Orpheus: Homecoming (The Orpheus Trilogy Book 2) (24 page)

"Just load up whatever you have. I'll be right there."

Orpheus got two steps before Hedley rounded the corner into the living room. "Here I am. Turned out I had to go number two."

O

When Jen had worked for Dr. Vincent, she had always been a little disgusted by his penchant for treating the bodies on his table as things. He never used their names, referred to them as "the subject," ordered them to be disposed of as if they were leftovers. It seemed cold, robotic, merciless. She knew that's what the doctor was. She saw some of the same qualities in Trager sometimes, but it seemed to be more of a shield for him, something to insulate him from all of the horrors that he had seen. Anytime she caught herself equating Trager with Vincent, she reminded herself that Trager had lost more than anyone she had ever known. He had to watch hundreds of patients slip away due to lack of proper medical care, and she knew that it ate at him. He was an asshole, but an asshole in self-defense.

Right now, while she was digging into this poor girl's head, she wished more than anything that she could emulate those qualities that she once thought so reprehensible. She regretted asking the girl's name, because it made the desecration so much more difficult. She had never understood why people named cows that were intended for slaughter, either.

She tried to work around the ear, but it just kept getting in the way, so she sliced it off. Now she cut out a square inch of flesh, only a few layers deep. She found nothing. She repeated the process several more times, until she hit paydirt. The light hit it just right, and the glint was impossible to miss.

"Oh, oh, oh," was all she could say. It was, fortunately, significantly larger than she feared it might be, although still tiny enough to be misplaced easily. She'd taken precautions this time. The severed head was in a deep plastic container, so if she did end up dropping the chip, she could at least track it down again. The way her hands were shaking, that was a real possibility.

She grabbed the forceps and gently squeezed the chip. She gave it a tug and it popped free. Lena laid it in a petri dish and covered it. She practically collapsed in her chair and just stared at the chip for a minute. It wasn't the flat square that she assumed it would be. It was tubular. It looked like something from the 1950's, if the technology of the time had allowed chips to be this small. It couldn't be a tracking chip, which is what she had initially thought it would be.

It seemed much more sinister, somehow.

She grabbed a paper cup from the dispenser on the water cooler and poured herself a cup. She drained it like a shot, then another, and a third. She crumpled up the cup and dropped it in the trash, where it joined dozens just like it, and she went back to work.

Her first step was to take several high-resolution photos of the chip. She wasn't going to touch it until she knew exactly what it was and maybe, if she was really lucky, what it did. She got some good shots and uploaded them to her laptop. She found the most promising of the bunch and blew it up.

The shape was reminiscent of a grain of rice, only much smaller. It was made of a clear plastic material. She didn't know precisely what material, but she could rule out anything that was biodegradable. It had been in Janine's ("the subject's") flesh for a year now and was still intact, although the majority of that was when her body was, for lack of a better term, deceased. To bolster her case, the chip had been in a living being, Falcone, for several months at a minimum. There was no way he received the implant while he was on the island.

The chip was segmented into two smaller sections. Each one of those seemed to contain a miniscule amount of liquid, one clear, one brownish. Each one of the mini-capsules had a micro antenna attached to it. So it was a receiver of some type, as well.

"Okay, now it's getting weird."

As far as she was concerned, the weirder, the better. She had two dead people in her morgue (one dead, one undead, to be precise), and they had matching incisions. She also had a funky microchip that gave her every reason to believe that it had been in both of them.

What else did they have in common?

They were both Patient Zero, only at different times. She had no doubt that if they could have gotten to the woman in the movie theater they would have found the same chip.

The outbreak was no accident.

It was organized.

And that terrified her more than anything she'd seen so far.

She hoped that the key was somewhere at Dr. Vincent's place, and that Cameron could find it. If he did, it would be all on her to figure it out.

Who am I kidding
?
It's all on me either way.

She enlarged a photo that showed a different angle of the chip and studied it. After a while, she was nearly cross-eyed from staring at it for too long. Microchip technology wasn't exactly her forte, but she knew someone who might either have a better grasp of it or know someone who would. She printed up the best photos she had and headed upstairs.

O

It's all on me,
Lena thought as she went through the haul from Dr. Vincent's place.

The few thumb drives didn't yield anything. They'd either never been used or they'd been completely erased. If she really wanted to, she could probably figure out which, but it would be a waste of time and wouldn't make a difference.

She rested her head in one hand and looked at the laptop. If she had a gun to her head, she'd bet that the laptop was most likely to hold something that she could use. On the other hand, it would take forever to go through it. If she did find anything intriguing, it would no doubt be protected. Vincent wasn't the most trusting person she'd ever met, and for good reason. The thing was certainly password protected at the very least, and that could take her hours to crack.

She decided to eliminate as many things as possible before launching in on that. She doubted she'd get lucky, but at least she could feel like she was moving forward a little bit at a time.

Small victories, that's how she got through stuff like this.

She reviewed a few data CDs, and was surprised by what she'd found on there.

Music.

Not just any music, MP3s that had been clearly ripped from a pirate site. And, she hated to admit this, his taste wasn't half bad. She recognized a few of the indie artists.

Well, no one is just one thing. Even ghouls like him.

She put the CDs aside. She already considered them her property, because finders keepers.

There were a few spiral bound notebooks. There was nothing peculiar about any of them that she could tell. It looked like he would just take notes or make lists in the notebook that was closest to him. She could identify with that, as well. Phone rings, you need to take a message, grab the nearest notepad and pen and flip to a random page. She put those aside, as well.

Her eyes settled on the black address book. She almost hoped to find it crammed with ladies' names with stars next to them. Her mind took that ball and ran with it. Next thing she knew, she couldn't get the image of the good doctor dressed up like Fonzie out of her head. She started giggling.

I'm losing it here.

She heard footsteps behind her and swiveled in her chair. "Oh, look. Someone else is losing her mind, too. I thought it was just me."

"JJ! Thank God you're here, I can't stop laughing." She broke out in another giggling fit.

Jen began to laugh along. "At what?"

In between giggles, she explained.

A few seconds later, they were both laughing uncontrollably, feeding off of each other. The stress and the lack of sleep made it a whole lot funnier than it should've been.

"Oh, God, I can't breathe," Jen managed to croak out.

"I know, it's so stupid ...” She managed to finally get control of herself. "Oh ... that was fun. I haven't laughed like that since the day before we came back here."

"Same here. This is where humor comes to die." Jen finally got a chance to look at what her friend was doing. "So, what are you in for?"

Lena waved her hand. "All of this shit is from Dr. Vincent's place. Cam found it, and this is the booty they came back with. I'm looking for anything. You?"

Jen pulled the printouts from a folder. "This was in a Zero. Cam," Jen debated on how much gruesome detail to include, and settled on none, "Cam recovered it."

Lena leaned forward? "Really?"

"Yeah. And I have reason to believe that another one was in Falcone, too."

"He was a Zero, too."

"Yeah."

"Whoa."

"I need to study the shit out of this thing and learn everything I can before I start messing around with it. I only have one, and I probably won't ever get another."

Lena just stared at the photo.

"You okay?" Jen asked.

"I'm sorry, can we back up a sec? This is proof that the outbreaks were intentional?"

Jen made a flourish with her hands. "Well, I'm a researcher, so I wouldn't say it's definitive. I need more evidence." She paused. "However, I just mentally punched out, and Off the Clock Jen says that shit, yes, it is."

"My God. I was always curious, but I guess I held out hope that there was another explanation. It's just evil."

"Tell me about it. I worked for him. Meanwhile, you got to work with the Justice League."

"Hey," Lena said as she got up and walked to a cabinet. "You're on the side of the angels now, girlie." She moved aside a few boxes of crackers and pulled out a bottle of wine.

"You have a stash?"

Lena held out her arm as if to shake hands across the room. "Hi, I'm Lena. Nice to meet you."

That elicited another laugh from Jen. "My mistake."

Lena put two glasses down on the desk and filled them past the point of moderation. "Here's what we're gonna do. We're going to switch. You take a look at my stuff, I'll see what I can get from those photos. I'm sure that I know some supernerds who owe me a favor."

"That," Jen said as she accepted the glass and raised it to her host, "sounds like a plan. Gimme."

Lena grabbed one of her new CDs and popped it into her computer. She set it to random and they went to work.

They worked without speaking for ten minutes, happy to be involved in something different.

Jen flipped through the first half of the address book. "I can't see anything odd about this. Names, phone numbers. The one thing that bugs me is that he doesn't care for alphabetization."

"Hold on a sec. I'm emailing a guy. Did you know that this thing has serial number or something?"

"What? How did I miss that?"

"My guess is because you were concerned with looking at it as a whole, trying to figure out how it works.” I blew it up as far as it would reasonably go and looked it over piece by piece. I asked my friend about the antennas ... antennae? Antennas. These things."

"You're right, that's exactly what I was doing. I'm glad we switched. Now if I could just find something here, pull my weight."

"It's an address book, not the Necronomicon. I'm just avoiding the computer as long as possible."

They went back to work for another thirty seconds or so before Jen asked, "Are you hungry? Let's go eat."

O

Jen and Lena entered the cafeteria. They'd missed dinner, but the cafeteria had a selection of sandwiches, dry cereals, and assorted fruit 24/7. At that moment, the women were very grateful for it. Jen treated herself to a chicken salad sandwich on wheat bread, and Lena grabbed a single serving cup of Frosted Flakes. There were only a handful of others in the cafeteria, and they recognized two of them.

They sat down next to Thompson and Hedley without being invited, not that one would have been necessary. "Slide, Clyde," Lena said to Thompson. He obliged her and Hedley did the same for Jen.

After the girls were settled in, Thompson said, "Double date, dude. Don't embarrass me."

"You wish. You're lucky I even talk to you, you media vulture." In truth, Lena liked Thompson when he broke character, which wasn't often. Most of the time, he was maddeningly cocky. She assumed that it was a product of his job. Meek reporters wouldn't survive. When he let his guard down, he was actually kind of normal.

"To what do we owe the pleasure?"

"Work," Jen said.

"The stuff we brought back from Vincent's?"

"Hmmm," Jen said in between mouthfuls. "Among other things."

Hedley asked, "Find anything?"

"Not yet. We're teaming up, for all the good that's done us. What are you guys doing?"

"Taking a break from editing footage," Hedley said. "There's a shit ton of it. This is the worst part of this job, I tell you."

"What's to edit?" Lena asked. "I thought you just kind of broadcast live-ish."

"We do. We may also be working on a documentary." Thompson looked from side to side in mock secrecy. "Totally hush-hush."

"Why?"