Genesis Plague (36 page)

T
he next room was meant for surgery. There was a stainless steel
operating table covered in scratch marks in the middle of the tiled floor. A
lamp hung down from the high ceiling, but the bulb was broken. The only light
came from a bank of dim fluorescents far above.

We approached the
operating table warily, keeping an eye out for the ‘medical staff’ mentioned in
the other room. A clipboard hung from a chain at the end of the table. It was a
handwritten list of names and dates, but many of them had been obscured by
thick black ink.

“What is this place?”
asked Maria.

Flint ran his fingers
over the scratched metal surface of the table. “Seems well-used.”

“I don’t think anyone’s
used it for a while,” I said, scanning the list of names on the clipboard. “I’m
assuming this is a list of patients, and the last one was added over two months
ago.”

Flint hesitated a
second, like he was afraid to say what he was thinking. “That doesn’t mean they
didn’t do any off the books, Paul.”

“I know what it means.”
I let the clipboard hang from its chain as I stared at the operating table.
Deep grooves marred the surface near where a patient’s hands would rest during
surgery. Fingernails weren’t strong enough to cause that kind of damage. Maybe
the patients were given some kind of rigid protective gloves, though I couldn’t
imagine the reason.

“Look at this, guys,”
said Maria. She wheeled a chair out from behind a bulky echocardiogram monitor.
“And if I put it here…”

She moved the chair to
the corner, in front of a computer workstation. A small video camera sat perched
atop the monitor. Flint put his head next to the camera and looked back at the
room.

“I’ll be damned,” he
said. “What we saw in the other room was a recording. The guy in the coat was
blocking the operating table, but this is definitely where it was filmed.”

“We must have triggered
the video replay.”

“Probably when we fell
down the pipe,” said Maria.

“
You
fell down,”
Flint said. “We just followed you.”

“And I appreciate your
chivalry,” she said primly.

It was hard for me not
to imagine Cass strapped down to the metal table, squirming under her
restraints as she was subjected to whatever they did to people in that damned
place.

“You okay, Paul?” asked
Flint.

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s
keep moving, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Anybody see a door?”

We searched the perimeter
of the room. There didn’t seem to be any exit other than the door leading back
to the room into which we fell.

“Wait, here’s
something,” said Maria. She lifted a hinged, rectangular covering on the wall.
“A lever.”

“Remember what happened
last time you pushed a button?”

“But this is a lever.
It says ‘Pneumatic Override’.”

“Maria—”

“Here goes…”

As she reached for the
lever, Flint and I took an instinctive step back.

“Maybe we should tie a
rope to her waist,” Flint said.

Maria grasped the lever
and pulled down. With a soft hiss of compressed air, a hidden door in the wall
slid open.

“
Voilà
,” she
said, smiling.

Flint sighed with
relief. Maria took a step toward the door and the floor sank an inch under her
heel. She let out a quick scream but didn’t drop any farther.

“Pressure plate,” she
said with relief. She toggled the plate up and down by stepping on it. “Power must
have been disconnected along with the medical equipment. I guess the lever is
the manual override.”

“Or they disabled the
pressure plate on purpose,” I said.

“Why would someone do
that?”

“To keep something locked
in,” Flint said, staring into the next room.

“Something like what?”
asked Maria. Then she gasped and covered her mouth.

Murky yellow light
spilled through the doorway – the kind of light that didn’t beckon you forward,
but instead had a strange, repulsive power. There was a heaviness to the light,
a palpable humidity that seemed to coat the floor where it fell.

“Oh, God,” Flint said,
turning away. His face wrinkled in disgust. “Do you smell that?”

“No,” I said, sniffing
the air. “What are you—”

Then it hit me. It was
a mixture of pungent ammonia and something else – something organic and rotten.

“Smells like cat piss,”
said Maria, rubbing her eyes. “And it
stings
!”

I breathed through my
mouth as I walked forward, toward the grimy yellow light coming from the next
room. I knew it in my bones that I didn’t want to see what the light was
illuminating – but there was only one way to go, and it was through the open
door, deeper into the facility.

B
esides the sour vinegar stench of ammonia and organic rot, the
first thing that hit me in the next room was the heat. It was thick as a
blanket and just as smothering.

It was shaped like a
grain silo, tall and cylindrical. Broad plastic flaps hung down in opaque strips
in front of a closed door on the opposite side of the circular space. Green
algae smeared the flaps. Thick mist hung in the air. Beams of murky light leaked
down through the mist from a grate above the large metal fan in the ceiling.

“Reminds me of Peru,”
Maria said. “You remember, Paul?”

I nodded. Hard to
forget our first adventure together, long before our relationship fell apart.
Back then it was all sunlight and warm cotton sheets, late Saturday mornings in
bed and long nights in front of the fire. That was back when her last name was
still Guerrera instead of Fontaine. The switch came later, after her big
discovery of the glowing octopus near Tamu Massif.

Peru had been a true
test of our relationship, and we passed, even if it was by the skin of our
teeth.

I was headed there to
pull water samples from the Ucayali River, a major tributary to the Amazon. My
university was one of several sending researchers to South America to study an
outbreak of waterborne bacterium that was spreading through the local farmers’
lands and decimating their crops.

Maria’s marine biology
career was kicking into high gear at the time, and she thought it would be nice
for us to go together. She had heard about the encroachment of twelve-foot
goliath catfish into the tributaries feeding the Amazon, and she wanted to
observe how the high influx of competition upset the established order.

Neither of us made it
to our destination. Our plane was ordered down under threat of destruction
after flying through contested airspace over a military zone. Our visas were
enough to not get us shot on the spot, but our satellite phone and much of our
gear was confiscated. We had to hike through fifty miles of rainforest with a
guide who didn’t speak English to get to a town that wasn’t run by the local
military so we could call for pickup.

Anyway, the heat had
been unbearable, and it felt like I had lost half my body weight in sweat by
the time we made it out.

If there was supposed
to be any kind of ventilation in the PharmaCor silo room, it stopped working a
while back. I studied the doorway leading back to the surgery room. Gleaming
scratches scarred the metal – long streaks raked by sharp claws. Dents in the
wall indicated where someone – or something – had thrown themselves repeatedly
against the wall to try and get through.

Glass crunched under
Flint’s shoe, and he said, “Oh,
man
.”

I waved mist away from
my face to get a better look. He and Maria were looking down at three
barrel-sized metal containers. Each barrel was supposed to have a glass
observation window in its side, but they were all broken. The cloudy, shattered
glass was scattered across the ground under our feet as if something had burst
from the containers with great force.

PharmaCor Genetics
was etched in blue lettering on the sides of the containers.

“I thought this was a
drug processing facility,” said Maria.

“Yeah, me too,” Flint
said, his eyes wide. “Nobody said anything about genetics.”

I tried to rub the
stench from my nostrils as I knelt next to one of the containers.

“Come on, Paul, don’t
do that,” Flint pleaded.

I leaned forward to
look inside. A lump of decaying meat was stuck to a shard of the broken window.

“I’m going to be sick,”
said Maria. She took a deep breath and rested her hands on her knees. “I’ll
probably regret asking, but what do you think was in those barrels?”

“Whatever it was,” I
said, “it’s out now.”

“Then we should keep
moving,” Flint said. “At least until we find someplace safe.”

A shadow passed over Flint’s
face, and he slowly looked up.

There was an animal
snort from high above, past the fan in the ceiling. Something bulky moved in
the light, its heavy feet stomping on hollow metal, its shadow dancing over the
three of us as we stared up through the mist to the top of the room.

“There must be another
level above us,” Flint whispered.

I couldn’t tell what
the animal was by its silhouette alone, but I could tell it was large enough to
nearly block the light above it.

“What the hell
is
that?!” shouted Maria.

At the sound of her
voice, the animal roared. The ceiling fan shook as the animal fought to break
through. Metal groaned and popped as its powerful jaws bit the blades. It snorted
and growled furiously, and I could imagine its infected, bloodshot eyes glaring
down at us, its prey.

“I’d rather not be here
if that thing gets through,” Flint said.

“Back to the operating
room!” said Maria.

She ran into the next
room and stomped on the pressure plate in the floor. When that didn’t work, she
grabbed the override lever and pumped it up and down. The door remained open.
She slapped the wall.

“Dammit!” she screamed.

Metal squealed from
above and suddenly the animal’s growling was louder. I squinted up into the
mist as something like a glimmering jewel fell down from the ceiling. The glob
of saliva smacked the floor like a ball of jelly. Flint and I looked at it,
then at each other.

We ran to the other
door in the silo at the same time, pushing past the hanging plastic flaps and
fighting to grab the door handle. The door opened surprisingly easily, and we
tumbled out of the silo room and into a jungle.

S
oft, wet grass covered the ground. My shoes slipped as I
hurried back to the door. Maria ran past me. The animal high above shrieked in
anger, redoubling its efforts to break through the ceiling fan and into the
silo room.

A strip of torn metal fell
down and clanged against the hard floor. Half of it was coated in the animal’s
blood.

I slammed the door
closed.

“That won’t hold if
whatever the hell is in there survives the fall from the ceiling,” Flint said.
He limped up next to me, keeping the bulk of his weight off his left ankle, and
wiped a streak of mud from his cheek.

I didn’t doubt it would
survive. It was easy enough for me to imagine a nightmare beast sliding down
from the top of the room, its claws digging into the walls, gouging deep grooves
to regulate its descent.

With a satisfying metal
thonk
, an internal crossbar locked the door firmly in place.

“Guess that will have
to do,” I said, wiping my sweaty hands on my shirt. “Everyone okay?”

“Twisted my ankle,” Flint
said.

Maria hugged herself
tightly, even though the temperature in the room must have been pushing a
hundred.

Perhaps
room
wasn’t
the best term for where we were. My brief glimpse as I fell through the door
had been more accurate: we were standing at the edge of a jungle. The ground
sloped away from the wall at a steep angle, meeting a shallow valley covered
with a dense jungle of lush green that extended into the distance. I couldn’t tell
how far the jungle stretched because of the heavy mist that hung over the trees
like a cloud, obscuring any end to the green expanse.

The roof was barely
visible high above us, but was quickly lost to the mist farther out over the
valley.

“Does this make sense
to anyone?” asked Flint.

“Oh, sure,” said Maria.
“I know
lots
of companies that grow jungles in their basements.”

She took a step back
and let out a surprised yell when the heel of her boot struck an object on the
ground. She fell backward and hit the soft grass on her shoulder, coming face-to-face
with a corpse. The body was mostly obscured by thick vines.

Maria pushed away from
the corpse, her hands sliding in the wet grass, her eyes wide with terror. I
quickly knelt next to her and pulled her back. She breathed hard as she hugged
me, keeping her back to the corpse. After a moment, her breathing slowed and she
stopped shaking. She pushed away from me and stood up, brushing off her pants
and sleeves. She tucked wild strands of her hair behind her ears as she
regained her composure.

The only part of the
body we could have seen at first glance was a grimy, skeletal hand protruding
from a mass of ropey vines. The person had died on the slope leading to the
silo. In an environment like that, I couldn’t tell if the body had been there a
week or a year. Insects or animals had cleaned most of the flesh from the
bones. I tried to avoid looking at the face through the mass of vines, but I
forced myself to glance at least once. I wasn’t sure if I did it out of morbid curiosity
or some sense that it was the least I could do for someone who probably died frightened
and alone.

Whatever the reason, I
regretted it instantly.

Straw-like hair framed
the bony face. The hollow sockets of the eyes stared out at me. Dried lips
curled outward in a hideous grin, exposing yellowed teeth and black gums. The
clothing I could see through the vines was torn to ribbons, exposing the gray
bones of the ribcage.

“And I bet that’s not
the only one we’ll find in here,” Flint said. He looked down at the body, a
solemn frown on his face.

I stood up and looked
out at the jungle.

“This isn’t going like
I’d hoped,” I said.

“Does it ever?” asked
Maria.

“We should have found
some answers by now. A research lab or an archive that would help us find out
what Xander brought back with him from Mauna Loa.”

“I feel like a lab rat
in a demented maze,” Flint said.

“One you’re not
supposed to survive,” said Maria.

We all jumped when
something pounded on the door behind us from the other side. The animal in the
ceiling had made it down to the ground level, and it hadn’t forgotten about us.

When I turned back to
the others, I saw that they were already almost to the edge of the jungle,
half-sliding down the wet slope in a mad scramble. It only took one more heavy
thud against the door before I was sliding down after them, into the jungle.