35
“The facility we are in is aptly named CSAIL,” Brenda said between spoonfuls of noodles, “the Computer Sciences and Artificial Intelligence Laboratories. You must understand that the people employed here are the apex minds in these fields. So last year, when the NSA came to our director and asked us to come up with a solution for an extremely nasty and aggressive viral worm based on the Stuxnet architecture, he didn’t hesitate to accept the challenge. Especially with the price tag associated with the project. Funds were nearly limitless.”
The two military men, the Texan, and Rick looked as if they had no idea what she was talking about.
She stopped slurping her soup long enough to realize they were confused. “Stuxnet? Iranian nuclear facilities? Operation Olympic Games? Don’t you people watch the news?” Bourne folded his arms, and Brenda got the message. “Okay, Okay, sorry. Stuxnet was a computer worm…a program hidden inside other programs to wreak havoc on computer systems. This particular worm was like nothing anyone had seen before. It didn’t just shut down hard drives, or gather information, it actually targeted specific functionalities in several nuclear reactors and either shut them down or took them over, completely locking out the facility technicians and not allowing the workers there to do anything. Equipment was destroyed, research lost, and people died.”
“Fascinating,” admonished Seyfert, “and the zombies?”
She took a sip of Gatorade, giving Seyfert a dirty look. "I’m getting to that. Stuxnet went through several iterations; Flame, Abyss, and finally Abaddon. The source code for each virus was far more advanced than the last. The Abaddon virus was the pinnacle of human code writing. Scary stuff. At first none of us here could even get inside the code, then Kerry devised an algorithm to…” Brenda had been speaking quickly, and she suddenly looked up from her bowl and noticed she had lost her audience again.
“This new virus could shut down anything. A hospital, an aircraft carrier, even your car. Things with the most basic of programming to the most advanced cyber security in the world began becoming infected. Independent systems with no link to the outside. Totally secure. Two systems at the NSA, three at the FBI, a critical system at the CIA. You remember that Russian sub that was lost with all hands in October of last year? Abaddon. That was when the NSA came knocking on our door. Russian subs are okay to lose I guess, but not American subs. The NSA was being proactive.”
“Jesus Brenda!” Ravi almost shouted. “This is…this is treason.”
“Relax, Ravi, the NSA is as dead as everyone else. I don’t think confidentiality agreements and gag orders are going to be enforced.”
Bourne was shaking his head. “I never heard of anything like this.”
“You wouldn’t unless you had SCI clearance. Nobody knows about this. We weren’t even kept in all the loops. So, back to Abaddon. Nobody could figure out how it could infect independent systems. Either a super spy network was infiltrating every three letter intelligence installation in the country, or there was some type of signal that could penetrate hard lines. The NSA was sure it was a bunch of spies, and so we were tasked with coming up with a counter virus to clean out Abaddon.”
She looked at Ravi. “We did. We worked day and night at their secure facility. We came up with a deadly, and I do mean deadly anti-virus. Rama. It not only undid the havoc that Abaddon had wreaked, but it re-wrote source code on the fly. It could prevent Abaddon from taking hold, and also save critical systems that had already been damaged by putting them in a slave mode allowing the systems to be operated by anyone who had the proper key code. Damaged systems were repaired.”
She paused and looked at the colonel. “Dead systems came back to life.”
“Holy shit,” said Seyfert, understanding. “You did it. You created the plague.”
“No,” she said, “no we didn’t. All of our research and development was halted as soon as we came up with the first Rama prototype. The NSA took our product and shut us down. They escorted us from their facility and revoked our clearance.”
Ravi harrumphed. “They wouldn’t even let me get my iPad from my locker, they bought me a new one.”
“That was months before the plague first hit Boston. Of course, you understand as soon as they shut us down, we started up again without telling them.”
“Now
that
sounds like treason,” Bourne said accusingly.
“You can shoot us later. Anyway, Ravi and I worked on this constantly, even after the plague broke out. There was one critical point that we never did figure; how Abaddon infected closed systems. When there were eighteen of us, and we were stuck in here, we tried to figure out how that could happen, so after we fortified the building, we brainstormed. We came up with nothing until Dr. Linda Martin, a neurologist and a pioneer in artificial intelligence and organic computing, came up with a radical idea. She postulated that the only thing that was common to every scenario was that there was human interaction.
“These NSA spooks, they undress all the way before they go in and out of the computer labs, and they made us do the same. No clothing, jewelry, or electronics of any kind. They had prescriptions for our eyeglasses before we even got there. When we were totally naked, we were escorted through a metal detector and each of us had a full body MRI. This was each time we entered or left a lab, and guards were rotated every four hours. Their computer labs were totally independent, no outside lines or wireless anything, and we were underground. Nobody could possibly have hacked a system to upload the virus, but it still infected three of the systems in lab two, and all of them in lab three.
“Dr. Martin came up with the idea that we must be carrying the virus and transmitting it with some type of hidden signal. She studied each of us and herself and there was nothing anywhere. Then she put Kerry in a magnetoencephalography machine. An MEG works by recording the magnetic fields that are produced by the human brain’s naturally occurring electrical currents. Kerry’s alpha wave patterns were like nothing Dr. Martin had ever seen. She put us all in the machine, and we all had irregular patterns. In addition, alpha waves are supposed to diminish when your eyes are open, but ours were super high in amplitude all the time, and the patterns didn’t look right.”
She lifted the bowl of soup and finished the broth. “Rama was being transmitted via alpha waves.”
“Still a theory,” Ravi added. “Thank you.”
“Yes, but it makes sense,” Brenda countered. “It makes sense that if the alpha waves are just a signal, then they could carry a
hidden
signal, but we were still back to square one. How did the signal penetrate a wireless network? That was when Phil reminded us that alpha waves were magnetic signals, and even wired computers are just signal machines.”
Everyone looked at Phil, who shrugged. “I’m not without skills.”
“What’s your field of expertise? Bourne asked.
“Cleaning. I’m the janitor.”
“Oh… I’m sorry, I just thought…”
“Well, I was gonna get my PhD, but then everybody woulda’ called me Dr. Phil. You understand.”
Rick, Dallas, and Seyfert smiled. Bourne did not.
“Anyway, we argued back and forth on how the signal could carry a virus, and how we thought it was just too coincidental that this plague popped up at about the same time we created an anti-virus for Rama. So we acquired some test subjects and began testing on the seventh floor. That’s where the MEG was kept and…”
“Wait,” Seyfert raised his index finger, “wait a second. Test subjects?”
“Yes, we needed to determine how or even if it was either Abaddon or Rama that was causing this plague. We captured seven subjects, and began testing immediately. Once we—”
Seyfert interjected, “Where are the test subjects?”
“Two are down the hall, the others are…they’re up one floor.”
“Ya’ mean ta tell me ya’ got the livin’ dead on this floor with us?”
“Of course. How else could we run our tests? It’s completely safe, I assure you. After what happened upstairs, we beefed up our security and contamination procedures. The precautions we’ve taken ensure that—”
“Where exactly is your holding facility?” demanded Bourne in his
I-will-not-be-fucked-with
voice.
“It’s right down the hall in the AI lab, I’ll show you.”
Rick, Seyfert, and Dallas all checked their weapons and clicked safeties off.
They walked down the long hall to another lab with a few larger instruments. It didn’t look like a computer lab. A large glass window looked in on the room.
“There, as you can see, they are quite restrained.” Two creatures, both naked, were strapped to gurneys. The first, a male, at least six feet in height, appeared clamped to the table with leather restraints and metal straps across its neck, chest, waist, and knees. The other was only most of a torso, nothing below her ribcage was left, and her arms were gone as well. Both were, as the doctor had said, very well restrained. Some slight movement came from each, but they were mostly content.
The colonel rubbed his shoulder wound and made a grimace. “Would you please open this door?”
The lab was hermetic, and the primary door whooshed as it was opened. “We have to step inside, the inner door won’t open until the outer door is closed. There are Tyvek suits on the wall that we will need to wear as well, but there are only four. If you would…”
“Seyfert, with me. Doctor Poole, please remain outside.”
“What? Why? What do you intend—?”
Ravi gently grabbed her by the arm and pulled her back. “Get out of the airlock, Brenda. Thank you.”
The door closed and Seyfert began looking around. He found a green cordless drill with a charger next to it and pulled the battery from the charger. Brenda began banging on the glass, but Seyfert and Bourne couldn’t hear what she was yelling. Seyfert garbed up with one of the Tyvek suits and put a shield over his face. The banging intensified, and Bourne folded his arms and turned around to look at her briefly. Rick was trying to talk to her, but she was shaking him off and pointing at the glass, obviously yelling.
Both creatures were agitated now, but they couldn’t move because of the restraints. Both undead wore blindfolds, and the male was growling.
Seyfert tested the drill, and the creatures grew significantly more rowdy, straining at their bonds and mewling or snarling. He moved to the full specimen, whose head was restrained with two crude, wooden two-by-four blocks on either side of its cranium. He used the drill to sanitize the thing, drilling into its forehead. It stopped its pathetic thrashing immediately, and Seyfert moved on to the next one. He repeated the process and put down the drill, and began to strip off the white suit.
Bourne nodded to him and they moved through the airlock.
Doctor Poole looked ashen. “What have you done? Do you have any idea what we had to go through to obtain those specimens?”
Seyfert was incredulous. “And you were going to do what now that we’re here? Take them with us? Got a big fuckin’ suitcase, ma’am? Earth to science lady: not happening!”
“Stand down, sailor.” The colonel looked at Brenda. “He’s right though, we couldn’t very well take them with us, and if we’re going to be here for a few hours, then I for one don’t want them around.”
“Me neither,” agreed Phil. “Never did like them in here with us. They killed eleven of our people up on the seventh floor.”
Brenda whipped around. “I could have told them that,” she spat with venom.
Phil just shrugged.
“Enough. Tell us what you need to bring with you, and we’ll help you pack. You are each allowed to bring thirty pounds of equipment and data, and we will assist by carrying thirty pounds each as well. Any more and you may slow us down, so figure out what you need. Seyfert, begin working on an exfil strategy. Dallas and Rick, check the perimeter, stay close and check all of the barricades. This mission is not over. Let’s get to work. Doctor Poole, you will also need to tell me where we are going, and how best to get there.”
36
“Seriously? That’s the best ya got?”
“Easy, Texas, there’s no other way. The fire escape we came in on is destroyed, and the one on the other side of the building is crawling with Limas, I checked.”
“But I don’t like climbin’. There ain’t no other way?
None
?”
“No. There
ain’t
,” Seyfert said the word in a southern drawl. “Yeah, it sucks, but what else can we do? It will bring us right into the loading dock, which is the only part of the facility that isn’t as secure as the rest.”
“I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not,” Bourne added, “but I don’t see any other options.”
Rick let out a deep breath. “C’mon, hillbilly, the colonel had a bullet in his shoulder a week and a half ago, and he’s gonna climb down.”
Bourne rubbed his shoulder again, and Dallas scratched his head. “I’m a mite prickly with heights is all.”
“Don’t look down then,” Phil chimed. “If you don’t look down, it will feel like you’re on a step ladder three feet in the air. Just look right in front of you.”
“Yeah, I heard that b’fore.”
Seyfert spread his hands wide on a table, flattening out a rolled up blue-print he had gotten from a hanging print closet. MIT was constantly upgrading or altering wiring, so blue-prints of the facility were a must to the scientists who worked there. “We’re here.” The SEAL pointed, tracing his finger across a hallway and down an elevator shaft. “It’s about sixty six feet from the entrance of this shaft on the fifth floor to the base of the shaft at the loading dock. It will be a long climb on the service ladder, but we can do it. We’ll lower the data and gear down first and follow. Ravi says that the loading dock is relatively small, so the amount of Limas down there should be negligible.”
“It’s true, the area is small, but there’s still an issue,” Ravi pointed out.
Seyfert looked up, “What issue?”
“What if the loading dock door isn’t closed?”
“Shit.”
“Shit? Izzat the best ya got? Shit?”
“Okay, so we tie the bags off just below the second floor, and everybody waits on the ladder while Dallas, Rick, and I clear the dock area. If we can’t clear the area, we climb back up and figure something else out.”
“That’s a lotta climbin’ boy.”
“Shoulda laid off the pasta and cheeseburgers, hillbilly.”
“Damn, Rick. Don’t be sayin’ cheeseburgers in front o’ me no more. Might be ya get bit by a live person instead of a dead-un.”
“Enough. Seyfert’s plan is good. Well done. Are there any questions before we begin?”
Ravi looked at Brenda, and they both looked at Henry, who raised his hand.
“Yes, Henry?”
“We, uh, we need the RAID on seven?”
“What is radon seven?” Bourne demanded. “Some type of chemical agent?”
“What? No. No it’s a system of computer hard drives. Redundant Array of Independent Disks.
RAID
. It’s on the seventh floor. In the magno lab.”
Dallas looked at Henry. “But you said the seventh was fulla dead people?”
Ravi let out a breath. “It is. There are eleven of our friends, plus…plus five test subjects,” he said sheepishly.
Brenda immediately started on the defensive. “The test subjects were necessary to—”
Bourne cut in. “Forget the subjects. Where are these discs and how do we get to them?”
“The array is on a lab bench in the magno lab,” Henry explained. “It’s a black box about this tall,” he put his palm about two feet from the floor, “but it’s heavy. Forty pounds anyway.”
Bourne let out a sigh as he rubbed his eyes with his palms. He folded his hands then steepled them with his thumbs under his chin and looked at Henry. “And of course all of your data is on those hard drives correct?”
“Not all of it.”
Seyfert threw himself into a chair. “Un-fucking-believable.”
“Secure that tone, seaman, this was the mission from the get-go.”
“Roger that, sir. Sorry.”
The colonel looked at Brenda. “So there are sixteen undead upstairs, and you need a black box that’s in the middle of them?”
“Actually the magno lab is at the
back
of the building,” Henry said.
“Oh, I’m startin’ ta dislike where this is goin’.”
A half hour later, Seyfert, Rick, and Dallas were looking up and down a stairwell. Henry Cho was with them, looking nervous. “Seventh is only one floor up, but the whole stairwell is clear from the basement to the eighth.”
“That’s good news at least.” Seyfert pulled his black tactical facemask up. “Henry, we move together, use the hand signals we taught you to communicate, and for Christ’s sake stay with us.”
The scientist looked around anxiously. “Why don’t I get a gun?”
“Because I don’t want to worry about Limas
and
getting shot in the back.”
Dallas pulled his rebar from his belt. “Here ya go, kid.” Henry grabbed it, but Dallas didn’t let go and the big man looked him in the eye. “Do not lose this.” Henry nodded and they began climbing the stairs.
A gray steel fire door with a yellow 7 on it greeted them when they reached the landing after two short flights. Light poured from a small window at face height into the dimly lit stairway. Seyfert held up a fist and pulled out an inspection mirror, which he put in front of the window so he could see into the room. “Looks like a glass cube,” he whispered.
Henry whispered back, “It’s an airlock. The whole floor is hermetic. My keycard will get us in this door and the next, but it beeps when I use it.”
Seyfert took another look in the mirror. The immediate area was clear, but there were shadowy forms moving down the hall. “Dallas left, Rick right, I’m center. Henry, you stay inside us, bottom of the pyramid. Open it.”
Henry moved forward, pulling a card on a lanyard from around his neck. He put the card in front of a reader, which emitted a quick beeping sound, and the red light on the reader turned green. There was an audible click, and Seyfert pulled the door open wide. The heavy door made the loudest sound of all as it opened, but no one came to greet them. Viscous fluids of many colors coated the airlock pane on the other side of them, with hand and fist prints covering the upper part of the glass as well.
Seyfert glanced in all directions through the airlock glass. He looked apprehensive. “I don’t like this. Okay, I’m going to smack the glass with my rifle until we get company, then we fall back and smoke them as they fill the stairway. Henry, give me your key card, and get back and hold the sixth floor door.” Seyfert turned and spoke into his shoulder mic, “Actual, do you copy?”
“
Loud and clear. SITREP?
”
“We are about to breach, but no hostiles in sight. Blood on the airlock door indicates unfriendlies inside as we were told. Objective is to draw them out a few at a time and take them in the stairway. We need someone down there to open the door for Henry and keep a lookout. Stair team will fall back to six if necessary.”
“
Copy that. Door is open. Good luck.”
Henry passed the card to Seyfert and wasted no time in beating a hasty retreat back the way they had come. Seyfert rapped the butt of his weapon on the door several times. Someone stuck their head out of a room a few meters up the hall, and looked in the other direction. The SEAL gave another light whack to the glass, and the thing turned and looked its red eyes at the stairway team. Its eyes widened and its mouth opened as it came at them in a slow plod. “Back up to the door behind us, Rick hold it open, Dallas back me up with the shotgun, but don’t shoot me.” He went over the load of his weapon in his mind and mentally ensured see he was fully loaded. As the creature got closer to the airlock, the team could hear it moaning. Seyfert looked back and nodded to his friends. “Here goes.”
He put the card in front of the reader just as the thing started scratching at the glass. The reader beeped, the light turned green, the door whooshed left, and the dead woman fell forward on her hands and knees, as she was leaning forward for a particularly hard pound on the glass. The smell that wafted out of the lab was almost unbearable. Seyfert shot the thing in the back of the head with a cold-loaded round before it could stand, and put his foot in the door to stop it from closing. The woman had a huge chunk of her neck missing, and a semicircle bite on her forearm. She looked freshly killed, a few days at most. “Come on out, pus bags,” yelled the SEAL, “I got something for you!”
Three more undead came from forward of the team. One was walking oddly as it had no right foot. Seyfert, his foot in the door, sighted and took them out one by one. “Is that it?” called Seyfert. “Where are the rest of you dead fucks!” Dull thuds could be heard in the lab area down the corridor, but nothing else came out to play. “Shit. Okay, we go in. I’m on point. Watch your corners and check our six.”
The three men moved forward slowly, stepping over the three corpses along the way. There were several doors off of a long corridor, then the corridor opened up into a large research area with lab benches and equipment. A glass wall, covered in gore, waited for them fifteen meters past that. Blood and gore spatter coated the walls and floor of the laboratory they were in, evidence of attacks as well. Overturned chairs and a parts bench, a computer monitor on the floor with a cracked photo of a long white beach flickering. Dallas shone his tac-light into the first door on the left, an empty office. He closed the door. Rick did exactly the same for the first office on the right. The next door on the left was smashed in and held the barely moving corpse of someone in a red cape. There was nothing left of the front of this thing. All of its muscle tissue had been eaten away, and the chest and abdominal cavity were empty. Eyes, face, both arms and one leg were totally gone, bones and all. The other leg ended at a gnawed stump at the knee. The door was destroyed and could not be closed, but the thing in the room would never move of its own volition again.
The thudding continued.
Two more offices held nothing, but the last one on the right contained a lone zombie, back to the door staring at posters on a wall. This one too had a mostly red cape, which the team silently acknowledged as a gore covered lab coat. Seyfert made to shoot it, but Dallas stopped him with a hand on his weapon. The big man stepped into the room and went for his rebar…only to realize he had given it to Henry. He gave a sharp intake of breath upon realizing his mistake, and the zombie whipped its head around and screamed, its hands clawing for the Texan. Seyfert shot it twice in the chest as Dallas backpedaled quickly. The thing fell on its back, and Seyfert put one through its forehead. Dallas swallowed hard, nodding his thanks to his friend. He closed the door and moved on.
They reached the end of the corridor and came upon the glass wall. It was another airlock, the right side of the small cube pushed in. The source of the constant thudding was now apparent: four undead pounding on the glass door creating a slowly spreading spider web of cracks. They were crowded into the airlock, trying to break the door down. Three wore lab coats, and looked as newly dead as the ones the team had encountered in the hallway. The fourth was barefoot with a pair of cutoff jeans and a ragged, fluid-spattered T shirt. It was also putrescent and impossible to tell what race or gender it had been, although it had long hair hanging in filthy strings. Its skin was a shiny black and pieces of its flesh were being left behind as it smacked the glass, the right hand worn to nothing but yellowish bone, the top portion of its fingers missing.
The living men checked their position, nothing was behind them and all the doors were closed except for the one that had been smashed in. The lab area the men occupied was as trashed as the one up front had been, equipment broken, and blood on everything. Rick and Dallas kept an eye out behind and to their respective sides as Seyfert moved forward. He stepped to the side of the first lab-coated zombie and shot it in the side of the head. It crumpled instantly. The ratcheting mechanism on the suppressed weapon was an odd sound in the partially enclosed area, and the shot was louder than Seyfert liked but the three remaining undead either didn’t notice or didn’t care. Seyfert shot the gooey one next, and then the other two. None had turned to look at him even when their fellows fell.
After making sure they were truly dead, Seyfert glanced in the window of the last lab. A large machine, with a short arm and small dome on the end of the arm, looked like a giant old-style hair dryer. It held a single occupant, a struggling zombie strapped in tight. Two corpses, one wearing a lab coat and one not were splayed on the floor in the room as well, and two more animated corpses were strapped down on gurneys to the far right.
Dallas and Seyfert pulled the re-killed zombies from the airlock as Rick stood watch. “
Stair team this is Lead, SITREP, over?
”
“Twelve Limas down, three restrained. Breaching the lab now.”
“
That leaves one Lima unaccounted for, seaman.
”
“Copy that, Lead, we are toes down. Another SITREP in three, out.”
Seyfert looked at both his friends, nodded, and smacked his weapon barrel against the cracked pane of the airlock. The creature strapped in the machine became more agitated, but that was it, nothing else came stumbling. “Double shit,” the SEAL said. He ran Henry’s card past the reader and the cracked glass slid to the right. “Anybody home?” he asked.