ViraVax

by Bill Ransom

  She had wanted to see daylight, and blue sky, but she was greeted by stars and a bright half-moon. Escape meant running the length of the hallway, high-stepping over the dead. Sonja and Harry ran this gauntlet of corruption hand in hand, bent almost double to keep out of the smoke. At the next intersection they faced freedom.

  A simple, institutional door with a stainless-steel bar strained against the perpetual breeze of the negative pressure inside. That breeze smelled of hot, wet ground and concrete.

  “Come on!” Harry urged, tugging her arm.

  Together, they shouldered the door outward enough to squeeze through. It slammed behind them and they stepped blinking and alive into the night air. Not fresh air. Little gouts of blue flame sputtered around the grounds.

  One, two, three steps, Sonja counted, away from that howling place, before she was caught by the silence. Not silence, no. Night birdsong in the distance, and a flight of bats down from the lake behind the dam. No, what she heard was the absence of noise. The guts of the machine that they had crawled through carried off the cries of the dying and added them to the choruses of the dead. She had never imagined such a horrible sound existed, and she knew she could never forget it.

  Harry rubbed his cramping legs.

  “I know where we are,” Sonja said.

  She pointed directly ahead.

  “That’s south. That’s their big farming area, you remember that from the air. This”—she gestured to the building behind them— “is the lift pad. One flight up, top of the hangar bays.”

  “There is nobody here,” Harry said, his voiced laced with awe and fear.

  Hunched shapes in human clothing glowed blue in the beans and the pumpkins. It had just rained, and now the stars were out full force. Some of the bodies were half-charred, probably saved by the sudden evening shower.

  “Maybe it was a gas, or something,” she said. “Maybe the rain washed it away.”

  “It must have got the sentries, too,” Harry said. “I don’t . . . .”

  In English, then Spanish, a loudspeaker warned:

  “Code Red, Levels One and Two. Code Red, Levels One and Two. Suit and seal. Suit and seal.”

  “What does that mean?” Harry asked.

  “We’re lucky,” Sonja said. “Levels Three, Four and Five are time-locked before the announcement. It’s vacuum-packed. Nothing gets in or out for forty-eight hours. . . .”

  Whang, whang, whang.

  Three heavy metal doorways slammed into place in the building next to theirs. The hiss and snap of an autoweld preceded its heady, metallic vapor.

  “Now Command Central shuts down specific areas in Levels One and Two as needed,” she said.

  “So,” Harry mused, “they’re not all dead. Someone is alive.”

  “Not necessarily,” she said. “Once programmed, shutdown proceeds automatically.”

  The announcement repeated itself in English and Spanish.

  “It also means that anybody left on Level Two or surface has one minute to get to a bio suit,” she said, “one minute to get it on and one minute to find and seal off a safe area. It’s really more to trap them than to save them. My dad said he’d take his chances topside.”

  Nobody came running. Crumpled shadows littered the landscape under the few yard lights.

  Harry’s eyes widened at a new horror. Vultures plopped from the sky onto the bloating dead in the garden, one by one.

  “I thought they only came out in the daylight,” he said.

  “Must be a special occasion.”

  Bolts shot to place in the door behind them, intakes hissed shut and alarms blared from a dozen points around the building. Charges blew directly above them and popped their ears.

  “It’s the dzee,” Harry said. “He’s doing all this to make sure we don’t get away.”

  That blast came from the lift pad!

  Sonja hoped that shutdown didn’t include destroying the aircraft on the pad.

  They huddled outside the shipping and receiving area, something she’d identified from the air. The actual lift pad was one story higher.

  “I sure hope we’ve still got something to fly,” she said.

  Harry yanked her down and hissed in her ear. “Quiet!” He pointed to the far corner of their building.

  Two hundred meters away, someone struggled with a locked door under an orange security light. The woman shouted something at the door that Sonja couldn’t hear, then turned and ran towards them. She stopped twice in the two hundred meters to stand on tiptoe, trying to see something up on the pad. Sonja noted the thin smoke-shadows wafting across the moon.

  Something’s on fire up there.

  Her one rope of hope had unraveled to a thread.

  “What do you think?” Harry asked.

  Sonja didn’t tell him what she thought was happening on the lift pad.

  The woman, then.

  “She doesn’t know her way around very well,” Sonja said, “but she knows that’s how she came in.”

  “Yeah,” Harry said. “Kind of like us.”

  Sonja stepped into the moonlight, slowly, so as not to startle the woman.

  “Hello,” Sonja said, showing her hands. “Can you help me?”

  She said it again in English. Harry was motioning her to get back, but she ignored him.

  The woman stopped. She was Asian, truly Asian, not one of the Innocents with the so-called mongoloid features. Her features were contorted with horror and anguish. Her gaze, like Sonja’s, kept itself carefully from the dead.

  “Someone is coming in after us,” the woman said between gasps. “We need to get up there, and I can’t find a way in.”

  “Who?” Sonja asked. “Who’s coming in after us? And who are you?”

  The Asian woman caught her breath. “I’m Marte Chang,” she said. “Mariposa is sending someone here to get us. She instructed me to be at the lift pad.”

  “Mariposa?”

  Again, that mysterious figure.

  “Is whatever killed these people going to kill us, too?” Harry asked.

  “I doubt it,” Marte said. “Everyone dropped around me and I didn’t feel or hear a thing. You’re intact. It was probably something that Dajaj Mishwe infected them with. I’m sure he killed them all.”

  Sonja held the small young woman as the sobs started. She and Harry had walked through the bodies, but this woman had watched them fall.

  “You were here all along?” Sonja asked. “Do you know anything about what’s going on?”

  “I just know that the people who run this place are crazy,” Marte said. “And they’re having some kind of family feud. You’re in the middle of it.”

  “Us?” Harry asked. “How?”

  “This Mishwe guy had you picked up,” Marte said. “Mishwe is psychotic and has been a problem lately. Casey, the boss, was livid. Mishwe killed him, and the rest of these poor people.”

  “I vote we don’t wait for the rescue if we don’t have to,” Harry said. He jerked a thumb towards the lift pad. “Let’s get up there and get gone.”

  “Right,” Sonja agreed. “We don’t know whether help is coming tomorrow or next week. This place is shutting down. It might have some automatic defenses rigged, too. The sooner we get off the ground, the better.”

  “There’s no way up there,” Marte said. “I’ve been all around the building. No doors unlocked. No stairs or ladders up the outside.”

  “Maybe we can find a way up,” Harry said.

  Sonja pointed towards a huge, bunker-like structure down by the farm. “There,” she said. “Some kind of shop. Look in the doorway.”

  Under the doorway light, she saw a tractor and a forklift. Ropes.

  “I want out of here,” Marte said. “I don’t care how we do it, or who it is. Some of them started. . . burning up. God, I want out of here and now all the doors are shut.”

  Sonja scanned the grounds. Clear sky, tail end of a rain squall spilling over the mountaintops, no breeze. A perfect night for a
lift-off.

  Neither big bird was in its hangar bay, so she gathered they were both atop the hangar, and, like Marte, standing on tiptoe didn’t get her any closer. All access bays to stairs, elevators, transport and passageways were double-sealed. Warning bells continued their clanging.

  More vultures dropped in from their circles—first, to the treetops around the perimeter, then the fencetop, lift pad and finally to the ground at the head end of some faceless human mess.

  “Look!”

  Harry pointed to a set of running lights on the southern sky that became two sets, three.

  “Choppers,” Sonja said. “Probably Garcia. He’ll send two more and an observer to flank us, probably east because. . . there!”

  Out of the moonlight bobbed the other three dots, wavy with heat and distance.

  The alarms ceased their mind-numbing clatter. The first sound Sonja heard when the ringing stopped was the blap-blap-blap of old rotors, holding off. Harry’s glance told her that he’d noticed, too.

  “They’re not coming,” he said.

  “They just can’t see us,” Marte said.

  She unfolded a thin, silver rain slicker from her back pocket, opened it with a snap and waved at the nearest chopper. It hovered just past the fence line, about five hundred meters south. Sonja felt the whump of a concussion underfoot. Then another.

  Harry yanked her and Marte under the protection of the hangar’s bunker-like roof.

  “They know we’re here,” Harry told Marte. “They want to keep us here. It’s a lot more important to keep people from getting out of this place. Nobody worries about people who want to get in.”

  A series of three explosions blew out ventilation shafts in front of each of the nearby buildings. The concrete caps of the shafts pulverized with a flash, and rained chunks of concrete and vegetation all around them. Smoke and steam roiled from the topside elevator and transporter accesses.

  “What’s going on?” Marte shouted, waving her arms at the voyeurs flying those choppers. “I thought they were coming to rescue us.”

  Harry gave her the bad news, the news he had been unwilling to believe because it was too logical and it weighed too heavily against them.

  “Garcia’s forces aren’t here to rescue us,” Harry said. “They’re here to rescue the rest of the world from us. The place is sealing off, burying itself. This is the ultimate quarantine.”

  “They’ll have to catch us,” Sonja reminded him. “And then they’ll take us to some other lab who will study us for the rest of our lives. Or they’ll see us as vermin and shoot us,” she added. “It’s happened before, in Japan and the Philippines.”

  A blast from the nearest warehouse dropped all three of them to the ground. A buzzard, feeding on a corpse in the doorway, blew out of one of its wings and skidded, quivering, on the concrete in front of them. More blasts followed inside the hangar, though muffled by the sealed-off Plexi and concrete.

  “Automatic charges,” Harry said. “Let’s hope they don’t include the aircraft.”

  All stairwells, ladders, shafts and ventilators leading from the ground level to the lift pad exploded at one-second intervals, beginning at the southwest corner and continuing around the huge, squat building to their position.

  Harry jogged towards the warehouse and called back to her.

  “I’ll find something to get us up there. You two stay under cover.”

  Chapter 39

  Harry sprinted for the open doorway and hoped he could make it before the doors sealed him out—or in. The half-minute sprint left him breathless but alive inside a huge agricultural equipment shed. His cramps had reduced themselves to twitches and he felt himself getting stronger as he caught his breath. Some kind of turbine or fan clanked itself to a stop just a few meters away.

  Harry saw the prisoner, trussed-up and struggling on a big stainless-steel cart. He was strapped to the top of the cart, and very much alive. The man had worked his head back and forth against the restraints, bloodying the back of his scalp nearly enough to slip out. His left arm flailed weakly, uselessly at the bloody straps.

  Nearby lay the remains of two of the ViraVax security team. One of them, beside the forklift, could have been ground zero of an explosion, except nothing else was damaged. The other could have been dead for moments or months, only his charred uniform lending him any hint of humanity.

  Harry scanned the undamaged forklift.

  We might get out of here yet.

  Harry approached the captive carefully, the man’s gray gaze following him with suspicion or fear. Something familiar, something . . .

  “Jesus!” Harry said, still out of breath from the run.

  He stumbled to the Colonel’s side and started unfastening the restraints with clumsy fingers.

  “Harry!” his father croaked. “What the hell, boy?”

  “Jesus!” Harry repeated, and blinked as though to clear the vision. “I suppose you’re the mysterious, superhuman rescue squad.”

  “That’s me,” Rico said. “Let’s get moving.”

  “Looks like the rest of them are all dead.”

  Harry tore at the double-taped restraints holding his father to the cart.

  Rico rolled his head slowly back and forth to free the spasms in his neck.

  “Who’s with you?”

  “Two more,” Harry said. “Sonja and another woman, Marte Chang.”

  Rico freed his legs and ankles, then tried, unsuccessfully, to stand by himself.

  “Shit,” he wheezed. “I can hardly walk.”

  “It’ll wear off,” Harry said. “Just don’t do anything twitchy.”

  “I’ve let myself get pretty rusty.”

  The Colonel reached out to Harry and rested an arm across his shoulders. Harry put an arm around his father’s waist and gripped a belt loop. Harry couldn’t think of anything to say, except that his father didn’t smell of whiskey for the first time in years, but he didn’t think it was the time to mention that.

  “I thought at first that Garcia took you and Sonja to hold against me,” Rico said. “I knew the guerrillas didn’t blow up the embassy and I knew I didn’t blow it. I didn’t think of this outfit at first because they’re so low-key. Blowing things up is not their style. A lot of people were investigating ViraVax all of a sudden, including my people. There was some interior struggle with this Children of Eden bunch. Didn’t think it would go like this.”

  “How were you getting out?”

  “Access shaft to the dam. It’s not in the drawings. You?”

  Harry pointed to the lift pad atop the hangars.

  “Sonja was going to fly us out,” he said. “Access to the lift pad was the first to go. I came looking for another way up there. Thanks, by the way.”

  “For what?”

  The Colonel lifted his head in surprise, setting off a new wave of spasm. No more explosions, suddenly. Harry set his father down for a moment and let the spasms pass. Sonja and Marte huddled inside the hangar doorway, watching.

  “No sudden moves,” Harry said. “They got me with something like it, too. It wears off fast, once it starts going. Try not to fight it.”

  “Thank me for what?” his father mumbled.

  Harry laughed.

  “For fifth grade,” he said. “When you used to take me into the elevator shafts at the embassy and the Intercontinental for lunch. I’ll tell you about it when we get out of here.”

  “Seen Garcia’s choppers yet?”

  “Yeah,” Harry nodded. “They got here about five minutes ago.”

  Another three whump-whump-whumps.

  The Colonel asked, “The facility is in shutdown?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well,” the Colonel sighed, “you know that Garcia’s men will have to shoot you down if you try to leave the grounds.”

  “What? You mean, it’s true?”

  “Yeah.”

  The Colonel sat up and chuckled, his voice clearing.

  “ ‘Contain everything and
everyone within the perimeter. Destroy anything or anyone who violates that perimeter until directed otherwise.’ Protocols for the government’s response to a shutdown situation—I wrote them myself.”

  “Great!” Harry groaned. “Now there’s no way out!”

  “No,” his father said, and grabbed Harry’s shoulder to pull himself up. “If those doors closed, others will open to us. Helicopters can be distracted or destroyed or outrun. Garcia’s men are notoriously bad shots. With a radio to the Gs—”

  Small-arms fire snap-snap-snapped from the direction of the dam.

  “Shit,” the Colonel said. “I think I can walk now. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Rico shuffled to the body of his guard and gingerly extracted his scorched radio and trank gun from the mess he was becoming.

  “My tool kit,” Rico said.

  Rico couldn’t quite make the high step onto the tall container loader, so Harry gave him a boost. Harry jumped up beside him as his father slipped a lever, threw two switches and fired up the sleeping beast. They sputtered across the infield towards the women.

  The Colonel signaled Sonja and Marte to wait where they were.

  “I should take a look first,” the Colonel said. “You just push this lever forward to send me up, pull back to bring me down.”

  “I can go, Dad,” Harry said.

  The Colonel put up a hand.

  “This is not personal,” he said. “We need to see if there’s a plane up there, yeah. But there could be a surviving sentry, and he could still be doing his job. Just take that last two meters, very, very slow.”

  Harry watched his dad’s hand signals near the top, and slipped him over the edge smoothly. The Colonel disappeared for a few long minutes, then reappeared at the top, signaling to come down. Harry dropped the forks and braked them at the last instant.

  “Kind of frisky with this thing, don’t you think?” the Colonel commented with a wink.

  Harry accepted it as the first compliment from his father in a long, long time.

  The Colonel informed the others: “We have two airplanes up there and no sentries. We’ll have to check for charges but I think they didn’t have time to set them. Hello, Sonja. Hello, Dr. Chang, and greetings from Mariposa.”