Quarantine (The Shadow Wars Book 7.5) (8 page)

With a sigh of relief, Allan reached the manual release and set to work. He found the gear wheel he had to turn to physically open the panel, grabbed it and began spinning it. Being in zero g helped him and he had it done within a minute. The panel was open, exposing the small, auxiliary array of communications gear. Now he just had to release it. Allan reached for the lever and then screamed as something touched his shoulder.

He spun around...and found himself staring into the insane, green eyes of Duncan Kato. There was nothing remotely human left in that gaze. Nothing but madness. Duncan had turned. How had he gotten out of that bathroom? Known to follow him out onto the hull? It didn't matter now, Duncan grabbed his helmet, intending murder.

In all his terror, Allan grabbed for his wrench, but Duncan batted it out of his hand. He had a quick glimpse of dull red metal flying away into darkness, then his attention was returned firmly to Duncan. Now what? His former team mate began to try and twist his helmet and black terror shot through Allan. He had no intention of dying out here. Practically before he knew what he was doing, Allan made a fist and punched Duncan's faceplate.

It cracked, and, under a second punch, broke. Duncan began to grasp at his exposed face, raw, furious pain etched into his features. Allan ducked away from him, reached back and pulled the lever. The comms gear began to rise from its metal nest within the hull. Taking a few steps back, Allan watched Duncan die. After a few seconds, he realized he didn't have the stomach for it. Giving Duncan a wide berth, he walked around him and made his way back to the airlock. His vision was swimming by the time he cycled back through.

Duncan was gone, dead now, attached to the surface of an isolated plague ship by his magnetic boots. Again, he expected to feel fear, loss, misery...instead he felt hollow and lonely. Worst of all, he felt an encroaching hopelessness. He was alone now. Somehow, he didn't expect Hunter to still be alive. But there were a few more things he had to do. Allan sat back down at the communications workstation and fired it up. He spent several minutes trying to get a distress call out, but could find no way to actually make a live connection with the
Atonement
...or anyone, for that matter. After several frustrated minutes, he finally found that he could send out a distress beacon. He programmed it only to transmit to the
Atonement
, something he
could
do, and then sent the beacon out. When that was finished, Allan sat back in his chair.

He heaved a weary sigh. Exhausted, he was utterly exhausted now. He felt drained and spent, and honestly didn't know if he could make himself get up and walk to the main lab. Was there even enough time? Duncan had turned, full-blown turned, before he had, and they'd both been exposed at about the same time. What did that mean? Was he going to turn any minute? Or did it depend on the person? No answers, only questions.

Allan forced himself to sit up, call up a map of the ship, find the main lab and then plan a route there. At least it wouldn't be that difficult of a route. When he finished memorizing it, Allan stood up, swaying slightly.

Get to the lab, find the cure, wait for-

His radio crackled.
“Gray...you still alive?”

Hunter. His pulse quickened.

“Yes...I'm the only one though. Where are you? What happened?”

A pained sigh.
“I got jumped, lost my radio, my weapons. I'm hurt, think I broke my arm, I'm laid up in an infirmary somewhere. Not sure.”

Allan spent several minutes getting her up to speed as he hunted through the bridge again for a better weapon. At the end of it, he found nothing, forced to rely on the little combat knife he'd picked up. It would have to do.

“So you want to meet at this main lab?”
Hunter asked at the end of all this.

“Yes. Quickly, too.”

“Fine. I'll meet you there.”

Allan felt something like hope.

He might actually get out of this alive.

Chapter 08

–
The Slow Burn
–

Paranoia was creeping in.

Allan had left the bridge five minutes ago, and already he was feeling worse, obsessed over his symptoms. His throat was dry and his head was pounding. Terror was welling within him, filling him up, making him jump at every sound. All he had was the damned combat knife. What was he going to do if he ran into more than a single enemy? Allan had faith in himself, at least in his combat abilities, but even that was waning. This sick, this scared...the odds were looking worse all the time. He wanted to talk to Hunter over the radio to make himself feel better, but somehow he was keeping his mouth shut. He didn't want to seem weak to her.

So, he stalked on, clutching at a combat knife, making his way through blood-soaked, flickering corridors on a plague ship floating in the middle of nowhere. How far was he from the nearest planet? Space station? From the nearest
ship
? He and Hunter might be the only living, sane individuals for a billion miles. The thought was terrifying. Allan made himself think about other things. For a moment, he wondered what he could possibly think about to make himself happy. What did other people think about to make themselves happy?

The future, he decided. The belief that tomorrow might not suck as much as today. Was it true? Rarely. In Allan's experience, tomorrow was about the same as today, which was usually only marginally better or worse than yesterday. Rarely were there particularly shitty or awesome. Though lately they had just been shitty. Did he have any reason to believe they'd be any good? Allan wanted to tell himself that after this it'd all change, to promise that tomorrow will be different if he could just only somehow live through today...

But he knew it was lie.

Everyone lied to themselves, everyone made false promises. People never changed, not really. Allan would either die here or make it off this ship, go back to the
Atonement
and stay miserable and guilt-ridden. Either because that's what he deserved or that's what would happen. At that thought, Allan stopped, coming to a halt in a T-junction of corridors. A pair of corpses, one leaned against a wall with its head bashed in, the other lying on the ground with a crushed arm and a broken jaw, were his only company.

Should he even bother escaping?

His previous assessment was that he should live as long as possible to lessen the suffering of others. That was enough. It had to be. How much had he taken away? How many lives snuffed out? How many of them didn't deserve it? At least some of them were probably murderers or rapists...though technically he and everyone he worked with was a murderer. Had Greg ever murdered anyone who didn't deserve it? Or Trent? Enzo probably had. Murder was ambiguous. Rape on the other hand...there was no ambiguity to that.

Rapists should die.

Allan heard a distant scream. He blinked, realizing that he'd entirely gone off on a tangent and that he was standing in the open in an enemy-rich environment. He turned and began walking in the correct direction, but that distant scream was suddenly repeated...then it grew, became two voices, then four, then a whole chorus of them.

And they were getting closer.

Allan turned around and looked back, suddenly frozen with fear, needing to see what was coming for him. The corridor behind him stretched away, going about a dozen meters before terminating in another T-junction. The screams were getting louder, closer. How many were there? One appeared around the corner, running right at him, screaming, yammering and mindless. Then there was another. Then four. Then six.

Then twelve.

Allan's nerve broke. He turned and started pounding down the corridor at a dead sprint. More screaming, the sound of boots and feet slapping the metal, echoing down the corridor to him. Allan came to a corner, slammed into the wall because he was running so fast, shoved himself off of it, turned and kept running. He'd made maybe a quarter of the way down this corridor when they entered the same corridor. They were faster than him, they were catching up on him. If they got him, they'd likely rip him apart.

Literally.

Allan knew he couldn't keep this up. Something had to give. He spied an open door to his left and decided to go for it. He leaped in through the door, saw he was in a small room and that it would have to do. He spun, closed the door and locked it. Immediately, the sound of shrieking and pounding sounded on the outside of the door. Slowly, Allan backed away from it, trembling violently from raw fear and adrenaline.

After a few terrifying seconds, he decided that the door wasn't going to break down. Either it was made of sterner stuff than his suit or they were getting in each others' way. Whatever the scenario, he couldn't stay in here forever. Allan willed himself to relax, to focus on staying alive, completing the mission. Find Hunter, find the cure, fix himself and then he could get the data to Hawkins and hopefully save some lives.

For now, that meant find something more useful than a combat knife. As luck would have it, he'd raced into a maintenance bay. Allan felt a tight grin twist into existence on his face. Two workbenches, an open crate, a pair of shelves and a collection lockers along the back. He quickly began sorting through them, looking for anything worthwhile to use against the hordes of insane, sick people who were trying to kill him. Working quickly, shoving stuff aside, he finally find another wrench, this one painted black.

He'd nearly decided it would have to do when his gaze settled on something way cooler. Slipping the wrench into his belt loop, he reached down to the workbench and grabbed the bolt gun someone had tossed there. Checking out, he found it empty of bolts, but stacked in one of the lockers, he found a few magazines of bolts.

Just like a real gun.

“Finally!” he whispered, loading the gun up, aiming it and squeezing the trigger. A bolt launched across the room and buried itself in the nearest wall.

Allan chuckled, feeling suddenly intoxicated with power. Grinning wickedly, he turned and unlocked the door. Opening it up, he aimed the bolt gun and fired, putting a bolt
through
the skull of the nearest crewman trying to get in. The second was a woman in a ripped orange jumpsuit with an awful sneer and missing teeth from fighting, he imagined. She took a bolt through the right eye and collapsed immediately. The third one to go down was a black security officer. After that, Allan lost track, and emptied the full magazine, reloaded and emptied half of another one. When he was finished, there was a pile of corpses outside the door.

He waited for more to come, but found none. As the malignant glee faded, an uncomfortable fear settled over him. He'd enjoyed that murder
way
too much. Not a good sign. At least he knew
why
now. Just another symptom. Allan scoured the bay again and managed to find a few more magazines. Stowing them in his various pockets along his suit, he made his way out of the bay, stepping over the corpses, and set off again.

* * * * *

When he arrived in the corridor that led to the main lab, he spied a tall, armored figure standing by the door, facing away from him. He swallowed, raising his bolt gun, preparing himself to face a truly difficult enemy. But he made a noise, his boot scraped on the deckplates, and the figured turned around. It was Hunter.

“Finally,” she said.

“Yeah, hello to you, too,” Allan replied unhappily, lowering the gun and hurried down the length of the corridor to join her.

“We've got a problem,” she said, turning back to the control panel next to the door. “It's locked down and it's reinforced and, as far as I can tell, there's no other way in. It's basically a sealed safe room. It's on lockdown. The only way to open it is to find someone's security card. I imagine the security chief.”

“Fantastic. So how do we find
that
?” Allan asked.

Hunter shrugged. “I don't know.”

Allan sighed. He stopped and thought for a moment, then something flickered in his mind. A memory. After a moment, it came to him. Keycards were usually tagged. So all he had to do was get to a security center.

He quickly explained this to Hunter, and the pair of them set off down the corridor. Allan remembered from the map that there was a security center not far away. Two turns and a corridor later, they were opening the security center door. Allan stepped in, cleared it with his bolt gun and then immediately crossed to the workstation. He sat and booted it up while Hunter watched the door. While he was running through the list of functions on the workstation, trying to figure out how to track the damned card, he had to turn up his internal air conditioning again. He was boiling alive in his suit. It wouldn't go up much higher than this.

“You okay?” Hunter asked suddenly.

Allan jumped slightly, looking over at her. “What?”

“You're hot, you boiling in that suit,” she replied, staring at him with a deadly calm.

Allan frowned, his vision going blurry and swimmy for a second. He squeezed his eyes, wishing he could rub them, but his visor prevented that. “How did you know that?” he replied slowly, finding it hard to think.

Hunter said nothing.

Allan began to press the issue further, but something chimed, indicating that the workstation had done as he'd asked. He let his gaze linger on her for a moment longer, then turned away and stared at the screen.

“It's in the observation deck, overhead,” he said.

“Then we should go get it,” Hunter replied. “Come on. We're running out of time.”

* * * * *

They made their way out of the science wing and up two flights of stairs before really running into any kind of problem. Allan was first out of the stairwell, into the corridor. He stepped out and was immediately thrown off his feet as someone slammed into him full force. Landing on his back, grunting in pain, he found himself staring up at yet another malignant human being. He was about to respond with violence when powerful, gloved hands abruptly appeared on either side of the crewman's head. With a sharp twist, Hunter broke the man's neck.

She threw him off of Allan and then turned to face another unseen assailant. Allan saw another appear from behind him, overhead. He brought the bolt gun up and fired, managing to get the shot through the bottom of his jaw. It exploded out of the top of his head and pinged off the ceiling. Allan rolled to the side to avoid being fallen on, scrambled to his feet and finding another two coming for him. He aimed, fired, aimed fired.

Two more corpses hit the floor.

Turning, he heard a vicious fight behind him. Hunter had found a length of pipe for herself and was presently beating four men to death with it. He raised his bolt gun and took aim, but hesitated. Hunter seemed to be able to handle herself. He watched her move in between the insane crewmen and saw it was almost like some kind of deadly but incredibly beautiful and graceful dance. She narrowly dodged a pair of grabbing hands while slamming her elbow into the open, screaming mouth of a security officer, took a step back and then brought the pipe around in a tight arc, utterly smashing the jaw of a medical technician intent on her death. She brought one boot up, planted it firmly on the chest of a technician and shoved back. Coming off of that, she delivered a solid punch to another crewman, sending him stumbling backwards.

She had them all finished in under sixty seconds.

“Shall we?” she asked after flicking the blood off her pipe.

“Uh...yeah.”

Hunter still scared the crap out of him, but there was something extremely impressive about her abilities. Allan followed her down another nameless corridor, took another two turns, passed through a storage bay and...found himself at a welded shut door.

“You have got to be kidding me,” he moaned.

“That's the way to the observation deck, isn't it?” Hunter asked.

“Yes. And it's the only door in...” He paused for a second, finding it more and more difficult to think as time went on. He could either cut through the door or... “Vents,” he said. “We can go through the ventilation system. It'd be faster...I think.”

“Fine,” Hunter replied.

He moved to a general access terminal and opened up the ventilation system layout. After a few minutes, he realized the only way he was getting in was to go down to the end of the corridor and enter one of the vent shafts through there. Of course, it couldn't be easy. He sighed, pointed this out to Hunter and then set off down the corridor. She was silent as she followed him. Of all the people to survive, she had to be the last one. It wasn't that he wasn't appreciative for the support of another survivor, especially one so effective, it was just that...she was scary, and she turned his stomach. She actually
respected
him for Lindholm.

He found the room they were supposed to go to, a poorly-lit storage bay, and cleared it. Nothing but shelves and crates. He stepped into the room, then hesitated. His vision was going tunnel again and he suddenly found it hard to breathe. Allan stopped, closed his eyes, tried to force his pulse to calm down, his breathing to come normal.

“Come on,” he muttered, opening his eyes.