“Remember, in the gazebo?” Dunbar chimed in. “Will said that regular rabies can’t get a foothold in possums because their temperature is too low.”
“Yeah,” Heath nodded. “I think it’s a similar idea. There’s a list of mammals…with their temperatures next to each. They’re all just a few degree points different than the standard human ninety-eight point six. It says here they tested the virus on chimpanzees and they all survived. Chimps are primates, like humans, and they have the same body temperature we do. That’s probably why we didn’t get sick either.”
“I don’t see any monkeys around,” Emma said. “Where’d they go?”
“They probably destroyed the chimps once they had their results. Burned the bodies in an incinerator or something.” Heath wasn’t certain that was true, but it seemed the most likely explanation.
Emma pointed out the flaw in the scientists’ plan. “Looks like someone forgot to carry the one, because people are dying from the new virus.”
“Maybe that was all part of their plan,” noted Emily. “The airborne form of the virus doesn’t seem to affect us, but—”
“When it’s passed to humans in a heated liquid like saliva…instant death!” Emma finished her sister’s thought.
“Right,” said Heath. “I’m not sure how it’d work, exactly, but if they wanted to kill a lot of people without making it obvious that it was a military strike, releasing the virus into the surrounding woods would be an efficient way to make it happen. Let the animals tear the people apart and no one gets blamed but the local wildlife.”
“They were making a weapon!” Dunbar slammed his fist into his palm. The gesture looked silly, but his anger was understandable. “Just like in the movies. Dude! They were messing with nature, thinking they could control it, and then things blew up in their faces! Somehow the virus escaped into the open. Out into the woods. And then the cowards abandoned ship. Marshall…Uncle Bill…Camp Harmony is a graveyard because these idiots let this nightmare loose.”
“Probably so,” Heath said.
“So why’d they give all of the other animals in here rabies, too?” Emma asked.
Heath had an answer for that. “I think the hyena unintentionally infected them all. The virus went airborne through his scent glands—that soapy smell—and these other animals were just put here to see what’d happen to them.”
The group was stunned by the thought that all of this madness was orchestrated on purpose. Heath felt that together they’d worked out a pretty plausible picture of what had happened, and it was disturbing on so many levels.
“We have to find a phone,” Emma said. “Did anyone see—?”
The sound of tiny paws running across glass jerked their attention to the ceiling. What they saw above sent them into a panic.
“This place has skylights!” Emily gasped. “The whole ceiling is glass!”
They’d been so preoccupied with the hyena that they hadn’t noticed the large panes above their heads. In the dusk’s fading light, squirrels were crisscrossing over them, occasionally stopping to peer down inside. Little pools of drool were collecting on the surface directly beneath their dark faces. The light of the room reflected in their beady eyes and illuminated the white fur of their rapidly heaving underbellies. Every few seconds, one of them would try to chip at the glass with its teeth or rake the surface with its claws. The squirrels could see them and they wanted in.
“Forget the phone,” Heath said, leading the group back toward the doors. “We need to find someplace safe to hide. This room isn’t it.”
Miles came bursting into the lab. “Hey! You need to come quick, I think…” He looked around with wide eyes. “Ooookay. Is that a freakin’ moose?”
“What’s wrong?” Heath said, snapping his fingers to draw Miles’s attention.
“It’s Cricket,” Miles panted. “He’s having a seizure. It’s like every muscle in his body is locking up.”
Heath remembered Marshall’s list of the final stages of rabies: paralysis, coma, and then finally death.
“Guys, I think this is it,” Miles said. “We’re losing him.”
The group followed Miles in a sprint out the door and through the lab beyond. There were skylights in this room, too. As they were passing the video surveillance monitor strange moving shapes in the exterior feed caught Heath’s attention. Hoping it was Will, he circled around the desk and leaned into the screen. The cameras had automatically switched to night mode. The light from the monitor washed Heath’s face in a ghostly green glow. The camera was recording at the back of the building, aimed at a pine tree a few feet away from the facility’s back wall. The lower, thicker boughs seemed to stretch out over the roof, past the camera’s mount.
“Is that live?” Miles asked, leaning over Heath’s shoulder.
“Of course it’s live,” Heath told him.
Miles jaw sagged open. “Then that means—”
“Yeah.” Heath nodded. He tapped the screen. “It means that our two grizzly bears are climbing that tree right now. And it means they’ll be on the roof in seconds.”
Emma whispered, “Can the skylights—”
“Can they hold the weight of two full-grown grizzly bears without breaking?” Heath’s head felt so heavy with despair he could barely shake it. “I really doubt it.”
The ghost of Miner Bill
Came tapping at my door.
He’d left his gold in a till
Deep beneath my floor.
I didn’t open to look,
Not even just a sliver.
I overheard when Old Bill swore
He’d drown me in the river.
EMMA SHOVED THE BOYS aside and hogged the screen. She had one thought on her mind and everyone knew it. “If the bears are on top of the building, then where’s Will?”
The first bear had passed by the video camera and pulled itself onto the roof. The second bear was chewing on the camera, and the group got a good look at its cavities before the lens cracked and the image turned to static. “Do you think he led them up there?”
“Why would he do that?” Dunbar rejected the idea. “He’d be trapped. Easy pickings. Maybe they just got bored of waiting for him to come out of the river and followed our scent to the building.”
Heath reminded them, “We didn’t see him the last time the river was on the screen.”
“You have to use the arrow keys.” Miles leaned in and tapped the keyboard and the live exterior feed blew up to fill the whole screen, shunting the other three boxes out of sight. Then with every tap of the arrow key, a new view replaced the old. “There’s probably a letter key assigned to each of the cameras, but the arrow keys will control them, too.”
Heath was impressed. “How do you know all this?”
“Dude, I told you my dad was in prison, right? They only allowed one visitor at a time, so when my mom was with him, I’d wait by the guard cage. I’d love to be a guard someday. Those guys are pretty cool. They showed me how the prison’s surveillance system worked and even let me play with it a little. It was the same basic setup as this one. Aaaand here we go. Voilà!”
The river popped onscreen.
“No Will,” Heath said. “He’s gone.”
“I’ll keep looking for him,” Miles said, sweeping Emma away from the monitor. “You guys go help Cricket.”
The foursome turned to leave but stopped when Miles jerked back from the desk with a startled, “Whoa!”
The camera he’d tapped into was positioned on a pole facing the front entrance to the building. They could see Cricket through the glass. He’d fallen off the bench and was lying facedown, sprawled out on the floor. Outside the building, a gathering of animals larger than any that had followed them before was milling about the small parking lot. Several animals were pacing in front of the glass, like customers window-shopping at a butc
her’s store. Cricket was the daily special.
Heath’s heart raced. He wanted to scream when he saw the scarred wolf. He pointed at a collection of pixels in the bottom corner. “There’s the alpha. The leader.”
“Are you sure?” Dunbar asked.
“Yeah, I’m sure. Look at the scars on her muzzle.” It was Quilt Face all right.
“No way,” Emma said. “Her pack found us?”
“Not just her pack.” Heath moved his finger around the screen, pointing out several dark shapes around the she-wolf. “There’re a dozen or more of them out there. Her family must have merged with another. A super-pack, like the bat swarm.”
It wasn’t just wolves stalking Cricket. There were deer, dogs, three mountain lions, a lynx, a red fox, coyotes, small ferrety creatures that were either ermines or minks, and an enormous animal that resembled a deer but was much larger and therefore had to be an elk.
“Look at the rack on that thing!” Miles whistled.
Its antlers weren’t quite as large as the moose’s, but they looked more dangerous with their many sharpened points. Heath thought of Marshall, skewered like a roasted pig on the rack of the buck back at camp.
Almost as if it sensed it was in the spotlight, the elk charged the building, ramming its head against the window with a loud bang.
“I didn’t know the camera feed had sound,” Heath said.
Miles shook his head. “It doesn’t. We heard that from all the way down the hallway.”
The elk shook off the pain and trotted away, revealing a hairline fracture in the glass.
“That window is tough, but it isn’t bulletproof,” Emily noted. “If the elk rams it again, it’ll shatter.”
Heath sprinted toward the exit. “I’ll get Cricket. You guys find a place we can hide. Hurry!”
He ran down the long corridor and stopped at the open door to the foyer. He hung back in the shadows for a moment, took a deep breath, then raced into the room. As soon as Quilt Face saw him she went berserk. She rose up on her hind legs and began scratching and biting feverishly at the glass. Her tongue folded against the window, her face blurred behind her smearing spit. The other wolves sprinted back and forth across the parking lot, growling in support of their leader.
“You can’t have us!” Heath hollered at the she-wolf, which only provoked her further. She rammed the side of her face hard against the window and a tiny web of cracks appeared, but she was dazed and paused to recover. Quilt Face never took her eyes off Heath, not even when a trickle of blood traveled down her forehead, ran the length of her nose, and dripped into her mouth, between her sharp teeth. If anything, the taste of her own blood seemed to make her crazier.
Heath knelt down and scooped Cricket up in his arms. The vines of infection were spreading across his belly, toward his heart. It was time to go.
A mountain lion slammed against the glass door with its oversized paws, but the door didn’t budge. The big cat swished its tail and growled angrily. Only at the last moment did Heath see the elk behind it, charging again, head down, antlers aimed like a dozen spears in his direction. The mountain lion’s head squished like a grape beneath the elk’s heavy hoof.
Heath carried Cricket into the hallway and kicked the doorstop loose just as the elk exploded into the room, smashing the door to a million bits of glass, which showered down around the animal. A large shard sliced into the elk’s neck, killing it instantly. The beast fell to the carpet with a tremendous thud and the sound of crunching glass. Quilt Face leapt into the foyer, bounded over the elk’s body, and reached the metal door to the hallway just as it slammed shut in her furious patchwork face. She rose up on her hind legs and glared at Heath through the tiny porthole. He leaned in until only a thick square of glass and a few inches of air separated their faces. He was so close he could see the scarred black skin on her snout where her fur had refused to grow back. Despite her wounds, she was quite magnificent. They both stared into each others’ eyes for several seconds, their breath fogging the glass. Then the wolf dropped from sight and the porthole was empty. “You blinked,” Heath said triumphantly. “I win.”
Heath met Miles in the hallway and passed Cricket off to him.
“We found a place!”
“Where?” Heath asked.
“There’s another hallway off the lab. It leads to the back end of the building. There’s a bunch of rooms there—offices, more labs, a kitchen. They’ve all got skylights, too, though.”
“You found the kitchen? With the heavy duty freezers?” Heath hoped it was the room he’d seen in the surveillance monitor.
“Yeah, why?”
“Show me.”
As the boys jogged through the winding hallway, Miles continued, “There’s a warehouse area. Steel doors that lock from the inside. Metal roof. No glass anywhere.”
“Great! Is it safe?”
“Well, there’s a bay door that leads to the back parking lot, but it’s chained and locked. We couldn’t see any other way inside. We should be okay.”
“Take Cricket there,” Heath instructed.
“You’re coming, right, dude?”
“I’ll catch up. I need to check something first.”
“This is it.” Miles stopped at a small room on the right. “That’s the kitchen. You are coming, Heath?”
“I’ll be there in a minute,” he promised. “Get Cricket into the warehouse and lock the door. I’ll knock when I get there.”
“How will we know it’s you?” Miles asked.
“Because animals don’t knock.” Heath gave him a weak smile.
“Oh, yeah. Sorry. I’m not thinking straight.”
“I know the feeling. Now get going, Miles. I’ll be right behind you.”
Heath entered the kitchen and started rummaging through drawers and cabinets. It didn’t take him long before he found a prize, several kinds of painkillers, including OxyContin. It was a lab that dealt in pain, so he wasn’t too surprised. He squinched the sides of the cap and twisted, popping it open. Two pills rolled out into his palm. He’d been in near constant agony for hours, although he’d tried his best to shove it from his mind. The pills would make the pain go away. He lifted them to his mouth and dropped them between his lips. And immediately spit them out. The pills would make him drowsy. Slow. A common side effect. This was another fork in the river. He could fix himself, or he could live with the pain and stay alert. In fact, the pain was keeping him sharp, on edge. An edge he might need to save his friends. He knew what Will would do, but for Heath there wasn’t really a choice at all. He dropped the pills back into the vial and slipped the vial into the pocket of his swim trunks. For later.
He kept searching. What had looked like a row of individual freezers on the monitor was actually one big freezer with several doors. The entire contraption was on wheels, just like everything else in the building. They were high-tech. Above each handle was a computer keypad. They weren’t meant to keep people out, just to keep the freezers sealed tightly when in use, and the symbols on the buttons were easy enough to decipher. He found the UNLOCK button and pressed it. A puff of icy air escaped from the seal. He yanked the door open and checked the freezer’s contents but didn’t find what he was looking for. He fared no better at the next door. When he checked the third, he saw a clear plastic case on the top shelf. The contents were visible inside.
“You do exist.” He smiled, pleased with himself. He was starting to think like a chess player.
He took the case and headed back into the hallway, where he ran headlong into Dunbar. The others were following closely behind him, shaken and panting. Miles was hugging Cricket tightly to his broad chest to keep him from thrashing around. Cricket was breathing in dry, raspy gasps through blue lips, like a fish out of water.
“The warehouse has an air duct,” Dunbar explained. “We didn’t see it until squirrels started pouring throu
gh it and dropping to the floor. We barely made it out in time.”
“Okay, we’ll keep looking,” Heath said. He led them back into the room with the animal cages. They could hear Quilt Face and the other wolves howling in the foyer. The bears were still pounding away at the skylight. The hyena was finding the whole show hilarious.
“Cricket!” Miles shouted. Their friend’s eyes had opened, but they were rolled back into his head. He was making a strange burbling sound, like his lungs were filtering water.
“Set him down!” Heath said. When Miles had Cricket prostrate on the tile floor, Heath knelt down beside him and opened the plastic case. Inside were six glass bottles with flat, metal screw caps. The centers of the caps were made of rubber. There was also a syringe inside the case. Heath took one of the bottles and carefully slid the needle through the cap to get at the liquid inside. He’d seen this done a hundred times before at the hospital.
“What is that?” Miles asked. The label glued to the sides had nothing telling on it except a bar code and Immunirhabdoviridae X handwritten above it.
“I don’t know,” Heath answered truthfully. “But I think it’ll stop the virus from killing him.”
“They made a cure?” A hopeful expression flitted onto Miles’s sweaty face.
“They’d be stupid to make a biological weapon as horrible as the Flash without a cure that reacts just as fast. At least I hope not.”
Heath bent forward to inject Cricket with the needle.
Miles gripped Heath’s arm. “Wait! You can’t stick him with that! What if you’re wrong? It could be some other virus, like bird flu or smallpox!”
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