Chapter 4
A crowd had already gathered in the canteen. Assorted white coats, suits, and technicians stood in small groups, the general hubbub of conversation punctuated by now familiar complaints of no phone lines, no TV, no internet.
And especially, how they were all too important to be treated like plebs.
The large TVs of the canteen, which yesterday had been busy beaming the chaos taking place across the country above them, now showed only the ubiquitous nothing message:
“All External broadcasts are suspended for the time being. Please refer to the intranet communication’s page for further details.”
Grace and the out-of-breath Professor joined a group of bacteria scientists sat in a corner by the wall. Grace sat next to Harry.
“Bet you wish you joined me for that drink last night now?” said Harry. “Who knows what’s going to happen today, the mood is ugly.”
“Never mind last night, I could do with a drink now.”
Harry smiled. “Do you guys know anything? It feels like we’ve suddenly been shut down in a hole.”
The Professor and Grace both shook their heads.
“We may be about to find out,” said one of Harry’s colleagues, pointing to the door, where the Secretary’s assistant, Davis, had just entered. It was unusual to see him in the canteen. He would usually only show himself for morale raising events. It looked like he was adding emergencies to his public appearance’s list.
He was immediately subject to a barrage of questions, the interrogation firing like the opening salvo of a battle. Voices fought over each other to make sure their own particular displeasure was known.
Davis patted the air, trying to quieten the hoard of unruly scientists.
“Ok, ok, please, be quiet. I have a statement that will explain everything, please, thank you.”
Harry leaned over to Grace and whispered, “Look around, amazing how quickly people will descend into a baying mob, once you sprinkle a little fear into the mix.”
“Please,” said Davis, “quiet, thank you.”
The questions stopped and the conversation sank to a hum, and then to nothing. An uncertain and heavy silence sat in the room. Expectant.
Ready to blow, thought Grace.
“Thank you.” Davis, his blue suit perfectly creased, looked over the assembled crowd. “As you know, there has been an outbreak of some magnitude of an unknown virus on the surface. Despite our government’s best efforts to contain the outbreak, which first hit our borders three days ago, it has swept across the country in an unprecedented fashion, the vector being, well, everyone.”
“What percentage of coverage are we talking about sir?” asked Grace.
Davis spied out Grace. “Last estimates were 85%.”
“In three days?”
“In three days.”
There was as second or two of silence and then a gasp, followed by raised voices, and then more questions. The realisation of what was happening was beginning to hit.
They had a specimen of the virus in the lab, they had all seen what it was like. They all knew the virus was fatal. 85%. Do the math. Nearly the whole country wiped out in three days.
Including a lot of loved ones.
People began to cry.
“What the hell are we doing down here then? I need to get to my family!” shouted Doctor Stockbridge, a stout virologist from Sector 8. His face was flushed with anger.
Similar protests followed.
Davis took a step back. Involuntary, thought Grace, but telling. He felt the anger and fear in the room.
“Why didn’t you tell us what was happening,” shouted a woman’s voice.
“We need to get out of here!”
“You can’t keep us down here, we have to go.”
Davis raised his hands again, “Please, please, I will answer your questions but you must give me a chance to speak.”
Quiet returned reluctantly to the room. The atmosphere reduced itself to a gentle simmer.
“I understand that a lot of you are afraid, and that you may feel we have kept you in the dark, and that you have been kept away from your families and loved ones.”
A few rude accusations flew towards Davis. He ignored them.
“While this may be the outcome, it certainly was not the intention. I only received those numbers myself late last night. I have been kept on the dark as much as the rest of you. It seems, that, if I am to be candid, the situation above ground is now out of control.”
Davis looked shaken. His face was ashen white and Grace was sure she could see a quiver on his lip. He was scared, just like the rest of them. He had known all of this before them, had more time to process the knowledge. He most probably had his own family, that was now gone.
Cries of anguish echoed around the room as one by one, people realised what was gone. The wife, the daughter, the husband, the young son, the nagging mother. What were the chances they were in the 15% that were still alive, if that number was even accurate?
Davis started talking again. “Our communication lines ceased operation this morning at 4:32am. We don’t know if this is intentional or whether a catastrophic failure has occurred in the topside systems. Either way, we have no further contact with anyone above ground.”
Davis took in a deep breath. Time for the finale.
“We are ordering a full and immediate evacuation of the Facility. All non-critical personnel are to report to exit stations 3, 5, and 7 immediately. Senior staff are required to report to their work’s stations and securely delete all sensitive material. We have executed Protocol Icarus.”
A heavy and dread silence fell across the room.
“My God,” whispered the Professor.
There was a sudden rush to the door, Davis was swept to the side, and he mopped his sweating brow with a handkerchief.
Chapter 5
Protocol Icarus was highlighted at the end of each new employee’s induction process. Grace remembered it well and its existence hadn’t surprised her - nothing about the Facility surprised her.
Security was tantamount. Every policy, regulation and legal construct was enshrined to maintain the security if the Facility at any cost. The overriding policy was not concerned with people breaking in, although numerous precautions were taken against unauthorised personnel, terrorist attacks etc, but mostly concerned with stopping anything from
getting out
. This applied to people, but mainly to the research. The only way any of the Facility’s work would ever be published to the wider scientific community was through two paranoid gatekeepers; the Facility’s board of directors, and an unknown governmental department that never confirmed nor denied its own existence.
The reason for this secrecy was that the research at the Facility was, as Grace heard it described in hushed terms, of an indeterminate moral nature, and as such, best operated within a moral vacuum perpetrated through isolation from society.
Grace had understood the situation and indeed approved of it, as it meant she could compromise her own principles in silence, without the rest of the world, and the people she knew and loved, from being able to pass judgement. But then, after twenty years working the Facility, she didn’t have many friends and loved ones top side anymore, apart from her mother.
The Facility quickly became the life of its most valued scientists.
And so, the implementation of Protocol Icarus was like a hammer to her heart.
It was only at that second she realised how attached she was to her gargantuan underground biological research lab, how much a part of her it had become. The news that the world above was falling apart was upsetting, alarming even, but nothing compared to the cold stark fear she suddenly felt at the removal of the Facility from her life.
For Protocol Icarus would leave nothing behind.
Slash and burn.
Strategic and Tactical Catastrophe Management.
The countdown would be over four hours. One hour for the Facility’s main systems to shut down and secure themselves. The next two hours was the charging and arming of the numerous small nuclear devices dotted around the complex.
The last hour was just to be sure that everyone had a chance to get out; although, a few of the statisticians on the department had, as a playful exercise over the years, estimated how long a full evacuation of the Facility would take, and their numbers usually came in higher than the four hours given by Protocol Icarus. This disconnect became a common joke made in the same nervous way people would joke about a plane crash - an event that everyone feared, but never really expected. Still though, that voice at the back of your mind
,
what if, what i
f
…
And now
what if
was here.
Grace didn’t want to be on the wrong side of the statistics.
A low key siren began to hum in the background, its monotonous wail piercing enough for one to take notice, but not ear splitting enough to instil too much urgency. Not yet. Grace suspected it would get louder as the hours ticked away.
A friendly voice announced on the loudspeaker that Protocol Icarus had been implemented, followed by a countdown.
“Three hours and fifty five minutes.”
A sick feeling in her stomach, like a hand gripping her insides and squeezing gently.
She chased after the Professor as he hurried back to the lab. He ignored her calls for him to wait. She caught up with him as he unlocked the lab doors.
“Professor, did you not hear me?”
The Professor glanced up. “I heard you, but we have no time to wait.” He flicked on a few machines around him and sat down by his terminal. “What are you doing here? Go and get your things and get out. The queues at the exit stations will be huge within minutes.”
He was right. But it didn’t feel right to leave him here. He was her friend, after all.
“Come on Professor, come with me.”
He shook his head. “I have to wipe all the drives, you understand what needs to be done.”
“I understand what it says in the book, but I’ve never understood why it’s necessary, the whole place is about to be nuked!”
“If, for some reason, one of the charges failed to go off, or a single hard drive remained, a particularly industrious person, or nation, may be able to recover some of what we are doing down here. It would be disastrous.”
“Disastrous? More disastrous than most of the world dying, and you being obliterated by a nuclear explosion?!”
The Professor turned to face Grace and gave her a sly smile. “You know me, a stickler for rules.”
“That’s exactly not how I know you.”
“Please Grace, I’ll be ok. This talking is only holding me up. I will take care of everything here and see you at Exit Station 7 in an hour?”
The Professor could be a belligerent old bugger, and he had that look in his eyes. She knew, through years of experience, that it was useless arguing with him. The best she could do was let him do what he had to do quickly.
“Ok, I’d better see you there, or I’ll be coming for you.”
He gave her a nonchalant wave, his eyes fixated on his terminal.
She ran out of the lab.
The usual peaceful corridors of the Facility were no longer peaceful. Gone where the wandering doctors and professors, talking over reports and iPads as they walked from one lab to another. Gone where the smiles and jovial greetings of one professional to another.
Instead, they ran. Everyone ran. Panic and worry knitted on each face.
The siren had increased in volume a notch, and with it came urgency.
Grace found herself running. Her quarters were located only a few minutes from the lab. Even so, she suddenly felt the passing of time like a new sense in her body. A demanding sense that overrode all others. The ever tick tock of the seconds took precedence over everything.
The lights suddenly switched from their bright day-like glow to a dull orange.
The Facility was conserving power, shutting down non-necessary systems as it continued its workmanlike stomp towards complete oblivion.
Chapter 6
Grace worked her way methodically through her small room, placing items of importance into her suitcase.
She didn’t have much. She packed her laptop - her personal one with no work related information. She packed her clothes and toiletries. She packed the few photos of her parents. She paused to look at the last photo she had of her mum and dad together, before dad died five years ago from pancreatic cancer. That period had been her longest break from the Facility since she joined. Six months topside helping her mum rebuild her life without her partner of forty years. She nearly hadn’t made it.
And for what, thought Grace? A lonely life with her daughter living in a hole in the ground doing ‘important’ government work.
As Grace pushed her laptop’s power pack into her suitcase, she took pause. She realised she was packing for a normal world. For a weekend break.
Who was to know if there would be any power up above, if she would ever be able to use her laptop again. With 85% of people gone, who was keeping the lights on?
A spike of nervousness and anxiety shuddered through her being.
She continued pushing the power pack into her suitcase.
The eternal optimist.
Exit station 7 was the nearest to her quarters. It consisted of a large waiting room and gated exit, manned by a soldier, who would conduct a battery of identity and security checks on personnel before they were allowed to exit - checks hopefully dispensed with due to Protocol Icarus.
Grace was painfully disappointed to find the chain of bureaucracy still wrapped tight around the exit procedure. The lounge was full of nervous people, an angry buzz of communication and demands hanging in the air, while the flustered looking young soldier at the exit gate methodically performed his security checks.
“The whole place is going to go up in a nuclear blast in a few hours and you want to check my fingerprints?” shouted one angry Doctor.
The soldier, with a glint of fear in his eye, said, “I’m sorry sir, but I haven’t received any orders to the contrary, we all have to be checked.”
“You haven’t received any orders to the contrary because there are no open communication channels with the surface, you stupid fucking grunt!”
Grace looked around for the Professor, but he was nowhere to be seen. She put her case down in a corner of the packed waiting room and went to find the Professor. She bumped into Harry, who was carrying a leather holdall.
“Grace,” he smiled, a pleasant window on his otherwise worried looking face. “Where are you going? Decided against leaving?”
“Have you seen his place? They’re still doing all the checks. It’s going to take hours to get out of here.”
“Is there any other way?”
“Not that I know off. But I have to find the Professor. He said he’d be here, and maybe he can help.”
Harry looked over the restless crowd. There was an unsavoury bite to the air. “I’ll come with you,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen here, but I’d rather be here after it happens, if you know what I mean.”
They both rushed away from the waiting room, in the opposite direction to the crowds, back towards Grace and the Professor’s lab.
It took them ten minutes or so to get there, pushing through agitated and scared flows of people heading in various directions. The loudspeaker kept countdown, every five minutes,
“Two hours and fifty minutes”
…until the end of the world, echoed Grace in her head.
They reached the lab and Grace put her hand on the closed door. Harry, who was looking through the lab’s small window put his hand on hers, stopping her from going in. He motioned through the window and Grace joined him in peering into the lab.
“It’s the guy from the other morning, the government spook,” said Grace. “He’s called Taylor.”
“I remember him,” said Harry.
Taylor was talking to the obviously agitated Professor, who was waving his arms and shouting. Grace couldn’t hear what was being said, the thick glass and door blocking out most of the sound.
Taylor stood calmly, regarding the Professor with what seemed to be amusement.
“Shall we go in?” said Grace.
Harry shook his head. “I don’t like the look of this. Let’s see what happens.”
The Professor stopped talking and lowered his head. He shook it slowly and took something out of his pocket. He handed it to Taylor.
“What’s he giving him?” said Harry.
“It looks like a flash drive. He said he was wiping all the computers, all our work, so what’s he doing giving a flash drive to that guy?”
“I’m not sure he wants to…” said Harry.
Taylor took the flash drive and looked at it. He smiled and put it his suit breast pocket.
Then, in one fluid movement, too quick for anyone involved to recognise what was happening, never mind intervene, he took out a gun from his inside pocket. Surely it can’t be a gun, thought Grace? Guns were never seen except on the TV, except in films. Certainly not in real life.
Taylor put the gun against the Professor’s head. The Professor didn’t have time to change his expression before a fountain of deep reds and purples exploded from the back of the Professor’s head, accompanied by a dull flat bang.
The Professor fell, disappearing from view.
Grace pulled her hand to her mouth to stop herself from screaming. Harry grabbed her, “Come on!” he shouted.
They ran down the corridor and into the next open lab and pulled the door shut. They pressed up against the wall and waited, keeping still. The room was dark. Grace breathed hard and fast, blood thumping in her temples, her hands shaking. The image of the Professor being shot in the head replayed in her mind, as if burnt onto her retina, like she had stared at the sun.
Harry grabbed her hand and she squeezed it tight. She could hear his breathing, also loud and fast.
“We wait here,” whispered Harry through laboured breaths. “Just five minutes, give him plenty of time to get far away.”
“Ok,” said Grace, happy to stay there in the dark, away from the now terrible world, at least for the next few minutes.
Silence, but for her heart.