Epitaph Road (18 page)

Voices rose from the depths: the doctor, a man or two, a woman or two. I couldn't make out the words. They sounded foreign, like something from an ancient movie about Nazis.

A moment later, Dr. Wapner was on the stairs. He arrived in the room with a small plastic box holding three hypodermic syringes. The needles looked like tree trunks. Was I really going to just let this guy — doctor of
what
? — stick one of them in me? Was Dad okay with it?

The doctor set the box on the desk. “Who's first?” he said, and Gunny rolled up his sleeve and offered his arm. Wapner rubbed on disinfectant, then plunged in the needle and emptied the syringe. Dad was next. He got through it without a grimace and gave me a reassuring smile. At least that was what I thought it was. I stepped up, trying to appear brave for the girls. But I couldn't help squinting my eyes, looking away, waiting for the jab. It was done before the temptation to run took over. I imagined weak or dead (I hoped) little Elisha bugs beginning their journey through my body.

“I'm on my way,” Gunny said. He hugged the girls, he shook hands with Dad, and he shook hands with me. His grip lingered, and I became more and more aware of his scars and calluses and beneath them, his strength and warmth.

“Beware of strange women,” Dad said as Gunny went out the door. Gunny didn't respond. He pulled the door shut behind him, and we were cut off again from the outside air, the sunlight. In here, it smelled of disinfectant and sweat and fish.

Dr. Wapner locked the door. “We have showers downstairs,” he said as if he'd noticed the smell, too. “If you want fresh clothes, I believe we have something that will fit all of you, and a washer and dryer for the clothes you're wearing.”

“Really?” Sunday said as if he'd just offered her a trip to an exotic tropical island. I thought about Puerto Verde and Grand Cayman and another lab — Brighter Day — and those northern owl monkeys again. How different from those monkeys were we? I felt a chill.

Sunday began moving toward the opening in the floor. Tia followed, I followed. I didn't care that much about a shower or clean clothes, but I was definitely curious about what was down those stairs. I rubbed my arm where the giant needle had entered. It was a little sore, but when I looked I didn't see any sign of damage — no bruising, no blood vessels pulsing with tiny foreign bodies.

“The rifle will have to stay up here, Charlie,” the doctor said, sounding friendlier now. “No arms in the lab area, security or not.”

Dad gave him a look, like he was ready to protest, then shrugged and took the rifle out of his pack and leaned it against the wall. It was short-barreled but mean-looking, all black, a magazine big enough to hold dozens of shells. I'd never seen Dad shoot a gun of any kind — I'd never even seen him with a gun — but he looked comfortable with this one, reluctant to let it go. He'd told me once about pirates, men who “catch” their fish by stealing from other boats. Dad got his rifle after a friend's catch was pirated at gunpoint.

I was surprised by what greeted us at the bottom of the steps. The staircase ended in the middle of a small room, but long, well-lighted corridors branched off from it in four directions like the spokes of a wheel. They reached much farther than the perimeter of the room we'd just left. I realized that the upstairs building was just an entryway, a false front for the real thing.

Doors, most of which were closed, lined the hallways. Dr. Wapner shut the overhead hatch, bolted it from the inside, and moved around us to lead the way down the corridor that lay straight ahead. An
A
was painted above its entrance. The other hallways, in clockwise rotation from where we were standing, were
B, C,
and
D.

“Where does the air come from?” Tia asked, and I could see why she was curious. With nothing but dirt and rock and roots over our heads, with no windows and a single door leading out of here, I had this claustrophobic feeling pressing in on my chest.

“We have ventilation to and from the outside world,” Wapner said. He pointed to a grilled opening high on the wall. No light showed through. “Of course, everything is filtered to screen out the finest dust, the most microscopic forms of bacteria and viruses and toxins.”

He stopped at the first open door and invited us to look in. It was a big bathroom, three toilet stalls on one wall, three shower stalls on the other. Sinks and mirrors lined the remaining two.

We continued on, passing a laundry room, then a kitchen with the latest in appliances, a bar in the center, and a long table near one wall. A couple of plates with half-eaten sandwiches sat on one end of the table. I realized I was starving. I was tempted to walk over and wolf down the leftovers. “You're all welcome to return here as soon as we finish our little tour,” Dr. Wapner told us, apparently reading my mind. He seemed relaxed, almost carefree. I wondered if he knew something I didn't. Besides all the obvious scientific stuff, of course. “There are provisions in the refrigerator and cabinets.”

We doubled back along the corridor, got back to the hub, and took a right down another hallway, corridor D
.
The sign on the first closed door said
LAB ONE
.
We passed it by and went to
LAB TWO
.
The doctor gave the door a sharp rap, and a moment later the latch clicked and the door opened. And the tour group was face-to-face with a woman. She smiled, but she didn't look happy. She looked harried.

She also looked familiar, in an everyday-face-in-a-strange-place kind of way.

“This is Dr. Margaret Nuyen,” Dr. Wapner said, and instantly I knew why she looked familiar. Just as it jarred me breathless, she focused in on me and it hit her, too. I could see it in her eyes. They widened and then went into communication mode. And the message she was sending me was
Don't. Don't say anything.
And to verify the message, just in case I had any doubts, she gave her head a whisper of a shake, a bare side-to-side twitch.

“Dr. Nuyen is one of our lead scientists,” Wapner said. “She's as responsible as anyone for the vaccine you just received. I told her about the news you've brought us, and she agrees with me that we need to show you every aspect of our hospitality.”

While Dr. Wapner introduced the girls and Dad to Dr. Nuyen and they exchanged canned pleasantries, I found myself staring at her face and imagining her a year, then twenty years, younger — I saw her daughter Merri in her — and pretending not to stare at the same time. Why had it taken me more than a second to recognize her? She looked pretty much the same as the last time I'd seen her, when she was my housemate. She still had an Asian face, she still spoke English with an Aussie accent. She even
sounded
like her daughter.

For a long but too-short moment I thought about Merri. Up-close body-to-body amorous visions danced in my head.

I was introduced. I nodded hello, as if Margaret Nuyen was someone I'd never seen before today, a stranger. But what
was
she doing here? And why didn't she want anyone to know we'd met? It wasn't like I really knew much about her. She was a scientist. She had a daughter a couple of years older than me. She used to live in the same house I lived in. Oh, and there was the breathing problem. That was about it. Anything incriminating there? Anything Dr. Wapner didn't already know? I doubted it. But I'd go along with her. I had no reason to rat her out or whatever. Not to Wapner anyway. Not yet.

Behind Dr. Nuyen, Lab Two didn't look much like a lab, at least not the lab I kept seeing in my head. In the murkily lit room were desks, tables, computers, papers strewn about and taped to the walls or tacked to bulletin boards. Not much else. Which in a way was a relief. At least there was no chance of renegade Elishas escaping from test tubes or canisters and floating over to the door, where we were still standing.

Neither doctor invited us in for a closer look, and a moment later we were moving again, proceeding down the hall. I gave Dr. Nuyen what I hoped was a reassuring backward glance, and she tried to smile. The smile wasn't convincing, which made me think of something Dr. Wapner said when we were still outside, his rhetorical question of who tipped off PAC about the work this lab was doing.

Was Dr. Nuyen the spy? The traitor?

It would make sense. She was a well-known medical research scientist and she knew my mom, an upper-echelon official from PAC and soul mate of the angel of death herself, Rebecca Mack.

A coincidence? I found myself doubting that.

I needed to talk to Dr. Nuyen, I decided. I needed to give her a chance to tell me if she was involved in leaking information, or at least look her in the eye when she heard my question and came up with an answer, whether it was the truth or a lie. But could I find her again? And get her alone?

Our next stop was a closed door marked
SECURITY
.
The doctor hesitated for a moment, then turned the knob and cracked the door wide enough for him to peer in for a long beat. Finally, he motioned for us to follow him through, managing to casually get his hand on Sunday's shoulder as he herded us inside. I was surprised when she didn't recoil.

A youngish red-haired guy sitting at a console in the center of the room nodded in our direction. “Dr. Wapner,” he said, and went back to his work.

Three walls were alive with monitors. Those on the wall to our left showed interior shots — several rooms in the lab, men working in some, women in others, a couple of angles from inside the little upstairs room.

Lab Two — Dr. Nuyen's space — wasn't showing.

Across from us were monitors displaying outside views: the exterior of the building from all sides, the rock outcroppings, the spot where the narrow road emptied into the clearing, a variety of shots of the surrounding forest.

The screens on the third wall, behind us, monitored the logging roads on the way in, beginning with the turn from the highway. As we watched, Gunny's rusty old truck appeared on a screen and disappeared again. I realized they'd known someone — Gunny, at least — was coming the whole time we were on our way in.

“Everything okay, Jimmy?” Wapner asked the security guy.

“Smooth,” Jimmy said.

“You've alerted all outside personnel? Scrambled the sleepers?”

“Twice, just to make sure.”

“Can you go vertical with half of the outside building cameras?” Wapner asked, but it wasn't a question, it was a directive. “And switch all interior shots to exterior feeds?”

“Sure.” Jimmy fidgeted with some controls, and the first four screens on the opposite wall segued from clearing to trees to mountains to broken clouds as the cameras panned skyward. On the wall to our left, the views of inside rooms vanished completely. In their place appeared new scenes of the grounds — woods, open areas, roads — in the vicinity of the lab.

“Good,” the doctor said. “Leave everything as is until further notice.”

“Will do.”

“You've got the whole horizon and above on those four monitors?” Dad asked, studying the screens on the opposite wall. He seemed as interested in this stuff as the rest of us were. It was obvious he hadn't been in here before today.

Tia and Sunday were transfixed, too. I'd never been around them when they were this quiet. But in addition to their being wrapped up in the technology and our surroundings, I had a feeling Wapner's attention had them dampened down — nervous and uncomfortable. And I didn't blame them.

“I've gone to wide-angle,” Jimmy said. “We've got one-eighty coverage in all directions. A seagull comes over the treetops, we'll have its picture.”

While everyone else was studying the monitors, I glanced over at the wall to our right. Except for two more screens mounted high and showing what looked to be highway approaches, it was mostly bare. But below the monitors were four full-sized metal doors with locks and latches and small single windows, their thick glass crisscrossed with heavy wire. A faint light showed behind the window of the door in the far left corner. I casually sidled in that direction, hoping for a peek inside, picturing imprisoned monkeys.

But Wapner caught me. “I'll save you the trouble, young man,” he said sharply, and I felt everyone's eyes on me. Jimmy tensed in his chair, as if I was about to do something drastic. “Those are holding cells. They're vacant. For now.”

His last two words sounded like a threat. I nodded and moved back to the group, wondering why the light was on in one of them if they were all vacant. The creepy feeling I was getting wasn't helped any by the fact that just as we were leaving the room, I swore I heard a noise coming from the direction of the far door. A muffled voice. A human voice. A woman's. Or girl's. I looked around at the other faces, though, and saw no reaction. Had I imagined it?

We returned to the hub of the underground, and Dr. Wapner took us down hallway C, another corridor full of closed doors with different lab numbers on them. “There are scientists at work behind some of these doors,” he announced, breaking off a murmured conversation with Dad, “but it's necessary to maintain sterile conditions in all of them and quarantine in some. So you'll have to use your imaginations. Think of a group of dedicated people working sixteen hours a day for little remuneration but the eternal thanks of society.”