Plague Nation (15 page)

“If I can’t detect it yet,” he said, “it might be something small.”

At which point, with the kind of comedic timing envied by sitcom writers everywhere, the fire alarm went off. The clarion call of disaster sent a new surge of adrenalin through my body.

“Head upstairs to the courtyard,” Gabriel said as he pulled on a pair of camo pants and a dark green T-shirt. “Gather anyone you can along the way.”

“Lil,” I said. “I need to get her first, and help her with the cats, get my weapons. Then we can both help evacuate.”

Gabriel didn’t even try to argue with me. Points for a learning curve there.

I ran to the door, poking the handle cautiously to make sure it wasn’t hot to the touch. It was still cool, so I opened the door without further ado and dashed into the hallway, barreling around the corner to the section that housed the wild cards. Hanging a tight left, I ran straight into Mack. He was already dressed.

He steadied me with one hand as another door opened and Tony stuck his head out, bleary-eyed from interrupted sleep.

“Is it a drill?” he asked, cringing at the sound of the alarm. I knew how he felt—sometimes enhanced senses were a pain.

Mack shook his head before I could say anything.

“Can’t you smell the smoke?” he asked. “I don’t think this is a drill.”

“It’s not,” I said shortly. “Go to the courtyard, get everyone you can out along the way. The soldiers will do the rest.”

Tony nodded and vanished back into his room, presumably to get dressed. Of course, being a quintessential teen, there was every possibility he’d crawl back into bed and go back to sleep. I made a mental note to check before leaving the building.

Mack nodded toward the stairwell door.

“Look.”

Smoke was seeping out from under the bottom of the door. I ran over and tested the handle, which was still cool to the touch. Cautiously I cracked the door, coughing when a plume of acrid smoke hit me in the face. I waved a hand in front of my nose and did a quick check, up and down the stairwell. The lower levels were hazy with an ever-thickening cloud, while the floors above were still relatively clear.

I shut the door and turned to Mack.

“It’s definitely coming from one of the floors below,” I said.

“Good. We should have plenty of time to clear the civilians from this level.” He took off to help with the evacuation process. Knowing Mack, he’d stay inside until every last person was safe, or until one of us dragged him out of the building.

A thin haze was definitely visible on our floor by the time I got to the room I shared with Lil. I opened the door to find her already dressed and frantically trying to bundle the cats into their carrier. Neither feline was cooperating, with Binkey holed up under my bed and Doodle doing the classic stiff-legged claw against the doorframe of the carrier. It would have been funny, if the situation weren’t so serious.

Lil looked up at my entrance, her tense expression relaxing into relief when she saw me.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said. “I can smell smoke, Ash. I could smell it before the alarm went off.”

“Me, too,” I said, giving her a quick one-armed hug.

“Were you with Gabriel?”

I nodded, figuring there was no point in being coy.

“There’s a fire somewhere in the building, on one of the lower levels,” I said, helping her lever Doodle into the carrier. “Let’s get the kids out of here, and then we can help with evacuation. Grab some food for them, and I’ll see if I can get Binkey.”

Lil nodded, grabbing a bag of dry cat food and her childhood toy Lambie-Pie, a threadbare stuffed lamb. She crammed them into a duffle bag along with her favorite pickaxe and M4, while I wriggled under my bed and tried to grab the cat.

Binkey, normally a mellow marshmallow, swatted me with an angry paw. I hissed with the unexpected pain of five sharp claws ripping bloody furrows in my hand.

“Son of a.”

I narrowed my eyes and grabbed the little bugger by his scruff, dragging him out from under the bed as he howled in outrage.
Ungrateful furball.

“Ready?” I asked Lil. She nodded and opened the door to the carrier just wide enough for me to stuff him inside. Lil slammed the door shut and latched it securely as both cats started up a chorus of the damned. They’d done the same thing when we’d liberated them from Lil’s old apartment in Redwood Grove, and the sound had attracted the attention of every zombie in a five-mile radius. At least tonight we didn’t have to worry about the Z factor.

“Here.” I handed Lil the duffle bag, helping her sling it over her shoulder. “You take the kids outside, and stash them someplace safe.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going to help with the evacuation,” I said, retrieving my own M4 and swords from the closet.

“You’ll be careful, right?” Lil’s eyes were wide and worried as Binkey and Doodle continued to howl.

“I will
totally
be careful,” I replied, rooting around in the closet for my ammo pouch and extra cartridges.

“Promise?”

I stopped what I was doing, my attention caught by the naked vulnerability in Lil’s voice. Gone was the slightly crazed zombie-killing goddess of death. In her place was just a frightened girl who didn’t want to lose anyone else she cared about. Dropping my weapons, I crossed the room and gave her a fiercely protective hug.

“I promise.”

“Okay.” She hugged me back, her face pressed against my shoulder. When she stepped away, her expression was suddenly fierce. “Don’t you leave me, Ashley.”

I grinned at her.

“No way am I leaving you on your own with the banshee twins. Now get the hell out of here!”

She slung the duffle bag over her shoulder, hefted the cat carrier filled with at least thirty pounds of feline, and dashed out the door. I heaved a sigh of relief, knowing I’d be able to focus much better with Lil and the kids out of danger.

Stepping out into the hallway, I waited until I saw her vanish up the stairs, then went back into our room to retrieve my weapons and change into fighting gear. As I did so, I formed a mental picture of the lower floors. If the fire had started in the labs, it meant the research subjects could be loose. And by “research subjects” I wasn’t talking lab rats. I was talking zombies. I’d been down there once when Colonel Paxton’s predecessor had tried to blackmail me into joining the wild cards by showing me my ex-boyfriend turned zombie.

There’d been around a dozen ghouls in cages, with more strapped to tables. There were also a number of lab techs. Hopefully they’d already made it out, but if they hadn’t... if their subjects had gotten loose, I needed to be ready for battle.

I ran back into the hallway toward the stairwell, passing Mack and a group of civilians he was leading out of the building.

“Any more of them?” I asked.

“Tony’s got another group,” Mack replied. “I think we’ve pretty much cleared this floor, and the military is handling the med ward below.”

“Have you seen Simone?”

Mack shook his head.

“You get everyone you can off this floor,” I said.

“What about Lil?”

I gave him a reassuring pat on one shoulder.

“She’s out, along with the cats,” I said. “I’m going to make sure Simone is safe.”

Mack nodded. “Be careful.”

I laughed. “It’s my job, right?”

“Right.” He gave me a quick one-armed hug.

* * *

We hit the stairwell. Mack and his group headed up, and I ran down the cement stairs into a slowly thickening cloud of ominously dark, acrid smoke, the smell noxious and chemical. It left an oily residue on my skin, making me wonder what kind of toxic cocktail was burning in the lab.

Could the infection be transmitted via the remnants of cremated zombies,
à la
O’Bannon’s
Return of the Living Dead
? I shuddered at the thought, and not just because that movie started the whole “braaaa-i-nsss” craze. It’d been wrong about that part, so hopefully it hadn’t gotten the whole infected rainfall thing right, either.

That would suck.

I coughed as I got another good whiff of the nasty-ass smoke when I reached the landing above the labs. The smoke further down was even thicker, and remembering that most people died of smoke inhalation, I knew I couldn’t risk going down another flight of stairs without any protection, even if it was just a damp cloth to drape over my head. Besides, I doubted this stairwell would get me where I wanted to go. Access to the labs required following a path of labyrinthine complexity through the med ward.

I shuddered at the thought. Last time I’d been in the med ward had been to watch a bunch of soldiers— including Gabriel—try to subdue my boyfriend-turned-zombie amid a bunch of people who were tied to cots and dying from a hideously painful disease involving lots of blood and black fluids oozing from various orifices. You know, the kind of memories that lead to major PTSD. I’d managed to avoid the nightmares so far, most likely because I’d been too busy training and fighting to give them a chance to take root.

Either that, or I was amazingly resilient.

Or shallow as hell.

Whichever it was, I still didn’t want to go back into that particular circle of hell. But if there was even a
chance
that Simone was down there, maybe injured or trapped... Well, I didn’t see that I had much of a choice.

A quick hand on the stairwell door told me it was safe to open. Stepping through, I found myself in the middle of a chaotic rush of military and medical personnel, dashing in and out of the med ward, some with arms full of medical equipment and supplies, others pushing wheeled dollies to the elevator at the far end of the corridor. I’d seen
Towering Inferno
so I wouldn’t want to trust an elevator in the middle of a fire, but since they were going up instead of down, the risk of it stopping on the wrong floor probably wasn’t an issue.

Smoke drifted lazily through the hallway, the acrid chemical smell becoming stronger by the minute. I looked for a familiar face, hoping to see Simone, but most of the people dashing back and forth were wearing protective gear, some with full-on Level 4 biohazard suits, and others just in protective face masks and hoods with breathing apparatus.

As I’d hoped, they were evacuating the civilians. I recognized Judy from the trailer park, huddling against a soldier in protective face gear, her eyes rolling, showing the whites like a crazed horse. Guess she hadn’t been infected, but her sanity levels clearly still needed a refill.

There were other folks with what looked like minor injuries—broken limbs and such—being helped out, but I didn’t see anyone with Walker’s symptoms, which made me wonder what was happening to the patients in the med ward. Some of the men and women there had been bitten, and were under observation to see if they were immune to the infection. Like me.

I grabbed one of the med techs as she ran past with an armful of syringes and bags of IV fluid.

“Have you seen Professor Fraser?” I asked. She shook her head, frantic to get out of the building.

Tough shit, lady.

“Are you sure?” I grabbed the front of her hazmat suit.

“I... she... she was in the lab, I think.” She nodded back over her shoulder.

“How long ago?” I demanded. “When did she go there?”

“I don’t know, maybe a few hours?” She tried to push past me, but I held onto the suit, ready to rip a hole in it if need be.

“Did you see her come back up? This is important.” I gave her a little shake for emphasis. “She’s the one trying to come up with a cure for this shit, remember?”

“I—I don’t think so. No, I haven’t seen her.”

“What about Dr. Albert?”

She shook her head again, clearly frantic to get the hell out of Dodge. I let go of her suit and she scurried past me toward the elevator.

Shoving my way through the hallway, I ignored the attempts by several soldiers and medical personnel who were trying to corral me toward the elevator, and elbowed my way through to the med ward doors. Pushing through, I was met with a Dante-esque vision of hell.

Trying to steady myself, I took a deep breath—and instantly regretted it, as I took in another lungful of smoke mixed with the thick, rich stench of blood, shit, and rotting flesh, overlaid with the smell of burning chemicals, plastic, wood and who knows what else. There was another set of double doors at the far end of the room, and I saw black smoke pouring through the cracks between, under and over them. They were the ones leading into the lab. I needed to find something to cut the amount of crap I was inhaling, or I’d end up with shriveled raisins for lungs.

Patients in varying stages of the zombie infection were still strapped to their cots, some unconscious, others in too much agony to notice the chaos and smoke. But a few, those still in the earlier stages, were all too aware of what was happening. They screamed for help, for release from the straps that held them to their beds, even as they hacked up gouts of black fluid and blood, their throats even more irritated by the smoke. But no one paid any attention to their screams. The techs and soldiers were busily piling supplies onto carts and wheeling them out of the room.

No one stopped to help the patients.

They couldn’t just leave them to die... could they?

I grabbed a passing soldier by the arm.

“What’s being done to evacuate these people?” He tried to shrug my hand off, but I easily maintained my kung-fu grip, pulling him closer. “Answer the question!”

I could tell he was young, even under his mask, and totally terrified.

Tough shit, dude.
It was becoming a litany.

“W—we can’t take them w—with us,” he stammered. “They’re infected.”

“So you’re leaving them here to burn?”

He shook his head. “No, w—we...”

Before he could answer, a shout went up from the far end of the room. The doors burst open and smoke poured in, along with several zombies in advanced stages of decay. Slices of flesh were missing from various parts of their bodies, cut away with surgical precision instead of being ripped out with teeth. The test subjects had gotten loose, which meant god-knows-what for the people who’d been working in the lab.