Survivors (8 page)

Trev chuckled and shook his head. “All right. You’ve got me there.”

The pair circled the wide landing and headed down the last set of stairs into the basement, nearly running directly into Rebecca Hall, the short young woman with dirty-blond hair who had been with the group since before Suez. Her naturally trim form had grown even thinner over the past few months. She ate little, spoke less, and when she did open her mouth it was usually with a biting comment. It wasn’t that she was unpleasant. Unlike the rest of the group, Brewster knew that she held little to no hope for the future. She managed to paint a grim enough expression on her face to discourage any flirtatious advances from the male survivors. She was backing out of a medical supply closet toting a cart behind her when she almost collided with Brewster and Trevor.

“Hey!” she exclaimed, narrowing her eyes. “Watch where you’re going!”

“Hiya, sunshine,” Brewster said, grinning. “We’ve got some presents for you.”

“Oh, goody,” Rebecca said acidly, and pointed an outstretched finger at the cart. “Just dump them there. I’m heading to the lab now, anyway.”

Brewster, a literalist when it suited him, opened his rucksack and upended the contents onto the cart. Rebecca cast him an agonized glance and began sorting through the boxes and bottles. Trevor took his time, unloading his findings by hand while engaging Rebecca in conversation. “Tell the Doc that some of this stuff is beyond its expiration date,” he said, holding up one of the bottles of Cipro to illustrate his point. “It might still be good, but she should know. How’re things coming in there?”

“How do you think?” Rebecca snapped, then looked guilty for doing so. She took a deep breath and softened up. “I’m sorry. It’s just not going so well. Every day it’s the same tests, the same negative results. I’m not sure what we’re missing. Hell, I don’t understand most of what we’re doing in there. I’m no help at all.”

“Don’t worry,” Trevor said, handing her the last bottle of medicine. “I’m sure you two will figure it out sooner or later.”

“And maybe once you do we’ll get to see you smile,” Brewster said, still grinning. “I mean, come on. Just once. It won’t break your face. I swear.”

Rebecca held up her middle finger. “Get back upstairs. If you stick around down here, I might break
your
face. I’ll get the cart.”

Brewster chuckled. After Thomas, Rebecca seemed to dislike Brewster the most. Irrepressible as always, he favored Rebecca with a wry smile, returning her gesture with one of his own.

“See you, Becky,” said Trev, waving.

Rebecca watched the men walk back up the stairs, chatting back and forth, until the doors swung shut behind them. Once they were gone, she grabbed the wheeled cart and began the walk toward the biosafety level four laboratory. A second set of double doors, directly opposite those leading to the stairs, confronted her. A simple keypad sat in place of a handle. Normally she would have had to enter a six-digit access code to enter, but Mitsui, handy with electronics, had disabled it. There was no need for security at this particular checkpoint any longer. Rebecca backed into the doors, pushing them open for the cart, which she pulled in after herself.

A long, dim hallway stretched out before her. It was as Spartan as the rest of the facility: white walls, white tiled floor, white ceiling panels. The lighting was only half-on. Every other bulb sat dark to conserve what little power reserves they had. The cart’s wheels squeaked with each rotation. That and Rebecca’s footsteps were the only sounds in the corridor, echoing dully off the walls.

Rebecca glanced to her left as she passed a side room with a wide observation window set into the wall. The room was dark and devoid of life, but the light from the hallway was just enough to give her a look at several rows of lab stations. Freezers lined the far wall, and surgical gowns and masks hung near the door. A sign beside the entryway warned passersby that the room was a biological hazard area, complete with a red-on-white painting of the international biohazard symbol. Beneath that, in smaller, precise lettering, was the simple code: “BL1.” Within, she could make out the still form of Gregory Mason, still recovering from the wounds he had received in his fight with Derrick, another National Security Agency employee, upon their taking of the Fac.

She continued on down the hallway, passing another doorway with a similar warning etched beside it, and the lettering “BL2.” The door to that room, unlike the first, was solid steel, and had the look of a submarine hatch, minus the wheel. Rebecca knew it would seal airtight when pulled shut. In addition to the gowns, Rebecca saw a rack of hanging gas masks with a shelf of replacement filters inside. The scientists who had worked in there before the pandemic would have to wear them: several of the diseases they would have been looking into were airborne and highly contagious.

Rebecca came up short against yet another pair of thick, swinging doors with a small black plastic keypad in place of a knob. This was the second security checkpoint, still active. She entered a code into the keypad, and the locks retracted. Before the pandemic, there would have been an armed security guard there to check her paperwork as well.

Rebecca backed through the door towing the cart behind her. The doors swung shut quietly, and she heard the locks click back into place.

There were only two doorways in this section of hallway, and no offices. The closest portal was off to her left, and had the same submarine-like hatch as the BL2 lab. Instead of a simple entryway, however, it had a small, one-man decontamination area added into the design, a control point. Outside the portal hung full plastic face shields and hoods alongside a number of hazmat suits. They weren’t completely airtight, but close enough. The researchers working in that room would have to go through several stages of preparation before they could clock in or out, and for good reason: the diseases stored inside could easily kill, and were highly infectious. A small screwed-in sign on the hatch read “BL3.”

The only other door in the hallway sat at the far end of a narrow catwalk, separated by an open, empty space from the rest of the building.

Unlike the other labs, the sign on this one was much larger, and printed in bright red ink, reading “BL4.” A sign below that, in smaller lettering, read: W
ARNING
: E
XTREME
B
IOLOGICAL
H
AZARD
.

The entryway always gave her pause. It seemed to be out of place, as if it belonged on the set of a science-fiction movie, not in a research laboratory.

It was a room within a room: a self-contained environment, held separate from the rest of the facility by several clever safeguards. Getting in, even with proper authorization, took a lot of doing. A lit-up keypad sat silently blinking next to the portal. That was Rebecca’s first obstacle.

She sighed and pursed her lips. The whole lab seemed ominous, somehow, in the dim light. Maybe it was just the knowledge that specimens of the deadliest diseases mankind had ever known were on the other side of those steel walls—including Morningstar.

Rebecca shook her head and wheeled the squeaking cart up to the hatch, punched in a nine-digit combination on the keypad. The LED embedded in the top of the device winked green, and the hatch’s dead bolts slid back with the sound of scraping metal, and in her mind she heard blunt swords drawn from stainless steel sheaths. She pulled the door open and pushed the cart inside ahead of her. She stepped through and watched the door shut firmly behind her. The dead bolts slid back into place automatically.

The small ready room she found herself in was much brighter than the corridor outside. The lab got preferential treatment when it came to using their energy stores.

Along one wall hung a rack of space suits, as Anna occasionally called them. Becky knew it was a misnomer. The things weren’t designed to handle a vacuum, but they
were
airtight. They were old, but still serviceable. Rebecca let go of the cart and walked over to them. She pulled one of the Chemturions free, rubbing down the corner of a strip of duct tape on the breast that had “Hall” written on it in permanent marker.

Rebecca sealed the suit, pulled a nozzle down from the ceiling, and attached it to the waist of the Chemturion. With a hiss of released air, the suit swelled up and held. Rebecca detached the hose and inspected the blown-up suit for any recent tears or leaks. Carefully, she ran a paper towel over the entirety of the suit, holding it millimeters from the surface, looking for a telltale flutter of leaking air. Seeing none, and hearing no hiss of escaping air, she unsealed the suit. It went limp in her hands as the air rushed out.

That was good. Even the tiniest rip could mean certain death.

Rebecca self-consciously glanced around the room as if looking for observers, then rebuked herself silently. She was alone—and a good thing, too, because you couldn’t wear a Chemturion with street clothes on underneath it. Any protruding buttons or zippers might cause a tear in the material.

She pulled her shirt off over her head, tossed it onto a narrow bench, then removed her shoes, socks, pants, and undergarments. All of these were similarly tossed onto the bench. She noted a similar pile of clothing on the far end of the bench—this one, by contrast, neatly folded and stacked—which meant Dr. Demilio was hard at work in the lab already. Naked and shivering in the slightly chill air, Becky retrieved her Chemturion from its rack and prepared to enter it.

“Chemical centurion,” she said, holding it at arm’s length. Rebecca unzipped the suit the rest of the way and stepped inside. Next, she pulled on a triple layer of latex gloves and used duct tape to seal the cuffs of the suit around her wrists. Finally, she adjusted her helmet and checked her seals by reattaching the air hose. Inside the suit, normal sounds were drowned out by the sounds of rushing air and her own breathing, captured and amplified by the helmet.

Rebecca grabbed the cart and pushed it over to the only other door in the ready room. She pulled it open and stepped inside.

This room was smaller and narrower than the ready room, with several nozzles protruding from the ceiling and walls, and one final door at the far end. Rebecca shook open a piece of thin plastic sheeting and laid it over her boxes, then pressed a small red button next to the door. The nozzles opened up, drenching Rebecca’s suit and the cart in disinfectant spray. The shower lasted for nearly a minute before it finally tapered off.

Rebecca pulled open the last door and stepped forward into BL4. The other rooms—the one with the Chemturions and the disinfectant shower—had merely served to prepare her for entry. She would have to go through the exact same routine in reverse when she wanted to leave. She wheeled the cart up against a table and pulled a nearby air hose down from the ceiling. As she attached it to her suit, she looked around the lab for Dr. Anna Demilio.

Anna was at the far end of the lab, facing away from Rebecca. She was hunched over a tray holding several dozen samples of Morningstar, dropping a possible vaccine into each sample to watch for a reaction. From the way her hooded head shook subtly with each drop, it wasn’t going well.

“Bad day?” Rebecca asked. Anna didn’t respond. Rebecca raised her voice over the hiss of the air hoses. “Doctor?”

Anna raised her head and looked over her shoulder at Rebecca.

“Good morning,” Anna said.

“Afternoon,” Rebecca said.

“Already? Jesus.” Anna pointed at an empty spot along one of the lab’s far walls. “You can put that cart over there. I won’t be needing any of that stuff until later this afternoon. My cultures aren’t ready yet.”

“Any progress?” Rebecca asked as she wheeled the cart over to the designated spot.

“I wish,” said Anna, leaning over her samples once again and dropping another possible vaccine into one of the test tubes. “Damn it. Another negative. I must be missing something.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Rebecca said, shrugging. “We’ve only been here a month and a half.”

“I know, I know,” Anna replied. “Most of these vaccines take years to develop. And eggs to grow them in, which we are conspicuously short of.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. You just haven’t had enough time.”

“Well, maybe, but I was hoping to at least have gotten
some
idea of what direction I should head in by now,” Anna said, frowning behind her faceplate. “Instead, I’m just waltzing in a slow circle. And in the meantime, God knows how many more people are dying from the infection.”

“I wish I knew more about what you were doing,” Rebecca said over the hiss of the forced air. “I might be able to help you out better.”

“Thanks, but even with two of us, we might never find what we’re looking for,” Anna sighed.

“Well, let’s start small, then,” Rebecca said, leaning her faceplate closer to Anna’s workspace. The Doctor was using a dropper to place samples of light green liquid into test tubes filled with a red, viscous substance. “What are you doing right now, with that thing?”

“Killing time, mostly,” Anna said, then noted Rebecca’s serious interest and changed her tone. “I had the thought that if I can’t figure out where to start looking for a vaccine, I may as well start looking for a better way to kill the virus.”