It made an escape attempt dicey as hell. Slowly, ever so fucking slowly, she twisted at her bindings. She strained in agonizing silence, pulling as hard as she could until her limbs shook. Eventually, after an hour of stifled grunts, she felt one of the sheets start to give away. It was the one clamped around her left ankle.
Fuck!! she screamed in silent rage. What good would a loose foot do her? Sweating harder than she had during Eng’s pathetic rutting, she laid-back to stare at the ceiling. Tears wanted to come. Now that she wasn’t fighting the sheet, fear over her terrible situation had her close to blubbering. The cold reality was that by letting the damned chink go to town on her, all she had done was hold off her death by a few hours.
There was no question, he would kill her. He would need to move and fast. He’d need to get out of the country. And he didn’t need her. He was an actual spy with the complete backing of his government, while she was just one woman who was now too petrified to go near an ATM for fear that her bank accounts were even then being monitored by the FBI. And who could she turn to? Certainly not Rhonofis, the French pharmaceutical company she had been spying for. They weren’t stupid, they would disavow all knowledge of her. She would bet her life on it.
So where did that leave her? In all likelihood she was even then being hunted by the police or the FBI, which meant there was no way she could go back to her apartment. And her car was back at Walton surrounded by zombies. She couldn’t go to her bank or to her mother’s or anywhere.
The only thing of real value that she possessed, the only bargaining chip left to her was the vial of Com-cells. It still sat in her lab coat. Eng had torn the coat off of her and had thrown it haphazardly to the side, not batting an eye when it made a “clunk” sound. Anna had nearly choked. How quickly would she have died if the vial had broken? Or would she have died at all? Another shudder ran down her back as she remembered the walking horrors around Walton.
Now, with the dark beginning to turn, she still didn’t know why she had kept the damned vial. It was, after all, direct and irrefutable evidence of her guilt.
She fell asleep and dreamed about a prison where all the other inmates were zombies. She found herself outside her cell with a chance to run away but there were more zombies out in the real world and so she ran back to the one place she was safe, her cell.
For his part, Eng slept like a baby. He couldn’t have been happier. Although it had been touch and go for a while there, he had accomplished every one of his goals: Thuy was dead, the Com-cells were now a catastrophic failure, and his supervisor in China was about to disgrace himself. Eng had heard through the grapevine that his superior back in China was about to begin testing a version of the Com-cells that could only end in a fiasco.
Even the fire had worked to his advantage. It had destroyed every scrap of evidence that linked Eng to whatever was happening around Walton. Really, the only evidence left was right there in the hotel room tied to the bed. Yes, things were looking rosy for Eng, and man if his balls weren’t aching in all the right ways.
He had dreamed about Anna. First about fucking her and then about killing her and, in his dreams, it had been easy. He had taken her lab coat, wrapped it around her throat and pulled until her face was purple and her eyes bulging black.
Eng came awake with the gray dishwater of morning light in the air. He gave the girl on the bed a look and thought about fire. One more blaze should do the trick. It would take away, not just fingerprints, but also fingers and every drop of Eng’s DNA he had left either on or in Anna. The one thing a fire wouldn’t take care of however, were dental records and Eng figured a chair leg applied thoroughly and ruthlessly would confound any dental expert.
These were the happy thoughts that had him smiling. He saw Anna pretending to sleep and that was just fine—in fact it was better than fine, it was perfect. Who needed to hear her whine and beg for her life? That sort of thing became annoying, fast.
He flicked on the TV, expecting to see the fire at Walton leading the news and he wasn’t disappointed. A few hundred deaths, a building going up like a bomb, a respected pharmaceutical company at the bottom of it all; this was what made for good television. But what was being displayed was more than he figured, a lot more.
This was Defcon 2. This was the National Guard being called out. This was a possible terrorist attack on American soil. This was the airports being closed and roadblocks thrown up over half the state. This was the President being briefed. There was even a shot of the old geezer stepping off Marine One, looking “concerned.”
It was a moment before Eng realized that it was canned footage. It was full light around the President in the shot and yet Washington DC was in the same time zone as the dinky motel where the sun was still twenty minutes from cracking the furthest horizon. Eng breathed a sigh of relief but it caught in his throat as he saw the crawl at the bottom of the screen: Travel restrictions are in place in the following counties: Putnam, Duchess, Orange, Ulster…
Eng had no idea what county the cheap roadside motel was in but he had a sinking feeling in his gut. Thinking that there was no way anyone would be looking for him for at least a week, and feeling his dick throb every time he had looked over at Anna, he had pulled over, the night before, at a motel ten minutes from Walton.
Now, he yanked out his smart phone, and gritted his teeth as he looked up a map of New York only to find... A second later, he spat out, “Cao ni ma!”
“What is it?” Anna asked, coyly, from the bed. She wasn’t stupid. She could read the scrolling words at the bottom of the television screen and knew what was happening. For her this was a golden opportunity. They were surrounded.
She envisioned searchlights and sirens, and barbed wire across every road with police cruisers sitting nose-to-nose as a secondary barrier. She pictured men in camo skulking in the tree line carrying big guns, and barking dogs going through the bushes, sniffing out anything with a pulse. There was little chance that Eng could get past any of that, but she could. If there was anyone on the face of the earth who could sweet-talk their way out of a bad situation it was Anna Holloway.
Eng needed her still, but neither of them knew just how much.
A world away at the Siangou Research and Development facility in Shanghai, China, the very place to which Eng was hoping to flee, a disaster was brewing on an epic scale.
From all outward appearances, the Tiesu Research Facility of Shanghai was state of the art. It boasted the finest western-made equipment money could buy and all the top researchers had either been trained overseas or at the Tsinghua University in Beijing, easily China’s top college.
Tiesu was a tall building and new; less than five years old. It gleamed wherever there was the least bit of glass or metal, and was a brilliant, stark white practically everywhere else. Its security rivaled the Pentagon’s both in depth and breadth, with checkpoints and armed guards on every floor. It seemed like the least likely place for a plague to originate and yet within six weeks, three billion zombies would be able to trace the source of their affliction back to one person.
Jiang Xiao, the facilities third highest ranking researcher strode through his labs with a blue mask held to his face. He wore latex gloves but nothing else in the way of protective gear, not even a lab coat. Ergot Alkaloids weren’t harmful in the tiny amounts being used in the preparation of his Com-cells. Just as Eng had predicted, Jiang had been stealing all the information that Eng had stolen from Dr. Riggs.
“Let me see the results,” he snapped, in sharp Mandarin, at one of the junior researchers the moment he came through the heavy steel doors of the number “9” room.
The labs were numbered with the most important projects quartered in the first three labs. There was a reason he’d stuck the Com-cell research so far in the back where only the newer scientists worked. As the chief scientific liaison, he had done his own manipulation of Eng’s findings, adding nitrogen and a tiny amount of sodium borohydride—a reducing agent in the bleach family—to the
mixture. He inserted just enough to ruin it and he wanted the researchers who were too new to question a thing.
And really, who would question a thing? Any negative issues would be blamed on Eng or the Americans, or one of the many underlings that were constantly under foot, and any positive outcome would be claimed by Jiang.
The junior researcher, one of the meek little ones he liked to brow beat, but which one it was he couldn’t tell behind her mask, smiled at him with her eyes in a way that made it seem as though she was in pain, and then pointed Jiang toward her station where she had the latest stats already on screen. The tenth round of testing showed results that were as dreadful as the first nine had been. Basically, nothing was happening.
“May I recommend changing one of the variables within the Com-cell, Dr. Xiao?” the junior researcher dared to ask. “It makes no sense to continue replicating the trial, endlessly.”
She was wrong, there was one perfectly good reason and that was to thoroughly discredit Eng and the American Com-cells. Jiang looked down at her, his face held in rigid lines that came to a sharp part in his neat black hair. “I don’t remember asking your opinion,” he said. His tone was haughty and his eyes hard. As always, he was snappish and exceedingly quick to offer harsh criticisms; at best it could be said that he treated his underlings as though they were his personal chattel and yet, if asked, he would describe his leadership as “fatherly.”
Dismissing the girl with the Ph.D., he clicked the mouse, bringing up the lab results of the unofficial research project, what he had told everyone was his own personal concept, when in truth it was the exact formula Eng had sent him—Riggs’ formula, the one that turned people into monsters. Behind the mask, a smile cracked Xiao’s generally humorless face. The tumors in the test rats had shrunk forty percent in three days.
“Excellent,” he whispered.
The junior assistant cleared her throat and he shot her a look from his coal-black eyes. She blanched at the look but steadied herself before saying: “There may be a problem with this project. I am so sorry, sir, but the anti-social behavior that we noted two days ago has increased.”
“And what did I say then?” he demanded.
“Uh…uh, you explained that the neurotropic activities of the ergot alkaloids may cause temporary hallucinations and attendant irrational behavior, but that the end result is worth the risk. That’s what you said, Dr. Xiao, however this is worse than that.”
“Show me,” he ordered, striding toward the kennels so quickly that the tiny junior researcher had to jog to keep up. As he waited for the researcher to punch in her door code, he fitted his mask on properly over his face. If there was a problem he was sure that it was the fault of one the young idiots working for him and there was no telling what they might have done.
The door opened and the girl stepped back, drawing her lab coat closer about her thin shoulders. She was afraid and for good reason. The noise in the room was surprising; there shouldn’t have been more than the occasional low squeak of the caged rats but it sounded, instead, as though there were a hundred snakes hissing in anger.
Xiao followed the noise past the official test subjects, who squirmed about in rat-fear, but otherwise looked fine. The problem was in the cages beyond them where his rats were. His rats had been injected with the same formula Dr. Lee’s had used in her project at Walton, the same formula that had been sabotaged by Eng, the same one that Eng had assured him would work miracles.
“What is this?” he demanded. “What did you do?”
His rats looked awful. Their usually glossy coats were clotted and nasty. Even though each enjoyed a cage to themselves they were patchy and mutilated as if they’d been fighting. The wounds wept a black substance and the same fluid dripped from their eyes.
His proximity to the cages riled them up to a higher degree. They hissed even louder and flung themselves against the thin metal bars to get at him. Some even tore at the bars with their jagged teeth; one somehow managed to break the metal.
Xiao turned to the girl in outrage. “Explain this!”
She hadn’t budged from the doorway and now she cringed back another step. “We believe this is a side effect of the Com-cells. We did not stray from your instructions.”
“I want to see the access logs. I want to know who fed them and what they fed them. Someone will pay for this…and you…”
“Doctor Yaoh.”
“Doctor Yaoh? You call yourself a doctor? If you’re a doctor why don’t you tell me what is coming from their eyes. Hmm?”
“We don’t know. You were in meetings all yesterday and you told us not to bother you at home and you said to run only the prescribed tests. You were very clear on that, sir.”
She was right but that didn’t absolve her in his eyes. “Do you not understand the first thing about taking initiative?” She kept her eyes on her clunky, sensible shoes. “I guess not. You have a lot to learn about science, Yaoh. We’ll start today. I want you to find out what that black fluid is. Run cultures and do a full blood panel on them. And then…then move them to the number three lab and increase their bio-status to Category B. Just in case.”
Category B required a much more stringent level of personal security: hoods with face-shields, gowns, and heavier rubber gloves and boots.
As per his instructions, the infected rats were moved, and in accordance with their training, all precautions were taken. The staff was glad to see the rats moved, especially Yaoh. These particular test subjects gave her the freaks and she had stepped back, allowing the other scientists to wrangle the hissing and squirming little demons into smaller transport cages.
Given the choice between touching the fiends and cleaning up after them, she happily chose the latter, right up until a piece of jagged metal punctured her glove and slid beneath her skin. The “9” laboratory hadn’t had its bio-safety level increased and all she had on was latex. She didn’t panic, not entirely, but she was afraid and disgusted nearly to the point of being nauseous. The rats had been revolting, filthy things, and the black goo had smelled of a toilet in one of the city slums where the water only ran every other day.
Cleaning the tiny pin-prick was her first concern. As she hurried to the sinks, she tore off the gloves and went through the ten-step procedure to clean a puncture wound, leaving off the final three steps: present one’s self to the building medical personnel, fill out an incident report, and present one’s self to one’s immediate supervisor.
Yaoh wasn’t about to put her neck right into the noose over such a small scratch. Jiang had a reputation for firing first and asking questions later and she needed the job. For five minutes, she scrubbed the wound until her flesh was red and raw. Satisfied that no germ could have survived, she reached for the paper towels and that was when she realized that in her haste she’d stuck her gloves in the front pocket of her lab coat instead of disposing of them properly in one of the bio receptacles.
She glanced around quickly to see if anyone caught the mistake and then slipped the soiled gloves out of her pocket and into the proper trash. She didn’t see that in the bottom of her pocket was a small drop of black goo.
It was just one mistake; one small breach of protocol—but it wouldn’t be the last.
Within thirty minutes Yaoh was wincing from a headache. In another thirty it was practicably unbearable and yet in the People’s Republic of China you couldn’t simply beg off work so easily, not if you wanted to keep your job. There was always the option of going to see the medical personnel, however Yaoh was suddenly feeling suspicious of them and their needles and their bright lights.
“I have a meeting,” Yaoh suddenly declared to the other scientists. “With a representative.” This stopped the friendly banter, which had been going around the room. Everyone’s mood had lightened now that the black-eyed rats had been moved much further down the hall; now they went thin lipped and their smiles took on a preformed appearance. Sudden meetings with a People’s Representative were usually an unpleasant
harbinger of things to come.
“It’s about my cousin,” Yaoh said, trying to assure them. “She’s…they think she’s a subversive but she isn’t.”
That helped, but only a little. Everyone in China had heard stories where investigations blossomed and grew deadly roots that reached out to strangle the guilty and the innocent alike.
One of the scientists, a man named Veng who had unruly, spiked hair, and wore glasses two centimeters thick, and who had a serious crush on the meek Yaoh, asked: “Do you need a character witness? I am more than willing to…”
“No,” Yaoh said, practically running out of the lab. With her head throbbing, she headed for the lady’s room, but at the door she heard voices on the other side. They would be loud as a roomful of hens, she just knew it. She knew they would cluck maddeningly and the sound would pound into her head making her grow crazy, making her want to hurt them. She already wanted to hurt them.
Barely holding herself together, she went for the elevators and rode one deep underground where it would be quiet and cool, and where there’d be fewer people to hear her moan. The basement was a labyrinth of storerooms and machinery and dark shadows if one knew where to look.
Yaoh searched out the dark to hide in. She found a room in which the lights had burned out. It was perfect. Not only was it properly gloomy, it was also piled to the ceiling with boxes of lab equipment, all of which clinked with the sound of glass on glass as she barricaded herself in.
Her mind was going—the pain was great and so too was the hate. It was awful and all she could think was that she had to hide, she had to burrow as far from people as she could get or she would hurt them. As fast as she could, she moved the boxes against the door, and all the while the sound of the lab equipment breaking went right along her nerves like someone dragging a needle across her brain.
Still she worked and she took the pain, knowing that it would be a blessing when all the boxes had been shipped to one side of the room and there was only quiet and dark.
The Apocalypse Crusade 2 Page 5