Stand your ground, Annie-girl.
Maybe it was not her father's voice that she heard, but she found strength from somewhere. Strength she had not had as recently as the night before. Every minute she stayed alive gave her more confidence. Besides, she had faced death so often in the last forty-eight hours that another confrontation with the grim reaper seemed like just another part of her day.
Is that how Major Gant and the others do it? They grow so accustomed to death and killing that it is just another routine? Is that what I am to become?
Waters wagged his cane in her direction, saying, "Your history is incomplete, dear. The Phaistos disc is not one of a kind. It is one of many. If you had looked a little more closely, you would have seen that what we have here is not the one found in 1908. The writing … the symbols … it's a different disc. Just as old, but not the same."
He smiled in obvious enjoyment of the puzzled look that fell over her face. He had just suggested something akin to finding another pyramid in the Egyptian desert or a second Stonehenge in the English countryside.
"You see, Dr. Stacy, you are in over your head. And I don't have the time or inclination to educate you in these matters. Now step away from the console or I will have you shot."
The idea of multiple Phaistos discs held center stage in her mind to the point that she barely heard his order.
"And the blueprint for your designer fungus came from there? I saw pages of biomathematics. Is that it? The writing on the disc gave you the map for this? How is that possible?"
Clearly Waters did not like giving credit to any outside source. His delight at having stumped her switched over to aggravation.
"I did the work. Make no mistake, I am the master of all this. I have nurtured the organism, modified it, matured it to perfection."
So many thoughts, ideas, and guesses swirled through her head. It all started with that disc. The Minoans had been wiped from the planet thousands of years ago by a combination of natural disasters and foreign invasion. How was it possible that they had created the original recipe for this type of organism, something that even the most modern scientists were in no position to engineer? What was the language on the disc?
So many questions, and each of those questions added another chill to her spine. There was something out there … something bigger and even more dangerous than Waters, Monroe, and their batch of parasitic fungi. What she had thought was a case of biological terror might be something more, with roots stretching back to the ancient world.
That scared the crap out of her.
"It's you who are over your head," she told him. "This thing you're playing around with is the perfect smart-weapon for killing people." She thought about what had happened after her test, although she felt it important not to provide him with any details. Her survival might depend on it. Nonetheless, Stacy told him, "You've unleashed a monster, and you are fooling yourself if you think you're in control. This thing … it does not act in any predictable way. It is evolving, Doctor, without your help. It's on the verge of wiping all of you out, but you just don't see it."
"I have more important things to do than to debate you," Waters said, then turned to the nearest soldier and ordered, "Shoot her."
What happened next happened fast, but somehow, some way, her eye saw everything, despite the eruption of chaos.
The Asian soldier standing next to Dr. Waters brought the iron sights of his AKM assault rifle to his eye and pointed it in her direction. While the rounded control console provided some cover, she presented a relatively easy target. She instinctively moved to duck behind the controls.
At the back of the room, Major Gant reacted to Waters's order. He shouted something that might have been "stop" or "no," popped up from behind the divider wall, and fired a pistol. The soldiers back there immediately shot at him; bursts of automatic gunfire filled the room with an explosion of noise.
The man shooting at Stacy got off one round a split second before Gant's bullet hit him high in the shoulder. At that same moment, Annabelle's reflexes caused her to bend behind the console. She felt the bullet fly over her head by a measure of centimeters.
Her hands never left the console, however, and she did as promised: her fingers flipped switches and the thirty cell doors running along the two walls of the rectangular chamber slid up.
Waters had warned that they were prepared for such a catastrophic release, and he proved to be right. The nozzles situated above each door automatically activated, releasing a fine spray of foggy white gas like a halon system but one not designed to fight fires. It seemed their frontline security system remained the so-called PX aerosol agent.
"You see," Waters boasted while ignoring the soldier writhing on the ground at his feet from a bullet wound, "you never had any leverage, my dear. The first step in creating a weapon such as this is to also create appropriate countermeasures. I thought I taught you that lesson back on Tioga."
The white smoke pooled along the side walls and then started to drift toward the center. On the other side of the chamber, the guards continued their assault on Gant, pinning him behind the wall and closing for the kill, although the quickly spreading fog inhibited visibility.
"You," Waters tapped another man on the shoulder. "I'm hoping you're more competent than your friend here."
The second soldier raised his gun, but unlike the first, he never had a chance to fire. Two rotting arms came surging out of the cloud of ineffective gas and grabbed his arm. Teeth followed, biting into his bicep and tearing out a chunk of gore.
He screamed. But he was not the only one screaming. The fog of the PX spray had served only to conceal its lack of effect. The zombies of the containment cells came at Waters and his security detail like the walls of a closing trash compactor. Guns initially aimed at Major Gant now aimed at the decaying, warped victims of Dr. Waters's experiments. Pasty white eyes … jagged fingernails … lunging jaws.
Stacy nearly vomited in a combination of disgust and excitement. She had literally dodged a bullet, and her plan to use the zombies as her weapon had come to fruition. The guards were outnumbered nearly ten to one and attacked on both flanks at close quarters. Most were wrestled to the ground before they knew what was happening. A few used their rifles as clubs to beat back their attackers, but they only managed to delay the inevitable.
"They're adapting, Waters!" She yelled at the stunned doctor, whose watery eyes had grown very large. "Your gas worked on these same creatures hours ago, but not now! Acclimatization. They developed their immunity to your gas without the benefit of generational evolution. That's not natural, Waters. Whatever this thing is, it was never going to let you control it!"
He swung his cane and smashed a big white bulb growing out of the side of the head of a fat woman. The orb popped and the zombie dropped. Before he could regroup, however, a walking corpse grabbed Dr. Waters from behind, pulling at his shoulders while teeth dove into his neck. Two more of the mad scientist's units converged, ripping at his arms and into his stomach.
Dr. Waters's expression changed from shock into a grimace of pain that resembled a grin. It sounded as if he might have laughed, even.
Annabelle remembered Major Gant at the back of the room. She pushed several buttons until she saw — through the fog — the rear bulkhead slide up. At that point she abandoned the control console and walked off between the ravenous ghouls that, thanks to the blocking agent, did not attack.
On her way to the rear of the chamber Annabelle grabbed a discarded assault rifle. She then found Gant near the now-open rear door. The walking dead were too busy taking the low-hanging fruit of the security detail to have moved beyond the divider wall, but that would change soon.