by Amber Wyatt
“Keep your fingers crossed this works,” she said to Gina, who was digging fruitlessly through the paperwork on the other desks. Hana typed in the login information and held her breath. Three long seconds later the screen cleared to show her a desktop background of a tropical island beach. “I don’t believe it. I’m in!” She looked quickly through the names of the multiple folders on the desktop but nothing relevant seemed to jump out at her.
“Check emails first,” suggested Gina, standing up and coming over to join her. “There must be something in there about deliveries of new exhibits. Start with the ones around the beginning of August 2015. That’s when Wilkins said that the first outbreaks started.”
Hana quickly opened up the emails and started scanning through their headings. Lucky I chose the biggest and fanciest desk, she thought. Looks like I am in the emails of T. Eddings, the general manager.
“It won’t be too hard to find them,” she said, looking at the dates. “It looks like the last emails were sent towards the end of August 2015.” Almost the entire first screen of emails had subject headings relating to ‘STAFF ILLNESS’ and ‘TEMPORARY SHUTDOWN FOR SEPTEMBER’. “Most of them look as if the management are bouncing emails back and forth to each other about staff illnesses and shutting down the museum for a while.”
“Of course. That makes sense, I guess. I wonder if those staff ‘illnesses’ were just the first poor bastards getting infected,” Gina replied, looking over Hana’s shoulder and scanning the subject headings as they scrolled downwards. “Maybe we should look at some of the ones about staff illness. It might mention where or why they were getting ill? Or if we get the names of those people getting infected, later on we might be able to work out which sections they worked in.” Then the Korean singer stiffened with excitement and pointed at the screen. “Wait a second, open that one.”
Hana dutifully tapped on the email marked ‘IT password update – GM Only’
“Yes!” hissed Gina triumphantly. The email had opened up to show a short staff list and their usernames and logins. “That one there, Celina Rivia. Her desk is the one I have just been searching. Let me try and log in and check her emails. With both of us on it, we will be able to search twice as fast.”
Gina quickly scribbled down the password on a piece of paper, then went back to the other desk and switched the computer on. While it was booting up, she took another, more moderate sip of gin, and then started typing on the keyboard as soon as the display lit up. After a minute something beeped and she gave Hana a big thumbs up. “I’m looking at her emails right now. This is a real stroke of luck. Let’s hope there’s something useful in here.”
In the meantime, Hana had been doing what Gina suggested, clicking through the staff illness emails, taking a pen and pad of paper and writing down the names of people who were being signed off absent for medical reasons. It ended up only being a short list of about a dozen names. Then on one of the earliest emails she found something which caught her attention.
“Gina, one of these emails says that people keep getting sick in the ‘clean room’. Are you getting anything about a clean room?”
“Not so far,” the other woman replied distracted, following one email thread. “I decided to start back in July and work my way forward. I think this woman was having an affair with some guy in Miami. There were a couple of quite sexy emails in the beginning, but they ended up with her threatening him with losing his job if he breathed a word about it to anybody else.” Gina looked up over her screen at Hana. “Guess it didn’t work out for them, huh?”
“It never does,” Hana replied, rolling her eyes.
“Clean room, you said?” Gina said thoughtfully. “Like some kind of lab? Let’s try typing ‘clean room’ into the search box as keywords and see what emails it brings up.”
The room was silent for a moment apart from the sound of tapping keys, and then the creaking of plastic as Hana leaned back in her chair and stretched out her spine. She studied the screen in front of her and scrolled down. There were a few pages at least, of search results. They were all listed as emails by date, and with a one-line preview of whatever line the words ‘clean room’ appeared in.
“Okay,” Hana said. “I have quite a few in early June, about construction of the room, and then more in July saying that the clean room has been completed and is ready for the delivery.”
“Me too,” Gina replied. “I have one,” she paused and then corrected herself, “no, I have three emails at the end of July about delivery of an exhibit to the clean room by a company called Trifecta Commercial Diving. You have anything about them?”
Hana typed ‘Trifecta’ into her search box and hit the return key. Almost immediately her screen filled with emails between Eddings and various people in Trifecta regarding delivery of an exhibit. She started scanning them in reverse date order from August back into July. Then she sucked in her breath, as the word ‘chest’ leaped out of the screen at her.
“Gina go and get the others. I think we found it.”
The rest of the group quickly filed in and crowded around the computer screen as Hana scrolled through emails with more and more excitement. Even Hugh and Thomas came in, although the giant bodyguard stayed in the doorway, facing outward towards the hangar with his assault rifle at the ready.
“Look here,” Hana pointed at an email she had just opened and looked around at them grinning. Then she noticed Behnke’s face, flushed bright red and glaring at her with fury in his eyes. God, it’s like dealing with a child. She sighed silently, then drew in a breath. “Mister Behnke,” Hana stood up and indicated the empty chair. “You know what? You should really be sitting here, going through these while Rob films you.”
Surprised, but slightly mollified, Behnke’s face immediately cleared and he smiled as he sat down in Hana’s recently vacated seat. Rob moved around to the side to get a clear shot of Behnke from his best angle, and the smile on the puffy face of the billionaire grew even wider with satisfaction as he noticed what the camera man was doing.
Suddenly there was a huge thud from behind the wall and the muffled sound of something clattering to the floor in the next office unit, and everyone froze except for Thomas who whirled towards the sound, ready to fire.
“Where the hell did that come from?” breathed Wilkins in a terrified whisper.
“It came from the cleaning room,” Thomas said grimly, looking in the direction of the final prefab unit that had not yet been cleared. “Everyone out on to the balcony as fast as you can. Be ready to shoot but keep your safety catches on, and watch where you’re pointing those muzzles!”
There was a quick but purposeful scramble as they piled out of the doorway and spread out on the balcony, taking up firing positions outside the office container marked with the sign ‘Cleaning and Maintenance’.
“Seems like someone trapped at least one of the zombies in the cleaning store and locked it in,” Hugh said. He cast a quick glance backwards over the balcony rail to check that the hangar was still clear and then looked back at the padlocked door. “Shall I get the bolt-cutters or shall we just shoot through the walls?”
“I vote we just shoot through the walls,” Behnke hefted his huge pistol purposefully and looked directly into Rob’s camera. “My custom-designed Piledriver will punch straight through those walls like they were cotton-candy.”
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” A voice shouted from behind the door, startling them. Hana looked at Hugh in astonishment and then around at the rest of the group who appeared to be just as shocked. Rob, unperturbed, panned across their faces filming their reaction, and then calmly turned his camera back towards the door.
“Come out of there now, with your hands up.” Thomas ordered.
“Okay, we’re coming out. Just don’t shoot okay?” The voice responded. There was some more muffled discussion from behind the door, but Hana could not make out what they were saying. How are they going to get out? She thought, puzzled. The padlock is on the outside
of the door.
Then there was a scraping sound from the top of the prefab container and the group all pointed their guns upwards in surprise as the men inside emerged from a hatch on the roof, and climbed out on to the top of the storage unit, holding their hands up high. There were four of them. Hana and Thomas both swung their rifles to cover one of the men who was in some kind of uniform with a gun belt, but then she realized that his holster was empty and he was unarmed.
“Who the hell are you guys?” Behnke barked.
There was a pause as the men on the roof looked at each other, and then a babble of answers as each of them started saying something different to the others.
“They’re escaped prisoners,” Thomas said loudly. His deep, hard voice cut across the cacophony like a hammer on an anvil, and the men on the roof shut up immediately. “While Hugh and I were looking for the fuses, we found some discarded orange uniforms. Prison uniforms. Those clothes you’re wearing,” Thomas pointed with his assault rifle. “You took them off the display mannequins downstairs, didn’t you?”
Hana looked up at them and narrowed her eyes. Thomas was right. That explained why some of the dummies downstairs were nude. The men on the roof were wearing an odd mixture of retro military pants and tops, apart from one massive bodybuilder who had squeezed into what must have been a XXXL museum T-shirt from the gift shop.
“Couldn’t find anything to fit, huh?” she said to the big man sympathetically. Then she pointed at the man in uniform. “But you, you’re a guard, right? Why are you with escaped prisoners?” Then her voice lowered and she aimed her weapon at him more purposefully. “Or did you kill a guard and take his uniform?”
“No, no, no,” the man said, waving his hands frantically. “I’m a real guard. I can show you my ID tag. We all escaped together.”
“What the hell do you mean, ‘we all escaped together’, if you’re a guard?” Thomas said.
“Didn’t you guys hear what happened at the prison yesterday?” the man asked.
Thomas and Hana looked at each other, and then over at Behnke who shrugged his shoulders.
“We have been on a communications blackout for just over forty-eight hours,” Thomas admitted eventually. “What happened at the prison?”
“There was a huge zombie outbreak,” answered one of the escaped convicts. “As far as I know we are the only survivors out of a few hundred inmates and guards. Look we aren’t any threat to you guys, whoever you are. Can we put our hands down? Maybe come down and discuss this like normal people? My name’s Dwayne by the way.”
He was a tall, handsome man with a powerful build. Gina caught herself eyeing him up appreciatively and looked around quickly to see if anyone had noticed her staring. Jeez, calm down girl. He’s a nobody. Just an escaped convict, probably a drug dealer or murderer. Or both.
Thomas looked to Behnke, who nodded. “Okay, you men can come down, but don’t try anything funny.”
“Don’t worry, sir,” said Dwayne. “We won’t be any problem at all.”
In a few short moments the four men had climbed down off the roof and both groups had gathered in the management office. Dwayne appeared to be the de facto leader of the prisoners and quickly introduced the other three newcomers.
“This is Friedman, a former guard. This is Sammy,” the slim Hispanic man winked and blew a kiss at Gina, which she coldly ignored. “And this here, is my man Albert.” The huge, six-foot six bodybuilder exchanged calm stares with Thomas who was of similar gargantuan proportions. Hana looked back and forth between the two of them, and thought to herself that she would not want to see those two get pissed with each other.
“So, let me get this straight,” Behnke leaned forward. “You say you’re the only survivors of an outbreak at the prison yesterday. So, what does that mean? Was the entire prison overrun by zombies? All the inmates and guards killed?”
“Yup, that’s right,” said Dwayne. “When we were driving away, the joint was surrounded by National Guard and they were machine-gunning the fuck out of anything that moved. We caught some of the news this morning on Friedman’s phone. Says that the whole place and everyone in it was infected and then the infected were exterminated by the army. They’re still in there today going through it room by room. With flamethrowers.”
“And you came here to hide out, to this museum? Why?”
“I used to work here at the museum as an aviation engineer,” said Dwayne. “I knew the district had been abandoned so, you know, there wouldn’t be any witnesses. And I figured we could pick up some new clothes, and maybe some tools or whatever was lying around, that we could pawn off for some cash in town.”
“And when Dwayne here said we was going to a museum,” Albert added. “You know, after we just finished escaping zombies and shit, I thought we could pick up like some swords or armor or something.”
Dwayne rolled his eyes, “I keep telling you, brother. It’s not that kind of museum.”
“So if you worked here,” Hana broke in. “How long have you been in jail? Do you know about the clean room that was built here?”
“Yes, I do,” Dwayne replied. “They were just started building it when I got arrested.”
“Where is it?” asked Hana.
“Hangar Five. It’s where all the aircraft conservation workshops are,” said Dwayne, his brow furrowed. “But you can’t go in there.”
“Why not?” asked Behnke.
Dwayne and the other prisoners exchanged troubled looks. Sammy, in particular, had gone virtually white with fear.
“Because it’s full of zombies.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Hangar 5
Behnke offered all four escapees from the prison the option to join his expedition. If there were as many zombies in the other hangar as they claimed, he figured that the extra muscle would come in handy. In return he offered them the chance to leave the quarantine zone together with the rest of the group once they had recovered the chest. Only Dwayne accepted.
Sammy’s entire family was in Miami and he would have loved to leave the zone to rejoin them. But even just the prospect of entering the other hangar and risk being seen by the zombies there, filled him with terror and had caused the young Latino to develop an uncontrollable, nervous twitch. After his narrow escape back at the prison, Sammy never wanted to see another zombie again. The other convict, Albert, and the sole surviving guard, Friedman, had no interest at all in leaving the zone, and even less interest in going into a building full of zombies.
“Bro, we only just managed to escape from a nightmare like that, remember?” Albert had said to Dwayne. “Besides which, my old lady’s right here in Fort Lauderdale. Where else would I go?” Similarly, Friedman also had family in the zone that he did not want to leave behind. Now that they had dumped their prison uniforms, the three newly clothed men had decided to head into central Fort Lauderdale. They had said their goodbyes to Dwayne, and then headed out to the rear of the hangar, where they had hidden their own truck from the prison.
Rob had already filmed multiple takes of Behnke digging through various filing cabinets in the office marked ‘Exhibits’, and Behnke was delighted with the way the light coming through the windows had showed off his muscular arms. He insisted that that was the room where they would show him discovering the critical emails in the final edit of the documentary. To that end Behnke had returned to the exhibits office and was pretending to type on a keyboard, so that Rob could film him talking through a self-congratulatory monologue on how he had hacked into the intranet and was decoding the secrets of the museum.
Hana had stayed behind in the management office. She had suggested, and Behnke had agreed, that it was important to print out as many of the emails as possible relating to the discovery of the chest, for analysis at a later date. The information contained in the documents might help them better understand the origins of the chest, and how the Lyssavirus worked.
The rest of the group stood on the balcony and looked out over the ha
ngar while Wilkins pointed out each of the planes in the exhibition and gave them all a brief history of each aircraft. The usually timid, British accountant was babbling with such childlike enthusiasm, that it made Gina smile.
“I’m just going to check on how Hana is doing with the printing,” Hugh said after a few minutes, and slipped back into the doorway of the management office. He closed the door quietly behind him, and Hana smiled warmly as she looked up to see who had come in. For a moment, the two of them were alone together in the management office.
“So, I was wondering…” Hugh said with a cocky smile that, for some reason, made her frown. She realized that it was because she was determined not to let him think that she had any interest in him, and she tried to wipe the answering smile from her own face and replace it with a more neutral expression.
“Yes? You were wondering about what?” Hana put down the folder into which she was filing all of the print-outs, and looked at him, her eyes automatically sliding across his broad shoulders and down to where his strong, lean fingers were tucked into his belt. As soon as she realized what she was doing, she angrily snapped her gaze back up to meet his laughing eyes.
“I was wondering if, after all this is over, whether you and I could go out for a drink together or, you know, maybe dinner to celebrate the end of this job? Just the two of us.”
Hana hoped that the dim light hid the sudden blush she felt suffusing her cheeks. That sounds nice, she thought. But instead she covered her embarrassment by smiling brightly and said, “That’s a great idea. But not just you and me. I think we should all go out and celebrate as a group.”
“Hana,” Hugh stepped in closer. So close that she could smell the clean scent of his skin again. “You know that I have feelings for you. I’m just asking you to give me a chance. Come out for dinner with me and get to know me a little better, that’s all. And maybe you might want to know me as more than just a friend.”