Cruel World (37 page)

Quinn checked the sodden fields through the porch windows before they loaded the truck and popped the overhead door. He threw it up on its tracks and backed the truck out before closing the garage again. Alice had noticed the clothing on the floor and looked at him as he climbed back into the cab.

“Just felt wrong to leave the door open,” he said.

They rolled down the driveway and turned onto a county road that led to a paved highway heading north, each mile leaving Fort Dodge farther behind.

Chapter 29

Ground Zero

Quinn pulled the truck to a stop in the marina parking lot and looked around the mostly empty space.

They’d driven for four hours straight, taking highways and side roads away from the interstates that had become cluttered with more and more stalled or crashed vehicles the closer they got to Minneapolis. Closer to Genset’s headquarters.

“What are you doing?” Alice asked, sitting up in her seat. She’d drifted off the last twenty miles and only woken when he stopped the truck.

“This is where you guys get out,” Quinn said, not looking at her.

“What?”

“I can’t ask you to come with me to that building. I have no idea what I’ll find there.”

“You don’t have to ask; we’re coming with you.” Alice’s voice was ragged with sleep but hardening with each word.

“No. I’ll get one of these boats set up for you guys, and you’re going to get on it and take it out into deeper water and anchor. I’ll go to Genset and come back here when I’m finished.”

“Screw that noise. Look at me, Quinn,” Alice said. He did. “After what just happened back there, you want us to split up again?”

“That had nothing to do with this. That was beyond anyone’s control. But I’m choosing to go to that building. I need to know what my father was doing.”

“I understand that, but you’re going to have to get used to the idea of us coming with you.” She crossed her arms and stared at him, unblinking, impassive.

“I want to come with,” Ty said. “And so does Denver.” The dog let out rumbly woof. “See?”

Alice tipped her head to one side and raised her eyebrows.

“See?” she echoed.

“Damn it, this is not negotiable. Of all the things that happened to us, most of them weren’t avoidable, but this is. You don’t need to be put in harm’s way again. You need to be somewhere safe.”

“Like I said before, nowhere’s safe. The best thing we can do now is stick together.”

Quinn glared at her, fiddling with a loose string hanging from the steering wheel cover. “I never thought I’d hear you say that,” he said finally.

She shook her head and sighed, but smiled. “Me neither.”

Quinn looked out over the gray water lapping at the boats. He closed his eyes.

“Okay.”

~

They spent a half hour searching the marina for a boat that had adequate fuel and room for the three of them and the dog. They located a sleek, twenty-foot yacht at the farthest end of the marina that fit their needs. In the bottom living area below deck, he found the dried remains of a man in a bed, only his underwear and some fillings were left within the sheets. The keys to the boat were in a pair of pants lying on the floor, and he found a nine-millimeter pistol in the bedside drawer, its magazine a little over half full. After disposing of the remains, they brought their bag of food and blankets on board, and Quinn test-started the engine, its chugging rumble answering as soon as he turned the key.

“Why are we taking a boat from here?” Alice asked when they were finished and returning to the truck.

“I have a hunch that they don’t care much for water. We haven’t seen any swimming or crossing lakes anywhere. I think it might be safer traveling the river for a while.” His voice must have betrayed something because she watched him for a long time before looking away.

Genset headquarters was located in a business complex outside the city of Hastings, only a fifteen-minute drive from the marina. They consulted the smart phone’s map judging the best route to take before pulling away from the docks.

The streets they traveled on were empty. Water streamed along the gutters and dropped into grates, houses reflected their passing in dark windows, everything quiet. No one spoke and even Denver seemed to be waiting.

They turned into the business complex and spotted the Genset building at once. It was a high, two-story structure, its front plated with reflective glass that mirrored the ashen sky. They drove across the asphalt parking lot and stopped before the entrance. The genetic lab was surrounded by stretches of cleared land, several business buildings in the distance rising up from the ground like the heads of buried giants. Quinn surveyed the area and drove in a circle in the parking lot before stopping again before the door.

“Looks clear,” Alice said.

“That’s what worries me.”

“We definitely left that large herd behind. Even going full speed, it would take them another four hours or so to get here.”

“I know. But if this is ground zero, where are all the people that turned?”

“Maybe they migrated like the others we saw,” Alice offered, turning in her seat.

“Maybe.”

The rain had let up for a time when they were locating a boat, but now it fell again in steady layers. They waited for another five minutes without talking before Quinn opened his door.

“Maybe you guys should stay here, just in case,” he tried again.

“Maybe you should give up a lost cause when you see one,” Alice said, climbing out of the car.

The rain was even colder than before, and they rushed through it to the solid awning over the entrance. Several lights glowed within the building, and a card reader mounted to the side of the door blinked a red LED. Quinn dug in his pocket and brought out Harold Roman’s ID and slid it through the reader slot.

The door clicked open.

They stepped inside.

Quinn drew the pistol he’d taken from the boat and glanced around. They were in a high-ceilinged lobby. A dark waiting area sat to the right, magazines spread across a low table, padded chairs against the wall. To the left was an unmarked steel door painted the same color as the wall. Ahead was a long reception desk, business card holders, pamphlets, and pens adorning its top. Before the desk was a towering glass sculpture of a DNA strand, its round base filled with water. As Quinn stepped closer, he saw that it was a fountain, the double helixes drilled with holes for water to drip through.

Their footsteps echoed on the marble flooring as they approached the desk. To either side there were double doors leading farther into the building. The rectangular windows set within the doors were dark.

“One or two?” Alice asked.

Quinn moved past the desk and peered through the left door’s window. A hallway lay beyond, doors closed on both walls. But there was something on the floor and ceiling, something uneven and stretching the length of the hall where it disappeared into darkness. Quinn squinted, trying to discern what it was. He tried the door, but it was locked. When he looked for a card reader, he found none. There was only a standard lock set in the door’s handle.

He moved away from the entrance, watching the small window the entire time, waiting for movement to slide past it.

They closed in on the other set of doors. Just as he was about to swipe Roman’s card across the reader beside them, Ty paused, holding Denver back.

“Momma, I don’t like it here,” the boy whispered. Quinn and Alice turned to him. He looked so young in the dimly lit lobby, so small.

“I know you don’t, honey,” Alice said, shooting Quinn a look. There was something there and gone in her expression. Unease. He felt it too. The whole building gave off a chill as if the temperature had dropped below zero the moment they stepped through the doors. They shouldn’t be here.

Quinn faced the doors again and swiped the card.

The locks clicked open.

They pushed through the doors into a hallway twice the width of the first he’d seen. The same strange shadow grew on the ceilings and floors as well as the walls. At first he had the wild impression that roots from some gigantic tree had invaded the building, shoving tendrils further and further inside. The shapes were humped and irregular, their ends coming to rounded points, all heading toward the doors they entered through.

“What the hell is that?” Alice said.

“I don’t know.”

There were offices to either side, and at the very end of the corridor another door without a window waited. Quinn leaned into the first room to the right and slid his hand along the wall until it met a switch.

He flipped it up.

Light bloomed within the office, spreading part way down the hall.

Alice sucked in a breath.

The ‘roots’ were gnarled tangles of white growths, their surfaces pocked with spongy holes and sharp protrusions not unlike a coral reef. Quinn moved to the center of the hall and knelt beside a patch of the material. He reached out and was about to touch it when Alice spoke.

“Quinn, don’t.”

He glanced at her, standing in the office doorway, light outlining her as she clasped Ty to her side. He drew his hand back but leaned closer to the floor. The growth gave off a faint odor of decay, dry but still potent in a way that a rotting vegetable smells when forgotten in the rear of a pantry. He ran his gaze across the protrusion where it met other coils that joined and became a larger mass that disappeared through broken sheetrock and disturbed ceiling tiles. Its composition nudged something in his mind, almost coming into the light before drifting away. His eyes narrowed in concentration, and all at once recognition tightened every muscle in his body.

The substance on the floors, walls, and ceilings was bone.

He rose and stepped away from it, wiping the hand he’d almost touched the osseous growth with on his pants. Alice found his eyes, questioning him as he turned and shook his head. He looked around the large office. It was made to be a comfortable space, the walls a calming beige trimmed with browns and tans. An executive leather chair sat before a sprawling desk that held a touchscreen computer console mounted within the wood at an angle comfortable to anyone sitting in the chair. There were large cardboard boxes on the floor filled with white confetti that he soon recognized as shredded papers. When he opened the desk drawers, only empty space met him, files hanging limp and thin on their rails. The same went for the file cabinet in the corner of the room. Every paper in the office had been destroyed.

“There’s nothing here,” he said, sliding the last drawer shut. He moved to the computer screen, bringing it to life with a fingertip. Username and password bars appeared, a curser blinking in the first box. Quinn stared at the screen, his fingers hovering over letters. Slowly he curled his hands into fists, arms shaking.

“Let’s check the other office,” Alice said, guiding him away from the mocking screen.

The opposite room was smaller and less elegant but yielded the same results. Shredded paper was strewn across the floor in twisted and torn strips as if the person performing the task had been in an extreme hurry, treading amongst the fallen fragments. He tried the computer console in the smaller office and attempted every combination of letters and numbers he could think of that had any significance to his father. None of them worked.

He picked up a stapler and wound his arm back, ready to throw it through the glass of a painting hanging on the wall, but Alice grasped his wrist. Gently, she brought his hand down, and he loosened his grip on the stapler.

“There’s nothing here,” he said, shoulders going slack, his strength seeping away with his anger. “They scrubbed everything.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“What the hell were they doing here?”

“I don’t know.” She ran her hand up his arm, her touch light and soothing. “Maybe it’s gone like everything else.”

They stepped back into the hall, and his gaze trailed along the shoots of bone that disappeared behind the door. The last unchecked door. One more barrier between him and what he wanted.

He moved toward it, Roman’s card already out of his pocket, the reader beside the door glowing red. His hand was on the knob, card sliding, door unlocking.

He turned the handle and stepped inside.

The room was long, stretching away in banks of stainless steel counters and tables covered in microscopes, square canisters, centrifuges, and several unfamiliar boxy pieces of equipment, their digital gauges still lit with numbers holding no meaning. A partial bank of fluorescents glowed at the far end of the room, throwing cold light like freezing water across the floor. To the left, a wall grew to the ceiling, its lower half solid block and steel while its upper was completely glass. The bone growth spanned the entire length of the room, its twisted calcifications reaching between tables and chairs, encompassing others within its folds like magma flowing around a formidable rock it couldn’t melt. Somewhere rain pattered.

Quinn moved farther into the room, taking small, careful steps over arms of bone that reached everywhere. A growl simmered within Denver’s chest.

“Quinn, what are you doing?” Alice asked from close behind.

“There’s something here,” he whispered. “Can’t you feel it?” She didn’t answer, but her steps followed him as he made his way to the opposite end of the room.

The partition between the rooms held a broad set of sliding doors near the back wall. They gaped open like jaws caught in a death cry. The second room was unlit, and the meager light from the fluorescents reached only feet into its space before succumbing to its void. A cool breeze drafted from somewhere as Quinn closed in on the doorway leading to darkness. He paused as he reached the entry, the smell of rot stronger in the air. At his feet, he noticed a layer of grime trailing into the adjoining room from behind him. He bent closer and saw that the dirt was an overlayment of giant footprints leading into and out of the lab.