He felt Sarah’s hand on his shoulder. He glanced up as she took a knee next to him.
“You sure you’re OK?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said. “Truth be told, it was pretty uneventful until tonight. They drew some blood, that kind of thing. Where’s Mike?”
Adam shook his head.
“Damn,” Sarah whispered.
“So what is this place?”
Sarah shook her head and looked away. The look on her face scared him.
“What? Did they do something to you?”
“No,” she said. “Like I said, pretty routine stuff.”
“Then what?”
“Something one of the women said,” Sarah said. “Rachel told her.”
“Rachel told her what?”
She opened her mouth to speak and then closed it again, delivering instead a sad, wan smile. She cocked her head to the side as she searched for the words.
“That they started it.”
Adam heard the words as they tumbled from her mouth. He felt his knees buckle, and he eased backwards down to his bottom. He felt dizzy and hot, despite the cold that was socked in around them.
“It,” he repeated.
Sarah nodded and Adam was up on his feet.
It.
The plague. The mother-fucking plague. The end of all things. The mommies and daddies and babies and poets and Thanksgiving and pizza delivery guys and accountants and interpreters and jazz music and whomever had invented French fries and 200,000 years of human progress from the discovery of fire through putting a man in goddamned outer space, all wiped out in the blink of an eye. The empty houses and restaurants and schools and churches, riddled with the wasted bodies of the dead in every city and town and village in the world. It hadn’t been a bad evolutionary break, an eff-you from Mother Nature for digging too deep into some tropical jungle in the pursuit of more land for a new resort. It had been a war against humanity, one declared and waged and won before they’d even had the first chance to defend themselves.
He felt dizzy again and he bent over, placed his hands on his knees.
“Is that possible?” she asked. “That someone did this on purpose?”
“I never thought it would be possible on such a big scale,” he said in between deep breaths. “But I just don’t know.”
He scanned the bodies for one of the shooters and stalked across the field toward the dead man; then he reared back and kicked it as hard as he could. He kicked it again, and again, and again. The rage coursed through his veins like hot lead as the magnitude of what Sarah had told him settled in on him. It all came rushing back, from the moment that Kate Sanders from Annapolis had knocked on his door at Holden Beach through his surreal bike ride through the city streets to his anger at the goddamned good guys for not catching them before it was too late.
All those years we’d spent worried about little bottles of shampoo and taking our shoes off in the security line, Adam thought, and here, in secret, these guys had been as busy as bees, building their dark dream.
“Did Rachel ever say how she knew?”
“A few weeks ago, there was some kind of uprising,” Sarah said. “A breakaway group tried to recruit Rachel, and they confessed to her. But this Chadwick guy, he sniffed it out, executed everyone but Rachel. He seemed to have taken a shine to her.”
Adam felt a chill ripple through his sweat-soaked body. A thought began to scratch at him like a puppy pawing at a door.
“Did she spend a lot of time with him?” he asked.
“That’s what the other women said,” she replied. “They think he took her to his quarters.”
The thought broke through, the puppy clearing the fence and running free, and all of a sudden, he knew where he had to go.
“I know where they are.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Eighteen women, including Sarah and Charlotte, had survived the massacre at the barracks. Sixteen had died. No matter how many times he reminded himself that they would all have died without his rescue attempt, he felt like he’d made a terrible mistake, and their deaths haunted Adam Fisher for the rest of his days. But as the surviving women gathered together, he saw no blame in their worn, weathered faces.
“Do you mind if I say something?” one of the women asked. She was a short, stout woman, sturdy through and through. She looked so tired.
Adam shook his head.
“Ladies,” she said. “We’ve become a family these last few months. And our family has suffered a terrible loss. But I want to tell you something. When we rushed the shooters, I was ready to die. I was fucking terrified, but it would’ve been worth it to try. To get these SOB’s and rip their balls off.”
Muted laughter.
“So we mourn our fallen friends,” she said. “But know that they died fighting. They died on their feet. They died for the rest of us. But we’re still inside these shitty walls. So we owe it to them to keep fighting until we’re free.”
A chorus of savage cheers went up with the force of fireworks.
“I need to find Rachel,” Adam said as the cheers died out. “The rest of you need to go, get out of here. There’s a group of us on a farm. There’s room there for all of you. We’re trying to rebuild. I can’t promise a lot of amenities, but it’s safe. Or as safe as anything is these days.”
“You know I’m with you,” Sarah said.
“Like Chewbacca and Han Solo,” he said.
“Who’s Chewbacca in this little scenario?” she asked.
“Well, obviously, I’m Han,” Adam said, for which he earned a stiff punch in the shoulder.
“I’m in, too,” Charlotte said.
“No,” Adam said. “You’ve done enough. I’ve already asked too much of you.”
“But-”
“No buts,” Adam said. “Besides, I want you to lead everyone back to the farm. We’ll meet up with you after we get Rachel.”
“But-”
He waved Charlotte to the side for a private discussion. She followed, her arms crossed, a look of pain on her face. Sarah joined them.
“I need you to go back to the farm,” Adam said. “This thing Sarah and I are doing, we have do it alone. By all rights, you should probably be dead by now. It would’ve been my fault. And the world is going to need you in it. You’re going to have to lead.”
She looked at Sarah, her eyes wide with longing.
“No, sweetie,” Sarah said. “He’s right. Adam is right. You’re too important.”
Charlotte’s eyes filled with tears as the finality of the decision slammed home.
“W-what if I never see you again?”
Adam and Sarah glanced at each other, but they had no response to her question.
“Promise me you’ll make it back,” she said.
Sarah again didn’t reply, instead wrapping the girl up in a fierce hug. They both cried silent tears, and Adam felt his own throat catch.
“I know,” Charlotte said, her words thick with grief and tears, “that’s a dumb thing to say. I can’t make you promise.”
“Go on now,” Adam said. “Load up these trucks and get the hell out of here. You know the way back to the farm?”
She nodded, wiping her face clear with her hands.
Fifteen minutes later, the women had loaded into three of the Suburbans parked near the barracks. It took a while to find the keys, which had been scattered among their would-be killers’ bodies, but they had finally tracked them down. The women were packed in tight, like a crowded city bus, but they didn’t seem to mind. Not a bit. There were a few laughs, and the nervous chatter of a group on an exciting new journey. The engines roared to life and the trucks pulled away one by one, following Adam’s directions to get back to the main gate. With any luck, they’d be at the farm before midnight.
Adam and Sarah watched the taillights wink out of view. As the trailing vehicle disappeared around the bend, Sarah took his hand in hers. A few moments later, the sound of the engines faded away, leaving them
alone in the dark graveyard that the Citadel had become. He looked down at her, his jaw set tight.
“Let’s finish this goddamn thing,” she said.
He squeezed her hand.
#
They trekked east-southeast, cutting across the north-south road and behind the generator field. It hummed along, powering a community coming apart at the seams. There was a wide dirt pathway running alongside the fence line, well worn with tire tracks. At the end of the fencing, they passed a locked gate, which seemed to be the primary maintenance access to the generator field. It looked like the fence surrounding Evergreen’s power plant. He realized with some sadness that it would be a long time before the world could rely on electricity again.
Electricity had been a feature of a technologically advanced society, which they no longer were. In many ways, society had regressed to infancy. And that meant re-learning everything. Starting over. It had been folly to think that they could just continue on the way they had simply by dint of finding Evergreen. Food and water, shelter, everything would have to be done anew. They’d have to adapt. It made him sad, but it was good to be free of the false promise of a fallen world.
“How are you feeling?” he whispered as they drew closer to their destination.
“It’s fine,” she said, but her answer lacked conviction.
He didn’t have to inquire any further. Her disease had begun to make itself known. Well, he thought. That was just another thing they would adapt to.
“Where are we headed?”
“I saw two groups tonight,” Adam said. “The one that came to you, and another smaller group that went inside a building near this development. I think Rachel was in that group.”
“Any idea what they were up to?”
“No. But I think that something very bad happened. Some kind of slaughter.”
“Maybe they turned on each other,” she said.
“Maybe.”
They curled around the eastern edge of the generator array and moved south, toward the road that led back to his storage shed. Their eyes swept the landscape for threats, but nothing was moving but the swirl and dance of snowflakes, peppering their eyelashes and stinging their cheeks with icy kisses. No words were exchanged, as there was no telling how far their voices would carry across the snowpack.
They reached the shed unmolested and paused to survey the scene. There were two sets of sloppy tracks in the thin layer of snow. Sarah pointed at them, and Adam nodded. She checked her weapon and started to move across the street; Adam grabbed her by the elbow and turned her toward him. He held her face in between his gloved hands.
“Wait,” he whispered.
“What?”
“Happy new year.”
She leaned in and kissed him hard.
“Never forget how much I love you,” she said.
She didn’t wait for a reply; she turned back and scampered across the silent, windswept road. Adam fell in behind her as she tracked the messy footprints cutting north between the building from which the group had emerged and another building just to its west.
Their pace slowed as they moved deeper into the shadows, approaching a boxy, one-story building that Adam hadn’t seen before. A single sentry was posted at the door, clumsily smoking a cigarette through heavily gloved hands. He was armed, but his rifle was slung over his shoulder. They watched for a quarter of an hour as he maintained his lonely watch. No one else entered or exited the building.
“I have an idea,” she whispered into his ear. “Stick your gun in my back and follow my lead.”
She bounced out of the shadows, her hands on her head, overcome with a bout of sad tears. Adam understood and followed, pushing the barrel of the rifle into her back.
“Who’s there?” the sentry called out.
“This one’s being a bit difficult,” Adam said, hoping his voice wasn’t as shaky as it felt.
“Where are the others?” he asked.
With each snippet of conversation, Adam and Sarah drew closer to their prey.
“They’re coming,” Adam replied. “This one caused quite the ruckus.”
“Nothing’s ever eas- hey, who the hell are you?”
The guard’s eyes went wide and his hands clambered for the rifle, but the gloves made for difficult work. Sarah was on him like a tiger. She crippled him with a devastating kick to the knee, buckling it in a direction it wasn’t meant to turn. He dropped to the ground, where Sarah snapped his neck with a vicious corkscrew twist. His body twitched, once, and fell to the ground.
Together, they pulled his body away from the door and deposited him on the side of the building, out of view. Sarah searched his pockets and removed his walkie-talkie. After combing through the channels, hearing nothing but static, she pocketed it. The gun she threw into the snow. Keeping their backs to the wall, they slinked back around toward the front door.
“Inside?” she asked.
Adam toyed with the idea of waiting for the group to come back out, but there was no telling what might happen to Rachel if they didn’t attempt a rescue now. They would soon know that something had gone terribly wrong with the executions, and then all bets would be off. He pointed firmly at the door, and Sarah nodded her assent.
Adam reached out for the door, wondering what they would do if they found it locked. But the knob turned easily, as though the building couldn’t wait for them to enter. He opened it slowly, an inch at a time. The door opened onto a darkened corridor, silent and dim.
The air was redolent with the clean, sharp smell of disinfectant. Some kind of medical facility, perhaps their famous clinic. There was something disquieting about the place, knowing that Rachel was in here, now, under cover of night. Something that whispered suffering or experimentation. They continued down the hallway, Adam’s heart slamming against his ribs like a jackhammer, his mouth dry.
They passed by a few small offices, all of them dark and locked. The building was larger than it looked outside; the structure must have stretched up to the southern edge of the generator field. Ahead of them, the darkness abated a bit. They came to the end of the corridor, the mouth of which opened onto a large control room, also quiet and abandoned. There were three rows of individual workstations, and large monitors hung on the walls of the rectangular room.
Here, a dark voice in his mind whispered.
It happened here.
The apocalypse had been midwifed into the world in this building.
He felt Sarah’s hand tapping him on the shoulder, directing his chin upward to the near wall. The front pages of a dozen newspapers had been mounted behind glass, a bizarre, twisted museum-like display. They bore the familiar headlines, their oversized fonts virtually screaming the terrible events of the previous August.
CDC: “NO PROGRESS” ON CURE
REPORT: CHINA LAUNCHES SURPRISE NUKE ATTACK ON IRAN, RUSSIA
MASS BURIALS UNDERWAY
And so on. Adam felt sick to his stomach and looked away; he couldn’t bear to read another headline from the world in its death throes.
In the dim light, Adam could just make out splotches of water, leading toward the far edge of the room. Sarah followed his gaze and picked up the trail there. The puddles led to a small door, nestled just under the darkened screen. Adam crossed the room, his gun up and ready. Sarah trailed close behind, keeping an eye on the rear flank.
The door was stark white and bore the universal symbol for biohazard, three connected rings superimposed over the center of a fourth. Underneath that, the following words were stenciled: Biosafety Levels 0, 1, 2, 3, 4. An alphanumeric keypad was mounted on the wall, its red lamp shining red.
“What’s that mean?” Sarah asked.
“More labs,” he replied. “Where they handle infectious agents. Four is the most dangerous.”
“Is it safe in there?”
“Probably,” he said. “I assume they’ve got the various levels compartmentalized. If they created Medusa, they had to be very careful in handling it.”
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“You think they’ve got her in there?”
He scrunched up his mouth as he considered the question.
“I don’t know. You guard the door while I check the rest of this area. If they’re down there, we may have to wait them out. Assuming they follow standard protocols, this will be the only way in or out.”
Sarah kept her gun trained on the door as Adam scouted the rest of the floor. There were no other offices, no keycodes, no keys anywhere, and he rejoined his bride by the door. Thirty minutes went by, then sixty, and he began to worry that they’d missed something. That Rachel’s captors had slipped past them somehow.
But after eighty minutes, a noise, the first of any kind they’d heard. The keypad on the wall beeped, and the light toggled to green. Adam studied the door briefly and was thrilled to see the hinges on their side; the door would open into the room, giving them a place to hide. They crouched low against the wall as the door swung open toward them.
Two men emerged, both armed. Adam and Sarah slipped in behind them and disappeared behind the door. As the door swung closed, Adam could just make out the men marching down the corridor. They’d find the sentry missing in a minute at the most. They were just about out of time.
The door clicked shut behind them, and he heard the magnetic lock engage with a ominous thud. They were in a stairwell now, on the top landing. Opposite them was another door, marked with the numeral 0. Adam peered down the middle of the staircase, which swirled down out of sight. Level 4, he presumed, would be at the bottom. The end of the line. The entire lab appeared to be buried in the earth.
A quick check revealed that the 0 door was unlocked. Adam cracked it open just a sliver and heard voices. His vantage point didn’t give him much of a view, but it was a hospital-like setting, a number of beds lining the walls, similar to a hospital’s emergency department. If Rachel were in this building, she’d have to be on this floor. There would be no rational reason for her captors to take her to the other levels, unless they planned to use her as some kind of guinea pig. And that didn’t necessarily comport with the previous reports, that this man had taken a liking to her.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 50