“Sixteen and counting,” Nate informed them, his voice dry but with a hard note to it now. I could see the tension mounting in his shoulders from where I still stood slightly behind him.
“Screw it,” the last soldier grumbled, turning around as he got back on his com. “Team eight is retreating. I repeat, team eight is retreating. They already set the charges. Sixteen minutes and counting.”
Nate didn’t hesitate to fall in behind the soldiers, and thankfully they set a pace that was almost too brisk to still call a walk. Over the drone their boots made, more gunfire and screaming sounded in the distance, but thankfully the corridors we crossed next were as deserted as when Nate and I had come up from the hot lab.
But what the ever-loving fuck was going on here?
We crossed two more intersections, then reached one of the connective hallways that went right by the seminar rooms below the cafeteria. Nate whistled loudly and held out his arm, making me stop and wait while he jerked his head to the side, indicating to the soldiers to take a right turn again. Now taking the lead, he veered back into the rabbit warren of the labs.
“Too much open space,” he commented as I eyed him askance.
The fact that neither of the soldiers rebelled to him taking charge was telling.
The sound of scuffling feet—a lot, like ten or so, and the steps didn’t sound like combat boots—picked up ahead of us, making Nate duck through a cell culture lab to traverse to yet another corridor. On the other side he stopped again and checked before we went on. I was glad that he knew where he was going, because I would have lost my orientation and likely run straight into the arms of, well, whatever else was out and about in the hallways.
Nate relaxed a little when we took another turn, and I realized that we'd made it into the wing that housed my workspace. The ground floor layout was different than the other levels, but still more familiar than any other part of the complex except for the hot lab.
“How much time do we still have?” I asked, trying not to sound too frantic, but failing.
Instead of replying, he got his radio out. “Status atrium.”
It took endless ten seconds until static changed to a pressed, female voice. The Ice Queen, I assumed.
“We've a barricade by the hostages. All three staircases are blocked. Good luck getting out of there.”
My stomach sank at the realization of what that meant, but Nate looked less grim than a second ago. Jerking his head to the side, he backtracked our steps for half a corridor, then went left and straight, wrenching open the door to one of the smaller stairwells.
“Didn't she just say that the staircases are blocked?” I asked.
“But this one's not connected to the atrium. Besides, how many staircases does the atrium have?”
He took the steps two at a time, forcing me to run after him if I wanted to keep up. I did a quick calculation in my head, not sure about the answer.
“Either six or eight.”
“Six,” he confirmed my guess. “Not three.”
“She could have meant on one side?” I hedged, not sure why I was even contradicting him.
We reached the third floor—my floor—and Nate eased the door open slowly to look outside, then motioned me through.
“It was a message. All exits into the atrium are blocked except one, and that's our way out.”
Slinking through the hallways I'd been walking through every day for the last fourteen months was eerie, but I tried not to let the familiarity lull me into complacency. Each step carried us closer to the atrium, and if I wasn't mistaken, we were angling for the side that was farthest away from the entrance. The intermingling sounds of voices and gunfire were more prevalent the closer we got, and it occurred to me that neither Nate nor the soldier had told their people to stand down. Our momentary truce seemed all the more temporary for that. Suddenly, having the soldiers at my back felt a lot less safe than seconds ago.
Then we finally reached the glass cathedral, and my pulse sped up with a twin feeling of hope and anxiety. I realized that we were standing roughly where I'd been peeking down into the atrium hours ago, not quite sneaky enough to avoid detection, which had ultimately lead to my capture.
A lot had happened since then, also to the structural integrity of the atrium.
Half of the opposite wall lay in ruins, partly caved in, glass shattered. At ground level I could make out what looked as if a giant had torn a hole through the wall, and a tank was stuck inside, flames and smoke billowing out of the hatch. The wall seemed to have collapsed around it, effectively closing off the breach it had presumably created, leaving barely enough room for a single person to squeeze through—if they didn't mind getting roasted or dying of smoke inhalation first.
Rubble, pieces of equipment, and at least fifteen dead or seriously wounded people in combat gear—and at least twice the number of other bodies—lay strewn across the floor, and an acrid smell made my nose itch and eyes tear up. Looking up and down the gallery we had stepped onto, I saw two more bodies on the floor to our left, with three of the not-quite-civilians standing over them.
Nate was shooting at them the moment I became aware of their presence, downing two. The soldiers took care of the last one. I shied back and tried to flatten myself against the wall, but Nate grabbed my arm and yanked me down into a crouching position instead. And not a moment too soon, as a barrage of fire opened from below, the bullets hitting the wall where my head had just been. The glass of the gallery balustrade cracked where a few of the less well-aimed shots struck, but it held, now looking like the safety glass car windshields are made of.
I was frantic with fear, the impulse to run contracting muscles all over my body, but the hand wrapped tightly around my forearm grounded me again. Nate didn't look at me, his eyes and the gun in his hand still trained on the heap of bodies a couple of yards down the walkway.
“Care to tell your guys to stand down?” Nate asked Martinez, but only got a shrug back from him when the soldier with the radio didn’t react. Ignoring them for the moment, Nate turned back to me. “There are at least thirty of those fuckers down there, just waiting for us to be stupid enough to get up. Across the atrium, right opposite of us, there are four more. You need to listen carefully, and do exactly what I say, when I say it.”
My ragged breaths were almost loud enough to drown out his low voice, but I felt myself nod as soon as he fell silent.
“Okay.”
Just then, one of the doors of the seminar rooms burst open, spilling out an entire group of screaming, rabid figures onto the gallery, maybe ten feet from us. The soldiers on the other side of the gallery decided that they'd given us enough attention and seamlessly joined the full barrage of shots that went off from all around me. Clapping my hands over my ears, I shrieked, panic clawing at my throat. The bodies fell one by one, creating yet more obstacles, but as soon as the last one stopped jerking from the bullets that hit it, Nate grabbed my arm and started pulling me forward, using a half scuttle, half crouch as he led me around them. I tried not to look too closely, but even so it was impossible not to notice that at least half of them had blood smeared all over the lower halves of their faces—and a few were missing chunks from their necks and exposed arms with gaping, bloody wounds left behind.
Then Nate’s phone made that annoying sound from before again, prompting him to utter a curse low under his breath.
“I hate to break it to you, but that was our ten-minute countdown. We have roughly three minutes to get down onto the ground floor, or this is going to end badly.”
“Three minutes?” I shrieked, my voice breathless enough not to carry far, but I hated that squeak.
Something moved underneath the bodies, making me scramble after him as fast as I could, the soldiers hot on our heels.
Right before we reached the back corner of the gallery, shots were fired from the other side, whizzing past our unprotected backs. Nate cursed but kept his rifle pointed toward the floor as the soldiers from the ot
her side of the gallery came toward us, moving as cautious as their comrades at our back—and a lot more intent on the dead than us. That he seemed to trust them all of a sudden made me incredibly wary, but then I remembered the police sniper on the roof. Just how many people did he know that some—like Martinez—felt confident to just fall in line with him if they got a good incentive for it?
Another of the doors behind the pile of bodies burst open, spilling an entire crowd out onto the gallery. The moment they saw us, they started surging forward, a mass of bodies so uncoordinated that they hindered each other immediately. Shots were fired, but Nate kept pulling me forward, while the others kept up with us, providing cover fire.
That put us directly next to the bank of elevators, and I finally got what exit route he'd been talking about.
“Shit, no!” I murmured, my voice getting drowned out by the racket all around me.
“That should keep them busy,” Nate grunted, then straightened and threw something at the mob. It dropped down right in front of them, then went up in smoke. “Incendiary grenade,” he pointed out, tossing another one over the destroyed glass railings to the soldiers below. One of those with us was rattling off a frantic status report, the words “stand down, stand down!” less of a relief than I’d thought them to be.
Dropping his rifle so that it hung across his chest, Nate crossed the last feet to the elevators. Beyond him, fire and smoke continued to obscure the other side of the gallery, hiding what possibly lurked around there.
Shoving his fingers between the closed elevator doors, Nate started prying them open, one of the soldiers quickly stepping up to help. By the time I'd reached him, they'd come apart enough to let someone through sideways.
Into the empty elevator shaft, that was.
Just looking down gave me vertigo, and my fingers convulsed into a fist. I must have let out some sound of distress because Nate gazed up, a look of concern crossing his face before it turned to clear-cut determination. Looking deep into my eyes, he gripped the sides of my head with surprising gentleness.
“What you did down in the BSL-4 lab was crazy. Crazy, and crazy dangerous. This? This is just like climbing on the monkey bars at the playground. You've done great so far, and I know you will take this in stride just like everything else. Okay?”
My lip quivered with fright, but I forced myself to let his confidence wrap around the iron cage panic had locked around my heart, and ease its grip on me.
“Okay.”
He held my gaze for another second, then dropped his hands, and after a last glance at the advancing mob eased himself through the doors.
For a moment it hit me as peculiar that, this once, he dropped his pseudo gentlemanly act, leaving me out here to the wolves, but when I followed him as quickly as my shaking limbs would let me, I saw that it was, in fact, the smart thing to do. Looking back, he made sure that I was watching him before he inched to the side of the shaft, gripped the rungs of the small ladder that was built right into the steel supports, and started climbing down.
He made it look so easy, and within seconds he was down an entire level. I knew I had to get going, but even when I didn't look beyond him further down the shaft, I felt like the entire world was spinning around me.
Then three shots hit the glass right where I was standing, startling me enough to almost let go of the strut I was clinging to and ending my sorry existence in the course of a seventy-foot fall. Screwing my eyes shut, I scrambled blindly for the next strut so I could move around the corner to the side, then forced them open as I started to lower myself.
Looking down between my body and the metal supports, I saw Nate hesitate below me, then send me an almost boyish grin.
“Just keep going. I'll catch you if you fall.”
That was certainly impossible, but for some reason, his words made me laugh. It was a high-pitched, cut-off, hysterical laugh that reverberated through my entire body, but it was the thing that shoved me into motion again. As soon as I was out of the way, the first of the soldiers squeezed himself through the doors, followed by Martinez—effectively barring my way back. So forward it was.
The ladder was just wide enough to allow me to place one foot there per rung, forcing me to keep climbing down at an asymmetrical pattern as I could never keep both of my hands at the same height. Quicker than I'd expected, I was down to level two, then one, and the tightness around my ribcage started to ease up.
Screams above me alarmed me to the fact that in my fright of falling down the shaft, I'd completely forgotten about the mob. How that was even possible, I didn't know, but that realization made me speed up.
Too late, I figured, when two bodies dropped down the shaft—one wearing combat armor, the other not—and the soldiers started shooting down the shaft, then four more bodies followed. Angry howls were suddenly loud below me, and something hot exploded across my left upper arm.
Shrieking, I let go before instinct could shut down the reaction. For only a moment I was airborne, then I crashed into something somewhat softer than the concrete floor and metal supports I'd expected to careen into. Pain raced up from my ankle, but I managed to stagger to my feet just as Nate let go of me, pushing me into the corner that wasn’t full of writhing, partly broken limbs. Not sparing a moment to check on me, he instead fired a couple of shots into the heap, his aim true.
I narrowly avoided being crushed by the next body falling down on us as I scrambled to the other side of the shaft, where strong hands grabbed my arms and pulled me up and out onto the main floor. Andrej gave me a quick grin before he pushed me forward, making way for Nate and the soldiers to follow me.
Panting heavily, I looked around. From here, the atrium looked even worse than three floors up. Except for the staircase the soldiers had apparently used to get up to the third floor gallery, all the exits were barricaded or otherwise blocked, a few of the doors so warped and twisted that they looked more like modern art than fire security doors. There were more dead bodies in the open spaces between the rubble than I'd thought, some of them burned. The front side of the glass cube had apparently been hit by something more powerful than guns, making it cave in, leaving shards of glass everywhere inside.
Around the elevator banks, extending almost to the wall on the side where the demolished tank had replaced the computer workstation, Nate’s people had barricaded themselves behind desks and what was left of the computer equipment. I counted eight of the hostages, Gabriel Greene, his assistant, and Elena Glover among them. None of them had guns pointed at them, but they were still cowering on the floor behind the barricades.
At the front of the atrium I saw a few more overturned parts of what had been the barricade to the outside world, now held by the soldiers that had stormed the building—but something had clearly gone wrong along the way, and not just because of the heavy resistance they had met. As I’d guessed from up above, only the minority of the bodies on the floor wore combat gear, and the soldiers seemed much more occupied with keeping the barricades up toward the outside world than the people they had been sent to eliminate. There was a perpetual din of screams and the occasional gunshots, interspersed by shouts coming from both camps to each other.
“We’re running out of time,” the Ice Queen remarked dryly as she walked over to Nate, giving him a cursory glance. The soldiers now piling up behind him she completely ignored. “Seven minutes. Cutting it a little close, aren't you?”
“You know me. My life is so bland and boring, I always have to find ways to make it more interesting,” Nate replied. “Who’s in charge?”
“Old friend of yours,” she said, just as a small group of soldiers—bristling with weapons—advanced on our position, all their rifles trained up at the upper floors. Glancing along their line of sight, I saw yet more movement above, making me guess that there were over a hundred people up there. Nate’s guys finally managed to wrench the elevator doors down here shut, but that didn’t seem to hinder the mindless jumpers that still thumped down into the
elevator shaft with a sickening array of crunching and splatting noises.
“Ah,” Nate murmured, turning toward the single man of the group not currently in a defensive position. “No surprise there.”
“Miller,” the man grunted out as he gave Nate a hostile look.
“Bucky,” Nate acknowledged, relaxing as if we had all the time in the world at our leisure. Turning to me, he explained, “That would be Captain John Hamilton, but you know how the guys are. Some need the nickname for the ego.”
In fact, I didn’t know, but thankfully no one expected me to join the conversation. Nate barely paused before he turned back to the soldier.
“What do you want? Twenty words or less, we’re kind of on a schedule here.”
Bucky gnashed his teeth, but sounded surprisingly jovial as he replied.
“The vaccine.”
Did everyone know about this damn virus but me?!
“There is no vaccine,” Nate replied, his tone more neutral than I expected, considering his personal involvement in the entire affair.
“I know that they were working on it. It has to be…”
“There is no vaccine,” Nate repeated. “They never managed to develop a working version of it. Before you ask, we have video footage of the lead scientist of the project getting infected after being dosed with their most promising candidate. Curious detail on the side, the one who infected him killed herself earlier last night. Besides, what stocks there were kept in the viral vault were manually destroyed.”
Bucky took that in with a stony look on his face, before his eyes zeroed in on me.
“Her?”
“Just my technical advisor,” Nate divulged, glancing at his watch again. “We’re out of time. The first charges will blow in just under a minute, and then we have exactly enough time to get out of the blast radius if we run like hell.”
I would have loved to know what the soldiers were doing here, and why anyone would send them for a vaccine that whoever had funded the project must have known wasn’t working—the part about Thecla not only infecting Raleigh but also dosing him with the supposed antidote was new to me, but Nate had clearly known about that from the start—was beyond me, but absolutely not my most pressing concern.
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