The third room was the staging area. There was a desk and a computer mounted on the wall near the curved door on the far side of the room. That would be the airlock, the last checkpoint before death by organ liquefaction or hemorrhaging. There, men like Chadwick could dream up things like Medusa. There, mankind had destroyed itself.
“So this is where you built it,” Adam said.
“Indeed,” Chadwick replied.
“How did you get away with it?” Adam asked. “How did you never get caught?”
“You want me to explain my evil plan? Really?”
“Have you taken a good look out there?” Adam snapped. “I think it’s a bit late to foil your plot.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “The truth is very simple. How did you get anything done in the old world?”
Adam considered the question for a moment.
“Money, I’m guessing.”
“Precisely. The very thing that would have no use in this world was the very thing that helped bring it about. This was all made possible by money. The lab, the equipment, recruitment of the staff, the safety protocols.”
“Dangerous work. And you were willing to die for it?” he said.
“Any good pathologist, any good scientist, really, must be willing to pay the ultimate price.”
“Don’t suppose you thought about using all your intellect and your resources for the greater good, did you? The CDC probably could’ve used a guy like you.”
“Where the hell do you think I started my career?”
Adam blew a noisy sigh through his lips. He wanted to keep asking questions, both to delay the inevitable and to satisfy his own curiosity. For a moment, he couldn’t think of anything to ask, and then one question roared to the forefront.
“You must have had a couple of close calls,” Adam said. “You ever come close to getting busted?”
Chadwick laughed softly.
“A couple of times, actually,” he said.
That was hard for Adam to hear. To hear that there’d been a chance to stop Chadwick’s nightmarish vision from coming to life. To know that opportunities had been missed. To know that the clock could not be unwound, no matter how close they’d come to stopping him. The die was cast. This was the world now, forever and ever, amen.
“Once, I nearly had to activate the fail-safe.”
He said it with the verve of a man at a barbecue recounting an old fishing trip.
“Fail-safe?”
“This lab is sitting on top of a thermobaric bomb,” he said.
“Jesus,” Sarah said, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, as though she were afraid she might detonate it.
“What’s a thermobaric bomb?” Adam asked.
“It’s the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. military,” she said, looking at Adam. “It would vaporize ten city blocks. It burns at four thousand degrees. But I don’t understand something. It’s an air-burst bomb. It won’t work if it’s buried underground.”
“Very good,” Chadwick said. “We had some modifications made. It’s a one-of-a-kind piece. Amazing what you can accomplish when you’re a military contractor.”
“And it would’ve vaporized any evidence of what went on here.”
“Exactly,” he said.
“And how would one detonate this bomb?” Adam asked.
“I think our conversation is over,” Chadwick said. “But I have enjoyed this little discussion.”
It was worth a shot, Adam thought. He’d gotten the man rolling a little bit. Worth a shot.
“What do you think you’re going to do now?” Adam asked. “There’s nowhere else to go. We’ve got you.”
Chadwick grinned.
“You know what they call the guy who graduates last in his med school class?” Chadwick asked.
It was an old joke, a good one, and Adam knew the answer, but he didn’t want to engage in this banter. So he remained silent.
“What?” Sarah asked.
“Doctor,” Adam said quickly, not wanting to give Chadwick the pleasure of delivering the punchline.
Chadwick laughed.
“What’s your point?”
“Your doctor friend here hasn’t thought this through,” Chadwick said. “You think you’ve got me pinned down. My back to the wall. But it’s not like that. It’s not like that at all.”
Adam was numb. At the moment he needed to be at his sharpest, he found himself dull and slow. All he could think of was Chadwick sending Rachel into a fog of disease as some kind of revenge for having his plans derailed. The man continued to hold his gun to Rachel’s back.
Adam had seen enough; he took a step forward with killing on his mind. But as he prepared to make his move, he felt Sarah’s hand on his elbow, giving him a squeeze. She squeezed it again, this time for a long second, and he realized she was trying to tell him something. Dread poured into Adam’s heart like fresh concrete. Chadwick drifted over to the far side of the airlock, pulling Rachel along, where a touch-screen computer was mounted, and typed a series of commands into the monitor.
“What the hell are you doing?” Adam asked.
“Tying off all my loose ends,” Chadwick replied.
He racked his brain for a solution that saved the three of them until it finally dawned on him. There wasn’t one. All he could do was destroy the pathogen. They would have to be humanity’s immune system, the antibody, the killer T-cell that finally rose up and snuffed out this terrible infection.
The airlock door whooshed open, revealing the small cylinder inside, the purgatory between the heaven of this safe room and the hell of the hot lab beyond.
“Inside,” he barked at Rachel.
Her eyes widened in terror, and she began squirming like a chicken headed to slaughter.
“Don’t worry,” he hissed, tightening the crook of his elbow around her throat. “All the goodies are locked up in the biosafety cabinets. Just don’t break anything.”
Together, they backed into the airlock. The door whooshed shut, sealing them off. A moment later, the far door slid open, and Chadwick and Rachel stepped into the Level 4 lab.
“What the hell is he doing?” Sarah asked when they were alone.
“He knows we’ll follow them all the way,” Adam said. “All the way.”
The safety glass distorted their figures, giving the appearance of two apparitions floating about the lab. Chadwick puttered around the lab for a minute, checking a few items, before settling in at a computer workstation on the back wall. He continued to hold the gun on Rachel, but she looked frozen, too terrified to move or breathe.
“He’s not trying to escape, is he?” Sarah asked.
“No,” Adam said. “I don’t think so. He knows it’s over for him. We have to stop him from setting off the bomb.”
“Into the breach, then,” she said.
“Into the breach.”
Adam pressed the button that unlocked the airlock and stepped inside, Sarah trailing close behind. The door sealed shut behind them. The room was very tight; he held Sarah close, and he breathed her in, knowing that it was probably for the last time. Her body felt warm against his. He could smell the cold in her hair, the hint of vanilla that always seemed present. It was over for them, but holding Sarah, being there with Rachel, managed to take the sting away a little. If they could stop Chadwick, he’d be okay with dying. He’d lived a lifetime in the past five months, and he was tired. So tired.
The airlock door opened with a hiss. The lab shimmered in a soft blue light, reflected in the glass from the UV room. Adam stepped in, his gun up. Chadwick turned to face them, but didn’t seem fazed by the gun aimed at his head. He wasn’t even holding one anymore.
Adam steadied the gun, but he couldn’t find the resolve to pull the trigger inside the lab.
“Too scared to pull the trigger?” Chadwick asked. “I would be too, with all these scary vials in here. It doesn’t matter anyway. You’re too late. I’ve already triggered the shutdown of the generators. W
hen the power goes, the security protocols will go. And one of us will become a new Patient Zero.”
Adam’s head swam with confusion.
“What are you talking about?”
“We didn’t know for sure that Medusa would work. So we had a Plan B.”
Rage swelled inside Adam; he sensed that time was of the essence, and here he was dealing in riddles and vague threats.
“What was Plan B?” Sarah snapped.
“Look around you!” Chadwick snapped back. “This lab houses the deadliest airborne pathogens known to man. Weaponized viruses and bacteria. When the power goes, the biosafety cabinets will be compromised. They’ll disperse out of the lab, into the ventilation system, out into the air beyond. They’ll infect wildlife, birds, other survivors. Who knows what’ll happen then?”
“Shut it down,” Adam barked at him.
“I can’t!”
“Goddammit,” Adam whispered. “God dammit.”
“Oh, he did,” Chadwick said. “God did damn us.”
“Why do this?” Adam screamed, his voice tinged with panic now. “You’ve gotten everything you wanted. What possible good would come from starting another plague? Let the world have a chance.”
“The world doesn’t deserve a chance,” Chadwick said with a terrifying finality in his voice. “Don’t you get it? The world was a shitty place before the plague, and it’s a shitty world now.”
“Then you should’ve just eaten a bullet like any other psycho fed up with the world,” Adam said, his rage pushing his needle into the red.
“And not make my mark on history? I couldn’t have that. I simply could not have that.”
“How much longer?” Adam asked. “How much longer till the viruses are released?”
“Twelve minutes,” Chadwick said, looking at the monitor. “And then they’ll spread for miles, infecting every living organism. You might be immune to Medusa, but you won’t be immune to all of them.”
Rachel, who’d backed up toward them, took Adam’s hand in hers. Despite everything, Adam couldn’t help but feel good about having found her. If nothing else, he’d kept his promise to her. That insane promise he’d made on his porch, drunk on Jack Daniels, listening to her desperate voice-mail message. He’d found her. He could die in peace.
That was when Chadwick went for his gun.
“No!” Sarah screamed, diving in front of Rachel and Adam just as the gun roared. The round struck her in the shoulder, and she tumbled to the ground in a heap.
“You son of a bitch!” Adam bellowed. As Chadwick prepared to fire again, Adam rushed him like a bull, slamming into him like an open-field tackler. The collision lifted the men off their feet, and they crashed to the ground. Chadwick grunted hard as his back hit the ground, absorbing much of the impact. He delivered a hard right hand to Adam’s head; Adam’s field of vision exploded into whiteness, and he rolled off the big man’s chest.
“That’s for ruining my plan,” Chadwick snapped.
His head swimming, Adam launched himself at Chadwick, and how strange it was that this was now being resolved via a glorified bar fight. The greatest crime in human history, perhaps humanity’s extinction, and justice was being delivered via fisticuffs.
Maybe we never did learn.
He delivered a swift shot to Chadwick’s kidneys, then another, and then another. Chadwick responded with another swooping fist, and that one connected purely with Adam’s ribcage, stealing his breath like a thief. He dropped to a knee, and he gasped for air, a grouper flopping about the deck of a fishing charter. This was it; Chadwick had the upper hand.
He tried to get up, but Chadwick stunned him with a knee to the chin; Adam’s teeth clicked together, his jaw snapping shut before he could get his tongue out of the way. A burst of blood filled his mouth, and he toppled backwards onto his seat. His consciousness began to fade and the world began to recede from view, made opaque by a dark curtain.
Chadwick had the gun again, and he pressed it to Adam’s forehead.
Sorry, world, he thought. I tried.
The gun roared, but Adam felt nothing. He wasn’t sure if he would feel pain or if the lights would simply go out on him, but he was still there, staring at a red stain blooming on Chadwick’s stomach. Adam gingerly turned his head to the left, a punch-drunk boxer on his stool looking for a loved one in the stands, and saw Rachel. And a gun in her hand. Chadwick dropped to one knee, then to both. He grasped at his midsection; blood seeped through his shirt, coating his hands, spilling onto the ground.
Adam slapped the gun out of Chadwick’s hands and brought a fist down on the back of Chadwick’s neck as hard as he could. The impact of the blow sent Chadwick flat on the ground. Adam reared back for a second blow, but before he could, Chadwick delivered a heavy elbow to Adam’s midsection. Adam rolled away, gasping for air, his lungs burning.
Now. It had to be now. They were running out of time.
The men struggled to get off the ground; Adam focused his whole existence, every microgram of energy on beating Chadwick to his feet. He dialed back through his personal hard drive through every mile he’d run, every weight he’d lifted, every sit-up he’d done. Every power song, the anthem from the Rocky movies, anything that might get his ass off the ground before this monster.
“Dad, move!” Rachel screamed. “I can shoot him!”
“No!” Adam called out as he struggled to win this most elemental battle. His voice sounded thick and muffled. “We need to know how to stop the viruses! Check on Sarah!”
“I’m fine,” she called out weakly. “The bullet grazed me.”
And then he was up. As Chadwick began pushing up off his knee, Adam reared back and drove his foot square into the killer’s chest. The crunch of rib bones was audible, and Chadwick flew backwards, back to the ground, emitting a desperate screech of pain that Adam worried might shatter the safety cabinets. Adam was on him like a hyena, grabbing him by the collar and pulling his head off the ground.
“Tell me how to stop it!” Adam pleaded. “There has to be a way.”
Despite the stomach wound, despite the shattered ribs, Chadwick managed to smile. As he did so, a trickle of blood bubbled from his lips. “They’re in final shutdown mode now.”
“I know that!” Adam said. “Tell me how to stop it.”
“There’s only one way to stop it,” Chadwick said.
“How?”
“The bomb.”
Adam’s heart fluttered.
“Shit!”
Chadwick giggled like a toddler who’d found a cookie.
“And you’re running out of time,” Chadwick added. “No more than eight minutes now.”
“Tell me how to detonate it,” Adam said.
“No,” he said. “You can go fuck yourself.”
Adam hesitated for a moment, just a split second, and then he pressed down hard on Chadwick’s bullet wound. The screams of pain echoed through the lab. Adam looked into Chadwick’s eyes as he tortured the man, and he realized he didn’t feel bad about it. Not one bit. This wasn’t a man he was dealing with here. This was hell personified. Satan’s imp. God’s fallen angel. Sent to earth to destroy all things.
But then he did the most human thing possible.
“Oh, GAWWWWWD!” Chadwick howled. “STAWWWWWPP!!”
Adam released the pressure. His hand was damp and sticky with Chadwick’s blood.
“The biometric sensor,” Chadwick gasped. “It will read my right thumbprint and open the program that controls the security protocols. Look for an icon called Fail-Safe.”
He paused, grimacing as another wave of pain washed over him.
“The detonation will be instantaneous.”
He closed his eyes.
Adam had heard all he needed to hear, and he rushed back to Sarah’s side.
“Rachel, keep an eye on him.”
“I got him,” Rachel said.
“Let me see it,” he said to Sarah.
Her face was pale, and her eyes a b
it cloudy. He pulled up the side of her shirt, which was thick and cold with blood.
“Aw, fuck,” he said.
“You sugarcoat bad news like that with all your patients?” she asked.
“Shit, I’m a terrible liar.”
Rachel stepped toward Chadwick and delivered a wicked boot to his groin; he could never be certain, but Adam thought he heard the man’s testicles rupture. A final layer of pain over the walls of his mortal wounds. Chadwick moaned, his hands covering his battered genitals.
“That’s for all the women who died here, you asshole.”
A few seconds later, the moans faded away, and Miles Chadwick died on the floor of his laboratory, amid the ethereal afterbirth of his soulless creation.
“You need to get out of here now,” Sarah said.
“We’ll never make it,” Adam said. “The viruses will spread in every direction.”
“The bomb,” Sarah said. “I’ll do it.”
“No,” Adam said, and he felt silly saying it. It was a knee-jerk reaction, the ideal, the easy way out. Of course she wouldn’t stay to detonate the bomb. They’d figure a way out, and all of them would survive.
Jesus, the human mind was an optimistic little shit sometimes.
“Someone has to stay and detonate the bomb,” she said softly.
“Look, it may not be that bad,” Adam said, looking for a way, any way, out. “If there’s no one left to infect, the viruses will die off.”
“But you and Rachel will be exposed.”
This Adam had no response to.
“Sweetie, there’s no other way. And you’re running out of time.”
Adam shut his eyes tightly and tried to silence the clinician that was always inside him. She’s right, the voice was saying. Either she dies, or we all die. And she’s going to die anyway. His stomach churned as he thought it, and he felt his mouth water. It was not unlike the sensation he’d experienced the day the fox had bitten him.
“The bomb will destroy everything, right?” she asked.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 52