He picked up the poem that Trent had given him, tapping it with his other hand. “One of Rebecca’s teammates has already had dealings with Mr. Trent. She thinks that this might be relevant to what we need to find, so I want all of you to take another look before we go in. It may be important.”
“So we can trust him?” Karen asked. “This Trent’s okay?”
David frowned, not sure how to answer. “It seems that for whatever reason, he’s on our side in all of this, yes,” he said slowly. “And Rebecca recognized one of the names on the list as a man who has worked with viruses before. The information looks solid.” It wasn’t a straight answer, but it would have to do. “Any idea on what the chances are that we’ll contract the virus?” Steve asked quietly. David tilted his head toward Rebecca. “If you could give us some insight about what we may see, perhaps a bit of background ... ”
She nodded, turning toward the rest of the team. “I can’t tell you exactly what we’re dealing with. When our team got kicked off the case, I lost access to the tissue and saliva samples, so I didn’t get to run any tests. But from looking at the effects, it’s pretty obvious that the T-Virus is a mutagen, altering the host’s chromosome structure on a cellular level. It’s an interspecies infective, capable of amplifying in plants, mammals, birds, reptiles, you name it. In some creatures, it promotes incredible growth; in all of them, violent behavior. From some of the reports we came across at the estate, I can tell you that it affects brain chemistry, at least in humans—inducing something like a schizophrenic psychosis through extremely high levels of D2 receptors. It also inhibits pain. The human victims we came across hardly reacted to gunshot wounds, and though they were decaying physically, they didn’t seem to feel it... ” The young chemist paused, perhaps remembering. She suddenly looked much older than her years. “The spill at the
estate looked like an airborne, but I don’t think that’s its designed or preferred form. The scien-tists were almost certainly injecting it in conjunction with genetic experimentation. And since none of us contracted it and it didn’t spread, I don’t think we have to worry about breathing it in.
“What we do have to watch for is contact with a host, and I mean any contact, I can’t stress that enough—this thing is incredibly virulent once it enters the bloodstream, and even a single drop of blood from a host could hold hundreds of millions of virus particles. We’d need a fully equipped hot suite and a trained biohazard virologist to pin down its replication strategy for certain, but direct contact of any kind should be avoided at all costs. With any luck, they’ll have died by now ... or at least deterio-rated past mobility. The humans, anyway.” There was a moment of strained silence as they all considered the implications of what she’d told them. David could see that they were shaken, and felt a bit shaken himself. Knowing that the virus was toxic wasn’t the same thing as actually hearing the specifics. My God, what were those people thinking? How could they live with themselves, deliberately infecting anything with something like that?
On the tail of that thought, another occurred to him: how would he live with himself if one of his team contracted the virus? He’d led missions before in which people under his command had been hurt—and twice, before he made captain, he’d been on operations in which S.T.A.R.S. had been killed. But taking a team into an area on his own initiative, where a silent, terrible disease could infect them, where they could die at the claws of some inhuman monster...
... it would be on my head. This isn’t an authorized mission, the responsibility stops with me. Can I truly ask them to do this?
“Well, it pretty much sounds like a shit job,” John said finally. “And if we wanna get there on time, we better head out soon.” He smiled at David, an un-characteristically subdued one but a smile all the same. “You know me, I love a good fight. And somebody’s gotta stop these assholes from spreading this stuff around, right?”
Steve and Karen were both nodding, their faces as set and determined as John’s, and even knowing what they would encounter, Rebecca had made her deci-sion back in Raccoon. David felt a sudden rush of emotion for all of them, a strange, uncomfortable mix of pride and fear and warmth that he wasn’t sure what to do with.
After a few seconds of uncertain silence, he nodded briskly, glancing at his watch. It would take them a few hours to get to the launch site.
“Right,” he said. “We’d best get to storage and load up. We can go through the rest of it on our way.” As they stood to leave, David reminded himself that they were doing this because it was necessary, that each of them had made up their own mind to participate in the dangerous operation. They knew the risks. And he also knew that if anything went wrong, that knowledge would be cold comfort indeed. Karen sat in the back of the van and loaded clips, the words of the mysterious message repeating through her thoughts as she thumbed the nine-millimeter rounds into each magazine.
. . . Ammon’s message received/blue series/enter answer for key/letters and numbers reverse/time rainbow/don’t count/blue to access.
She finished another clip and set it aside with the others, absently wiping her oily fingers on the leg of her pants before picking up the next. A welcome breeze whispered through the muggy van, smelling of salt and summer-warmed sea. They’d pulled off the road south of the cove, finding a clear patch to set up not a quarter mile from the water’s edge. Outside, the sun was setting, casting long shadows across the dusty
ground. The not-so-distant sound of soft waves against the shore was soothing, a white noise back-ground to the low voices of the others as they worked. Steve and David were propping the raft, while John checked out the motor. Rebecca was assembling a medical kit from the supplies they’d “borrowed” out of the S.T.A.R.S. equipment warehouse.
... the letters and numbers... a code? Does it relate to time? Does counting relate to the sum of the lines, or to something else?
Her mind worked the riddle relentlessly, gnawing at the words the way a dog worries a bone. What did it mean? Were the lines connected to a single concept, or did each represent a separate aspect of a bigger puzzle? Had Ammon sent the message, and if he worked for Umbrella, why?
She finished the last clip and reached for a water-proof carryall, refocusing herself to the task at hand. She knew that her thoughts would return to the strange little poem as soon as she’d completed her assigned detail. It was the way her mind worked; she just couldn’t relax when presented with an ambiguity. There was always an answer, always, and finding it was just a matter of concentration, of taking the right steps in the right order.
The semi-automatics were cleaned and ready, lay-ing in a neat line next to the checked radio gear on the floor of the van. They weren’t taking any weapons besides the S.T.A.R.S.-issued Berettas, David insist-ing that they needed to travel light. Although Karen agreed, she was sorry they wouldn’t be bringing in the assault rifles, which were equipped with night scopes. After hearing more of the details about the zombie-like creatures on their ride, she didn’t know how comfortable she felt with just a handgun and a halogen flashlight.