“Not that I’m aware of,” Raynor said. “I was offered three of their people but declined. I like people to have to put actual effort into getting spies into my lab.” When she saw me grimace, her expression turned shrewd. “So it is true. They were the source for Taggard’s misinformed undertakings.”
Shit, I hated when she and I agreed on something. “You know that for a fact?”
She deflected my question with a shrug. “There have been rumors. Very few survivors, from what I have been able to gather. Whoever set them to their task made sure none of them could flip and make it easy for us to undo the damage.” She paused, her gaze going to Hamilton once more before she went on. “I’m sure that Cpt. Hamilton has filled you in on the fact that we did our best to attempt to break the serum’s hold on all affected soldiers who got the wrong versions, but we eventually had to give up since nothing short of killing them would have done the trick? That’s how that abysmal camp got started. It sounded like a good idea to let them be useful in food production so they could provide for themselves, under supervision of course. That did not turn out as expected.”
“You could say that,” I muttered. Stone’s connection to the camp suddenly made a lot more sense. If he’d been a part of the faction that was working on the wrong serum versions, it must have been easy to keep track of what happened with the affected soldiers—and then keep adding the scavengers to the mix. Complete insanity in a world that had already lost billions too many, but that didn’t seem to matter to a lot of people. If I’d learned one thing, it was that.
“I can read you the report now,” I told her, done with that topic. “Should I find anything else, I will update you on that.”
The interesting part of our conversation concluded, most of the others turned to focus on something other than two scientists prattling overly complicated chemical terms at each other—for the second time tonight. Nate and Bucky left for the cafeteria, with only Cole, Hill, Marleen, and Eden remaining, the two women mostly because they weren’t done with the game of cards they had been engaged in since we’d gotten started. I was damn exhausted when I finally signed off, but at Cole’s question if I wanted to hail anyone else, I paused.
“Get me New Angeles on the line. Greene himself. And tell them he will want this to be a private conversation.” The least I could do was tell him about his father’s demise. I considered calling Nate back, but didn’t figure that necessary. All I wanted was to see Greene’s reaction, and I wouldn’t need anyone’s help to interpret that if it turned out to be what I expected. Hoped for, really, or else we were more fucked than ever.
Unlike the other calls, it took a good fifteen minutes to get someone on the line ready to listen to us in the first place, and I’d almost given up on this when Greene, sitting in his secure office, appeared on the screen. He was staring at me expectantly. “I’d say it was a pleasure to receive a call from you, but judging from that pinched look on your face, you’re jonesing for a fight, and I’m absolutely not in the mood to oblige you.”
Two could play that game.
“I’m sorry to inform you of your father’s death,” I said. “Since he was directly involved in the drug trafficking to the labor camp, the infection of thousands of scavengers with a serum variant that kills them sooner rather than later, and doing his very best to find a way to cut through the protection of the working version of the serum itself, I’m not sorry about his death.”
I felt a smidgen of relief when Greene’s eyes widened at the mention of his father. Obviously, he hadn’t been aware that Walter had survived the end of the world. He quickly regained his composure after that.
“I presume you had something to do with his demise?”
I shook my head. “Not directly. The guards killed the scientists while we were breaching their compound. The only one left standing was Brandon Stone, who’d been acting—yet again—as a figurehead for a much more nefarious organization.” Putting my hands on my hips, I glared long and hard at him. “I always assumed he was your spy at the Aurora, Kansas lab. Your spy and liaison to the army. It was he who leaked the location of the Colorado base to you, that you later gave us when we came after them?”
To his credit, Greene hesitated less than I would have before he replied. “Yes, he was my spy, until he wasn’t. He did all that, and more, but soon after your crusade was over and you disappeared, we came to realize that a lot of his intel had been bad, costing many good people their lives. I hope you at least had something to do with his horrible, gruesome demise?”
That made me feel a little better about the whole thing. “Hamilton suggested we leave him locked in the hot lab. He turned on the lab’s cleaning cycle. I doubt Stone manage to bleed to death before that. Not a way I’d want to go myself.”
Greene looked pleased, but I could tell that the news didn’t make up for the damage caused. “Good.”
I considered offering him the same information as I’d already shared, but figured it would be less useful to him—and he likely already had someone on a line who was painstakingly writing it all down. Maybe someone from the Silo would send down a flash drive to spare them the weeks it would take to make sense of it all.
I knew I should have signed off then, but for whatever reason, I felt myself reluctant to do so. It wasn’t like Greene and I would ever become friends, but I couldn’t help but feel that if he was actually as much of an asshole as I loved to pretend, he would have turned on me by now. Pretty much everyone else had, including a bunch of people who I’d have sworn never would.
I wasn’t quite sure why, but on some level I felt knowing that most people currently alive were likely going to outlive me by decades mellowed down my need to get into everyone’s face somewhat.
While I stood there, unsure what to say or do, Greene kept studying me, going from leaning forward with his arms crossed on the desk to reclining, much more at ease. “I presume someone has by now told you that the serum isn’t quite what it was cracked up to be?” he questioned.
“That’s one way of putting it,” I grumbled. “Why didn’t you tell me when we were hitching that ride together on the boat?” I presumed it really wasn’t recent news.
He shrugged. “Honestly? I figured you knew. You are actually one of very few people who has a clue what that shit does and why. From what I’ve heard, accidental conversions have been going on from the very beginning of the outbreak. Since there’s usually nobody left standing to share the details, we have no clue about the unofficial numbers.”
“And the official ones?”
“Somewhere between one in three to one in five,” he offered, his tone surprisingly gentle.
I swore under my breath, incapable of holding the words in. Greene’s grim expression was as close to a sincere declaration of condolence as I was likely ever going to get from him.
“Most people still don’t know,” I stated once I had myself back under control. “Why?”
Now a smidgen of his usual condescending attitude returned, but after dealing with Hamilton on a daily basis, it was easy to ignore. “And escalate the shit storm that has been raging for the past two years even further?” He shook his head. “How would you even get the level of confirmation needed for it to be more than rumors? Even with Cortez and his camp infecting hundreds of scavengers, most affected still got the original versions. I know you likely don’t want to hear this, but the army has been bleeding manpower more than any of the other branches—or maybe it’s a simple fact of having been better organized because of you amped-up assholes that they’ve remained more visible. Who knows? Since the marine corps didn’t systematically single out their members, it’s hard to tell them apart from the rest.”
I couldn’t help but grin, despite the grim topic. “If you check out the odd scavengers, you’ll see a lot of them carry around a different kind of easily identifiable ink, besides the single marks on their necks.” I paused. “Do they still do that shit—mark us up?”
He shook his head. “Not
since the winter you disappeared, pretty much. Dispatch still requires the marks, but I hear they have a flourishing black market outside their gates to account for the people refusing to enter.”
“Good.”
Now it was his turn to snort. “People were scared—can you fault them for that? Now consider what would happen if all their worst fears got confirmed. Anyone with three marks would be shot on sight, and likely a lot with single marks as well. Traders would refuse to deliver goods to settlements. People would die of starvation again. What little we’ve regained of civilization would go up in flames quicker than you could go off in my face. Nobody wants that to happen. So you’re safe for now. Or as safe as you’ll ever be. You have a penchant for finding yourself in the worst of places.”
I had to accede that point to him—in part. “Could have been worse.”
Greene pursed his lips. “You mean, you could have been at that very lab you’re standing in? Stone did offer you their little satellite office in Kansas. And you were always kind of an overachiever.”
I would have loved to refute his claim, but the words refused to make it over my lips. “Your father was their leader,” I choked out. “He was as much a part of why I signed that contract with his company as Raleigh Miller was. I don’t know what it would have taken for me to realize what was going on, but there’s a good chance that it would have been way too late to undo the damage.”
If I’d expected him to throw me a pity party, he’d have disappointed me right then. “That still makes you one of the better people in the company you keep,” he remarked wryly. “Speaking of which—why is it just you here, talking to me of all people, in the middle of the night? Shouldn’t there be at least one asshole hulking in your direct vicinity?”
“Maybe I needed a break from that,” I offered, laughing in spite of myself.
“Don’t we all,” Greene mused, growing pensive. “That old cooter. Never thought he’d survive the apocalypse. Sure, I joked a few times that there’s a good chance he’s locked away with the elite in some doomsday bunker, but I never expected to be right about that.”
“Do those even exist?” His eyebrows shot up at my question. “Doomsday bunkers, I mean,” I clarified. “Sure, small remodeled basements like where we spent the first winter are easy to set up. But beyond that I haven’t heard of anything else, if you ignore all these super-secret laboratories.”
He flashed me a quick grin but his eyes remained distant. “You must have toured all of them by now.”
“There’s still the official CDC installations,” I pointed out. “But if I found out they were connected with this as well, I’d give up.” I wasn’t even joking about that. “I can take on megalomaniac assholes, but not the people actually sworn to protect us from shit like this happening.”
Greene shrugged as if it was the same to him. “I’d have expected things to work more efficiently if the CDC had been involved,” he admitted. “The FEMA blockades and camps got a lot of first responders killed, but they also saved a shitload of people. They did what they could on short notice that was a fraction of the most pessimistic contingency plan in existence.”
Silence fell as we both got lost in thought. More on a snap-judgment decision than because I actually believed this would lead anywhere, I got out the piece of paper where I’d scrawled the address down that Cole had retrieved from the SatNavs. Prattling it off, I asked, “That ring a bell?”
Greene laughed, which irritated me as much as it set off the sirens in the back of my mind. “You’re joking, right?”
“Let’s pretend for a second that I’m not,” I offered, trying for a neutral tone.
I must have failed because Greene sat up, his eyes narrowing as he squinted at his screen. “Stop screwing with me, Lewis. It was kind of funny when you did it with Decker’s name, but this one’s just stupid.”
It was only that mention that made me remember that—back when I had been fishing for intel—Greene had mentioned that his father and Decker had been tight. Just one more piece in the puzzle that fit perfectly.
“Indulge me,” I begged. “Please?”
Greene harrumphed but finally did. “You were joking about doomsday bunkers just minutes ago? Well, there you have one. Or not. It turned out to be one of the biggest scams of the last decade. Apparently, a lot of people way too wealthy for their own good had bought into it, but an investigative journalist debunked it all.”
I’d almost forgotten about Cole idly cleaning his fingernails with a knife at his computer station, but that made him perk up. “Yeah, I remember the documentary,” he threw in. “The progress updates were all filmed on green screen, or some shit. A friend of mine was pretty impressed, saying that was blockbuster movie level of CGI that they used. Apparently still cheaper than attempting to build the real thing. The documentary even featured footage from the construction site. In five years of work, they’d barely done more than required to pour the foundations of a house.”
That did jog my memory, but since it had been long before I’d found anything related to survivalism interesting, I’d mostly ignored the hype. “But what if the documentary was the real ruse?” I suggested. “I feel like we’ve been chasing ghosts for fucking forever. Adding a ghost bunker to the list really doesn’t change much.”
Greene didn’t look convinced, and now that the topic had come up, Cole seemed less enthusiastic about his own investigative powers. Since Greene and I were pretty much done weirding each other out by not being at each other’s throat, I signed off. Cole excused himself to go check on the cars once more. I didn’t hold him back, but mostly because I was sure he hadn’t been wrong in the first place. Even with the communications center here making not just audio but video possible to the handful of other places like it—which would probably include that doomsday bunker—it sounded highly unlikely that they’d be able to make do without physically sending people this way and that. A simple three-page report about experiments was hell to discuss over the radio. I doubted something as involved as Greene’s father and Stone had been running here was possible without a lot of direct interactions.
I was overdue to hit the sack but I knew that this new realization would make sleep impossible, so I decided to make myself useful. Eden and Marleen were still playing cards, likely waiting for Cole to call it a day so they could return to the cafeteria together. Since they had to walk by the labs with the airlocks, I’d join then. I’d already scoured the offices adjacent to the BSL-3 labs and I was too tired to bother with suiting up now—even if it was just disposable scrubs with some protective gear instead of a full suit—so I went further back to the lower security labs. I still hadn’t checked on three of them. Considering how many scientists we’d found dead in that room, a substantial number of them must have been working there as well.
Because the bright lights hurt my eyes, I didn’t turn those in the lab itself on, leaving the corridor illumination to do its thing through the large window panes instead. It didn’t take me long to find several volumes of black, bound journals filled to the brim with scrawled notes, print-outs, and the odd dried gel on thick paper directly glued in. From the very first basic chemistry lab on I’d always been required to keep detailed notes of what I’d been up to, making it second nature to keep doing so even for the most routine shit. The scientists here hadn’t been any different, although they hadn’t kept notes for later needing to reference anything for publication. Knowing what they’d been up to suddenly put a very different spin on the seemingly disconnected mix of disciplines showing up in the different lab suits. The one I was in now was full of neurobiology stuff—brain chemistry for the most part, with an extra emphasis on pain management around. It made sense—the serum definitely screwed with neurotransmitters, and I doubted I would have survived on Emily Raynor’s operating table if I’d felt the effect of every cut and scrape to its fullest extent. I still didn’t know how much the serum itself dulled pain, but the virus sure did a number on the receptors, and not just
at the direct infection site. Being able to replicate that effect must have been a neat little trick, although like a lot of things concerning the serum I felt like it had been a lucky side effect, and then scientists had scurried to explain how and why it must have been deliberate.
I got so lost in reading—and my own acerbic commentary in my head—that I didn’t realize someone had snuck into the lab behind me until I felt a sharp pain in my lower right torso… before my world exploded in agony.
Chapter 17
The pain should have kicked my body into overdrive, but while my mind screamed, my lungs didn’t comply. My pulse slowed although it should have skyrocketed. I tried to whip around but barely managed to catch myself on the workbench, and even so my control over my muscles was slipping away quickly.
My first guess—as much as sluggish ideas managed to cut through the pain—was that we’d somehow managed to miss one of the guards. No, scratch that—of course my first guess was Hamilton, but while emotionally that made sense, what disjointed information my body managed to give me as it systematically powered down made it obvious that it couldn’t have been him. Whoever had just knifed me in the back—figuratively and literally—was shorter than me… which left only a single possibility.
Marleen.
The moment that name came up in my mind, I heard her coo into my right ear, from where she was standing behind me, straight while I was hunched over the lab journals on the workbench, my legs barely holding me up. Her grasp on the knife was the only thing that kept me from slipping to the floor, making the blade slice deeper into me. I tried to scream but my throat had completely shut down, not even letting me swallow.
“This is too easy. When I accepted the contract, I expected it to be at least some kind of challenge, not a walk in the park.”
Her free—left—hand grabbed my shoulder and pulled me upward and back. I tried to tense but my muscles felt like goo, my body folding in on itself without any resistance. I recognized that sensation all too well from the nightmares that still plagued me sometimes—that fucking paralytic shit! Marleen managed to keep the knife right where she’d stuck it into me to the hilt, crouching down behind where I ended up almost kneeling on the floor, only her hold on the knife and her hand on my shoulder where she eased me against her torso holding me upright. All that jostling sent the pain levels up another few notches, but my tear ducts refused to work. I tried crying out again but that didn’t even produce a croak—or any sound, for that matter.
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