Genesis Plague (35 page)

T
he inside of the building was pristine besides the debris from
the hole Flint had just made with the car. We stood in a spacious lobby,
complete with a reception desk, lounge area with stuffed leather couches, and a
small cafeteria which was well-lit but completely empty. A large opening to one
side revealed a product showroom. Its white, backlit walls were lined with glass
shelves, each displaying rows of glass vials filled with colored liquids.

“Very Twilight Zone,”
said Flint, moving toward the reception desk.

Maria walked in the
other direction. “I need the ladies’ room.”

“We should stick
together,” I said.

“Nobody’s stopping
you.” She waited by the door to the restrooms, her eyebrows raised.

“We can start when you
get back.”

She rolled her eyes and
pushed open the door.

Flint picked up the
phone on the reception desk and listened for a dial tone.

“Dead,” he said. He
typed on a keyboard in front of a slender computer monitor, then he sighed.
“Nothing.”

“The place has power,”
I said, looking around. Bright lights glared down from the high ceiling, making
the reflective floor painfully bright.

“Probably an automated
system running off the solar array.”

“Why wouldn’t they shut
it all down?”

“This is weird,” Flint
said quietly, studying the reception desk.

“What?”

He suddenly ripped the
computer monitor from its wires and slammed it down over his knee. It folded in
half easily.

“It’s cardboard,” he
said, holding up the bent box. “And these wires are just colored rope.”

Flint searched through
the drawers of the reception desk as I walked toward the showroom. It reminded
me of a tech store in the mall, with all of its products on brilliant display. A
large plaque on the wall read
PharmaCor: For Your Future
.

The glass vials were
arranged in groups, each below a printed sign fixed to the wall. The signs
explained the various process stages for creating a product, all the way from
the discovery of the ingredients to the final result you could find in your
local drugstore.

Flint walked into the
room, letting out a deep, frustrated sigh.

“Desk’s empty. I just
don’t get it. I found a bank of security monitors, but they were all fakes,
too.”

I lifted a vial from
its setting and pulled off the cap. I sniffed the colored liquid and pulled
back sharply.

“It’s some kind of
syrup,” I said, sniffing it again. “Sugar syrup. Raspberry, maybe.”

“You’re kidding me,”
said Flint. He moved quickly to the wall and popped the cap off a vial filled
with green liquid. “Lime!” Then he sniffed a yellow one. “Lemon! My God!”

“What are you lunatics
doing?” asked Maria, walking into the room. She rubbed her wet hands on the
sides of her jeans.

“The bathrooms work?” I
asked.

“Of course, why
wouldn’t they? No paper towels, though, the cheapskates.”

“Everything else is
fake,” said Flint.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a sham. An
illusion.”

“But the bathrooms
work.”

“If you were giving
someone a tour and they needed to, you know,
go
,” I said, “you couldn’t
give away the secret by having cardboard toilets.”

“What secret?”

“I don’t know. But
whatever it is, I don’t think this is just a place that manufactures medicine.”

“Paul’s right,” Flint
said. “You don’t create an entire floor of fake rooms if all you’re doing is
making painkillers.”

“Depends on the
medicine,” said Maria. “Or if it’s even medicine in the first place.”

Flint looked at her
slowly. “What else could it be?”

“You saw how heavily
the lab in San Fran was guarded,” said Maria. “And the troops showed up
fast
.
Someone knew about the virus before we did, and they were waiting to make that
call.”

“Who?”

Maria shrugged.

“Xander King,” I said.
“He brought his samples from Mauna Loa to this facility. He wasn’t just in
Hawaii looking for a potential new product to sell to the highest bidder. I bet
he knew what he was looking for from the very beginning.”

“You think he’s still
here?” asked Flint.

“Only one way to find
out.”

S
everal doors led from the main foyer. Through one was a viewing
room with rows of chairs and a video screen which played a commercial for
PharmaCor when Flint switched on the projector. Another room held three large
aluminum tanks. I would normally guess tanks like that were incubating chambers,
but these were empty. More fake displays.

The last door we tried
opened onto a hallway.

“I hate this place,” Flint
said as we walked down the hall. He looked at the walls suspiciously, as if he
expected someone to jump out and grab him. “If there’s nothing else here, they
sure went through a hell of a lot of trouble for no reason.”

“There’s a reason,” I
said. “We just haven’t found it yet.”

“Then where are the
employees?” he asked. “Even in a facility like this, you need a minimal staff
to keep it running.”

“Evacuated, along with
everyone else in Rapid City. I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole building were
to shut down soon. We found the pilot light burning, is all.”

Maria opened the door
at the end of the hall and we stepped into a dark room. It was lit like a
museum exhibit: shadowy spaces punctuated by subdued lights which illuminated
different sections of the room.

In a glass case was a
still image of the
Loasis
virus, two heads and all. In another was a
picture of the great volcano Mauna Loa, mid-eruption.

“Paydirt,” Flint said.

He walked to a map that
covered the entire wall opposite the entrance. Small lights shone down the
entire length from above, casting thin, bright streaks over the map.

“They circled Mauna
Loa,” he said, pointing to the Hawaiian Islands.

Standing next to him, I
saw the small, red circle printed over the location of the volcano.

“And Erebus,” said
Maria.

There was a second
circle around the southernmost volcano on the planet: Ross Island in
Antarctica.

“Sabancaya,” said
Flint, “in Peru.” Then he pointed to the last of the four red circles. “This
one is Bardarbunga, in Iceland.”

“What’s it mean?” I asked.

“I think I know,” said
Maria from the corner of the room.

She stood in front of a
glass display case containing a small pedestal. On the pedestal was a sealed,
transparent tube, and inside it was a perfectly preserved specimen of
Polychaeta
Loasis
, the slug-like creature found in the cavern beneath Mauna Loa.

“Did Xander bring this
back?” asked Flint.

“No,” I said. “The only
samples I saw him with were red liquid.”

“That you
saw
him with,” he repeated.

“I think it’s obvious
what this means,” Maria said. “PharmaCor found other
Loasis
colonies at each
of these sites.” She pointed to the red circles on the map.

“So, it’s not a new species
after all.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,”
she said. “It’s new, it just wasn’t reported.”

“Why the hell would
they keep it a secret?” asked Flint.

“So they could make a
profitable vaccine for the virus before it got out,” I said.

“
Now
who’s the
conspiracy nut?”

“I can’t think of
another reason.”

Maria picked up a
binder attached to the wall by a chain.

“What’s that?” asked
Flint.

“Profit reports,” she
said, holding up the binder. The laminated pages showed detailed graphs
arranged quarterly per fiscal year, all of them in the green and quickly
improving.

Flint whistled.
“Shoulda bought PharmaCor stock.”

“This is a room for
potential investors,” Maria said.

“Judging by those
charts,” I said, “the company didn’t need the help.”

“Maybe not investors,
then. Maybe partners, or decision-makers the company needs for land rights, I
don’t know.”

She dropped the binder
and paced the room. “Flint, do you remember what I said about the military
personnel when you first showed up at the lab in San Francisco?”

“You said you didn’t
think they looked like military at all. They were more like a private security
detail.”

“Exactly.”

“Hired by PharmaCor?” I
asked.

“Probably. But there
were at least a few military boys there. I remember a General.”

Flint snapped his
fingers. “Tall guy with the permanent frown.”

Maria nodded. “And the
young Lieutenant, what’s-his-name.”

“I kind of liked him,”
said Flint wistfully.

“Private security working
with the military,” I said.

“PharmaCor made a
deal,” said Maria. “Information for protection. Or maybe they were feeding
information to the government in exchange for full immunity from the law.”

“Alright,” I said,
stepping toward her. “Let’s try to stay focused on what we’re doing
right
here
, okay?”

Maria ignored me. She
stopped pacing and stared at a corner of the room lost in deep shadow.

“What’s that?” she
asked. “What
is
that? Do you guys see it?!”

“Maria, take a breath.”

“It’s an elevator!”

“I see it!” said Flint,
squinting at the shadowed wall.

As I stared at the
darkness, my eyes adjusted, and I began to discern the dim outline of a sliding
door near the corner. On the wall next to it was a panel with a standard
elevator button pointing down.

“The rest of the facility
must be underground,” Maria said.

She reached out for the
button and pushed it. With a click, a trap door under her feet dropped away,
and she fell, screaming. The door snapped shut, muffling her scream.

Flint and I ran to the
trap door. I dropped to my knees and pounded on the panel, yelling for Maria. I
could no longer hear her.

Flint pushed the
elevator button and the trap door opened again. I caught a quick glimpse of a
long, curving pipe before the door closed again.

“What do you think?”
asked Flint. His eyes were wide with fear.

“I think I’m going
after her.”

“Me first,” Flint said,
standing on the trap door. “I don’t want to be up here alone.”

He pushed the button
and the floor opened beneath him. He let out a yelp as he fell, and the trap
door closed.

I stood over the trap
and found myself hesitating to press the button. My thumb hovered right over
it, shaking with fear or exhilaration, I couldn’t tell which. Probably both. I
squeezed my eyes shut and tried to imagine what was below. Through the myriad of
images, Cassidy’s face appeared.

I pressed the button
and couldn’t help but scream as I fell.

T
he trap door closed above me, plunging the pipe into total
darkness. I shot down the tube like a greased torpedo. The walls were slick but
not wet; there was no friction between the surface and my body.

The pipe plunged deeper
at a steep angle, bending only slightly every few seconds. I shouted for Maria
and Flint but couldn’t hear a response.

The pipe suddenly
disappeared from under me and I fell straight down. I reached out and my hands hit
the walls of the pipe.

The pipe was now
completely vertical.

I slammed down hard as
it bent at a forty-five degree angle and continued downward. Then it slowly began
to level out, and my speed decreased until the pipe ended, dumping me into
space.

It was a six-foot fall
to the hard floor, and I didn’t land gracefully. At least I managed to turn at
the last second so I didn’t hit my face. Instead, I landed on my bruised ribs,
and I lay there feeling like I had been flattened by a car.

Someone coughed behind
me, but I couldn’t turn my head to look without sharp knives of pain stabbing
my ribcage.

“Flint?”

He coughed again. “I’m
here.”

“Me, too,” said Maria.

“You okay?”

“Landed on my stomach,”
Flint said. “Didn’t feel a thing.”

“I hurt my wrist,” said
Maria. “Not too bad, though. How about you, Paul?”

“It helps that I have a
thick skull. Where are we?”

I groaned as I sat up.
The room was square, with dull brown walls. Besides a single closed door and
the pipe protruding from above, there was only a blank video screen embedded in
the wall behind a protective plastic cover.

“Locked,” Flint said,
pulling on the door handle. “Now what?”

“Well, there’s no way
we’re getting back up that pipe,” said Maria. “It felt like it was coated with
oil.”

Flint planted one foot
against the wall and grunted as he pulled on the door handle with all his
strength. His hands slipped off the metal and he fell on his back, breathing
heavily.

“So,” he said, folding
his hands over his chest and staring up at the ceiling. “If a rep from
PharmaCor is showing you around, and you decide you don’t want to buy whatever
they’re selling, then…what? They flush you down the drain?”

“Maybe they keep people
here until they agree to cooperate,” said Maria.

With a high-pitched
buzz, the video screen in the wall powered on. A man with a reasonable face in
a collared shirt sat in a sterile white room, a clipboard in his hands. He had short
silver hair and piercing gray eyes.

“Good day,” he said in
a deep baritone. “I hope the ride down wasn’t too uncomfortable.”

“I don’t see any video
cameras,” Maria said, checking the black border around the video screen. “How
can he see us?”

“The medical staff will
arrive shortly to take you into surgery. Until then, I’d like to go over a few
things.”

“Surgery?!” Flint said,
grunting as he clambered to his feet.

“What the hell is going
on?” asked Maria.

“Firstly,” said the man
on the screen, “you should know that the more you resist, the more painful the
process will be. Your best course of action at this stage is acceptance. If you
make it through the program, you’ll have nothing more to worry about. You’ll
probably even thank us. And if you don’t make it…well, then you don’t make it.”

“What program?”

“Who is this schmuck?
What is he talking about?”

“Allow yourself a few
hours to adjust once the surgery is complete,” said the man on screen. “You’ll
find you can function much more clearly once you’re fully synced. It will feel
strange at first, even unnatural, but don’t worry. That’s normal.”

“I’m not listening to any
more of this,” Flint said. With a look of determination on his face, he reached
for the doorknob and yanked – and the door opened.

“Good luck,” said the
man on the screen. “And I hope to see you on the other side.”

The screen went black.