17He hated it when they called him 'Sir' in that oh-so-crisp military tone of voice. But then, he hated most Lieutenants who came his way. They were all the same, with their fresh-out-of-the-academy manners and their eager, bright-eyed stares. "Yes..." there was a slight pause as he attempted to remember the Lieutenant's name,
"Brannigan?"
"Sir, there's been a containment breach. Section 12. The sealed quarter, sir."
He especially hated it when they did it twice in one breath. "Damage report." There wouldn't be much damage, of course. The only section currently working on anything lethal in the sealed quarter was Section 15. Still, he did wonder how many carefully arranged condolence letters he'd have to be writing today.
"All dead, sir. All appeared to have died of self-inflicted or assault wounds. Do you wish to assign a coroner?"
After the first three words, Captain Tanaka snapped to full attention, all internal snipping about Lieutenants and musings about what he would have for dinner that night forgotten. After the next few he immediately began punching up the video cameras that monitored Section 12 to the screens that continually cycled between the sections. True to the young man's words, the young man who was even now growing more and more pale as he stood next to him, everyone in the research labs, staff rooms, even the lavatories, everyone was dead. He didn't swear under his breath, he was too disciplined for that, yet had it occurred to him to do so he would have done as he brought up the video records for the past four hours. "When did this happen?" he asked, not taking his eyes from the screen as he did so.
"Approximately 1830 hours today, sir."
"That was ..." his fingers paused in their flight over the keyboard as the information sank in, "Only 30 minutes ago. This new virus works this fast?"
"Apparently, sir."
The Captain was watching the screens as he typed, recording the horror in blunt, dispassionate yet explicit detail for his superiors. In a moment of inspiration, he renamed the virus Odin. "Seal off the perimeter. Get the HazMat team in there, have them clean up the place. They were engineering it to die off in the air within seventy-two hours, let's hope they succeeded."
Brannigan saluted. "Yes, sir." Tanaka sighed.
"Get the hell out of here."
"Yes, sir."
-
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"This base is deader than Elvis."
Wong glared sourly at his senior officer as he moved through the hallway, flashlight firmly clutched in his hand. Demolitions on this old bio-technology research station was going to be spooky enough with all the stories about this place, even without Roberts' asinine commentary. Unfortunately Roberts was his senior officer, which meant he couldn't call the man out on it.
"Less talk, more attention, Roberts," Brannigan said. Wong breathed a sigh of relief. Despite the fact that the old man was technically a civilian, having been honorably discharged a long time ago, he was still more than nominally in command of this operation. The command was more practical than it looked. Wong had done his research on the place, and Brannigan had been the one to call in the alert that something had first gone wrong, back when they'd shut it down the first time. No one had touched the laboratories since then, a fact that was painfully obvious in the stale air around them as they worked to shut the station down for good.
"Yes, sir," Roberts said, sounding belligerent beneath the dutiful deference. Most of the squad felt that Brannigan should have stayed out of it where he belonged. Wong scowled and moved off down the left fork at Brannigan's gesture.
"You really think we're going to find anything?"
Wong nearly shot the man who had come up silently behind him.
"Don't do that! Christ!" he whispered. He didn't know why he was whispering. The sepulchral silence of the underground laboratory was getting to him.
Prael shrugged. "Sorry," he said, not sounding at all apologetic.
"Not really," Wong said in answer to the earlier question. "But Greg wants us to check out the lab before we shut it down for good, so we check out the lab. See if they left any hard-copy data behind. Anything in test tubes, that kind of thing."
Prael snorted. "Right. And what made us expendable?"
Wong frowned. "What do you mean?"
"Think about it. We're down here, in some bio-warfare lab, without haz-mat suits or anything, looking through decades-old equipment. It's a medical emergency just waiting to happen." Prael shook his head and moved past the other man.
"I checked, Prael. They cleaned this place out the last time, before they sealed it off. The virus isn't supposed to last more than three days in the air anyway. It was supposed to be a mutagen trigger or something like that, not a killer flu. That's what they did over in Section 15."
Prael shuddered. "Don't remind me. Stoltz's grandfather was in Section 15. I heard when they sealed the thing off and filled it in with concrete that there were people still in there. I heard..."
Wong shook his head, not caring what Prael had heard. His head was starting to hurt, probably some sort of dust allergy brought on by stumbling around in the dark in this place. It felt almost like he was coming down with the flu himself. Maybe that was it. "Hey Prael," he started to turn. "We should head back, you know?
There's nothing here." He stared. "Prael?"
His partner was on the floor. He didn't look like he was moving.
Wong suddenly had a very bad feeling about this. "Prael?" He checked the man's pulse. Still breathing, but he was burning up to the touch. "Roberts!" he screamed down the hallway. "We got a man down! Call for the medical..." He trailed off. His voice was echoing, as though the hallways were empty. "Roberts?"
"Stoltz?"
"Cleverdon?"
"Anyone?"
The walls were starting to spin. Wong was starting to get dizzy, and
his neck felt hot, as though someone had stuck a steam valve up his shirt and through his collar and cranked it up. He felt the wall hit his shoulder and realized just how far he was listing to one side or the other as he walked. This wasn't good. He had to sit down. But he also had to get out, get help. He had to...
sit down
somewhere and rest. But he had to
lie down
and take it easy. He couldn't keep walking with a... whatever it was. Fever, he figured, but the symptom had come on too quickly for it to be just a flu. It was something else. Whatever they had left down here in the labs had got into him.
Suddenly Wong was panicked. He hadn't dug that deep, didn't know what they'd been growing down here in the labs. Maybe it was fatal, despite what the engineers had wanted or what Prael had said. There'd been a reason it had been closed off, maybe because it had killed everyone who'd worked with the project. He wanted to run the hell away from the labs, take a whole bottle of aspirin, forget it ever happened. But the floor was rising up to meet him and he was passing out...
-
-
Brannigan leaned against a wall in the alcove where he'd tucked himself as soon as he realized what had happened. Closing his eyes, he damned all the commanding officers who'd decided that the original project was a good idea to whatever hells the kids under his command were now going through. They'd thought it was a good idea and implemented it with less thought than they'd given to seeing it shut down later, when it had become very crystal clear that it was nowhere near a good idea. Damn them, anyway.
The noise had stopped in the hallways. The old man figured they must have all passed out by that point. The ones who were still alive, of course, were now either insane or mutilated. If they were very, very lucky they were neither, but he'd seen for himself just how rare that was. And even Carey had had her own problems with the whole thing, disappearing into the mega-sprawl on the East Coast after she'd gotten her honorable discharge.
Brannigan walked slowly out into the hallway, nudging bodies with his foot. Roberts, dead. Cleverdon... if he wasn't dead, he would be soon. Spano, dead. Stoltz, dead. Mortensen...
The old man knelt down beside the young woman. She was miraculously alive, and she didn't appear to be physically harmed. Insane, most likely, Brannigan thought sadly, at least until she stirred and sat up very slowly, with no hint of jerky or dementia-caused behavior. He grabbed a canteen from one of the fallen soldiers, opened it, and held it to her lips.
"Drink," he ordered her. She did so. He patted her shoulder reassuringly and moved on. Snyder, dead. Wong, dead. Prael...
The man stirred. Prael seemed to be alive too. Brannigan shook his head; higher survival rate than he'd seen. He'd fully expected everyone to be dead once he'd realized what was happening. But Prael was alive... and recovering at a remarkable rate.
"What..." Prael coughed. Dry mouth from the fever, Brannigan diagnosed. Other than that the man sounded normal, almost too normal for someone who'd had most of his squad die within minutes. "What happened?"
"The people in charge... whoever they are... miscalculated. The virus is still active. They'll need to seal this place with concrete, or something stronger. And we'll need to go through full decontamination when we get out."
"Is anyone else alive?"
"Mortensen is. No one else made it."
Prael nodded, swallowing and grabbing for his canteen. "I read the reports from last time. The Odin virus was supposed to only last for seventy-two hours in open air."
"Supposed to being the operative words there, son. You and Michelle are living proof that it's still alive and..." Brannigan had the sneaking suspicion he knew what the other man was going to say when his eyes opened wide.
"It worked. Goddamn, the virus..."
"Worked. Yes. Those are quite probably Michelle's thoughts your hearing, and maybe echoes of mine. We're still getting a handle on how this works... the survivors, that is," Brannigan concluded grimly.
"Does the government know about this?" The old man wasn't sure whether Prael was afraid or eager to tell his superior officers what had happened.
"No. And with any luck, they won't. If they knew they'd try this on other people, even with the overwhelming fatality rate. And that's not acceptable to those of us who survived the experiment. We're few enough as it is." Brannigan stood. "Come on. We have to get Michelle out of here, and then tell the others that the virus killed off the rest of your squad. Mercifully, you and Mortensen turned out to be resistant. They'll have to seal the place off with concrete..." he kept talking as Prael followed numbly, avoiding the bodies of his fellows with almost atavistic fear.
Mortensen twitched away as they approached, her eyes almost abnormally wide in the darkness. Brannigan sighed.
"She's insane, isn't she?"
The old man nodded. "Most likely. Those of us who didn't die were permanently damaged in some way by the high fever... mostly delusional, some blind or deaf. Only one of us escaped without injury, and she disappeared some years back."
Prael blinked as Brannigan picked up the shivering woman. "One of you... but I thought you..." His eyes opened wide as everything clicked into place. Brannigan chuckled. "How can you ..."
"Get around? Well, the virus didn't leave me totally defenseless. I can see, a little bit, through the eyes of other animals. Not humans, before you ask. And I can sort of see what the psychic hotlines like to call auras. Between that and some other... extras, I can get along almost as well as I could..."
"... if you could see." Prael shook his head. "All this time... does the government know?"
Brannigan snorted. "They know. Of course they know. But they don't do anything about it. After all, I'm not exactly a stellar success."
"But ... you said..." Prael frowned. "You implied that even that would be considered enough of a success to keep the project going. Why aren't you still with the organization?"
Brannigan smiled. Even barely visible as he was in the underground laboratory, the man's cold smile made Prael shiver. "Well, it's a funny thing. Every time they start trying to bring me in for more tests, they forget about what they were doing."
Prael swallowed. "Let's... get out of here." He hurried down the hall to the fire stairs.
Brannigan smiled. Behind his sunglasses his fixed-pupil pale blue eyes sparkled. "Good idea." He shifted around the woman in his arms briefly and dropped the canister into the pocket of his jacket. "Nothing more we can learn here anyway."
-
-
The crazy woman wandered through the small crowd of people, silently staring at each and every one of them. No one seemed to know what she was doing at the funeral but everyone assumed she belonged there. They'd seen her around enough to become used to her, even if most were mildly surprised that she'd been brought to so solemn an event. She wandered over to the coffin and put her hands on the edge, leaning over till she was nose to nose with the dead man.
Hands on her arms quickly pulled her back and steered her away. "No, hon. You shouldn't do that. It's not polite."
The woman stared back at him as though understanding, and then she smiled and patted his cheek. The man sighed as she tucked a flower into his hair and wandered off, saying something about fishes. He looked down at the dead man, who looked somehow more ominous and sinister in death than he ever had in life. Behind him he could hear the crazy woman babbling to the rest of the crowd, something about violets.
"Damn you, anyway," he muttered to the corpse. "Damn you for starting this. And damn you for not stopping it when you had the chance."