What he settled on saying was a semi-grumbled, “You have your tasks, I have mine. We both should get going.”
Before I could reply, Cole interrupted our grandstanding conversation. “I got the camera feeds up, if anyone’s interested? Only from inside the BSL-4 cocoon, the others are fried for good. But it’s better than nothing.”
I pointedly continued our staring match for another second before I broke eye contact so I could round the desk and look at the display Cole was pointing at. Everything looked like it was supposed to, I realized after a moment of dreadful anticipation. After all, we’d been breathing that air for thirty minutes now—too late for any measures to save us, and nothing I could have done about it in the first place; but security was security.
“Does the decontamination system still work?” I asked as I continued to check what I could see of the rooms as the camera feeds cycled through them every few seconds.
“Check on the lab,” Cole reported, looking at a different display. “And on the decontamination showers, too. All systems green, and zero breach attempts.” Since the other logs had said the same, I wasn’t terribly comforted by that last statement, but it was something.
Looking at Hamilton, I considered. “We do whatever each of us has to do next, and then we go in there, I presume?”
“Correct.”
“So I have, what? An hour until then?”
Hamilton checked his watch. “One hour and twenty minutes. We go into the hot lab at exactly two hours after breach.”
I didn’t ask whether he’d calculated the insane amount of prep work we’d have to do, but figured that was his problem, not mine. And we did have those extra forty-five minutes on top of the four hours, if push came to shove. “Great. Can you engage the decon cycle from here? And when was the last one?”
Cole nodded. “I can, and just over three hours ago. Next one is scheduled in nine hours.” He paused. “Isn’t that a little paranoid even for you?”
I shrugged. “If it’s my life on the line, I like everything as squeaky clean as I can have it.” Casting another sidelong glance at Hamilton, I patted Cole’s shoulder. “Run the cycle. I’m not going to be the one who breaks his neck slipping in a puddle of formaldehyde.”
I didn’t wait for Hamilton to add anything to that as I walked out of the room, Nate following me, a slight smile playing around his lips. I rolled my eyes at him, as if he was the petty one. Burns was waiting for us outside, clearly having watched the spectacle from there, next to Richards, Munez, and Davis. “I presume you’re coming with me to search through Dr. Andrada’s office?”
Red nodded. “And the other two scientists’ as well,” he reminded me. “That is, if you’re done here?”
“Quite.”
Although we knew exactly where we were headed, Richards and Nate still checked on the blueprints once more before we set out, me and Burns trailing behind the others. As soon as we were at the top of the stairs leading to the upper floor and outside of the downstairs view, I let go of the relaxed demeanor I’d tried so hard to keep going, letting my body snap to full alertness. The chuckle coming from behind me let me know that Burns had noticed the difference. Well, good for him.
With only six people, it was impossible to secure the corridors and offices as we passed them, but since the space here was only reaching as far as the area we’d passed down below, not the wings to the sides, it was less of a worry than it could have been. I still strained my ears for any sounds coming from anywhere that weren’t caused by us, but the echoey hallways remained unremarkably so. Within ten minutes, we’d made a quick tour through the entire area and returned to door number 312—Dr. Rosamie Andrada’s office.
Nate did a quick sweep before he let me in—not much work seeing as it was just a desk, a chair, a cupboard, and all available wall space filled with shelves, no place to hide for anything that was larger than a mouse. It wasn’t even a large office as those went, making me guess that she’d been a junior among the senior scientists. There were a few personal items, among them a photograph of a large, beige dog, but everything screamed professional and tidy.
I didn’t even check on the laptop, simply signaled Richards to pack it up. Her lab journals were next, but after the third I checked I shook my head. “We won’t find anything in there that’s not typed up if it’s important. That’s all the official documentation, and you already have that.” I still rifled through two more in another section, then turned to Davis, who was trying to pay attention but seemed really bored. “Can you look all these over? Just check if you find anything out of the ordinary, like a piece of paper that doesn’t belong, or whatnot.”
“Think she hid something in there, in plain sight?” Davis guessed, already setting to the task.
“Got anything better to do?” I asked, then turned to the others. “Do the same with her books. We have another hour, and this is the best place around.” Then I turned to Red and silently pointed at my mic before giving a questioning shrug. He considered, raising three fingers—switch to channel three. Munez and Davis looked puzzled at the order but did so just as Nate, Burns, and I did. There was still a chance someone might be listening in, and we’d get the general alerts on the main frequency, but I didn’t need to make it easy for Hamilton. The fact that we hadn’t heard a peep from him and the others made it obvious that they were doing the same thing, only with a different frequency.
“What do you hope to find, anyway?” Richards asked as I started going through the things filed away on top of the desk.
“I’ll know it when I see it,” I replied, mostly focused on my work. “Not sure there is anything to find here. Her home address would make a lot more sense for anything she might have wanted to hide from the powers that be.”
I checked the desk drawers next, but again, nothing. The only moderately interesting item I came across was a bottle of ink, which made me laugh for the simple fact that it must have been the most useless item in the entire post-apocalyptic world. Fucking ink! Richards meanwhile poked around the cupboard where I could see more files neatly put away. I wondered how a woman that pedantic had dealt with dog hairs.
“That’s old school,” Red muttered, making me look up from my drawer.
“Say what?”
He held up a bundle of envelopes. “Letters. Actual handwritten letters. I didn’t know anyone did that anymore.”
I shrugged, not quite sure what to respond. The only remarkable thing about them was that she’d stashed them in her office, but considering the work hours she must have kept, she’d probably not had time for private correspondence at home. Unless…
“Who are they from?”
“Doesn’t say,” Richards offered after checking the envelopes, then went as far as pulling one out and scanning it. “Signature says, ‘Lee.’”
I was ready to forget all about that but Nate suddenly stepped up to Red, looking at the letter in his hand. “That’s my brother’s handwriting.”
I immediately dropped the inventory note I had been looking over and joined them. “You sure?” I asked quite needlessly. Raleigh. Lee. Close enough, and you’d think that Nate would recognize his brother’s scrawl. Or penmanship, rather, I corrected myself as I got a glimpse at the letter. I couldn’t have written anything that curly and plain legible if I’d tried. “What does it say?”
Nate continued to read the letter while Red started on a new one, leaving the rest of the envelopes on the cupboard. I pulled another one out, checking the date first—a few months before Raleigh Miller’s untimely death. This could be good. Like really good…
Only that it wasn’t.
“What the fuck is this? Some kind of code?” I asked as I finished the first page—of six. It read like a school assignment, What I Did In My Summer Holidays, only way more boring because Miller hadn’t been on vacation. He didn’t even passingly mention his work, or anything else that might have been remotely interesting to us. And it wasn’t a love letter, either, the only other valid o
ption that came to mind.
Nate shrugged, frustrated himself. “No fucking clue. If it is, I don’t think we can decipher it.”
Grunting, I put the letter back, ready to continue searching… but then paused. Something tickled my mind. Something… I’d seen. Just where? And when?
“Gah, I hate this,” I muttered, looking around mostly to distract myself, hoping to jump-start my memory this way.
“Life in general, or just working with people you can’t stand, to accomplish something you don’t believe in?” Richards snidely observed.
He got a brief, sweet smile for his trouble but I talked to Nate instead. If anyone could jog my memory, it would be him. “Do you ever feel like if you could just concentrate hard enough, you’d remember something you really needed to know?” Far be it from me to hope that the reply I had coming for that nonsense would help.
Only that, for once in my life, he didn’t make fun of me for waxing platitudes but instead looked at me with interest. “Booster.”
“Huh?”
“Cognitive enhancement can be a side effect of the booster,” Nate explained. “If you feel like your mind’s going off on something, it probably is.” He glanced at the letter I’d just dropped. “Anything you read in there?”
I shook my head. “No, it wasn’t connected to the contents. Just in general. Like—”
I glanced at the desk, but to no avail. It wasn’t like that cursed woman had left anything out there that could be inspiring, except for those two fancy pens she’d likely written her responses in—
“The ink!” I called out, already making a dive for the bottom drawer. Seconds later I resurfaced, a triumphant smile on my face. “Anyone got any blacklight? I’m sure I saw it in the logistics files at the destroyer for the decontamination protocol in case of getting mauled by something untoward.” Which was exactly what had happened with Rodriguez—and what the French had done when they’d scanned us for injuries.
Richards held out a small stick to me that he fished out of a pocket in his pants. “Here.”
Grinning, I picked up one of the letters and switched the light on. Nothing—until I turned it over, and the seemingly blank backside of the page was covered in softly glowing script. I only needed to read over two lines to know that I’d hit gold. “Gotcha.”
Nate and Red both craned their necks to see. Even to the uninitiated, the mention of “virus” and “serum” was a dead giveaway, as were the experimental setup conditions that followed. I started reading the letter from the top, more slowly this time to try to commit the contents to memory. Hey, if my mind was running at one hundred and twenty percent right now, I was getting the most out of that for sure.
Davis seemed absolutely flashed by my congeniality. “How the fuck did you get the idea that anyone would write with invisible ink?”
I shrugged, not quite sure how to explain. “She had two pens. There’s only one bottle of ink in her drawer. Made me wonder with what she’d inked the other pen.”
“She could have simply liked the color.”
“Dumb luck, I guess.” I couldn’t help but laugh. “That got me this far. Not going to let that hold me back now.”
While I continued reading the letters, Nate and Red got busy sorting them by date, and handing me the next one as soon as I finished the one I was occupied with. The earliest dated back almost three years before Raleigh’s death, and they had made quite a lot of progress—if not quite in the direction I’d expected.
I didn’t even notice that I had started rubbing my side absentmindedly with my free hand until Nate’s grunted, “Just don’t,” made me look up, confused. He caught my gaze, perfectly scowling. “Don’t,” he repeated. “The booster will start screwing with your mind if you key up but don’t have anything to burn off the adrenaline. Might be scintillating reading material but not that scintillating.”
I ignored him with a slight snort to myself—but dropped my hand to my side instead. My foot started tapping a few seconds later of its own account, and I realized that I was now rubbing my left thigh where the massive scar tissue from the zombie bites was, with the titanium parts that kept my femur together right underneath.
Red noticed, prompted by our conversation, no doubt. “Are you always this hyper when you’re physically inactive?”
Snorting, I shook my head. “Still not the h-word I’d be using.” So much for that. Back to reading.
Everyone was looking at me expectantly as I finished the last page, my mind churning with possibilities. “And?” Richards asked simply, but I was sure he was ready to wring my neck if I didn’t spit it out the very next second.
“They didn’t find a cure,” I offered, choosing the simplest version first. “But they were close to finalizing a version of the serum that came with most of the benefits yet without the final conversion.” I paused, tempted to keep my trap shut, but then barfed up the rest. “They also managed to, accidentally for the most part, generate a super-charged version.”
Davis snorted at the face I was making. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“None of the subjects they tested it on survived past sixty hours post inoculation,” I explained. “And they all went crazy way before that. Not really a good trade if you ask me.”
I got several solemn nods for that. Nate latched on to a different part of my statement. “I take it they didn’t test it on rats?”
I shook my head, grimacing. “Five test subjects, five negative results. There’s also a side note that makes me guess that they kept them afterward and put them in a single cell and watched which one would be the sole survivor, if you want to call it that. Number three, if you were wondering.”
“That means—” Red started, but I finished for him before he could.
“That means that whoever was running this facility was very aware of the trials, and likely also the materials used and took samples. There’s a chance that none of that made it out of this facility, but it’s not something that remained between Miller and Andrada. Hell, part of that could be the reason why it’s possible that we convert if you get in contact with the original activated virus. I also have no clue what she did after Miller died. I’d love to believe that she continued trying to hunt for a cure but the fact that they turned it all into a deathmatch makes me think that whoever funded this was way more interested in weaponizing it. Without the human trials, they might have kept this on the down-low, but not like this.” And who knew who else was aware of this? After all, Bucky had pretty much told me to my face that I didn’t know everything about what he was here to get.
Maybe I would do the world a favor if I somehow managed to shut us all in here and drowned us in peroxide and formaldehyde? The answer was likely a resounding “yes.”
Richards looked less disturbed than was good for my psyche. Nate gave me a considering look that let me know he was considering where to plant the explosives, right on track with my own reasoning. Burns tried hard to pretend he wasn’t considering the ramifications but the way he kept inching toward the door made it obvious that it only took a breath from me or Nate, and he’d help us do away with the other three to enact whatever plan we were hedging.
“So not exactly good news?” Red summed up what I’d said.
“It’s not all bad,” I admitted. “Actually, I think they were closer to finding the cure than they thought. I’d need to check her notes—if they are on that laptop—but I think that Miller was right with his initial assessment.”
“Which is?” Finally, a thread of exasperation appeared in Richards’s voice. So he was human after all.
I shrugged, but there was no sense denying it—and who knew, maybe this would turn into an extension of my lease on life? “That if he hired me, I’d be able to fit that last missing piece into their puzzle.” That sounded way less modest than it had in my head, making me smirk. “I’m not blowing my own horn. They both were experts in their own fields. I was beginning to be one in mine. Miller never confirmed it, but I g
ot the job offer from Green Fields Biotech after I’d shared the later stages of my thesis with him—sounds realistic that he figured my knowledge could complement theirs.”
“But you can’t tell right now what’s missing,” Red stressed.
I couldn’t help but cock my head to the side and regard him suspiciously. “And I probably wouldn’t tell you if I did. Not as long as we’re pretty much stranded in the middle of a shambler nightmare on the other side of the world. But I’m feeling generous right now so here’s an honest answer: Not right now, but I have some ideas from the notes Hamilton gave me to go over when we stayed with the French. And right there in these letters are a few more clues, ones that are missing from her official notes. Given enough time, I might come up with some theories. One of them might just be the one.”
Richards nodded, ignoring how exactly I phrased my answer, talking in suggestions rather than absolutes. He looked at the stack of letters next, considering.
“Are you going to take them to Emily? I’m sure she’d be extra nice to you if you dropped those in her lap,” I cooed.
I got a look that was shy of an attempt on my life for that—almost worthy of Nate but not quite getting there—but Richards finally grabbed the letters to store them away in his pack. “I’m sure that Dr. Raynor will appreciate getting a look at them,” he agreed, very levelly.
“Oh, come on! I’ve been horny as fuck because of that damn booster you shot me up with. The least you owe me is no more bullshit like that. We all know you two are a thing. No worries, nobody’s gonna judge you for having a thing for strong, older women who could eat you for dinner if they wanted to.”
If I’d sprouted a second head, Richards would have looked less taken aback. Nate allowed himself the hint of a grin but gave me a warning look, silently telling me that Red wasn’t necessarily the one I should antagonize. Burns was grinning outright, and Munez had a hard time not choking on his chuckle. Davis bit back a bark of laughter before turning to Burns. “Is she always like that? Because I’m starting to feel like I’ve missed out on a lot since deciding not to go with you bunch of idiots.” He had been one of Nate’s guys for his mission to avenge his brother but had decided to throw his lot in with Bucky when given the choice.
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 3 | Books 7-9 Page 90