He ran from the control room and headed back for the elevator. There were other levels with more secrets he didn’t know shit about. Louie was no scientist, but he had plenty of drive, and total clearance throughout the facility.
Chapter 17
Louie discovered a hundred more canisters on level 5. They were useless to him without the pen key in Braden’s pocket. Level 6 consisted mainly of offices and about a million boxes of filed papers. Louie hadn’t been there often; security passes were minimal, and the only service calls he’d made were to replace faulty keyboards and frozen desktops. Level 5 was where all the lethal stuff was stored. The entire staff used to joke how dangerous 5 was by holding their breath in the elevator as it passed between 4 and 6. The joke was on us, he thought, kicking a box of reports out of his path on the way back to the elevator. You couldn’t be in a safer place on earth just feet away from the most horrendous diseases known to man.
That’s why Winnipeg was the perfect location for such a dangerous goods facility. It was in the middle of nowhere—literally smack-dab in the center of Canada—nestled into the ground with miles of solid rock beneath. There were no earthquakes in this part of the world, no volcanoes erupting, no hurricanes blowing. It was prairie land with little or no chance of geological upheaval—besides having a nuclear bomb dropped on its doorstep. And even that hadn’t proved disastrous; the canisters were still safe, even with Louie’s suicidal tampering.
He needed to find something else—something fast-acting and lethal—so Louie took the lift down to level 7. It was a level he’d always tried to avoid. This was where they’d conducted experiments on living specimens; mice, rats, cats and dogs, all sizes and all ranges. There were creatures on 7 as small as mites and as big as sheep. They all shared one thing in common—eventual extermination. Louie liked animals, and he detested the way they were treated here.
He made his way past the outer offices and medicinal storage rooms. With a swipe of his key Louie pushed through a final heavy door and stepped into what the DSC employees had lovingly nicknamed the zoo. It was dark inside, with only the dimmest of red emergency lighting. A chimpanzee jumped forward to Louie’s right and screamed, bashing its fists against the thick wire mesh of its cage. Louie jerked away from it and bumped into the cage opposite. Something big and hulking started growling from within. It lunged at Louie and smashed its wet nose into the metal. Teeth scraped along the mesh, and the animal started to bark, drowning out the monkey’s wails. A dog, he thought. It’s only a dog, and he can’t hurt me behind there. It was a Rottweiler, or had been one once. The thing frothing against its cage was built more like a Greyhound, emaciated to the point where all that showed was ribs and teeth. Most of its brown coat was missing, fallen out in chunks and clumped up against the bars.
Cats started howling. They scratched at the wired walls of their tiny cages, and hissed at Louie as he worked his way along the narrow aisles. He covered his nose and mouth with one hand to block out the stench of feces and urine, and started to run. There was nothing in here he could use against his tormenters. Louie could see a door in the shadows up ahead. It wasn’t the way he’d come in, but Louie didn’t care. He needed to get out, and he needed to get out fast. The security card fell from his shaking fingers as he tried inserting it into the key slot. He started to whimper on his hands and knees searching for it in the red and black gloom. He found it seconds later, resting in a pool of dried blood and drool, inches away from a dead animal carcass. It had been a goat, or possibly a sheep—Louie could never tell the difference—and its pointed nose was jammed into the black wire of its cage. It had died there like that, stuck, starving, and thrashing. The black lifeless eyes stared at Louie as he scooped the key back up. He inserted it into the slot and escaped into the next room.
It was much quieter, and the smell was tolerable. Louie pushed the strands of hair back hanging over his eyes, and wiped the sweat from his forehead. There was no way he was going back through that screaming hell and stench. He would have to find another way to the elevator. The lighting was better in here, and there was a calm order to the glass containers lining the walls on either side of him. Louie peered into one and saw a bug as thick and long as his thumb crawling about in a layer of black soil. Another one poked its way out of the dirt and started climbing up the glass. There were a thousand flies in the next one, feeding on a mat of squirming white maggots.
Louie walked slowly, running his finger tips along the glass surfaces. I could load up a gurney with a whole bunch of these insect aquariums… toss them through the doors and let those assholes deal with a bug infestation. He decided against it. With his clumsy luck, one of the containers would undoubtedly break open before he ever got back down to level 10. There was another door down at the end of the aisle. Louie rushed towards it, hoping to find a corridor that would lead him back to the elevator.
He found a small lab instead. A stool had been knocked over at an island counter in the room’s center. Papers had fallen to the floor. Someone had been in a hurry to get out when word arrived that the nukes were flying. They had left their work strewn all over the counter. Louie saw a small glass container on the counter. It was rectangular in shape, like the bug boxes in the room before, but a quarter the size. It was empty but looked dirty inside, the inner walls coated with blackish grime.
Louie picked some of the papers up from the floor and started reading. Most of it was gibberish—charts, time tables and pie graphs, formulas and equations—proving he didn’t have what it took to become a research scientist, and never would. But some of it was easy enough to understand. They had been studying Lyme disease—a bacteria carried by deer ticks. Everyone knew about Lyme disease in Manitoba. The prairies were infested with ticks in the spring months. Though hardly life threatening, the disease could cause years of discomfort if not treated in its early stages. Louie’s mother had warned him as a child to never stand too long in high grass, and to always pull up his socks and wear long pants. Kids always came home with wood ticks stuck in their legs and bellies. Some even managed to crawl all the way up into their hair, and could go undiscovered for days.
But wood ticks weren’t deer ticks. Deer ticks were much smaller, and harder to spot. The little fuckers would fill up on blood and eventually fall away, leaving their bacterial infection behind as a way of saying thank you.
So where were the ticks? Louie looked about the lab, trying to spot jars on the shelves filled with the little brown arachnids. He spotted a vault door left open in the wall. He looked inside and discovered it empty. The area was small, smaller than a bread box, and there was a tiny socket receptor built into the back wall. It’s a cooling unit. Louie clicked the door shut and read the label attached to it. TICK LDV3. There were two more cooling vaults next to it labelled TICK LDV1 and TICK LDV2. He pulled the handle open on one of them and discovered a frosted-over glass container fitted inside. Louie looked back at the island work station where the dirty container was sitting.
So that’s TICK LDV3.
He went back to the counter and lifted the glass box up for a better look. Louie could see where it attached inside its cooling unit. There was a tiny docking socket in the upper corner, and a second one in the opposite corner that must have acted as an air circulator. The grime stuck up inside the glass walls started to move. Louie placed the container back down hurriedly and stepped back. The dirt—what he had thought was dirt—was swirling about inside like a thin layer of dark grey smoke. It coalesced up against the wall facing Louie and stopped.