Liz glanced at her paper again and told Sanchez, "Point is, Corporal, that zombies may sound rather far out, but it seems they are not quite as far out as I once thought."
"And who would screw around with that type of thing? And why?"
She glanced back at Friez.
"Yes, sir, our initial reports are sketchy, but something very unconventional has happened on Tioga Island. That's why we require this type of freedom of action."
Thunder told Sanchez, "People like us, Corporal. There's a reason we have all those containment cells downstairs. We don't just fight this weird stuff; we bring it home, study it, and see if it can be useful."
"Seems to me," Sanchez replied, "that this type of stuff would be useful only if you wanted to wipe out the whole of the human race. I don't think the Russians and the Chinese, or even most terrorists, would want to mess around with that."
"I guess that's the big question now, Sammy. Who exactly is behind all this? And why?"
Annabelle Stacy turned off the main corridor at the first side passage. She noticed a security camera at the intersection, so she moved as fast as possible, hoping the wrong eyes were not watching that particular monitor at that particular moment. When no alarms sounded, she assumed she had passed unnoticed. The lack of alarms also meant either that the three men she had locked in the test chamber a few minutes ago were still trapped or that their deaths had not yet been discovered.
Still, she felt as if her body might shake apart at any second. Her legs quivered, her intestines felt ready to burst, and she found it difficult to calm her breathing. Some of those shakes came from knowing she had probably — almost certainly — indirectly killed three people. The fact that they had been planning to kill her — or worse — did not change that fact.
Voices in the back of her head kept reciting fantasies about how she could have escaped in some other manner. That perhaps she could have left the door open or negotiated the reopening of the door in exchange for a head start toward escape … something, anything, to have avoided trapping them inside; to avoid the blood that was most assuredly now on her hands, righteous or not.
Furthermore, while not quite as scary as being rushed by rotting, parasite-controlled corpses, sneaking through the facility pushed her nerves into overdrive. While some of those symptoms might be side effects of whatever concoction they had put into her veins, she knew that most came from her lack of experience at this type of thing.
Truth was, she did not know what to do now. Should she run for the exit? Despite finding the idea of immediate escape appealing, she felt a sense of responsibility for Major Gant. At that moment he might be undergoing the same type of sadistic test Waters and Monroe had subjected Costa to yesterday. Thom might be in the midst of fighting off zombies and fatigue. She could not abandon him.
"DOCTOR WATERS, REPORT TO SECURITY."
The automated announcement system's computerized voice caused her to jump, and she spat an exhale so hard that the wind scraped her throat.
Ahead of her a door opened. Stacy panicked like a deer in the headlights. She saw no place to hide, no alcoves or unlocked doors, no pieces of furniture in the white, featureless hallway. So she did the only thing she could do: she pressed herself flat against the wall and held still.
If Waters had exited the room and stepped to his left he would have seen her. Instead, he turned to his right and stopped, propping his cane against the wall while he made notes on a small pad and mumbled something to himself that sounded as if he were working out a complicated problem in his head.
After a moment he stowed the pad in his lab coat and moved off away from her.
Stacy waited until he had rounded a corner and then approached the door from which Waters had come. She expected it to be his office, but instead found it labeled "STORAGE AREA A."
Using the security card she had stolen from the young technician, Annabelle swiped the lock and caused a bolt to retract. She then proceeded inside, in the hope of hiding for a spell.
Instead, she came upon a sight that was so different from what she could have possibly expected that her mind — not her eyes but her mind—took three whole seconds to properly compute the room's contents.
Up to that point, she had seen Monroe's little hideaway as a high-tech laboratory, not unlike a CDC containment complex or a military research facility. Yet while "Storage Area A" was constructed from the same building blocks as the rest of the place, the contents were of a different nature. It seemed to Dr. Annabelle Stacy that she had walked out of the lab and into a museum.
A trio of big tables occupied the center of the room while the walls were lined with bookshelves and display cases. The air felt dry by design, and odorless save for a whiff of ancient dust tickling her nose.
On the tables rested a line of artifacts, broken only by the occasional computer, which made for a contrast in eras measured in millennia.
She saw a chunk of jagged rock that appeared to be a surviving piece of an otherwise destroyed bas-relief with the image of a bull clearly distinguishable above several lines of chiseled script. She saw a pair of clay figurines depicting persons emerging from a type of barrel with crowns on their heads, a colorful but fading fresco of several slender ladies on a slab of plaster, and many more such trinkets all sharing a common lineage that, for the moment, eluded her recognition.
Given the fact that one of Dr. Annabelle Stacy's three doctorates was in history, the collection fascinated her but her failure to decipher their origin caused her to let out a frustrated grunt as she examined a block of clay and the strangely hypnotic language carved therein.
In between more chunks of history sat a computer and a stack of papers. She gave up on accessing the PC when a password prompt appeared. However, the papers included lines of mathematical equations as well as molecular structure diagrams, the purpose of which was unclear, particularly when included in a room clearly devoted to history, not science.
Her eyes drifted around the collection, finding one of the bookshelves first. There she saw an eclectic collection of worn leather-bound books and scrolls alongside modern texts and binders. Again, a clash of centuries — maybe longer.
Suddenly, one of the display cases caught her eye. No, grabbed it; pulling her attention in like the grip of a black hole's gravity well.
Inside a square case set upon a metal pedestal sat a disc made of fired clay covered with a spiral display of stamped symbols. Slightly larger than a compact disc, this was the one object in the room that finally managed to spur her memory to recognition.
Stacy approached it cautiously, not out of fear but in awe. She knew exactly what this was, but knew it should be a world away on display at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum.
Unless … unless there are two?
Like a child gazing in the display windows of FAO Schwarz, she pressed her nose to the glass and ran her eyes over the tokens and signs crowding the disc's surface. As far as she knew, no one had yet deciphered the inscription, despite its slight resemblance to Anatolian and Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Still, it seemed so incredibly out of place. Why would they gather ancient tablets and art in a storage room deep inside a covert bioweapons research facility?
"Wait a second," she again mumbled to herself. "Wait one damn second."
The papers next to the computer drew her in once more. She pulled out the top sheet, then the next, then the next. She set them on the tabletop between a recently released Pentium G2120 computer and a piece of broken tablet containing a language thousands of years old.
Mathematics and molecular structure diagrams. Mathematical biology.