The List (Zombie Ocean Book 5) (3 page)

The figure was inside, almost certainly a man judging by the backwash of white light on his angular face. He roved the flashlight along her workbenches, over notes lying in scrawled heaps, her high-powered microscope, her tall titration kit set up in the middle; all complex glass pipes, flasks and turrets, glinting oddly like a tenuous Fraggle construction.

Even here, this man moved with a confidence and comfort that suggested familiarity, as if he knew his way around. Without pausing he carefully cleared a section of worktop, moving her notes to the side, then knelt to open a specimen tray in her refrigerated sample stack. She was surprised to see frozen gas spilling out in a wispy white fog; she'd definitely drained the supply when last she'd been in here a month ago. It couldn't still be cold in there, could it?

The man extracted a test-tube slide, then spoke in a low, muted tone.

"That is a strange discoloration."

It wasn't loud, but in the silent lab Anna heard it clearly. Her frown deepened. Was he talking about one of her samples? Or was that, in his hand, a new one?

She didn't remember anything discolored. She hadn't run any stain tests because she'd exhausted their effectiveness before she'd even gone to Mongolia. They never showed anything; only the electron microscope had exposed the T4 to her. But then, what else could he be talking about?

She was so befuddled that she didn't realize what was happening as he went to the wall and pushed the breaker she'd installed. All at once, drawing from a battery she hadn't charged for a month, the roof lights flickered up to bright white sterile life, the air conditioner/scrubber surged to full power, and the lab came alive.

What? The corridor lit with the sharp light, exposing her completely, but she was too fixated on watching him to care, with her nose pressed to the glass as he bent over, took a heavy-looking canister from his backpack, and poured fuel into the generator.

What the hell?

He pulled the cord and pushed the button and the cacophony of the generator joined in with the scrubbers and air cyclers. This was crazy. So he was charging the battery? Did that mean he was doing experiments? Was he using her lab?

That was enough.

She stood up and strode without hesitation to the airlock door, pushing through the blowers that blasted polluting dust particles off her, through the inner door, and emerged into the lab.

He stared at her with his mouth dropping open.

"What the hell are you doing in my lab?" she demanded.

A long moment passed. This man before her, with his thin cheeks and slight raspy beard, bright eyes and short-cropped dark hair, seemed more shocked than her. Perhaps that was fear in his eyes, though it was quickly followed by a certain resignation, sinking in.

She recognized it. She'd seen it before in Amo, had felt it in herself, but she didn't have time to forestall it now. Abruptly the unreal feel of this bizarre, midnight meeting fell away, as from his loose jacket pocket the man drew a gun and pointed it at her face.

Lots of images raced through her head in that moment, taking less than a second and coming like shells fired from an autocannon. She saw herself again in a yacht off Hawaii, held at gunpoint by the madwoman who'd killed her own son to 'end his suffering'. That feeling of power when she hadn't cared if she lived or died came back in a heady rush, though other feelings came with it.

She saw Ravi curled asleep in their bed with his knees too high, blissfully unaware. She saw the look on Amo's face as he lied about what Salle had done, in the moment he decided that he would kill the bunker himself. She saw her own father's white eyes, flickering briefly back to brown as he died to save her from the red demon, and she saw Cerulean's lonely head, lying in a drift of snow in Julio's torture pit.

The rage came easily after that, flowing through channels well carved and only delayed by three months of waiting. This was easy. This bastard in her lab, this idiot using her samples, was not going to hurt any of her people again.

She raised her arm in an underhand lob and hurled the crowbar. It went spinning wildly over the worktop, crashing through the fragile titration apparatus and shattering glass into the man's face before plowing on to strike him solidly in the shoulder.

The gun may have fired, she wasn't sure, but nothing hit her and she was already moving anyway, rounding the workbench. She snatched up two flasks and flung them at him as she ran; one struck him a hollow THUNK on the breastbone and drew a gasp, while the other sailed harmlessly over his head to smash loudly against an air-filtration pipe.

She sprinted the last few steps barefoot over the smashed titration glass just as he leveled the gun again, then she was on him and her shoulder thumped into his gut. He was heavier but not by much, and her 100 pounds of speeding muscle carried him off his feet and into the air. For a split second they flew, then the ground rose up and walloped him in the back.

Anna landed neatly on his chest and rolled up easily to straddle him. Up close his thin face was worn, pale as a zombie and haunted by the defeat he had to know was on him. She thrust two palm-first blows at his nose; one glanced off his cheek but the other caught him full on and shattered the cartilage flat with a red burst, like she'd just splatted a ripe tomato.

He bucked and struggled to throw her off but he wasn't strong and Anna didn't give him the chance to gain leverage. With one hand she leaned over to secure the gun, holding it flat to the ground in his hand, while with the other she stabbed at his neck three times, driving the edge of her palm into his throat like she was karate-chopping a block of wood.

On the second he gargled and began to choke as his airway crumpled inward, then the third blow fell in a frenzy and only made it worse.

His grip on the gun faltered and his body began to spasm. Anna grabbed the weapon and rocked back off his chest to point the gun at his head. His face was already turning purple, and she squeezed her finger to the trigger. It wasn't enough that he'd choke now, not after so many people had died, not after Cerulean died, and Abigail and Lucy and Chantelle and so many others all had died.

Red cloaked her like a bloody fall of snow, and flashes of the day Cerulean beat Julio rose into her mind, back when she was only five years old. Her memory of it was foggy, but she had no doubt that this was how he must have felt, in the seconds before Amo and Jake pulled him away. It was the right thing. If only they'd let him finish it and kill Julio, then so many good people would still be alive.

He foamed and pawed feebly at his throat, but there was no choice here. She'd already killed three thousand, what was one more? Better safe than sorry, that's the lesson she'd learned by now.

She squeezed the trigger.

3. QUARANTINE

Click.

The hammer fell but no bullet discharged. His brains didn't blow out across the floor as she'd expected.

Click, the hammer fell again. She checked the safety- off. She palmed the release to eject the clip, saw no bullets, and laughed.

No bullets. He hadn't fired at all, then. The muzzle was cold and there was no tangy cordite smell in the air, which only confirmed it. Did that change things?

Anna looked down at this strange, pale man as he died. His face was purple, he was gasping and reaching, sweaty and desperate, and was that the kind of thing that might haunt her in days and months to come? It wasn't satisfying, not like killing the mad woman or watching Salle Coram's head blow out. It wasn't even a grim kind of justice, as roaming the halls of the bunker had been, turning three thousand mostly innocent colonists to zombies.

This just seemed sad. Like a mistake.

She stood up. Choking was an ugly death, with the bulging eyes and obvious, grasping torment. Really ugly, not one she'd wish on anyone, not even someone who'd, what? Used her lab? Pulled an unloaded gun on her?

"Shit," she whispered, as the red rage ebbed. Certain people certainly deserved to die; certain whole populations
had
to die just to keep her people safe, but this man?

"Shit," she said again, as the weight started to hit. She would regret this, she could feel it, but then what could she do now; how did you fix a broken windpipe? Her training at Macy's hands, training she'd scheduled to go deeper than basic first aid and full on into battlefield medicine, covered some of this, but not this exact scenario.

She closed her eyes for a second and focused. They'd practiced something like this on zombies, who hadn't cared. In the event of a throat injury, an extreme allergy, even poison gas that the enemy could theoretically deploy, you did, what, a tracheotomy? Maybe that wasn't possible with the injury she'd done him; the upper part of his neck didn't look right, punched in and crooked, but lower down?

There wasn't any choice.

On the worktop she found one of her glass knives easily. Those things cut through skin like butter. And a tube? She snatched up one of the glass stalks from the titration kit then dropped back onto the man's chest. He'd gone gray now and his legs were only feebly kicking. Death throes. Anna knew the brain could survive for four minutes without oxygen, and he was already about a minute into that.

The glass knife made short work of his black hoodie and she tore it away. Underneath his chest was frail, pale and bird-like, with an array of striped scars, like lash marks. She laid three fingers at the top of his breastbone, steadied the knife on her index finger, then pushed it a cautious inch in.

He convulsed a little bit harder. She ignored it, drew the knife out, and pushed the titration tube in to the slit. It slid through easily, filled up with blood, then the blood blew out like a whale spouting water from its blowhole.

Anna was splattered. She laughed, as his throat sucked roughly at the air.

"You're welcome," she said.

He was breathing. His eyes glared at her, wide and mad with having just almost died, before unconsciousness sucked him down. A single tube wasn't perfect, it was probably barely enough oxygen to keep him going, but he was alive, and for now, out for the count.

She pushed herself to her knees, starting to feel a little drowsy. Looking down, she saw two puddles of blood pooling out of her torn feet. The amount of shattered glass stuck in them was appalling.

"Ugh," she mumbled. That was a lot of blood. She needed to pluck it out and get a bandage on them soon. Lucky she was in a medical facility.

* * *

In an hour she had everyone there, all seven of them: Feargal, Macy, Wanda, Ollie, Ravi, Peters, and Jake. The assault squad, gathered round a man on the floor with a tube in his throat, breathing through it with an even wet whistle.

"You did this?" Peters commented, first amongst them to speak.

The white floor of the lab was painted with bloody pools. The walls were spattered with blood; there was even spray on the ceiling, presumably from his first gasp through the tube. Glass lay in the dark red, sparkling like little diamond islands. Her bloody footmarks marked a trail leading out of the room, before she'd bandaged herself and slipped on her rain boots.

The man lay in the middle, wheezing through his tube. There was some color in his face now, though his neck was a deep purple and his throat was horribly crooked inwards.

Peters had asked her a question. She turned to him, feeling light-headed.

"It wasn't the first thing I did," she said. "I didn't just run up and stab him with a tube."

"But you did stab him with a tube?" Ravi confirmed. His expression was queasy. He wasn't good with blood.

"To save him," Macy stepped in sternly. "It's clear what happened here. Now we need to deal with it."

"He's lucky he's alive," Peters said, and that seemed to settle it. "Macy, what do you need from us?"

The rest happened while Anna spaced out. Loss of blood was making her faint. She slumped when Ravi pulled up a wheelchair for her to sit in. She tried to stand up again moments later, but her hands were too weak to get any traction on the handles. Through a fog she watched the others clear the workbench and lift the man up onto it.

A little later Macy was there before her, taking her pulse and peering into her eyes one after the other.

"She's lost a lot of blood," she said, not even talking to Anna. "Responses are sluggish. Ravi, get her on a drip; we've got saline packs back at the RV. You can lay her here."

Anna tried to say- "Don't worry about me, I'll be fine," but it came out instead as- "Ungghh", which was close but not quite there. For a time after that, while they laid her on a bench across from the man she'd almost killed, and rigged her drip, and Ravi squeezed her hand and Macy did exploratory surgery on the intruder's broken throat, she felt like she'd mostly gotten her message across.

So she relaxed and drifted. Everything was going to be all right.

But there was one thought that kept resurging, spiraling insistently round and round her head like a bug that wouldn't flush down the drain.

What discoloration?

What discoloration had this man found, when she'd found none? Who was he, and why was he so familiar with her lab, and what had he found? 

"Amo," she mumbled.

"I love you too, honey," Ravi whispered. "I'm not going anywhere."

She tried to give him a disapproving look. He just smiled more convincingly.

* * *

A time later she roused.

Ravi was sitting nearby, slumped and dozing in a chair. The ward's white lights had been dimmed and she could hear the generator chugging away, but the man was there still, strapped to the workbench with what looked like airplane seatbelts. There was a small airplane cushion under his head and a red blanket over his legs. The glass tube was gone from his throat, replaced by a large bandage, though she could still see the dark bruise spreading up his jawline and down his chest.

This was the cost. Everybody paid the cost in blood and pain and loss, and ultimately they paid with their lives, because that was the way of the world now. There was no use crying over it, any more than there was any use crying over three thousand dead. They were dead and more would follow.