The door opened without a knock, and a young security guard stepped into the room.
“Excuse me, Dr. Kitzmiller, but there’s some trouble at the gate. I think maybe you’d better get out of the plant.”
“Trouble? What kind of trouble?”
“Some people are trying to break in.”
Corey got out of his chair and started for the door. The guard stepped into his path. He looked at Dr. Kitzmiller.
“It’s all right,” Kitzmiller said. “Mr. Macklin is with the press. He would like to see what is happening. So would I, for that matter.”
He came around his desk, and he and Corey walked swiftly with the young guard through the lobby and out to the executive parking area. A distraught-looking Baldwin Edge hurried out of the office he was using and joined them.
Across the asphalt at the fence, the older guard was standing inside the locked gate as a dozen or so people clamored to get through. The people outside screamed and gabbled incoherently. Their faces were twisted into mindless masks of agony, their eyes wide and rolling, their mouths agape. The facial skin of many of them had begun to blister and pop in the deadly telltale of the brain eaters.
Corey stared in disbelief. “My God, who are they?”
“I recognize some of them,” Kitzmiller said. “They are people who work here.”
“Look at them,” said Baldwin Edge. “They’re like … wild animals!”
As he spoke, a car skidded to a stop at the gate, and two more wild-eyed men stumbled out to join the others. A pickup came. Another car. It collided with the pickup, but the occupants paid no attention as they spilled out and stumbled toward the gate. From both directions on the road others came staggering on foot. Across the field they came. Out of the small stand of beech trees across the road.
“What do they want?” said Edge. His voice quivered with emotion.
“Some instinct must have brought them here,” Kitzmiller said. “Obviously they are not in rational control of their behavior.”
The guard at the gate had his revolver in his hand, the barrel pointing to the sky. The younger guard unholstered his own weapon as he ran to join him.
There were now more than twenty of the crazed victims outside the gate, screeching and yammering. Their clawed fingers grasped the mesh; their ruined faces pressed against it. They put their combined weight against the gate and pushed. It began to buckle inward.
The older guard fired his pistol in the air. The report had no effect on the growing crowd outside. There were more than twenty of them now, pushing and jostling one another to get at the gate.
Baldwin Edge began making a strange sound. Corey looked at him and was surprised to see that the man was crying.
“We had better go out the back,” Kitzmiller said. “There is an exit there that will take us back toward the laboratories.”
Before they could move, the latch holding the steel gate shut snapped with a bang. The two guards fell back, brandishing their pistols as the wild, screaming people lurched in through the breech. One of them, a young woman, reached the older guard. Her fingers dug into his face. From where they stood, Corey and the other two men could see the blood spurt out over the woman’s hands as the guard screamed. His pistol clattered to the ground.
The younger guard fired. The woman dropped. The older guard stumbled away, both hands to his torn face. A man from the crowd hit him with a wild swing of his fist. The guard staggered sideways and fell. The younger guard fired again. The man who had hit the guard grabbed at his stomach.
Edge gave a little cry and started to run toward the gate. The younger guard was now firing at random into the writhing crowd.
“Stop it!” called Edge. “Stop! These people can’t help themselves. You’re killing them!”
The hammer of the guard’s revolver clicked on an empty chamber. Two of the men who pushed through the gate hit him, and he fell. They began kicking at his head and his stomach.
Baldwin Edge ran up to the fallen guard, gesturing and trying to talk to the people who were kicking at him. Then Edge, too, was knocked to the ground. His screams were cut off abruptly as a middle-aged man with the strength of madness crushed his throat.
“Can’t we do anything?” Corey said.
“Don’t be foolish,” Kitzmiller said. “Come.”
He took Corey’s arm and began to lead him back into the building. They stopped abruptly as they saw coming toward them through the lobby two men and a woman dressed in the white smocks of laboratory technicians. They reached out toward Corey and the doctor. They were close enough for Corey to see their faces erupting in bloody sores.
As Corey and the doctor turned back, they saw the knot of people from the gate leave the fallen ones and start toward them.
“Here is your story, Mr. Macklin,” Kitzmiller said in a tone of lifeless irony. “Unfortunately, it looks as though you may not have the opportunity to write it.”
The sound of a revving automobile engine made Corey look beyond the crowd of babbling victims to a black Buick that turned off the road and was picking up speed as it headed for the broken gate.
“More of them coming,” Kitzmiller said.
“No,” Corey said. “That’s my car.”
He could clearly see Dena at the wheel, her mouth compressed into a grim line, her eyes intent on the scene before her. The Cutlass hit what was left of the gate, shattering a headlight and carrying the twisted chain link segment completely off its hinges. Dena swerved to avoid the stumbling people, letting the shattered gate fall away from the car as she did so.
She skirted the milling crowd and slammed the car to a stop in the parking area in front of the entrance where Corey and Kitzmiller stood. Corey yanked open the door on the passenger side and shoved Kitzmiller into the car. He started to climb in himself but was pulled back by something clutching at his jacket. He turned and saw the crazed, blistered face of one of the lab technicians. The man had a fistful of Corey’s jacket. In his other hand was a broken glass laboratory flask. As the jagged edge of glass was thrust toward his face, Corey shrugged out of his coat, leaped into the car, and slammed the door. The flask shattered against the safety glass of the side window.
Dena tramped on the accelerator and spun the car back around toward the gate. Corey saw her wince as they bumped over something yielding that lay on the asphalt. Dena set her jaw and drove on, picking up speed. They roared back out through the gate and onto the road, heading away from the shrieking crowd that was spilling into Biotron.
Chapter 23
Dena slowed the Buick as they passed through the suburbs of Germantown and Menomonee Falls into Milwaukee. The traffic was sporadic and unpredictable. Corey sat beside her, leaning tensely forward.
“Do you want me to drive?” he asked.
“No, I’m okay.”
Dr. Kitzmiller sat slumped in the back seat, saying nothing.
Dena watched the seemingly aimless progress of the other drivers. “I don’t think people know where they’re going,” she said. “Being out in their automobiles gives them a sense of being in control, but once in the car, they feel they have to move, to go somewhere. And there isn’t anyplace to go.”
“The place for us to go right now is a hotel,” Corey said, ignoring the philosophical observation.
“I detest hotels,” Dr. Kitzmiller volunteered.
“It’s only temporary,” Corey told him, “until we find out what’s happening.”
Kitzmiller was unappeased. “I should be back at the laboratory. There is much to do.”
“It will be a day or so before anybody can go back there,” Corey said. “You remember how it was when we left. We were lucky to get out.”