God, no!
With a quick gesture, the scientist wipes the magnetic badge to a cleaner part of her lab coat, then she tries again to unlock the door.
More powerful thuds, more violent, come from somewhere in the elevator area.
On the third try, the door slides sideways, revealing a new section of corridor. Many doors are on its sides at regular intervals. Each of them is flanked by plates showing the name of the occupants and other card readers.
Moore enters quickly, then she immediately pushes the lock button to close the door behind her. This one however doesn’t close completely, leaving a slender ray of a few centimeters.
Damn!
Walking in the corridor, with a heavier apprehension at each step, Moore approaches the first door, hoping for a miracle.
Nothing, as expected, her badge doesn’t work.
She goes on down the corridor, reading the names of soldiers staying at the base in a permanent service. Bishop Samuel, Brody Simon… Her stomach shrinks, when reading the name of Juan Vasquez.
After a bend to the right, the corridor proceeds with other rooms, to finally end with a big and massive door on the far wall.
Going on, Moore approaches the second-to-last door, bearing a single name: Philip Redmond. A look at the wall beside the door freezes her.
Macready curses through clenched teeth to the entire series of events. He walks at a brisk pace along the main hangar of the base, followed by two marines. All of them wear bio-hazard suits. The worsening situation, and the radio silence of the base – his base – has deeply shaken the Major, turning his initial bewilderment into a lucid fury.
On board of a jeep, the three soldiers have traveled at breakneck speed the few kilometers between the helicopter crash site and the base, and they almost rolled over on the dunes a couple of times.
After reaching the destination, they found the guard post empty. A number of attempts to call the elevator to the floor didn’t have any success.
Using the video surveillance system, Macready has accessed some of the internal cameras of the base, those still in operation, and has seen the state of things in the underground levels. The devastation is almost complete, and the absence of traces of soldiers still alive is a reality that is hard to assimilate.
Giving up the idea of forcing somehow the elevator to operate, the commander guides the two soldiers to a seemingly small service room used as storage. This is located on another side of the huge hangar. Before entering it, Macready takes off his protective suit remaining in tactical pants and a khaki t-shirt.
“That Russian brainiac was right. We’re not dealing with a virus. And these suits just slow us down. I have made my choice guys, you are free to decide for yourself.”
After about a minute, three protective overalls are lying on the thin layer of sand that covers the ground.
Going into the tiny room, they find an environment barely lit by a dusty spotlight. Macready moves towards the opposite wall, on which some old wooden boards, yellowed plastic panels and other junk are piled up. “Quick, help me move this stuff.”
The three quickly free up the wall, revealing an aluminum box also covered with dust. With a quick gesture Macready removes it, revealing a white plastic plate with a hole and a red LED. The Major removes a crumpled plastic tarp on the floor, just to the right of the safety device.
The torches mounted on the assault rifles of the two soldiers illuminate a square metal plate, about a meter in size.
“Stand back and be ready for anything”, commands the Major. After rummaging with one hand inside his t-shirt, he pulls out a chain with a kind of a pendant looking like a tiny box. He inserts it into the hole on the plate in the wall, then takes a step back pointing his weapon to the metal panel. After a moment this one seems to sink a few centimeters and then it slides sideways revealing a staircase that goes down deep. Macready peeks slowly, staring at the inside for a few seconds and smelling the stale air coming from below. Then, apparently satisfied, he begins to descend, ordering the two men to follow him.
The three descend through a short section, proceeding on the rungs of a metal ladder. Then they reach a rough concrete floor. The place is narrow, lit by the cold light of LED spotlights mounted at regular intervals along the walls. The shape of the room is essentially cubical, about ten meters per side. A little further on, an opening in the floor reveals a stair, also in concrete, going down to the lower levels. Pointing their guns and their torches in front of them, the men go quickly down a few flights of stairs, coming soon to a different level. On one of the walls they can see a heavy armored door. It carries the number 1 painted in a bright color. Lit by spotlights, it seems to shine with its own light. A retinal scanner is beside it, with the case for the emergency button.
“You two stay back. Howe, get ready with incendiary grenades.” Macready approaches the eye to the scanner, then takes a few steps back.
The three men wait nervously for a few long moments, until the door slides sideways.
A damp breeze invests them, bringing to their nostrils a mixture of nauseating odors.
The door opens onto a small hall, a little wider than the door itself. The room is empty, except for a smaller door on the other side, whose glass has been broken through. It’s flanked by an unlocking button lit by a red LED. The soldiers approach and Macready pushes the release button, turning the led green. The door slides aside quickly. Macready starts to hate those automatic sliding doors, which don’t allow half measures and make it impossible to sneak inside in a stealthier way.
The opening faces a long corridor. There are clear signs that something terrible must have happened, not long ago. The floor is wet, the air smells of burning mixed with a rotten stench and chemical effluvia. Down the corridor, a flickering glow reveals a fire not yet extinguished by the sprinkler system. Many doors face the hallway. Some of them are smashed, one is torn from its hinges. The walls are stained with dark blood splashes and organic material that looks mucilaginous.
The soldiers move on cautiously, fearing an ambush at any moment. Through the gashes in the doors and in the walls, they can see inside the rooms.
They find nothing but occasional dark puddles and stains on the walls. This side of the base holds generic rooms, possibly used during the external staff’s visits. Macready moves on. The soldiers come down the hall beyond the first bend. About twenty meters down the path, it turns left again. The men reach the corridor section that runs along the laboratory perimeter. The windows are completely destroyed, the interior is dark, barely lit by a small fire, still burning. The cones of light projected by the soldiers illuminate the devastated environment, and stop on a deformed and dark mass, motionless on the floor. The soldiers look at the remains of a charred creature, briefly dwelling on the monstrous forms visible in the mist generated by the fire sprinklers. Deformed limbs, wide open jaws, traces of human faces grotesquely distorted that scream pain and anguish.
“Jesus help us! It’s like that shit on the helicopter…”, one of the soldiers whispers.
A little further on, the path ends up on a barrier of debris of a collapsed wall and ceiling and a laboratory workbench flipped sideways and partially burned. There is no way to go further.
Macready steps back without a word, the two soldiers with him move along with him. With the senses alert and careful not to make a sound, the three walk back to a corner in the hallway, near the section facing the laboratory.
“Howe”, the Major whispers. “Set here a C4 charge. Half an hour.”
“Range of the explosion, sir?”, the soldier asks.
Macready’s gaze is more than eloquent. Howe takes quickly the material from his backpack.