Deadout (29 page)

On the other side of the fence was a car that looked like a police car but wasn't. It looked more like mall security than Darkstar.

It seemed as though both sides had sent their “A” teams to Katama.

A couple of the protesters looked up at us wearily, but when we turned toward the gate across the street, they looked away.

I drove up the driveway and pulled in behind the lab unit, then killed the engine. The words “Leave Our Island” were spray-painted in red across the side, and the door was bent where it had been pried open.

“That's the vandalism?” I said.

She nodded and rolled her eyes. I wasn't buying it either.

“Okay, so how do you want to play this?” I asked.

“There didn't used to be guards,” Annalisa replied with a tight, jittery shake of her head. “I'm allowed access to unit one. The server is in unit two. But once I'm inside the gate, I can use Julie's card to access unit two, where the server is. They're not going to let you in, though. Not with everything that's going on.”

“Are there surveillance cameras?”

She nodded again. “Yes, but just at the front gate. To keep an eye on the protesters.”

“Do they cover the entrance to this place?”

“They might.”

I studied her face for a moment: nervous but resolute. “How are you going to get through the crowd?”

She shrugged, pretending she wasn't scared at the prospect. “I'll get through.”

I stared at her for a moment, but she just shrugged again.

“Okay,” I said. “Give me ten minutes to make my way around to the side. Then approach the gate. I'm thinking there should be enough commotion to cover the noise of me climbing the fence.”

“Then what?”

“Go open your lab, but wait by the door. Keep an eye on the other unit. When I give the signal, you hightail it over there and we'll slip inside.”

“Okay,” her mouth said, the rest of her face silently signaling that it was not okay at all.

“You'll be fine,” I said, my hand on her shoulder, but I was concerned about her getting through the small group of protesters.

Annalisa looked up at me, her eyes sparkling in the moonlight and a brave smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. She was an extremely beautiful woman, and I was struck by her strength, her bravery, her humor. And her proximity. She reached up and kissed my cheek, then whispered, “We'd better go.”

I gave her shoulder a squeeze, and then jogged off toward the tree line. When I turned back she was standing in the moonlight, looking very alone. I gave her a wave, and she waved back. Then I plunged into the darkness.

The underbrush was thick, and the going was slow and loud, like sound effects from an old radio show. The smell of skunk was in the air, and I hoped the noise would scare them away before I got too close.

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I found my footing, the going got easier and quieter. I made a wide loop through the woods, crossing the road fifty yards up and doubling back on the other side until I came to a chain-link fence. I smiled. I'd done a lot of chain-link fence-climbing back in Dunston, and I had hoped I was done for a while. The smile faded as I thought about what had been behind those fences.

I paused and listened to the slight breeze, the ambient sound of insect life, and a quiet conversation not too far away.

On the other side of the fence, I could see the two lab units. One was just in front of me, back from the road and half obscured by shadows. The other was thirty yards past it. Twenty yards beyond that was the front gate.

The security cruiser was parked between the two units, the rear of it just visible. Two guards were leaning against the trunk, their backs to the gate. They looked as tired as the protesters.

I was starting to wonder what I would do if Annalisa got through the gate with no commotion. Then I heard her, voice raised. “Get your hands off me!”

The two guards were startled to attention, and they quickly hurried toward the gate, accompanied by a chorus of raised voices, mostly protesting their innocence. I took my cue, scrambling up and over the fence, dropping to the other side, and scurrying over behind the closest lab unit.

Clinging to the wall in the darkness, I could hear and feel a faint hum, like machinery running inside. I expected the outer wall to be cold in the night air, and metallic, but instead it was still warm from the day and it felt like wood. I caught a faint but distinct odor as well, homey but only vaguely familiar. A moment later, I saw the two guards accompanying Annalisa to the other trailer. They seemed apologetic, presumably for the reception she had gotten from the protesters. Annalisa was fumbling for her keys as she walked, squinting furtively into the darkness in my direction. I resisted the urge to wave to her.

They walked right up to the door with her, and they waited for her to open it. I felt on the ground and picked up a couple of small stones. The smaller one was the size of a quarter. I flipped it high into the air and cringed, waiting for the impact, but all I heard was a soft thud. One of the security types turned around to look.

His partner asked him something, and he shrugged. “I don't know,” he said, turning slowly back around to watch Annalisa.

The next stone was bigger, maybe the size of a lemon. The difference in weight was substantial as I hefted it. As Annalisa opened the door, I flipped the rock up into the air.

This time it landed with a loud crack followed by the sound of it bouncing across the hood of the security car.

“What the fuck?” the first guard said as they both grabbed their sidearms and trotted back toward the gate.

I stepped into the moonlight, dropping the third rock onto the ground and waving frantically for Annalisa to run over as the chorus of voices rose up once again, this time even louder.

Annalisa was all business, hardly fumbling at all and barely looking at me as she swiped the card through the slot. She pulled me into the lab unit and pressed the door closed behind us with a soft click.

 

52

We stood with our backs against the door for a moment in what seemed like total darkness. Then I noticed a soft red glow coming from lights running along the base of the walls.

The smell was even stronger inside, but I still couldn't place it. Annalisa felt her way to a chair and a moment later a computer screen came to life, filling the room with harsh light.

She swiped the stolen card through a reader and navigated through a couple of different screens then started tapping at the keyboard, bringing columns of numbers sliding up the screen. Every few seconds she would stop, stare intently at the screen, and resume typing. A few times she lingered, tapping differently, and it wasn't until I noticed the paper sliding out onto the tray at my elbow that I realized she was printing. “There's no USB ports or disk drives,” she said, reading my mind. “Security.”

As she went about her business, I studied the lab, bathed now in the bluish light of the computer screen.

It was long, and narrower than I expected from the outside. There were no windows, just Formica countertops along each side and a couple of computer workstations with stools. The Formica curved up the wall six inches, like a backsplash. Every three or four feet, a pair of four-inch holes was cut into the wall. Above that, the wall was blank except for some shallow grooves, like horizontal paneling. Halfway down the counter was a rack of small glass test tubes. The Bee-Plus cartoon logo was sprinkled liberally around, on folders, binders, plastic bottles.

“What's the smell?” I asked.

She reached over to the wall, where there were two rows of switches marked
INNER PARTITIONS
and
OUTER PARTITIONS
. She flicked the switch at the end under
INNER PARTITIONS
and the paneled sections of the wall began to slide up into the ceiling, revealing metal mesh, like a heavy-duty window screen. The smell grew instantly stronger, a yeasty mixture of beeswax and honey. I recognized it from the hives we had opened my first day on the island. Squinting into the darkness, I could make out the faint movement of bees crawling on vertical wooden slats.

“Bees,” Annalisa said, glancing over at me. “It's late. They're mostly asleep.”

“What is this place?”

“This is Sumner's mobile clinical lab, so he can study the bees. The hives open up on the outside so the bees can go out and find nectar. They always come back at night. That's one of the things about honeybees.” I turned to the nearest test-tube rack. There were four tubes, the first three marked
HONEY, NECTAR
, and
APITOXIN
. The fourth one was marked
APS
9678
. In the dim light, the liquid inside looked a pale amber.

“What's this stuff?” I asked, holding it up and swirling it around.

“I don't know,” she said. “Put it down.” She took it from my hand, but then looked at the rack and back at the tube in her hand. I could tell she was curious. Cocking an eyebrow, she lifted off the plastic stopper. She put her nose close to the mouth of the test tube, but she didn't need to—the smell seemed to fill the room, sweet but not like honey. More like bananas. The odor was accompanied almost immediately by a wall of noise, like a roiling, angry army of chainsaws.

Annalisa jumped to her feet, the liquid sloshing up the glass sides of the vial. I took a step back, too.

The metal screens were vibrating, and as I looked closer I saw that the few bees that had been crawling about had been suddenly transformed into a dense mat of tiny bodies, thousands of them, grinding against the screen, tiny limbs poking through it.

“What is that stuff?” I said, raising my voice over the roar.

“It smells like alarm pheromone, bees release it when they sting or are killed, or feel threatened. It incites the other bees to attack. But I've … I've never seen that kind of reaction.”

As we looked down at the tube in her hand, a single droplet slid down the outside of it, just touching her finger. She moved her finger—too late—and jammed the cap back on. But whatever genie it was, it was out.

She put the tube back into the rack, her eyes wide in the dim light. She paused, staring at the wet spot on her finger. With her other hand, she reached out and flicked that same switch on the wall. Then she darted back to the middle of the room, as far from the sides as possible.

The wall panels slowly slid down, and I could see that the mesh screens were now glistening with moisture. Droplets were forming, dripping down to the bottom. I realized they weren't limbs poking through the screen, they were stingers. Venom was collecting in tiny puddles at the bottom of the screen.

“Those are stingers,” I said. “That's venom.”

She nodded.

“So are they all going to die now?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don't bees die after they sting?”

She shook her head. “Only when they sting soft flesh,” she said absently. “And not all of them. A lot of them get away.”

When the panels finally came down into place, Annalisa looked up at me with wide eyes. “We have to get out of here,” she said breathlessly. But then she looked down at her hand, the dim light reflecting off the moisture on her finger.

She went over to the small sink in the corner and started vigorously washing her hands. I noticed her shoulders were shaking.

I went over and put an arm around her, looking down at her hands as she frantically wrung them under the hot water.

“Hey,” I said, as softly as I could. “You okay?”

She turned off the water. “This doesn't just wash off,” she said.

I didn't say anything, and she turned to look up at me. “The alarm pheromone. I can rinse off most of it, and the rest will dissipate eventually, but meanwhile … I'm marked.” Her eyes widened as she looked over my shoulder toward the muffled buzzing coming from behind the partitions. “I've never seen bees behave like that. Not even Africanized bees. Imagine if those screens hadn't been there.”

I tried not to picture it, but I already had.

“It's nighttime, though, right? There shouldn't be any bees out there.”

She shook her head. “No. But it woke these ones up, didn't it?”

I couldn't argue with that, or with any of it. This was her territory, not mine.

“We should get going,” she said, reading my mind. The bees were quieting down, just enough to let me worry about the armed guards outside.

“How about hand sanitizer, or something like that?” I said. “Could that break it down?”

She looked up at me and smiled, momentarily distracted by the cuteness of my scientific ignorance. Then she shook her head. “You can't break it down, Doyle. The best you can do is try to mask it or cover it up, with something else, like…” Her eyes went unfocused, staring into space as she tried to think.

“Julie!” she said, yanking open a drawer under one of the workstations, rooting around in it with her unaffected hand. She pulled out a bandana, a hacky sack ball, a bag full of hair scrunchies, and a miniature Rubik's cube before exclaiming a triumphant, “Aha!” and plucking out a small bottle with a white label. “Julie Patchouli,” she said by way of explanation, as she unscrewed the cap and dabbed a tiny drop onto her finger.

As she rubbed it over her hand, the enclosed space filled with the scent of earnest hippies.

“That's powerful stuff,” I said, my eyes watering.

She smiled. “Here's hoping. I actually don't mind the smell, except that it reminds me of Julie, who's annoying.” The relief on her face faded as once again she seemed to read my mind.

“We need to get going,” she said.

I nodded. “Yes, we do.”

She sat at the computer and with one hand started closing windows. When she finished shutting it down, she looked up at me. “Now what?”