Toxic (26 page)

“It must be swarming with L-Ds. I’m definitely not going down there,” the biologist declared.

Masters nodded.

“Possibly.”

“But why do they stay on the lower levels? They could try to come up and eat us.”

“It’s an old war ship,” the marine explained. “The ladders are too steep for them.”

Bruce let his opinion be known. “At the store in Cocoa Beach, I saw them climbing escalators by crawling.”

“Elaine and me, we haven’t crossed paths with any and we’ve gotten up to this point.”

The colonel indicated a point half way to the room.

“Without electricity, we won’t be able to open the laboratory door and we’ll be forced to leave the boat without Alison,” he continued, “and most importantly, without information on a possible cure. That’s why we came here.”

Hector didn’t back down. His black eyes shone at the idea of a quick departure.

“Are we sure that she’s hiding there?” Alva asked.

Annoyed, Elaine leaned on the table. “I want this to be very clear for all of you. I’m not leaving without her. If I need to, I’ll go myself to flick the switches.”

Her proposal didn’t provoke any reactions except that of Masters, who raised his eyebrows.

“Are you sure?”

As a response, Elaine walked up to the Colombian and stretched out her hand. “I’ll be needing your gun.”

Fifteen minutes later, she regretted her decision.

They had wished her good luck. Nobody had offered to accompany her or cover her, not even Masters, who had followed her each time that she threw herself into an ordeal. Alva had hugged her tight and then they closed the hatch. Plunged into the darkness, the oppressive fever took over her and her thoughts immediately. Alone, panting and with her heart banging against her chest, she faced the darkness, armed with a flashlight, a plan drawn by Masters and Hector’s gun.

“Fuck, it’s hot,” she whispered.

Sweat dripped down her sticky skin. Distant grunts welcomed her annoyed thoughts. They remained vague, as if the infected were blocked or trapped in one part of the ship. In that case, she told herself, why had they left?

Going down the ladders revealed itself to be more dangerous than going up them. She almost fell several times. She let the gun and the electric flashlight fall, and luckily they landed close by. The beam of light on the metallic floor allowed her to recover them easily.

She mumbled some swear words and got back on her way.

The more time that went by, the more Hector asked himself why he followed these people. After all, he continued to brood, he had saved them from death and left them at the port. But they always dragged along in his wake, like leeches stuck to his skin. Even worse, he didn’t have control over them. The soldier and the nurse had joined forces to lead the little troop. The young guy swung from one person’s side to another. Of course, there was Alva. The beauty balanced on her feet right in front of him. She leaned over the wheelhouse railing, revealing her never-ending legs.

The ex-junkie turned around and her full lips fluttered. He smiled at her instinctively, without even thinking about it, simply because she was a beautiful woman and in this upside-down world, he didn’t see anything else to fix his gaze on. She reminded him of a flower barely closed on a dead tree.

“I think there’s some sort of hold. Did you notice the large tarp covering it?”

“
Sí
, we could go check it out. We’ll most likely find slaves to free or boxes of supplies,” he joked.

Alva took him at his word.

They took the rusty ladder that led to the platform below them. On the ground, they tread upon the empty space which was destined for an array of guns or a radar system. The ship had been stripped of its weapons and parked in the corner of a naval base well before the invasion, awaiting its future dismantling. On the starboard side, a passage descended directly onto the front deck.

When she got to the last rung, Alva froze. Hector also heard the muffled grunts. He searched for the grip of his gun mechanically and then remembered that he had lent it to the nurse.

“Is that what I think it is?”

The hands of the singer closed once again on the safety railing, he remarked. He put his hands on the diva’s shoulders, not without hesitation. She didn’t push him away.

“If they’re trapped in the hold, there’s no risk.”

She kept calm. As he caressed the silky skin, his heart ascended the Andes. He damned the sweat which was dripping down his forehead. The salt stung his eyes which he blinked constantly, but he refused to wipe his face. Instead, his fingers slid down her side, stopping at her thighs.

“Let’s go,” Alva decided, moving ahead suddenly.

They clearly heard the grunts as they approached. A manual mechanism allowed them to roll up the cover. Hector started to turn the handle, removing all doubts as to what was hidden beneath it. Leaning over, they made out shapes in the darkness. Not exactly vertical, the sun’s rays lit up one side of the wall without reaching the floor.

“What’s that?” Alva pointed.

In front of them, a crane with a folded arm sustained a plateau whose far end, once lowered, would rest at the bottom of the hold.

“I think it’s better not to send it down.”

Bit by bit, the hold lit up. The yellow light bulbs installed on the edge shone a harsh light over the macabre spectacle. Dozens of infected were wandering around in the middle of a floor strewn with corpses. It was hard to tell if they came from humans or animals. The hot stench of rotting meat escaped from the gaping opening. Alva put her hands to her mouth. Her chest rose. Not able to stand the smell, she stepped aside to vomit. The creatures shuffled along above morsels of flesh transformed into a repugnant stew by the heat inside. The intolerable odor made the trafficker scowl in disgust.

“
¡Madre de Dios!
”

Master and Bruce showed up with the good news.

“Elaine succeeded,” the latter chuckled, before going very pale.

Overcome by nausea, he swore. “Son of a fucking bitch, that smells like death!”

The biologist went up to Alva, who was clutching her stomach. In turn, he doubled over behind a capstan. The colonel went up to the edge of the pit. He didn’t seem disturbed by the borderline intolerable stench. The litany of whines went down to the depths of hell. Below them, the infected seemed to be indifferent to what was happening above their heads. They continued to wander around inside the furnace, trapped between four metal ramparts.

“Are they all down there?”

“
No sé
,” the Colombian responded.

“OK, we’ll make do. Now that the electricity is back on board, we can get to the lab.”

Elaine was waiting for them at the entrance, her back to the wall. She told them that she hadn’t run into any L-Ds, as the biologist liked to call them. That was one less thing to worry about.

Upon arriving, Masters busied himself with the door’s covering, which, once removed, revealed a mechanical system. It didn’t have any electronic parts, but it required an electric feed. Once it was turned on, the clicks announced that it was unlocking and the colonel asked for help to move the panel. Hector and Bruce cooperated. The door squeaked and then opened.

Hector’s face contorted into the stretched features of a clown, surprised and stunned at the same time, with a sort of grimace deforming his lips. Alva kept her mouth closed, as still as a statue, as if someone had pressed the pause button on her remote. Dew kept calm and looked either serene or indifferent. Elaine frowned and squinted her eyes without believing what she saw.

“So, you succeeded.”

Alison ran towards Elaine’s arms as the latter bent down to embrace her. However, she didn’t manage to look away from the inside of the lab. Masters crossed the threshold first. She took Alison by the hand and then went in after the soldier. A dozen cylinders contained suspended bodies, in more or less advanced stages of decomposition, emaciated like skeletons. The girl pulled the nurse towards a neighboring shelf.

“Come on!”

She brought her to the end of the line of transparent coffins. The last one held a woman wearing a torn uniform. She was missing her left eye and her half-opened jaw hung strangely to the side. Her fingers no longer had nails.

“You see, dad didn’t lie, she’s on board.”

Alison got down on her knees beside the sarcophagus. Her dirty hands slid along the glass. “She’s here!”

“Who are you talking about? Who’s that inside?”

“My mom.”

After a quick exploration, their empty stomachs in knots, they gathered around the landing of the room of horrors, as Bruce called it. The dilapidated material covered the neighboring tables ominously. The microscopes looked like they had come out of museums and odds and ends, tubes and vials were spread across several meters of dusty shelves. Masters paused at a strange apparatus with lights on a copper wire circuit and components fixed onto a piece of wood.

“An electromechanical machine,” Bruce clarified.

“Immune to EMPs?”

“Yes, but it carries out simple operations only. These types work the old fashioned way,” he declared, wielding a slide rule and booklets filled with equations.

“Do you think they were looking for the cure?”

“It looks like it to me. The girl’s father may have been right.”

“Mom also worked on the medicine,” Alison affirmed. “Dad told me.”

Elaine decided to take Alison away from the laboratory. She stopped beside a cabinet with glass doors. It held racks of vials arranged in compartments. The colored contents varied from blue to green. She pushed Alison in front of her.

“This isn’t a good place for you to be.”

The girl displayed a mental strength that could handle anything and that could seem surprising for a girl her age. She reacted with aloofness by denying the evidence of her parents’ death. She likely imagined that a few days later, she would find them healthy and they would go back to their former life. The existence of a cure sustained her illusion of a return back to normal. Children possessed this ability to stick to their craziest dreams. As long as the hope remained, she wouldn’t crack. She had promised her dad. Elaine felt incapable of such strength of character. She held Alison to her, without finding the courage to tell her the truth.

The next meeting was held in the hallway, around the middle of the afternoon.

One by one, each person expressed their opinion on the discovery of the laboratory.

Hector once again advocated for a rapid departure. According to him, they couldn’t do anything more than the experts who had either deserted or ended up in the hold.

“This boat stinks of death,” Alva declared. “You’d think we were in a nasty old hospital from the last century. This place is giving me a headache.”

As for Bruce, the situation was more subtle. The group’s scientist wanted to explore the question. “Maybe they found something, like a cure,” he ventured cautiously.

The Colombian dampened his enthusiasm. “
Sí pero
why not have given it to the L-Ds in that case? Instead, they got out of here.”

He made an irrefutable point, but he remained the minority. Once again, the balance of power leaned in favor of the nurse and soldier. The trafficker went out on the deck to have a smoke, joined a little while later by the singer.

“These poor people…” she started. “Stress will be the end of me if I don’t find anything to smoke.”

The Colombian smiled and handed her his pack. She breathed in to inhale the first puff, which raised her chest emphasized by her deep cleavage. Hector forced himself not to look, his eyes fixed on the horizon.

She turned towards him, looking suspicions.

“Did I dream just now or were you about to feel me up?”

He almost strangled swallowing his puff.

“
¿
En serio
?
What?”

“At the bottom of the stairs, before discovering the infected, your hand on my hips. Do you think I didn’t feel anything? »

“I…”

Taken by surprise, the words were stuck in his throat. She gratified him with an alarming story.

“I lost my virginity with the high school dealer. We smoked a rank type of weed that he said came from Mexico and we loved it. One night, we took refuge in his truck to escape from our parents. He asked me what I would do if the end of the world happened and there was nothing left but us two and a bar of hash.”

Before he could open his mouth, she continued her rant.

“I told him that we’d smoke it and fuck until the last second. In the end, I’ve only got this shitty smoke. I dream of a line of coke and getting fucked up. After all, it’s the end of the world, right?”

At that moment, Hector hesitated. Was she joking or was she serious?

J
ave finished preparing himself for his assault on Site B. He adjusted his nasal filters just as the door signaled the arrival of a visitor. He ordered it to open, and to his surprise, Naakrit’s lieutenant was on the other side. Kjet greeted him with a slight inclination of his chest.