The zombies lurched toward us.
“Get us out of here, man,” Sam said.
I jabbed at the button marked “5” over and over. “The elevator’s too fucking slow,” I said.
Sam began shooting. In the steel elevator car, the noise was deafening. Every sound in my ears became muffled except for a sudden high-pitched ringing. Sam continued to fire, the MP5 jerking in his hand as it shot bullet after bullet into the mass of advancing, rotting flesh. A mottled blue hand reached in through the door. I hit it with my baseball bat but the lack of space to swing the bat meant I had to jerk the bat at the hand as if I was playing cricket, slamming the fingers into the steel wall above the elevator’s control panel.
Jax used her own bat to push the zombies’ face out of the elevator as the doors began to slide shut.
We went up to the fifth floor.
“Tanya, what’s the fifth floor like?” I asked quickly into the walkie-talkie.
“Clear,” she said as the doors opened and the disembodied female voice, sounding muffled in my ringing ears, announced, “Fifth floor.”
We stepped out into the corridor, weapons ready. The rooms on this level appeared to be offices. Some of the doors had metallic nameplates on them. I saw one that said, “Administration”, and another that read, “Personnel”.
“We need to find somewhere safe where we can discuss what to do next,” I said. There was no way we were going down to the labs on the floor below until that zombie horde moved somewhere else. I wondered if they had been attracted by the smell of the dead bodies by the elevator. If so, they would feed, and then hang around the area until something stimulated them to move. That was going to be a problem.
Sam opened a door that was marked as belonging to a Doctor David Laurie, looked inside, and waved us over. We entered the office, which was decorated with light blue walls and a darker blue carpet. One wall was lined with a bookshelf. The books were mainly thick hardbacks with titles that looked like they related to chemistry. A light wooden desk with a computer, mouse, and keyboard sat near a window. I looked out at the view of the compound and the rolling hills beyond. The rain had smeared the glass, making the outside world seem unreal.
“What are we going to do now?” Jax asked.
Sam shrugged. “I don’t know, man.”
I leaned against the desk, wondering how we were going to get to the labs. “We need those zombies out of the way,” I said.
“No shit, Sherlock.” Sam rolled his eyes and started to read the titles of the books on the wall.
The walkie-talkie crackled. It was Johnny’s voice that came over the airwaves, his smooth tone reminding me of when Lucy and I used to listen to him on Survivor Radio. I wished I was on the deck of The Big Easy now, dancing to some tune Johnny had chosen, instead of here in this facility where the virus that had destroyed the world had been created. “Alex, there’s someone walking along the corridor on your level.”
“Who is it?” I whispered into the walkie-talkie.
“It’s that woman we saw earlier, the one with the broken glasses. She’s near the elevators again.”
Sam went to the door, opening it quietly. “She’s there,” he whispered. “She’s not a zombie or anything.”
I remembered the way she had been staring vacantly as she walked, her broken glasses hanging from her face. If she wasn’t a nasty, then she had probably lost her mind. Still, she knew this place. She might be able to help us in some way.
“We could talk to her,” I suggested to Sam.
He nodded and was about to walk out into the corridor when he suddenly stopped. His eyes widened as he saw something out there. Then he stepped back into the office and closed the door.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
His voice came out as a whisper. “Something took her, man. Something that moved so fast I barely even saw it.”
Jax took the Desert Eagle from her holster and held it loosely in her right hand. Her hand was trembling, making the gun shake in her grip.
Sam backed away from the wooden door slowly, keeping the MP5 steady. “If it comes in here, I’m going to blast it,” he whispered.
We stood in the office silently, waiting. I realized I was holding my breath. I wanted to contact Tanya and Johnny on the walkie-talkie but didn’t dare make a sound. I was thankful that they had the good sense not to talk to us. The crackling from the walkie-talkie would alert anything in the corridor to our presence.
The rain beat on the window as if it were counting off the passing seconds.
“Do you think it’s gone?” Jax whispered.
I shrugged. I could imagine it standing outside the door, waiting patiently for us to step out into the corridor. My fingers brushed lightly over the butt of the Desert Eagle at my hip. If the thing out there moved as fast as Sam said it did, I wouldn’t even have time to use the gun on myself before I was torn apart like those security guards by the elevators.
I remembered that it moved through the air vents, and frantically looked for the vent in this office, breathing a sigh of relief when I saw that it was barely big enough for a rat to crawl through. The larger vents in the building were probably only in the corridors, labs, and bigger rooms like the meeting room where we had seen the dead hybrids on the monitors.
I didn’t know how long we had been standing there when the walkie-talkie crackled.
It was Tanya. “It’s moved away from your location. It’s on level three. We just saw it run past one of the cameras there.”
I breathed another sigh of relief. “We have to get that chemical and get out of here as soon as we can,” I said. “Hart said that patient zero had become something more dangerous than a hybrid but he didn’t say it was so fast.
“He probably didn’t know,” Jax said. “They would only know what the people here at Alpha Two told them. Most people who knew how fast that creature was probably didn’t live to tell the tale.” She put the Desert Eagle back into her holster. “But I agree that we need to get the hell out of here as soon as we can. This place is much more dangerous than we thought.”
“So what do we do, man?” Sam asked. “There’s a shitload of zombies right outside the lab where the H1 is. If we go down there and start shooting, that thing might hear us and come to check out what’s making all the noise. Then we’re fucked.”
I looked out of the window at the dark, rainy night as if it might offer some inspiration. It didn’t. We couldn’t just stay in this office all night; we had to make a move. Each passing second we spent in this building could too easily be our last, and my nerves were so fraught I felt like I might snap at any moment and make a mad dash for the exit.
It became all too clear why Hart had injected us with the virus; he had sent us somewhere so dangerous that any sane person would abandon the mission and run for safety. I would never do that because of Lucy, but the others would and I couldn’t blame them. By injecting us with the virus, Hart was forcing us to see this mission through to the end. We had to ignore every survival instinct in our body that told us to get the hell out of Dodge. Because failing the mission would kill us anyway. We would become monsters.
So let’s get it done, I told myself. There has to be a way to get that chemical.
My thoughts were interrupted when the door opened. I spun around, bringing my bat up, ready to fight. When I saw the woman who walked into the office, I lowered it.
She was in her fifties, with blonde hair that was cut short in a pixie style, and blue eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses. Her white blouse and tweed skirt made me think she was an office worker rather than a scientist, but she wore a nametag that said she was Doctor Lisa Colbert. She looked at Jax and me as she entered the room, but she didn’t react to us other than to say, “This is Dave’s office.” It was said as a matter-of-fact statement rather than an accusation regarding our presence here.