Zero had called up a layout of the BDC. Building Thirteen was highlighted.
Maryk started to see it then.
The Genetech brain powered the BDc’s life functions. It coordinated everything from climate control to employee schedules to internal security — including the security of the dangerous pathogens vault of Building Thirteen.
Maryk stepped back. Suddenly Stephen’s conversation with Zero made sense.
Heritage. A sort of homecoming. We are all who are left here.
Maryk fumbled open his own tablet. All bureau tablets functioned as satellites feeding off the power of the Genetech’s digital network. His screen came on normally and Maryk gripped the sides of the casing in relief. The Genetech was still sound.
Then the screen began to flicker. It flared white until the characters were no longer comprehensible. Icons began blurring and drifting like ice melting off the screen.
Zero’s virus was confounding the DNA core of the Genetech brain. He had infected the BDC.
Maryk dropped the diseased tablet and raced out of the room. Building Thirteen was five buildings away.
The Labyrinth
There was no way she would be a sifting duck in Maryk’s office with Zero on the loose. She ran out into the halls, hoping to find an exit out of the BDC, but quickly became lost in the endless, unnumbered corridors. She was making her way through the labyrinth when the ceiling lights started to fade. The hallway dimmed and the hum of the air-conditioning went dead, as though there had been a power outage. She stood in darkness for a long moment, then the lights began coming back on again, but not all of them, and not all at once. She heard a whisking sound behind her as a fire door at the end of the hall was released from its magnetic clip. It slammed shut. Lights flared brightly here and there inside the empty offices, as though some kid somewhere was fooling with the switches, Then a ceiling sprinkler came on and pinwheeled a cool spray of water onto her waist and legs.
She moved out from under the spray, along the wall and through double doors into another hallway with overhead light filaments crackling, alternately dimming and flaring. A fire alarm bleated two shocking reports, answered by similar honks in the distance, and it was like some sort of short-circuit chain reaction. The hall emptied into a sun-filled, third-floor catwalk. She could see the various connected buildings from there, and lights flashing inside each one.
She held her handbag at her side and continued into the next building, looking for exit signs as she ran past labs with sensors droning on and off and automatic doors sliding open. Some lights flared too brightly and popped, glass tinkling inside the lamps, and she stayed close to the wall as she hurried toward the stairwell, and down two flights of stairs.
She came out into a carpeted side corridor of glass-walled offices and saw a figure in the flashing fight in front of her, moving away. For one crazy moment she thought it was Stephen Pearse. Then the lights changed and she saw the hunched figure and his familiarly dirty nylon jacket.
Zero heard her behind him and turned. His red eyes were wide in the varying light, his decayed mouth open and shadowed inside. Melanie screamed. She pitched back from him and turned to run away down the frenzied hall, but her handbag strap jerked her back, and his hand closed around her right arm. She rocked and fought him but his grip was firm and he pulled her closer to him. She kept fighting. She was trying not to look at him, but his hand was right there on her sleeve, bruised and ungloved.
He forced her around to face him and said something, but the alarm bleated and drowned out his voice. She veered away as far as she could. His head was bare. The dry gray skin of his face was split open with glistening sores, and then the lights flared and she saw the blistered flesh on his neck and chin, slick with sweat, livid and pulsing somehow, as though creeping over his diseased cheeks.
“Nice,” he rasped. She could see deep into his mouth, past his twitching red-black tongue and all the way down into the guttural workings of his throat. Frothy saliva glistened on his chin, and she thrashed even more. The stink of his putrescence appalled her as his abominably blood-soaked eyes roamed over her body.
He jerked her around, and against all her will began forcing her down the hall. He was stooped and frail, dying even, but possessed the strength of the insane.
“Melanie,” he breathed.
She thrashed and flailed, trying to twist out of his clutch. “Get off me—”
He worked his arm up against her shoulder and propelled her forward. She swung back with her heel as they moved and caught him somewhere in the shin, and he grunted and stooped lower, and further wrenched her arm. Her shoe heel found him again, sharply this time, and then with a sudden lurch he jerked her to one side and bashed her against the wall.
She came off it stunned. The disorientation was immediate, and she saw before her now a veering passageway filled with sparkling pastel rain. He shook her and she rattled. Her lungs were seizing up. She used her free hand against the wall to keep from falling and being dragged. The arm he gripped was dead to her now. He moved her down the hall too quickly for her to fight. She heard his pained moans.
“I took Maryk’s friend,” Zero said. “I took his home. Now I take his work.”
They came to a catwalk between buildings. Zero pushed her through the doors and at once pulled her to his side, using her as a shield to block out the deadly sunlight beating down upon the walkway.
“Building Thirteen,” he said. “A vault. Viruses from all over the world, held in limbo. A monument to the myth of human superiority.”
She remembered them talking about it: Building Thirteen, the germ bank. She pulled and struggled, trying somehow to pivot him into the virus-smashing sunlight.
“Smallpox,” he said. “Imprisoned there. My genetic offspring. It can repair me. I will meld with it, and see this to the end.”
They emptied out of the catwalk into the next crazed building. Pain seized him and ripped through his body like a revelation, then passed and let him go.
“And you will lead my charge, Melanie.”
The salacious way in which this obscene, malignant, repellent, gloating freak sucked on her name turned her stomach.
“You’re dying,” she spit out, kicking at him. “Your body’s dying.”
“What I am will live on.”
“You’re” — she struggled — “crazy.”
Zero yanked down on her arm and the sudden pain made her cry out. He stopped and held her there in the manic hallway, a sprinkler raining down on them from above, and he spun her so that she had to look at him. The muscles of his emaciated face crawled and twitched and his open mouth spewed strings of drool. His other bare claw came up to grip her shirt over her shoulder. She thought he was going to touch her face, and there wasn’t anything she could do to stop him. Her lungs were going flat again.
“You don’t know,” he groaned curiously.
“Get off—”
“I already have a new host. I live on in you.”
She heard the words, but it was the satisfaction she saw in his hideous face that stopped her. She hung there in the hallway like a balloon losing air, slowly going limp.
“Inhaler,” he told her. “At the airport. You lost it on the stairs. I put it in Maryk’s bag.”
Melanie remained still, not fighting. She remembered Maryk taking her inhaler away after he regained consciousness. Spasms of nausea and revulsion, self-revulsion, crept like the sickness itself beneath her skin, and she lapsed immediately into the mind-set of the sick. It was a reflex action, like gagging. The repulsion and the self-loathing. It all came back.