But that determination did nothing to quiet my fear.
We crossed the reception area quickly and silently, heading through the access door that led to the emergency stairs. Tanya took the lead, with Sam behind her. I stayed behind them; they had the big guns and were cooler under pressure than I could ever be.
When we got to the emergency stairs, they pushed through the doors quickly. I wanted to tell them that we should check the area ahead before we went charging up the stairs, but they were already ascending the steel steps. They seemed so eager to get this done that they had lost an edge of caution. I followed them at their pace, almost running up the steps to keep up.
We were halfway between level 1 and level 2 when the first hybrid appeared above us. It had once been a woman known as Doctor Debra Francis, according to the name badge on the lapel of its lab coat. Now it was a monster, a killing machine we had to deal with.
It rushed down the stairs toward Sam, lips drawn back and teeth bared. Sam was taken by surprise. He let out a yell and instinctively stepped back to avoid the hybrid. He lost his footing and tripped backward on the stairs, dropping to the unforgiving steel with a grunt of pain.
The hybrid continued past Sam, carried by its momentum, and made a grab for me. It got hold of my shoulder and we tumbled together down the hard steps. I tried to hold it at arm’s length because even as we were falling, it tried to sink its teeth into me.
I landed on my back, the hybrid on top of me. It snarled and leaned its face forward, ready to bite. Its breath smelled of rancid meat, probably the remnants of its last meal.
A shot rang out in the stairwell, and the hybrid dropped heavily to one side, blood spurting from its head.
I pushed it off me and stood up quickly. Tanya was crouched in a firing position, the MP5 raised.
“Thanks,” I said.
“No problem.”
I saw a second hybrid coming down to us, this one a man in a shirt and tie. His yellow eyes were wild and hateful.
“Behind you!” I shouted to Tanya.
She whirled around and fired. The hybrid dropped immediately to avoid the bullet, crawling down the steps toward us like a spider.
Sam had regained his footing. He aimed at the hybrid’s head and fired. The hybrid skidded to a halt, blood pouring from its temple.
Walking over to the lifeless body, Sam kicked it with the toe of his boot. “That’s some fucked-up shit, man.”
We continued up the stairs with more caution. I had a pain across the back of my shoulders where I had slammed into the steps and a throbbing tenderness in my right elbow. If we had been more careful, that could have been avoided. We couldn’t afford to get sloppy now, not when so much was at stake.
When we reached the second floor, I asked Jax over the walkie-talkie if the corridor beyond the door was clear.
“All clear,” she said, her voice sounding distant through the crackling airwaves. “At least, I think it is. The lights are out, so it’s difficult to see.”
Tanya opened the door onto the dark corridor. The smell of petrol hit me immediately. It was so strong that it burned my nose.
“Wow,” Sam said. “This must be the no-smoking zone.” He turned on his flashlight. I did the same, playing my beam along the corridor. Red plastic petrol canisters lay littered all around. The floor and walls seemed to be soaked with the flammable liquid. My flashlight picked up an axe, its head buried deeply in the wall as if someone had swung it with all their might.
“What the hell happened here?” I asked.
Tanya shrugged. We carefully moved farther along the corridor and found two male bodies lying face down. It looked like their spines were gone but the abundance of blood and guts made it difficult to tell for sure.
“Do you think they poured the gas over everything?” Tanya asked.
“It looks like it. Maybe they were trying to kill Vess. If so, their plan must have gone horribly wrong.”
We stepped past the dead bodies and found the door marked Maintenance Room. Tanya opened the door, stepping back as I shone my flashlight inside.
The room was small, barely more than a cupboard. Wooden shelves were fixed to the walls, holding cleaning equipment, some power tools, and plastic containers full of nails and screws. The fuse box was positioned on the back wall, thick wires running from it into the wall. I inspected the row of switches. All except two were in the up position, indicating that they were on. The two in the down position were labeled Server Room and Light Circuit.
It was hard to believe that by flicking these switches, we could establish communication with Alpha One and save our own lives. It almost seemed too simple.
I flicked them both to the upward position. The overhead fluorescent lights in the corridor came on, casting stark illumination over the bloody bodies on the floor. “We should check the servers,” I said.
We walked quickly to the server room and opened the door. There was a hum in the room. It sounded like everything was booting up. Red, yellow, and green lights began flashing and I could hear the whir of fans within the servers.
Doctor Colbert’s voice came over the walkie-talkie. “Bring a laptop. I can try to log onto the network.”
“Okay,” I said as we went back out into the gasoline-filled corridor.
I opened the door next to the maintenance room, hoping to find an office with a computer, but instead I was looking into a large storeroom with shelves full of chemicals in plastic containers and larger drums on the floor. Everything was labeled as flammable. It seemed a strange place to store such chemicals; I would have thought that these things would usually be kept in a fireproof room.
Maybe the two dead guys had tried to set a trap for Vess, or the zombies, hoping to burn them. The petrol was all over the floors and walls in here too. Someone had splashed it around everywhere for a purpose, and the only purpose I could see was to blow up these chemicals. Maybe they were trying to make an explosion so big that the sprinkler system wouldn’t be able to handle it. Maybe they had realized that they couldn’t defeat Vess unless they blew up the entire building.
My guesses were just that… guesses. I couldn’t know what had happened here in the madness that had occurred after patient zero had gotten loose in the building. Maybe the two dead guys had simply lost their minds.
“We need to get off this level,” I said, “The smell is going to make me puke and we should get a far away from this stuff as possible. We can find a laptop somewhere else.”
Tanya and Sam nodded. As we headed back the way we had come, I heard a noise behind us that sent my fear level spiking, the crash of the metal air vent grille hitting the floor. All three of us spun around to face the creature that had once been a scientist but was now a bloodthirsty monster. Vess stood facing us with a sneer on his lips. He knew we couldn’t escape him; it was too far to the stairs and he was too fast. He stepped forward, his eyes flicking from Tanya, to Sam, and then to me as if he were deciding which one of us to kill first.
When those yellow eyes met mine, I felt as if Vess could see inside me all the way to my spine.
Adrenaline rushed into my system, making me panic. There was no way we were going to get away from him. I wondered if those dead men had felt the same desperation when they had decided to blow up the building.