“See something you like?” he asked, a playful lilt in his voice as he started pulling on the socks.
“Do you care?” I shot back, hoping that my increasing anxiety would bleach my face of any color that might have been rising in my cheeks under different circumstances.
“Every man cares what an attractive woman thinks of his physique.”
Touching the bruised and battered side of my face gingerly, I winced.
“Not feeling so attractive right now. And not that gossipy, either.”
He paused, grinning as he put his foot off the bench he'd used to pull the stockings on over the scrub pant legs, following regulations to a T. I silently handed him the roll of tape, then got my own socks rolled up and securely taped into place over my calves. Nothing worse than wandering socks when you're already in a space suit and can't adjust them for the next couple of hours.
“You still haven't answered my question,” I reminded him.
“Neither have you,” he observed.
I snorted.
“Because unraveling the mystery of whether I still have the hots for you or not is on the same scale as the question of whether or not you have any clue about putting on a positive pressure personnel suit?”
“Well, I know your answer already,” he teased, but then got serious. “I'm familiar with the safety regulations. I’ve worn a space suit before, but I'd be much obliged if you'd give me another rundown of the proceedings. As much as I don't mind dying for the cause, I don't want it to happen because of avoidable mistakes.”
I glared at him for another moment, then decided that I really had something more pressing to worry about than his cockiness.
“I have to check my suit anyway, so I'll do the checks on yours, too. Mind if I take point on this from here on until we leave the lab again?”
He shook his head and motioned for me to go ahead.
Exhaling slowly, I walked back out into the foyer, then continued on into the suit room. It was eerie seeing the entire rack of suits without vacancies, but then it didn't come as a surprise. Fetching some gloves, I told him to select a pair that fit him well, then taped them down and let him do mine over the standard latex gloves. His touch was deft but gentle, and entirely too distracting. I was glad when he was done and I could get our communicators, briefly explaining the functionality, but as they would be on the entire time, I didn't go into too much detail.
While I taped the first blue suit for the pressure check, I rattled off the explanations of what I was doing. Talking along while going through the motions was more soothing than I expected.
First, visual check for holes, paying special attention to the hazard zones of the gloves, feet, and visor seams. Next, tape the vents shut and connect the suit to pressurized air to inflate it enough to check for the hiss of air escaping through a previously missed leak. There was none, so I opened the suit back up, removed the tape, and handed it to him.
“Step into it one foot at a time. I’ll help you with the rest.”
He gave me a long-suffering look as if I was treating him like a child, so I didn't feel the least bit guilty when I let him figure out for himself how to wriggle his feet properly in place, then get the upper half of the suit on without banging his head or wrenching a shoulder. This obviously wasn't the first time he'd donned similar gear, but there was still that amount of uncertainty in his motions that came with lack of familiarity. I'd suffered the same when I got used to the whole procedure.
Once he was all zipped up, I helped him with the boots, then unhooked one of the red spiral air hoses and handed it to him, explaining how to connect and disconnect it from the suit. I had him practice it while I got my own gear ready, then watched him take a few experimental steps as I pulled on the suit.
The room seemed to close in on me as I pulled the zipper up and connected a hose to properly inflate the suit. Panic clawed at the back of my throat, poisoning my veins with adrenaline and locking muscles all over my body. Screwing my eyes shut, I forced myself to take a few even, deep breaths while the air hissed loudly in my ears.
I was safe. Nothing was going to happen to me. We were not going to handle anything that could kill me. The suits were precaution only. This was just like a training run. I knew that I simply had to get lost in the close comfort of the plastic encasing me and let the steady stream of air that rushed around me soothe me into the routine, and I would be fine.
“You really weren't kidding about the claustrophobia, eh?” came his mocking voice over the speakers of my com unit. Close as we were standing, I could still hear him directly, too, but using communicators made that entire “unhook yourself from the air supply so you can talk” hassle a thing of the past.
Turning slowly so that I faced him, I glared at him, wondering just how ridiculous the move must look.
“I'm really not in the mood for taunts right now.”
“I was just observing,” he amended. Not that he sounded chagrined, but he waved his hand in what might have been a mitigating gesture. “There's no need for you to freak out. The labs have been out of order for more than a day now, and I ran a full decontamination round last evening.”
“You did what?”
He flashed me a grin.
“Told you I have some experience with this. I'm really not keen on catching anything down here, so I checked the logs and initiated a full decontamination cycle in all rooms. Even if anyone left anything out in the open, we're good. Feeling better now?”
I considered that, but shook my head. “No, the fact that the leader of the terrorists who have taken over the building knows his way around the hot lab does not alleviate all my fears.”
He gave me a deadpan stare but broke it off when I just kept glaring back at him.
“I get it. You're scared shitless. That's why you think it's a good idea to get in my face. That's okay, I can handle you not worshiping the ground I tread on. But now that we're already here, all suited up, we might as well do what we came here for and get this over with.”
He unhooked his hose and swayed over to the door we'd entered through to pick up a small black device. I'd noticed him putting it there earlier but hadn't really paid any attention to it until now.
“What's that? We're not supposed to take anything into the lab with us without proper decontamination. And no electronics.”
Turning enough so that he could see me through the side of his visor, he offered me a small smile.
“I think I'll ignore those regulations. It's some kind of routing device that's cued into our main tech station. If we find a computer down here, I just need to plug it in and Dolores will be able to get all the files stored on there in no time. Or would you prefer it if we dismantled the hard drive and then somehow tried to decontaminate it without destroying all the data? Would make our endeavor here quite pointless, wouldn't you say?”
I swallowed the remark that I didn't really care, but then told myself that antagonizing him was the last thing I wanted to do while we were in here. Unhooking my own hose, I headed for the door that would lead us into the central corridor behind the air lock. He followed me without another word.
Logically, I knew that once the suit was fully prepped, there was clean air for six to eight minutes for me to breathe before I even had to think about hooking myself to the next hose, but the moment we'd cleared the airlock I threw myself at the next red lifeline and connected it to my suit. The familiar hiss of air rushing in didn't relax me, but it kept my panic at bay. Nate imitated my maneuver—if at a more measured pace—and patiently waited until I'd gotten myself under control enough to proceed.
Walking through the empty lab was eerie in itself. I was used to working alone at weird hours in my cell culture lab, but down here there'd always been a coordinated bustle of activity. Unlike in all other labs, the hot lab was run by specialists who did only what they were specialists for, not entire experiment runs from planning to finishing up. That usually meant that at any given time, there were at least f
ive if not ten people around for any experiment that was being conducted.
How Thecla and whoever else had been involved in that ominous Project Destiny had managed to hide it from the rest of the staff was beyond me.
That was, if they hadn't been involved, too. Somehow that didn't make me feel any better.
Trying my best to ignore my galloping pulse, I turned to face the central hallway rather than stare at the wall like a caged animal.
“Okay, let's do this. Biomolecule Production is the third door on the left. Stay with me, but I'll go in first and check that everything is where it's supposed to be.”
Nate could have added a scathing remark there but kept his tongue. At his nod, I disconnected the air hose and started walking down the hallway, trying to let routine take over. Even with fourteen months between now and the last time I'd been down here, it was deceptively easy to fall into my old rhythms.
My heart ached thinking back to that time. I'd felt so at home down here, finally part of a team where most of my eccentricities were valued as virtues, where people kept track of each other, cared... and killed innocent human beings behind a door I was now supposed to find. That thought was sobering, but did its own to disband the ghosts—and panic—of events past.
Just before we reached the door to my previous lab, I hooked up again and waited for him to do the same. He was still the picture of patience, making me wonder how nervous he must be.
Mostly to distract myself, I asked, “Where did you get your suit training?”
“Not anywhere you would have heard of,” he replied.
“As ominous as it sounds?” I ventured a guess.
He moved a little in what I presumed should have been a shrug.
“I had eighteen months to get this operation going, from the first bit of concrete information to acquiring special training, recruiting people, and gathering all the intel I could. I'm good, but I'm not good enough to get into a BSL-4 safety training course with only basic school chemistry for my main qualification.”
I considered asking him more about this, but right now wasn’t the time to obsess over how many drug lords funded labs that could rival the CDC's in equipment.
“Fair enough.”
With that, I disconnected the hose once more, turned to the door, and opened it.
Beyond, the lab looked exactly as I remembered.
This was rather anticlimactic. There should have been flashing lights, ominous stains on the walls, or at least an unscrewed container open in one of the hoods. Reality was your typical neat and clean, boring lab setup, with all clutter stored away and the hoods shut for the vaporized hydrogen peroxide to kill anything that might have been of organic origin once.
After a brief look around, I walked back to the door and signaled Nate to follow me. He surveyed the room with interest, and before I could ask what he planned to do next, he singled out the small maintenance panel half hidden next to one of the cabinets.
“That's the door?”
I nodded, feeling my throat constrict with something else than the panic that had been upsetting my equilibrium for the last half hour.
“It is.”
He nodded and made a beeline for it, taking a moment to grab a hose even when he seemed driven to get this over with fast. I was a lot more reluctant to follow him, but did when standing around uselessly didn't sound like a good alternative.
Unused to working with several sets of gloves—even though they were surprisingly manipulable—made him fumble, so I stepped up to help. Together we got the panel pried loose quickly, but behind it was the same old crawlspace I remembered.
“Maybe your plans were outdated?” I suggested, but shut up when he gave me the stink-eye. Seeing as with him it had a definitely homicidal quality, I figured it was for the best to let him see for himself.
My heart sank when the back wall of the maintenance cabinet swung into the adjacent room not twenty seconds later.
At first glance, the room looked like a cross between the lab we were standing in and a hospital room. The far wall was taken up by a one-way mirror that looked like a dark window, with a workstation and hood beside it. Closer to the door were two hospital beds, facing each other, bare except for the multiple leather straps dangling from the frame.
Nate walked through the door with determination, and with curiosity surpassing trepidation, I followed.
He ignored me as he made his way over to the workstation and table-mounted terminal, connecting his nifty black box that would hopefully do the work for us. That left me with either inspecting the beds or checking the hood and adjacent cabinet. For obvious reasons, I chose the latter.
More boring, everyday lab equipment waited for me there—boxes of autoclaved pipette tips, empty 15 and 50 milliliter tubes—and medical supplies that I didn't want to second-guess what they were for. There was also a small fridge and freezer, but they were both empty and turned off. The lack of ice and condensation buildup made me guess that they hadn't been in use in quite some time.
“Find anything useful?” I asked when I'd exhausted all my resources.
“That I can't type in these gloves,” came his surprisingly dry answer.
I sent him a pointed look that he missed as he was still staring at the keyboard with frustration.
“Maybe I can find a way around that,” I offered.
He ignored me, so I shrugged and went to the blank panel I'd seen set into the wall next to the hospital beds. Two taps with my index finger were enough to make the screen come alive. It didn't display the company logo as all touch screens inside the building normally did, but went straight to a folder full of video files. They were labeled in ascending order of numbers and short abbreviations—sample series.
There were no ports on this terminal so I figured he was better off with the other. I wondered if I should warn him, but then clicked on one of the files at random.
Thecla's face behind the visor of a blue suit appeared, and she started reading numbers and facts off a sheet she held somewhere off screen. Nate looked up briefly, but otherwise continued ignoring me. I figured he'd found the same—and likely a lot more—at the computer. Judging from the consistency in labeling, I figured that all of the files were Thecla's personal logs.
Listening to her confirm that the video they'd shown me before wasn't a fake was making me sick, but thankfully not yet in a way that would compromise the integrity—or at least comfort—of my suit. Until yesterday I'd had the joy of never having to deal with betrayal. Being forced to face it not once—with Nate—but twice now hurt on an even deeper level.
After about five minutes I shut the video off and checked some of the others. They were just more of the same—a chaotic log system not supposed to be seen by anyone but the woman who'd recorded it, and not just because of the horrible things she'd done. Bringing a personal recorder into the hot lab was impossible, and this terminal had clearly been the next best thing she could come up with.
“I think I got what we came for,” Nate let me know from across the room. I nodded absently and closed the video I'd been watching, but then paused when I saw that somewhere near the bottom of the second row of files one had a different title. It was also longer, fifteen minutes instead of the briefer other files.
My curiosity piqued, I tapped the screen to activate it, expecting more of the same.
Raleigh Miller's face appeared on the screen, unobscured by any suit or face shield, close enough to the camera to give it focusing troubles, his eyes narrowed and anger plain on his usually charming face.
“Thecla, you miserable bitch! If I get my hands around your throat I will choke you to death, then reanimate you, and choke you again.”
I shied away from the screen, not because of his threat, but seeing a ghost wasn't the most reassuring thing when I already felt leagues off my game. Common sense had me hit the screen again so that the video turned off, but before I could even look around and check whether Nate had noticed anything, he was right behind me
, one hand touching my upper arm lightly. Fear zoomed through me, sharp and acute; there was no guessing what he would do if he found not only proof of what had happened to his brother, but his first-hand log recount.
He looked surprisingly calm and composed, but his eyes were filled with a sadness that was so profound that it cut right through my terror and made me want to lessen his grief somehow. Giving someone a hug in a space suit was a bad idea, so I touched his hand where it was still resting on my arm. He looked from the screen to me, then back, before he used his other hand to reactivate the video.
It started from the beginning again and wasn't much better the second time around. After hissing into the camera, Raleigh moved back enough to let the autofocus do its thing while he pushed his fingers through his sweaty, disarrayed hair. Now that I knew that he was Nate’s brother, it was impossible for me not to see the family resemblance.
“This is your log, eh? Guess it will be my log for the next fifty hours or so. Oh, right, if that was version eight point four you stuck me with, it will be closer to forty, because by then I will have lost all coordination and will be unable to operate this fucking terminal.”
The camera shook briefly as he moved, and I realized that he must have punched the wall beside the terminal. If I hadn't met his brother in the meantime, I would have been surprised to see him get himself under control in less than the blink of an eye, but that trait seemed to run in the family.
“I've looked through some of your logs. I hope you don't expect me to keep a timetable. Finding myself on the other side leaves me somewhat disinclined to give you any useful data.” He went silent for a moment, looking away as if he was considering something. Then his eyes were back on the camera. “No, I think I'll use this entirely for self-gratification, seeing as you'll likely not let me have a last phone call to my relatives. What are you planning on telling them—that I was too stupid to follow the safety regulations I helped establish in this lab? That I was overworked and tired, making me infect myself? If you're stupid enough to use that excuse, you deserve what you have coming for you. But then you do anyway, after sticking a fucking needle into the side of my neck!”
The Green Fields Series Box Set: Books 1-3 Page 16