Artifact (15 page)

It was a long process, and I have no idea how long it took, but we eventually found a key with a pink cap that fit. Inside, we saw that the primary generator was dead and silent, but the backup generator was functioning just fine. Kate circled the behemoth combustion engine until she located the terminal block. She rubbed her stubble a few times and then shook her head. “Oh, man…”

“What?”

“Well, most of the wiring is intact. But it looks like some of it’s been cut,” She pointed at a distribution panel, and most of the wires on the bottom half looked fine – half of the wiring on the top, however, looked as if it had been cleanly severed.

“We could have simply completed the circuit or something,” she said. “But the wire isn’t just cut–” She pointed at the wall where most of the wiring disappeared into various conduits through the ceiling. “The wires that were cut from the terminal block have also been ripped out of the ceiling. We couldn’t even hotwire these if we wanted to.”

I tracked the conduit on the ceiling to where the rest of the wires seemed to disappear.

“This wasn’t some accident,” I said quietly, turning quickly to leave the room, but Kate stopped me.

“This place,” she said. “You do a lot of important work here?”

“Yes, why?”

“Because I’ve seen power supplies at important facilities like this before,” she said. “Like at the CDC or something – and they usually have several backup generators – at least one separate generator for the room where all of the important stuff was kept. I’m talking a whole floor of generators.”

I thought about the Clean Room. I remembered something about a separate generator, but not much. “You’re saying that there might be another generator room.”

“Has to be – let’s have a look at the map.”

We studied the map for a moment and concluded that GR meant Generator Room
–
this was where we were – and that ER meant Electrical Room. Kate said that electrical panels and fuse boxes are typically kept separate from the generators because of the fuel. She pointed at the only unlabeled room on the map, which was directly across the hall. “Let’s check that one out.”

We spent some time again looking for the right key, and when we opened the door a thick pungent scent of diesel wafted into the corridor. We found the Clean Room generator inside.

There was a massive puddle of fuel on the floor. Kate inspected the generator with her flashlight, and revealed how someone must have been through already.

It looked as though someone took a pair of bolt cutters to the thing, and snipped all of the exposed wire and hoses. It was completely useless and irreparable.

“Well,” Kate said quietly. “That’s that…”

“What does it mean?” Sarah asked.

Kate picked her way through the puddle, taking in the extent of the damage. “Someone wants us dead,” she said softly.

I stepped into the room and, just as I suspected, there was a pair of bolt cutters carelessly tossed onto the floor near the generator, covered with fuel.

“So,” Sarah repeated. “What do we do now?”

“I – I don’t know.”

Kate and I stood in the puddle, numbly staring at what was our only chance to get the magnetic roller going. Somebody really went out of their way to make sure that the Clean Room remained inoperable.

“Wait,” Kate said suddenly. “Look at this.” She shined her light on the generator’s terminal block. None of the wires seemed to have been cut on this one. “They probably figured that they didn’t have to mess with the terminal block,” she said. “Since they completely ruined the generator itself.”

I shined my light on the panel as well. “What are you thinking?”

“We could jump it,” Kate said, focusing on the remaining cables sprouting out of the distribution panel.

“Jump? Like a car?”

“I thought you were a physicist,” she said under her breath.

“I know how it works,” I said defensively. “I just don’t know how you expect to do it.”

“This distribution panel is intact. If we could supply power to it
with the generator across the hall – by like, running wire from the Clean Room’s terminal block to the backup generator’s terminal block – we might be able to get this going.”

“That’s very dangerous. You think you can figure out a way to do this?”

She circled the block, studying the wires branching out of either end. “Yeah. Everything looks good. If we could simply get some voltage running through these things, we could get the Clean Room up and running again.”

I studied the terminal block, tracing the wires as they disappeared into some more conduits in the ceiling, mentally following their complex routes through the building into the Clean Room. “How do you suppose we do it?”

“Well, it would be major fire hazard,” Kate said. “And a lot of the wire is going to melt – and we’re probably going to have to figure out a way to suspend the wire so it doesn’t ignite the fuel on the floor.”

I glanced at the ground, noticing that fuel and coolant was beginning to run out of the room into the corridor.

“But,” she continued. “We could head upstairs and start pulling random wire out of the ceiling – braid large enough spools together to make a larger wire, and we should be able to do it.”

“That’s not very safe.”

“No.” She smiled, “But I don’t know what else to do. We just have to make sure to power down the backup generator before we try running any wire into this terminal block. Like I said, at the very least some of the wiring will melt – the worse that could happen,” she glanced down at the floor. “The electricity arcs to the floor, and we ignite the fuel–”

“–and burn the building down.”

“Pretty much.”

“What about this?” Sarah asked. She pointed out an oversized three-pronged socket hidden from view underneath the distribution panel. It looked like there was both a plug and a socket for either end of a very large power cord.

Kate knelt and inspected it. She smiled and ruffled Sarah’s hair. “You’re too smart,” she said, and turned to me. “These generators are custom made.” She rubbed her thumb across the Honda logo. “All we need is an industrial extension cord – but a special kind of cord. It looks like a regular extension cord, but the plugs are twice as big and the cord is twice as thick.”

I bent down to see what she was talking about. “Does the other generator have anything like this?”

We walked back to the other room across the corridor, and hidden underneath the bottom of the terminal block was a plug and socket, exactly the same size and shape as the plug and socket on the Clean
Room’s terminal block.

“We just have to find the cord,” Kate said. “We should have a look around.”

“No pulling wire out of the ceiling?” Sarah asked.

“Not if we can find the extension cord.”

“There are a couple of maintenance closets upstairs,” I said. “If you two are okay down here, I’ll head up and see if I can find anything.”

Sarah glanced at the bend in the hallway and started twisting the bottom of her shirt, but remained silent.

“I’ll hurry back,” I patted her shoulder. “Promise.”

Kate nodded and started looking around with her flashlight. Sarah stayed close, holding onto the tail of Kate’s shirt. The zombies on the other side of the emergency exit tirelessly continued their siege.

6.

I entered the lobby to an echoing whisper of hoarse moaning. There must have been thousands of them pressing into the barricades, which weren’t going to last much longer. The windows had long ago been pulverized to dust by the multitudes. How the flimsy, shoddily placed doors and planks held this long is beyond reason, reality and logic. But such things had been rare in this place. The good news was that it didn’t look like there were very many windows exposing the prime network of hallways. Most of the windows were inside offices – so all one had to do was simply close the doors, and have enough spares around to barricade what was left.

A wave of memories hit me as I stood in front of the name of the research center written large on the wall. The Center for Energetic Materials, and underneath the misquoted inscription read,

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.

A bloody handprint swept away from Proust’s name toward an office. I followed until I came upon a pair of legs jutting out of a door. When I was satisfied that whoever those legs belonged to wasn’t going to get up and follow me, I moved on.

The spirant moaning echoed off the walls, seeming to come from everywhere, menacingly close and at the same time distant. And somehow those dead voices formed a chorus of ravenous dissonance.

More scared than I thought I’d be – much, much more scared than I’d hoped I would be – I moved toward the hallway beside the information kiosk. I reasoned that most maintenance closets I ever saw usually orbited the restrooms. I followed the signs. My long-term memory was still completely blank, and I may as well have been navigating a maze. I spent some time anxiously walking the halls, often backtracking as some hallway or other closed to a dead end. It didn’t help that the only light I had was a tiny generic flashlight. I grew worried that I was going to lose myself – and I focused on what I remembered from orienteering – I kept the location of places that I visited tacked onto my internal compass, hoping that I could at least make my way back to the lobby if things got bad.

It’s strange how selective my memory was. I could remember the most distant things like vacations in Arizona, my childhood home and my parents; the most complex formulas, equations and friends from college – but I couldn’t remember simple things like my middle name, or the faces of those I worked with for however many years – I couldn’t even remember who I was or what I looked like up until a few hours ago. I successfully suspended those thoughts so far, focusing instead on surviving the moment. But when I had time to think, the sheer horror of what was happening hit me with waves of despair.

And then I would fall into that deep abyss of epistemology, suddenly finding myself in a dark and unproductive place, unable to know anything for certain, questioning everything that I observed and experienced until I was tempted to simply give up, lay on the floor and let myself die. It didn’t help thinking that I couldn’t count on knowing anything at this point. It didn’t help knowing
that this was some sort of fantasy that couldn’t be relied upon. It sort of threw a wrench into strategizing my survival – because what was I surviving? What was the point of making it through this hallucination? Why not just simply sit on the floor and wait for the next dream to take me? I could be anything, anywhere, at any time and nothing I did here could have any real bearing on anything that happened elsewhere. Life was meaningless, and I was pointless, and the world was a collapsing flux of experiences with which there was no end, no beginning and absolutely no meaning in and of itself.

I pulled myself away from that dangerous, self–defeated place and focused on the task at hand. That was my purpose for the moment. That was the meaning I must know and understand.

I finally found the lunchroom Alice and I made a pass through earlier. It looked as though someone circled the freezers and messily rifled through the cupboards, scavenging for food or – whatever.

There was enough space between the doors that Alice and Sid nailed up, that I could see corpses reaching through the windows. The widest parts between the barricades were about the width of a phone book, and several smaller zombies thrust their arms inside to their shoulders. Others were simply trying to press their heads through the cracks. The windows were filled with human heads – tens of thousands of zombies, mostly compacted together beneath the mass that almost filled the entire wall, floor to ceiling. The fact that these barricades were holding their weight made absolutely no sense on physical terms. Behind the kitchen, I found a maintenance closet near the restrooms. The door was open a crack, and I could see something about the size and shape of a human hunched over another body with its back to me, chewing viscera.

I eased into the kitchen and grabbed the nearest thing with a handle, which happened to be a fairly heavy skillet. It still hadn’t noticed me at that point, and continued ripping into the person on the floor. The zombies at the windows clawed at me through the air. I eased around the corner and froze, horrified, as my mind registered a strange configuration of shapes – there was
something
inside the maintenance closet, half obscured in shadow–

–and I could see that it had a tail.

My light illuminated the thing by segments, and it took me a few seconds to put everything together into one clear mental image – I wasn’t sure if I was looking at one thing or several. Its flesh was made of something like gray brain tissue, with squamous folds and parallel wrinkles along its sides. I could see reptilian looking spikes running at various lengths along its dorsal, with what also looked like rugose sores along its abdomen where the pubis should have been, and two lifeless eyes that didn’t seem to focus on anything. I saw blunt human teeth inside a mouth that opened and closed in slow rhythm. The zombie it was chewing on uselessly tried to bite back. The thing – this
new
thing – had completely disemboweled the corpse, and was now absentmindedly chewing on its abdomen.

I couldn’t move.

I was expecting another zombie, which was bad enough, but this…

I stepped back, loaded my knees to run and knocked over a recycling bin near the cash register, spilling aluminum cans and plastic bottles across the lunchroom. The thing swung its upper half around like an alligator, everything above its shoulders remained on its own axis – the head couldn’t seem to move where the shoulders didn’t point it – but the movement was made obscene by the fact that this thing, whatever it was, still looked very much like a human
–
between the sudden epinephrine and adrenaline dumps of my fight–or–flight response, some distant part of my brain thought that it closely resembled a flesh colored alligator with a human head. It ponderously wrenched its crocodile neck toward the sound of the aluminum cans. Something clear and thick oozed out of the thing, and I noticed a glistening trail on the floor, which led to the windows. Its lifeless, doll eyes locked onto me, and then it shockingly skittered out of the closet, screeching like a wounded rabbit. I couldn’t imagine a more horrible sound.