by David Kazzie
“Wish we could. Too dangerous.”
A bit of static before the CB clicked off.
“Roger that.”
Regular people checking on each other. Regular people, like herself and her dad and Harry, trying to do the best they could, play the cards they were dealt. No one was innocent. They all had blood on their hands.
“You know who they are?”
Priya didn’t reply.
“Who were they?”
“Religious group,” she said. “They believe in Will’s divinity.”
“Jesus H. Christ.”
“Kind of.”
“You knew, and you took us right through there.”
“I wanted to flush them out,” Priya said. “They’re known to be a bit rash.”
Rachel wanted to strangle the woman, but she counted to ten, keeping her eyes on the prize. This was not the hill to die on. If they could figure out why Will had survived, what it would take for the babies to live, then maybe they could figure out their other problems. Maybe a big old injection of hope would fire up humanity’s engine, make the problems they had seem a little more manageable. Make no mistake, the problems were not insignificant. But they were not impossible. They could solve the food problem. Hell, hadn’t Priya had her hands on those seeds? Life would find a way, as long as they kept fighting. Then they could all let go of the past together, absolved of their sins, baptized in the blood of new life.
The sound of new life. Perhaps someday, the sound of children again.
She glanced back at Will, who sat with his arms crossed. A quick thumbs up. He returned the gesture. It would have to do for now.
Sure, one could argue they were better off without children, because what were they going to feed them anyway? But maybe they hadn’t come up with a solution to the food shortage because they weren’t properly motivated. If you had nothing to live for, then what was the point of trying to keep living? In some very real way, they had all given up. Maybe if the babies lived, they would think of things they hadn’t yet. Their minds would be open to new ideas, to new connections, new approaches they hadn’t yet considered.
The idea that the answers to all their questions might be tucked away in her own body, in the body of her little boy was a bit hard to deal with. Even now, with the evidence laid out before her, she didn’t want to believe something about her, about her family, had cast a long and terrible shadow over the world.
What if it didn’t work?
So what if it didn’t work? The trying was the important thing. Not sitting around and waiting to die. That’s all they were doing really. Killing each other while waiting to die. Hell had come to earth.
She was going to find the truth if it killed her.
#
They ran unmolested for another half hour, Rachel navigating, Priya following the route but frequently doubling back to ensure they weren’t being followed. They stayed out in the open, away from tall buildings, away from spaces that closed up around them. Rachel pressed her hand to the window; it was cold, the coldest it had been yet this season. It was early spring, probably April, best as Rachel could guess. Much of the winter snow had melted, but there was still plenty lying about. They didn’t use the heat in the truck, as it was too much of a drag on their fuel efficiency, which was bad enough as it was.
Eventually, they made it to 18th Street, a long and winding road cutting through alternating tracts of commercial development and undeveloped real estate that would bear nothing but unrealized potential.
“This is it,” Rachel said. “Up on the left.”
There was a sign at the corner of the intersection reading PENLABS. Underneath that, the following inscription: A Proud Subsidiary of the Penumbra Corporation! A thin range of trees flanked either side of the access road. Priya pulled to the side of the main road without turning; the second vehicle lay in behind them.
“Got any binoculars?” she asked.
Priya snapped her fingers and someone handed her a pair of field glasses. She held them to her face. A large brick structure lay about a half-mile distant. The sizable parking lot in front of it was empty.
“What’s your plan?” Priya asked.
“Well, I was thinking of going up and knocking on the door.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Look,” she said, “I’m not a spy or a soldier. I don’t know anything about cloak-and-dagger shit. The one thing I have going for me is this tattoo. That will buy me some tokens.”
Priya’s eyes narrowed as she considered this.
“They might kill you.”
“They might. Do you have a better idea?”
Priya shrugged.
“It’s your funeral if you’re wrong.”
“There’s only one way to find out,” she said. “Will, let’s go.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. He stays with me.”
“Like hell he does,” Rachel said, bristling with anger, her hackles up. “Will, out of the car.”
Priya nodded to Kovalewich, who took Will by the arm.
“You let him go.”
“Rachel, let’s dispense with this nonsense. Will stays here. End of story. You know he’s my insurance policy. You insult my intelligence when you act in a way contrary to that. It will just anger me, and that is not something you can afford right now.”
“Fine,” Rachel said, a hint of defeat in her voice. “Can I have a few minutes with him?”
“Take all the time you need.”
Priya and the others got out of the car and left Rachel alone with her son.
“You really have to do this?” he asked.
“I do, buddy. It’s important.”
“Can I come?”
“No, you need to stay here.”
“But I can be brave.”
“You have been so brave. You’re the bravest kid I’ve ever known. You saved Mommy’s life.”
One devious benefit of raising Will in a world without other kids was that he’d never learned to shorten her honorific to Mom. She could be Mommy for as long as she wanted to be. And he had been brave. No kid should have to go through what he’d been through.
“When will you be back?”
Her stomach flipped.
“Buddy, I don’t know. As soon as I can.”
He let out a sharp breath, squared off his shoulders.
“OK,” he said, and in a flash, she saw his future in his face. It passed in the flicker of a second, like a bolt of lightning, but for just a second, the little boy that he still was fell away, like a skin being shed, leaving behind a man hardened by the world in which he’d grown up, but maybe properly equipped to handle it. She could only hope she had done enough because she had no idea if she would ever see him again.
She leaned in to hug him, but he drew back from her a hair, as if he was preparing himself for a life without her. The gap between them was only a few inches, but it felt interstellar. A spike of sadness ripped through her. A boy rejecting a hug from his own mother. She stood up and tousled his hair. It felt cheap and phony, but it was all she would get from him today.
And then it hit her.
He was saying goodbye.
Priya was waiting for her at the front bumper when she was done.
“I remember how difficult that age could be,” Priya said, her voice empty and far away.
Knives of guilt ran deep into Rachel’s soul. There was nothing she could say. She had her son, and Priya’s lay dead somewhere, probably in some hospital morgue, a pile of bones. Bones of the children, bones of the world.
“I’m going to go on then,” Rachel said. “How long will you wait?”
“Three days. You need to be back by then or we go.”
Rachel’s heart fluttered. Three days to finish this or she would never see Will again. She went to the back and strapped on the heavy backpack, already loaded with supplies. Priya had agreed to give her a gun, but it was unloaded, a small supply of ammunition in a separate compartment, lest she try something foolish.
She nodded.
“If this goes south on me…” Rachel started to say, before her voice caught in her throat.
“He will be fine.”
Rachel nodded.
“See you soon,” Priya said.
32
Rachel crossed 18th Street, even pausing to look both ways, and headed up the access road. She hugged the tree line, not hidden necessarily but not anxious to advertise her presence.
The walk was quiet, peaceful. It was a chilly afternoon but the sky was reasonably clear. The air was redolent with pine. Her journey reminded her of another incursion, one made by her father many years earlier. Once upon a time, he had done a great thing. It had started like this for him, she supposed, alone and terrified. Certain that death was close by, that those he cared for would be lost forever.
And he had made it.
She had to finish what he had started, even if he would never know how deep the rabbit hole went. She would solve the mystery he never could, unlock the secret that had kept all of them alive when so many had died.
After a quarter mile, the trees thinned out, and she came up to a security booth and gate, which was fixed in the upward position. She withdrew her pistol and made sure it was loaded. The parking lot was wide and open, pockmarked with potholes. Thick weeds and hardscrabble bushes grew from the fissures in the asphalt.
First, she checked the booth, which was empty. There was an old binder sitting on the built-in desk; the faded lettering read Visitors’ Log decorating the cover. The pages inside had long since fused together into a thick brittle clump. A check for any forgotten supplies came up empty.
The window in the booth gave her a clear line of sight to the front of the building. There was no movement, no sign of life, and her heart sank. The compound appeared as desolate as everything else in the world.
What if this were it? What if there were no answers to be found?
Pushing those thoughts away, she emerged from the booth and crept across the parking lot. The gun was up, her finger on the trigger, her head rotating from side to side, ahead and behind her. Nothing.
Another minute brought her to the front of the building. The doors were intact, tinted, revealing nothing of the building’s interior. Her heart pounding, she tugged on the door pull and was relieved to find it unlocked.
She opened it and stepped inside.
#
To her great surprise, the lights inside were on. Her ears picked up the faint buzz of power coursing through the building. Electricity. Her first taste of it in thirteen years. She stared at the lights, blinking at their brightness, forgetting how harsh and invasive artificial lighting could be. Still, for a moment, this modern-day comfort they’d taken for granted whisked her back through time and she could still feel, deep inside her soul, a different version of herself, one who had never seen the plague come to pass.
Hell, maybe they could just live here!
She was standing in a square-shaped foyer, unremarkable, minimalist in design. No reception desk, no waiting area. There were doors to her left and to her right. Alphanumeric keypads mounted on the wall next to each door, both with indicator lights shining red. The hacker in her awoke, a long-mothballed version of herself that had once wreaked havoc on any computer network that drew her attention.
The problem with password protection was that it had only been as strong as the person’s willingness to create a strong password. And when you got right down to it, most people had been fundamentally lazy about passwords. Many years earlier, Rachel had read a research paper positing that three different codes could open ninety-five percent of four-digit password-controlled systems.
She tried the first.
0000
A beep, followed by a click. The light shined red.
Her breath caught.
1234
A beep, followed by a click. The light shined red.
Her heart skipped a beat.
One last guess. It was commonly used in laboratories, as accidents were common and often called for a fire/EMS response. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. If this didn’t work, the odds of successfully hacking the door would plummet.
0911
A beep, the thunk of the lock disengaging. The light shined green.
A laugh sprang free from her throat.
Achievement unlocked, stealing a phrase from the video game lexicon once popular with her generation.
After wiping her hands dry, she readied her gun and slipped through the door. Bright fluorescent bulbs shining down from the ceiling left her feeling naked, exposed. The corridor immediately doglegged right, opening up on a long hallway. On either side of the hall were several small laboratories. As she edged down the hallway, a splash of déjà vu washed over her, her memories from the Citadel as strong as they had been in years. The massacre of the captured women during the Citadel’s unraveling. Seeing her father. Shooting Miles Chadwick in the stomach as they had struggled to escape. Her skin crawled.
A much larger laboratory sat at the end of the hallway.
A sign reading CLEAN ROOM was posted above the double doors
There was something different about these labs than the ones at the Citadel.
No biosafety cases.
Not as clinical.
Something industrial.
She pushed on a door, but it refused to budge. Then she wedged her fingers in between them and leaned her weight into separating them. Slowly, the doors began to slide on their tracks, squealing in protest. It had been a while since these doors had been opened. Her arms began to burn but finally, there was a gap wide enough for her to slip through. Before entering, she waited a good two minutes to make sure the doors wouldn’t automatically slide shut behind her. She didn’t want to be inside the lab and find out the doors were shatterproof.
When she was satisfied she’d be able to get back out, she stepped inside. She gave the lab a quick once-over. There were six computer workstations, three on each side of the room. A bookcase stuffed full of thick three-ring binders on the back wall. Above the bookcase was a large LED screen. In the center of the room, a seventh computer, this one a desktop, sat on a rectangular table.
Her head swam with confusion.
What was she looking for?
She didn’t know.
She ambled over to the desktop and pressed the spacebar. A fan whirred and the screen blinked to life to reveal a login screen. Two fields, calling for a user name and password. She passed on trying to hack that for the time being. She turned her attention to the binders on the bookcase. After checking back down the hallway to make sure she was still alone, she grabbed a binder and set it down on the desk.
The words stamped on the cover of the binder chilled her to the bone.
PB-815
HUMAN TRIALS
AIRBORNE AEROSOL EXPOSURE
ITERATION EIGHT
FAILURE
The date November 11, not quite four years before the outbreak, was stamped underneath. She’d seen the PB-815 moniker before, many years ago, when she was at the Citadel. It was the official name Chadwick’s group had assigned to the Medusa virus.
Her heart pounding, she flipped open the binder to the first page.
She found it difficult to focus, her brain processing only bits and pieces of the terrible crime memorialized in these pages.
Twenty-three-year-old Caucasian female
Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Exposure … 3.6 seconds … Subject Zero
Symptomatic … Bleeding from Ocular Cavity … 18.3 hours
Remained conscious
Seizures
Time of death: 0715
Infectious Waste Protocol
She flipped the page.
Forty-six-year-old Latino male
Subject terminated.
And again.
Fifty-eight-year-old African-American female
And t
hen one more.
Six-year-old Asian male
…
Subject 17
…
Recovered from infection
…
Subject terminated
She slammed the binder closed, her breath coming in big, sloppy, ragged gasps. Hell inside these pages. Pure hell. Her head hurt. Her legs buckled, and she sank to the ground in a heap, bawling. She could not wrap her head around the evil at work here. A peek behind the curtain of the preparations that went into all this. She flipped the binder back open to the last entry she had read and traced down the page to the line that had caught her attention.
Recovered from infection. Subject terminated.
Recovered from infection. Subject terminated.
A little boy had survived infection with an older version of the virus, and they had killed him anyway. Her stomach heaved, and she vomited on the floor. Her whole body hitched, and it took all her strength to stay up on and her hands and knees.
She rolled back into a sitting position, crossing her legs and holding her head in her hands. Being at the Citadel, that had been bad enough, and she thought it would have prepared her for all this. But it was worse, much worse, seeing this place, seeing the binder, seeing the description of this little boy, nothing more than a science experiment to these people, disposed of like a broken piece of lab equipment. A shattered beaker.
But she had to keep pressing. She still hadn’t learned anything she didn’t know. This binder, horrific as it was, simply added detail work to a nightmarish landscape, one with which she was already intimately familiar. There was another picture she needed to see in full, one of which she had only seen the barest outline. Still no clue how she was connected to this.
After wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she struggled back to her feet, using the edge of the desk to support her shaky legs. A few cleansing breaths, her sea legs returning, blood again warming her clammy face. She turned her attention to the computer screen in front of her, dark again after having returned to sleep. The screen blinked back to life after a quick touch of the mouse.
Two fields awaited her.
USER NAME
PASSWORD
The first step was to search the workstation for sticky notes, index cards, old notebooks, anywhere this computer’s primary users may have scribbled down his log-in information. No matter how many times system admins told people to never do that, without fail, they did. Not that she could blame them.