Rippled (17 page)

“The other shifters? We’ll have them ready to go. One of my men stands guard near the control room. He can unlock every door all at once should we need him to. It’s meant as a last resort in case of a fire or some unseen attack, but we can use it for this as well. Just meet us in the front yard when you’re ready. No matter what happens, you leave tonight.”

I glanced up at the sky. It was close to evening already, and who knew how long it would take us to destroy every last vial of the virus.
We’ll have to be quick.
It wouldn’t be any different from the last handful of days. Brian had asked me to shift time and time again, decreasing the time between shifts whenever we could. I had control over them, but I’d be lying if I said the whole process wasn’t exhausting. Put that on top of not sleeping much at all and I was about ready to fall back into bed.

“Here.” Darien stopped halfway across the yard. “Take these with you. I won’t need them, and even if I did, I could ask to borrow a set from my men.” He handed his key card and a large ring of old keys over to Brian. “Good luck.”

“Thank you.” Brian shoved the keys in his pocket. “I have a feeling we’re going to need it.”

Darien excused himself and moved into position. We had to make it look as if nothing had changed. There were cameras on the fence lines, but Darien had made sure to have those disabled hours ago. Malcom would probably notice the error before lights-out, so we had a few hours to spare before he could possibly see what we were doing.

Brian squeezed my hand. “Come on. The clinic’s this way.”

Like I don’t already know.

Chapter Sixteen

Krista

The lab wasn’t as hard to find as I expected. Once we had reached section C, there was a locked stairwell that apparently not even Brian had known about. Fortunately for us, most of the nurses were off having dinner, and as promised, every single one of the guards we passed didn’t slow us down.
Darien’s men.
The ones who were loyal to him instead of Malcom. In fact, most of them either smiled or bowed their head. It was amazing to think how long this could’ve gone on, or how difficult this would’ve been if Darien hadn’t relieved the other guards of their posts.

Still, being back in this building made my skin crawl. I had no cravings for the drugs. No twinges of pain or nausea. But the concrete walls, the dim lighting and the stench of things that were way too sterile made my muscles tense up just from the thought of being tied down and injected with numerous drugs.

Brian stopped in front of a metal door once we reached the bottom of the stairwell. “According to Darien, this must be it. You don’t have to come in here, you know?”

I furrowed my brow. “Where else would I be?”

He dropped his gaze before looking back at me. “It could be a trigger. You’ve never been down here, but I bet they have a lot of the same instruments here as they do upstairs.”

“I was fine in the clinic.”

“You were drugged or at least not sober back then.”

I took a deep breath, then released it. “We’ve gotten this far. We can’t go back now. Darien’s counting on us.”

“No,” Brian corrected me, placing a hand on my cheek. “You’ve already done more than enough. This is my thing. I know what the virus looks like. You don’t have to be here, and you know you can find your way back just by asking one of the guards for help.”

I stared at the door and swallowed down my apprehension. “I’m not going anywhere.”

The determined look on my face must’ve been enough. Brian turned his back to me and unlocked the door before guiding me inside. The metal slab slammed shut behind us. I wasn’t the only one who jumped. We were so close
.
We couldn’t wuss out now.

Not when everyone else is depending on us.

I wasn’t sure how many of the other shifters Brian had told about this or even if they knew, but just having Darien and his men up there waiting on us was more than enough motivation for me. We couldn’t go back. If we did, we probably wouldn’t get another chance.

We’ve been prisoners long enough. Especially Brian, Darien and the other guards. They’ve been stuck here a lot longer than you have. It’s time everyone got to go back home.

Wherever that was.

You can’t go back.

It didn’t matter. Getting out of there was as good a way to start over as any. To have a normal life, though nothing was normal anymore.

“You coming?” Brian asked, pulling on my wrist. “You don’t have to.”

I shook my head. “It isn’t that.” I took a few steps forward. “I was just thinking about what’ll happen once we leave.”

“Oh, and what is that?” He led me down a hall to our left.

“Where we’ll go once we leave here.” My gaze fell on to the glass windows on either side of us, looking in at what was left of the old exam rooms.

“Well, don’t worry about that yet. We need to find the virus first.” Brian paused at a set of doors and read the plaque on the wall that said
Exam Room D.
“I think what we’re looking for will be in here.”

I looked up and down the length of the hall. “There must be something like twelve rooms down here. What makes you think it’s this one?”

“For starters, it’s bigger than the others we’ve passed so far. It also doesn’t have a table in it, not to mention that we have to start somewhere.”

I nodded. “I just hope this is the right one. We don’t have a lot of time—not to search every single one of these rooms.”

“How about this? If it isn’t in here, we can split up and try different rooms.”

I gave his question some thought. “You’d have to unlock all the doors first. That way it’d go faster.”

“I think they lock when they close.” He rubbed his forehead as he unlocked the door
.
“Okay, so it wasn’t the best of ideas.”

“It was. We just don’t have enough keys.”

“Or hands.”

I nodded at that. It would’ve been nice if we could’ve got a handful of guards down here with us to help, but Darien and his men had to stay in place. The less obvious this was, the better.

You could’ve used a second set of keys, though.

But I was pretty sure most of the guards didn’t have keys for down here. Hell, I didn’t even know how Darien had got his. He probably had the only copy.

The nurses might have one…

I heaved a sigh. The nurses were at dinner, and getting a key from one of them was probably just as impossible as it was our getting out of here with our lives if the company found out.

Searching one room at a time it is.

Once Brian had unlocked the double doors, we filed inside before they could close behind us. Lights flickered above us and barely gave enough light to see.

“How they hell do they see in this place?” Brian grumbled, fishing through a set of cabinets to our left.

I shrugged, then said, “They probably can find everything they need with their eyes closed. Either that, or they carry flashlights.”

Even in the little light, I could see Brian wince from the constant flickering. “Yeah, but you think they’d just change the damned bulbs!”

“Now, see, that would make sense, and I don’t know about you, but I have a feeling they aren’t all there.”

“Meaning Malcom.” Brian smirked. “In their defence, neither are we.”

“At least half of us are.” I furrowed my brow. “Where is Malcom anyway? He isn’t going to find us down here, is he?”

“Doubt it. If anything, he’ll be busy in his lab, which is upstairs. Here? He’s never even spoken to me about this place.”

“You think he knows?”

Brian shrugged. “It’s hard to say what he knows anymore. He used to be the voice of reason, but now…it almost seems as if he’s a different person. And it isn’t for whatever the DOD is paying him, either.” He rested his palms on a nearby counter.

The pit of my stomach loosened the slightest bit, but my relief did very little about the dim lighting. “I have a really dumb idea. How about one of us shifts and the other handles all the opposable-thumb shit? Then again, can snow leopards read?”

“Can you?”

Not sure if he was being serious or not, I said, “Yeah. Maybe not at an advanced level, but I can read.”

“Then you should be able to as a leopard as well. Remember, you keep your human mind, but when you shift, there’s bits of leopard in there as well.”

“Okay, so what job do you want? Holding crap, or reading stuff?”

“I’ll hold things.” He jingled the keys in my direction and unlocked the cabinet in front of us.

“Oh sure, hold that over my head.” I closed my eyes and focused, just as Brian had taught me, and within seconds, I was in my other skin. “Stupid keys.”

He grabbed a pile of charts from the cabinet and set them down in front of me. “See anything? The letters are hard to read without more light.”

I lowered my ears and studied the files. One was labelled
‘
Statistics and Values’, a second read ‘Relocation’ and yet a third just read ‘Subjects’
.

I glanced up at Brian. “Nothing we can use.” I watched him rifle through a set of new charts that were just as unimportant as the last. “Seeing as we’ll probably be out of here before morning, there’s something I’ve wanted to ask you about Darien.”

Brian shuffled the files and kept his head down. “And what’s that?”

“How did you two ever meet?” I flicked an ear. “I mean, was it on the grounds or before you got here?”

“Here, actually. Believe it or not, he was actually pretty shy when he first arrived.”

“Darien, shy?” I laughed. “You’re joking.”

“Not at all. Before you, he was quiet and reserved. Turns out coming here to watch after us freaks was his first big assignment. He didn’t want to mess it up.”

“So what happened?”

Brian stopped searching for a moment and raised his eyebrows at me.

“What happened to not screwing things up? He’s sided with the ‘bad guys’, hasn’t he?”

“He got smart, like the rest of us. He may have been new, but he wasn’t dumb, that’s for sure. And seeing as I knew the ins and outs of the virus, he latched onto me. At first I was put off by his insistence to know all things regarding the Ripples virus, but over time I realised it was mostly just Darien’s healthy curiosity. Any spare moment we had, we spent discussing the virus, Malcom, our history and such like that.”

“Sounds like a one-sided deal to me.”

“How so?” He held another chart in his hand for me to read.

I shook my head and he put that one down as well. “Well, you told him about the virus and Malcom, but what did he tell you?”

“A lot of things. He knew when certain things on the grounds would happen. Your injections, for example. That was all Darien and his men. He’s also been my ears for those I wasn’t there to witness.”

He grabbed another chart that wasn’t as thick as the others. “What about this?”

He opened it up for me to see. Inside were a series of papers, each one with a different name on it. My stomach twisted when he stopped thumbing through them and reached mine. I chewed at my lip as he opened it.

According to this little slip of paper, I took on the drug trial to get money for my father who had fallen ill. I also had two siblings somewhere in Oregon and a dog named Peppermut. I smiled at the odd name before reading further down the page. Closer to the bottom was a photo, which I assumed was me, or who I used to be before coming here. My hair had thinned since the picture had been taken—it didn’t look anything like me.

I frowned at a footnote at the bottom of the chart. “‘Memory serum administered before transport’? ‘Ill effects’?”

Brian peered at the notes, then opened another, nameless chart. “What about this one?”

“Subject X?” I skimmed the notes, paying close attention to the bit written at the very bottom. “‘Memory serum administered upon arrival. Mixed with the virus. Ill effects including death.’”

“Then that must mean—”

“It was the other woman,” I finished for him.

“The memory serum must’ve altered the virus when it was mixed in a single vial. That explains why your shift was a little different, and even more so why that woman died. Malcom was wiping memories.”

“But why?”

“If the DOD cut funding, I bet they also refused to support further testing. So…memory wiping meant he could keep testing, but what the hell? He couldn’t be that stupid, could he?”

“You tell me. You’ve known him longer. Honestly, it explains a lot—the memory serum, I mean. No wonder I can’t remember much of anything before coming here. That’s the memory I felt I was having at the clinic. It’s blocked.”

Brian set down the other woman’s chart, but held onto mine. “Want to keep it?”

I shook my mane, and with less regret than I expected, I said, “Burn it. We’re going to need new identities once we leave here anyway, aren’t we?”

He offered me a weak smile. “Yes.”

“Then it’d be a lot easier if I didn’t have one to begin with, wouldn’t you think?”

Brian frowned then nodded in agreement. “But you can’t completely forget your past. Even if you don’t read the rest of that file, your memories will come. They could slip out during a conversation or in your dreams. Burning the file won’t be enough.”

“What else can we do?”

“Nothing. It’s just a part of who you are.”

Brian replaced the files and pulled a case of vials from the cabinet. His eyes moved between the vials and the shelves he’d got them from before sweeping over the rest of the room. As far as furnishings went, there wasn’t much else in here. A handful of drawers, leather suits and gloves, but that was it. Whatever was in those cabinets was about the only thing we’d find.

“Are those the ones?” I asked, unable to read the label on the side of the vials.

Brian put one close to his face. “This is the right batch. I’m not sure if they have any of the older batches here or if they tossed them. Undesired results and all that.”

I gave the gold liquid a wary glance. “So that’s…the same stuff they used on me?”