Yes, it makes sense, a trick question—
They had twenty seconds left.
“Anyone disagree?” David asked sharply.
No answer. David hit the key, entered it—
• and the countdown stopped, sixteen seconds to spare. The screen turned itself off. From somewhere overhead, the now familiar chime sounded. David exhaled, leaning back in the chair. Thank you, Rebecca!
He turned around to tell her as much, but she was already bending to examine Karen’s eye, fixated on her patient.
“I need a flashlight,” she said, barely glancing around as John handed his to her. She turned it on, shining it into Karen’s eye as the rest of them looked on silently, watching them. Karen didn’t look well; there were dark circles under her eyes, and her skin had gone from pale to almost sickly.
“It’s pretty inflamed ... look up. Down. Left and right? Does it feel like there’s something rubbing it, or is it more like a burn?”
“Actually, more like an itch,” Karen said. “Like a mosquito bite times ten. I’ve been scratching it, though, that might be why it’s so red.” Rebecca turned off the torch, frowning. “I don’t see anything. The other one looks irritated, too . .. did it just start itching all of a sudden, or did you touch it, first?”
Karen shook her head. “I don’t remember. It just started itching, I guess.”
A look of sharp, almost violent intensity flashed across Rebecca’s face. “Before or after you were in room 101?”
David felt a cold hand clutch at his heart.
Karen suddenly looked worried. “After.” “Did you touch anything while you were in there, anything at all?”
“I don’t—“
Karen’s red eyes widened in sudden horror, and when she spoke, it was a breathless, quivering whis-per. “The gurney. There was a bloodstain on the gurney and I was thinking about—I touched it.
Oh, Jesus, I didn’t even think about it, it was dry and I, my hand wasn’t cut and oh my God, I got a headache right after my eye started itching—“ Rebecca put her hands on Karen’s shoulders, squeezing them tightly. “Karen, take a deep breath. Deep breath, okay? It may be that your eye just itches and you have a headache, so don’t jump to conclu-sions here, we don’t know anything for sure.” Her voice was low and soothing, her manner direct.
Karen blew out a shaky breath and nodded. “If her hand wasn’t cut...” John started ner-vously.
Karen answered him, her pale features composed but her voice trembling slightly. “Viruses can get into the body through mucous membranes. Nose, ears ... eyes. I knew that. I knew that but I didn’t think about it, I—wasn’t thinking about it.”
She looked up at Rebecca, and David could see that she was struggling to maintain her composure. “If I am infected, how long? How long before I become . .. incapacitated?”
Rebecca shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said softly.
David felt as though a raging blackness had envel-oped him, a cloud of fear and worry and guilt so vast that it threatened to overwhelm his ability to move, even to think.
My fault. My responsibility.
“There’s a vaccine, right?” John asked, his dark gaze darting between Karen and Rebecca. “There’s a cure, wouldn’t they have a shot or something here if someone got it by accident? They’d have to, wouldn’t they?”
David felt a sudden surge of desperate hope. “Is it possible?” he asked Rebecca quickly.
The young biochemist nodded, slowly at first but then eagerly. “Yeah, it’s possible. It’s probable, they created it—“ She looked at David seriously, urgently. “We have to find the main lab, where they synthesized the virus, and quickly. If they developed a cure, that’s where the information would be. ...”
Rebecca trailed off, and David could see what she’d left unspoken in her troubled gaze; if there was a cure. If Dr. Griffith hadn’t taken the information there, too.
If they could find it in time.
“Ammon’s message,” Steve said. “In that note, he said we should destroy the lab—maybe he left us a map, or directions.”
David stood up, his hope building. “Karen, are you feeling well enough to—“ “—Yes,” she said, cutting him off, standing up. “Yes, let’s go.”
Her red eyes were bright with fervent intensity, a mix of despair and wild hope that made David’s heart ache to see.
God, Karen, I’m so, so sorry!
“Double time,” he said, already turning for the door. “Let’s move.”
They quickly jogged for the front of the building, John’s jaw clenched, his thoughts a grimly determined loop of angry intention.
No way some goddamn bug is taking Karen down, no chance, and if I find the bastard who set this nightmare up he’s Dead, capital D, Dead meat. Not Karen, no way in hell....
They reached the front door and silently drew weapons, checking them, tensely impatient for David to give the signal. Karen, always so cool and collected in times of stress, had a shocked vagueness about her, like she’d just been kicked in the gut and hadn’t yet managed to take a breath. It was the same look that John had seen time and again on the faces of disaster survivors—the haunted disbelief in the eyes, the slack and terrible blankness of expression that spoke of a yawning emptiness deep inside. It hurt him to see her like that, hurt him and made him even angrier. Karen Driver wasn’t supposed to look like that. “I lead, John in back, straight line,” David said softly.
John saw that he looked almost as freaked as Karen, though in a different way. It was guilt gnawing at their captain, he could see it in his reluctant gaze, the tight set of his mouth. John wished he could tell him that blaming himself was wrong, but there wasn’t time and he didn’t have the right words for it. David would have to take care of himself, just as they all would. “Ready? Go.”
David pushed the door open and then they were slipping through, back into the gentle hiss of waves and the pale blue light of the moon. David, then Karen, Steve, Rebecca, and finally John, crouched and running across the packed dirt of the open compound.
There was darkness and the scent of pine, of salt, but John’s soldier mind wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know as they pounded through the shadows. There was only anger, and fear for Karen—making the sudden blast of M-16 fire a total surprise. Shit!
John dove for the ground as the thundering rattle opened up to their right, saw that they were just over halfway to block E as he rolled and started to fire. Then the air was filled with the blast of nine-millime-ter rounds, crashing over the steady pulse of automat-ic rifles.
Can’t see, can’t target—
He found the muzzle flashes at three o’clock and jerked the Beretta around, squeezing the trigger six, seven, eight times. The stutter of orange-white light blocked the shooters from view but he saw one of the flashes disappear, heard the clatter decrease—
• and a rage overtook him, not the “soldier mind” but a blinding, screaming fury at the diseased attack-ers that far exceeded any he’d ever known. They wanted Karen to die, those numb, brainless night-mares wanted to stop them from saving her. Not Karen. NOT KAREN.
A strange, feral howl beat at his ears as he pushed away from the dusty earth and then he was standing, running, firing. Only when he heard the shouts of the others, the Berettas except for his holding fire, did he realize that the howl was coming from him. John ran forward, screaming as he fired again and again at the things that meant to slow them up, to kill them, to claim Karen as one of their own. His thoughts were no longer words, just an endless, form-less negative—a denial of their existence and what had created them.