Genesis Plague (19 page)

F
ive masked men wielding semi-automatic rifles silently filed
into the hallway and crouched in two lines near the elevator, rifles aimed at
the door to the lab. At
us
.

A sixth man strolled
from the elevator. I recognized him as the guy who stood atop the black truck,
shouting into a megaphone and whipping the mob into a frenzy. His mask was
different than the others, more streamlined, more aggressive.

He stopped on the other
side of the door and looked at me.

“Is that glass
bullet-proof?” I whispered.

Nash nodded as he
crouched down and aimed his M4 Carbine at the man on the other side of the
door. The man looked at Nash, then back to me. He pointed at the ID reader that
would let him through.

I shook my head,
no
.

The man walked back to
his crew and jabbed his thumb over his shoulder in our direction. One of the
soldiers hurried forward, a wad of gray material in his hands. He pressed the
blocky mass against the door and pushed a small black cube into its center. He
tapped a button on the cube, waved at us, then retreated to join his group.

“Take cover!” Nash
yelled.

The C-4 detonated. A
pressure blast hit me like a truck and threw me backward with the others. The
door disintegrated in the explosion. Flames roared down the hallway, curling
against the walls, scorching them black. I jumped sideways into Conny’s lab as
a whip of fire licked across my back, burning my lab coat. I quickly patted my
shoulders and put out the flames.

The chimpanzees went
ballistic, jumping up and down in their containers and bashing their bodies
against the glass. I didn’t see Flint or Nash anywhere. From the hall, I heard
heavy boots marching closer.

Johann huddled in the
corner of the lab, next to the electron microscope. I looked at him
questioningly, too afraid to speak aloud. He held up three fingers and his eyes
flicked up to the chimp’s containers.

For a moment I was confused,
then I remembered the trays beneath each container: sealed drawers that held
the data and vaccination samples for each chimp, accessible only with one of
our ID cards.

I reached up for the
drawer below Number Three’s container. One of the armed men appeared in the
doorway, gun leveled at my head. I froze, and he twitched his gun upward,
motioning for me to stand.

“You, too,” he said, aiming
his gun at Johann.

We both stood slowly.
My legs threatened to buckle at any moment. I tried to keep from shaking, but I
couldn’t help it.

The masked soldier
filled the doorway, blocking our view of the hall.

“Where is it?” he asked.

“Where’s what?” Johann
said. He sounded surprisingly calm.

The soldier squeezed
the grip of his rifle. His finger pressed lightly against the trigger.

“You know
what
.
The vaccine.”

There was a coldness in
the man’s voice, a deadness, that set off a primal alarm in my mind. He sounded
like a man who had lost his conscious, or never had one to begin with.

I was about to speak
when Johann said, “Don’t tell him, Paul. Don’t tell these men anything.” He
puffed out his chest and took a step toward the soldier. “You think you can
come in here and take the vaccine? You think you deserve it more than anyone
else? What gives you the right to—”

The soldier fired three
shots, and Johann’s body snapped back. He fell to the floor in a sitting
position, his back against the wall. He looked down at the bloody holes in his
chest, all three grouped over his heart. His last breath came out as a long
wheeze, and then he was still.

The soldier slowly
lifted his rifle and aimed it at me.

“Your turn.”

I clenched my jaw to
keep my teeth from clattering. Without knowing what else to do, I walked slowly
toward the chimpanzee containers.

“Careful,” said the
soldier, stepping closer.

“I’m not stupid,” was
all I could think to say.

“We’ll see.”

The printer beeped and
I almost jumped out of my skin. The soldier grunted with amusement and motioned
for me to continue as the printer spit out a page of dense text. It was Johann’s
blood test results on the vaccine he administered to Chimp Two, the one that
was infected with Dan’s blood. I reached out for the paper and the soldier
tapped me away with the muzzle of his gun.

“Focus, egghead,” he
said.

I held out my ID badge
and waved it in front of the drawer below Number Three’s container. The drawer
beeped loudly and popped open.

Then I saw the large
metal latch on the side of the container that sealed the door, and I hesitated.

“It’s in one of these,”
I said.

Without opening the
third drawer all the way, I moved over to the second container. The chimp
inside howled like a banshee and snarled through bared teeth. I reached out for
the drawer and the soldier pressed the muzzle of the gun to my skull, behind my
ear.

“I said
careful
.”

I nodded, and he lifted
one foot to take a step back. Before his foot hit the ground, I ducked and elbowed
him in the chest. He tripped backward and pulled the trigger. The bullet went
wide, sinking into the wall over my head.

My heart pounded as I
grabbed for the latch on the second container and unlocked it, but the door didn’t
pop free.

What the hell’s
wrong?

The soldier screamed
for his buddies as he strained to get up. His armor made him bulky, less agile.
He got to his knees and I kicked him hard in the shoulder, sending him
sprawling to the ground. His fired his gun wildly, cracking through the acrylic
door to Number Three’s container. The chimp inside screeched and collapsed.
Blood splattered against the back of the container.

My shaking fingers rattled
against the latch for the second container, seeking a reason the door wouldn’t
open. Chimp Number Two snarled at me, watching my hands work with solid red
eyes.

Then I remembered there
was an identical latch on the other side of the door.

Stupid-idiot-dumb-stupid-idiot
,
I thought in a continuous loop as my shaking fingers fumbled against the latch
on the other side and popped it free.

Chimp Number Two was
all-too-ready to get out. As I pulled the door off, the ape leaped out at me.
Using the glass door as a shield, I deflected the chimp to the side, pushing
him toward the soldier, who had finally managed to get to his feet.

The chimp attacked him
in a blind rage, saliva flying from his mouth as he bit and ripped at the man’s
armor. The ape’s bleeding lesions glistened in the harsh emergency lighting.
The soldier toppled backward, screaming.

I yanked open the
drawer beneath the third container and searched for the vaccine. There were
three transparent sample tubes, each filled with a pale orange liquid. I grabbed
them and pulled the sheet of blood test results from the printer as I ran from
the room, slamming the door behind me.

Only one of the
soldiers was in the hallway, and he had his back turned until the door closed
behind me. Within Conny’s lab, I heard a gunshot, and chimp Number Two fell
silent.

The soldier in the
hallway shouted for the others. He grabbed for his rifle and I dove into the
observation room across the hall, kicking the door closed behind me.

O
f course it only bought me a couple seconds, enough time to
stuff the sheet of paper into my pocket and scramble away from the door as the
sound of running boots approached from the hallway. I stood with my back to the
wall as the armed men filed in.

Conny sat in the back
corner of her room, still clutching her knees to her chest. She slowly stood as
she watched the men with guns. Then she looked at me, and it seemed as if I was
in the same boat as her. We were both stuck in helpless situations, at the
mercy of elements we could not control.

Levino stood near the
transparent wall on his side of the divider, staring up at the ceiling and
gently swaying side to side, oblivious to the world around him.

The last two soldiers
escorted Flint and Nash into the room and pushed them to their knees just
inside the door. The soldier guarding Nash held the MP’s M4 Carbine in his
hands.

“We searched the lab,”
said one of the soldiers.

The one I pegged as
their leader, the guy who stood atop the assault truck, stepped toward me.

“That’s alright,” he said.
“I think we found what we came for.”

He began to raise his
rifle in my direction. I quickly held the vaccine samples away from my body. The
tubes were hard, transparent plastic, designed to take a hit or survive a fall
– but they could easily be mistaken for glass.

“They’ll shatter if I
drop them,” I said.

The leader lowered his
rifle and held up his hands.

“Easy there,” he said.
“We didn’t come to kill anyone.”

“That’s not what I saw
in the other room.”

He shrugged. “You get
in the way, you’re gonna get stepped on.”

This earned a chuckle
from a few of his compatriots. I began to wonder why none of them were
concerned that they were standing in the middle of a lab that was researching a
deadly virus.

Something told me they
didn’t follow standard decontamination procedure on the way into the building.

The mystery was solved
when the leader peeled off his helmet, revealing a face spotted with deep,
cratered lesions. He grinned at me, and Conny screamed, her voice shrill and
tinny through the small speaker in the comm panel.

“Somebody shut her up,”
said the leader.

One of the soldiers
studied the comm panel in the acrylic wall, then flipped a switch. Conny’s
voice cut out, but she was still screaming. The soldier who cut the comm
speaker unclipped Nash’s ID card from his vest and walked out of the room. None
of the other soldiers said a word.

The leader stood at the
transparent wall, watching Levino thoughtfully. He turned back to me and I held
the vaccine tubes out again.

“It’s a simple thing,
what we have here,” he said. “You give those to me, and all of your friends
walk out of here alive.”

“Don’t give them
anything,” Flint said.

The soldier behind
Flint cracked him in the back of the skull with the butt of his rifle. Flint
groaned and doubled forward until his forehead hit the floor, his scalp wet
with a splash of blood.

“Or better yet,” said
the leader, walking over to Flint, “how about I give you a taste of what we’re
going through? Then maybe you’ll change your mind.”

He hocked saliva deep in
his throat and acted like he was going to spit on the back of Flint’s head.

“Don’t,” I said.

The leader looked at
me, eyebrows raised, still ready to spit.

“You can have it.”

I held the tubes out
for him, and the leader nodded for one of his men to retrieve them. My hands
shook as a soldier came forward and gingerly collected the tubes, then stepped
back.

The leader spat on the
floor next to Flint. Then he walked over to me quickly, with purpose, both
hands gripping his rifle. I backed against the wall as we stood toe to toe, his
face inches from mine. The smell that wafted over me was a sickening potpourri
of rotting flesh and sour breath.

“Clear out,” he said to
his men. Then he leaned in closer to me and I turned my face away. “We’re not
monsters, even though we look the part.”

“Who—who are you?”

“Just hard-working men
with the means to change our fate. You and your friends are sitting up here,
holding onto a cure—”

“It was only completed
right before you showed up,” I interrupted. “And it needs more testing.”

He pressed the side of
his rifle into my throat, pinching off my air supply. I tried to push back, but
he was too strong.

“The rest of those
people out there,” he said through clenched teeth, “they can’t do a damned
thing about what’s going to happen to them. They’re
sheep
, and they’re
going to
die
like sheep.”

He pulled the gun back
and I gasped for air. The other men had already left the room. Flint lay on the
ground, holding his bleeding scalp. Nash knelt next to him, glaring at the
leader of the soldiers.

Levino stood perfectly
rigid next to the cracked hole in the divider wall. At first it seemed as if he
was looking through the small hole, but then I noticed that his eyes were
glazed over, cherry red, just like Dan Grayson’s were before he went berserk.

Past the divider in the
next room, Conny slowly retreated from the back door as it swung open. The
soldier who took Nash’s ID badge had found his way to the decontamination
chamber.

The door closed behind
him and he stepped toward Conny. He pulled off his helmet, showing her the raw,
wet lesions that covered his face.

The leader turned on
the comm panel.

“We got what we wanted,
Parker. We’re pulling back to the bunker. We will leave you behind if you miss
extraction.”

Parker nodded to the
leader, who promptly walked out of the room without looking back and headed
toward the elevator.

I ran to Flint and
knelt beside him.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,”
he said, groaning as he sat up.

Nash stood and moved
toward the exit. I grabbed for his vest but he shook me off and ran down the
hallway, after the soldiers.

“Conny!” I shouted,
turning to the observation room.

She backed against the
dividing wall as Parker approached. He slung his rifle around to his back and
licked his lips greedily.

“I don’t wanna die,
Paul,” she said, her eyes wide and full of tears. “I don’t wanna die I don’t
wanna die—”

“I’m coming in to get
you,” I said.

Then she screamed as
Parker wrapped his fingers around her throat and pushed her against the wall.
She kicked at his shins but her effort only made him laugh.

“I’m coming,” I said as
I ran for the door.

“Paul, wait!” shouted
Flint.

I turned back in the
doorway as Parker released Conny and she fell to the floor. Parker was standing
right in front of the crater Dan had made in the divider wall. The soldier
looked confused when he heard a guttural, rasping groan from the hole in the
center of the crater. He took a step closer, squinting at the wall. Levino’s
bleeding hands erupted from the hole, cracking it open wider as he grabbed
Parker’s throat.