Mutation (Twenty-Five Percent Book 1) (30 page)

“Then why are you here?”

He gaze returned to the body.  “My husband works here.”

Both Alex and Micah looked at the corpse.

“That’s not...?” Micah said.

“No, that’s not him,” Carla said.  “His name is Dr Franklin Waters.  I never liked him.  But I suppose you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, so I won’t tell you why.”  She stepped over the body and walked into the room beyond, which appeared to be some kind of storage area, containing stacked tables and chairs and other items of dusty furniture.

“How did you get into the city?” Micah said as they followed her.

“A friend in the army got me onto one of the helicopters.”

“If this place isn’t a secret,” he said, “then why is the entrance so hard to find?”

“What, the shed?”  She smiled.  “That’s just the back door.  Emergency exit.  Most people use the main entrance.”

“Of course there’s a main entrance,” Alex said, feeling ridiculous.  “Because there isn’t a secret lab.”  He gave Micah a pointed look. 

Carla reached a half glazed door, checked through the window, then opened it and stepped through. 

“Is this Bates’ amazing inside information?” Alex muttered to Micah as they followed her into a wide corridor.  “A laboratory everyone knows about?”

“What kind of research do they do here?” Micah said to Carla as she moved along the corridor, checking through the window of each door as she passed.

“Phil didn’t talk about it much, but they’re trying to find a cure that will work for more people, as well as when people are fully turned.”

“Why is this place underground?” Alex said.

“Phil said it was because the work is important and it’s easier to keep it safe down here.  I would have thought there would be easier ways to ensure security, but...” She shrugged.  “There are a lot of people who don’t care about a cure, who would rather have everything happen elsewhere or simply wipe out all eaters and Survivors.”  She glanced at him.  “You of all people should be familiar with that attitude.”

“And that’s all they’re doing here?” he said, not quite ready to let the idea of the secret laboratory go, even if it was sounding less and less plausible. 

“Far as I know.  Why?”

He didn’t answer, but the empty warehouses, the underground facility, the fact that he’d never heard of the place, it wasn’t adding up.  But whether or not Carla believed what she was telling them, he couldn’t tell. And what did it have to do with the outbreak? 

“How long...”

“Shhh,” she hissed, ear pressed to a windowless door at the end of the corridor.  “I can hear movement.”

Alex and Micah drew their pistols immediately.  Carla pulled the door open quickly and aimed her gun into the next room.  Someone screamed.

“Mrs Heaton?”

Carla lowered her gun and stepped through the door.  Feeling fairly certain they weren’t about to be attacked or bitten, Alex followed, with Micah bringing up the rear.

The large room they entered was obviously an employee lounge, furnished with tables and chairs, a small kitchen area, and several sofas.  A set of glass double doors on the opposite side of the room led into another wide corridor.

Five people were in the room, three men and two women.  Four of them were wearing lab coats.  The only one who wasn’t, one of the men, wore a security guard’s uniform and carried a pistol in a waist holster. 

“Is Phil here?” Carla said.

The little group exchanged nervous glances.  For the first time since she’d arrived, Carla lost her cool.

“Is my husband here?”
she screamed. 
“Tell me!”

One of the women stepped forward, a young brunette with red rimmed glasses and a ponytail.  She touched Carla’s upper arm.  “He’s here, Carla.  I’ll take you to him.”

Carla took a breath and nodded.  “Thank you, Hannah.”

The others in the room eyed Alex and Micah suspiciously, but no-one said anything, and with nowhere else to go they followed Carla and the brunette through the glass doors. 

A long corridor stretched out ahead of them, the walls on either side glazed from waist height up.  Through the windows Alex could see rooms with long, white, Formica topped tables covered with medical equipment and machines.  It was definitely an underground laboratory, which was almost as unbelievable as a secret laboratory.  Making their way through the facility, Alex felt slightly surreal.

Ahead of them, Carla strode purposely while Hannah, who was at least five inches shorter, was almost jogging to keep up.  Alex’s eyes dropped to her feet.  She was dressed in a white blouse with a black pencil skirt that came to just above the knee, all very professional looking, but on her feet she wore black canvas shoes with red laces and little red flowers printed all over, the rubber soles squeaking on the smooth, off-white floor as she hurried along.

It was cute in a geeky kind of way.

Every so often she would glance back at them with a slight frown on her face, as if she wanted to ask them who they were.  But then she’d look at Carla beside her and return her attention to the way ahead.

After traversing two corridors, they came to a set of double doors with a keypad and card swipe on the adjoining wall.  The doors were heavy, metal, tough-looking.  They were doors that said, “If you don’t belong here, go away or we will hurt you.” 

One of them was propped open with a chair.

Hannah led them through without a word.

The further they got into the facility, the more apprehensive Alex became.  The rooms they passed now, as well as medical equipment, included large metal tables equipped with metal restraints.  Large, round lights, the kind Alex had seen on TV in hospital drama operating rooms, hung from the ceilings over the tables, or were attached to tall, moveable stands.  He saw a tray covered with what looked like surgical instruments, but there was no sign of any gas cylinders that could have contained anaesthetic or oxygen. 

Finally, they reached a solid metal door. 

The smell of eaters permeated the air here, both the originals and the new strain.  Alex drew his gun, immediately on alert.

“It’s alright, you won’t need that,” Hannah said.

“I’m sure you’re right,” he replied.  He kept it ready anyway.

Through the door was a large, square room.  The wall was lined with a series of six feet square cells, fronted with clear acrylic. 

Occupying several of the cells were live eaters.

It all became clear. 

The tables with the metal restraints, the surgical instruments with no anaesthetic.  Everything was for working on eaters.  

A rack on one wall contained a selection of tools Alex recognised from the early days of Meir’s, produced for eater restraint and control.  He didn’t know they were still in use, at least in the UK.  Most of them had been denounced as inhumane, even for Meir’s victims.

An anguished cry wrenched from Carla’s lips as she ran across the room towards one of the cells.  The eater inside was a tall, dark-haired man somewhere in his forties.  He was wearing a lab coat.  If not for the moan he let out, he could almost have passed for normal.

Carla reached the cell and placed her hands on the plastic surface.  The eater pushed his face against the other side, trying to reach her. 

“Phil,” she sobbed.  “No.” 

Micah turned away and walked from the room.  After a few seconds, Alex followed.  She didn’t need two people she’d only just met intruding on her grief.

Hannah was in the corridor outside, holding her glasses in one hand while she used her sleeve to wipe her eyes. 

She gave a small smile as they approached.  “Are you friends of Carla’s?”

“No, we just met her coming in,” Alex said.  “I’m Alex, this is Micah.”

“Hannah,” she said.  “So what are you doing here?  Are you looking for relatives, like Carla?”  She focused on Micah.  “Oh, are you Patty’s brother?  You kind of look like her, a bit.  Not a lot, but around the eyes.  And maybe the cheekbones.  But not the nose.  Patty’s nose is... well, you’ve seen it.  Not that it’s a bad nose, just... unusual.  I’m really sorry, but I don’t know where she is.”

“No,” Alex said, taking advantage of the gap as Hannah took a breath.  “He’s not... we’re not... actually, we were looking for this place.”

“We came to find out if what’s going on out there has anything to do with what you’ve been doing in here,” Micah said, a little harshly, in Alex’s opinion.

“Oh.”  Hannah looked at the floor.  “None of us knew what they were doing.”

“What who were doing?” Micah said.

“I’m just a virologist,” she said.  “I work in the main lab.  Or what I thought was the main lab.  Now, I’m not so sure.”

“Main lab?” Alex said.

“Beyond those doors we came through, with the chair.  You know the ones?”  She stopped, waiting for them to acknowledge that they did indeed know which doors she was talking about.  They both nodded.  “Well, that’s where I work.  We’re working to create a better cure that will be effective on more people, as well as a way to treat those who’ve already turned.  We’re trying to help people.”  She looked through the window into the lab next to her.  “We didn’t know what went on back here.  We were just told it was nothing bad, but was top secret and the funding for our work came from what they were doing here so we shouldn’t rock the boat.  Well, they never said that specifically, but we all got the feeling it was implied.  When we found out...” She shook her head.  “We didn’t know they were using live eaters.  I’m not even sure what they were doing to them.  All the information is on the computers here, but we don’t have the passwords.  None of us who are left worked back here.”

Alex was relieved to hear she didn’t have anything to do with whatever was going on in the labs.  Wherever he was going to direct his anger, he didn’t want it to be at her.  “Where is everyone else?” he said.

“Some didn’t come in the first day.  Most of them left when we realised how bad things were, to find their families.  I live alone, so I had no-one to go back for, and I thought maybe we could help somehow.  Then Frank turned and bit Phil.  We didn’t even know he was infected.  He could have killed us all.  Phil saved us.” 

She stopped and looked down, sniffing.  Alex dug in his jacket pocket for a clean tissue and handed to her.  She smiled and dabbed at her eyes.

“Thank you.  The five of us left have been trying to find out what they were doing so that maybe we can do something to help.”

“So the outbreak started here?” 

“In a way, yes.  We found blood in one of the cells, uninfected blood.  From what we can tell, one of the people who worked here was bitten, didn’t tell anyone, probably went home and turned and it started from there.”

Alex remembered the map on which Parker had been marking down the reports of eaters, how the infection seemed to be spreading from a point to the north west of the city.  It was probably where the infected man or woman lived.  Or as far as they got before they turned. 

“But this strain is different,” he said.

Hannah nodded.  “They must have been working on a mutated strain, although why they would do that I have no idea.  We were supposed to be curing Meir’s, not making it worse.”

“Did my husband work back here?”

All three of them turned at the sound of Carla’s voice.  She was standing in the doorway to the room of eater cells, her eyes red and puffy.

Hannah looked down.  “Yes.”

Carla took a breath and lifted her chin.  “Take me to his computer.”

Hannah went to fetch the others while Carla got to work at her husband’s workstation.  It took her two minutes to figure out the password, at which point the overly excited scientists descended on it like children around a birthday cake. 

When it became obvious they were extraneous to proceedings, Alex and Micah retreated to the employee lounge.

“So,” Alex said, “a secret laboratory within a legitimate laboratory buried underground.”

“Kind of makes the merely secret laboratory seem a bit mundane, doesn’t it?” Micah replied.  He stretched out on one of the couches and made a face, squirming in discomfort.  “I miss your sofa.”

“At least we know why this place is underground,” Alex said.

“Live eaters,” Micah said.  “They couldn’t make it secure enough.”

They sat in silence for a while.  Alex leaned his head back against the cushions of the sofa, his eyes drifting closed.

“How do you do it?”

Alex opened his eyes again and looked over to see him staring at the ceiling.  “How do I do what?”

“How do you not let what we’ve done the past few days bother you?”  He drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly.  “I tried to keep count, at the beginning, of the number of eaters I was killing.  But I couldn’t keep up.  There’ve been so many.  Those were human beings, with people who loved them, just like Phil back there.  I just...” He rubbed his hand across his face. “I don’t know how much more of it I can take.”

Alex closed his eyes again.  “It does bother me.  Every single one I’ve killed bothers me.  The only way I can deal with it is to keep reminding myself that the people they were are gone, as good as dead.”  He was silent for a few moments.  “When I turned, I lost who I was.  I woke up a month later with no memory of what had happened to me.  Did you know they have video cameras in the rooms where Meir’s victims are treated?  And they give you the choice to see yourself as you were when you were turned.  It took me five months to get up the courage to watch my video.  And what I saw wasn’t me.  It looked like me, but the thing chained to that bed, surrounded by bars, devouring raw human flesh, that wasn’t me.  That was a living nightmare.” 

He’d destroyed the disc as soon as he’d watched it, but even now, three and a half years later, he could still remember the mindless, ravenous monster with his face. 

“If it had been different, if I hadn’t been treated, I wouldn’t have wanted to live the rest of my life like that.  I would have wanted someone to end it for me.  So that’s what I remember, and I tell myself that every eater I kill is one more person released from that nightmare.”

Micah was quiet for a while, before saying, “I understand.”

For some reason, maybe the way he said it, Alex knew he really did.

. . .

At some point, Alex drifted into sleep.  He was only woken when Hannah returned to the room and started the kettle boiling.  He opened his eyes to see her leaning against the counter, nibbling on a biscuit.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.  Would you like some coffee?” she said. His stomach growled audibly at the sight of the biscuit and she smiled.  It was a pretty smile.  “And something to eat?  We have all different kinds of biscuits, chocolate digestives, custard creams, bourbons, ginger nuts.  Lots of rich tea because, obviously, no-one ever eats them.  No Hobnobs though.  Someone really dropped the ball on that one.”

Alex laughed quietly as he stood and stretched, glancing at Micah who was lying on his back on the other sofa, snoring softly.  “I’d love coffee and a chocolate digestive, thanks.  But how are you for food here?  Have you been able to go out for supplies?”

She took a packet from the counter behind her and held it out for him to take a biscuit.  “Oh, don’t worry about that.  We’ve got enough here to last months.  A couple of days ago we found a whole storage room stuffed with everything we could possibly need, except Hobnobs.”  She frowned.  “Apparently, someone was prepared for this eventuality.”

The kettle clicked off and Hannah stuffed the remainder of her digestive into her mouth before taking three mugs from a shelf and opening a jar of instant coffee.

Alex was beginning to think nothing about the outbreak was accidental.  A thought came to him, did someone release the virus on purpose?  He shook his head, unwilling to believe, without proof, that anyone could do something so utterly callous.

“Is that coffee?”

He looked over at Micah, who was rubbing his eyes as he sat up. 

He winced and pressed a hand to his back.  “You need some better furniture,” he said. 

Hannah glanced at him and smiled.  “Believe me, I know.  Sugar?” 

They took seats around one of the round, white tables to drink.

“How’s it going with Phil’s computer?” Micah said around a mouthful of custard cream.

Hannah’s expression darkened.  “From what we’ve got so far, although this place, at least the bit we worked in, is government run, it was built and maintained by Omnav.  What we were doing here to find a cure, those were the official reports the government got and that’s what they saw during inspections.  But in the other section, things seem to have been controlled purely by Omnav itself.”

“They hid a whole research laboratory under the government’s noses?” Alex said, not quite believing it would be possible.

“They hid it under our noses, and we worked here.”  Hannah stared into her coffee.  “I can’t believe we didn’t know what was going on.  I mean, we knew
something
was, but I just can’t believe I didn’t...”  She sighed, shaking her head.  “I’m so
naive
.”

Alex felt guilty.  He hadn’t meant it as an accusation.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean that it was your fault...”

“No, I believed what I was told.  I’ll never do that again.”

“So what have they been doing?” Micah said.

She sat back and stared at the door leading, eventually, to the restricted part of the facility.  “They’ve been turning the Meir’s virus into a weapon.”

During the few seconds of silence that followed, Alex had a mini mental meltdown. 

“There were two aspects to what they were trying to achieve,” she continued.  “First, they seemed to be creating a virus that could decimate a population.  They’d managed to speed up the time it took to turn people, which you’ve seen, making it close to impossible to fight.  Whoever used it could just release the virus, then sit back and let it wipe out everyone.  From the data, they were also trying to speed up the eaters’ metabolism even further so that after infection they would all starve within a couple of weeks, but it didn’t look like they’d succeeded yet.”  She stopped and Alex saw her shiver.  “The second thing they were doing was using the disease to create eater soldiers.”

Micah almost choked on his coffee.  “They
what?
”

“An army of super strong soldiers who can’t feel pain and feast on the other side,” Alex said.  “They’d be unstoppable.  The psychological impact alone would probably send any opposing army running.”

“But how could they control them?” Micah said.

“Pheromones,” Alex replied.  It suddenly all made sense.

Hannah looked at him in surprise.  “How did you know that?”

“I can smell them,” he said.  “And we’ve seen the eaters acting together.”

“Together?  They’re already organising themselves?” She stood and began pacing, not looking at them as she continued to talk.  Alex wasn’t sure she was even speaking to them anymore.  “I didn’t realise they were that far along.  Humans already produce pheromones, so it was a matter of ramping up that ability.  It looked like they were splicing termite DNA into the virus to create the instinct to gather and work as a unit.  Normally, that wouldn’t work, but the Meir’s virus already alters behaviour, so the mechanism was already there.  It’s taken years for them to get this far, but it’s a hugely complex procedure.  How they’ve even done it this fast I have no idea.  No idea.”

“Then whoever was running the show would just have to release the right pheromone instruction and the eaters would do whatever they wanted,” Alex said.