Immortal (8 page)

She stepped forward and rammed the still smoldering barrel of the shotgun into the nearest scientist’s belly, doubling him over, then grabbed another by the collar.

‘The labs. Now!’

Saffron shoved the man headfirst through the remains of the door and into the reception area, the man sprawling onto a carpet sprinkled with shattered glass.

A hand grabbed her shoulder, and she turned to see Colin Manx’s pale features stricken with panic.

‘What the hell are you doing? You should have shot us
out
of here, not further in!’

Gripped by a rage coursing through her veins like acid, Saffron whipped Manx’s grip aside with a swipe of her free hand and grabbed him by the throat.

‘You’ll leave when I fucking tell you to, Colon, understood?’

Manx, all pretense of bravado vanishing before her wrath, nodded and backed away, the palms of his hands raised defensively toward her. Saffron turned to Ruby Lily and Bobby.

‘Ruby, watch out for the cops. Bobby, look for another way out of here just in case we’re cornered, okay?’ As the two teenagers nodded and dashed away she turned to Manx.
‘You, keep watch on this lot and don’t let them move. Think you can handle that without crapping your pants?’

Saffron didn’t wait for him to respond, reaching down to grab the scientist still sprawled on the carpet beside her.

‘Let’s go.’

The man reluctantly hauled himself onto his feet as Saffron jabbed the shotgun under his jaw and shoved him forward. Other employees, seeing one of their colleagues covered in blood and with a
shotgun shoved under his face, melted out of their way.

‘You’ll never get away,’ the scientist muttered as Saffron prodded him down a corridor toward the rear of the building. ‘The police will be here in minutes.’

Saffron nodded.

‘I’m counting on it. Now shut up and keep moving.’

The corridor ended in a solid-looking glass door containing an atmospheric chamber sealed off from the rest of the building. The chamber represented the transition between the normal atmospheric
pressure of the main building, and the low-pressure environment of the laboratories within, designed specifically to ensure that, in the event of a breach, air would always flow into the
laboratories and not out of them. This meant that any toxic chemicals or hazardous viruses within the center’s laboratories could not leak into the outside world.

‘Inside, Einstein,’ Saffron said, opening the chamber and shoving her hostage inside before following him in and sealing the door. ‘Do it.’

The scientist jabbed a couple of buttons on a panel and the air around them hissed gently for a few seconds before a small red light on the panel turned green. Saffron pushed the door to the
laboratory open, striding in as a handful of scientists looked up from their test tubes and petri dishes and froze. Saffron raised the shotgun in her hand.

‘Anybody moves, I’ll give them an enema they won’t forget!’

Nobody moved.

Saffron turned toward the sound of animals, and her heart wrenched as she saw cages lining one wall of the laboratories, where half a dozen chimpanzees sat watching her with interest. Their
cages were small, matted with straw and hopelessly inadequate for either comfort or movement. Two were hooked up to machines nearby, one of which was clearly for some kind of brain-manipulation of
mechanical or robotic arms, coils of wiring traveling from computers directly into the animal’s brain stem in a complex tangle.

Saffron’s throat pinched tight, and tears blurred her vision.

‘We’ll let them all go, if you want.’

The voice of her captive standing beside her sent a surge of fury through Saffron. She whirled, driving the butt of the Beretta into his face like a sledgehammer. The scientist crashed backwards
into a desk, smashing beakers and vials as he went before slamming onto the tiled floor.

Saffron pointed at the nearest person, a thin-looking man in a white lab coat.

‘You. Where’s the main database?’

He stared at her for a moment. ‘The what?’

Saffron stormed across to him, kicking a chair out of her way and pushing the Beretta up under his chin with enough force to drive him backwards over a table, his legs flailing wildly.

‘The fucking
database
, the computer records, everything you’ve done. Where is it?’

The man, terrorized to the point where he could no longer speak, pointed across the room to a large pair of computer terminals. Saffron took in the tall servers with their flashing lights and
humming fans, and strode over to them. She reached into her pocket and called over her shoulder to the stricken scientists watching her.

‘You’ve got about sixty seconds to get every one of those animals out of here.’

Saffron didn’t look back at them. She listened to a moment of silent disbelief followed by a sudden manic scrambling as they began grabbing cages and rushing them out of the laboratory.
She studied the computer servers as she produced from her pocket two dirty-looking devices the size of large pears. MK 2 fused grenades, bought from an antique dealer near Cedar City, Utah, and
refurbished to operational standard by a retired US army sergeant of questionable motives out of El Paso, Texas.

Saffron waited until the laboratory behind her fell silent. She looked down at the grenades in her hands, gripping them tightly, and took a deep breath.

‘We can’t free this one.’

The voice behind her made her whirl around in surprise. A young woman was standing beside the chimpanzee wired to the robotic arms.

‘What?’ Saffron stammered.

‘He’s hard-wired right now,’ the scientist said. ‘We can’t just unplug him like a toy.’

Saffron’s eyes welled with tears as she shook her head.

‘You bastards, you just don’t know when to stop, do you.’

The woman stood her ground.

‘His name’s Eric,’ she said simply. ‘He’s helping us learn how to help disabled people walk again.’

‘He’s a victim of your Nazi experiments!’ Saffron shouted.

The woman closed her eyes for a second before speaking.

‘He broke his back in a fall in Phoenix Zoo, Arizona. When we learn how he can control these robot arms, we can fix him too.’

Saffron choked on her tears and pointed at Eric, who watched her with intense curiosity.

‘How long?’

‘Ten minutes,’ the woman said.

Saffron cursed mentally, but could not tear her eyes away from Eric.

‘Do it, now!’

Saffron turned as the woman began unplugging Eric from the machines, and she reached into her pocket and produced a slim black portable hard drive. She plugged the drive into the servers and
tapped a few keys before dashing out of the laboratory, checking her watch as she ran. She burst into the reception area to see a dozen cages scattered around and a nervous-looking Colin Manx
holding court with a fake pistol in his hand pointed at some thirty scientists cowering on the floor in one corner.

‘The cops will be here any minute,’ he wailed. ‘We’ve got the monkeys, let’s get out of here!’

Saffron ignored him, looking at Bobby. ‘You find another way out?’

‘Nothing,’ Bobby said desperately. ‘The labs stand along the back wall of the building. Are we going to be arrested?’

Saffron didn’t reply. She strode to the glass doors of the reception area, cocking the shotgun. Without a moment’s hesitation she blasted the glass clean out of the doors, the
tearing report of the gun replaced by the shrieking of the chimpanzees in their cages.

Saffron turned to Colin and Bobby.

‘Bobby, get the van. Colin, get the cages out and into the van first, then let these bastards go.’ She gestured to the scientists with a jab of her thumb.

‘What about you?’ Manx asked in surprise.

Saffron scowled at him.

‘Just do as you’re fucking told and get out of here. I’ll worry about me.’

With that, Saffron hurried away down the corridor back to the laboratory, reaching it as the female scientist was gently lifting Eric’s limp body from his seat and folding him into her
arms. She looked up as Saffron burst back in.

‘Why are you doing this?’ she demanded. ‘We’re not hurting these animals, we’re helping them.’

‘Shut up,’ Saffron snapped. ‘Get out, now.’

The scientist looked at the grenades in her hands and the computer servers, her face stricken.

‘There are almost five years of research on those servers,’ she said. ‘Everything we’ve done.’

Saffron turned her back to the scientist and Eric, hissing over her shoulder, ‘Get down behind the counter.’

In the glossy black screen of the computer servers, Saffron saw the scientist stare at her for a moment longer.

‘You disgust me,’ she said, and then ducked out of sight. Saffron stood before the computer servers with a grenade in each hand. She glanced over her shoulder at the seat where Eric
had been sitting only moments before. Tears pinched at the corner of her eyes again.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered softly.

And then she pulled the pins on both grenades before tossing them behind the huge computer servers and diving for cover. The explosives rattled behind them for a second or two, and then the
servers vanished amid a blast of vaporized metal.

Ethan Warner glanced nervously at Lopez before speaking.

‘Hiram Conley was suffering from an infection?’

Tyler Willis nodded, gesturing to one wall of his office where a series of graphs and charts were pinned haphazardly.

‘I tracked the course of the infection over six weeks. Never seen anything like it, some kind of telomere mutating bacterium, not a virus. It shared similarities with
Bacillus
permians
, but appeared to have evolved differently.’

‘Is it transmissible by air?’ Lopez asked, touching her face again.

‘No,’ Willis said firmly, ‘this isn’t something that’s easy to contract. What’s fascinating about it is that I was able to extract a genetic profile of the
bacterium, and by tracing its mitochondrial signature I was able to ascertain that Hiram Conley had been suffering from this infection for something over one hundred fifty years.’

Ethan thought for a moment.

‘So, what is it? Was this guy some kind of zombie or something?’

Willis shook his head.

‘No, but that’s not the interesting part. The infection was starting to mutate again, and I was trying to find out what was happening when Hiram Conley was shot.’

‘How was the mutation affecting him?’ Lopez asked.

‘That’s the really interesting part,’ Willis said. ‘He was starting to fall apart and—’

Ethan flinched as the deafening sound of an explosion rocked the office around them as though a truck had crashed right outside the walls and smashed its way across the compound.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Lopez shouted, yanking the office door open. ‘What the hell was that?’

Ethan was right behind her, his ears ringing from the explosion.

‘Grenades,’ he said, recognizing their distinctive sound from his service with the Marine Corps in Iraq and Afghanistan, when the infernal devices had thundered through caves in Tora
Bora or were tossed into buildings as his men stormed Taliban strongholds. ‘Come on.’

Ethan led the way at a run, unsure of what he would find as they burst out of the administrative building and into the bright sunlight outside. Instantly, Ethan saw the pall of oily black smoke
rising from the laboratories opposite. Dozens of scientists in white coats were scattering across the lawns, shouting at each other and pointing uselessly at the destruction behind them.

Ethan looked across the road as he heard a vehicle, and saw a battered old camper pull onto the main road and accelerate away toward the south. Lopez turned toward her car, but Ethan called out
to her.

‘Get their plate and let them go! There could be casualties here!’

Lopez obeyed without hesitation, squinting at the license plate of the van for a moment before joining Ethan to dash across to the panicked people.

‘Was there anybody inside?’ Ethan demanded, grabbing the arm of what looked like the most senior of them.

‘Two,’ the old man said, his features twisted with fury and fear. ‘Goddamned activist is still in there with one of my people.’

Ethan didn’t wait to hear anything further, turning and plunging through the shattered glass of the entry cubicle and into the foyer. A galaxy of glass crystals twinkled on the blue
carpets as he dashed forward toward a narrow corridor filled with a haze of swirling blue smoke. The thick taint of cordite stung his throat and seared his eyes, but he pushed on until he saw a
poster warning of hazardous chemical spills. Ethan hesitated, sudden thoughts of infectious diseases and spores floating on the air flashing through his mind.

‘It’s okay.’

He whirled as Lopez appeared behind him, a simple fabric mask covering her nose and mouth. She handed one to him. ‘I checked, no hazardous chemicals.’

Ethan snapped the mask over his face and advanced further down the corridor. Ahead, another cubicle stood with its glass walls shattered by the shockwave of the detonation. Ethan recognized it
as a pressure chamber of some kind as he passed through and into the laboratory beyond.

His gaze was quickly drawn to the smoldering remains of what looked like two huge computer mainframes, sparks hissing and spitting from severed power mains and junctions.

‘Anybody here?’ Ethan shouted, not sure of how else to quickly locate any injured scientists still inside the lab.

‘Here!’

The voice was feeble and coming from behind a row of worktops to Ethan’s left. He hurried across and saw a young woman in a white coat with what looked like a monkey wrapped in her
arms.

Ethan rounded the corner of the workbench. ‘Are you okay?’

Before the woman could answer, another woman leapt up from behind the far end of the bench with a sawn-off shotgun.

‘Freeze, hero.’

Ethan obeyed, standing silent and looking at the young girl glaring at him from behind the barrel of the shotgun. The girl glanced at Lopez. ‘You, Chiquita, on your knees and face the
wall.’