Pathogen: Ch. 15

The closer it got to sunset, the more anxious Marnie got. She had no idea whose idea it was to break into the army base after dark. Surely they could do the same thing during the day. In fact, a daytime operation would probably be less conspicuous in hindsight. She chalked it up to Julian watching too many heist movies. Maybe Bianca had seen too many as well, which was why Marnie had been outvoted so quickly.

At seven p.m. sharp, Bianca parked her SUV a block away from the base. Marnie had to admit she looked very professional, decked out head to toe in black with a wireless headset and two laptops ready to go. Once everything was fired up, she pulled a pair of earbuds from her pocket, handing one to Julian and the other to Marnie.

"Okay: according to these blueprints, most of their files are stored in the east wing records room," she said. "Julian, that'll be your job. Pistol will be heading to the research lab in sub-basement three. If there is an antidote, that's where they'll keep it. I'll run point from here."

Marnie looked at the images on the laptops dubiously. "How do you know all this stuff?" she asked. "And where the hell did you get those maps?! I thought they were classified!"

Bianca bit her lip, like she wasn't sure she should answer. "I know a guy," she finally said. "Anyway, it's not important. Are there any other questions that have to do with the mission?"

Julian raised his hand with a frown. "Uh, yeah: why does Pistol get to infiltrate a super cool, super-secret government lab and I get stuck with a bunch of musty, dusty records? It doesn't seem fair."

Without warning, Bianca took off her shoe and swatted Julian on the arm with it. "Because grunts like you aren't allowed in the lab!" she hissed. "The only people who can get in there are officers, duh!" She looked over at Marnie again, her eyes scary intense. "You've got your mom's access codes memorized, right?"

"Yeah... I mean, I guess so," Marnie said, squirming in her seat. "They change 'em pretty regularly, though, so-"

"Just try to think like your mom," Bianca advised. "You can do this, Pistol..." she took Marnie's hand and Julian's then, squeezing them both, "...we can all do this. Trevvie is counting on us, and so is the world!"

Marnie glanced behind her over the back seat, where their zombified friend was snoozing peacefully in the trunk. It made sense why they had to bring him along - as he couldn't stay by himself at Bianca's house - but Marnie still felt uneasy about it. Hell, she felt uneasy about everything tonight. There were so many things that could go wrong, it made her want to barf. Every instinct was telling her to sucker-punch Bianca and Julian in the face and run, but it was way too late for that. Marnie was in too deep, and there was no turning back now.

Before she lost her nerve completely, Marnie stepped out of the SUV onto the curb, wobbling on her high heels for a second, then adjusted her tie with a heavy exhale. Her skin prickled like gooseflesh under her borrowed uniform, but she resisted the urge to chafe her arms against the chilly night air. The atmosphere was so still; so quiet. Almost like the universe was holding its breath in nervous anticipation for what they were about to do. Marnie shrugged off the cold - as well as her nerves - to the best of her ability, squaring her shoulders and holding her head up high as she tottered up the street to the base's front gates with Julian on her heels.

The guard on duty let them through without any trouble, barely glimpsing at the military ID card Marnie showed him. Either Marnie resembled her mother a lot more than she realized, or somebody had been doing way too many double shifts with not enough coffee breaks in between. Deciding not to look a gift horse in the mouth, she and Julian hurried through the gates, acting like they belonged there to avoid as much suspicion as possible.

"Come in, Baby Eagle: do you read me?"

Bianca's whispered voice filled her ear so suddenly, it made Marnie leap out of her skin. For a second, she'd forgotten she was wearing her friend's earbud. Based on the soft yelp Julian let out and the startled jig he performed, so had he.

"Baby Eagle?" Marnie muttered. "What kind of lame codename is that?"

"Hey, I'm not the one who came up with them, ok?" Bianca snipped. "If you don't like it, take it up with Jul - I mean, 'Papa Condor'."

"I thought it was cool," Julian muttered, scratching his cartilage to hide the motion of adjusting his earpiece. "We read you loud and clear, Mama Bird. Everything looking okay from the nest?"

"So far, so good," Bianca reported, punctuating her sentence with a sigh. "Everything out here is clear and quiet... but don't dawdle. In and out, quick and clean: just like we planned. Mama Bird, over and out."

Once they'd made it into the base's main building, Marnie finally had to concede that an after-hours break-in had some merit. The halls were practically empty. After walking from one end to the other, they only met one other person, but she was too busy thumbing through her armload of files to even give them a second glance. With every step, Marnie gained a little more confidence that this harebrained stunt could actually work. She played her part beautifully, mirroring every stride, micro-expression and head movement on Lt. Nightingale. It all fell apart in an instant, though, when they reached the record's room and Julian grabbed Marnie's hand without warning.

"Looks like we split up from here," he said, giving her fingers a nervous squeeze. "Meet you back at the car in half an hour?"

Marnie nodded, wetting her parched lips anxiously. "Half an hour," she agreed. "Please be careful, Jules... and don't do anything stupid. Almost everyone in this place carries a gun, and they know how to use 'em."

Julian echoed her nod with a small nervous gulp, smoothing a hand over his gelled locks before zipping into the record's room. In a split second, Marnie was alone in that dimly lit, khaki-colored hallway. It surprised her how afraid she was without Julian by her side, but she quickly tried to suck it up and keep going. There wasn't time to be scared now; not while she still had a mission to complete.

Relying on the mental image of the map on Bianca's laptop and the occasional whispered directions in her ear, Marnie finally found what she was looking for: a single elevator at the bottom of the basement stairwell, leading further down to the facility's lowest subterranean levels. Her hands were trembling so badly, she could barely punch in Lt. Nightingale's access code into the keypad beside it. By nothing short of a miracle, the code still worked, and with a shrill beep and a whoosh, the elevator doors opened.

"Okay," Marnie puffed, dabbing the sweat off her brow with the cuff of her sleeve, "I'm in. Which floor again, Mama Bird?"

"Sub...ree," Bianca answered, her voice choppy and heavily muffled with static through the earbud. "Signal...retty bad down th...areful, Baby E... ...ou read m...?"

"What?" Marnie hissed, pressing the earbud harder into her auditory canal. "Mama Bird? Bianca!! I can't hear you! Say that again?!"

If Bianca answered, Marnie couldn't hear her. Seconds later, the earbud let out a soft tone. "Call disconnected," a computerized female voice crisply announced, earning a frustrated groan from Marnie. She popped out the earbud and stuffed it in her pocket, defeated, then turned her gaze to the button panel in front of her. Luckily, there were only three subbasements to choose from, and she was sixty-five percent sure Bianca had said "three" in between all that interference. Without giving herself further time for self-doubt, Marnie slapped the button and held her breath, bracing as the elevator slowly sank into the earth.

She didn't know what to expect from a secret, underground government lab, but Marnie was honestly a little underwhelmed when the elevator opened again. It didn't look anything at all like the mad science labs she'd seen in movies, with bubbling flasks and Tesla coils everywhere. The low-ceilinged room before her looked more like a clinic; outfitted with a smattering of neatly arranged, reasonably comfy chairs on one side, and a wide desk behind a glass wall on the other. For a second, Marnie panicked, thinking she'd picked the wrong floor. When she saw the crisp, black letters on the door leading to the desk - which read "Alpha Lab" - she figured she had to be in the right place.

All the chairs and desk were vacant, so Marnie hurried as fast as she could through the door. It was unlocked, but what it led to was not what she expected. She thought she'd find a narrow hallway leading to a handful of exam rooms, like any average doctor's office. The hallway was there, but the metal walls on either side were all lined by huge picture windows. The heavy steel doors in between the windows were all fixed with electronic locks and biometric scanners, each labeled with a number from one to ten. When Marnie peeked through one of the windows out of curiosity, she was almost glad to see that the room beyond it was empty. She had no idea what it might be used for, as it only contained a single padded chair in the center of the room. After eyeing the straps on it, and the viscous red fluid dripping from them that looked an awful lot like blood, Marnie decided she didn't want to know.

When she remembered what she was there for, Marnie pulled out her phone. If she couldn't find the antidote, she could at least gather a little evidence to figure out how Trevor had been made into a zombie. Marnie had just hit the record button in her camera app when a primal scream from the end of the hall made her hair stand on end, grabbing her attention completely. The logical part of her brain told her to stay the hell away from whatever had made it; the rest of her, unfortunately, had no choice but to follow her feet, as she was drawn to it instinctively like a moth to a bug zapper. She eventually found herself looking through the window into room 9: the only exam room that had an occupant. What she saw, however, would haunt her forever.

A cadet - not much older than her - was strapped to the padded chair inside it. Just like Zombie Trevor, his skin was dull and tinged with blue, while a thick film clouded his sunken eyes. Bright red foam bubbled at the corners of his lips as he gnashed his teeth, snapping and snarling at anything that came near. Marnie felt sorry for the man and woman in the room with him, their once crisp white lab coats torn and flecked with blood as they probed at the cadet cautiously with needles and long cotton swabs. Whatever samples they were trying to take, though, it didn't seem like they were having much success.

An older man watched the chaos from behind a blast shield on the far side of the room, his gaunt, pock-marked face set in a deep scowl as he fidgeted with the colorful badges that covered half his chest. Marnie immediately figured him to be a general, based on the stripes on his sleeve and the steely cold look in his eyes most likely from decades of service to his country. He didn't even bat an eyelash at the flailing, screaming cadet before him, confirming that he had nothing but ice water in his veins.

"Sir, it's no use," the male scientist said, backing away from the cadet and smoothing his blond crew cut with a shaky hand. "We can't even touch him in this state! There's no way we can administer the antidote like this! Permission to terminate him, like the others. It's the most humane solution at this point."

"Permission denied," the general growled, folding his hands tightly behind his back. "Any wild dog can be trained, given enough incentive! Increase the voltage of his intracranial inhibitor another ten percent and try again!"

"Sir, we can't," the second scientist insisted, her brown eyes flashing with incredulity. "The inhibitor is already maxed out! If we crank it up any higher, we'll fry it, along with his cerebral cortex!"

"So what?!" the general barked. "Dead men don't feel pain! That's why we started this project to begin with! If the inhibitor fries, just shove another one into his brain! I gave you an order, Major, so do it!!"

"He may not feel pain, but it's still wrong!" the major argued. "Dead or not, sir, he's a human being... and if we destroy what little cognitive function he retained after death, he'll be nothing but a vegetable! Is that really what you want?!"

"What I want is the results you eggheads promised me!" the general shot back. "An army of undead soldiers: unstoppable, unkillable, insatiable, and completely under my control! That was the whole point of Project Lazarus! Are you trying to tell me now, after all the work we've done, that you can't deliver that outcome?!"

"We can," the male scientist interrupted quickly, "there have been some... setbacks... but the formula does work! We can make Project Lazarus a success, General Hackett! All we need is a little more time to work the bugs out first and-"

"We don't have any more time, no thanks to you lab jockeys getting sloppy," General Hackett stepped out from behind the blast shield, glaring at the quivering scientist. "If you don't get that leak plugged and make sure the antidote works by sunrise, it'll be my ass on the line! Project Lazarus will be dead in the water, Lieutenant... and if I go down for it, I'm taking this entire lab down with me! Is that understood?!"

Both scientists snapped to, barking, "Yes, sir," in unison, although neither looked like their heart was in it. Marnie lowered her phone and backed away from the window, realizing she had less time than she thought to find where they were keeping that antidote. Although, now that she knew it was untested, she doubted it was even worth finding it at all. She backpedaled so fast, she accidentally tripped over her own heels, smacking into the wall behind her before she could catch her balance again. Immediately, the general and scientists snapped their heads toward her... which was when Marnie learned that the glass was not a two-way mirror like she assumed.

"Who the hell are you?!" General Hackett roared, squinting through the glass angrily. "Is that a camera?! Major, sound the alarm: we have an intruder! Code Red! I repeat: Code Red!!"