Bob Jr.’s thought process moved sluggishly in the best of times, and these latest developments had really thrown a wrench into the gears of his mind, leaving him nearly paralyzed with incomprehension. Finally though, current events snapped into understanding, and panic bloomed in his eyes like a match dropped into a backyard grill.
He edged around the table to check on Dr. Deemer.
Something was growing out of the old man’s skull. Gray and bulbous, it seemed fragile and dense at the same time. It reminded Bob Jr. of the body of an octopus somehow, as if the creature had been quietly growing inside Deemer’s head and had gotten too big for its cage. Bob Jr. used the tip of his shoe to nudge the scientist’s knee.
The gray sac wobbled with the movement, but did not break.
Bob Jr. blinked. Had it gotten bigger since he was standing here?
He looked around. Except for the two men and the three corpses, the conference room was now empty. “We gotta go,” Bob Jr. said.
“No. Now is precisely the time to be patient. Let the rest distract whatever measures the company has prepared.”
“Look at him. C’mere and look! There’s something growing inside his head. We need to get out of this room. We gotta get far away.”
Slade peered at Dr. Deemer and thought about it for a moment. “Very well.” He pushed away from the table and struggled to his feet. His cane tumbled to the floor. “Help me up, dammit!”
Bob Jr. didn’t need any more encouragement and half-lifted, half-dragged the older man out of the room. The hallways were empty and quiet. There were no alarms. No screaming people rushing around. Except for a few white pages scattered on the floor where the hallway intersected a wider corridor, there was nothing to suggest an island-wide evacuation.
No, not an evacuation, Bob Jr. reminded himself. If what Slade said was true, then this was more like a hunt, or flat-out extermination. Even if he didn’t quite believe it was happening, the rest of the executives sure as hell did, and that was enough to kick Bob Jr.’s self-preservation instincts into high gear. He slung Slade’s left arm around his neck and pulled the old man along. “Where? Where to?”
“Through the labs, out to the greenhouses,” Slade said, gasping for breath. His glasses had slid down to the end of his nose in a slick sheen of sweat, despite the frigid air-conditioning.
“Then what? Tell me you’ve got a plan.” Bob Jr. felt a little sick when they came upon an airlock that stood wide open. After all the precautions they had to tolerate just to pass through the membrane, seeing it gaping and exposed now was, in some ways, almost worse than seeing the VP get shot.
God knew what all was in the air.
“We have to hurry,” Slade said.
No shit, Bob Jr. thought. It’d be a lot faster if I didn’t have to drag your lame ass. Out loud, he asked again, “What’s your plan?” Bob Jr. was starting to wonder if he even needed the old man once he knew where they were going.
But Slade didn’t claw his way up near the top of the Allagro food chain by being an idiot. He knew damn well what Bob Jr. was thinking. He would have done the same thing, except he would have gotten the plan back in the conference room. He said, “Shut up and keep going.”
They found the first bodies soon after. Three of them, all wearing the protective scrubs, slumped in their chairs around a low table strewn with a frantic storm of printouts and graphs. One had fallen to the floor and lay twisted and tangled, one arm propped against the wall.
Bob Jr. noticed all three had empty coffee cups nearby and faltered, trying to put the pieces together.
“I told you this was no joke. Keep moving,” Slade said.
The second airlock was closed, not that it mattered. It hissed open upon command and they stumbled through, feeling the temperature rise at least fifteen or twenty degrees. The greenhouses were close.
The next body they found, some local wearing the uniform of one of the fieldworkers, was on his stomach in the middle of the corridor. He had a small hole in the back of his head and a gaping, ragged maw where his face used to be. Bob Jr. had to look away. Before today, he’d only seen one dead person in his entire life. That had been when he was twelve, at the open-casket funeral of his church’s former pastor. That man had looked asleep, at peace.
These people looked interrupted, violated.
The corridor started up a gentle incline, and Bob Jr. and Slade struggled on, both drenched in sweat. Bob Jr.’s sides hitched and he could feel the morning’s rum threatening to boil back up his throat. Slade’s arm kept slipping, so they switched sides. Slade’s thin fingers were surprisingly strong, and Slade wasn’t shy about using his fingernails to sink his grip into the side of Bob Jr.’s neck.
Sunlight appeared through the glass doors at the end of the corridor. At first, it was so bright it washed out the artificial lights down there, but as they got closer, it grew dim for some reason, as if heavy storm clouds had covered the sun.
The panic swelled within Bob Jr., sending bursts of herky-jerky twitches through his muscles, making him lurch along as if he were stepping on exposed electrical currents. Slade’s fingernails left bleeding trails on Bob Jr.’s neck as he struggled to hang on.
They both heard the distant rattle of automatic gunfire.
The island burned.
They had reached the glass doors and saw that the cornfields were on fire. Boiling black smoke filled the sky. Another stitch of gunfire.
They heard a muffled whump, and a mushroom cloud of fire appeared, roiling above the corn before transforming into a bubbling fountain of smoke. “Fuel truck,” Slade said.
Bob Jr. craned his head and saw one of the Range Rovers, stalled at an angle across the main road. Smoke seeped from under the hood, the doors hung open, and the bodies of men in bloody gray suits were clustered around it as if a bunch of drunks had all staggered from the vehicle and passed out.
A man dressed as a lab tech, his blue scrubs startlingly pale against the vivid red and black chaos, moved into sight from behind the SUV. He carried an assault rifle. Another man, a fieldworker, darted at the lab tech with a machete raised over his head.
The lab tech turned and calmly fired a burst of bullets into the fieldworker’s chest. The fieldworker hadn’t even hit the ground before the lab tech turned back toward the facility’s main entrance, moving with a methodical, unhurried precision. The burning fields threw skittering shadows around him, as if he were illuminated by false gods while a black funeral shroud cloaked the noon sun above.
Bob Jr. shifted Slade to get a better look. “He… he works here. He must. Who the hell is he?”
Slade panted, struggling for breath. “A mole. Somebody kept here just in case.”
“In case of what?”
“In case of something like today.”
“But you said they would kill everyone on the island.”
“They will.”
“But he’s… that’s suicide. Isn’t it?”
Slade gave a slight shrug. “Sometimes suicide is the preferred option. Perhaps he’s here to repay a debt. Perhaps he is willing to die so his family does not.” Bob Jr.’s face made it clear he could not fathom dying intentionally. Slade smiled, a cadaverous, sick expression. “It’s a big, bad world out there, farm boy.”
They watched as the man strolled through the koi ponds and the sweeping lawns that had been clipped more carefully than most putting greens. The lab tech stopped for a moment, then leaned over a low hedge.