ViraVax (27 page)

Chapter 37

Dajaj Mishwe monitored the facility-wide panic from the comfort of Casey’s inner office. The outer office had been rendered unbearable by the searing stench of the two bodies in full reduction and oxidation. The AVA that Mishwe had sent out on today’s shipment carried a further, and very deadly, refinement—steam from the sudden oxidation-reduction spread the active agent further, faster. The vaccine was meant for children, and who could bear to abandon a sick child?

Mishwe had reserved Casey’s private elevator behind the office for himself, ensuring his liberation from Casey and all his doomed minions. The scene facility-wide was a triumph of horror and despair, a joy for the Angel of Eden to behold. The fires from the two Caseys sparked a general conflagration in the office complex, unimpeded by the fire-control system which Mishwe himself had disarmed just moments before he was summoned by security. Every monitor displayed the same scene: security, missionaries and Innocents alike bathed in the hot, blue blossoms of their sacrifice.

The “intruder” light lit from the ag security desk, and Mishwe’s joy was complete. There could be only one intruder. Only one man would risk all to enter this compound, and he had done so just in time for a warm welcome.

“Colonel Toledo,” Mishwe said aloud.

He liked the sound of it, the good fortune, the fateful opportunity to tie up this last end so neatly. Dajaj was a fastidious man, as befit an Angel of the Lord.

“Welcome, Colonel,” he said. “And thank you, Lord, for your perfection.”

He checked the monitor at the ag station and saw nothing but two empty terminals and a desk. The men had not yet turned on their lights, so the scene was drowned in shadow. Mishwe rotated the viewer and glimpsed a gurney near the exchanger fans, and someone was strapped to that gurney. The identity was impossible to make out. Smoke and steam from the two charred lumps in the foreground obscured all of the detail in the room. The figure did not appear to be moving.

Should I get him myself,
he wondered,
or should I leave him to the flood?

Mishwe decided it was time to burrow in and activate the final seals. A few million tons of water would finish Marte Chang and Colonel Rico Toledo quite nicely.

Chapter 38

Sonja knew she should have followed Harry up the ladder. Now she was ahead of him and the sound of his struggle beneath her scared her as much as the scent of smoke that she’d caught on the air-conditioned breeze.

Brought up in diplomatic circles, Sonja and Harry had dozed through many social briefings and shared many a joke over the elaborate ritual of manners that went with their lives. Yet, when they began their climb he had stepped aside for her, out of reflex, and out of reflex she had mounted the ladder ahead of him. Harry was still burned-out by muscle weakness and spasms, and he couldn’t fake it on the ladder, not even in the dark.

“It won’t kill you to learn a few manners,” her father had told her once.

Sonja believed everything that her father told her—until now. Now she believed that something as ridiculous as manners could kill them both.

“Harry,” she whispered, “I’m climbing over you, hold still.”

A hissing rumble started above them, and Sonja positioned herself behind Harry on the ladder. She pressed herself against his back, one leg hooked through a rung, both hands gripping hard in spite of the blisters. If he slipped, she could manage him.

What is that noise?

Her spine prickled with static and fear. The fine hair on the backs of her arms rose, and she felt Harry’s hair rise from the back of his head. Sonja clung to the ladder and to Harry, the vibration burning her palms and ankles where they gripped the metal.

Something huge passed them with a flash and a whoosh just a meter from their faces. Sonja opened her eyes as the downdraft hit, and watched an express elevator recede into the darkness below. The light inside the car was very bright, clearly illuminating the remains of five decomposing passengers through its Plexi ceiling.

My God!
she thought.
What happened to them?

The bodies on the floor of that elevator had slumped away from their bones, as though they’d been outside in the sun for weeks.

A tornado followed the car down the smaller shaft in front of them, and it was all Sonja could do to keep the hair on her head. Her hand would not come free to begin the climb again.

Sonja had discovered a dead horse one time, in the flats behind Casa Canada. Bloated and wearing its fly-and-vulture coat, the horse had smelled just like those people in the elevator. She leaned her face into Harry’s sweaty tunic and gulped a couple of deep breaths.

“Up there,” Harry said.

The downblast of air and dust gritted her eyes, but she saw another landing in the fading light, about ten meters above them. The light seeped through the familiar framework of the immense decon doors, doors that the two of them couldn’t budge on the last two floors.

“Did you see. . . ?” she asked.

“Inside the elevator?” He took a deep breath. “Yeah, I saw.”

“What if the dzee was right? What if he’s saving us from some huge mess they’ve made up there?”

“Why not just fill us in so we can be thankful and useful and suitably respectful little hostages? He’s not saving us
from
something. He’s saving us
for
something. I don’t want to find out what it is.”

Harry shrugged off her grip and resumed his struggle to the next landing.

Far off in the dark, another express car plummeted to Level Five, then another.

“I have a feeling we’re lucky that we didn’t take one of those,” she whispered.

Harry grunted, and swung himself around to the catwalk at Level Two. The shaft was sealed off above them, a precaution.

“There’s another shaft close by,” Harry reassured her. “Like the embassy—no one elevator goes all the way to the top in one run. The individual shafts all share this serviceway . . . at least, I hope this is it. . . .”

Sonja joined him and they stood breathing hard for a moment, uncramping their fingers, listening. The thousand cacophonous voices of the machinery of ViraVax rose upshaft around them, battling the downshaft breeze. The smell of smoke and spoiled meat was stronger, much stronger. Most of the noise was swallowed, as if by magic, in the mass of the bunker cap above them.

A blue service light at the end of the catwalk marked an active entranceway. When Sonja pressed the blue indicator beneath it, a panel whisked aside to reveal a lobby bathed in very bright light, and two missionaries struggling into a pair of emergency hazard suits. The oozing bodies of several
deficientes
lay around them on the floor.

“Get back in there!” one of them yelled.

Harry and Sonja stood in the doorway, so the panel couldn’t slide shut.

“Stay put,” Harry whispered. “Give me room.”

Sonja shifted away from Harry, but stayed in the doorway. All she could focus on was the little Galil in the missionary’s trembling hand. The pistol was identical to the one her father bought for her mother years ago. The barrel looked like it could swallow her whole.

“Get back!” the missionary repeated. “You get back to Hell, where you belong.”

He waved the pistol and stepped closer. His partner, now fully suited, backed him up. Sonja saw only the one weapon.

Harry has a plan,
she thought.
What is it?

“No entiendo,”
Harry said in his perfect accent. He shrugged his shoulders in the all-purpose Costa Bravan gesture.
“No hablo ningún inglés.”

“You understand
this,
don’t you?”

The missionary took another step and shook the gun in Harry’s face. Harry stood his ground, and Sonja heard him breathe slow and deep.

The missionary took one more step and poked Harry’s chest with the muzzle. That’s what Harry was waiting for. What happened next was nearly too fast for Sonja to see. Harry grabbed the muzzle with his left hand and snapped it down. The man couldn’t fire and instinctively jerked backwards. Harry kicked him in the crotch and, as the guard doubled over, kicked him again in the face. The second man made a lunge for Harry, but the suit was too clumsy and Harry stepped aside. Harry put a spinning back-kick into the man’s kidney as he lurched past, and it forced him over the rail and down the shaft. He did not scream.

The first missionary lay very still on the floor, a lot of blood bubbling from his smashed nose.

“Stay here,” Harry said.

He dragged the missionary onto the landing behind them, then leaned on the railing and vomited down the shaft. His hands were trembling so violently that he dropped the pistol down there, too. He took a few seconds to catch his breath, then put a hand on Sonja’s shoulder. Harry and Sonja stepped through the doorway cautiously, and saw no one else alive.

The panel hissed shut behind them and Sonja heard security seals inflate. After much whirring, another door opened across the hallway. This time the two of them stepped into a grisly tableau of bodies, some charred, some in an accelerated state of corruption. The rising steam and stink spasmed Sonja’s throat shut, and she nearly blacked out before she could force a breath.

This was a wait station for transport cars, one of which kept trying to shut its doors around a very large, very dead pair of Innocents. Harry shuffled to the nearest doors and tried to pull them apart. No luck. He tried the next pair, still no luck.

“Okay,” Harry said, his breath coming harder, “I guess we take their car.”

The two dead men came apart in their clothing as Sonja and Harry pulled them out of the transport. A flicker of blue flame licked the stump of one leg, and the muscle began to melt from the bone. Sonja gagged, but caught the door in its final surge and they tumbled inside. Their car rose immediately without awaiting orders, and by the time Harry found the automatic shutoff, they were topside.

The door opened onto a plaza of hallways, each one littered with bodies of people who clearly had dropped instantly, in midstride, without a struggle. A haze of black smoke hung over the scene and stained the whitewashed walls.

“I sure hope it’s not catching,” Sonja said.

“Maybe this was the ‘guard virus’ the dzee was talking about,” Harry said. “Maybe it turned on them.”

Up ahead, reflected in the Plexi, Sonja saw the real thing.

Outside!

She had wanted to see daylight, and blue sky, but she was greeted by stars and a bright half-moon. Escape meant running the length of the hallway, high-stepping over the dead. Sonja and Harry ran this gauntlet of corruption hand in hand, bent almost double to keep out of the smoke. At the next intersection they faced freedom.

A simple, institutional door with a stainless-steel bar strained against the perpetual breeze of the negative pressure inside. That breeze smelled of hot, wet ground and concrete.

“Come on!” Harry urged, tugging her arm.

Together, they shouldered the door outward enough to squeeze through. It slammed behind them and they stepped blinking and alive into the night air. Not fresh air. Little gouts of blue flame sputtered around the grounds.

One, two, three
steps, Sonja counted, away from that howling place, before she was caught by the silence. Not silence, no. Night birdsong in the distance, and a flight of bats down from the lake behind the dam. No, what she heard was the absence of noise. The guts of the machine that they had crawled through carried off the cries of the dying and added them to the choruses of the dead. She had never imagined such a horrible sound existed, and she knew she could never forget it.

Harry rubbed his cramping legs.

“I know where we are,” Sonja said.

She pointed directly ahead.

“That’s south. That’s their big farming area, you remember that from the air. This”—she gestured to the building behind them— “is the lift pad. One flight up, top of the hangar bays.”

“There is
nobody
here,” Harry said, his voiced laced with awe and fear.

Hunched shapes in human clothing glowed blue in the beans and the pumpkins. It had just rained, and now the stars were out full force. Some of the bodies were half-charred, probably saved by the sudden evening shower.

“Maybe it was a gas, or something,” she said. “Maybe the rain washed it away.”

“It must have got the sentries, too,” Harry said. “I don’t . . . .”

In English, then Spanish, a loudspeaker warned:

“Code Red, Levels One and Two. Code Red, Levels One and Two. Suit and seal. Suit and seal.”

“What does that mean?” Harry asked.

“We’re lucky,” Sonja said. “Levels Three, Four and Five are time-locked
before
the announcement. It’s vacuum-packed. Nothing gets in or out for forty-eight hours. . . .”

Whang, whang, whang.

Three heavy metal doorways slammed into place in the building next to theirs. The
hiss
and
snap
of an autoweld preceded its heady, metallic vapor.

“Now Command Central shuts down specific areas in Levels One and Two as needed,” she said.

“So,” Harry mused, “they’re not all dead. Someone is alive.”

“Not necessarily,” she said. “Once programmed, shutdown proceeds automatically.”

The announcement repeated itself in English and Spanish.

“It also means that anybody left on Level Two or surface has one minute to get to a bio suit,” she said, “one minute to get it on and one minute to find and seal off a safe area. It’s really more to trap them than to save them. My dad said he’d take his chances topside.”

Nobody came running. Crumpled shadows littered the landscape under the few yard lights.

Harry’s eyes widened at a new horror. Vultures plopped from the sky onto the bloating dead in the garden, one by one.

“I thought they only came out in the daylight,” he said.

“Must be a special occasion.”

Bolts shot to place in the door behind them, intakes hissed shut and alarms blared from a dozen points around the building. Charges blew directly above them and popped their ears.

“It’s the dzee,” Harry said. “He’s doing all this to make sure we don’t get away.”

That blast came from the lift pad!

Sonja hoped that shutdown didn’t include destroying the aircraft on the pad.

They huddled outside the shipping and receiving area, something she’d identified from the air. The actual lift pad was one story higher.

“I sure hope we’ve still got something to fly,” she said.

Harry yanked her down and hissed in her ear. “Quiet!” He pointed to the far corner of their building.

Two hundred meters away, someone struggled with a locked door under an orange security light. The woman shouted something at the door that Sonja couldn’t hear, then turned and ran towards them. She stopped twice in the two hundred meters to stand on tiptoe, trying to see something up on the pad. Sonja noted the thin smoke-shadows wafting across the moon.

Something’s on fire up there.

Her one rope of hope had unraveled to a thread.

“What do you think?” Harry asked.

Sonja didn’t tell him what she thought was happening on the lift pad.
 

The woman, then.

“She doesn’t know her way around very well,” Sonja said, “but she knows that’s how she came in.”

“Yeah,” Harry said. “Kind of like us.”

Sonja stepped into the moonlight, slowly, so as not to startle the woman.

“Hello,” Sonja said, showing her hands. “Can you help me?”

She said it again in English. Harry was motioning her to get back, but she ignored him.

The woman stopped. She was Asian, truly Asian, not one of the Innocents with the so-called mongoloid features. Her features were contorted with horror and anguish. Her gaze, like Sonja’s, kept itself carefully from the dead.

“Someone is coming in after us,” the woman said between gasps. “We need to get up there, and I can’t find a way in.”

“Who?” Sonja asked. “Who’s coming in after us? And who are you?”

The Asian woman caught her breath. “I’m Marte Chang,” she said. “Mariposa is sending someone here to get us. She instructed me to be at the lift pad.”

“Mariposa?”

Again, that mysterious figure.

“Is whatever killed these people going to kill us, too?” Harry asked.

“I doubt it,” Marte said. “Everyone dropped around me and I didn’t feel or hear a thing. You’re intact. It was probably something that Dajaj Mishwe infected them with. I’m sure he killed them all.”