Backwoods (27 page)

Hoping like hell that it hadn’t broken in the
fall, Andrew fumbled along the shaft until he felt the on-off
button. When he pushed it, a bright beam of golden light speared
across the corridor and he uttered a happy little cry. It cut
abruptly short when he saw what the flashlight’s beam had pinned in
its stark and momentarily dazzling glare—more soldiers lying near
the wall, sprawled together, one nearly atop the others, all of
them dead and battered.

“Oh, God,” he gasped, recognizing their
faces—Maggitti, Reigler and Spaulding, three from Dani’s
company.

He realized what had happened to the lights.
They’d been shot out, the bulbs splintered by stray bullets. The
wall was riddled with automatic gunfire, pock-marked in wildly
erratic patterns, as if several armed men had spun in manic
circles, shooting all the while.

He’d seen something else near the dead
soldiers—their assault rifles. Crawling forward, tucking the
flashlight beneath his arm to direct its beam ahead of him, he
reached for one of the fallen M16s. When he went to push a leg
aside to grab the nearest stock, he realized it was severed from
its corresponding torso. He’d been expecting resistance from the
deadweight of a corpse. Instead, the leg slid with surprising ease
away from him. It made a squishy sort of sound as it moved, like a
mop that hadn’t been wrung out well being slopped across the floor,
and he jerked his hand back, feeling his stomach roil.

This is crazy,
he thought.
God,
what am I doing? I’m supposed to be in a motel room in Pikeville
right now, watching pay-for-view porn and plugging tree counts into
my laptop to email back to the office.

Nevertheless, he uttered a triumphant little
cry as he wrestled the rifle loose from beneath the tangled heap of
dead soldiers. Once he had it free, he scrambled back to the wall.
Shrugging the gun strap over his arm, he shouldered it long enough
to sweep the flashlight along the corridor in either direction,
surveying his surroundings. He saw another one of Dani’s squad
mates dead on the floor nearby, Barron, the young man from
Anchorage who’d bet Andrew ten bucks the Seawolves would win out in
that year’s college hockey face-off against Fairbanks. It had been
Barron’s body that Andrew had first tripped over, Barron’s
flashlight that he now held in hand. And it was beside Barron’s
outstretched and motionless hand that Andrew’s pistol had come to
rest when he’d dropped it.

“I’m sorry,” Andrew whispered as he leaned
down, retrieving the nine millimeter, shoving it beneath the
waistband of his pants. He spoke not just to Barron, but to all of
them, because although they hadn’t been close enough for him to
consider them
friends,
per se, they’d been more than mere
acquaintances, and they’d made him feel welcome among them, a part
of their group.

He tried not to look at them again as he
started down the hallway again, carrying both the rifle and
flashlight at the same time so he could keep the beam of bright
illumination trained ahead of him. He focused his attention on each
closed door as he passed, each stainless steel knob glittering
coldly in the flashlight’s glow.

One forty-two, one forty,
the numbered
placards outside the nearest read. Because these were the lowest
numerals he’d found so far, he felt a momentary, fledgling hope
that it meant he was finally heading in the right direction.

One thirty-eight, one thirty-six,
he
saw to his right, while on the left,
one thirty-seven, one
thirty-five.

As he passed by door number one thirty-four,
he heard faint but distinct noise seeping through the wood and
froze. It sounded like someone crying from inside the room.

A woman crying,
he realized, and he
whirled, training the flashlight beam directly at the door.
Dani!

Moore had told him his office number was one
twenty-seven, or so Andrew had thought.
Maybe I misheard,
he
thought.
Or maybe I remembered it wrong. Or maybe that son of a
bitch just lied to me so I’d wind up lost.

Whatever the case, it didn’t matter.
She’s
in there. She’s alive.

He tried the knob, but it was locked.

“Shit,” Andrew muttered, because he’d started
to punch the pass code in before realizing the power was out; the
key pad didn’t work. Turning the knob futilely in his hand, he
pressed his ear against the door. “Dani,” he called out. “Open the
door.”

After a long moment in which there was
nothing but silence, he closed his eyes, chanting over and over in
his mind like a mantra,
Answer me, Dani. Come on, be alive. Be
alright. Answer me.

Then, through the door, he heard,
“Andrew?”

He laughed, slapping his hand against the
door. “Dani,” he cried. “It’s me. Let me in. I can’t open the door
from this side. The power’s out and the key pad doesn’t work. We
have to get out of here.”

From the other side, he heard a series of
shuffling footsteps, some fervent sniffling, then loud, overlapping
crashes and bangs, like someone had stumbled into something in the
dark, toppling a pencil cup or cutlery set across the floor.

“Dani?” Concerned, he leaned against the door
again. When it opened unexpectedly, swinging inward, he stumbled
forward, falling against the woman on the other side.

“Oh, God, Andrew,” she gulped, and all he
caught was a glimpse of blonde hair and a pungent whiff of alcohol
before she staggered into him, clapping her arms around his neck in
a fervent embrace.

“Suzette?”

She’d buried her face against the side of his
neck and when she looked up, he saw her make-up streaked down her
face, crooked lines of smeared mascara ringing her eyes, bisecting
her cheeks. She hiccupped moistly for breath as she choked back
tears.

“Suzette,” he said again. “What are you—”

“
Shhhh!”
Spraying his face with
spittle, she shoved her hand over his mouth, muffling him. Her eyes
were round and wild, rolling in their sockets as her gaze darted
frantically past him, up and down the corridor. “Don’t let them
hear you.”

She staggered back into the room, dragging
him with her, slamming the door shut behind him. He panned the
light around and saw they were in a small office. She’d shoved the
desk against the wall and piled blankets in a tangled heap in the
chair nook beneath, making a rudimentary nest for herself. Beside
this, he saw a cardboard box heaped with cartons of crackers,
canned vegetables, some Spaghetti-O’s, but these were far
outnumbered by the dozen or so bottles of gin, tequila, red wine
and vodka, the latter of which she’d already been hitting pretty
heavily, judging by her condition and the nearly empty bottle that
listed on its side, cap removed, well within view.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Suzette slurred,
shambling toward him again, offering a crooked smile. Her hair was
wildly askew, her clothes rumpled and blood-stained. Her eyes
remained haunted, gleaming in the reflected flashlight’s glow with
a manic sort of glaze. As he watched, she dragged her hands across
her cheeks, trying to wipe her ruined make up away, then fought to
smooth her hair down behind her ears. “I brought some things. Do
you see? Everything I could carry. It should be enough to last us a
week, maybe more, a little less.”

“What are you talking about?” Andrew asked,
then she snuggled into him again, twining her arms around his
waist, burrowing her nose into his chest.

“God, I’m so glad you’re here,” she crooned,
muffled against his shirt.

“Suzette, look at me.” Shrugging the gun over
his shoulder and setting aside the flashlight, he tried to tilt her
face up. “What are you doing here? How did you get inside the
lab?”

“Through the front doors,” she replied, then
she snorted laughter. Holding out one unsteady index finger, she
mimed punching in a pin code. “I just pushed the buttons.” Her
smile faltered, then withered. “I’m scared,” she whispered. “I’m so
scared, Andrew, and I heard gunshots outside, people screaming. It
was horrible. I didn’t think there was anybody left, no one but me,
and that they’d find me somehow. They’d break down the door and
kill me.”

“It’s alright,” he said, and she crumpled
into him again. He embraced her clumsily, awkwardly. “It’s going to
be okay, Suzette.”

“I’m so glad you’re here.”

“Do you know where Dr. Moore’s office is?” he
asked. “Do you know how to get there from here?” When she nodded,
still tucked against his chest, he said, “You have to show me.
Right now. Come on, let’s go.”

Stepping toward the door, he pulled away from
her, leading her by the hand. Her eyes flew wide with renewed alarm
and she shook her head.

“No,” she said. “No, no, oh, no, we can’t go.
Are you crazy?
They’re
out there.”

The way she said this, the emphasis she
placed on the word
they’re
made him frown. “Do you know
what’s going on?” he asked, cocking his head, meeting her bleary
gaze. “Suzette, do you know what
they
are?”

Because by all rights, she shouldn’t.

She cut her eyes away, burying her face again
into his shirt. “Stay with me,” she mumbled. “Please, Andrew. It
will be okay. You’ll see.”

“You do, don’t you?” he asked. “You know what
the screamers are. You know what Moore did to the soldiers from
Alpha squad.”

“It’ll be okay,” she said again, shaking her
head, clinging to him. “Another week, maybe two and we won’t have
to worry.”

“Why not? Why won’t we have to worry?”
Grasping her by the arms, he hauled her forcibly back from his
chest. He gave her a sharp shake, rocking her head on her neck,
making her cry out miserably. “Tell me, goddamn it. What are you
talking about?”

She blinked at him, tearful again, her bottom
lip quavering. “The virus will eventually overtake them.”

“You know about Moore’s retrovirus?” he
demanded and she nodded.

“I helped him design it,” she whispered. “The
restriction enzyme that breaks down the host cell’s DNA, anyway.
That’s what allows the virus to encode its own genetic
sequence.”

“
What?”
Stricken, Andrew shook her
again. “You’ve been helping him all along? You knew what he’s been
out here doing, and you never tried to stop him?”

“How could I?” she cried. “No, I wasn’t
helping him. I told you before, I work with his daughter, not his
research. Not anymore.”

“But you used to,” Andrew said. “I saw your
picture in the scrapbook Alice made. You used to be Moore’s lab
partner.”

She nodded, then uttered a harsh, scraping
laugh. “Back when he was just Edward Moore, before he became a
Nobel Laureate.
That son of a bitch. He wouldn’t have won
that goddamn prize if it wasn’t for me. It was my enzyme that made
his precious vascular endothelial growth factor work, anyway.”

She flapped her arms furiously and he let her
go. Suzette staggered over to her messy blankets and bent over,
lifting the vodka bottle off the floor. Tilting her head back, she
opened her mouth wide, tongue protruding, and dribbled the last
trickles down her throat. When she’d finished, she threw the bottle
aside, sending it clattering across the floor, while she yanked
another from her box.

“He left me behind,” she told Andrew,
unscrewing the cap and pitching it behind her. “Isn’t that just
like a man? You dip your dick, then you hit the road.”

“You were sleeping with Moore?”

She tipped the bottle at him, a mocking
toast. “When he left Cold Spring Harbor, he left me, too. He said
they’d give me his post. Said he’d lined it up for me. You know
what I got instead?
Fired.
This was his idea of making
things up to me.
This.”
She motioned to indicate the room,
the lab, and vodka slopped messily over the lip of the bottle top.
“Being stuck out in the middle of godforsaken
nowhere,
U.S.A. playing Nanny-goddamn-McPhee to his half-wit, retarded
brat.”

“Alice isn’t retarded,” Andrew said,
bristling.

“You know what they had the nerve to tell me
at Cold Spring Harbor?” Suzette continued, oblivious to his comment
or choosing to ignore it. “That I had a drinking problem as well as
a…” She cleared her throat, affected a, exaggerated stuffy, prim
expression, her lips pursed, her nose wrinkled. “…‘demonstrated
moral turpitude. ’ Whatever the hell
that’s
supposed to
mean. Anyway, they told me that they couldn’t turn over the helm of
a multi-bazillion-some-odd dollar bioengineering research facility
to a woman with a bottle in one hand and her ex-boss’s dick in the
other.” Another long swig. “Never mind you can’t fill a
kindergartener’s hand with Edward’s pathetic excuse for a
cock.”

Glancing at him now, her brow arched, her
lips uncurling in a thin smile. “Now
your
cock on the other
hand,” she murmured, sidling toward him, stumbling unsteadily and
marking a meandering path. “I can think of a few places I might
fill with
it.”

“Suzette,” he said with a frown, even as she
reached for him, tickling him lightly along the collar with her
fingertips.

“Andrew,” she replied, mimicking his stern
tone, then following up with a drunken titter. Setting aside the
liquor bottle, she hooked her fingertips beneath his waistband.
“Why don’t we start at the top…work our way down?” The tip of her
tongue swiped her lips suggestively as she dropped to her knees,
trying to ease his pants down with her.

“Stop.” He caught her elbows, his grip tight
enough to make her wince, her expression bewildered at first, then
pained. “Get up.”

“You’re hurting me,” she whimpered, then she
yelped as he hauled her to her feet.

“Tell me about the screamers,” he said. “You
said in another week, it would be alright. What did you mean?”