things first.
“So let me get this straight. You came here to destroy a CDC-funded operation that was trying to find a vaccine against some kind of supervirus? And you needed my help for that, telling me that it was the right thing to do?”
Thankfully, he refrained from pointing out that his exact words had been different, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t sound condescending as hell.
“I came here, and recruited your help, to find out what exactly happened to my brother, and put an end to it. Whatever his ideas or plans were, they died with him, as did his research. Or did you find any further files on this? Because we sure didn’t. That bitch killed him, and while I would have loved to put the fear of her life into her before she d
ied, I’m not regretting that she’s gone.”
Judging from the way she had looked when she’d gone for the grenade, I figured he’d gotten that wish either way.
“But this makes no sense! If she knew what he’d been working on, why kill him? Why?!” I shouted.
Nate remained mute at my outburst, his silence speaking louder than words.
“Hell if I know,” he admitted, defeat seeping back into his tone. “And that’s by far not the only hole in this story. As much as I’d like to have all the answers, I don’t, and with Raleigh and Thecla both dead, I doubt we’ll ever know.”
“You don’t have a lead on who financed this? Who at the CDC signed off on a billion-dollar check?” Suddenly, the very existence of Green Fields Biotech seemed so arbitrary. Two brilliant scientists banding together to build up their company that focused on basic research—the part of the field that paid the least, except for the patents, if they could sell them—and earned out within a decade, without ever developing some ground-breaking compound or procedure? “It’s all a front, isn’t it?”
This time every second he took to answer grated on my nerves. When he finally gave his reply, a hint of sympathy was plain in the look he gave me.
“Every scientist they ever employed was carefully vetted and selected for their skills and previous accomplishments. Meticulous work ethics, out-of-the-box thinking, a deeper understanding in the right fields that was perfectly suited for their goals. I doubt that more than a fraction of the people who worked here knew what they actually worked on. Have you never wondered why all the papers that came from basic research here could have been done by any grad student at any publicly funded university lab, while the company blew billions of dollars into research each year?”
That implication hurt, but then it made sense. To keep a low profile, they’d had to employ a number of pipetting monkeys to lead everyone who might have gone looking on quite the merry chase. That I’d been degraded to that stung on so many levels—and might just have saved my life, considering that it could easily have been me who drew Thecla’s ire, for whatever reason it had been directed at Raleigh Miller in the first place.
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