“Well, I can take a guess,” I grumbled, trying to keep the anger out of my voice. Not his fault, and so far he’d done nothing but be exceptionally cooperative. More so than I deserved, likely. “But seeing as I’m already here, might as well get your version of the story.”
Blake behind us huffed, but we both ignored him. Dom scratched his chin, trying to decide how to phrase it. “Let’s just put it this way. The common theory is that you deliberately sent a walking time bomb into our midst to take our labs out.”
That was unexpected. My sidelong look seemed to portray that well enough, judging from how it made Dom fidget.
“Good to know that, for once, people overestimate me,” I offered with a harsh laugh, ignoring more chuffing—and clearly disbelieving—sounds coming from behind. “You really think that I planned to get captured, starve myself down to a breath above emaciation, run an entire day and night through the zombie-infested wilderness so I’d get picked up by a settlement just so I can get taken hostage by the asshole who, among other things, took great pride in repeatedly raping my former girlfriend, so I could infect him with my blood and send him over here, estimating exactly how long he’d remain alive with the delayed onset of infection and outbreak, and arrange none of your capable soldiers to permanently put him out of his misery so he could die, return, and take out scores of your people? I’m flattered, really.”
A hint of a smile crossed Dom’s face, confirming that I had more of an ally in him than I’d dared to hope. “If you put it like that—“
I didn’t reward that with a reply, but none was needed. I could tell that we were on the same page. In the end, it didn’t matter—much. “Sorry for the people who died,” I offered. “It shouldn’t have happened. None of it, but least of all innocent bystanders becoming collateral damage.”
Dom nodded, his mood somber. “It could have been much worse. Would have been if not for Stanton.”
That made me perk up. “Where is she?” I asked, trying to sound casual. “What happened?”
More disbelief until he realized that I really couldn’t have known. “When she heard about the commotion in the labs, she charged in and managed to shoot the zombie. Pure chance that she happened to walk by that early in the morning. Nobody knew why she’d even come to this part of the Silo; there’s only maintenance tunnels beyond the labs. Guess she needed a few moments of quiet before her shift.” Oh, I had an idea, but wisely kept my tongue. Dom barely paused to let me interject, and when I didn’t, he quickly went on. “They’d just started dissecting that thing when it happened. Stanton saved a good five people, but she got mauled badly.”
Fuck. That also explained why the last message hadn’t come from her. It fit the time frame well. Perfectly, actually, from what I could remember. The tech that had hailed us—and inadvertently sent us into Taggard’s trap—had done so late morning, likely after everything had been cleared up and he’d deemed it safe to call.
“So she’s dead.” No need to question that.
I was surprised when Dom shrugged. “Honestly? We don’t know. Of course we assumed she’d been infected, but she didn’t get sick for three days, and the wounds started to close and heal up normally. But then she got a heavy cold and got worse. Not much we could do for her here, but there were a few soldiers around who—“ He cut off, glancing back to Blake before resuming. “They said they had a research facility still up and running. She didn’t want to leave at first, but you know how it is. If you’ve already given up, no way you can try to survive. That’s the last we heard of her, so I assume she didn’t make it. They promised us they’d give her a proper burial in that case.”
Trepidation squeezed the air out of my lungs until I forced myself to take the next breath, but if she was already infected, I doubted anything like what had happened to Gussy and the other pregnant women would have happened to her. “She died a hero. I’m sure she didn’t regret that.”
“She was one of the good ones,” Dom agreed with me.
“That she was.” No protest from me, but a new layer of regret slowly settled into the depths of my mind.
“Progression was delayed to about two days of incubation time and three days from onset of symptoms until he expired, if you were wondering,” Dom went on, skipping right to where I’d not dared to venture yet—the science behind the gruesome stuff. “With Stanton, it was three days and an estimated five to seven, at the very least. As I said, we don’t know. With you it was two days, right? Regular progression.”
I nodded. “Nerve damage set in almost immediately, and I was running a fever by late afternoon, about three hours in? Virtually no incubation time, but they got me good. Norm is between five and twelve hours post-infection for minor wounds.”
“I can show you the updated computer models that we made. Later,” Dom added, glancing meaningfully at Blake before he fell silent again. Bless him.
We walked by another lab, this one dark and deserted. I was starting to wonder where Wilkes had exiled us to, when around another bend a last door appeared, this one with a somewhat agitated Sunny waiting for us. Apparently, whoever had informed Dom must have alerted Sunny to the fact that we were coming down here. He looked a lot less at ease seeing me than Dom had, but then our last visit had ended on somewhat rocky terms, with me being angry at him for cutting up my unborn child and him thinking me childish for it. Ah, the good old days. I greeted him with a raised hand and as much of a smile as I could muster. He did the same, visibly easing up. Why did everyone expect me to go right for their jugular these days? And that was before either Dom or Sunny’d had a chance to hear me out.
“This is it?” I assumed as Dom reached for the door handle, halting before he opened it.
“You could say that,” Dom murmured under his breath as he flipped on the lights. The stench of bleach was overwhelming as it hit my clogged nose. At least someone had tried to do some preliminary cleanup.
“Let me guess. This is where they tried to dissect the zombie,” I hazarded a somewhat informed guess. The bloodstains that had remained on the walls, resistant to anything but a good paint job or a sledgehammer, kind of gave it away. Only the bare workbenches remained with not a single bottle on them, but there must have been a lot of shattered glass.
“Yup,” remained Dom’s only answer. Turning to Sunny, he asked, “Nobody else coming?”
Sunny shook his head. “Just me. I’ll get everything we need from the other labs, once we know what we’ll need.”
They both went into the room, but before I could follow, Blake held me back, blocking the door by reaching across the frame in front of me. I looked up at him, not even bothering with a glare. Of late, that emotionless stare seemed to work much more effectively. “Yes?”
“You stay in there,” he stated in a deep bass befitting someone who’s chest resembled a barrel. “You sleep in there, you eat in there. You try to step out, and I’ll throw you right out into the snow.”
“What, no potty breaks?” I wisecracked.
“She can’t sleep in here!” Dom groused from inside the room. “This is a designated lab space. Certainly no consumption of food or liquids. There are a few maintenance rooms further down the corridor where you can put up makeshift quarters. Use that.”
Blake’s eyebrows drew together. “That’s not what Wilkes said—“
Dom huffed at him, looking mighty proud to have a reason to get into the beefcake’s face. “That’s what he meant, dumbass. If you need me to spell it out for you, I’ll vouch for her. You heard the commander. We have forty-eight hours. We won’t waste much on idle chatter but I’m not going to pull two all-nighters in a row. If you want to watch her sleep, be my guest. But it makes far more sense to put up a cot for her in the next room and get a comfy chair for yourself out here. Unless you want to come inside with us?”
Blake didn’t exactly blanch, but removed his arm so I could step inside. “You wait until I’m ready to get you,” he told me before he slammed the door shut. It was on
e of those without a glass pane to the outside so we were alone among ourselves.
Sunny didn’t waste a moment before he rounded on us. “What exactly is going on?” He stared imploringly at Dom first before he turned to me, his eyes scrunching up as he scrutinized me. “Are you sick?”
Outside, the redness around my nose and the bloodshot eyes could have easily been explained by the cold, but with my body slowly thawing up, they must have become more obvious. My eyes still burned from the bright overhead lights, but not just because of that.
“Kind of. Yes,” I started, then launched into my explanation—starting at feeling a little off at training which had ended with Nate knocking out my molar, and ending with the increasing signs of what felt more and more like a mix between a sinus infection and strep throat, if slow progressing ones. They both looked kind of scandalized when I started peeling off my clothes, but the moment Sunny’s gaze fell on the blooming bruise on my thigh, he stopped asking me what I thought I was doing mid-question, hunching over so he could get a good look. “Call me paranoid,” I joked as I held still, letting him do his thing. I was wearing the same underwear I’d donned in the settlement, so I was quite sure that it was only scientific fascination that got him putting his face there. “I’m infected with a virus that’s partly a hemorrhagic fever. That’s one hell of a bruise, and it’s not starting to fade.”
Sunny prodded it lightly, surprised when I didn’t flinch. “We should do a biopsy,” he concluded as he straightened, gesturing me to get dressed again as he turned to Dom. “So we do what? Run a full blood panel? I have a kit in my lab with testing strips for all kinds of things. I should get that.”
Dom nodded. “We should have enough prepped agar plates for the standard antibiotic resistance tests. I’ll make some more for the less common stuff.” Seeing my confusion, he shrugged. “If we plate the samples on antibiotics and find some where nothing grows, we could try dosing you with that and see if it goes away? Would be a shame if we get all alarmed and shit, and all you really need is a week’s course of Erythromycin. No offense to whoever did the testing in New Angeles, but that sounds like a load of cross-contamination and bullshit to me.” He indicated one of the lab stools. “Get comfortable while we get what we need to get started. Wanna lend a hand?”
I had to snort at Sunny’s weird look at Dom’s question. “Hey, just because I learned how to blindly field strip a gun doesn’t mean I don’t know how to work a pipette anymore. Just hand me the protocol and I’ll follow it like a trained little lab monkey.”
“Great.” Dom flashed me the first real grin, excitement pushing away bad memories quickly. “Go turn on the hoods in the back there, we’ll get some centrifuges and other stuff we need. There should be some spare incubators in the B-lab, right?”
“You can just take one from mine,” Sunny offered. “And we need an autoclave.” Scrutinizing me, he pulled open a drawer and handed a face mask to me. “Wear that.” When he saw me frown, he explained. “All of us will, but I don’t particularly want to breathe in anything that might come out of your lungs. Maybe you’re not infectious, but this is a closed air system in here. Let’s err on the side of caution.”
I watched them bumble out into the corridor, chatting excitedly between them. I figured that even if Blake intended to spy, he wouldn’t understand more than every fifth word. I felt a light wave of nostalgia as I put on the mask and some gloves before I walked over to the laminar flow hoods at the very back of the lab, switching them on after wiping the workspace inside down and closing the front up once more. I wasn’t really bothered about contaminants, but more than a decade of safety drills was surprisingly hard to ignore. Then I rolled back to one of the tables by the wall and waited for Sunny and Dom to return.
Maybe I really was too paranoid. Maybe this was nothing.
My thigh gave a painful twinge where my fingers kept drumming on the bruise. Not just painful like it hurt when you slammed into a desk corner, but a deep-seated kind of ache that I felt for several heartbeats longer after I’d removed my hand.
Maybe. But somehow, I was starting to doubt it.
Chapter 15
Dom’s protest to Blake aside, we ended up with a field cot rolled into the lab, and it soon saw some use in irregular intervals as one of us crashed there while the other two worked. None of the other scientists joined, but when Sunny stepped out for a smoke break toward the evening, he returned with an entire stack of handwritten notes and photocopies. Come close to me none of the others would, but curiosity was a devilish thing, eroding moral high grounds quicker than a scientist could rattle off the periodic table of elements. I would have lied had I insisted that I hadn’t been counting on that. Whatever else had changed in my life over the past year and a half, that was still a constant. Just as I hadn’t been able to brush Nate’s concern off and ignore the signs, none of them could sit idle and not wonder.
It had been forever since I’d last worked with bacteria, but the actual lab work wasn’t that hard. There was some fumbling involved on my part, but after a few—decidedly embarrassing—mistakes I got the gist of it, much to Dom’s amusement. Sunny eased up soon after that, the somewhat tense atmosphere turning collegial bordering on comfortable. I had a million anecdotes from my years working in labs somewhat better equipped than this one to regale them with, and for once an audience appreciative of them—something I couldn’t pass up. So far, everything was working splendidly.
What turned out to be tricky was the material we were working with. By the time Sunny had drawn the third vial of blood from my arm, the contents of the first were already congealing. I’d warned him about what the doc in New Angeles had told me, but he obviously hadn’t taken me seriously. Murmuring something about EDTA and the powers of chemistry, he started dumping an entire cocktail of reagents into the vials until he found the perfect balance that didn’t make it all look like goo—even if it was resembling pinkish water by then. More out of curiosity than expecting to see anything, Dom put some of the congealed goo on a slide to check it under the microscope, and came up a second later, cursing.
“That good, huh?” I hazarded a guess.
Rather than reply, he grabbed one of Sunny’s discarded dilution attempts and checked that. When he looked up at me this time, he was doing his best to school his features, but that alone told me more than I wanted to know. Ignoring my imploring stare, he turned to Sunny instead. “Let’s get started on the sensitivity tests right away. I can’t wait to see what grows on which plates.” That made me guess that my blood was teeming with bacteria, all right—which normally shouldn’t have been the case. That slide, still under the bright light of the microscope, kept calling my name, but I resisted. Whatever they’d find, I figured the Reader’s Digest version would be interesting enough.
After that first hitch, things went surprisingly smoothly. Dom was smearing agar plates for the antibody resistance tests, while Sunny was busy doing the Gram staining on the blood culture to try to narrow down what critters might be inhabiting the many spaces in my body where they shouldn’t be. I vaguely remembered that, usually, one needed to actually cultivate cells of any kind, including bacteria, to get enough growth so there was anything to stain, which just underlined my guess at how bad the results had looked under the microscope. Sunny had me prep the samples for PCR and Western blots, making me guess they’d run those same tests that all of us who later became the Lucky Thirteen had been subjected to when they’d so succinctly fished out those who’d received the serum before. Part of me felt like protesting, but they already had my profiles from that first test and when I’d recovered from the infection, I figured, so might as well check what my immune system was up to now.
Late afternoon turned into evening as I was slogging along, watching the blue bands on a gel electrophoresis separate slowly, when I heard Dom cursing from where he was checking on the plates he’d done earlier. The entire batch went straight from the incubator into a medical waste bag, with Dom continuing t
o mutter under his breath. By the time I stepped up to him to catch a look, he was already tying the bag off and bundled it into the small autoclave, set on destroying whatever had grown there.
“Likely some heavy cross-contamination,” Dom groused when he couldn’t ignore me any longer. “It’s pretty much the same across all plates. That’s virtually impossible, unless there was something in the agar itself. I’ll do them again.”
“Maybe not such a bad idea,” Sunny muttered from across the room. “But we should do some controls, too.” Looking up, he focused on me. “Think your folks would mind if we drew some blood from them as well? Your husband makes the most sense, seeing as we have his old profiles, too. And if there’s anyone who might catch anything from you, it’s him.”
It turned out, not only Nate was willing to get stuck with needles, but Burns, Tanner, Gita, and Jason insisted that they’d check their results against mine as well. It made sense—there was a chance that Burns might have gotten too close to me a time or two, same as Gita, while Tanner and Jason were the equal set of immune and normal controls that I hadn’t shared too much quality time with of late. It took us until midnight to prep everything and get the experiments and cultures started. Then all we could do was wait. Dom was the first to crash, his plates needing at least half a day to show realistic results, if at all, while Sunny continued to hog the microscope. I was a little surprised that their chief geneticist would be the one to do the bacterial stains, but as Dom had pointed out, they’d had a lot of time down here to catch up on each other’s fields of expertise. It had only made sense to try to get everyone up to par on all the fields of biology they’d neglected before the shit had hit the fan. Meanwhile, I’d learned to become pretty efficient at killing things. I still wasn’t sure which had been the better idea.
Sunny and Dom switched places at around 3:00 am when I insisted that I wasn’t really sleepy. A lie, but standing guard at all times of the night had made me pretty good at going on even when my body was screaming for rest. Besides, my contribution to the effort was basic lab tech level at best. I’d rather the experts were well-rested enough for their brains to work.
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 3 | Books 7-9 Page 21