And just moving brought jabs, every time he straightened a lance of pain shot from his groin to his navel, and the painkillers were barely taking the edge off.
At least his attack had put him at the front of the line for testing when they’d realized someone had weaponized rabies. Looking around the tent, he didn’t catch any eyes on him; they were too busy. His bosses had put him in charge of the field lab queue, testing all FEMA personnel who’d gone into the contaminated zones or been in contact with survivors before they’d realized the danger. He belonged in a bed, even if only one of the temporary barracks beds across the field, but at least he’d landed where it was safest. Clean-lab conditions, far from the public, where all he needed to do was supervise techs and watch the numbers—
“Hey, you guys look busy. Good for you.”
He turned to rebuke whoever had interrupted his satisfaction and froze. The speaker stood eye to eye with him, her eyes hidden by dark fitted sports-goggles under a blue skullcap and over a blue bandana mask. Her bomber jacket, fringed with metal and decorated with grinning skull patches with disturbing sparking eyes, belonged on a street and not the best streets. The other three intruders behind her, faces covered in different colors but the same style, screamed supervillain just as loudly.
“How did you—”
“No, doctor.” She sounded European. “You know what this is, and I’ll ask the questions. Any capes around?” She kept her voice low while her comrades kept their attention on the lab-techs around them.
“N-no. The last that tested positive got their vaccines and that didn’t happen here.”
“Good. Guards?”
“Not inside. We need to keep people moving in and out to a minimum.”
“Very good. Now, where are the vaccines? No answer needed, you’re going to take us to them. We’re all going together.” She waved a sparking hand and the others gathered up the five lab-techs. “You look like you had a bad day,” said. “Let’s not do anything that makes it worse.”
Everybody not in villain-wear kept their hands where they could be seen and moved slowly. Leo didn’t think of being a hero for an instant; it was obvious that they’d be dead heroes too quickly to accomplish anything but dying stupidly. The threat implied by the intruder’s villain-wear costume choices aside, the one in a red motif stood well over six feet tall and was built like a wall, his bare arms covered with golden scales.
Leo led everyone down the paneled prefab hall. FEMA/CDC missions assembled their own facilities wherever they went—speed was of the essence and trying to take over and adapt local facilities, no matter how good, would only slow them down. He hadn’t laid eyes on the vaccine stocks himself, but he knew right where they were.
Unguarded stocks. Only authorized personnel allowed in this tent building, who needed physical security except on the perimeter? And why wasn’t anyone noticing four color-coded villains?
“This is it.” He stopped them all in front of a keypad locked door. “Inventory Lab One. There’s a prep-room on the other side, and a mobile cold room with our stocks. I can get your doses, but you didn’t need to jump the line.”
“We’re not in line,” blue-bandana said. “Just get us in.”
His access code opened the door and their captors herded them into the empty room, bare except for metal tables along the walls, Styrofoam boxes, and the inventory terminal.
“Now the freezer.” Blue-bandana nodded at the cold room’s metal door.
His access code failed.
He tried again.
Failure.
“What’s wrong?” Blue-bandana’s tone implied it had better go right, and now.
“My access code isn’t working.” Leo swallowed. “If I try one more time without a valid code, security will be alerted. If I don’t try again in thirty seconds, security still gets alerted.”
“Dammit. Fine, step away.” She raised her hands and when her comrades all covered their ears and turned away Leo hastily did the same.
He’d played with M-80 firecrackers as a kid, creatively misspending his summers in rural Georgia, and the bangs flashed through his eyelids and pounded his ears like he’d dropped a whole lit handful at his feet. His ears rang so loudly that for a long moment he didn’t know the sensory assault had stopped. He cautiously opened his eyes.
The cold room door hung open, its internal latching mechanism exposed and shattered. “Bring him,” blue-bandana instructed. Green-bandana, the only one visibly armed and only with a pair of metal batons, grabbed his arm. The large walk-in container held only a single long aisle flanked by metal shelves stocked floor to ceiling with marked cooler boxes. “Show me the labels.” When Leo showed her the red-on-white labels for the boxes of vaccine vials, she counted boxes and nodded. “Everybody out.”
Leo’s palms were sweating. This wasn’t going down right. Nobody grabbed a box. Nobody asked questions about dosage or anything else. Nobody— He almost didn’t catch the villains covering their ears again before the world blew up in light and noise and the stink of burned Styrofoam and chemicals filled his nose. Then the ceiling came down. In white-speckled unreality he saw Astra swinging at blue-bandana to get blocked by the gold scaled red one, Artemis throwing herself into the green-coded baton holder—whose sticks lit up with eye-searing light.
More light and thunder punched him and he curled into a fetal position where he lay—and when had he fallen?—and then hands were pulling him away. “Stay down, doc,” someone shouted in his ringing ear. “People susceptible to death have no business here right now.” A crash over his head confirmed the absolute sense of that and he scrambled on hands and knees in the direction of the tug on his lab coat.
Then he was in the hall without remembering the door and scrambling to his feet, propelled by a final tug from The Harlequin. “Go!” she yelled at him, voice muffled by the ringing. He ran for it.
He was done with Chicago.
Chapter Eleven
“City officials now confirm more than two thousand fatalities from the attack. Power is fully restored to the city, however, and while areas are now under quarantine, all city services are up and running. The CPD has established three field stations while facilities in the quarantined areas are unavailable. Residents of Chicago are encouraged to continue their routines if they are able; residents impacted by the current emergency are encouraged to report their situations to Emergency Authority through the following channels.”
Chicago Evening News
“Two of the lab technicians caught in the fight are dead,” Shell confirmed.
“Dammit.” Blackstone swore without heat. He sat at his desk with one eye on the live-action report playing out in the corner of screen above Shell’s face; a burning field tent, plumes of steam rising from Riptide’s efforts. “Is Hope alright? She shouldn’t have gone in.” Vulcan-designed helmet or no, one good hard hit . . .
He’d had to sit down when Dispatch mask-cams verified the presence of some kind of Ajax-Type villain at the scene.
“Hope and Jacky were closest. Quin was almost right behind, she’d gotten to the crowd before the first explosions and just kept right on bouncing into the field. Hope’s fine—soon as I realized what Scales was I put Jacky on him and she gave him both Vulcans in the face. Didn’t drop him, but he didn’t get a chance at Hope and with Jacky on him Hope was too busy getting bystanders out of the way to push it before they broke off.”
“Thank you. If she’d— Thank you.” Not for the first time, he sent up a thanks to whatever deity might be listening. Once again Shell’s ability to process the chaos of an event at quantum-computer speeds had likely saved their girl. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“I’ve compiled the mask-cam and security footage, and we’ve got four unknown villains who went right for the rabies vaccine stockpile. They didn’t even try and take any—their force-projector blew it all to hell. I’m trying to find recoverables.”
“How did they get in? How did they get out?” They’d
managed to break contact with Artemis, The Harlequin, and Astra—something the public wasn’t going to understand at all, but first priority once they’d lost the stockpile had been bystander safety. But they still shouldn’t have been able to disappear into thin air. Unless they teleported out. Dammit! “Shell, get your sister’s specs on those teleportation bridge anchors. How small can they get, and could someone have just walked one in? Find it!”
“How much do you think’s left?”
“I don’t know. Thirty vials? Maybe? Keep the frost up.”
Jack Frost held his hands wide, chilling the air and pulling moisture into another layer of frost over the white he’d laid down. Galatea moved carefully through the shallow drifts of ice crystals coating the destroyed room and its contents. Whoever they’d been, they’d opened the refrigeration room like a burst tin can and set it on fire, and he didn’t know how anything could be salvaged or how much longer he could do this. He also didn’t know how Galatea could see anything beneath his frost, but the silver-and-blue armored android girl stepped and reached with mechanical precision, depositing whatever she was finding into neat piles.
“I’m not going to freeze this stuff, am I? That would be bad, right?”
The CDC had been giving him a crash-course on viruses and cold—apparently ice-crystals disrupted virus membranes—and he’d spent the last day icing outside surfaces in the attack zones under their direction. And vaccines were weakened viruses, right?
“They can’t crystalize in their sealed containers,” Galatea assured him. “We just can’t let them warm up too much. At least no more burning ceiling is going to fall on what’s left.” The tent-building, what was left of it, had been opened to the sky—partly from Astra making a hole, Jack guessed, but a lot of the roof had burned and fallen in too before Riptide and Jack had gotten to it. Who the hell attacks a CDC mission?
Astra landed beside him holding a refrigerator box. “I can take what’s left to the Dome,” she said, eyes dark. “There’s nowhere more secure, now.”
“How’s the crowd out there?”
She grimaced. “Bad, but there are enough police finally and they know there’s really nothing here for them, anymore.” Nothing was the truth; Galatea had told Jack the shattered unit they were standing in had held close to a thousand doses of vaccine—most of what could be flown in from around the country in a day. “How are you guys, Jack?”
“We’re doing our job. K-Strike’s death is hitting us hard, but nobody else was seriously hurt.” He didn’t mention the bandages under his fresh t-shirt and cargo pants; close to fifty stitches and lots of surgical glue, but he was up and doing. Wouldn’t be hitting the Fortress for drinks and company for a while, though. “A couple of us are infected, but I didn’t test positive. Any idea who did this, yet?”
“Nothing confirmed. Multiple possible actors.” She handed the container to Galatea and dropped her hands but not before Jack spotted the tremors. She tucked them at her sides. “And we have no idea of why, yet. The motives we’re guessing at don’t really go together.”
“Right.” Despite the past few days Jack found himself grinning. The girl probably hadn’t even noticed she’d done it, but she’d pretty much confirmed the theories a lot of Guardians tended to throw around over drinks. The Sentinels were involved, or at least some of them were. They knew stuff way above most capes’ paygrade.
Astra wasn’t so hurting and tired that his look escaped her, and her narrowed eyes made him smile wider.
It was pure reflex. Just a month ago at the Fortress he’d caught Chicago’s favorite daughter on a Girl’s Night, trying an espresso martini on a dare from Artemis. He’d thrown a friendly hookup invite in her direction and she’d laughed and turned him down to leave with some guy who quoted poetry at her.
A guy can try, right? And she called him Jack now, anyway.
“That’s it,” Galatea announced, carefully snugging a final vial into the box. “Thirty-two intact vials. At four doses a vial, one hundred and twenty-eight vaccines. Each vial will need to be tested to make sure the contents are still viable, but fingers crossed.”
Jack sagged. He’d been bone-tired before being called here, had laid down more frost in this small space than he’d have used on the fire. A hand landed on his shoulder. “Come on Frosty,” Astra said. “The Dome’s got beds and it’s close.”
“Also,” Dispatch said in his earbud in a voice that sounded suspiciously like Galatea, “you’re going to be needed real soon according to Her Majesty.”
“Huh? Never mind, a bed sounds perfect.” Now if only he could close his eyes without seeing K-Strike lying in the street.
“Less than two hundred doses left,” the CDC Director summed up from the big screen. “And that’s what we have here and what’s arriving in the next twenty-four hours. Then we’re looking at international stocks and there’s no way we’re talking any of that loose fast enough to do much good.”
Kindrake hated wearing her new armor, and her Changing Ring let her wear her purple and black vest-and-tights outfit when not in the field, but the barely checked anger of the people gathered in the Assembly Room made her wish she’d changed to her heavy silver suit before coming to the briefing.
Every empty chair around the huge oak table was an injury; Lei Zi, Rush, Crash, Watchman, Megaton, Variforce—every one of them badly hurt or infected, two just holding on to life. Superheroes weren’t supposed to go down like that, and she was beginning to wonder if her time with the Hollywood Knights had really prepared her for the Sentinels.
“The remaining stock is secure,” Blackstone informed the director. “A step we should have taken initially.”
“We’ve never considered vaccines strategic targets before,” the tired woman objected. Kindrake could tell that nobody around the table considered that an excuse. Astra looked especially upset.
“Even so.” Blackstone rubbed his eyes, grimacing. “We should have known it was on the table. Their plan was for us to be blindsided by the outbreak in the next day or two. We’re familiar with bombs. This . . . We need only imagine the destruction a berserking Lei Zi would cause, and multiply it by a hundred or a thousand. At best we’d have been facing temporary civic collapse. At worst . . .”
His gaze landed briefly on Astra before sliding away, and Kindrake shivered. She’d at least heard that story—the girl’s odyssey through multiple alternate realities, a couple of them near or post-apocalyptic according to Shell.
“After we discovered it,” he concluded, “if they wanted to achieve any impact from their viral attack then destroying our stocks before we could complete vaccination of a significant number of infected civilians was a must. Now—” he sighed. “Now we need to brace for mass panic. The near-riot of earlier today is only a prelude.”
“On that note,” Dr. Clemens broke in, “we do have some news.”
Oh shit. Something in her voice triggered Kindrake’s paranoia, and watching the woman’s face darken, her stomach sank as she realized the tired physician (the woman needed at least a day’s sleep and restorative spa therapy) was holding onto bad news. Where’s Chakra?
“First the positive, we’re almost ready to release Lei Zi from her accelerated observation. The vaccine protocol appears effective, in fact we believe the modifications made to the virus have also rendered it less resistant to the standard protocol. We expect all infected subjects who received the vaccine to fight off the virus with no complications.” The woman sat back, rubbing her face.
“On the negative side, we’ve finished our accelerated observations of Patient X. The progress of the modified virus was very swift. The berserk phase of infection lasted only hours, subjectively, with seizures and paralysis following quickly. Progression from initial symptoms to death was less than twenty-four accelerated hours. From what we observed, assuming Patient X represents a typical infection response, the modified virus is no less lethal than the natural variety. The presentation of symptoms is a death sentence.”
<
br /> “Is—Patient X alright?” Astra asked. “Where is he?”
“He’s fine, and in fact out of my care. After his reset he tested negative for the virus and appears to be in perfect health. Even the drugs we used to ameliorate his symptoms and eventually fully sedate him were absent from his system, a fascinating power. But that’s all the good news I have.” She took a deep breath, gathering herself. “Chakra has asked me to tell you that Rush has died.”
Astra blanched, making the still-fading brown and purple mottling of her injuries stand out even more starkly. Blackstone closed his eyes as beside him Seven sat rigid and Riptide’s fists crashed on the table. Artemis fixed cold eyes on the screen but didn’t join the voices rising around the table. Kindrake just felt numb. Astra was the first to say anything beyond a protest.
“How is Chakra? And how is Crash?”
Dr. Clemens’ voice dropped. “Chakra is continuing her support of Crash. Rush’s condition was further along, the virus more strongly established in his brain when she began her treatments. She asked . . .” She sighed. “She asked me to tell you that Rush’s condition deteriorated quickly but that he wasn’t aware of it or in any distress at the end. She was able to give him that.”
Keening broke the silence around the table and Kindrake flinched. She’d only kept one of her drakes with her, and the little violet guy on her shoulder gave out a high-pitched warbling cry of distress that jabbed her ears. All eyes turned to her, but she was too outraged to be embarrassed. “So this shit just kills people? No cure, not even with—” she waved her fingers. “And you’re telling us we’ve got a thousand infected people who are all going to die, we can’t do shit about it except make sure they don’t take anyone else with them?”
“The current count is closer to three thousand,” Dr. Clemens answered. “And we’ll make them comfortable, insure they don’t become uncontrollably violent. But yes. The sole mercy is it will be relatively quick.” Her expression showed what she thought of that little mercy.
Repercussions (Wearing the Cape Book 8) Page 11